In short: The Three Musketeers (2011)

I think I can spare everyone the plot synopsis. Just imagine the usual Dumas highlights as well as the additions most loved by all other adaptations of the material and add airships and a weird-ass diving suit.

You may have read that Paul W.S. Anderson’s version of the old (but grand) chestnut here is supposed to be not very good, but if you’re me, that’s not a thing that’ll stop you. Even though, in this case, it really, really should have. Now, I’m not a traditional hater of Anderson, and while I absolutely agree with the usual consensus that many of the guy’s films are not very good, I can’t help but respect a director so clearly putting everything he’s got into entertaining his audience. That the filmmaker often seems to believe the audience he is out to entertain has a all the culture of the inhabitants of a monkey cage is a bit unfortunate here, but what can you do?

Even here, Anderson clearly tries to entertain us: there are half a dozen or so relatively loud and somewhat entertaining action sequences in the film, and these are, for what it’s worth, actually pretty fun in an extremely undemanding way. Alas, there is also a version of (parts of the) rather complicated plot of Dumas’s novel, containing rather a large amount of intrigue and dialogue, and here’s where the film completely breaks down, for Anderson clearly has no idea how to stage this sort of thing at all. It doesn’t help that all those parts of the dialogue that aren’t taken word for word from earlier movie versions of the material are some of the most insipid tripe I’ve heard in a long time – and as my imaginary readers know, my tolerance for this sort of thing is usually considerable. Nor does it add to its quality that the film clearly wants to be some kind of cross between the Lester version of the Musketeers and Guy Ritchie’s big damn action approach to Sherlock Holmes; of course, what it tonally actually is,  is what our British friends know as panto, just performed by quite a few theoretically highly capable actors.

In theory, I say, for whether it’s Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans, Ray Stevenson, Udo Waltz, Juno Temple, or Mads Mikkelsen, they’re just mugging their way through every single scene, clearly trying to get through this thing as fast as possible, pretending that winking at the audience about how shit the material is will somehow magically improve matters. To add insult to injury, the capable actors stand side by side with decidedly not capable screen personalities Milla Jovovich as the worst Milady, Orlando Bloom as the worst Lord Buckingham and Logan Lerman as the worst D’Artagnan imaginable outside of nightmares so terrible, they would probably be lethal. Particularly Jovovich is so bad, only a director who is married to her would let her get away with it. Wait a minute…


So yeah, this is indeed as horrible as everyone says it is.

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.

Three Films Make a Post: Turning eighteen is going to be hell.

Book of Monsters (2018): Calling a horror comedy inoffensive is not exactly the highest praise, but then, Stewart Sparke’s female-centric film is one of those horror comedies that seems terribly nice and friendly even though quite a few people get ripped to shreds in it. It’s just that the characters we are supposed to like all make it, so there’s a certain lack of tension running through the whole affair. The jokes are all over the place, some are exactly the ones you’ll expect going in, some are not quite as obvious. Generally, this is a likeable film though, using its clearly not terribly high budget as well as possible to provide its audience with a good time, and while I never got terribly excited watching this, I did enjoy myself with it more than I didn’t.

Bumblebee (2018): Given that it is comedic, YA-ish, likeable and female-centric, Travis Knight’s entry into the Michael-Bay-haunted Transformers franchise feels a bit like the big sister of Book of Monsters. Just that big sis has all the money in the world to make things as slick and streamlined as possible, where its low budget sibling has to fight for every scene to come together on a simple technical level.

While it isn’t exactly deep, unlike the other Transformers films, this one actually understands little things like character arcs, human feelings, and even has thoughts about what growing up means for a young woman still mourning the loss of her father. Knight is able to put all this into a slick and mainstream compatible movie featuring a very charming Hailee Steinfeld that also includes fun robot fights, explosions and some really rather cool chase sequences. Basically, this is the first Transformers movie that actually seems to be made by people with a degree of respect for their audience and their characters, who also happen to be really good craftsmen. It’s not a deep exploration of grief and loss, obviously, but it is a really entertaining film that’s not utterly brain dead in a franchise known for the exact opposite. Also, the robots have different colours.

