Three Films Make A Post: One hell of a rodeo.

Lasso (2017): If you can’t beat the competition in the backwoods slasher space with your movie’s quality, there’s always the time honoured use of the gimmick. So, as the title promises/threatens, Evan Cecil’s Lasso is indeed a backwoods slasher movie with rodeo and cowboy themed kills. Some of them are even pretty fun in an at once pleasantly nasty and ridiculous way. But alas, that’s all the film has to offer, for the characters are as bland and generic as you’d expect – having one arm isn’t a character trait, you know –, the plotting is by the numbers at best and stretches out nothing to great lengths at its worst, while actual suspense is absent.

Still, this one could have been much, much worse.

Spy Game (2001): For a Tony Scott movie, this spy affair with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt (two guys who managed to get impressive careers out of pretty faces, an understanding of how to best utilize their limited ranges as actors, and clever choice of roles) is downright sedate. It’s clear that Scott at times tries to emulate the style of classic 70s spy films with early 2000s technology, but he’s still not a terribly great choice for a spy film that isn’t going bigger than James Bond all of the time. Scott’s too showy a director to provide the subtlety a good espionage movie needs, even the sort that’s a third of an action movie, and simply not thoughtful (as a Scott detractor, I’m tempted to say not intelligent, but I didn’t know the guy, so…) enough to get into the questions of personal ethics, political expediency and morals the best of these movies explore. Though he is clearly trying, and not vomiting stupid camera tricks into my eyes for most of the film’s running time, so that’s a plus.

(Tyler Rake) Extraction (2020): I’m actually rather happy that Netflix is putting money into higher budget action movie fare like this, but Sam Hargrave’s Extraction doesn’t really scratch the action itch like Netflix’s Indonesian and Filipino examples of the last few years do for me. It is clearly trying to go as all out as these films, but there’s a strangely bland quality to the action, rather as if you were watching drafts for a nasty, bloody action movie than the actual thing.


The by-the-numbers script by Joe Russo (who has done much, much better in the in theory much more restrictive superhero genre) certainly doesn’t help, nor does Chris Hemsworth’s not exactly exciting lead performance. And at this point, Hemsworth is good when he has the right script to work from, but can’t make a film look better than it actually is.

In short: Man on Fire (2004)

Creasy (Denzel Washington), an alcoholic ex-CIA killer with the mandatory traumatic past (therefore the alcohol) is hired to protect Lupita (Dakota Fanning), the child of US company exec Samuel (Marc Anthony) and his wife Lisa (Radha Mitchell). Despite there having been a rash of kidnappings of the children of executives of US companies in Mexico like Samuel, he really hires Creasy because he comes cheaply, and because Creasy’s old murder buddy Paul Rayburn (Christopher Walken) pushes the guy recommending people to Samuel a bit in Creasy’s direction.

After a bit of the expected “PTSD suffering guy can’t let anyone into his heart anymore” shenanigans, Creasy falls in replacement father love with Lupita (who, as played by Fanning, really is a particularly nice kid), so when she is kidnapped and apparently killed, he does of course go on a murderous rampage, killing his way up the long, long totem pole to the people responsible for her death.

At first, Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, written by Brian Helgeland, is a surprisingly effective retelling of the ole tale of a shut-off man of violence reminded of his humanity by a child, and then falling back into his old ways again to protect/save her. After some minutes of the kind of noisy visual bullshit typical of late period Scott, even the director seems to calm down a little about the whole thing, giving his excellent performers enough space to breathe life into the very clichéd set-up and even – gasp – using his love for all kinds of annoying technical tricks to enhance instead of destroy what the actors are trying to do. Why, for once in a Tony Scott movie, I even felt emotions coming on.

Alas, once the film gets going with Creasy murdering his way through the supporting cast, all of this stops. Scott loses himself, Washington’s performance and my attention through the use of all the phony visual nonsense he so dearly loved in this part of his career. So there’s an incessant barrage of whoosh-cutting, pointless superimposition of Washington’s face over Washington’s face (honestly, I have no idea why), a camera that randomly jitters and jerks, jumpy editing, micro-zooms, stutter and all imaginable kinds of pointless visual graft, all, I assume in service of keeping the audience awake through way too many scenes of Creasy torturing and murdering characters in various ways. As my imaginary readers know, I’m not exactly bothered by tasteless violence, but rather by the directorial assumption that this sort of thing used as much as in this film will somehow shock a viewer.


