Category: 3 Tinseltown Tuesday

Three giant holes in REBEL MOON

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Yes, you could write about 17 massive problems with this film, or 99 reasons I will never get these two hours of my life back.

HOWEVER: I want to focus on three actual storytelling lessons.

For educational purposes and such.

But hey, we will still make fun of this stinker.

HOLE NUMBER ONE: Our rebel heroine

Zack Snyder wants this to be Star Wars, so let’s get into the structural trouble at the crumbling foundation of this passion project.

Luke Skywalker starts out as a farmer, an orphan. So does this character.

After that, nothing is the same.

Luke has a secret Jedi pedigree, but he isn’t secretly a master warrior. It takes him three freaking movies, and a ton of training from two different mentors, to improve and improve before he starts kicking butt. Luke has to suffer and sacrifice.

He nearly dies a zillion times and gets his hand lopped off by Vader in the second film. He would have failed and died in the third film, except Daddy Vader switches sides.

Luke also learns a number of cool skills, and it takes time for him to master them. Fighting with a lightsaber. Force pull or whatever. Force jumping. All kinds of force stuff. It works as storytelling. You buy into it.

REBEL MOON makes the opposite choice. Our heroine randomly takes out an entire squad of baddies. Afterward, we get a flashback explaining how she’s a super warrior. Uh, no.

Yes, it’s a cool fight scene. There’s simply no setup to this payoff.

Then she kills the bad guy in the first movie, her first try, only for him to get un-Palpatined in a Bantha tank or whatever.

No mentor, no practicing, no suffering, no losses, no growth. This heroine starts out as a badass and ends the movie as a badass. That makes for a flat, boring arc.

HOLE NUMBER TWO: Our lame villain

This movie is trying to be Star Wars, which features maybe the most iconic villain of all time, the towering and powerful Darth Vader.

And they go with a skinny man with a British accent, a thing for tentacle porn, and the worst haircut in the galaxy.

Darth Vader wielded a scary red lightsaber and force-choked generals who annoyed him.

This villain has a walking stick. OMGWTFBBQ.

HOLE NUMBER THREE: Seven million sidekicks

Yes, this movie copies Star Wars, but it’s also trying to copy Seven Samurai, so we have all kinds of extra characters taking up all kinds of screen time.

None of them are essential. Seriously.

What we needed was a mentor, an Obi-Wan figure, to help our heroine learn and grow. Because she’s already amazing, there’s no room for that.

Therefore we get random characters who add nothing. A farmer who follows her on the journey. A rebel leader who only shows up and dies in order for her to assume that role. Bare Chested Beastmaster, a rogue spaceship pilot, a samurai woman with glowing red These Are Not Lightsabers, and so forth.

All forgettable and unnecessary. The one you could argue for needing is Rogue Spaceship Pilot, who is not Hans Solo but more of a Lando because he betrays them to the Empire or whatever.

The only side character who resonated, and should not get ripped from the script, is the robot voiced by Anthony Hopkins–and this character gets built up in the beginning, abandoned, and cameo’d at the end.

Honestly, the easiest way to fix the structural problems is to strip away all the side characters.

Send a real farmer girl, with no skills, with Anthony Hopkins as her Robot Obi-wan.

Have him teach her to fight, and hide, and sabotage the bad guys. Have her suffer and lose and learn.

Give her and the robot interesting weapons and powers other than “she just kicks ass.”

BOTTOM LINE

Huge budget. All kinds of special effects and possibilities. It all goes to waste because the heroine, villain, and story don’t work. 0/10, spend the sequel money on SHIMMER LAKE PART 2: GIVE THIS TOWN A BATH.

Why real fights are far cheaper—and far better–than fake CGI cray-cray

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Yes, every movie and TV show can now afford to use CGI, which they do. Way too much.

And you can’t watch a Marvel or DC movie without noticing how every frame is packed to the gills with CGI: fake set, fake hero suits, fake explosions, and fake fights.

The fake fights are what kill me.

Every action film and superhero movie is required to end in a final brawl, hero vs. villain. Usually at night and in the rain. Hey, I don’t make the laws.

Here’s the thing: these fights are the absolute climax of these movies. If you nail them, the whole movie works. Screw them up and the audience remembers forever.

I loved the hell out of BLACK PANTHER, but couldn’t buy the cartoonish final fight, which made me feel nothing.

The scene right after, with real human actors doing this thing called acting, generated tons of emotion.

This is an old problem. Way back, THE MATRIX looked revolutionary, and every fight felt real. In the horrible sequels, they poured all kinds of money and effort and CGI into fights that should have been epic yet looked like cut-scenes from a video game.

