Three Films Make A Post: Your favorite fire-breathing monster... Like you've never seen him before!

Uncle John (2015): I feel a bit like a barbarian saying this, but despite being well-acted, beautifully shot, and all-around well-made, Steven Piet’s sort of crime drama, kind of romance, US post-mumblecore indie does very little for me thanks to pacing so glacial, calling it slow would be like pretending it is fast. There are quite a few scenes that are brilliant, clever, and effective but a viewer has to pay for them by suffering through long, long scenes of the characters very poignantly doing little of interest. I just found myself losing my patience watching it. It’s not only the slowness that bugged me, really, but that quite a few scenes seem to be only in the film to reiterate points about its characters it has already made twice before. As it stands, the film could lose a good twenty minutes of runtime and not say less but actually say what it has to say more effectively instead of dragging it out. I really blame the influence of mumblecore as well as a certain type of arthouse movie and their inherent unwillingness to edit things here.

Lone Star (1996): John Sayles does of course belong to an earlier generation of US indie filmmaking, and having spent his times in the (sometimes gold) mines of more commercial filmmaking quite obviously taught the man things about getting to the point of any given scene. Or rather, the points, for this – one of his best films perhaps even his best – is a film that speaks about a Texas border town and its history by way of its people, explores the idea and practice of real, metaphorical and ethical borderlines, the shaping of history and our stories about it, and understands how to draw complex characters and show complicated situations without ever feeling the need to show us every single interaction its characters have in excruciating detail. While it is a highly shaped tale, Lone Star still feels as if its storytelling came about naturally, by the by; there’s no grasping for moments of truth here, they just come, or don’t, as is their wont.


How Do You Know (2010): Theoretically, this is a light, fluffy and not terribly pointed romantic comedy deep from the Hollywood mills featuring Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd as two people finding one another in a time of personal crises, but because it’s written and directed by James L. Brooks, it is also a film that has a lot of fun with just letting (often wickedly funny) dialogue flow, knows how to shape the ensemble surrounding its stars into more than just a backdrop (which would be a waste of for example a very funny and ambiguous performance by Jack Nicholson). It is also a film about grown-ups growing up more instead of the sort of romantic comedy that pats its characters on the back for learning not to be complete tools, as well as one that comes by its emotional moments the honest way – by being about well-written and well-acted characters going through things that feel like movie-enlarged versions of experiences people might actually go through. I’m afraid real life does not have dialogue this good nor the appropriate happy end, alas.

Hidden Assassin (1995)

aka The Shooter

(This write-up is based on the shorter US cut of the movie that excises about ten minutes of scenes meant to deepen characterization and make the plot clearer).

US Marshal Michael Dane (Dolph Lundgren), one of those people who abduct foreign nationals from countries the USA don’t have extradition treaties with, is doing a small favour for his old friend, CIA agent Alex Reed (John Ashton) and Reed’s boss Dick Powell (Gavan O’Herlihy). The CIA thinks that professional assassin Simone Rosset (Maruschka Detmers) has already killed a Cuban ambassador for kicks, and is now planning to slaughter the participants of a historic peace conference between the US and Cuba in Prague, so they’d be very thankful if Dane could catch her and bring her to the US.

Catching Simone turns out to be quite difficult for Dane, and catching and keeping her even more so, because she is just the decisive bit more competent at the whole cat and mouse game. Consequently, it takes quite some time and effort, and some rather unpleasant lies to Simone’s girlfriend Marta (Assumpta Serna) for Dane to reach this goal. Not that he’s all that happy about it – he neither likes the CIA way of going about things, nor does he seem to like to morally compromise himself; he has also taken quite a shine to Simone until his head and his penis are pulling into very different directions when it comes to her.

At least on an ethical level, Dane’s life becomes easier when people probably working for the CIA are trying to kill Simone before he can bring her out of the Czech Republic.

Ted Kotcheff’s Hidden Assassin is one of the more surprising vehicles for that loveable lug, Dolph Lundgren. As we all know, while Lundgren is one of the more likeable action specialists of his generation (which automatically puts him in a higher league than Seagal and Norris), his thespian skills have their limits mostly in glowering, looking like the nicest guy ever to bash your head in, and two kinds of smiles, which results in a limited repertoire of roles, so much so that most of his films aren’t even trying to get anything else out of him.

Even though Kotcheff’s film isn’t going against the trend completely, its script (by Yves André Martin) does provide Lundgren with a slightly more complex character than usual, as well as with a backstory that is actually connected to what’s going on in the rest of the film on a thematic level. Given his acting limits, Dolph really does comport himself very well here, not exactly giving a subtle performance but a convincing one; that he’s doing his usual good job in the action sequences is a given anyway.

It’s quite interesting to see how well the script’s slightly slicker execution (why, there’s actually a reason for people to do what they do, and it even makes sense in context) turns your generic Lundgren vehicle into, well, an actual movie, the sort of film where the action becomes more exciting because it carries meaning beyond going through the action movie motions. Not that Kotcheff is bad at directing the action sequences – there are some fun cheap chases through the mean streets of Prague (prettier as Sofia - there, I said it), a simple yet pretty great final rooftop chase, as well as some of the always entertaining train top shenanigans (though none including a motorbike), and other moments of the kind of joyful anti-gravitational nonsense that make action cinema so delightful, all of them done with great competence and providing thrills big enough I’m not even going to call them mandatory thrills.

On the other hand, I don’t want to oversell the script’s depth or perceived depth. This is – at least in the shorter US version – still very much an action movie and not a character study, and certainly also not on the level of the rarefied kind of action movie where the action is part of the character study, too. It just knows how to enable the action better. Plus, there’s no hilariously earnest scene where a hallucinatory George Clooney holds a ridiculous pep talk, so it’s already better than Gravity.

Adding to this, there are also all kinds of nice little touches giving Hidden Assassin a distinct personality of its own. I particularly enjoyed Gavan O’Herlihy’s and some of the minor actors’ shameless scenery chewing, as if they had drunkenly stumbled in from one of Lundgren’s later direct-to-DVD films; or how much more competent at the whole action hero business Detmers’s Simone seems to be, at least until the film feels the need to get out the refrigerator.

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