OnoOdog

This movie has multiple genres; there's philosophical drama, dark comedy, action, and partial surrealism, and they're all handled rather well. The acting is fantastic from all, with Colin Farrel's hitman with a childish temper and sense of humor carrying most of the comedy and Brendan Gleeson's lofty minded hitman grounding the emotional side of the proceedings. The two of them balance each other out and are able to handle all the material excellently. Ralph Fiennes showing up late in the film pulls off sinister very well and makes the last half hour highly suspenseful yet still somehow funny. Unlike Taika Waiti, whose latest film I was fairly apathetic towards, Martin McDonagh strikes the balance between comedy in tense situations and moments of genuine pathos unlike most others, a talent he shares with his brother John Michael, whose film Calvary is one of my favorites of the entire 2010s. The brothers both have a talent for dialogue that, though filled to the brim with foul language, still manages to drop some lines that are both witty and wise to be remembered. The themes of guilt, revenge, religion, honor, friendship, and reconciliation are present in all of their films, and this one manages to include all those and still have a shootout. The location is beautiful, and this film could just be an advertisement for the city of Bruges, but the actual meat of the story is worked very capably and the setting is adopted into the story, rather than just merely being a backdrop. There is some seedy material that I think could have been done without and still had just as good a story, so I will rate it slightly lower than I might have otherwise, but I found it better than McDonagh's Banshees of Innisherin, even if it's not quite as good as his brother's Calvary.

This movie has been redone, remade, referenced, and homaged so many times across every story medium that I felt intimately familiar with it before I ever saw it. I'm still fairly partial to that one Clone Wars episode "Bounty Hunters" as well as the book 'Young Samurai: The Ring of Fire' but this original variant by the revolutionary Akira Kurosawa is rather grand. The cast is quite large and slightly ungainly but the actors do a rather good job, with the leads of Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune holding down the fort both as actors and literally as the characters. Mifune especially gives an unhinged performance with random ticks and noises that make him an obnoxiously humorous character, but he has a couple moments in which he's allowed to ground it emotionally and he does well in those too. The movie takes a little bit to lift off the ground and then grows slightly repetitive near the end with the multiple bandit attacks, but things flow well enough for the most part. As a lover of action films, the actual battles are definitely a little 50s for my modern tastes, with some somewhat cheesy combat, but it all manages to feel serious and weighty that I can forgive it. An interesting, influential, emotional, and well crafted work of art.

This is also not really an action film, silly me. Anyways, this sci-fi drama/crime thriller is pretty good with some great effects and a wild performance by Rutger Hauer as the villain. Harrison Ford is pretty good in the lead, but if you've seen him in one thing you've pretty much seen his whole repertoire, though he looks a little more scared in this one than as Han Solo or Indiana Jones or such. Like my previously reviewed Gattaca, it doesn't delve too deep into the "what makes a human" question as I think it could have, and the third act Terminator sequence maybe goes on a little too long, but it's impact has been strong and it is pretty good cyberpunk sci-fi.