Here is an old-fashioned final battle that completely avoids CGI and completely works. It also avoids the modern problem of blurry action with a camera that never stops moving. You can see the whole fight and it’s glorious.

And I’ll end with the best fight from a Marvel movie, one that’s very real and human that makes you think Sebastian Stan is the baddest man on the planet.

VERDICT: Save a few million and step away from the CGI, directors. Hire fight choreographers and film real fights with real human beings. Because that’s how you generate real human emotions.

Here’s how Marvel lost its mojo–and why DC never had it

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Unless you live alone in an ice cave, you have seen these things we call “movies” along with shorter, lower budget shebangs we call “shows.”

And doesn’t it feel like half of all movies and shows are about superheroes? The other half are Disney+ series about random Star Wars characters, like the new show THAT STORMTROOPER WHO HIT HIS HEAD ON THE DOORWAY OF THE DEATH STAR.

Yet I remember a day, not long ago, when an actor holding a hammer and saying two words absolutely blew us away.

So let’s talk about the rise and fall of Marvel movies, and why DC is like bread dough without yeast: never rose, so it never had the chance to fall.

Here’s how Marvel climbed Mount Mojo and ruled all that it surveyed

1) The climbing crew absolutely rocked

Part of the story is who they picked to climb this mountain: a great crew of actors and directors. Sure, there are some big names like Robert Downey, Jr., and these days every bigshot actor is getting recruited to join the MCU.

But back when they started this climb, their core group was unknowns, who all happened to be named Chris, maybe because the Marvel casting people had a thing for somebody named Chris, maybe the One Who Got Away–who knows. Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Pratt were all risky choices that paid off. Even Robert Downey, Jr. was a risk, a big name with a history of addiction and rehab.

Whatever criticism you might level against Marvel movies of the past or today, they pick good actors.

I mean, everybody says Sebastian Stan is a nice guy, but after watching this, I thought he was the baddest man on the planet.

2) The writers and studio built up suspense, movie by movie

From the first time we saw an Infinity stone (and they kept popping up in every movie) to that last scene of INFINITY WARS: ENDGAME, WE REALLY MEAN IT, THANOS GONNA DIE FOR REAL THIS TIME, you knew that these movies were building up to a climax. There was a peak to Mount Mojo, and a ginormous purple villain sat on a throne on top of that peak, and shit was gonna happen when the heroes and audience finally clawed their way all the way up there.

You wanted to see what happened.

3) Each new movie added real pieces to the puzzle

You can fire up IRON MAN and microwave a vat of popcorn to binge the first round of movies, and every movie brings you new clues and characters. Even if you knew basically what was going to eventually happen–THANOS GONE WILD–all the little things mattered.

Why DC never got its mojo at all

DC came to this bazillion-dollar poker game with the far-stronger hand: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Joker, and Aquaman.

Before these movies, the Marvel characters (except for Spiderman) were pretty obscure. Thor, Ant-Man, a talking tree and his pet raccoon? Come on. DC should have eaten Marvel’s lunch.

And they mangled it.

Instead of introducing each superhero with their own movie, they did it backwards, and gave us a movie with Batman and Wonder Woman before sending us back in time for a solo Wonder Woman movie and Aquaman flick, and never giving us a solo Batman with Batfleck at all.

You can’t build up to something big when you go back in time with prequels like that.

Instead of having one big bad guy, we got Villains of the Week who were vanquished, buh-bye, we will not see you around.

Marvel keeps stopping and starting with new actors, new directors, and new tactics to rival what Marvel did, and it’s like they don’t know what direction they’re driving.

THE BATMAN was a good movie, and a nice start to a new trilogy. If they’re smart, they’ll use that as a starting point to build fresh. That’s just incredibly hard to do when you have an established Wonder Woman and Aquaman who do a great job and don’t need to be recast.

This opening scene is golden.

Don’t get me started with Flash and that actor.

So it’s a hot mess, which is really too bad.

How Marvel lost its way

1) Over-saturation

I’m not a comics nerd, and neither am I a snob who only watched black-and-white French existentialist films. I’m probably a lot like your average movie fan who sees all the big movies, and the Daredevil/Punisher/Jessica Jones stuff. But now I’m starting to skip a lot of these shows, along with some of the movies.

Because you need to clone yourself to have time to watch it all. There is too much content.

They started out strong. WANDAVISION was amazing, and LOKI rocked. Started watching MOON KNIGHT, love Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke–did not finish.

Haven’t watched any of MS. MARVEL or SHE HULK, and all the other movies and shows in the works just don’t excite me.

