In short: The Gray Man (2022)

A CIA killer (Ryan Gosling, whose popularity I’ll never get, because he doesn’t act in any sense of the word beyond acting as some sort of hole in a movie for a viewer to project whatever into and has little charisma I’d see) finds himself first on the run from his own people, and then looking to free the kidnapped sick child of his mentor (Billy Bob Thornton) while fighting off the the private sector incompetents of bad guy Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans, clearly having a blast with the villain role; also at least some recognizable character traits). A pacemaker with GPS is involved, so you can imagine how the rest of the script is.

On the corporate franchise side of movie making, brother duo Anthony and Joe Russo are responsible for some of my favourite Marvel movies – I’d even go so far as to call Captain America: The Winter Soldier one of the best action movies ever made in Hollywood – but their non-superhero action thrillers for Netflix suggest that Marvel’s presumably heavier hand is exactly what they need. Without that sort of guidance, we get movies as bad as Extraction, or as aggressively tedious as this one, a movie that somehow manages to make two hours of action sequences seem long and pretty boring. At least the incessant noise keeps one awake.

It doesn’t help here that none of the action sequences are anything more than big budget competent, lacking in inventiveness, interesting staging and the spark that makes a movie explosion fun, nor that the not-Bourne super spy script all of the action is based on is mostly pretty damn terrible. At least, it has more holes than most victims of Hansen’s or Six’s shoot-outs, does character motivation so badly, it would have been better not to even bother, and wastes a mostly great cast on nothing whatsoever. Because that’s not enough, the movie is also excruciatingly long-winded, and jumps from country to country without ever making any use of the different locations. This could all have happened in a warehouse and not looked or felt any less interesting.

Three Films Make A Post: This movie is so real it makes every other movie in this town look like a movie.

Playing It Cool (2014): Meta genre films are difficult, for you really need to have something interesting to say about a genre if you want to get away with deconstructing it (at least a little) while still staying inside its lines. Otherwise, a film will end up looking embarrassed being part of the genre it is in, satisfying no one, most certainly not an audience going into a genre movie because they actually like the genre it operates in. Which is a bit of problem. In parts, this dreadful fate does strike Justin Reardon’s film. It has its funny moments, its short flashes of interesting insight, but mostly, it really doesn’t seem to want to go for the big tearful emotion, and isn’t really as clever as it thinks it is to make up for that. Adding to the problems is that the film is – like a lot of the more male centric romantic comedies – really not interested in romance so much as in its male lead Chris Evans’s character learning to stop being a complete dickhead, with the supposed partner Michelle Monaghan really not being fleshed out terribly well. Which again doesn’t exactly scream romance to me.

La délicatesse aka Delicacy (2011): In the same genre is this French movie directed by David Foenkinos and Stéphane Foenkinos about Nathalie (Audrey Tautou) losing her husband and much of her joy in life until she rather randomly romances her mildly weird, not terribly pretty (that’s a plot point, though one rather curious in a film from the country that treated Gerard Depardieu as pretty damn hot) colleague Markus (François Damiens). It’s just as genre conscious as Reardon’s film but where the American movie seems a bit embarrassed by the whole thing (and really not terribly interested in being romantic, like a slasher movie without murders), this one steps into clichés, traditions and regular plot beats with wild abandon, discarding the bits it doesn’t like, wallowing in those is does, adding an honest appreciation of the weight of pain, as well as general whimsy, and otherwise trusting in Tautou’s natural awesomeness. Or more precisely, her ability to go through emotions from bereft to confused to adorable (that’s an emotion, right?) with full conviction, changing tracks at the drop of a hat, while actually producing effective chemistry between her and her not exactly obvious romantic partner Damiens.

The Hearse (1980): It’s easier to go from that last film to this horror film starring Trish Van Devere than you’d think, seeing that both concern a female main character coping with loss, badly. Just that Van Devere’s Jane stumbles upon a mix of late 70s/early 80s supernatural horror clichés from ghosts over Satanic conspiracies, to bad love, reincarnation and (sort of) an evil car instead of love. Unfortunately, director George Bowers (or the script, for that matter) never manages to get a grip on the material, turning what should by all rights be at least an entertaining grab bag of horror fun into a tame little film that never amounts to much – not even a decent ending.


