In short: Bullet Train (2022)

Half a dozen characters of the violent criminal persuasion converge on the same bullet train in Japan. Their diverse missions turn out to have rather more connective tissue than they are first led to believe, so it’s a good time to team up and betray or murder one another in various, changing constellations, while the laws of physics turn increasingly optional.

One could snark about how few Japanese people seem to populate the criminal underworld of the Japan of David Leitch’s adaptation of a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka that features rather less white people. But then, I find it difficult to argue with a film that casts Brad Pitt as the Big Lebowski of killers, and has quite as much fun pitting him and the other comical grotesqueries populating the film against each other as this one has.

Like most of Leitch’s other films, this wants to be action cinema as POP! (a curiously British feeling idea of POP! for a guy from Wisconsin to boot); unlike most of Leitch’s other films, it actually achieves this goal with a kind of gleeful enthusiasm that I can hardly read as anything but a pure joy at creating cinema that’s absolutely free from all pressures to be serious and thereby can feel curiously freeing and subversive. Bullet Train clearly knows all the rules of character building and plot structure, when and how a film is supposed to use flashbacks, how much an action scene is allowed to break the laws of physics and logic. Having realized them, it then goes about very consciously breaking all of them in clever (sometimes clever-dumb) ways that’ll either leave an audience cheering, giggling madly, or throwing tomatoes at the screen. I found myself on the side of the gigglers here, more than a bit astonished about how seeming randomness can feel free and freeing when applied with as much thought as it is here.

Life (2017)

Warning: while I’m not going to go into too much detail, I’ll have to include some structural spoilers; also, this one made me rather cross!

Apparently, there is life on Mars, and an international probe is hurtling towards Earth, carrying some promising samples in its belly (or wherever probes are carrying samples). The scriptwriters were probably afraid to lose the audience right at the start if not something “exciting” happens to begin with, so the probe is a bit out of control and instead of some sane manoeuvre, the crew – as played by the overqualified and desperately underused cast of Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dihovichnaya and Ariyon Bakare - of the international space station tasked to evaluate the samples has to catch the thing with a robot arm, which improbably works too.

The samples are worth the effort, though, for among them is an actual living alien cell. A cell that quickly grows into many cells, and then into an organism that becomes increasingly big. If you think you know where the rest of the movie is going to go, you are exactly right.

For if there is something that is inarguably true about Daniel Espinosa’s alien on a rampage movie, then it is that is has no original bone in its cinematic body. The plot goes where you expect it to go, the characters are the blandest bunch of nonentities with vague motivations you could get from these actors, the production design certainly suggests the 58 million dollars the movie supposedly cost didn’t go into creativity, and Espinosa’s direction is sort of there, but certainly not reaching any – even small – heights of suspense and excitement.

There are two elements about the script that truly stand out: firstly, it is chock full implausibilities: the crew of a small space station who will potentially work on alien biological material does not know what the final stage in a complete breach of quarantine is; a space station manned for this project has only one person actually qualified to work on the samples in its crew; on the other hand, said space station has a potent hand flame thrower; the so-called quarantine measures make no sense at all, the characters might as well just leave all doors open and invite their alien guest in; nobody ever follows procedures. And it goes on and on that way.

Which are of course all problems I’m not unaccustomed to from my SF horror movies, and willing to overlook (though a film at least trying to sell me on its world usually helps my tolerance here) but then comes in script standout problem number two. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick use the valuable brain space freed by not taking care of details to demonstrate cleverness without being actually all that clever (a tendency that already annoyed me quite a bit in their scripts for Deadpool and Zombieland). First, they pull a Psycho through killing off one of the “name” actors first (so that they can keep exactly the other two you’d expect them to keep for as long as possible), but telegraph it so much it does not feel surprising so much as expected. It certainly doesn’t help that it isn’t 1960 anymore.

Next, the film tries something so clever with a moment involving a leg you won’t have to look long on the Internet to find people who think it is a plot hole, when in actuality, it’s a character helping the creature because he’s lost it. The characterisation is so bland (probably aiming for subtle, and badly missing) the character never reads like actually losing it until he holds a speech about it. The film is much too coy about actually showing how leg met alien and why for the scene to work at all, and it’s no wonder people do misread what’s going on. It probably sounded like a clever little flourish to add, but again, the script doesn’t put the work in for this part of the plot to feel plausible at all and expects the audience to imagine stuff it doesn’t bother to show them.


The last and most annoying example of the film thinking it is clever for cleverness’s sake is, of course, the ending, when Life attempts to pull what it clearly thinks is a very bright little trick on its audience by lying about what its climax is actually about. That sort of thing can work, but a film really needs to have worked for the audience’s trust and patience up until that point, which this one certainly has not, and really only should use this sort of trick if the realization of what is actually going on in the ending will put everything that came before into a different light for the audience. To my great annoyance, Life opts for using this technique to finagle the usual horror movie bullshit ending. Most horror films save that sort of thing for a single shot pseudo-twist because that’s much less annoying than wasting the potential emotional effect of your whole climax, but then most horror films don’t think they are quite this clever when pulling this sort of crap, unlike Life.

Message From Space (1978)

aka Return to Jelucia

Original title: Uchu kara messeji

Silver-faced, kabuki-inspired intergalactic villain Rockseia (Mikio Narita) and his black-clad troops have conquered Jelucia, a planet full of people who dress like space hippies (crappy robes, leaves on their heads and all), though their not non-violent but only really bad at fighting. The planet's last hope lies in sending out eight magical space walnuts to find eight heroes to rescue it. Two of the Jelucians, Esmeraldina (Etsuko Shihomi!, wearing what looks like a white silk bathrobe - and the leaves) and Urocco (Makoto Sato) are supposed to follow the leaves in a space ship that looks like a clipper and help bring the heroes in.