THOR: RAGNORAK is one of my fav movies of the whole bunch, yet I have zero desire to watch THOR 4: THOR AND LADY THOR VS PALE BATMAN. I’ll probably check it out on the televisions later. No guarantee.

There’s so much content coming out so fast. Instead of a couple of giant blockbusters every year that you definitely circled on the calendar, it’s a flood that you can’t track.

We’re basically to the point where this SNL skit has become our reality.

2) The multiverse means no character is ever dead, so the stakes don’t mean anything

Yes, the multiverse is a cool concept, and introducing it with Miles Morales was brilliant. A great movie.

After INFINITY WARS and LOKI, though, we know that no character is really dead. I mean, we watched Loki die, and here he is. And yeah, Iron Man died, though if he gets bored in a few years, I bet you every quarter in my swear jar that Marvel could wave $50 million under his nose to show up on set for three days.

Now when a character dies, we don’t really feel it. Because they can just pop into the multiverse and get another version of Thor or Iron Man or anybody else.

3) There is no clear mountain we’re climbing where the One True Bad Guy is waiting

Yes, the writers at Marvel may have a secret plan involving secret wars with the green shapeshifting aliens or Kang the Conquerer or whatever, and all of this will make sense seven movies and thirty shows from now.

Whatever phase they say we are on, and I will not keep track, it is too confusing,

HOWEVER: it’s not clear to us, as an audience, why we need to watch everything to see what happens. These movies and shows used to be all part of one body, with all the parts working together. Now they are loosely connected, and you have to contort your brain to see why it matters, and why you should care.

If your audience has to wonder why it should care, they won’t.

Go the to theater and see EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, then see it again

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Listen: I am not an easy mark, or the kind of fanboy who’s read all the comics and would love a three-hour Marvel movie that got super deep into what kind of shopping list Deadpool would have and whether he’d buy organic fruits to be ironic or not.

Nor do I embrace the easy nihilism that everything sucks, though we all go through that phase.

I can like things, love them, hate them, or be completely ambivalent. I AM MULTITUDES.

Yet some movies are like your true love. You just know it. There is no doubt, no caveats, no wishy washy bullshit whatsoever.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE is one of those movies.

Here, watch the trailer and we’ll talk smack.

This movie will surprise you, make you laugh, surprise you more, make you cry, and do the impossible trick of making you want to see it again.

Seriously, there is a short list of movies I’d happily watch again & again. Bet you have a short list, too.

This one makes that list.

Some interesting bits without throwing 583 spoilers at you:

  • It’s directed by the Daniels (two men both with the first name Daniel) and my only regret is they couldn’t get Daniel Ratcliffe in here to go full Daniel.
  • The budget was only $25 million, which I did not believe at first.
  • You’ll recognize the male lead’s voice from THE GOONIES and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.
  • Damn near everybody in this movie deserves Best Actor nominations, they did not hold back, they owned this thing.
  • Bagels with everything are the bomb.

I want to say, up front, that giving the Daniels a budget of $250 million would not have improved the movie. The special effects were great when they wanted them to be great and entertainingly cheesy when called for. One of the best scenes features two rocks, I kid you not.

Also, a budget of $250 million would mean studio execs and preview audience nonsense killing half of the insane and absurd parts that makes this movie stick with you so much.

So: go see this thing at theaters while you can. Bring a friend or three and share a giant tub of popcorn, which seems like a great deal because it’s only 50 cents more than the itty bitty Medium bag of poporn, though that’s an economic illusion due to the overpriced and bullshit nature of that Medium popcorn.

You’ll be able to see the Dr. Strange movie later, and the Thor movie, and all the other comic book movies that cost more than the Gross Domestic Product of Paraguay to create.

See this movie in a theater while it’s still around. Maybe you’ll simply like it. My bet, though, is that you’ll love it, and we need to support indie movies that take big risks like this.

Why was FREE GUY fun but unfulfilling?

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Yes, my name is Guy, and I watched FREE GUY the second day it hit theaters, as required by Guy Law.

Is it worth watching in a theater? Sure. This is a fun summer movie. But that’s not the most interesting question.

The acid test for a movie, even a summer action film or comedy, is simple: Would I watch it again?

And listen, we can make that test far more accurate and meaningful. Here’s how:

  1. How much would I pay to watch it again, and again?
    versus
  2. How much would you need to PAY ME to watch the thing one more time?

There are plenty of films that are worth watching once and never again. The movies that are rewatchable are golden nuggets of cinema worth treasuring forever.

