Striking Rescue (2024)

Bai An (Tony Jaa), a man with a rather expert talent for inflicting physical punishment on dozens of goons at once, is going on a bit of a personal crusade through the underworld of a South East Asian (or the censors would never allow some of the elements of the plot if it took place in China) country. Turns out murdering his pregnant wife during the course of some corporate/criminal business wasn’t the villains’ greatest idea.

Because movies – supposedly - need a bit more of a plot, Bai An rescues the teenage daughter of the corporate overlord he takes to be the man behind the murder, and finds himself drawn into protecting her while still murdering his way through the underworld and what turns out to be a conspiracy.

This Chinese direct to streaming action movie by Siyu Cheng is positioned as something of a return to form of its leading man, troubled Thai action star Tony Jaa, and if you’re an old-fashioned lover of watching Jaa smash his elbow (and other parts of his anatomy) into bad guys’ heads like me, you’ll be quite happy with the fact that Jaa is indeed still a fantastic screen fighter up to all kinds of inspired physical shenanigans. One whose elbows you want to keep far away from your head.

The plot, such as it is, is decent enough to hold the action scenes together, though the film could have lost its final scene that’s built on a misguided believe we care one way or the other for a certain character, or feel the need to see them punished, as well as the Chinese morality police mandated text about how Jaa’s character is going to be punished for his violent acts off-camera, because order and virtue and blah blah blah.

Even the subplot about the teenager, the sort of thing that can get pretty annoying right quick, meant to humanize proceedings and our violent protagonist, works well enough, also thanks to a perfectly decent performance by Chen Duo-Yi (I believe) as said teenager.

The action itself is brutal and varied – as we like it around here. Cheng knows what he has in the screen fighters, martial artists and stuntpeople assembled here, and appears to see it as his job to make them look as good as possible doing their things. Which, obviously, should be a given when you direct an action movie centred on a beloved martial arts star, but I’ve seen too many directors obfuscating instead of enhancing what’s happening in action scenes to take this sort of approach for granted.

So, yes, Striking Rescue is indeed the comeback we were promised, possibly the one we deserved.

Mutant Ghost War Girl (2022)

In the confusing future of 2077. Superpowers acquired through gene editing are apparently now a thing, and international gangs/companies of evildoers use this technique to build themselves fighters they apparently mostly use for blood sports and only the occasional assassination.

An operative known as Ghost (Muqi Miya, apparently a Chinese-internet-famous yoga instructor) is sent to infiltrate the evil Medusa Company/Network to acquire super-secret data of some kind. This she does indeed acquire, but she is also mutated by the bad guys before her colleagues can rescue her. Now, after a rescue mission gone bad, she’s on the run from Medusa Corp through the mean streets of future South Korea.

Zhou Yang (Li Mingxuan), some kind of Korean intelligence agent is helping her out, though not via logical things like calling in any reinforcements. Instead he’s hiding her at his place for a bit, until they team up to acquire more of the mutating juice for…reasons.

Eventually, there’s a climactic fight with the leaders of the bad guys.

If all of this sounds vague and confusing, that’s firstly because Liu Binjie’s Chinese cyberpunk-y science fiction action movie comes with a set of subtitles that completely defies comprehension for at least half of the time, and defies sense even when the words used manage to combine into something you might confuse for a proper sentence. I’m not sure this is to the movie’s detriment, for this may very well be the sort of film made more enjoyable if you don’t understand what’s supposed to go on. At the very least, this incomprehensibility does add to Mutant Ghost War Girl’s mood of deep peculiarity.

Liu clearly loves western science fiction and superhero media so the film is as stuffed with quotes, borrowings and stolen parts from these films as much as Zhou Yang’s place is stuffed with fan tat (he even proudly displays a bust of Iron Man, Marvel’s trademark lawyers be damned). Liu does tend to like very peculiar parts of his western idols – you will encounter a character who is Jared Leto’s Xtreme Joker, and a scene borrowed nearly directly from the atrocious Ghost in the Shell abomination with Scarlett Johanssen, but again, this of course only adds to the film’s personality.

While all of this is pleasantly weird, MGWG also shows off some more than decent filmmaking chops: the production design is weird in a coherent and always fun to look at manner – mixing Western ideas of Cyberpunk Asia with actual Asian aesthetics – and the action scenes are fast, imaginative and silly in the best rule of cool manner.

Hell, even Muqi is a pretty good CGI action star for a yoga instructor.

Three Films Make A Post: Insert Clever Title Here

Mojin: The Lost Legend aka 鬼吹燈之尋龍訣 (2015): A trio of traditional-official tomb raiders return from dubious retirement in America to China to rob a particularly mysterious tomb. This high on very digital looking effects adventure directed by Wuershan (and based on one part of a long and complicated sounding series of novels) is a whole lot of fun if you like this kind of blockbuster at all.

It’s like a Chinese Indiana Jones with more supernatural action, some surprisingly snarky remarks towards the Cultural Revolution (though it isn’t called by name), and quite a bit of the sense of anything goes that made Hong Kong cinema so enticing but not generally translated to mainland China cinema like this. This really has everything and the kitchen sink in it: romance, zombies, Shu Qi, Shu Qi cursing a lot, complicated mechanical traps, a weird cult, bizarre humour, Shu Qi, and more good and bad ideas than most film trilogies.

Mojin: The Worm Valley aka 雲南蟲谷 (2018): And three years later this happened: none of the actors nor the director of the original return, and with them also leaves the spirit of fun of the first film, as well as parts of the budget. There’s something rote and mechanical about the whole affair – this is pretty much the empty and lifeless spectacle too many people pretend all blockbuster style cinema is, lacking in fun, joy, and the ability to actually deliver the promised rollercoaster ride as a rollercoaster ride.

Deadful Melody aka 六指琴魔 (1994): Welcome to 90s wuxia land. Various martial world weirdoes attempt to steal a magical lute that also happens to be the most powerful weapon this side of your favourite magical sword, while a mysterious, sometimes cross-dressing woman played of course by Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia takes bloody vengeance for the death of her family. Also featured are a not terribly young Yuen Biao as the young hero and Carina Lau Ka-Ling as his love interest and comic relief.

