Honeydripper (2007)

The early 50s in the Deep South, Alabama. The Honeydripper Lounge, the juke joint of pianist Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) has seen better days – the music doesn’t excite, it probably doesn’t help that Tyrone doesn’t allow guitarists into his place, the audience doesn’t leave enough money, and most everybody appears to have lost patience with Tyrone’s attempts to save his place hustling. Not even to speak of his debts, particularly to a landlord who comes calling with a weekend ultimatum. Thus this weekend will be Tyrone’s last chance to save his place – for this he even breaks his “no guitarists” rule and has managed to invite famous New Orleans electric guitarist Guitar Sam. Obviously, things do not run as smoothly as Tyrone hopes.

Despite being set a couple of decades later, and being far less interested in plot or vampires, John Sayles’s Honeydripper would make an interesting double feature with Sinners, seeing as it centres around a dive bar in deep Alabama, music, and all aspects of the surrounding culture. Of course, this being a John Sayles film, it uses its plot as an incitement to begin exploring a community of people – what keeps them together, what keeps them apart, and in this particular case, how do you live when a racist system is always stacking the deck against you to lessen your triumphs and make all of your fuck-ups much worse. So the film spends just as much time on the disillusionment and potential religious conversion of Tyrone’s wife Delilah (LisaGay Hamilton), the dreams of his daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) for a very modest idea of a better life, the hopes of young guitarist Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) for a life in music, and so on and so forth as it does on Tyrone’s increasingly desperate and immoral attempts to keep his head above water. There’s a plain matter-of-factness to the film’s portrayal of day-to-day racism, the way the local Sheriff (Stacy Keach) takes his corruption as his simple due as a white man lording it over black people that’s perhaps more painful than if it were showing the extremes and deepest horrors of these injustices (knowing Sayles, he probably wouldn’t think it his place to do so).

The film features a nearly all-black cast of Sayles veterans, character actors, musicians, and young actors on early gigs, and everyone appears deeply engaged with their craft here, even if they are just in the film for a scene or two. Glover does give one of his career best performances, projecting a complex mix of desperation and sadness, but also a genuine hopefulness that feels lived and earned. Nobody else here falls below that sort of level of performance.

Visually, Sayles sometimes strains against his budget, with some shots and camera set-ups that feel more as if they belonged into a contemporary cable TV movie, and an all-around cheapish look to the photography. Fortunately, Sayles’s script, the great performances and, yes, the quality of the music are more than enough to keep Honeydripper engaging and emotionally involving.

Surviving the Game (1994)

Jack Mason (Ice-T) has hit rock bottom. He is homeless, and making his life even more difficult by torturing himself for something pretty damn traumatic that happened in his past. When his only friend, an elderly white guy, dies, Jack gives up completely and tries to kill himself by walking into traffic. He’s rescued – or at least dissuaded – by Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton) who works at the local food bank and thinks Jack is just the right man to work for him and his partner as a wilderness guide, even though the only external wilderness Jack knows is on the streets (or probably the Streets).

Alas, once Jack has gone through a curious encounter/job interview with Walter’s partner Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer in his best creep mode), and he ends up with Thomas, Walter and a group of clients in the wilderness, things turn out to be less empowering for our hero than he thought. In fact, Jack isn’t there to help some rich idiots hunt, but rather to be the human prey of former CIA men and assorted perverts – the most dangerous game, you know the drill. Co-hunting Jack are psychiatrist Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey in a short, surprisingly nuanced and creepy performance), cowboy John Griffin (John C. McGinley), and rich people supremacist Wolfe (F. Murray Abraham) who has brought his son Derek (William McNamara) to make him a real man by making him complicit in sadistic murder. Turns out this amount of injustice and cruelty is just the therapy Jack needed, and soon, he’s rather effectively striking back at his tormentors.

Among the group of rappers gone genre actors, for my taste Ice-T has always been the best one, probably because he usually makes efforts to act his characters instead of exclusively performing his standard persona. So it is no surprise that Ice-T in a film directed by undervalued (most probably because he’s black, if we’re being honest) Ernest R. Dickerson makes a rather fine action hero; and he is the more interesting kind of US action hero to boot – the one with troubles, who isn’t a perfect killing machine. In fact, the film makes rather a point out of our hero not being a killer by nature or inclination but a guy who defends himself with as much force as necessary and who is even willing to give the worst people imaginable a choice and a chance to walk away. Which is certainly more than they did for him.

Another obvious point in Surviving the Game’s favour is its cast of a host of great character actors, all with copious experience at being entertaining Bad People. They all can chew as much scenery as is needed but also don’t chew more than they should this time around. Not that the characters are exactly subtle, mind you: each and every one of them does after all represent something that is very wrong with (white, powerful) America and its structures turned up to eleven. Still, Dickerson treats these crazy freaks at times much more seriously than you’d expect, giving even the worst of them some depth beyond their inherent horribleness. Which doesn’t make them better people or people we as an audience don’t want to see killed or maimed (preferably both) by Ice-T, but sure turns them into much more interesting action movie villains. Obviously this also gives the film’s political arguments about the intersections of race and class in the USA further heft.