Here are two examples, both somewhat similar to FREE GUY:

BOSS LEVEL is worth watching again and again, because I have literally watched it five-point-seven bazillion times.

Why is it worth two hours of your life, repeatedly? Because it mixes action with comedy so well, and has moments–like the sword training and fight scene–that never get old.

Similarly, THE EDGE OF TOMORROW is a movie that you can watch again and again. The more you hate Tom Cruise as an actor, the more you like this movie, seeing how you get to watch him die a ton of times in a war zone before he redeems himself. Also, Emily Blunt is a total badass in this thing.

FREE GUY is thankfully an original script and not a movie based on an actual video game or ancient board game like BATTLESHIP, which they actually got Liam Neeson to do a movie about, for the love of all that is holy.

Yet despite being fun, there’s something missing when you walk out of that theater after watching FREE GUY.

Here’s what I think that missing thing is: you can’t buy the ending, no matter how much bubblegum ice cream they pile on it.

Spoilers galore from here out.

So the key relationship is between Guy and Millie, with Guy not realizing he’s in a video game and Millie looking like a supermodel inside and outside the game.

In the end, they do NOT get together, because Guy is just an AI with a pretty digital face, so Guy becomes single and Millie gets together with…Annoying Tech Dweeb.

Listen, this doesn’t work on a number of levels. The audience WANTS Guy and Millie to get together for real. They do not, in any part of their popcorn-munching bodies, want Millie to hook up with Annoying Tech Dweeb.

Honestly, real-life Millie is beautiful enough to get pretty much any man she wants. It’s not believable that she settles for a man she ignored for years despite his blatant crush on her.

How could we fix the ending and the movie?

First, we don’t need three Tech Gurus — Annoying Tech Dweeb, his sidekick, and Millie are all coders.

You need one coder in this movie, and that’s Millie, so we can safely axe the other two characters. I mean, put a gun to my head and I cannot remember either one of their names. THAT IS A SIGN, RYAN REYNOLDS AND SCREENWRITING PEOPLE.

The other stakes were whether Millie and Annoying Tech Dweeb won their intellectual property battle with Korg, and listen, I didn’t not care about that at all.

Second, there’s only one true romantic question built up in this movie, and that’s whether Millie and Guy get together.

Third, how do we give the audience what they want–Millie and Guy actually getting together–in a way they don’t expect?

Here’s how: you go MATRIX or TRON LEGACY.

The MATRIX path has Neo take the right pill (I don’t know if it’s red or blue and do not care, sorry) and enter the Matrix so he can hang out with Trinity.

If he stayed in what he saw as the real world, there’d be no future with her. Zero. None. Nada.

The TRON LEGACY option means going the opposite route and taking somebody (Olivia Wilde!) from the digital world to the real world.

So let’s pick one of those options: you make Guy a real Guy or bring Millie into the digital world.

Turning the digital Ryan Reynolds into a real-life Ryan is the easy and expected choice. The more surprising and deep thing would be making the stakes more real for Millie and going digital for her.

Give her a ticking clock–a deadly cancer, say–and have her desperately needing the servers and such to upload her consciousness into FREE CITY to survive.

High stakes now, right? And that would be an ending that stuck with audiences.

What went right, and wrong, with WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH?

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Michael Jai White is one of the best action movie stars, period. I put him up there with Jason Statham and Scott Adkins.

His fight scenes are always inventive, and he’s simply fun to watch whether it’s a straight thriller like BLOOD AND BONE or a comedy like BLACK DYNAMITE.

So what felt off about WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH, which is a sort-of sequel to a Jean Claude Van Damme movie with the same premise: DIE HARD in a sports arena.

Check out the trailer before the customary smack talking begins.

The Good

There are good fight scenes in this movie, and Michael Jai White is totally likeable in here, as usual. There’s also good comic relief his cowardly sidekick, another arena employee who is super reluctant to take on a bunch of professional bad guys.

The Bad

Something seems off through the whole movie.

It looks fake–too well-lit, too in-focus. Maybe they shot it with some kind of cutting-edge 4k camera and we’re used to some film grain. Dunno. Worth thinking about, seeing how I remember they had the same sort of problem with THE HOBBIT movies being shot in 60 fps or whatever.

Compare that first trailer to a scene from probably the best Michael Jai White movie of all time, BLOOD AND BONE.

Notice how the camera moves, how it puts certain characters in focus while blurring the background, and how things don’t seem perfect without being clunky?

It just feels more real. Like you’re somebody in the crowd watching the action.

