So here are four flicks I saw in the first few weeks of April. Two were good. Two were not. Hey, that’s 50%! (r=repeat viewing)
Crank (2006) (r) – Visiting my dad in Stockton, where there is no wi-fi or streaming in sight, my movie options were limited to what was on his various cable channels. Lucky for me, one of them was showing Crank! I just saw Hardcore Henry, which I thought owed quite a bit of its style to this Neveldine/Taylor opus. Turns out, it owes even more than I thought. Crank has a first-person cold open in which a confused Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) wakes up on an operating table, which is almost exactly how Hardcore Henry starts. They eventually discard the first-person conceit, but by that time Refused is playing on the soundtrack and we’re off and running. At its heart, Crank concerns itself with an interesting question. What would you do if you knew that you only had a few hours to live? Well, if you’re anything like Chev Chelios, you’d go on an insane, drug-fueled rampage of mayhem and vengeance through the streets of L.A. Crank is pure action silliness, with Statham as some kind of hired killer who’s been injected with an Asian super-poison that will kill him in a matter of hours. The only way to stay alive is to keep his adrenaline pumping, which means he has to do things like pick fights with gangsters, snort coke off a bathroom floor, or ride a motorcycle with no hands or pants. Crank plays as an over-the-top satire of action flicks, and it happily acknowledges the ridiculousness of its plot. The action set-pieces are fun and dumb, more like video game levels than movie scenes. Statham is perfect as Chelios, balancing his tough-guy poses with eye-rolling nods to how much fun he’s having. I could live without the casual racism played for laughs, and I could certainly have done without the sexual-assault-turns-into-passionate-public-sex scene (also played for laughs). Overall, though, Crank is certainly an enjoyable action flick and ranks among Statham’s best. The ending is great, too.
The Expendables (2010) – Sometimes you’re flipping through channels and you see a movie title and say to yourself, “When’s the last time I watched a Sylvester Stallone flick?” Ok, so maybe that doesn’t happen to everyone, but it at least explains how I ended up watching The Expendables in the middle of the night. Little did I know that I was really delving into the Stallone psyche, since this disposable action flick was also co-written and directed by the one-time Italian Stallion. The Expendables is Stallone’s vision through and through, and I must say it’s not all that intriguing of a vision. Sly stars as the leader of a group of aging, nationless mercenaries who will do any black ops mission for the right price. Right off the bat, we’re on shaky footing here, because mercenary soldiers of fortune aren’t exactly my first choice for heroes. They’re actually kind of scumbags in reality. Shady CIA operative Bruce Willis hires the gang to assassinate a military strongman in some mythical Latin American nation and things go wrong and people get double-crossed and so on. The whole thing is really just an excuse for Stallone to team up with a bunch of other aging action stars and (for the most part) waste their talents. It’s a Who’s Who of b-grade 80s and 90s heroes, including the likes of Jet Li and Dolph Lundgren. That sounds like it could be fun, but the execution just doesn’t match the ambition. The flick is a not particularly compelling grab bag of action movie cliches that relies almost exclusively on its star power to carry the day. We’re even treated to the obligatory and utterly superfluous love story between Statham and his estranged girlfriend Charisma Carpenter, a time-consuming subplot that exists just so Statham can beat up some guys on a basketball court. Mickey Rourke seems to think he’s in another movie, giving an effectively melancholy performance as a damaged former Expendable who broods, spouts philosophy, and runs a tattoo parlor on the side. The film sparks to life every now and then when its leads are allowed some time to shine, especially during a funny cameo by Arnold Schwarzenegger as Stallone’s secret ops nemesis. The two trade insulting barbs and really seem to be having a good time needling each other. Sadly, Arnie then leaves the film for good, leaving us with nothing but a series of OK action scenes and an ending you can see coming from ten miles away. Expendable indeed.
Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) – This is the highest-grossing film in the history of China, and it’s easy to see why. Wolf Warrior 2 is a highly effective and entertaining action flick that goes heavy on the Chinese nationalism. Think of it as China’s answer to Rambo, except that it’s a better movie than Stallone’s rah-rah 80s hit. Jing Wu returns as the Wolf Warrior of the first film, this time having been tossed out of the military for the extra-judicial killing of a ruthless slumlord. As the film begins, he’s working in Africa as a mercenary, helping protect tankers from the predations of local pirates. The opening scene is a classic, as Jing Wu single-handedly takes on two boatloads of pirates in a wild underwater fight that looks like it’s done in one take. It’s an amazing action scene, and it lets you know right away that you’re in the hands of people who know what they’re doing. From there, Jing Wu gets drawn into the country’s civil war, helping to rescue Chinese nationals trapped behind enemy lines. Of course, the Chinese are portrayed as the big heroes throughout, with lines like “China is Africa’s friend” being tossed around a lot. While the Americans flee the country as soon as trouble pops up, the Chinese stay and fight until every good person is saved and every bad guy is blown to bits. Sure, it’s hyper-nationalistic and kind of silly, but no more so than 90% of Hollywood action flicks. I’ve read a lot of reviews in which folks complain that the Chinese depiction of the Africans is super racist, but I didn’t find it any more racist than what I see coming out of Hollywood. At least the villains are the interracial mercenaries trying to take over, not the Africans, who actually fight alongside the Chinese. Here in America, we make sure all the villains are Arabs or Mexicans, which I actually find a bit more racist than what’s going on in Wolf Warrior 2.
Wolf Warrior 2 is China’s attempt to make a big, crowd-pleasing, Hollywood-style blockbuster of the sort that we cram down the world’s throat on a monthly basis. And it succeeds in its goals pretty darn well. This movie could pass for any big studio’s summer franchise entry. It seemed more like a Tom Cruise movie than the wacko Chinese action flicks I’m used to watching. I’m not sure that’s a compliment, but it’s exactly what the film is going for. Part of the whole subtext of the film is that China is ready to take the lead in world affairs and help where others (the U.S.) have dropped the ball. They won’t take a back seat to other nations anymore in any way, and this film actually stands as an example of this concept. Wolf Warrior 2 is a shot across Hollywood’s bow, showing that China is more than capable of producing international blockbusters that hit all the same story beats as their American counterparts. It smartly trades the jungle warfare of the original for a more kinetic series of urban combat scenes, making the most of the bigger budget they get to play with. Sure, the African rebels aim their machine guns with Imperial Stormtrooper levels of ineptitude, and you’re never in doubt that the Chinese will save the day, but Wolf Warrior 2 is a really solid action flick that will surely entertain all but the most xenophobic genre fans.
The Crooked Way (1949) – This old film noir chestnut is one of the more confounding flicks I’ve seen recently. On the one hand, it’s probably the best example of noir cinematography I’ve ever seen. Shot by future Oscar-winning cinematographer John Alton, every shot is dripping with noir style. Venetian blinds cut across the screen, silhouetted faces light cigarettes, crazy shadows bleed out from the corners. . . I found myself blown away by shot after shot. On the other hand, the story we’re presented with is nonsense. John Payne stars as Eddie Rice, a WW2 vet who’s got a piece of shrapnel embedded in his head, causing him to have complete amnesia. He doesn’t remember anything about his life before the war, only that he’s from Los Angeles. So he heads to L.A., hoping to run into someone he used to know. Fat chance, you might say, there are millions of people in SoCal. Well, wouldn’t you know it, Eddie runs into a couple of guys he knows the moment he walks out of Union Station! It turns out that Eddie used to be a mobbed-up hoodlum, and he joined the Army to avoid being killed by some gangster he double-crossed. As his coincidence-heavy trip to L.A. continues, he also meets his own ex-wife in a chance encounter. Ultimately, Eddie ends up on the run from the cops and the mob, falsely accused of murdering a police detective. All of this might sound like it could have made a good movie in the right hands. These clearly aren’t the right hands, though. For some unknown reason, Eddie doesn’t tell anyone that he’s lost his memory and doesn’t know what he did in his past life. Even while hoodlums are beating him up and asking, “Why’d you come back to L.A., Eddie?”, he growls out tough-guy patter. “It’s a free country, ain’t it? I can go where I like!” Well, yeah, but maybe they’d stop beating on you if they heard the real story. It takes over half the flick before he even tells his ex-wife! Why would he act so mysterious? If he’s really trying to find out who he was, why doesn’t he ask someone instead of barking hard-boiled cliches at them? The whole thing’s kind of dumb. At one point, Eddie is caught by the mobster he sent to prison for five years. The mobster says, “I ought to kill you, but I don’t want another rap coming down on me.” Fair enough, but he had just sent a man to be murdered in the previous scene, and he later guns down a policeman in cold blood in his own office! He kills quite a few people during the flick – everyone except the guy who actually sent him to jail. Hmm. I’d love to recommend The Crooked Way for its cinematography, but the rest of it is just too relentlessly stupid. It looks so great, I kept hoping that it would turn into a better movie. It never did.
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