The rest of the film mostly consists of a breathless series of shots of people flying, making shit explode with their Qi, a lot of twirling and a good amount of flying body parts, blue fog, blue light, blue everything, all presented by director Ng Min-Kan with the manic energy of Joel Silver on a real coke binge. This is absolutely awe-inspiring if you enjoy this wuxia revival as much as I do, and aren’t afraid of headaches.

Three Films Make A Post: A Scream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

Screamboat (2025): In the realm of the PublicDomainsploitation slasher, something like Steven LaMorte’s murderous Mickey Mouse effort is basically a masterpiece. That’s not saying terribly much given a sub-genre that usually makes 90 SOV slashers look brilliant in comparison. So outside of its particular little pond, it’s a basically competent by the numbers slasher with pop culture jokes. Which is to say, it’s a little dull.

Unlike with many a film of its kind, those pop culture jokes are actually standing in dialogue with the thing it has been inspired by – the next step would be to make this dialogue actually interesting, or more of the jokes funny. But I’m optimistic that some day, one of these movies will actually do more than drop jokes and have children’s characters do the slasher thing. This one’s half way there, after all.

Rape of the Sword (1967): Even in 1967, Griffin Yueh Feng’s vengeance-based wuxia must have felt a bit old-fashioned. The film featuring two female heroines in form of Li Ching and Li Lihua as its lead right at the end of this cycle of the domination of female-led wuxia (despite what some writers say, swordswomen leading never went completely away before the next big revival) is the kind of old-fashioned I like, obviously. Yueh’s filmmaking as well as the choreography are a bit dusty as well, though never in a way that lacks in charm when seen from half a century away, while the narrative is very standard and trope-heavy. Again, not unpleasantly so, if one enjoys the genre – I certainly do again, these days.

Burning Dog (1991): This early V-cinema movie directed by Yoichi Sai doesn’t go as heavy on the sleaze and the insanity as one might expect when one has mostly seen more extreme examples of the form. Instead, this is basically a 70s heist movie, starring Seiji Matano trying to look like a badly aged Yusaku Matsuda, and other middle-aged guys of some experience.

The pacing is slow and careful, the action, once it comes, feels rather too methodically staged, but there’s also an unhurried calmness to Sai’s approach to the crime movie which makes it worth watching. Again, as with Rape of the Sword, there’s a lot of joy to be found in somewhat middling genre entries for me.

Three Films Make A Post: Where the cashiers have no name

Supermarkt aka Supermarket (1974): If you know German director Roland Klick mostly for his psychedelic noir western Deadlock or his Dennis Hopper coke freak-out White Star, you’ll be in a for a whole world of pain in the form of an hour of very earnest Hamburg-set naturalism pasted onto the beginning of a pretty great, naturalist, heist film. Needless to say, simple guy as I am, I don’t appreciate this approach much.

However, it’s not that Klick isn’t good at the earnest naturalism bit – one could imagine him going on to become a German Ken Loach figure in a more interesting German cinema – the problem is all mine. I just find earnest naturalism the least interesting mode for a fictional narrative possible and have never seen the point to it. Surely,if you want to go for straightforward representation of the world as it is, why not make a reportage or a documentary? Hell, I might even praise you for that one (if only with backhanded remarks that I prefer Herzog style documentaries all about poetic truth, of course). As it stands, this just isn’t a film for me.

Only the River Flows aka He bian de cuo wu (2023): Speaking of films that aren’t for me, this arthouse crime drama for the Cannes crowd by Wei Shujun suffers from what I see as a weakness of most of the minor wave of mainland Chinese arthouse noir cop films of this style: an attempt to make genre films so critical of their genre they go out of their way to extract all joy and excitement from it. No thrills in our serial killer thriller, sir! No excitement to finding the killer! Hell, not actually finding the killer clearly is the way to go.

This particular example of the form eventually descends into a vague kind of surrealism, akin to Lynch without a sense of humour or a heart (so not very much like Lynch at all), without the power to actually make its surrealism feel like anything of substance or with a point; indeed, things are so opaque in the end, I have no idea why the film exists at all.

Admittedly, it is very well shot, and decrepit 90s China is evoked just as well – I don’t have any idea why, though.

Fantomas (1947): This second attempt to drag Fantomas into the sound film era after one in 1932, as directed by Jean Sacha, certainly has no ambitions at being anything more than a potboiler.

As such, it has decent entertainment value eighty years later: there are a handful of nice, mad science-y sets, some of the action is staged on a more than decent level, and after pacing issues early on, things zip along nicely, and mindlessly. The whole affair suffers from a very flat Fantomas performance by Marcel Herrand, but kinda makes up for it with a very young Simone Signoret running circles around every other actor as the villain’s virtuous daughter Hélène.

In an uncommon move for 1947, Hélène is a rather competent heroine who even takes part in the physical parts of the plot, which obviously is the sort of thing I like in my pulpy nonsense films.

Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)

Jake Pentecost (John Boyega whose performance only isn’t the most lifeless and dull one in a movie full of lifeless performances because Scott Eastwood is even more of a zombie), rogue yet boring – and retconned in so the lazy script can include Hollywood’s daddy issues fixation - son of Pacific Rim’s Stacker Pentecost is roped in to help train a bunch of teen cadets as the next generation of Jaeger pilots. They may or may not be obsolete soon, for a Chinese company has invented piloted drone Jaegers. Returning to die – and if you think that’s a spoiler you haven’t seen any movies at all, have you? – Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) isn’t quite convinced of the concept. Soon a mysterious evil – it is painted black, after all - Jaeger attacks, and other supposedly exciting things are bound to happen later on.