The Ugly

The other thing that bugged me was the villain, who was a little too jittery and on-the-nose with his dialogue to be truly scary. One of his minions, a fighter with a shaved head who said hardly anything, actually was super scary. Make that guy your baddie and we’ve got a better movie.

VERDICT

But hey, things to quibble with in a movie during the global zombie apocalypse are far less important than the only question that matters: Should you fire up the Series of Tubes and watch it?

Yes. Anything starring Michael Jai White is basically (a) Watchable, (b) A Popcorn Fest, or (c) So Knowingly Bad It Circles Back to Good.

It’s a cheesy action movie, not two hours of a black-and-white French existentialism flick that you talk about with your bestie until the sun comes up at Denny’s and the waitress gets sick of you drinking endless coffee and ordering your fifth side of fries because it’s been five hours and she knows you’re a starving college student or starving artist/writer type and the tip is going to be a joke.

Fire it up and watch this thing. Then watch BLOOD AND BONE for the first time, or the second, before closing your eyes later this week and picking a Michael Jai White movie totally at random, as required by law.

Top four mistakes made in TRIPLE FRONTIER–which legit stars Batman, The Mandalorian, the dude from Sons of Anarchy and Poe Dameron from Star Wars, I KID YOU NOT

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triple frontier, netflix movie, ben affleck, oscar isaac, pedro pascal

What if I told you there was a movie starring Batman (Ben Affleck), The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal), the dude from Sons of Anarchy (Charlie Hunnam) along with Poe Dameron from the Star Wars movies?

You’d say “Nuh-uh,” and I’d say, “Yeah-huh” and we’d argue about who was drunk until I fired up Netflix and started showing THIS ACTUAL MOVIE THAT EXISTS.

Here is the trailer. Watch it, then we’ll talk smack.

The immediate question is, “Who is that other blonde dude who I sorta recognize?” and the answer is Garrett Hedlund, who played the lead in the TRON remake and is in other motion pictures I will not list right now because you know how to use the googles, if you care that much.

But there is more to talk about, and yes, this will involve spoilery spoilers.

The big issue is, “Did our dream team of ex-special forces experts make nightmarishly stupid mistakes?”

Yes. Yes, they did.

Let’s go into the Top Four Mistakes made by our superteam.

Mistake No. 4: Not splitting up

After they found all the money and took it from the drug cartel boss, they took the cash in a single van.

Then they tried to exit the country in a helicopter, with most of the cash carried in a cargo net dangling beneath. A long list of bad things then happens, based on this single decision, with their pile of cash shrinking each time.

All of the Bad Things could have been avoided if they split up, right away. Have each team member take their share of the cash and go in different directions, alone or in pairs, by sea or by train. Whatever.

Mistake No. 3: Not hiding the money

Hey, what’s in all those bags hanging underneath the helicopter flying low and under the radar? Any farmer, police officers, soldier, or drug cartel member who saw their chopper would not think “Basmati rice” or “every known VHS tape of The Star Wars Christmas Special.” They would hear that helicopter from far away, then see it, then notice all the bags, and think “scads of drugs” or “mountains of cash.”

And word would spread, like it did, making it hard for the team to escape.

The first rule of heists and capers is simple: Don’t get caught with the loot.

The second rule of heists and capers is: Don’t get caught with the loot.

The third rule of heists and capers is: Hide the loot in multiple places, you ding dong.

Another smart idea is to transfer or hide your precious stolen treasures immediately, so there’s nothing on you that’s incriminating, and the loot is safe even if you get detained, arrested, or thrown in jail for a year. Because when you get out, the first thing you’re doing is safely retrieving ALL THE CASH from a storage unit or whatever, then living a nice life as you sail around the South Pacific in that sweet sailboat Kevin Costner had in WATERWORLD or drink mojitos on a white sand beach with Red and Andy Defrusne.

Mistake No. 2: An exit route over ginormous mountains

Yes, it may have been the shortest route to the sea. However, big helicopters and little airplanes both have trouble getting over towering mountain ranges, especially when carrying too much weight.

This was the Stupid, and also led to many other problems, like crashing the chopper (bad), getting into a shoot-out with local villagers (very bad!), and eventually going over the ginormous mountains by foot (terrible).

If you avoid Mistake No. 3 and hide the money, you can put away the guns and body armor and also avoid Mistake No. 1 (not splitting up) and have folks leave the country by train, plane, car, truck, or whatever. You’re a normal person going home. There will be food and warmth and no need to get into firefights, or freeze your hiney off in the mountains while villagers track you down and KILL BATMAN because he shot their villager father and such.

