Some quick takes and longer looks at another batch of recently and semi-recently viewed flicks:
(r) = repeat viewing
Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) – I didn’t think the original Kingsman was all that impressive, so I certainly wasn’t expecting great things from this unnecessary sequel. I was right. The Golden Circle is the emptiest of empty calorie flicks, an overblown action movie with no reason to exist, nothing to say, and an annoyingly self-satisfied air about itself. This time, the British superspies of the original find themselves in the United States, working with their American counterparts, the Statesmen, to thwart a cannibalistic, 50’s-fetishizing drug kingpin played (for some reason) by Julianne Moore. And yes, that description is accurate. Moore’s character is indeed a part-time cannibal who lives in a ridiculously overdesigned jungle hideout that’s been built to look exactly like a fever dream of 1950’s living, complete with old-school diner. Why? Who knows. Moore ends up kidnapping Elton John to play at her club, which begs the question: If she’s such a 50’s nut, why Elton John? He was never big in the 50’s. Little Richard would make a bit more sense. Or anyone who actually played in the 50’s. It’s obvious that Sir Elton is there simply because he agreed to be in the movie, sense be damned. He’s also the focus of a running gag about his fighting prowess that isn’t that funny to begin with, and gets less amusing every time it’s trotted out again. This series seems to want to be a jokey, CGI-heavy James Bond, but none of the characters are likable enough to carry it off. I’d like to call particular attention to Channing Tatum, whose half-assed performance is the definition of “phoning it in.” He seems so disinterested that it’s hard to understand why he even wanted to be in the movie. I’m sure a glance at his multi-million dollar paycheck would clear things up. The flick also trots out some pretty lame anti-drug platitudes while celebrating whiskey drinking at every turn. A smug, wearying, 141-minute (!) entry in a series that really doesn’t need to continue past this second installment. Sadly, it made more than enough money to ensure that we’ll be revisiting this tired world before too long.
Project A (1982) (r) – After wasting my time on a modern piece of CGI-spiked garbage like Kingsman, it was a blessed relief to rewatch this early Jackie Chan classic with my son. Project A is undoubtedly one of Chan’s best flicks, a fast-paced story of cops, sailors, and pirates that has much less of the silly slapstick that he usually peppers his films with. Chan plays Dragon Ma, a sailor who’s part of an elite pirate-hunting unit called Project A. Or something. It’s never made entirely clear what Project A is or how it’s different than the regular navy, but who cares, really? This flick is all about the action scenes, and on that front it delivers in spades. An early barroom brawl between Chan’s sailor pals and Yuen Biao’s police force sets the tone, with incredible practical stuntwork and a propulsive, manic energy. The fun continues from there, with other highlights including a crazy bicycle chase through a maze of tight, winding corridors, and the climactic dust-up between the good guys and the pirates. This is one of the first films in which Chan really leaned into his use of the environment in his fight scenes, creatively launching himself and his stunt crew over, through, and around the props cluttering up the sets. The always entertaining Sammo Hung is also on hand to lend his distinctive skills, playing yet another character named Fats. Project A also features one of Chan’s most notoriously dangerous stunts, a fall from a clock tower that’s an homage to the Harold Lloyd scene in Safety Last. Chan takes it well beyond anything Lloyd dreamed up, though, actually falling three stories through a series of awnings and hitting the ground. Hard. Chan then pops up and delivers a line. The whole sequence is shot in one take, so you know for a fact it’s Chan himself taking that fall. It’s insane. If you’re any kind of action film fan at all, you owe it to yourself to check this one out. It’s among the best Hong Kong action flicks of the 80’s, which is really saying something.
