Action Archive

Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting: SPL

By
Ian W
Published: April 6, 2008Posted in: Action, Martial Arts, Movie Reviews, ThrillerTags:

Director Wilson Yip seems to have fooled himself into thinking he’s made a serious crime movie along the lines of Infernal Affairs but beneath the films highly stylised look is a decidedly simple story. When Wong Po has the key witness in a case against him murdered, Detective Chan dedicates his remaining time on the force to bringing him down. With his time running out and Inspector Ma set to replace him he decides to frame Wong for murder. But how far will he go to make sure the case is airtight?

Simon Yam is good as Chan, although the story throws a little too much at the character (he’s got a brain tumour that’s killing him and a daughter he adopted from the witness Wong had murdered) instead of giving us a little more insight into what makes him tick. He clearly had a beef with Wong Po even before the witness is murdered but the script gives us no inkling as to why. Yam a great actor but he’s not given enough here to create a fully rounded character. His crack crime fighting team fair even worse, reduced to mere ciphers for the bad guys to pick off. Any attempts to make us care about them are so heavy handed that they almost have the opposite effect.

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I Spy: Goldfinger

By
Ian W
Published: March 31, 2008Posted in: Action, Movie ReviewsTags:

While I prefer From Russia with Love (more so with each viewing) there is no denying that this is quintessential Bond. Everything that would become a mainstay of the series is here – the pre-credit action sequence, the cool main titles, the evil mastermind (complete with henchman), a bevy of Bond girls (even though Bond fails to keep most of them alive), the bombastic score, and the big action packed finale (though it’s in Fort Knox rather than the evil masterminds secret base).

In fact I think it may be because From Russia with Love lacks some of those elements and doesn’t feel the need to be quite so BIG in scale that I’ve come to prefer it. Not that I don’t like Goldfinger, it’s great fun and finds Connery quite possibly at his peak as Bond, familiar enough to be comfortable in the role but not so familiar as to be bored with it. And in Gert Fröbe and Harold Sakata, as Auric Goldfinger and Oddjob respectively, the series has two of its most famous villains. Michael Collins deserves a mention too for providing the voice of Goldfinger, without him “No Mr Bond, I expect you to die” wouldn’t have quite the same delicious menace to it. It also makes a nice change to have a Bond girl who’s both voluptuous and can actually act, with Honar Blackman, fresh from TV’s The Avengers more than able to hold her own opposite Sean.

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Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting: Zatoichi’s Cane-sword

By
Ian W
Published: March 30, 2008Posted in: Action, Martial Arts, Movie ReviewsTags:

Skipping number 14 in the series as it has yet to receive a DVD release with English subtitles (I’ve got an ‘unofficial’ DVD but decided to hold off reviewing it in the hopes that one day we’ll see a proper release) we reach Zatoichi’s Cane-sword. By now the series had established its formula and that formula has much in common with the American Western.

Zatoichi’s like the weary gunfighter who comes into town hoping he won’t have to use his gun again but, when he encounters a damsel in distress, he knows he’s going to have to take on the local cattle baron (or in this case Yakuza boss) . Of course gunfighters aren’t normally blind and they tend to leave fewer corpses behind than Master Ichi but you get the idea.

This time around Zatoichi’s got sword troubles. An ageing alcoholic swordsmith tells him that his cane-sword is on its last legs – one more fight and it will snap. What’s a blind swordsman to do? Hang up his gun sword of course. Ichi tries to live a normal life in a boarding house, taking a job as a live in masseur but when a Yakuza boss attempts to take over the town after murdering his rival, Zatoichi steps in to defend the murdered boss’s daughter.

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The Friday Night Fright: Grindhouse

By
Ian W
Published: March 29, 2008Posted in: Action, Horror, Movie ReviewsTags:

In a break from routine this week’s Friday Night Fright was seen on the big screen. The Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino Grindhouse project is on tour at selected cinemas around the UK in its original form, complete with fake trailers, and I caught it last night at the Vue in Leicester.

I’d previously seen Rodriguez’s Planet Terror segment, along with the fake trailer for Machete, at the FrightFest All-nighter back in November but it anything I enjoyed it more second time around. It’s an insanely gory and utterly demented homage to trashy zombie flicks that totally embraces the Grindhouse concept. Hilariously bad dialogue, over the top performances, a crazy and completely illogical plot and more gore than you’ll see in the rest of this year’s movies combined add up to a thrill ride that doesn’t pause for breath until THE END appears on screen and we hear the last notes of the greatest score John Carpenter never wrote.