Mistake No. 1: Not wearing masks

This may seem silly. What a small thing, wearing masks? How could this be the biggest mistake?

Except wearing masks is everything.

How does the drug cartel know to look for them, specifically? Because they left witnesses, being unwilling to kill women and children, the family members of the cartel boss. That’s honorable and good.

HOWEVER: If they wore masks, and stuck to the rest of their plan, there would be no witness description. They did kill the guards and the cartel boss, so nobody would know what their voices sounded like. Plus, it’s pretty hard to tell all your cartel minions with guns to be on the lookout for a guy who sounds like Batman, another guy who sounds like he was on that biker show, plus a dude sorta sounds like The Mandalorian.

Wearing masks means even if the family members got a glimpse as they passed each other on the road, they wouldn’t know who hit them. Was it an inside job? Did another cartel come after them, or police officers? Those would be the first three logical suspects. A superteam of American ex-special forces folks would be last on the list.

VERDICT

Wear masks. Don’t go over stupid deadly mountains in a helicopter. Hide the money, or at least get it out of the country five different ways when the team splits up after the job.

Seems pretty simple, right?

HOWEVER: This isn’t really a traditional caper or heist. It’s almost an anti-war movie, like PLATOON. The closest thing I can think of is the damned excellent Chris Pine-Jeff Bridges bank robbery caper, HELL OR HIGH WATER, with a similarly mixed ending. They successfully pull off the heist. But it comes at a high price, due to hubris.

TRIPLE FRONTIER is actually a cautionary tale of the downfalls of greed and violence. Unlike most action movies, where the heroes blow stuff up and show the glorious thrills of killing bad guys with abandon, this movie is meant to make people question those decisions. Because people do die. Was it really worth it?

Your average action movie doesn’t pause to consider this question at all. Though I’m a giant fan of thrillers and action movies, there comes a point where most of these movies jump the shark on this issue. So many bad guys, zombies, or alien invaders get shot, stabbed, and blown to hell that you lose count. And it loses meaning.

This is why movies like JAWS, ALIEN, and PREDATOR are so memorable. There isn’t a sea of bad guys dying left and right. There is one Very Bad Guy, who seems invincible, and he’s winning until there’s one hero left.

Which means my armchair quarterbacking of the big mistakes made by our superteam isn’t casting aspersions at the screenwriter or director. They totally intended for the characters to make all kinds of mistakes, based on their greed and character flaws. Batman wanted all the monies, despite the fact that it made them spend too much time at the drug cartel house, and that it made the helicopter overweight. So if you really wanted to pin the blame on a single character, he’s most at fault, and he gets punished the worst for his sins, seeing how a villager shoots him in the head from long range as revenge for Batman killing poor villagers who wanted some of the money they found after it fell from the sky. Don’t blame them for that at all.

Back to the verdict: it is the apocalypse, and you have watched Every Possible Thing on the Televisions Already, which means tes, you should fire up the Netflix and watch TRIPLE FRONTIER.

And if you haven’t watched it, do HELL OR HIGH WATER while you’re at it. 11/10 would recommend.

Fire up the Netflix and watch Chadwick Boseman in MESSAGE FROM THE KING

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chadwick boseman

This is not one of his more famous roles–it’s kind of an obscure movie. A hidden treasure. And because this week is where we pay tribute to the King, there’s no better way than to talk up movies he made that people may not know about. Especially this one.

Here’s the trailer, then we’ll chat.

What makes this so good?

I mean, Chadwick Boseman could have gone grocery shopping in Safeway with a short list, and I’d still watch 40 minutes of film about him talking to the woman at the seafood counter about sea scallops and clams.

MESSAGE FROM THE KING isn’t a big-budget movie. I doubt there’s a single frame of CGI in this film. More and more, I appreciate films that rock without an ounce of CGI.

What makes this so special isn’t just Boseman’s acting, which is always stellar. I like how this thriller sets up our hero as being badly outnumbered and outgunned, in a foreign land, and still winning–not because he’s faster and tougher than the bad guys, which is the typical path of any action movie. On occasion, they’ll mix it up and have the hero win by being more brutal and bloodthirsty. You know, DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY style.

This movie shows our hero do clever thing after clever thing. And yes, he gets into fights, but he does it smart. In the final confrontation, instead of taking on all the bad guys on a rainy rooftop, outnumbered 10-to-1, minimum, he uses the greed of the villains against them. It’s so well done.

Chadwick Boseman was an amazing talent and it still hits me that he’s gone.