It’s too bad, for Van Devere certainly applies herself with conviction, but apart from two, perhaps three creepy scenes, she seems to be the only one involved. Unless you count Joseph Cotten chewing the scenery outrageously (and tone deaf) as an impossibly rude lawyer.

Push (2009)

In Push’s world, there exists an international underground of people with various psychic powers, reaching from telekinetics to people who can scream really unpleasantly, from people with mind control powers to various types of clairvoyants. Many of them are controlled – willingly or not – by various government agencies, though the film is a little ambiguous regarding how much control these agencies actually employ about the powered.

We do learn quickly enough that the American organization concerned with this – led by one Henry Carver (Djimon Hounsou) – is rather evil, what with them doing human experiments and murdering the father of what will be our protagonist. And that just after Dad has given him what very much sounds like the beginning of a chosen one prophecy it’s not really turning out to be!

At the start of the film’s main plot, said protagonist Nick Gant has all grown up to be played by Chris Evans, and is trying to keep something of a low profile in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as low as he imagined it to be, for the Division knows exactly where he lives and which triad he’s owing money to - they clearly just don’t see him as much of a potential threat. So when a suitcase containing a rather important substance makes its way to Hong Kong carried by a woman we will later learn is Nick’s ex-girlfriend Kira (Camilla Belle), a couple of Division agents come sniffing around his apartment, threaten him a bit, and leave. Nick’s just about to go on the run when another visitor comes in. This time it’s teenage pre-cog (“watcher” in the film’s terminology) Cassie (Dakota Fanning). Cassie is – for various and complicated reasons – after the same thing as the Division agents and really wants Nick’s help.

Eventually, they team-up and become involved in various plots and counter-plots that also involve some Chinese operatives with a much better watcher than Cassie is (Li Xia-Lu). At least, they’ll be able to team up with a handful of other independents with middling super powers (Ming-Na Wen, Cliff Curtis and Nate Mooney).

Paul McGuigan’s Push seems to be what happens when someone imagines the X-Men by way of the European post-Bourne spy film with visible influences reaching from classic heist flicks to – appropriately enough - Hong Kong cinema. That might sound a bit like a high concept mess, but in fact, the resulting movie is pretty great. Push is surprisingly excellent at finding the point where the genres and influences it is working from coalesce, making it all feel much more organic than I would have expected.

I’m particularly fond of the way David Bourla’s script plays with genre expectations, often diverting from the tropes of one genre to that of the next one to surprise the audience and even subvert the usual plot beats a bit. An example is the way the prologue and the first act suggest that this is going to be a Chosen One tale with Nick as its Chosen, when the film instead turns out to be about a handful of characters who are all down on their luck one way or the other trying to do some good in a world that has stacked all cards against them, with Nick honestly not being particularly special.

Even our heroes’ super powers aren’t terribly impressive: Nick loses practically every fight he gets in, Cassie is a much less precise and clear pre-cog than her Chinese counterpart - not to speak of the things her mother could do - and their friends have powers of very limited applicability. Only Kira’s actually dangerous in that regard, though she’s a rather ambiguous character, and not just because the film is pretty good at showing how horrible the things her mind control powers do to her victims actually are.

Push does particularly well with the surreal and strange parts of its world, really making its audience feel the strangeness of a place where characters try to find a way through to a half-knowable yet always shifting future, where what you think who you are might not be true because someone might just have literally put your past in your head. There’s often something appropriately hallucinatory to McGuigan’s direction, his characters moving through a world that feels just ever so slightly off yet at the same time hyper-real.

In this regard, the director makes perfect use of Hong Kong locations that look and feel like strange, neon and candy-coloured pieces of a slightly mad near future, at once absolutely real and knowable yet ever so slightly disquieting and off. Which might sound like exoticism but seems to speak to the nature of actual Hong Kong as the dream of a very peculiar futurist, something it seems to share with Tokyos, real and imagined.