A Bullet for the General (1966) (r) – One of my favorite spaghetti westerns, starring one of my favorite Italian actors, Gian Maria Volonte. I’ve seen this a couple of times and it’s pretty great. Set during the Mexican Revolution, the film stars Volonte as a rebel bandit leader who steals guns and delivers them to the revolutionaries. He ends up joining forces with an enigmatic American adventurer who’s there (unbeknowst to Volonte) to assassinate the rebel leader. There are some stirring action scenes here, including a train ambush that gets the flick off to a rousing start. Klaus Kinski has a nice supporting role as a bomb-lobbing religious zealot who’s got a sack full of “Holy Hand Grenades.” This is a fast-paced, fun western with a serious subtext about class warfare and revolution. It’s also got one of the great last lines of any movie. A slightly longer review of the flick can be found here.
The Big Heat (1953) (r) – Another old noir, this moody Glenn Ford vehicle stood up a lot better than most I’ve been watching lately. Ford plays a homicide detective who runs up against the violent criminal syndicate running his city. The suicide of a former cop opens the lid on a seething netherworld of corruption and violence, and Ford has to get to the bottom of the whole mess. In the process, he ends up on the bad side of some truly murderous characters – his wife gets blown up by a car bomb intended for him. He resigns from the corrupt police force in disgust, but continues to hunt down the mobsters responsible. The most memorable performances are from two of the supporting players: Lee Marvin, as the mob boss’ unhinged right-hand man, and Gloria Graham, as Marvin’s sassy, doomed girlfriend. Marvin is quite convincing as the violent, woman-beating thug, cutting a truly dangerous swath through the flick. His coffee-pot scalding of Graham is the most famous scene in the movie, and it really is a quite shocking burst of brutality that stays with you long after the movie ends. Unlike most of the old film noir flicks I’ve been rewatching lately, The Big Heat retains every bit of its power today. I guess corrupt cops and suave mob bosses never go out of style.
Hurricane Heist (2017) – This flick was recommended to me by a fellow fan of daft action movies, and I decided to give it a chance despite some serious reservations. It was directed by Rob Cohen, who did a pretty good job with the first Fast and the Furious flick, after all. Well, Hurricane Heist turned out to be more Sharknado than Furious. The flick starts like your typical disaster film, introducing a wide range of soon-to-be-dead characters, all of whom badly underestimate the storm heading their way. The exposition in these early scenes is painfully earnest and clumsy, but things pick up once a bunch of crafty criminals start their heist of $600 million from a Treasury Department storage facility. Well, they kind of pick up. The whole thing’s pretty silly, with production values that hover just this side of SyFy network straight-to-video monster flicks. For a movie about a hurricane, it’s remarkably housebound. You get the distinct feeling that the filmmakers had to cut corners due to budget concerns, and some scenes look awfully shoddy for a supposedly big-budget action film. Maggie Grace turns in a winning performance as a Treasury agent out to recover the money, giving some life to a very thinly-written character. Mostly, though, it’s just an excuse for some over-edited action scenes. The climactic confrontation between the heroes and the robbers is particularly lame. That said, I did laugh out loud at a few of their ridiculous stunt ideas and silly plot twists. Dumb fun, with the emphasis on the dumb.
Fallen Angel (1945) – Another day, another crappy Otto Preminger noir. After the dubious pleasures of Laura, I should have been more leery of Preminger’s next noir effort, shot the following year. Dana Andrews stars as a two-bit hustler who finds himself stranded in some small coastal California town. He hooks up with salty, sultry diner waitress Stella (Linda Darnell), then cooks up a ridiculous scheme to take a wealthy local woman for her fortune. I guess his plan is to get the rich woman to fall for him, then embezzle money from her. Then he’s going to give all the money to Stella, as he explains to her in between stalking attempts. Well, his plan works a little too well, and before you know it, Andrews is married to the wealthy woman, although he’s still cooking up plans to drain her bank account. This whole development gets Stella pretty angry and confused – right along with any portion of the audience that’s still paying attention. The scheme makes no sense at all, especially because the entire action of the film happens within the span of about a week. The tension supposedly escalates when one of the main characters turns up dead. Andrews panics and flees town, establishing himself as the main suspect in the process. It’s all awfully dumb and relies on the audience having as little common sense as the characters in the film. Andrews plays the grifter as unappealingly as possible, making him into a grabby, bossy asshole who’s pretty hard to sympathize with. There’s not a single character in Fallen Angel who acts like a believable person with actual motivations. The worst of the worst is Alice Faye as the swooning rich girl who falls for Andrews’ line of grumpy patter. She moons over this jerk constantly, vowing her undying love for him even after he’s revealed that he’s only after her cash. Tack on a lame, utterly unearned happy ending and you’ve got the makings of one of the crappiest noirs I’ve seen in some time.