Note: If you like the accent he used when playing Black Panther, his character in this movie is from South Africa, and he does the accent so damn well I freaked out when seeing him speak at the MTV Awards show, kinda like hearing Christian Bale’s natural Welsh accent for the first time and your brain is completely befuddled.

It’s worth watching the clip for what he does during his acceptance speech for Best Hero–what a decent, honorable, good-hearted man.

VERDICT

Fire up Netflix, watch this film, and raise your glass in Boseman’s memory.

THE MECHANIC is a clinic in betrayals, the beating heart of thrillers

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the mechanic starring jason statham directed by simon west

You can make all sorts of academic arguments about how many stories there are. One: the hero’s journey. Two: tragedies and comedies. Ten, if you read SAVE THE CAT and see what primeval stories ring true. Plus plenty of other books and storytelling gurus and academics who will happily explain why there are actually 36 stories, or 100.

With action movies, I’d argue there are clearly some distinct types:

Monster in the House–You’re trapped in an enclosed space with a monster, and either it’s gonna kill you or you’re gonna kill it. There’s no escape, no calling the cops, no trickery. This is a great situation and I’d argue ALIEN (supposedly sci-fi), FATAL ATTRACTION (pigeon-holed as domestic drama), and JAWS (mislabeled horror) are all actually Monster in the House.

A key difference between these stories and horror: the monster dies. In true horror stories, the monster is actually punishing everybody for their sins (teenagers drinking, doing drugs, having sex, or scientists playing God) and everybody dies in the end. Only the monster returns for the sequels.

Disaster–A volcano is about to go off, a giant asteroid will hit the planet, or a climate change means Kevin Costner’s movie WATERWORLD is a prophecy. This type of movie ends one of three ways: (a) the hero stops the disaster (ARMAGEDDON), (b) the hero can’t stop it but gets everybody out of the burning lava, or (c) this is really a horror movie and the disaster can’t be stopped because we’re being punished for our sins.

Related: WATERWORLD was a prophecy, so get your sweet sailboat ready

War–You can’t get a setting with more conflict and action than a war zone, though war movies are often actually about other things with the war truly being the setting and backdrop. Pure war movies are about fighting the good fight and punching Nazis in the nose, or defeating an invasion of aliens by flying your F-16 straight up into the death beam after the president gives an amazing speech. Anti-war movies (PLATOON) are about making people cautious about getting dragged into a mistake, or fighting wars for the wrong reasons.

Rescue–I don’t know who you are. I don’t have any money. What I do have is a certain set of skills.

Betrayal–This is beating heart of thrillers, especially ones that don’t rely on Jason Statham finding creative ways of kicking people in the face. Betrayal from within is a tough, tough story, and there’s plenty of tension and storytelling goodness involved. Using betrayal in an action movie is a wonderful way to spice up the typically predictable plots of most action stories.

Which brings us to THE MECHANIC, an under-rated action movie directed by Simon West, who also helmed WILD CARD, perhaps Statham’s most interesting movie.

Related: Top 4 reasons why WILD CARD is the best Jason Statham action movie ever

Why betrayals work so well

What this film does so well is piling up layer upon layer of betrayals.

Your average action film has zero.

A decent one may have a big betrayal right before the climax, something you really did not see coming.

THE MECHANIC shows us how smart storytelling, with early setups, can matter far more than a film’s CGI budget.

This movie starts with a betrayal that leads to Statham being tricked into killing his mentor. And that leads the dead man’s son to Statham, seeking solace and revenge, not knowing it was Statham who pulled the trigger. What’s great is we don’t know until late that the mentor was set up, the evidence against him faked, so Statham genuinely felt remorse. That guilt doesn’t go away when he learns the truth, because it doesn’t change the fact he shot his friend, false pretenses or not.

So it’s beautiful in the end that the son, after helping take out the bad guys, still can’t let go of the fact that his new friend killed his father, and tries to take him out by blowing up his truck when they stop for gas. Even better are the setups–and they are plural, for they are legion–of how the son goes back to Statham’s house, full of dead bad guys, and does everything Statham told him to never do: turn on his fancy record player and drive the red sports car he’s always fixing up and never using.

The car and house blow up, along with the son, and all of this feels about right. Statham didn’t go out of his way to kill the son, not even after the attempt on his life. Wouldn’t seem correct since he did take the man’s father. The son only dies through hubris.

There are more betrayals in this movie, I kid you not, and they’re all set up correctly. None of that nonsense where a film shows a payoff, then explains the setup with a flashback scene THAT YOU NEVER SAW BEFORE.

VERDICT

11/10, an excellent movie that starts strong and ends stronger, with deautiful twists you do not see coming.