Turns out magical space walnuts have no taste at all when it comes to heroes, and choose a bunch of dumb space jocks (Hiroyuki Sanada, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan), a shady gambler type guy (Masazumi Okabe), a former space general played by Vic Morrow and his pet robot. Later - much too late - Hans (Sonny Chiba!), the true heir to the throne of Rockseia will join in too, but before that, it's mostly scenes of the crappy non-heroes selling Esmeraldina into sexual slavery (from which she is freed by the bad guys to be kidnapped), pouting a lot and being annoying. Well, and Vic Morrow talks a lot with his robot (turns out it was a good thing R2D2 didn't talk back).

Anyhow, after the audience has spent too much time with the film's crappy heroes, Rockseia falls in love with Earth and decides to conquer it too, so off he and his minions go by way of having Jelucia turned into a giant spaceship without any of the inhabitants having noticed. Will our intensely crappy heroes ever do anything about it?

By now, Kinji Fukasaku is actually better known for his great yakuza films and his general awesomeness than for the weird pieces of cracktastic nonsense he produced whenever he took on the job to be really commercial (for the uninitiated: you can usually recognize these films by featuring an "international" cast or being made during the 80s). If you only know Fukasaku from his more earnest-minded work, Message From Space will come as a bit of a shock, for not only is it nonsensical bordering on totally incomprehensible, it's also a film that barely seems to have been directed at all.

There's certainly little on display of Fuksasaku's usual dynamic (sometimes chaotic) visual style - much of the film seems done with a nailed-down camera, and concentrates on framing and staging everything in the least interesting way imaginable. The film's visual side is clearly not helped by sets that are the opposite of lavish. Jelucia and what we see of Earth are the sort of brown, sandy non-entities that make the rock quarries that so often tended to stand in for alien planets in SF movies look colourful and fanciful.

The script is no help at all, either: there's not much actual plot, nor dramatic tension. Nobody does much - and that slowly - until the film suddenly remembers that it's supposed to end soon after, and everything that might have been interesting had it been developed in the time that came before suddenly happens at once.

Despite these failings - and I haven't even mentioned the film's wasting of Sonny Chiba on a longer cameo and of Etsuko Shihomi on the classic princess role - there is something about it that makes Message eminently watchable, namely, its utter, ludicrous silliness that makes it a brother in spirit to the great Alfredo Brescia's Star Wars rip-offs. Kabuki traditions, truly bad space opera, moments of surprising violence and childish silliness collide in the most ridiculous ways. Space clipper ships meet horned helmets galore; an evil emperor is under the thumb of his mother, who is played by a guy (again the kabuki influence?). Tetsuro Tanba pops in for a minute as the new chairman of Earth; there are space fireflies. Earth is home to a wicked witch with her Plutonian son; Vic Morrow goes on a diplomatic mission dressed up as the camp version of an 18th century navy admiral. I'd say there's always something happening, but the film's tone (until the grand finale which by the way makes no sense at all) is so sedate it's more honest to say there's always something to look at.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,sf,kinji fukasaku,etsuko shihomi,sonny chiba,hiroyuki sanada,vic morrow,reviews

In short: Royal Warriors (1986)

aka In the Line of Duty 2 (or 1? My sources contradict each other on that point)

When a group of gangsters hijacks a passenger plane that is transporting a Japanese gangster boss to his new home in a Hong Kong jail, their plan of freeing the boss is thwarted by three law enforcers who are sharing the same flight.

CID Inspector Michelle Yip (Michelle Yeoh, definitely not stupid enough not to have a different first name than her character), the pea-brained sky marshal Michael Wong (Michael Wong, very possibly stupid enough to need to share his name with his character, and the worst actor this side of Keanu Reeves) and Japanese cop Peter Yamamoto (good old Hiroyuki Sanada) take the gangsters out with aplomb and a disturbing lack of surviving perpetrators. Still, the three are the heroes of the day. But their hijackers have a few surviving friends, two old war buddies, who are less than willing to forgive the death of their old friends and start a rather rude campaign of vengeance on the cops.

If I tell you that Yamamoto has a wife and a small child and is just in the process of giving up his police job to have more time for his family, you know what will happen next.

Royal Warriors is a very typical mid-80s Hong Kong action film. This of course means the characters are flat as cardboard cutouts and the plot is as thin as India-paper, but the action is so furious and ruthless that I don't find myself caring about the film's weak script.

Hong Kong films from (one of the Golden Ages of HK cinema) like this had a sense of absolute and wild abandon about them, milking the willingness of (probably mad) actors and stuntmen to do the damndest things (very much like some Thai action productions do today) without a care for anyone's health, good taste or realism. You can just watch your last hopes for the latter go up in flames with the homemade tank Yeoh drives into the finale.

Royal Warriors is also a wonderful showcase for the young Michelle Yeoh (at that time often billed as Michelle Khan), who is throwing herself into her role and the action sequences with the mix of athleticism, charisma, kicks to the face and plain talent that would make her famous. Of course she's just waltzing over her co-stars here, which isn't much of a surprise when it comes to Wong (who just can't act at all), but needs more of an effort with Sanada, who never was a Sonny Chiba to be sure, yet alright enough in his mere mortal way.

There really isn't more to say about this one. It is a movie as far from anything cerebral as possible, yet it is a fine choice if you crave some very Hong Kong adrenaline kicks in an 80s stylee.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,action,michelle yeoh,michael wong,hiroyuki sanada,in short