As someone who liked Guillermo del Toro’s original Pacific Rim quite a bit (well, actually loved it to bits), I was going into Steven S. DeKnight’s sequel with a degree of optimism despite the bad write-ups for the film at the time it came out. Alas, this one’s really just barely better than a Transformers film of the Michael Bay era, dropping basically every bit of interesting world building (drift compatibility between pilots as a form of intimacy for example is written out completely except for one scene that repeats a plot beat from the first film but much worse), and misusing the returning characters badly. As a matter of fact, quite a bit of the film feels as if the filmmakers feel more than just a little loathing for the first one and go out of their way to tell you. It’s not just the identity of the villain – whose plans and actions being undetected by the way makes no logical sense whatsoever even if you’re applying tolerant blockbuster logic – or the undignified way Kikuchi’s character is written out, the film’s whole approach to mecha, kaiju and human beings is unpleasant and cynical where del Toro’s film goes out of its way to be anything but.

One might think the high diversity of the kids playing the cadets would at least be a nice step in the right direction, but the script just doesn’t bother to provide anyone with any characterisation going beyond their skin colour at all. This thing’s so badly done, you often don’t even know who is supposed to be in which mecha. The writing as a whole is atrocious: there’s no concept of how a film can make shorthand characterisation work, the plotting is vague, inconsistent and anti-dramatic, and there’s nothing here that doesn’t come directly out of the big book of Hollywood blockbuster clichés. Now, the first film did use said book quite a bit too, but it also knew how to give a cliché a little twist and how to put some heart and excitement into it when done straight. Where the first film understood clichés and knew how to use them creatively, Uprising just reproduces them, badly.

The mecha and kaiju action are a huge step backwards, too. It’s supposedly bigger, better and more fun, but in actuality, there’s no heft, no excitement and no verve to any of the action set pieces. They are joyless, pointless and lack any sense of wonder. Which actually make them perfect fit for the rest of Uprising.

Three Films Make A Post: Where there is no more death we shall meet again.

Laurin (1989): This is that rare example of an interesting, moody German horror movie. Of course, director Robert Sigl shot in Hungary with predominantly Hungarian actors and crew, so few Germans were actually involved in the production.

This is an example of Gothically inflected, psychological horror concerning the business of a girl starting to grow up, a serial killer, and possibly ghosts, slow-moving yet emotionally and metaphorically intense. Sigl is rather good at imbuing small gestures with a depth of complicated meanings, which traditionally tends to be the sort of thing I like. This being a serious German movie, certain weaknesses show whenever there’s a need for traditional suspense (which isn’t something we do in Germany), but the mood of childhood nightmare is so thick, I won’t blame Sigl for not understanding how to stage a chase scene effectively.

Black Cab (2024): On the plot level, Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab isn’t a terribly original mix of urban legends and contemporary horror tropes, but as a mood piece, it has considerable strengths.

There’s a dreamlike unreality to the various night drives under duress here that make the involvement  of the outright supernatural utterly plausible via the mood provided. Another strong element is a pleasantly deranged performance by Nick Frost as a very sinister taxi driver that greatly strengthens the impact of some well-chosen moments of the kind of dread women suffer from terrible men on a daily basis.

If this sort of thing works for you, you might be as willing to forgive the film the weaknesses of its plotting as much as I did.

Suzhou River (2000): Finishing today’s trilogy of vibes (see how hip I am, fellow kids?), Lou Ye’s play on (and with) elements of noir and Vertigo is all ambiguous doublings of characters, moments and movement, hand-held camera that signals subjectivity instead of authenticity, mermaids and the curious beauty of an industrially wasted river.

Lou’s play with the meta-level of his narrative mostly manages to avoid getting annoying (there’s typically little worse than a filmmaker getting precious about this sort of thing to me) by the amount of ambiguity it shows: this isn’t meta to show how many movies the director has seen, nor to make a precise point, but because it is a movie about ghosts and phantoms, on the screen and off, and the ghost of old movies are ghosts as real as any other.

Haunting Soul from the Dark Building (1989)

aka Haunting Ghost from a Dark Building

aka Haunting Soul in an Old Building

The soundman (Chen Xiguang) of a mainland Chinese movie project lives in a run-down apartment building that features dubious neighbours, a sleazy and mildly threatening caretaker, and a cellar nobody has entered in years. It also has the most wonderful room sound in its staircase, so our soundguy does invite the film’s lead actress (Pan Jie) to walk up some stairs for him there when he’s not satisfied with the sound on set.

She’s got a creepy feeling in the place, though, and begins to have visions of the rape and murder of a teenager that must have taken place in that cellar during the Cultural Revolution (when nobody cared much about one murder more, the film suggests, somehow getting that past the censors). At the same time, the soundman is suddenly able to record bits and pieces of the future on his equipment. Thus drawn into the apartment’s mystery, the two team up to find out how killed the teenager.

All of this apparently excites the kid’s ghost quite a bit, and it begins haunting and killing people.

Haunting Soul is that rare example of an actual horror movie from mainland China. Stylistically and thematically, it is firmly anchored in the tradition of Asian ghost horror as I know it quite well from other countries in the area. Some of its ideas run parallel to those that would later make up the core of the J-horror explosion but never quite lead to as interesting and horrifying places as these later films would reach. But then, not being on the level of Kiyoshi Kurosawa or Hideo Nakata when he was at his best, is not such a terrible failure.

Yet, while they are clearly knowledgeable about the traditions of films about hauntings, and do like to borrow from those traditions, directors Mu Deyuan and Ming Liang seem at times somewhat insecure in their approach to horror cinema, perhaps on account of a certain lack of practical filmmaking experience with the genre in their national cinema. There’s a certain clumsiness and awkwardness in some of the horror scenes that isn’t helped by highly misguided ideas of how a flying doll head can be made creepy (note to directors: probably not make it look quite as much like it were on some very bad drugs), and sudden outbreaks of bizarre nonsense like the synth version of “Also sprach Zarathustra” that underlies a supposedly dramatic scene. Elements that, of course, make the whole affair pleasantly psychotronic even though they weaken its effect as a proper horror film.

On the other hand, Haunting Soul has moments of actual dream-like dread – everything having to do with the characters’ visions is particularly nicely done - and has quite a bit of fun with using the movie making background as part of its horror. It’s meta, but only as much as the film can actually carry without becoming completely silly.

