In short: Asher (2018)

Asher (Ron Perlman) is a professional killer. You know the kind – aging, tired, sad, lonely apart from a handful of professional contacts, and not without regrets for his life decisions. His life just might take the kind of surprising upturn few people of his age get, when he killer-meet-cutes Sophie (Famke Janssen), a woman with some baggage herself and a mother (Jacqueline Bisset) suffering from dementia.

But as these films go, a strategic mistake in his professional life sets Asher on a collision course with one of his former friends and associates (Richard Dreyfuss), and some too ambitious plans the killer doesn’t know about get most of the rest of said associates killed, so his newfound hope for an actual human life just might come too late and be rather deadly for Sophie.

On paper, Michael Caton-Jones’s Asher is nothing special. We’ve seen its plot and variations thereof a hundred times before and its central characters are just as well-worn (though kudos for Sophie not being blind). However, in practice, there’s something pretty special about the whole affair. In part, the film’s considerable amount of actual human pathos is won by a cast and director whose careers have reached a trajectory quite parallel to Asher’s, a late middle to final phase that doesn’t fit comfortably with anyone, and the least with consummate professionals in a business that favours youth over talent and experience any day, as much as you try to mutilate yourself with botox and whatever other nonsense’s the flavour of the day.

It’s not all self-pity and doom and gloom here, though. Instead there’s a relaxed quality to quite a bit of the film, a willingness to stay with characters and care for them when other films would make haste to the next plot point. But then, we know the plot very well indeed, so fixating on it would be quite beside the point, especially when caring for what’s going on with the characters is a lot more rewarding.

Part of Asher’s special quality in this regard is how clearly it applies actual lived experience to the genre tropes it uses, providing the film with palpable humanity where it could get away with going through the motions. The actors clearly share in the film’s approach here, and they all, especially Perlman, Janssen and Bisset, seem to put a lot of themselves into what we are seeing.


There are also some fine, homage-heavy scenes of professional killer business, a dry yet warm sense of humour and low-key eccentricity as a way to give standard plot beats more life to enjoy here, turning this into quite a different film from the would-be post-Tarantino thing I expected Asher to be going in.

In short: Daughter of the Wolf (2019)

Just after Clair Hamilton (Gina Carano) has returned home from military service to bury her father and take care of her estranged teenage son Charlie (Anton Gillis-Adelman), Charlie is kidnapped. The kidnappers do ask for a ransom consisting of basically all the money Clair has, but they still plan on selling Charlie off to someone even if they get the money. Their leader, only known as Father (Richard Dreyfuss, of all people now also in a low budget direct to home video career phase) we will learn during the course of the movie, has some rather personal reasons for the whole affair, as well as a pretty perverse sense of morality.

Fortunately for Charlie, Clair is well up for hunting a bunch of criminals through the snowy mountains, even teaming up with one among their number (Brendan Fehr) who has a bit of a conscience as well as the kind of tragic backstory that lends itself to a bout of redemptive action. There’s also a wolf pack hanging around the borders of the narrative, threatening, attacking, and sometimes helping, sometimes feeling like real animals, sometimes as if the film would turn them into creatures of myth any scene now.


David Hackl’s Daughter of the Wolf is a somewhat successful entry into the survivalist thriller sweepstakes, often making good use of the snowy woods of British Columbia and the action movie heroine talents of Gina Carano (who could kick your ass in real life, so is rather plausible kicking fictional ass). Carano’s a decent actress by now when she doesn’t shoot someone, too, so there’s never the feeling the whole film’s point is only about the violence. Of course, while it does have a somewhat thoughtful manner, and does put more than a little effort into building up the screwed up family values of Father, as well as giving most characters who would be only canon fodder in other films a bit of a personality and background, the characters are still very much stock types going through stock situations. And even though Hackl does a good job with action as well as dialogue scenes (not something to be taken for granted in the low budget action and thriller bracket), he doesn’t exactly make the material sing or feel real. It’s a workmanlike job, I suppose, elevated by Carano, Dreyfuss and the landscape to be never less than entertaining.