Cold Skin (2017): Xavier Gens’s adaptation of Albert Sánchez Piñol’s novel must be an excellent one, seeing as it left me with pretty much the same feelings as the book did, the impression of having watched/read a very competently and eloquently realized story that never quite gets around to saying as much of interest about the human condition, colonialism or just the human heart as it seems to set out to. Curiously enough, for something taking place in 1914, the film (as the book) seems to be held back by too great a love for the narrative and philosophical habits of 19th (instead of 20th) century fiction, never really reaching the point where it should take a good long look at its own assumptions about how to speak about the things it is clearly most interested in.


As a horror adventure story, it is rather convincing, though, even though its fish people design is disappointingly derivative and conservative. It mostly disappoints because it seems so desperate to be something more.

In short: The Transporter Refueled (2015)

For the standards of Luc Besson’s Europa Corp. this attempt to get back to one of the company’s defining franchises without its defining star is a bit of a middling film, providing the expected amount of car chases, some martial arts set pieces that somewhat suffer from new lead Ed Skrein not being a seasoned (or good) screen fighter and clearly not a dancer either - which usually is the next best thing for fake martial arts in movies - and a bunch of stuff and nonsense.

Said nonsense is just general action movie silliness this time around and not Europa Corp. trademark brain-breakingly offensive stupidity, which should not be a complaint coming from a guy who has so often complained about the EC brand of stupidity in the past, but actually very much feels like one right now. Either it’s Stockholm Syndrome, or I’ve just gotten used to Besson’s very particular view of the world and the natural laws that govern it, but I’m missing the deeply stupid bits here, perhaps because most of Refueled’s silliness feels so pro forma and bland.

The word bland leads us directly to Ed Skrein, a man who I’ve seen act, so I’m pretty sure he can, but who doesn’t bother here. Instead he just shows up, mumbles through his dialogue in the most toneless voice imaginable, stiffly goes through the action sequences even though director Camille Delamarre – not being the terror we know as Olivier Megaton – does his level best to film around his lead actor in an action movie not actually being much cop for action sequences. Now, I’m really not a fan of Jason Statham, but Skrein’s performance at least gives me a new appreciation for Statham’s screen presence and acting abilities. Sure, it’s a pretty one note shtick, but unlike Skrein here, Statham always hits his one note.

Given Ray Stevenson’s presence as Frank’s father, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one not terribly convinced by the film’s actual lead, so at least the film gives us the Europa Corp. mandatory aging English language actor having a bit of fun on camera. Stevenson’s cast in a bit of an atypical role here (he’s still a tough guy, but the charming and mildly cultured sort), and whenever he is on screen, proceedings become that important bit more lively. Why, even Skrein seems to wake up from his slumber a bit when Stevenson’s around to drag him out of his coma.

Thanks to Stevenson, as well as the fact that Europa Corp – whoever is actually directing any given movie there – can by now film solid action sequences in their collective sleep (and you could argue that’s how the action here came to be), The Transporter Refueled still works as an okay little Euro action movie. The genre – and even EC’s back catalogue – is just so full of more worthwhile films I’m not sure why you’d bother with this one unless you’re really, really bored.

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!

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In short: Punisher: War Zone (2008)

Well, this wasn't as bad as I was lead to believe. Whenever the film concentrates on its strengths - unhealthy humor and splat-happy violence - it's pretty entertaining. Ray Stevenson is also physically perfect as Frank (and is able to act when it is necessary), so I can't complain there either.

The only trouble comes when War Zone errs in one of two ways. First among them a useless effort to make Frank relatable and humanize him, when every reading of the good part of the film's source material (that is, the various Punisher comics written by Garth Ennis) should scream at a scriptwriter that the point of the character is that he is not human and not relatable. The second and especially irritating flaw are the moments when the film is rather earnestly arguing for vigilantism, which is something a film about a frigging serial killer with a body count going into the thousands wearing a white skull on his body armour should just avoid like the plague.

But all in all, I had my fun with it and I don't think we'll ever get to see a thoughtful Punisher film, or one that gets more of Ennis' interpretation than the jokes and the violence - not as long as Hollywood scriptwriters and producers stay what they are, at least.

 

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