The apartment location is wonderful as well, looking as Gothic as a modern building can look with its improbably large cellar, light that always threatens to turn the colours of horror and as many hand-placed artificial cobwebs as one can dream of. I also suspect some of this would look like a proper time capsule to the right Chinese audience; it does at least have that feeling from over here in Germany.

This being a mainland Chinese horror movie, there is, of course, the dreaded “natural explanation” for everything we’ve seen to appease the censors, but the directors clearly don’t care about convincing us they actually mean it. Seldom have I seen less effort and screen time sacrificed to this particularly kind of nonsense; so much so that the whole “it was all a tale mental patients told each other” bit feels more of a satire on rational explanation endings than a proper one.

Metamorphosis (2022)

Original title: Yi bian bao long

After catching a very weird giant snake that escaped from a dubious gene research facility, biologist (weird wildlife expert?) and all-around honourable man of action Liang (Gao Shuang) hires on with the research outfit responsible for the monstrosity. His ex-girlfriend, scientist Shi Wen (Sun Ruiqi) is working there as well, and there’s still clearly still a lot going on between them. It’s a bad time for romance, though, for escaping giant snakes aren’t the place’s only problem: the T-Rex the researchers have cobbled together out of the genetical material of other animals breaks out of its cage as well, and now starts hunting the research staff. Liang and Shi Wen do their best to keep everyone alive, but herding these bickering scientists is rather a lot like herding the proverbial cats.

To make matters worse, the perhaps cow-sized T-Rex mutates whenever it encounters deadly force, and eventually evolves to acquire interesting traits like a prehensile tongue and super-chameleon-like stealth powers. All very much to the delight of the mad scientist who actually owns the facility.

Apparently, while I wasn’t looking Chinese streaming services have started to fill the niche for cheap and cheerful CGI monster movies left deserted when the SyFy Channel jumped the Sharknado, and I’m all for it. Chen Liangyan’s Metamorphosis follows all the of the important rules of this particular genre, showing off its dubious but certainly not charmless creatures early and often, while only wasting time on the human characters to create a modicum of plot forward momentum.

Mostly, the people are in here to get eaten, look pretty, bicker to make us happy for them getting eaten, and be heroic, and the cast fulfil these functions as well as can be hoped for. Showing good sense for the kind of movie this is, Chen puts little emphasis on the interpersonal dramatics, and instead hits the monster action as quickly as possible, while doing his best to keep away from too much repetition through the wonderful goofiness of the monster’s mutations. Thanks to an economical runtime of just seventy minutes, this plan works out fine for the movie and at least this viewer.

I have a lot of time for cheap monster movies, and certainly ones that understand the basic needs they are made to fulfil quite as well as Metamorphosis does – the tropes and clichés are the point of these films, not something to be shamefacedly avoided, so wallowing in them is indeed a good thing.

Plus, there’s very little I can say against a film that follows Chekhov’s edict while replacing a boring gun over a fireplace with a colourful giant CGI snake.

Fierce Cop (2022)

Original title: 烈探

Super cop Zhang Tu (Richie Ren) is a third generation Chinese policeman in an unnamed Southeast Asian country. Zhang is trying his best as a single dad, and is certainly doing pretty well by movie cop standards. Alas, when he arrests the rapist idiot son of a drug and slave trade lord, said lord kidnaps Zhang’s son and brings him over the boarder into another unnamed country that isn’t supposed to be Thailand at all, no sir.

Our hero does of course take off in pursuit where his colleagues can’t help him – though his boss is actually as helpful as he can be, in what is a confusing twist for a movie about an angry cop. Zhang is, however, assisted by one of the women (Chen Yao) the bad guys ferry back and forth over various boarders to work in nightclubs.

In fact, he already knows her from the accidental nightclub raid and rapist son arrest, which does set up the two pieces of character development in the movie – her regaining her courage, and Zhang learning that moral uppitiness isn’t a fair reaction to sex workers.

On the character front, there really is very little else worth mentioning going on here. This already brings us to the main problem with Chen Tai-Li’s Fierce Cop – a script that’s really not very good at finding appropriate connective tissue between action sequences, and goes for some kind of mildly socially conscious melodrama that never hits because the material is so underwritten. The script is also cursed with one of the banes of my movie existence – flashbacks to scenes that happened about ten minutes earlier, suggesting filmmakers that believe their audience to have the memories of house flies. Also pretty bad is Fierce Cop’s insane unwillingness to even attempt to plot properly. Instead is uses coincidence as the main driving force of much of its plot. In an interesting turn of events, the film also goes out of its way to make its ending uniquely unsatisfying for reasons of what I can only assume is sheer laziness, first setting up the kind of anti-climax that undermines the impact of the pretty damn great climactic fight, to then eventually trundle into a happy end of sheer, idiotic coincidence, because, to speak with the movie “good things happen to good people”. To which one might also reply, “on what planet?”.

All of this is particularly irritating since the action scenes – action directed and most probably choreographed by Kenji Tanigaki - are genuinely great, full of clever uses of improvised weaponry, and a genuine feel of physical impact. Ren seems fully engaged in the action, showing screen fighting skills I can’t remember him having displayed before, though I could be wrong there. There’s an effective rawness to the action but also enough imagination to never let it devolve into “realistic” fighting.

In fact, the fight scenes are so good, it’s worth it wading through the rest of the film for them.

Journey to the West (2021/3)

Original title: 宇宙探索编辑部

Tang Zhijun (Yang Haoyu) has spent his life hunting after UFO sightings and alien encounters, editing the magazine “Universe Exploration” about his obsessions. He’s never encountered anything extra-terrestrial, however, and public interest in his magazine has hit rock bottom. Today, a couple of years after the death by suicide of his daughter, Tang is sad and broken man, looking for alien contact in the static on his TV and trying to pay the heating bills of the magazine’s tiny office by holding lectures about UFOs in a psychiatric hospital.

After a sponsorship deal falls through under the kind of bizarre circumstances that appear to be part and parcel for Tang’s life, he encounters a video featuring strange aerial phenomena shot somewhere in Sichuan in Southwestern China. Tang decides to grab what’s left of his staff and go on one last big attempt at finding what he so desperately needs to believe in. It will be quite the odyssey.

