Past Misdeeds: G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

The end of the first G.I Joe movie left Cobra agent Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) perfectly positioned for further evildoing – and revenge - by leaving him stranded in his new position as the fake President of the US of A (Jonathan Pryce). Consequently, using his awesome presidential powers of ordering illogical death traps and making up non-existent evidence by TV declaration (realism in the land of G.I. Joe!), he leads G.I. Joe into a trap, where most of the team is killed and their good name besmirched with their supposed responsibility for the assassination of the Pakistani president and an attempt to steal the country’s nuclear arsenal. However, among the characters we know and dislike/love from the first film, we only get to see Channing Tatum’s Duke die on screen, so there’s room left for a return of Scarlett and so on in the next sequel, if their actors’ careers are on the needed downward spiral.

However, the only Joes left standing for now – or the only Joes that concern us – are Roadblock (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki), Flint (D.J. Cotrona) and of course super ninja Snake Eyes (still Ray Park) who was off in Japan on ninja business concerning the training of Jinx (Elodie Yung), the non-evil cousin of Snake Eyes’s part-time arch enemy and childhood ninja rival Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee).

While the Joes are picking themselves out of the wreckage, Storm Shadow frees Cobra Commander (now Luke Bracey), who at once proceeds to set in motion a frightfully complicated and silly – which is to say totally normal for him - plan to attain world domination. Fortunately, the surviving G.I. Joe members, Jinx and the original G.I. Joe General Colton (Bruce Willis earning lunch money) are there to save the world by shooting people and blowing stuff up.

Despite the big deforestation manoeuvre the film pulls on the more up-market actors from its predecessor, I actually think Jon M. Chu’s Retaliation is the better movie. At least, I felt myself highly entertained throughout its running time. The things to be said against the first attempt at getting every American middle-aged guy’s favourite toy/comic/cartoon show onto the big screen do of course still apply - namely that it’s stupid and exclusively makes canon changes of highly dubious merit. One might even argue the bad guys’ plans here are even more silly this time around, but to make up for that, the action here is decidedly more fun to watch. Plus, if you don’t want something silly, you’re probably not going to watch a G.I. Joe movie anyhow.

Chu makes good use of the opportunity the film’s two-pronged Snake Eyes & Jinx/Roadblock, Lady Jaye & Flint storyline offers for action diversification, so you get your firefights, your ninja stuff, your ridiculous chases, and your heavy ordnance, with no repetitions in style or content apart from people dying in imaginative manners, things exploding, and no dialogue scene taking longer than a few minutes before people get shot again.

My personal favourite among the action scenes is Snake Eyes’s and Jinx’s fight against Cobra ninjas on a mountain side, including grappling hooks (well actually ninja grappling hook pistols, but who cares), swords, video game inspired gymnastics and a ninja-made avalanche, and if that sounds like your thing, it’s pretty obvious you’ll like the rest of the film too. Stylistically, Chu’s direction of the action sequences is decidedly on the modern and technical side, but there’s the focus and the flow to the action scenes that’s often missing in films that go for the state of the technological art on the direction side.

The whole shebang (with a heavy emphasis on the “bang”) is grounded by an acting ensemble that – like the actors in the last film – does not mind being in a movie with a silly plot pretending to be badasses and weirdoes, with The Rock/Johnson and Palicki making likeable and charismatic heroes. Johnson proves again he’s the one among the current former wrestlers turned actors who actually belongs in front of a camera (or does anyone really prefer “Lukewarm” Steve Austin?), and Palicki recommends herself for all kinds of superhero and ass-kickers roles, if Hollywood would just care. It’s also pretty nice to see a US mainstream action film that actually has competent fighting women on the side of the good guys, none of whom needs to be rescued all of the time, without feeling the need to permanently defend their presence against the assumed idiots in the audience.

Pryce gives a hell of a course in scenery chewing, out-Vosloo-ing Vosloo in the first one, and Willis is Bruce Willis, elderly action hero, the role he was born to play. The only weak point here is Cotrona’s Flint, and I don’t think I should blame the actor for it, for there’s just little reason for him to be in the film at all, with the character doing nothing of dramatic import and not much more on the ass-kicking side. He’s there to make up the numbers and look pretty, I suppose.


This leaves us with a fine example of the slightly more up-market loud, mildly dumb and pleasantly silly US action movie, a genre that seemed dead just a few years ago but now is alive, kicking, and walking away from the explosion in slow motion as is its birthright. Me, I salute it, and liked G.I. Joe: Retaliation so much, I didn’t even include a paragraph here moaning about the RZA cameo despite my dislike for people who got famous in one art form then buying their way into a different one through their popularity, taking roles away from people who can actually act. Oh well, next time.

District 13: Ultimatum (2009)

Original title: Banlieue 13: Ultimatum

A couple of years after the first movie, not much has changed for the people of Banlieue 13. There might be a new President (Philippe Torreton) governing France, but the place is still cut off from the outside world by a large wall that makes moving in and out of the place akin to travelling to another country, and dominated by racially segregated gangs who – in absence of actual government – are the only form of order around.

Of our two heroes from the first film, Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) is still working as the the apparently only decent cop in Paris, while Leito (David Belle) seems to spend his time on more or less minor acts of violent resistance. They will team up again to thwart a conspiracy by evil secret services to provoke the President – who will turn out to actually be the kind of guy who firmly believes in the principles of the French constitution – into razing the Banlieue to the ground so an evil company can build some nice white, middle-class, apartments where it once stood.