Mind you, this is not first and foremost a deep analysis of US society but a great (perhaps the greatest, depending on the day you ask me) action movie version of The Most Dangerous Game that just doesn’t see why it shouldn’t also consciously comment on the world around it; its makers are after all living in it and had to live through part of it.


As US style action director, Dickerson here is as fine as they come, delivering many a tense scene, a handful of pleasantly absurd ones, and nary a moment after the very effective set-up that isn’t exciting. He also really knows how to get the best out of his actors – which isn’t always typical of directors good at action – by leaving them space to work. There’s an incredible monologue by Busey’s character about his fucked up childhood in the film’s big dinner scene that alone would be worth the price of admission but in this film it’s just one of many great scenes, some of them delightfully and cleverly cheesy, some just clever.

Android Cop (2014)

Welcome to a Los Angeles of the near future. An earthquake has hit the local nuclear reactors, leaving parts of the town as an irradiated quarantine zone populated by the poor and your usual post-apocalyptic gangs. Obviously, it’s called The Zone.

Excellent, if irascible, cop Hammond (Michael Jai White) is getting a new partner in form of the newest in police SCIENCE(!) – an android he soon dubs Andy (Randy Wayne). Now, after a partner killing incident with one of the turrets guarding the Zone, Hammond isn’t much of a lover of machines (and clearly, there’s no difference at all between an android and a gun turret), so the relationship between Hammond and the rookie robot starts with a lot of patented buddy cop bickering.

However, when our heroes are tasked with rescuing the android body harbouring the consciousness of the Mayor’s (Charles S. Dutton) daughter (Larissa Vereza), they’ll just have to learn to respect each other. Particularly since their rescue mission is connected to a conspiracy that soon sees them having to fight off not just the local gangs, and a few cannibals, but also the corrupt forces of evil cop Sgt. Jones (Kadeem Hardison).

Going into a film made by the writer/director (and editor, and cinematographer, and more, because who says movies aren’t a one man job?) responsible for nigh unwatchable The Asylum productions like Princess of Mars and Battle of Los Angeles is not a task one sets oneself without adjusting one’s expectations. As it turns out, however, in the case of Android Cop, there isn’t actually much need for any adjustments of the unpleasant kind, because when it comes to silly, low budget SF action movies a tiiiiny bit based on other movies you might have heard about, this one’s actually great fun.

Now, obviously, the SF elements, as well as the details of the conspiracy, are very much on the silly and not always on the coherent side but since the film presents them with a self-deprecating sense of humour (yet not cloying self-conscious irony) and with fun, they set up exactly what they’re supposed to set up in the sort of film this is – action scenes, basic motivations for basic characters, and a bunch of bad yet funny jokes. Why, the SF elements even have an actual plot function I found myself appreciating as silly yet kind of awesome!

The most important elements for silly SF direct-to-video action – action all work out quite nicely for the film. The action scenes are, despite mostly taking place between our heroes and guys dressed up in rags (so you can use the same stunt actors in more scenes a bit easier, one suspects), pretty fun, decently choreographed and directed, if not with particular style, at least with the sort of discreet confidence that eschews too many dumb editing effects. Sure, Atkins isn’t Isaac Florentine or John Hyams but here, he shows himself to be a much more capable action movie director than I had expected. And while the film’s ruined houses - that look a lot like reused sets from some kind of Middle Eastern set war movie to me – aren’t exactly incredibly attractive, they sure beat the exclusively warehouse set action of many another cheap action movie I’ve seen. The same goes for the costumes and the make-up effects – they’re a bit dumb (particularly the silver sheen of androids), they’re certainly cheap, but they get their jobs done and look as if the people involved at least cared a little about them. It seems like The Asylum truly has changed.

Android Cop’s true not so secret weapon, though, is Michael Jai White. If you’ve watched your share of direct-to-DVD action films in the last couple of decades, you do of course know that White is an excellent screen fighter who at least deserves to have the name recognition of your Van Dammes and your Lundgrens (whom I have both grown to love in their own special ways) but doesn’t really seem to get it. So, yes, White is great in the action scenes, yet his real gift to people consciously deciding to watch a film called Android Cop (hey, that’s me!) lies in his overall performance. He’s playing a somewhat hard-ass yet sympathetic cop who isn’t acting like one of your typical action movie cop on the edge assholes (why, he even prefers peaceful solutions), and he does so with the sort of easy-going charm that suggests he’s quite conscious he’s in a movie of highly suspect quality yet not willing to go the easy way of just cashing his pay check without giving the audience something. Doesn’t mean he can’t have fun with it, though, and so he plays whatever silliness the film throws at him with a friendly wink (but not too big of one), and a relaxed but not bored attitude that suggests he’s having quite a bit of fun here. I’m not too surprised about that part, given White’s past career; what I didn’t know is how good his comical timing is, so he milked quite a few laughs out of jokes that really weren’t all that funny from me.

Randy Wayne isn’t exactly the ideal comical foil for him, seeing as his interpretation of an android is to talk like he’s reading the phone book aloud and turn his head stiffly. Wayne isn’t terrible, though, so it’s just about enough. The rest of the cast is mostly okay (Vereza), or hamming it up in satisfactory manner (Hardison and Dutton), which, given that the acting side still is the Asylum’s biggest problem, is perfectly fine for a fun little flick like Android Cop.

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