Premiered in 2021, but only finding actual release a couple of years later, this first feature film directed by Kong Dashan is an astonishing thing. Stylistically, this begins with the look and tone of a fake documentary of the fly-on-the-wall, no commentary by the filmmakers type – including characters speaking directly to the camera in an interview setting - but one that grows increasingly peculiar and uses an increasing amount of visual and editing techniques of dramatic filmmaking, until it simply stops with the documentary approach altogether. This shouldn’t really work at all, or at least feel like a stark directorial imposition on the audience, but in Journey, these kinds of decisions feel like organic growth instead.

This sort of thing is absolutely programmatic for the film as a whole. Its wild mix of often very broad comedy, allusions to the Chinese literary classic it shares its English title with, in-jokes, moments of peculiarity that compare in their individual strangeness with somebody like Lynch (but have a very different emotional and intellectual resonance), science fiction, walking-based road movie, slow cinema with a touching movie about grief should not work at all. Instead of producing a series of tonally unrelated scenes, however, Kong manages to present all these strange idiosyncrasies in tone and style as parts that add up to an actual whole that expresses the feelings of a lost sense of wonder, loss of love and grief from loss that have nearly broken Tang much clearer than any more straightforward treatment could. Simply because lives, Tang’s, as well as those of the people he encounters and infuriates – and the audience’s - are this way, full of disparate elements that still become wholes in our minds. Seen from that perspective, the idiosyncrasies aren’t of course idiosyncrasies anymore, but actually a brilliant way to talk about some of our shared experiences in non-obvious ways, even though most of us – I presume – do not travel westwards to look for aliens.

Interesting for this old friend of the cosmicist, there’s also a bit of cosmicism in here, though the kinder, friendlier version of the philosophy that finds a bit of sadness and fear but also a sense of wonder that borders on joy in our own smallness in the universe. So more Clarke than Lovecraft. Seen from a certain direction, the film can be read as being about Tang’s journey from a softer, enthusiastic cosmicism through the harsher one, to a new, wiser version of it as much as it can be about him finally coming out at the other end of grief or about him learning to give up on dreams that have turned to poison for him.

In short: Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

This time around, aging super spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team of little buddies (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames) who are actually allowed to do something in this outing are fighting two enemies: first, a CIA director (Alex Baldwin) who shuts down the IMF with the reasoning that they cause more harm than they prevent. Which, given the fact that the villains in three of the other four Mission Impossible movies were rogue or traitorous IMF agents, has the ring of truth to it.

Enemy number two is a sort of anti-IMF made up of a world-wide network of disgruntled spies disgusted with keeping up the status quo following the leadership of the reptilian Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). As all Mission Impossible villains, Lane is a bit obsessed with Ethan, of course.

Seemingly playing both sides – like a proper spy – is the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).

In an ideal world, this fifth Mission Impossible movie would of course hinge on the fact that its villains are absolutely right – the IMF is a bunch of idiots causing problems it then solves with grand gestures and considerable loss of life, and the status quo it is bound to uphold and its methods to do this are morally unsupportable. This being a modern blockbuster and Tom Cruise vehicle instead, Baldwin’s character is a well-meaning fool, and Lane is a movie villain.

This isn’t something I actually condemn Christopher McQuarrie’s film for, but it is something so remarkably obvious, I couldn’t help but comment on it. Coming to the film the filmmakers actually made, this is a marked improvement on the horrors of the fourth Mission Impossible, featuring interesting villains actually allowed and able to make an impression on the audience – Harris is just great – a twisty plot line that might not hold up to too much logical scrutiny but is very fun when you’re just willing to go with it, and some genuinely great action and suspense set pieces. The opera sequence alone would be worth the price of admission as a piece of high drama suspense filmmaking, but the rest of the set pieces is just as fun, well directed and exciting as it.

Coming to our the “state of the Cruise” segment, I can gladly report that the close-up hogging isn’t painfully egregious anymore, and that the movie actually has quite a few scenes for other actors to shine in during which Cruise doesn’t even make an appearance. A personal appearance, I should say, for everyone here has a curious habit of throwing in a sentence or three about how awesome/sexy/breathtakingly dangerous Ethan Hunt is, even if that’s not a pertinent question at all right then. Vanity’s an interesting thing.

Meg 2: The Trench (2023)

Some years after the first Meg. Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), still a total badass (because he’s played by Jason Statham), is now working for Jiuming Zhang (Jing Wu, also a total badass, but more on that in a second), the brother of the last film’s tragic (cough) shark victims. Apart from being a badass underwater explorer, Jonas is also a bit of an eco warrior now and takes good care of his daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai). Because this is a very Chinese co-produced movie, Jiuming is just as great at everything he does as Jonas, so if a Gary Stu double team isn’t part of your movie dreams, you’d probably best hide now.

Their combined perfection will come in handy when an exploration of the trench where the megalodons come from goes badly awry, and the team has to fight their way back to the surface not just through megalodons but also a couple of other critters. And yes, of course, Meiying smuggled herself on the expedition, do you even need to ask? Also involved are a traitor in our heroes’ midst, an evil American corporation of evil (in contrast to the angelic Chinese one the good guys are working for, of course) who hires the least competent mercenaries on the market – probably to save a buck – and eventually a place known as Fun Island. Which is more fun with added monsters.

Given that even the directors of Marvel blockbusters are allowed to put some stylistic marks on their films, you’d think that Meg 2 would leave some space for the things its director Ben Wheatley is known for and good at. No such luck here, alas – there’s really not a single shot in the movie that would suggest Wheatley, or really anyone with a personality behind the camera.

If one can cope with that, and treats The Meg 2 as the cartoonish shark action movie with way too much unfunny humour it is meant to be, there is a lot of fun to be had here. While the script is a mix of painfully unsubtle Chinese propagandist subtext, more clichés than you can throw a landshark at, plotting that’s as far from being dramatically effective as can be, and further dragged down into absurdity by having to include not just the usual one but two specimen of men who are always right and can do anything, it is difficult to fault a film that’s so hell-bent on shoving in whatever its writers think is fun. So there’s the expected megalodons, but also a horde of other critters, underwater action, a few second of claustrophobia, thriller-type traitors, a third act that just jumps to a completely different place as well as into a different shark movie sub-genre – whatever shark movie you’d like to watch, there are couple of scenes of it in here. None of which combined makes much sense as a story, or works as a proper narrative, but is very enjoyable as a series of colourful, noisy flashes in front of one’s face. If this makes a viewer feel like a cat following a laser pointer, well, there are worse fates in life.