The Big Fix (1978)

Moses Wine (Richard Dreyfuss), formerly a proper 60s radical, is now a divorced industrial detective (missions in this glamorous job include the counting of chickens, which is more depressing than hunting cheating spouses), with two kids living with his ex-wife (Bonnie Bedelia), and a minor case of depression, sadness and self-hatred all his own. Things change when his old protest buddy and flame Lila (Susan Anspach) steps back into his life.

Lila hasn’t given up as many of her dreams as Moses has, and while she’s arranged herself with elements of changing times, she has stayed alive in and engaged with the world around her in a way Moses has not. Right now, she’s working for a political candidate named Hawthorne. Hawthorne might very well be the most boring and uncharismatic man alive yet he is also not corrupt and no monster, the kind of compromise you bet on when all the alternatives are all sorts of terrible. Unfortunately, someone has taken it upon himself to print flyers carrying endorsements for Hawthorne by radical turned terrorist turned disappeared wanted man Eppis (F. Murray Abraham). That’s the sort of thing that can end a political career right quick, so the Hawthorne campaign has sent Lila to hire a private detective to find out who is responsible for these flyers. Who’d be a better candidate for that than Moses – a trustworthy guy who knows the circles Eppis once moved in?

At first, the investigation is very much fun and games for Moses. He’s spending time with Lila, falling back in her love with her – a feeling that’s clearly reciprocated – and enjoying a light-hearted investigative romp that awakens an optimism in him he hasn’t felt for a long time. However, things turn much more serious, a murder and a conspiracy (or more than one) pressuring Moses into sticking his nose in very dangerous corners.

Jeremy Kagan’s comedic mystery The Big Fix is a very pleasant surprise. It’s one of those late 70s films that seem to have fallen through the cracks nearly completely, and while it isn’t the sort of film that’ll rewrite movie history, it is certainly a hidden gem. With a script by Roger L. Simon based on his own novel, it is another of those late 70s movie concerned with the unfulfilled promises of the 60s, but it is a bit more hopeful than many of its brethren in its belief that some of the people who have seemingly given up on all those high ideals they espoused might step back into the body politic again. The film doesn’t use the dire consequences Moses’s return to life has for a character who really doesn’t deserve this at all to end on a cynical and bitter note – it rather treats this as the sort of injustice the Moseses of this world should help fix. It’s just not lying about fixing the world being easy for anyone involved.

The film’s tonal half-shift from light-hearted mystery to something a bit darker is handled very well, Kagan timing the moment when it happens excellently, and actually rather more subtly than it at first seems. After this point, the film rightly never quite gets regains the sense of whimsy it had before (when the Moses/Lila team basically capered through their investigation), but it still contains quite a few funny and satirical ideas, like the true fate of Eppis and the way hippie and yuppie collide in how he lives now (milked grandly by an Abraham who seems to have a very good time). All the while, the film steps merrily through the ruins of former radical politics in the US, visiting the groups that still fight, those that have given up, and those that have turned malevolent with sarcasm but without the sort of cynicism that could easily come with this territory. The film’s too interested in its characters’ humanity to ever become completely bitter about it, I think. It also has a great hand for memorable side characters, not just because it has some very memorable actors (John Lithgow, Fritz Weaver and Ron Rifkin are around too, for example) to work with, but because it so clearly enjoys spending time with figures like Moses’s staunchly socialist Russian Jewish émigré aunt (Rita Karin), even if they are only marginally pertinent to the plot. 


Along this way, the viewer is accompanying a lead in Dreyfuss who finds humanity and depth in a character that could have been a caricature through a plot that probably becomes a bit too complicated for its own good (but that’s par for the course for this sort of mystery) and is finished perhaps a bit too neatly.