Again written by Luc Besson and produced by good old EuropaCorp, this sequel directed by Patrick Alessandrin carries some of the hallmarks of the company’s – and therefore Besson’s - films. Apart from the tragic absence of some grizzled Hollywood veteran, this is very typical EC fare at least on the writing side: the script at times seems to unnecessarily go out of its way to be pretty darn dumb – there’s even a risible moment where the protagonists criticize a particularly idiotic bit of the bad guys’ plans instead of Besson just writing something more sensible –, physics do not work the way they do even in a semi-real world, and human psychology does not exist, not even in its action movie version. The action, on the other hand, is done with great verve by an experienced team, with nice scenes of Raffaelli kicking people in the faces and those of Belle doing his parkours thing in a pretty spectacular manner providing the film with a nice diversity in action styles. To change things up, there are also explosions, a feature fight for Elodie Yung (who pops in for the film’s last third when the Banlieue’s gangs of racial caricatures unite behind our heroes to kick evil awkwardly secret agent butt).

This time around, you can even admire the very fine achievements of actors, action choreographers and stunt teams, for – unlike an EC director like Olivier Megaton – Alessandrin apparently prefers to film and edit his action so the audience can actually see what’s going on, using the camera to enhance the action instead of obfuscating it (the latter tendency particularly frustrating in EuropaCorp movies where nobody involved in the stunts needs this sort of trick to obfuscate their failings).


Sure, the quality of the action doesn’t make the plot less forgettable, but at least the script does have its cartoonish heart in the right place (on the left, that is), preferring solidarity among the poor of all colours in ass-kicking, yet also showing an adorably dishonest believe in somebody in power actually caring about their purported principles. Or shall we call the latter an Utopian hope? Anyway, where more than a few other Besson scripts do annoy me quite a bit even after years and years of watching his output and even loving other parts of it, this one seems to so honestly revel in its cartoonishness, it is impossible for me not to be charmed by it. It does certainly build an entertaining base for the action, and what more can I ask of an action movie?

The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017)

Belarus – please don’t ask me why they didn’t use a made up country here - dictator Vladislav Dukhovich (Gary “The Russian” Oldman) is standing trial for various counts of mass murder and all that other stuff dictators tend to get up to. Alas, it looks as if he’ll go free to return to his reign of terror, for the eyewitness accounts of his victims are dismissed as “hearsay” (that’s action movie law for you), while other witnesses “mysteriously” disappear or are outright killed by gangs of heavily armed men who totally aren’t working for Dukhovich. Ironically, the only chance of seeing justice done could be the statement of imprisoned professional killer Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson, motherfuckers), who is obviously much more believable a witness (he wrote, not at all sarcastically).

Kincaid is willing to play ball in exchange for the freedom of his also imprisoned wife Sonia (Salma Hayek in a pretty funny cameo role). Unfortunately, there’s a mole (you’ll never guess who, cough) in Interpol, so the transport supposed to cart Kincaid from England where he is jailed to The Hague is ambushed. Only Interpol agent Amelia Roussel (Elektra, ahem, Elodie Yung) and Kincaid manage to escape and hole up in a safe house. Roussel is no dummy and knows someone inside of her organization has sold them out, so she sees only one choice to get Kincaid where he’s supposed to go: rope in her ex-boyfriend Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds and all three of his facial expressions). Until an unfortunate incident for whom he makes her responsible for no good reason, Michael was one of the best professional bodyguards in the world, and he’s certainly not corrupt, so he’s Roussel’s best bet of protecting Kincaid.

Surely, the bodyguard and the hitman who attempted to kill twenty or so of his clients will hit it off sooner or later, or after a lot of bickering and sniggering at each other.

The reluctant buddy action comedy is alive and well, apparently. At least, Patrick Hughes’s film is a perfectly fun time if you’re willing to go with a film who puts no thought or work at all into improving on any of the weaknesses of the formula. So its villain is a bizarre, mildly racist caricature (though one played with vigour and enthusiasm by Oldman, who is not one of the type of actors phoning his stuff in just because the film he’s in is rather silly), the plot only makes the vaguest bit of logical sense, the villain’s plan is even worse, and women aren’t even allowed to beat their old, slightly overweight boss  without male help (which also gives one a bit of mental whiplash if one has seen Yung’s performance as Elektra in Netflix’s Daredevil).

Of course, the first three flaws are also parts of the charm of the genre, so I’m not exactly complaining too loudly here, specifically not in a film that features such a funny central performance by Jackson. Why, it’s a performance popping off the screen so well, I hardly even noticed Reynolds and his tendency to just rotate through his book, well pamphlet, well one-sheet, well, tiny little slip, of facial expressions.


I am sounding rather more cynical towards the film than I actually feel about it: this is a slick, wickedly funny, well paced despite its considerable length (for the kind of thing it is), piece of filmmaking featuring increasingly great – and wilfully absurd – action sequences, as well as Samuel L. Jackson in what feels like an excellent mood, calling people motherfuckers left and right. Why, the film even has a heart.

On ExB: G.I. Joe Retaliation (2013)

Ninjas! Explosions! Totally decent character actors! Fake evil presidents! I’m down with G.I. Joe Retaliation, and I’m not afraid to write about it on the venerable Exploder Button!

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,sf,jon m. chu,dwayne johnson,jonathan pryce,adrianne palicki,elodie yung,ray park,ray stevenson