In short: Knock at the Cabin (2023)

My relationship with the films of M. Nigh Shyamalan has been long, rough, and one-sided, resulting in quite a few annoyed write-ups by me. With most directors, I’d simply have given up on their films or shelved them for a later decade (once our AI overlords abolish work for anyone but robots), and spared my imaginary readers some suffering. Thing is, on a technical level, Shyamalan has a second great film in him, he’s just not interested in making it, apparently.

Instead, we get this incredibly offensive hymn to literal sacrifice, a film that masturbates on the altar Abraham has dragged Isaac onto, and doesn’t even leave in the biblical get out of jail free card, I was only kidding, buddy. For Shyamalan, apparently worse than the godhood of the Old Testament, insists on his sacrifice. Which results in a film that exults in fulfilling the random whims of an ill-defined godhood for no reason whatsoever, instead of saying no to what the film can’t even bring itself to call a monstrosity. Ideologically and morally, this is complete opposite of the Paul Tremblay novel it supposedly adapts, by the way, and while I’m not actually much of an admirer of the writer’s body of work, that has rather more to do with his concept and execution of ambiguity rather than his books getting hot and bothered at bending the knee to abuse and monstrosity (because they do the opposite).

Apart from its moral bankruptcy (and when do you find me complaining about a film’s morality?), and some bizarre ideas (the “four human qualities” are apparently malice, nurture, healing and guidance, whatever that’s supposed to mean), the film suffers from another problem as well: namely, while I approve of Shyamalan’s decision to for once eschew his beloved, idiot, plot twist in the end, thus we get a film where everything that happens in it is laid out right at its beginning, and is indeed happening as advertised, which really isn’t how a narrative is supposed to work, last I checked. Given this, the film feels drawn out and draggy, shambling to its enraging foregone conclusion with little dramatic tension, however dramatic the score by Herdís Stefánsdóttir swells.

That this thing wastes a great performance by Dave Bautista only adds further insult to injury.

The Swordsman in Double Flag Town (1991)

aka Swordsmen in Double Flag Town

Original title: 雙旗鎮刀客

A teenage boy named Hai Ge (Gao Wei) travels through the deserts of Northwest China to a village known as Double Flag Town. On his deathbed, his swordmaster father told Hai Ge about the girl that’s supposedly been promised by her father to marry him. She’s the daughter of an old companion of Hai Ge’s father (the film actually uses the term “uncle” to describe the man, but everybody here’s called “uncle” or “sister” by basically everyone else, so he’s probably not an uncle by blood), but the only things our protagonist actually knows about her is that she must be about his own age, has a father with a lame leg, and a mole on her butt. This not being a comedy, Hai Ge concentrates his search on the thing with the leg.

It isn’t actually all that difficult to find the two, even for a shy and naïve young guy like Hai Ge. Other problems arise, though: both Lame Uncle (Chang Jiang) and his daughter Hao Mei (Zhao Ma-Na) start out deeply unimpressed by the young man. Though Uncle does give him a job and a place to stay, he’s not willing to marry off his daughter to a nobody she very much doesn’t want to marry, at first. During life in the closed-off little community that is apparently regular visited by duelling swordspeople, and is dominated from afar by the murderous Lethal Swordsman (Sun Haiying, I believe), Hao Mei’s heart softens towards Hai Ge.

Before things can properly develop there, the little brother of the Lethal Swordsman attempts to rape Hao Mei. Hai Ge uses his surprisingly great swordsmanship to defend her, killing the would-be rapist. Alas, killing the brother of a guy like the Lethal Swordsman is not a healthy thing – not only for Hai Ge and Hao Mei, but for the village as a whole as well. It is doubtful that Hai Ge can win a duel against a swordsman this, ahem, lethal, but running away might mean the end of everybody else in the village.

Far too few wuxia films use the Chinese Northwest or a Silk Road setting, so I’m always happy to stumble over one, especially when it is as interesting a movie as – recently deceased – He Ping’s Swordsman in Double Flag Town. Officially taking place in the Chinese West, this is as much influenced by Westerns, particularly the more abstract of the Italian Westerns, as it is by wuxia cinema of its time.

So instead of long, artfully choreographed, non-realistic martial arts battles, this is a film where scenes of guys eyeing one another – in Hai Ge’s case often as fearfully as befits him being a kid and not a grown-up – end in short explosions of quick violence. He Ping loves to hide those behind quick cuts, or, in the finale, a dust cloud, until the slow dropping of a body explains who actually won the fight. Which does of course also have parallels in Japanese cinema.

Where wuxia is traditionally colourful and set in clean – at worst artfully cobwebbed – locations and sets, everything here is realistically grimy and dusty; people look like people eking out their living in the desert do probably look, so there’s a decisive lack of glamour.

Still, the film never feels like one of those dreaded attempts at making a “realistic” wuxia (or western, or chanbara). Rather, it uses what could be flags of realism as its own way of stylizing things when it then shoots them in a surprisingly slick early 1991 visual style, where a synthesizer score doing slightly shifted westerns score riffs feels absolutely appropriate.

On a narrative level, this is a rather minimalist work that eschews huge backstories and monologues in favour of suggestion and archetype efficiently as well as effectively. This is not a film of many words, or one that wants to explain its philosophy to you, but rather one that knows a viewer will understand its morality as well as the emotional price characters here pay for decent actions without it emphasizing any of this.

So often, this feels more like a mood turned film than a detailed narrative, a minimalist, but elegant picture that demonstrates the moral parallels between Western and wuxia by working exactly where these genres meet.