High points? Josh Brolin’s mad doctor is a superb scenery (and thermometer) chewing performance. It’s also nice to see Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey in something other than the straight-to-DVD trash they’re normally wasted in these days. The films only weak performance comes from Naveen Andrews, maybe it’s because I’m so used to seeing him as Sayid in Lost, but he seems out of place here and doesn’t really get into the real grindhouse spirit of things.

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Comic Tales: Daredevil – Theatrical Cut

By
Ian W
Published: March 27, 2008Posted in: Action, Comic Book, Movie ReviewsTags:

Matt Murdock was blinded as a child in a freak accident that heightened his remaining senses and gave him a new one, a ‘radar’ sense that allowed him to ‘see’ what was going on around him. This, along with the murder of his father, a boxer who refused to throw a fight, sets the course of Matt’s future – by day he’s a lawyer, defending those no one else will, by night he’s the masked vigilante called Daredevil. Into his dual world comes the beautiful Elektra Natchios and Matt is smitten at first ‘sight’ of her. But Elektra’s father has links to Wilson Fisk the ‘Kingpin’ of crime and, when he attempts to sever his ties, Fisk hires Irish hitman Bullseye to eliminate both him and his daughter.

Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil gets so much right it’s easy to forgive its failings. The ‘origin’ section of the film is a pretty faithful adaptation of the original comic story, with David Keith playing Matt’s pugilist pop and Scott Terra doing a pretty good job as the young Murdock. He’s particularly good once he’s been blinded and starts learning to use his newfound abilities. The main problem with this section is it’s a little rushed but that’s to be expected – this isn’t a film about a child coming to terms with a disability, it’s a superhero action movie and the audience wants to see grownups beating each other up, not kids.

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I Spy: The Silencers

By
Ian W
Published: March 24, 2008Posted in: Action, Comedy, Movie ReviewsTags:

Dean Martin’s first outing as Matt Helm is less a movie and more an extended comedy sketch. I’ve never read Donald Hamilton’s Helm novels but I’d say it’s a fair bet that they bare little relation to what we have here.

Dean doesn’t so much play Helm as he does himself, or at least his Mr Smooth public persona, with an eye for the ladies or a bottle of booze, whichever comes first. It’s sporadically amusing, although time hasn’t been kind. What seemed cool to me as a kid doesn’t have the same charm now – a station wagon driving superspy? – but Dino oozes charisma and Stella Stevens shows off her ample charms as the comedy love interest. Add in some reworked Martin songs, a cameo by Cyd Charisse and the obligatory Frank Sinatra joke and you’ve got a painless way to spend a hundred minutes.

Like the superior spy spoof Our Man Flint that came out the same year, a trick gun has a major role to play in the climax (both films milk the idea a little too long) with Helm’s firing backwards while Flint’s had a time delay. On the music front Flint wins hands down, Elmer Bernstein’s score no match for Jerry Goldsmith‘s super cool Flint theme.

Producer Irving Allen, when partnered with ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, turned his nose up at Fleming’s Bond books but subsequently went in search of his own superspy franchise. The Helm series lasted four movies while Mr Bond is still going strong. Says it all really…

Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting: The Street Fighter

By
Ian W
Published: March 22, 2008Posted in: Action, Martial Arts, Movie ReviewsTags:

No not the Van Damme movie but rather Sonny Chiba’s first outing as Takuma Tsurugi, the badest of bad asses. Bruce Lee’s characters may have been tough but they had a moral compass, so long as you stayed on the straight and narrow you’d be okay. Tsurugi would think no more of killing you than he would of stepping on a cockroach. And he won’t just kill you either, he’ll kill you in the nastiest way possible, throats are ripped out, balls are ripped off, skulls are cracked open…even by today’s standards this is one violent flick.

Tsurugi is basically a hired gun (just without the need of the gun) and early on we see what kind of guy he is. When he breaks a man out of prison and the man’s siblings are unable to pay he kills the male and sells the female as a prostitute to a crime lord. He’s a psycho with a black belt whose only interest is the money and the violence.