There’s quite a bit of interesting thematic work going on in the background here, too, with more than just one character having to carry the burdens as well as the hopes of their parents generation, with some of these burdens rather cruel, some inevitable, some very much imagined and some kinder as they seem. The film doesn’t really fall into the trap of simplifying this either, with what we can glean of the motivations of the absent parents mostly as complex as that of actual parents. Like it is with the future in Push’s world, things are complicated, ambiguous, and generally not as clear and easy they seem.

Which of course all fits neatly into the superpowered spy/heist film tale the film tells, suggesting a surprising amount of care and thought having gone into the writing. Why, the film even largely manages to keep this up throughout its final act, even though there’s a bit of angling for a sequel that will never come. The film’s action is rather on the excellent side, too – varied, inspired by Hong Kong cinema yet not aping it, and taking place in diverse and interesting environments.

There are quite a few other small touches I love about the film: there’s the number of character actors from Hong Kong popping up everywhere (the film’s thanking Johnnie To’s Milkyway as their local co-operator for a reason), the imaginative and telling way even the same power works differently here for different people, the film’s love for people who aren’t born to be heroes and still do their best, the various wry nods at pop-cultural touchstones, the general quality of the cast, and quite a bit more.

Clearly, I have a bit of a crush on Push, and why not? It certainly deserves it.

In short: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

By now, I’m actually going into Marvel productions banking on them being at least entertaining and generally non-stupid, but I think I’m going to adjust my attitude and will from now on bank on them being really good, and can still be positively surprised when they turn out like The Winter Soldier, which is to say pretty darn great.

Of course, seeing that it’s highly influenced by Ed Brubaker’s excellent run on the comics, the last decade or so of mainstream-yet-intelligent spy movies like the first three Bourne films and the Daniel Craig James Bonds, 70s conspiracy thrillers, and – quite obviously if you look at the fights – martial arts and action cinema from all around the world (The Raid quite heavily comes to mind), and does all the right things with a character that should by all rights be a horrible jingoistic mess but nearly never becomes one, Winter Soldier seems a bit made for me. Particularly because it uses the synergy of the already established Marvel movie universe very well without running into the trap of thinking this synergy replaces the actual plotting, and knows that Captain America in this century is very much a character belonging into an ensemble. By all rights, this should be called “Captain America, Black Widow & The Falcon: The Winter Soldier”, but then, that’d be a really unwieldy title. The film really does a lot of cool and interesting things with Natasha and Sam, thanks to a script that knows how to write the personal stuff into the explosions, and actors in Scarlett Johansson and Anthony Mackie who have proven themselves highly adept at the particular acting style you need to apply in blockbuster cinema.

As a pinko commie, I’m also quite happy with the film’s politics, not because I perfectly agree with them (I’m not the kind of pinko commie who needs that to appreciate a film, fortunately), but because they are as coherent as can be expected in a film genre that can do subtlety only to a degree, and are a perfect fit for a Captain America film in 2014 that wants to stay true to the character’s origins of Hitler-punching and taking the promise of America by its word.

All these elements, as well as Chris Evans’s still note-perfect performance and many a nice nod to established comic characters, I mostly expected (or at least would have bet minor amounts of money on). What I didn’t expect is that Anthony and Joe Russo, both directors with mainly experience in sitcoms (even though one of them is the sainted and seemingly indestructible Community), were this great as action directors, with so many propulsive action sequences that also just happen to be often really cleverly and beautifully choreographed there should by all rights be not enough breath in anyone watching left to complain about them as “empty spectacle”. Which of course they aren’t – as in all good action movies, these action scenes are actually saying a lot of things about the characters the dialogue scenes don’t, all the time not just working to drive the film forward, but working as a physical connection between theme, characters and plot.

Needless to say, I’m very, very happy with the resulting movie.