Three Films Make A Post: An Old Man and his Mule Go West

A Perfect Enemy (2020): Don’t you just hate it when a film clearly thinks it is oh so very very clever, but actually confuses cleverness with being contrived and far-fetched? Case in point (at least for me) is this example of the type by Kike Maíllo, one of those films that thinks they are twisty and formally complex, when in fact they are a bit tedious and increasingly obvious. The plot, such as it is, would – after judicious rewrites to get rid of the faux cleverness - have made for a nice thirty minute episode of something like Inside No. 9, but is stretched out to ninety minutes full of pointless detail and the film shouting “look how clever I am!”.

There’s a nice, scenery chewing lead performance by Athena Strates without whose efforts the whole thing would become completely tedious, but her counterpart Tomasz Kot approaches his role so low key, she might as well not have bothered, while their surroundings scream of technical achievement in the filmmaking arts without any idea how to properly apply it.

Terror and Black Lace aka Terror y encajes negros (1986): Keeping with the tediousness, how about this sleazy Mexican number that starts as a sex comedy and continues in that way for way too long, until it turns into a mock giallo about a serial killing hair fetishist. From time to time, there’s a genuinely creepy scene popping up, and the hetero pervs among us will not complain about all the ways the film comes up with to show off attractive women with little or nothing on. Alas, even the latter gets tedious after a while, while the former’s mostly used to keep the audience awake through all the tedium. If I were a nicer guy, I’d probably suggest that Luis Alcoriza is trying to satirize the Mid-80s Mexican bourgeoisie like a cut-rate Chabrol during the sex comedy parts, but Chabrol was never this relentlessly boring.

An added minus is that every single character here is thoroughly unlikeable, either a serial killer, an abusive husband, or women trading sex for material goods, with no complexity to help a viewer tolerate them.

Abduction (2019): Last but certainly best today is this direct to home entertainment science fiction and action movie by the dependable Ernie Barbarash, starring Scott Adkins and Andy On. Adkins is laying it on a bit too thick this time around for my tastes, but then, the action is surrounded by a lot of weird to totally cracked alien abduction business that’s at least partially expressed through the language of martial arts cinema (so the aliens are really into chi-driven dimensional travel because this is a Chinese production after all), so subtlety clearly isn’t asked for. If you think that sounds a bit dumb but also rather a lot of fun, you have the film pegged perfectly; and if you’re like me, and always wanted your cheap but well-staged action (Barbarash and his leads know what they’re doing in this regard) paired with affordable interdimensional shenanigans (see On run through the same patch of park again and again, trapped in a loop, watch Adkins realize he’s been abducted for decades etc), you’re going to enjoy this just fine.

In short: Monster Hunters (2020)

Looking for some missing colleagues, some bad-ass US soldiers under the leadership of one Artemis (Milla Jovovich) drop through a rift in space into a desert full of giant monsters.

It doesn’t take terribly long until Artemis is the last one standing of her team, so it’s lucky for her she meets and eventually – after the usual tensions and miscommunications – teams up with a guy she dubs Hunter (Tony Jaa). There’s more monster fighting, unfunny jokes, and even something akin to a plot for the two to work through eventually.

I know I’m supposed to hate everything Paul W.S. Anderson does, what with all of his films (let’s ignore Event Horizon and that thing with Kurt Russell as early aberrations on the more brainy side, comparatively) being low-brow action, science fiction and horror mash-ups based on video games that aren’t ideally suited to adaptation even at the best of times. His insistence on casting his wife in the lead in every single movie he makes doesn’t make the not hating part easier, given that Jovovich can barely act on the best of days.

However, watching this stint in the playground of Capcom’s Monster Hunter games, I found myself not annoyed by low effort writing (though the script by Anderson himself certainly is nothing to write home about) but started enjoying myself quickly. Watching old Milla, the always lovely Jaa and co fight against various well-realized CG monsters may not be the deepest experience of my movie watching life, but it turns out to be effective popcorn movie fun, with neat monsters, special guest star Ron Perlman, a silly cat person right out of the games, and a well-paced script. Hell, I didn’t even mind Jovovich’s performance here, and found the film’s “so what” shrugging at its source material’s stranger elements pretty charming.

Even better, in this one, Anderson has most of his annoying directorial tics fully under control, not showing even a single scene first backwards in slow motion before repeating it normally, and really giving off the calm, professional directorial air of a guy who has made mid-budget popcorn movies of this type for several decades, and actually knows his business very well indeed; at least this time around.

All of this may not sound like a glowing recommendation, but honestly, Monster Hunter is a fine way to watch people fight giant monsters for hundred minutes or so.

Three Films Make A Post: Like a sudden, terrifying scream… Suspense shatters the Screen!

Foreign Intrigue (1956): Well, suspense certainly didn’t shatter my screen when watching Robert Mitchum’s European vacation as directed by Sheldon Reynolds, what with the total absence of suspense from the film. This certainly wants to be a Hitchcockian or Third Man style type of film, showing Mitchum travelling all over Europe to find out the secret of his deceased employer, but in practice, this is way too comfy an affair for that. Mitchum strolls through Europe amiably, kissing the girls and sometimes punching the guys, but Sheldon never manages to build up much actual suspense. From time to time, the director hits on an atmospheric shot or two, but the script is never bothering with making the mystery Mitchum chases actually interesting, leading to a slow and comfy kind of Eastman Colour chase. For certain moods, there’s something to be said for a leisurely amble, of course, just don’t expect much of an actual movie going in.

Mulan (2020): Of course, there’s slow and kinda likeably boring like that old Mitchum vehicle, and then there’s this remake of the Disney animation based on the Chinese tale as directed by Niki Caro. It’s slow, lacking in charm and visual imagination and does nothing better, or even just as well, as even a proper Chinese, Taiwanese or Hong Kong wuxia from the third line of that genre (let’s not even speak of the good ones), wasting Donnie Yen, Gong Li, Jet Li, and so on and so forth on things they could do in their sleep.

This is also a good example that simply throwing money at your blockbuster doesn’t necessarily make it watchable. Even in the highly commercial arena of the big loud film for international audiences, you need creative vision. If you don’t have that, you get a very loud version of what my brain does when my feet are falling asleep, or, as Disney called it, Mulan.

