In short: Skylines (2020)

aka Skylin3s [ugh]

I thought that Liam O’Donnell’s Beyond Skyline was quite an improvement over the first film in the series, winning my heart through the overwhelming powers of all sorts of sci fi pulp martial arts tokusatsu action nonsense. When presented with so much energy, only a fool would have cared about the thing having the brain of a dinosaur.

Alas, a returning O’Donnell can’t catch this kind of lightning in a bottle twice, and this sequel starring the perfectly decent Lindsey Morgan (replacing the perfectly awesome Frank Grillo), is a real drag, trying to do epic science fiction world building on a budget that can’t pay for it, and with brains that can’t conceive of it, and so falls back on a mess of boring clichés, failing with little grace and no style whatsoever.

Once the plot actually gets going, the film is slowly – for some reason the thing puts half an hour of actual plot into nearly two hours runtime - crawling through all your usual sci-fi action clichés, in the classic tradition of all films that are kinda like Cameron’s Aliens but crap. The final thirty minutes or so do win back some of the energy and general craziness of the second film but at that point it’s simply a case of too little, too late to save the film as a whole.

Not improving my mood is some of the worst dialogue I have had the bad luck to encounter (seriously, the sentence level writing makes Michael Bay look like a writer), and a supposed scenery-chewing villain performance by Alexander Siddig (who can really do better) that reminds of nothing so much as a little boy playing dress-up, badly.

Oh well, there’s always going to be Skyfourth4line, right?

Hard Target 2 (2016)

After he has killed his best friend in an MMA championship match – and was thrown out by the officials of his league – guilt-ridden Wes Baylor (Scott Adkins) is fighting illegal underground matches in Southeast Asia, clearly looking for a way to die but unwilling to do the deed himself.

When one Jonah Aldrich (Robert Knepper) offers Baylor the opportunity for one last big fight in Myanmar worth a million dollars, the fighter has vague dreams of using that money for some kind of redemption that’ll come in the uncommon form of a beach house (don’t ask). Unfortunately, though not terribly surprising given the film’s title and prologue, that “fight” isn’t so much a fight but rather a big game hunt through a part of Myanmar’s jungle kept free of pesky villagers by corrupt military, with Baylor as the prey. If he makes it the hundred miles to the border of Thailand, he’s home free with a bag full of rubies, supposedly. Of course, the hunting group consisting of Aldrich, his partner Madden (Temuera Morrison) and a bunch of rich assholes – killed off too early to have any character traits Gigi Velicitat, rich girl in leather pants Rhona Mitra, torero Adam Saunders, rich redneck Peter Hardy and wavering rich redneck son Sean Keenan, and gamer dude Jamie Timony – have vehicles where Baylor is on foot, military assistance, drones, and all kinds of weapons.

Yet that might still not be enough to kill one very angry Baylor, particularly once he meets Tha (Ann Truong) in the jungle, the sister of one of Aldrich’s former victims, and borrows a cause to fight for apart from mere survival from her.

There may be people who think the John Woo directed Jean-Claude Van Damme-starring Hard Target didn’t need a very belated direct to streaming (home video?) sequel, hell, there may even be people who believe the original wasn’t terribly great. Spoilers: both of these groups are wrong, the latter even horribly wrong.

This film’s a sequel to Hard Target only very freely anyway; it’s simply another Most Dangerous Game variation that found a sexier (or at least some decades more modern) title to use, so the producers might just as well have called this one a reboot. Director Roel Reiné does clearly love his John Woo, too, so the film includes about half a dozen direct homages to certain Woo tics used in the original film, naturally including those frigging doves. Otherwise, Reiné is no John Woo, but he’s certainly one of the more talented guys working in the low budget action sphere at the moment, showing a sense of pacing, a clear understanding of how to use the camera to create physical spaces for the characters to fight in, and an obvious appreciation for the fighters and stunt people involved that uses editing and whooshing noises to emphasise their efforts instead of distracting from them.

It does of course help that Scott Adkins is the contemporary king of this kind of movie – a decent actor and a great screen fighter, and by now also an experienced workhorse who is having a slow year when he’s doing only three films in it. The more important parts of the cast are rather great low budget movie people, too. Knepper, Mitra and Morrison all have a couple of action scenes to sink their teeth into as well as more than enough opportunities for some rather delightful scenery chewing.

Speaking of the action, while the film obviously puts the emphasis on the very fine martial arts fights, you also get a variety of fun vehicle stunts, a bit of shooting, as well as a lot of running; there’s even what I think counts as an exploding hut. Reiné does well by all of it.

What further elevates the film about the lower tiers of the contemporary low budget action crowd is a script that’s not written around some one shooting day cameos and so hangs together well without having to ruin its pacing to accommodate Bruce Willis’s need to buy cigars. The character work is pretty obvious, but pretty obvious is what a film where motorcycles are inevitably carrying machine guns needs.


Also wonderful is the film’s complete lack of warehouse sets. Shot in Thailand (with a mostly Thai crew in the technical on-set roles), Reiné has rather a lot of very picturesque jungle, a few ruins, waterways and bridges to work with, which does of course help enable the variety of action scenes I’ve already praised and provides the film with a sense of place and space always useful in action cinema. It’s what turns Hard Target 2 into a much better film than you’ll probably hope for going in.

Skinwalkers (2006)

Werewolves exist! And they are divided into two groups. The first group are the nice small-town werewolves who like to have a nice chat drinking coffee and eating apple pie, and like to tie each other up in nice harnesses when changing time comes to not have to go out and kill people. Killing people makes a werewolf insta-evil, you understand, and these evil werewolves, or to be more precise, evil biker werewolves make up the second group of werewolves.