In fact, having a murder machine murder their way through personality-less goons can only keep one’s interest up when it is either very well staged (which is impossible with all actual action buried under all of Scott’s tacky direction ticks), carries some interesting resonance, or actually does something else needed for the film. In Man on Fire’s case, all the killing ever does is make the film way too long, until what should be a tight little 90 minute thriller becomes tedious two and a half hours of nothing but Scott editing into your face, which isn’t just an unpleasant time, but also time of your life you won’t ever get back.

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

Once, Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) was a secret service agent who took a bullet for the president. Today, he’s a washed-up, alcoholic private eye with a marriage on the rocks, a mad-on for the senator who fired him, and a love for potty-mouthed witticisms minus the wit, because this was written by Shane Black. The plot will throw him together with younger, yet still washed-up, former American Football pro Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans), who shares his love for talking crap, if little else. When they are not flirting with each other and verbally comparing their dick sizes, they are set against a really complicated plot to legalize gambling with the help of a little assassination and a bit of the old ultra violence that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Which honestly is not much of a problem for this Tony Scott directed big, loud, expensive US mainstream action buddy movie, because nobody expects the evil plans in a film like it to be probable or believable. As long as an evil plot is fun and a helpful framework to hang various action sequences on, it’s all good in this genre. In this particular case, more sensible villains with a sensible plot would just not fit scenes like the one in the finale where Wayans, riding through a football stadium on horseback, throws a ball to catch a bullet meant for the assassination target (who, dramatic irony alarm, is the guy responsible for Hallenbeck being fired from his old Secret Service job). And really, who’d want to miss out on that?

I’m actually a bit surprised how much I wouldn’t have wanted to miss anything happening in the film, seeing that I usually have quite a few problems with its director and often at least some problems with its main scriptwriter. Both men, though pretty maligned by quite a few people at their height, are by now highly beloved by a certain type of middle-aged, male American nerd movie critic (all things that apply to me too, apart from the being American thing), often to my bewilderment. Scott to me always was the prime example of a director with obvious technical chops who tended to put these chops in service of not very much – well, there was that one time when he made a feature-length ad for the US Airforce, but that’s not the thing to endear anyone to me, either. To my eyes, Scott mostly made films in genres I usually enjoy that slicked away all the rough edges, the grit and the strangeness I love about these genres, leaving something that feels much more like “product” than any Marvel movie I’ve seen.

And Shane Black? Can write a good one-liner, sometimes even a dozen, but can just as often annoy me endlessly with his fixation on male asshole characters he clearly admires for being violent pieces of shit and therefore mostly never allows to truly change or learn from their experiences (at their core, his assholes are always right), sprinkled with a bit of casual misogyny, the kind of lame cynicism most of us grow out of once we get into our twenties, and the belief that having characters say fuck (etc) a lot makes your writing somehow “edgy” instead of going for the most obvious, and least shocking, kind of shock value. To be fair, if we ignore The Predator, he is genuinely great at plotting abstruse narratives with great conviction, has quite the hand for pacing, and more often than not manages to deliver a script that still makes for a fun (sometimes even good or great) movie.

Truthfully, all these criticism can be applied to The Last Boy Scout too, but through some weird kind of alchemy, the combination of Scott’s soulless slickness and Black’s try-hard yet certainly not soulless edginess somehow turns all the flaws into sources of great fun, an amusement ride of a movie that uses its director’s and writer’s respective shticks (and tics), and a metric fuckton (to keep in the vernacular) of explosions, to bludgeon all the critical faculties of a viewer’s brain into blissful submission.


Is it a good movie? Well, it’s certainly one made with the highest level of craftsmanship, diving joyfully into all sorts of excess, and featuring a whole lot of awesome violence, so definitely yes.