Deep Blue Sea (1999) – Oh, Deep Blue Sea, you had me at “super-intelligent sharks.” This silly dose of ocean-going mayhem concerns a group of scientists (and others) who find themselves trapped in an undersea research facility, at the mercy of a trio of genetically-modified sharks who have been bred for superior intellect. Superior to any of the characters they feast on in the course of this film, at least. Saffron Burrows stars as another one of those drop-dead gorgeous scientists who pop up in flicks like this, ready to wear unflattering glasses or strip down to her underwear in the pursuit of science. She’s trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s by extracting the brain fluid of her super-smart sharks, which can then be injected into human brains to reverse the course of the disease. Sounds plausible! Wealthy entrepreneur Samuel L. Jackson flies in to see the progress of her work, and is suitably impressed. But that’s when a giant storm hits the research facility, trapping the people inside while simultaneously allowing the sharks to get free. Of course. As the sharks pick off the people one by one, only one question remains: Why does chef LL Cool J have a live parrot on his shoulder? Oh, I mean: Who will survive? LL’s devotion to that bird is kind of odd, though. The cast is probably a shade too talented for this nonsense, but their performances do give all the stupid action some grounding. Ultimately, it’s a decently fun romp that I would probably rank as the second best shark film I’ve seen, which is saying almost nothing except that Jaws was better and Jaws 2 was worse. I was genuinely surprised by a couple of the deaths, which is something, since most flicks of this type stick pretty close to the template. One death, in particular, ranks with the most startling and hilarious on-screen chompings this side of Anaconda. As if you needed another reason to check it out, the flick’s closing credits roll over an original LL Cool J song about a big shark and how LL’s hat resembles a shark fin. Yep.
The Steel Trap (1952) – I’m getting pretty tired of watching these crappy flicks that get labeled as “film noir” because they’re from the 40s or 50s and involve a crime. This flick was featured on TCM’s Noir Alley series, but it really isn’t a noir at all, as far as I’m concerned. Yes, it stars Joseph Cotton as a post-war suburban guy who gets wrapped up in a criminal plot, but that’s about the only noir aspect of the whole thing. Otherwise, it’s really just a poorly written melodrama. It’s not even shot as a noir, more like a badly staged teleplay. Cotton plays a banker who’s gotten bored with his old routine, so he cooks up a badly conceived scheme to steal a million dollars from the vault and high-tail it to Brazil. “Cooked up” is actually putting it a bit too strongly, since there doesn’t seem to be much planning involved in his daft caper at all. I’m a big fan of Richard Stark’s Parker novels, in which the meticulously professional criminal plans out heists and robberies to perfection. I had just finished a Parker book when I saw this lame flick, and was appalled at the sheer stupidity and lack of planning that Cotton puts into his “plan.” Once he decides to steal the money, the whole rest of the film consists of a series of supposedly tight scrapes that he gets into. Will the night maids catch him robbing the safe? Will he make his plane? Where is his passport? Will the police pull him over? Will the storm slow him down? The problem is that every single one of the obstacles he encounters as he tries to escape could have been eliminated if he had just planned his caper a little bit. He literally decides to rob the bank and then does it the next day, though. It’s really dumb. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that almost all of the exposition comes via Cotton’s flat, overdubbed narration, a technique that you’re taught to toss aside on day one of Screenwriting 101. This is an awfully bad movie in its own right, made even moreso by TCM’s claim that it’s noir. It’s not.
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