Congo (1995): Let’s not end this trilogy of films of dubious quality on a positive note this time around. Instead, let’s talk about Frank Marshall’s supposed love letter to the classic adventure movie and its serial siblings based on the insufferable Michael Crichton. It’s got a talking ape in it, and I’m half convinced it was also written by one (sorry to all talented writing gorillas out there). What it doesn’t have is dramatic tension, a script that’s more than a long string of nonsense, action sequences worth their name, or any enjoyment factor. I do appreciate that somebody involved in the production at some point (this is one of those films with a million script versions by dozens of writers, none of whom is in the credits, because US unions are weird about crediting the people doing the actual work) tried to update some classic adventure tropes, giving us Ernie Hudson as a tough and at least semi-competent leader, and Laura Linney getting to be a two-fisted adventurer.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film is still terrible, featuring mawkish sentimentality next to badly staged action sequences and dialogue I can only ascribe to a gorilla.

Mile 22 (2018)

Usually, I relegate movies that piss me off quite as much as this thing to my Saturday “Three Films Make A Post” segment but sometimes a boy does have to express his anger and pain in more than a hundred words. Really, calling this a movie goes a bit far, and is a bit of an insult to those people making movies in their grandma’s backyards and could probably use the 35 to 60 Million US Dollars this was apparently budgeted at to make a thousand films that at least show some enthusiasm for the art of filmmaking; and who certainly have more talent than the crew of highly paid professionals under “director” (I use this term loosely) Peter Berg demonstrate here.

Now, if you’ve seen any of the other films Berg made with Marky Mark in the lead, you’ll probably expect the reactionary spirit far beyond the average of the not exactly progressive action movie genre (and as you know, I love me some action movies even if they have their heart on the wrong side), as well as the inability of Wahlberg to act his way out of a wet paper back, his macho alpha male posturing mostly emphasising how ridiculous the guy is in these roles; the casual racism is going to be a given too, I suppose.

But Berg (and whoever else is responsible for the decisions made during and after production) doesn’t stop there this time around. The dialogue (“script” – and I use the term even more loosely then “director” - by Lea Carpenter) is a painful mess that’s made slightly more bearable by a sound mix that seems as embarrassed by this shit as everyone else involved also should have been and buries about half of the dialogue under noise and crappy music. The action direction lets the Michael Bays and Tony Scotts of this world look like beacons of clarity, Berg apparently going out of his way to shoot the action sequences by pointing away from the action as often as possible. This becomes particularly egregious during the martial arts fights of poor, misused Iko Uwais (who also happens to be the only one in the movie bothering with some acting; Marky Mark can’t, John Malkovich won’t), scenes that suggest to me that Berg would really hate for the audience to see or actually enjoy any of this crap. For reasons only known to the filmmakers, our “hero” spends much of his time insulting everyone he meets, be it co-workers, strangers or random passersby, making the guy unsympathetic even in a genre whose heroes are borderline psychopaths anyway. The film’s also suffering from the delusion that gritty (you can bet everybody involved just loves that descriptor, plus the good old “edgy”) dialogue means having Marky Mark use the word fuck at least ten times in every scene. In reality, this just makes the character we spend most of the film with even more of an asshole, and a childish one to boot.

Tonally, this pretends not to be a proper action movie at all, but more the kind of think-peace-style semi-political semi-action thing like Sicario or Zero Dark Thirty (both films I have problems with, too, but rather more upmarket ones having to do with their meaning and storytelling and not a lack of even the most basic filmmaking skills). That nobody involved has the brains or the talent to actually make that sort of film nearly goes without saying; turns out there’s more to this filmmaking stuff than pointing a camera away from the action. Though that bit, Berg has down pat.


I could go on berating Mile 22 for another six-hundred words or so, but by now, my imaginary readers will have gotten the gist and can supply their own insults towards its “storytelling” and “plotting”.

Three Films Make A Post: The struggle is real.

Witches in the Woods (2019): I can appreciate that this film directed by Jordan Barker does try to use the metaphorical power of witch lore to explore very contemporary ideas about feminism (really, the #metoo movement in this case), class, and race. Unfortunately, the idea is much better than the execution, for Christopher Borelli’s script is about as good at actually writing the characters involved and their relations as the scripts of 80s slasher movies were. Believing that these specific people are supposed to end up in the same SUV looking for hot snowboarding action and have ever been friends is honestly a bridge too much to cross for my ability to believe any damn nonsense a movie tries to sell me. Making matters worse is of course that an 80s slasher could easily get away with this sort of thing because the characters were not really what those films were about.

This one, on the other hand, is supposed to be about the social and the psychological, so not delivering on these things marks complete failure. Even ignoring this, the film’s horror stylings are bland and conventional, and there’s nothing to see here but some pretty young things who probably deserved to be in a better movie.

Tone-Deaf (2019): Keeping with films I didn’t enjoy at all, here’s Richard Bates Jr.’s movie about an intolerably annoying young woman (Amanda Crew) renting a house in the country for a weekend to get over her life being crap and to have a different place to stare at her phone from encountering an equally insufferable old guy (Robert Patrick) with a tendency to break the fourth wall right into the camera who has found the new hobby of murdering people. I have no idea why I should care, or what the film’s permanent shifts between blood, the flattest jokes outside of a pancake, META!, and whatever the director/writer wanted to shove in next are supposed to achieve, but I’m sure everybody involved thinks this one’s really, really clever, given all the smug mugging into the camera the film and the actors do.


Blackhat (2015): On the other hand, I thought Michael Mann’s generally maligned crime and action movie that presses an actual performance out of Chris Hemsworth instead of a star turn is rather good. After the horrors of Miami Vice, Mann has returned to his old tricks – actors doing ACTING in diners, hoisting enough detail into a film to make the silly perfectly believable – and come up with a film that’s about as realistic a portrayal of international hacking shenanigans as Hackers was, but that creates its world with such drive and force, I even found myself buying into the even more improbable finale in which Hemsworth – genius hacker and action movie badass at the same time – does manly shit wearing phone book armour.