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In short: The Avengers (2012)

Sometimes, it's easy being me. I'm not one of those cult movie fans always in desperate need to proof they're part of the cool kids (not unlike certain friends of art movies who would not be found dead ever being entertained by a movie, or smiling watching one), so I can allow myself to like those blockbuster concoctions that are good, or - as is the case here - pretty fucking great.

Given the overabundance of money director/writer/king of nerds Joss Whedon had to blow up (often quite literally,) it's not much of a surprise The Avengers' spectacle is fantastic to watch. Although even that part is not always a given if one keeps the body of work of Michael Bay in mind, who knows how to make big explosions and giant robots boring. Whedon, on the other hand, knows how to make the big and loud things big and loud and actually interesting.

Not surprisingly, he also understands that the big and loud things become inherently more interesting, more fun and more important to an audience if you anchor them in smaller and quieter moments that are in reality much more important, and therefore spends as much - if not more - time and effort on these.

As an old comic fan, Whedon also inherently gets what his characters are about (so no Bendis-style Captain America silently condoning torture, and no Kenneth Brannagh-Thor as a jock with a hammer), and uses this knowledge, a cast that can act their asses off if given the opportunity (and isn't by the way, Mark Ruffalo the best Bruce Banner you've seen, and Scarlett Johansson a much more convincing Black Widow than anyone could have expected?), and a script that manages to squeeze an insane amount of subtlety in to make what would in a lesser movie be just the connecting tissue between action scenes sing.

Other typical Whedon virtues are also in and accounted for - the quick and clever dialogue, the sudden reversals of genre tropes, and the ability to naturally shift from comedy to tragedy and back again in the course of two lines of dialogue. The real beauty of the film is how well this aspect of The Avengers connects with the more usual blockbuster virtues, as if having a heart and a brain and big explosions in a movie wasn't a big thing.

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Three Films Make A Post: Things happen that have never been seen by human beings. The blood flows like vintage wine.

And The Crows Will Dig Your Grave aka Los Buitres cavaran tu fosa (1972): Despite its being graced with an awesome title, routine Spanish Western director Juan Bosch's film is a wee bit too generic to warrant me writing anything long about it. It's the usual mess of people (Craig Hill, Angel Aranda and Fernando Sancho among them) of variable nastiness doing nasty things to each other for monetary reasons - not much vengeance going around here - with some light political allegory thrown in. While I've seen it all before, I can't really complain about Bosch's execution of the story: the cruelty is cruel, the action is tight, the dialogue scenes have a certain amount of bite. Add decent acting by people with excellent facial hair and a generic yet fine soundtrack by Bruno Nicolai, and you get a Spaghetti (Paella?) Western that might be totally forgettable, but is also pretty entertaining.

My Horse, My Gun, Your Widow (1972): Again directed by Bosch, again made in 1972 (and still not the last film the director shot in that year), again a Spaghetti Western, again featuring Craig Hill, a Bruno Nicolai soundtrack and an awesome title. Alas, I wasn't as happy with this one, for this is one of those dreaded "comedic" films that suffer from not being funny at all. There are of course some good Spaghetti Western comedies, but those films usually know if there in it for the jokes, want to be parodies of the genre their working in, or hide more complex things behind their humour. My Horse etc doesn't seem to have much of a plan at all, and ends up being one of those films that are just kind of there without ever amounting to much.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011): After the rather disappointing Thor, Joe Johnston (the guy responsible for the horrible Wolfman remake) of all people pulls the Marvel superhero films out of the druthers again with what is as fine a piece of blockbuster cinema as you're likely to encounter. The film not only gets the core of the character it is about right, but also realizes which elements of the original's serial/pulp origins will work under these particular circumstances and which won't, and then proceeds to dial up the useful elements to awesome. Add that the film has an actual heart, and find me a very happy man.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,italian movies,american movies,juan bosch,craig hill,joe johnston,chris evans,hayley atwell,stanley tucci,tommy lee jones,hugo weaving,spaghetti western,comedy,superheroes,in short