All could be well - or uncomfortable, depending on how you look at it - for werewolf-kind, but there is a prophecy that the son of a werewolf will end their curse when he turns thirteen years; something the biker werewolves do not approve of.

So it is probably rather fortunate that Timothy (Matthew Knight), the chosen one, and his mother Rachel (Rhona Mitra) are protected by a whole small town full of good werewolves. Not that anybody would tell Rachel or Timothy about the whole werewolf Jesus thing - they're thinking they're living with the family of Rachel's dead husband in a very friendly small town.

Alas, a few days before Timothy is supposed to fully turn into Werewolf Jesus, the biker werewolves (all four of them) under their leader Varek (Jason Behr) attack the town. Turns out the good werewolves didn't spend any of the last thirteen years on planning how best to protect their messiah, and are mostly slaughtered, notwithstanding that they should be prepared, are fighting on their home turf, and have an incredible advantage in numbers.

A handful of the nice wolves do at least manage to get away with Rachel and Timothy, but their backup plan seems to be to drive around until they can hide in a cave, so it's probably no surprise that more encounters with the biker werewolves will follow.

As far as action movies with werewolves go, Skinwalkers is one of the better examples of that particular sub-genre. Unfortunately, this isn't a sub-sub-(sub?-)genre that includes many films that are any good at all, so the movie reaches its lofty position at the top of the dubious pack by being just about watchable.

Director James Isaac (of Jason X "fame") does at least know most of the tricks of mid-low-budget action filmmaking, and so all scenes containing shooting, werewolf punch-outs and gratuitous slow motion are as basically alright as they come, if completely lacking in imagination or the sense of excitement that would come with less predictable or just more awesome action. Hong Kong this is not.

But at least there's the - in cheap US action movies since 1995 - mandatory exploding gas station to enjoy. Though it's disappointingly not placed in the rather limp finale.

The rest of the movie (aka every scene without violence) suffers  more from terminal stupidity than from predictability, though it's still more predictable than rain in autumn around where I live. It's not just the whole prophecy set-up - and why exactly does everybody know Timothy is the chosen one? Was there a burning bush somewhere who informed everyone? Do the biker werewolves have an email newsletter? It's also the fact that everybody acts like an utter tool, from the bad guys coming in guns blazing when they could reach their target better by stealth and using the pulsating masses in their heads, to the good guys who don't seem to have any actual plan of action, or any sensible back-up plans. The film seems to take place in a parallel universe where it's logical not to tell Rachel that her son's on somebody's death list; where a shoot-out in a hospital or the killing off of a whole small town or lots of werewolf attacks don't incur any form of police reaction, and so on, and so forth. It's always astonishing how little thought and care three scriptwriters can put into a single script.

That lack of care and intelligence really is a shame in this particular case, because there was an interesting film about the difference between barbarism and civilization waiting to be made out of some of the film's ideas; not necessarily an original one, but a thoughtful one.

On the more positive side, the bad-script-experienced cast is as good as the film allows, with everyone playing their usual parts. Rhona Mitra is only allowed to get into action heroine mode very late in the proceedings, though. I suspect nobody involved with the production wanted to get anyone watching too excited. You never know if a member of the audience has a weak heart, and who wants to have to live through a law suit for manslaughter?

Be that as it may, Skinwalkers is perfectly watchable. It's just not good enough to excite nor bad enough to amuse.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,action,rhona mitra,elias koteas,james isaac

Three Films Make A Post: Chained For 100 Years In A Sunken Tomb!

Highwaymen (2004): Director Robert Harmon attempts to re-capture the magic of his The Hitcher in this film about an obsessed man (Jim "Boring" Caviezel) combating the car-based serial killer (Colm Feore) who killed his wife, on the way rescuing Rhona Mitra who isn't allowed to do much of interest.

Alas, Harmon is not all that successful. He certainly knows how to make a conventionally exciting thriller, but it is exactly his keeping too close to formal and structural conventions of the serial killer thriller that gets in the way of the film's more interesting aspects, like the way the traumata and obsessions of the three main characters mirror each other and the nearly there commentary on cars/technology as extensions of the human body.

It's certainly a competent thriller, though.

 

S&Man (2006): J.T. Petty (who I think is one of the most interesting horror directors with a career starting this century) explores the nature of reality and film (or reality on film), and the reasons we watch horrible things happen to fictional characters by way of a half fake documentary that consists half of Carol J. Clover being clever and uncomfortable and various "extreme underground horror" (aka fake snuff) people doing their respective shticks and Petty's meetings with a director whose fake snuff very possibly isn't fake. It is an at times uncomfortable experience - which comes with the thematic territory - containing thoughts that might be autobiographical regarding Petty's own obsessions, but might also very well be not. There's something deeply confusing (in a good, interesting way) about a film interested in the nature of reality that is asking its questions by making things up.

 

Kereta Setan Manggarai (2009): A group of random Indonesian teens is trapped in a ghost train. Lots of screaming and running around ensues. This one definitely does not belong to the higher echelons of quality of the mad Indonesian horror boom. It's not the worst film of its kind I have seen, though, because it thankfully lacks the copious amounts of "comedy" that mar some of its peers. Instead of comedy, it's all running around screaming all the time, which could certainly be annoying enough for anyone with a proper sense of taste. Personally, I didn't mind the film one way or the other.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,indonesian movies,horror,thriller,in short,robert harmon,j.t. petty,rhona mitra

A short review of Doomsday (2008)

AWESOME!!

Technorati-Tags: scottish movies,post-apocalypse,reviews,action,neil marshall,rhona mitra