Chiba commands the film, sporting a perpetual sneer he’s super-cool. He may lack the grace and style of Bruce Lee but he makes up for it in brute force, and the fight scenes have a gritty, down to earth feel to them, with unfeasible gymnastics kept to a minimum. Sonny’s gurning during the fights is at times amusing but the bone crunching action and copious amounts of ketchup splashed about ensure that he’s never a figure of fun.

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Literally Speaking: Sahara

By
Ian W
Published: March 18, 2008Posted in: Action, Movie ReviewsTags:

Twenty-five years after making his first cinematic appearance in the box office bomb Raise the Titanic, Dirk Pitt, hero of many a Clive Cussler novel, returned with this loud, derivative and frankly rather dull action movie.

Think Indiana Bond and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the producers were aiming for here. We go from Bond style boat chase, complete with Bondian score, to a desert action sequence that gives us a glimpse of what Indiana Jones might have been like if it had a talentless hack like Breck Eisner at the helm. I like Matthew McConaughey, in the right part he can be quite effective, but one thing he isn’t is an action hero. He’s not helped by a script that feels like it was put together by committee, which, given the number of writers who worked on it, is probably close to the truth.

It’s not just McConaughey who underperforms; Penélope Cruz looks like she’s just there to get a tan while Steve Zahn does the comedy-sidekick-by-numbers. William H. Macy has his eye on a potential cash cow with the ending setting him up as a Mr Waverly type in what could have been The Man from NUMA (that’s National Underwater and Marine Agency in case you were wondering).

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Comic Tales: Superman II

By
Ian W
Published: January 31, 2008Posted in: Action, Comic Book, Movie Reviews, Science FictionTags:

The problem with Superman is that he’s Superman. He’s almost omniscient and it’s hard to find a worthy challenge for him. Superman II manages it by pitting him against three Kryptonian villains, each with powers equal to his own.

When I first saw Superman II at the cinema I thought it a better film than the original. As a fifteen year old comic geek it had what the first film lacked, namely super villains. For the first time we got to see a real Superhero vs. Supervillain knock-down-drag-out fight. There were faults – the romance with Margot Kidder never really worked for me (and still doesn’t) and Superman’s mum lying to him that, after choosing to become human, he can never go back, was always a pretty big plot hole.

The forty-three year old comic geek who just watched the film still loves the fight scenes (although some of the effects seem a little less special than they used to) and Terence Stamp and Sarah Douglas are still excellent bad guys (even if General Zod does go a bit Cockney at times, particularly the TV broadcast from the White House).

Now though I can also see the faults – sllly comedy moments and some ropy dubbing (how many characters does Shane Rimmer voice?), Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor completely superfluous to the plot, too little Ned Beatty, E.G. Marshall’s atrocious wig. Plus the whole Superman becoming human (for all of about five minutes) subplot isn’t really needed. The film runs over two hours, not as long as the first film, but then that had to tell the origin story, with Superman not making an appearance until an hour into the film. Superman II could have been trimmed by about thirty minutes and not lost anything of importance.

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I Spy: From Russia with Love

By
Ian W
Published: January 29, 2008Posted in: Action, Movie Reviews, ThrillerTags:

This, the second Bond film, one I never really liked that much when I was younger. It lacked the gadgets (unless you count 007′s attaché case, and I didn’t), the diabolical mastermind (unless you count Blofeld stroking his pussy, and, as we don’t even see his face, I didn’t) and said master criminal’s hidden lair (Bond’s final confrontation is with a small Russian woman in a hotel room!)

Yet it’s now one of my favourites and for many of the same reasons. Coming before the series found its formula (that would come with the next film, Goldfinger) it stands out from the rest. Things don’t really get moving until Bond boards the Orient Express in the films action packed second half. This section is one long chase, first in the claustrophobic environs of the train, then by truck, and. finally, in the first of the series spectacular boat sequences. The film has more in common here with North by Northwest than anything in the subsequent Bond films, but of course 007 is no innocent victim.

The film may lack a lead villain but it does have one of the all time great henchmen in the macho form of Robert Shaw’s SPECTRE agent Grant. With so much testosterone on display it’s hardly surprising Connery and Shaw wanted to do their own fight scene, and it gives the sequence a raw brutal quality, aided by the close confines of the confrontation, that’s never been equalled. Both stars no doubt nursed a few bruises (in private of course).

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