 

Top 4 reasons why WILD CARD is the best Jason Statham action movie ever

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Listen: I have watched all kinds of movies, from black-and-white French existentialism to popcorn blockbusters, and my list includes Every Action Movie Known to Man–so if there’s a Jason Statham movie I haven’t watched, that’s only because THEY ARE STILL SHOOTING IT RIGHT NOW.

And there’s a little known movie of his, WILD CARD, which is the hands-down champion of anything he’s ever done.

Counter-intuitive Reason No. 4: Not the fights

You can count on one hand the Statham movies that do not feature tons of amazing fights, where instead he just helps rob a bank and such, and maybe punches THREE people. These movies exist. I have seen them. THE ITALIAN JOB (remake), THE BANK JOB (looks like the ’70s, is not). There is a list.

It is entirely possible, and conventionally smart, to rank typical Jason Statham movies on the quality and creativity of the battles.

That isn’t what makes WILD CARD stand out. The fight scenes aren’t 10 times better. They’re quite good, sure, but that isn’t it. Here’s the big casino brawl. Nicely done.

However, THE TRANSPORTER is packed with some of the best action ever filmed. Ding dong.

Reason No. 3: The writing

This is a big part of the appeal of WILD CARD, which deserved a bigger box office and more attention.

Most thrillers–movies or novels–are pretty linear. A to B to C, straight line. Evil men are doing evil things and we need a hero who can match them, whether it’s spy vs spy or fist vs fist.

The writer for this movie is William Freaking Goldman, who wrote a novel this film is based on and also dabbled in screenplays since, I don’t know, 1965. Wrote a few little films like ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN and THE PRINCESS BRIDE and five billion others.

So yeah, Jason Statham will never get a better screenwriter for one of his moves. Ever. And the quality shows, start to finish.

Instead of an A-B-C storyline, where everything is on-the-nose, Goldman starts with a fakeout. We see Statham being a jerk to a man and his girlfriend in a bar, and it isn’t until a few scenes later that it’s clear he got paid to bully the man and lose a fight in the alley to boost the man’s prospects with his girlfriend. The whole movie is like this, with setups and payoffs interwoven with subtext and subtlety. You just don’t get that in your average action movie.

Reason No. 2: The director

Yes, you can make a case that Luc Besson and Jason Statham were born to make movies together, with Luc’s gonzo style goosing up Statham’s dry delivery and humor.

Simon West isn’t quite on the god-tier level of William Goldman, though he’s got an action-movie pedigree a mile long. The man directed CON AIR, THE MECHANIC (another Statham film), and the original Rick Roll video, NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP. I kid you not.

Writer and director are 90 percent of the battle, and in this case, it was the right decision to run in the opposite direction of Luc Besson and gonzo. Simon West went with gritty, and it works.

Reason No. 1: Letting the hero be clever

I know, I know–every hero should be smart, right? Except this doesn’t typically happen in thrillers and action movies.

Hero see problem. Hero smash!

Did that not work? Smash different way?

Not work? Smash harder!!!

There’s a huge, quiet, and tense scene where Statham is in deep trouble. Baby, a Vegas mob boss, brings him in about two murders. His fingerprints are on the gun (true). In an ordinary action movie, the solution to this problem is Statham kicks a thug, punches another dude in the throat, and jumps down an elevator shaft with the cable wrapped around Baby’s throat.

Except that’s stupid, and not really an option. Statham knows he can’t fight his way out of this. Even if he somehow killed everybody in the room, Baby’s organization would not shrug and say, “Okay, you win, go on with your bad self.” They would hunt him down, and he would die.

So I really found this scene to be different and beautiful. The one setup you need to know is the bad guy accusing Statham raped a friend of his, and Statham helped sneak her into the hotel to get a little revenge, and they didn’t actually kill anybody.

You have to love Baby’s dialogue in this scene. Normal action films would be on the nose, with Baby saying, “Yeah, I believe him over you. Get outta here before I change my mind and tell Junior to put one between your eyes.” Baby’s polite, understated menace and sarcasm is far more frightening than a tough guy who has to yell and threaten people.

VERDICT

Every year, Hollywood, Bollywood, and other movie-making centers of the world spend $459.3 bazillion dollars producing action movies, with $458 bazillion going to CGI and special effects and $0.00001 bazillion paid to the screenwriters.

WILD CARD is a tremendous argument that you can produce far better movies in this genre by reversing that ratio. I don’t believe there is a single frame of CGI in this thing. Doesn’t need it.

Kudos to Simon West, Jason Statham, and the legend known as William Goldman–we will never have another like him.