A Dangerous Man (2009)

Seagal will fuck you up ugly

In a strange coincidence I received DVDs for both A Dangerous Man and A Serious Man in the mail on the same day, which left me with a difficult decision to make. One Coen brothers' black comedy about a Jewish physics professor struggling with his faith. One DTV action film where Steven Seagal kicks Chinese dudes in the junk. A difficult choice for any cinephile, but I think I made the right one.

In the prologue we learn why Seagal is the titular Man. His girlfriend Holly is waiting in her car when she gets attacked by a rapist. Seagal shows up to rescue her and chases him away, but the next day the would-be rapist shows up dead in an alley. Although Seagal swears he is innocent the cops accuse him of being an uncontrollable killing machine (understandable) and lock him up. Cut to six years later and Holly sends Seagal a "Dear John" letter. He must have known this was coming too, because he reads it outside alone in the prison yard at night in the pouring rain. That sort of heavy-handed dramatic context doesn't happen by accident.

It's not all bad news though. The very next day Seagal is released thanks to some exonerating DNA evidence, although it's never revealed who actually killed the rapist or why. He's also offered $300k by Uncle Sam but Seagal refuses, saying he only wants his life back. This is all thanks to the Innocence Project, although if they'd known what he'd get up to afterwards they probably would have reconsidered.

All Seagal wants to do now is drown his sorrows with a bottle of generic bourbon, but you can probably guess how that goes. Liquor store, muggers etc. I did like that Seagal tells the punks that he's going to "fuck [them] up ugly". I especially like that one of the muggers asks him what it means, like he couldn't have discerned its meaning from context. In this case it means that Seagal's going to steal his gun, take the slide off the barrel, repeatedly stab him in the face with the pointy end and then kick him through a window. Which is pretty ugly. Then Seagal calls him a "bitch" and steals his car.

While drinking alone in a parking lot, Seagal somehow gets caught up in a confusingly-edited gunfight between the son of a Russian crime boss, a cop and some Chinese gangsters with a kidnapped girl in their trunk. The girl is named Tia, and she's the niece of a big-shot accountant in China who has the dirt on some high-ranking officials. He was being smuggled to America until the gangsters realised how important he was and held him hostage. Seagal agrees to help the girl save her uncle, but interestingly the reason he helps her is because she says she'll help him leave the country. I don't think I've seen a movie hero with that particular motivation before.

The main bad guy is called Chen and somehow he owns all the local cops. Not just one either, the whole lot. Chen is also involved with a corrupt Chinese military official called The Colonel (played by Byron Mann from Belly of the Beast). I thought it was pretty funny how Chen acts like a bigshot with his nice suits, huge cigars, dancing with hookers etc, but he does it all out of his shitty wood-panelled dockside office. There's a bit where he tries to lure a disinterested Colonel into partying with a hooker by saying she has an "ass like a 10 year old boy", a line which I've heard before but always sticks out to me as unappealing and kind of gross. Anyway, eventually the Colonel turns on Chen and takes over his business.

For a while it seems like they're trying to set up a buddy relationship between Seagal and Sergey, but Sergey is not the most compelling character so they forget about it about halfway through. At one point I thought Sergey was shot by The Colonel's men while he was hanging out with a topless hooker in a pool, but I guess it was some other guy. Seagal is eventually helped out by Sergey's dad, who lives in one of those huge mansions where there's a party full of young, hip people going on 24 hours a day. Seems like it would get pretty annoying after a while, especially since it looks like Vlad is sitting in his office trying to work. By the end of the film Seagal and Vlad take on The Colonel I think, but by this point I was pretty confused. In my defence it was pretty boring.

I liked that The Keeper didn't indulge in the embarrassing DTV tradition of giving Seagal a much younger, hotter girlfriend, even though they had several opportunities to do so. They show no such restraint here. There's a part early in the film where Seagal sits in his stolen car and fondly reminisces about the time his girlfriend stripped butt naked and gave him a lap dance while he sat there fully clothed and fumbled with her boobs. By the epilogue it's implied that he's sleeping with Tia as well, but thankfully their on-screen shenanigans are limited to an awkward hug. Kind of a dick move though, because Sergey saved her life and it seemed like he was sweet on her.

One interesting point is that I think Seagal is supposed to be a Native American. At one point he calls Sergey "white boy", which I thought was just Seagal randomly breaking out into ebonics like he does sometimes. Later on, however, one of the bad guys refers to him as "that Native American". After all the fringed leather jackets he's worn and ancient mysticism he's spouted in his other films, it's weird that this is the one where they decided to go full on Billy Jack. Not that it figures into anything else in the film or is ever mentioned again.

There are a lot of lines that sound really strange and I can't tell if it's because they were poorly written or badly delivered or both. “I will leave you here to get eaten by the fuckin jackals, who are coming soon." Stuff like that. Seagal's delivery is generally pretty mumbly and incoherent, but it must have been particularly bad here because they dub his voice about half the time. At least the guy almost sounds like Seagal. Usually they'll get any old guy to whisper all the lines and call it a day, even though Seagal hasn't done that whispery thing in years.

The gun fights aren't particularly well shot, but they're okay. It's just alternating shots of two guys firing from behind cover until one of them falls over dead. The fight scenes are a little better and are really brutal. Seagal feeds one guy into industrial shredder, kicks another guy face-first into circular saw and pounds a chopstick into a guy's neck. Throughout the whole thing he's invincible like Jason Voorhees. Stunt doubles are used frequently and sometimes it gets a little distracting. One fight is shot through the gap in some shelving so that they don't have to go to trouble of obscuring the double's head through editing. No stunt double for the lap dance scene though. Sometimes you've just got to get your hands dirty.

This one comes courtesy of Leoni Waxman, the same guy who did The Keeper. I still haven't decided which one I like better. This film is superior in terms of quantity and brutality of action, but Seagal only wears his Half Past Dead do-rag. In The Keeper he wears a huge cowboy hat. Clearly further analysis is required.

The Keeper (2009)

Yee-haw!

I've fallen a few movies behind in my On-Deadly-Ground-style spiritual odyssey through the DTV ouvre of Mr Steven Seagal. This one had been sitting on my DVD queue for some time, but I hadn't felt compelled to review it since the two subsequent films (A Dangerous Man and Born to Raise Hell) were still MIA. A year or two later and the Region 4 DVDs have lazily flopped onto Australian shores with all the energy and vigour of DTV-era Seagal himself, so I guess I've got some catching up to do.

In this one he plays Roland Sallinger, Super Cop. As the movie begins, he and his partner raid a drug dealing operation to discover a couple of million dollars in cash. His partner suggests that they help themselves and Seagal refuses, so his partner shoots him in the chest and leaves him for dead. Seagal fakes a coma and steals a gun from his niece, so I figured this film was a Hard to Kill type deal and that his revenge would play out over the course of the film. Instead his partner returns to finish the job that night, so Seagal shoots him and frees up the next 70 minutes of screentime for a completely unrelated plot.

Seagal is forced into retirement as a result of his injuries, sending him into a depression, so he is visited by his niece who says ridiculous yet no doubt confidence-bolstering things like "You're an inspiration to everyone on the SWAT team" and "I've seen you do shit that's beyond belief." It's not quite R. Lee Ermey's "million dollar smile and a fistful of pesos" speech from On Deadly Ground, but it's enough to get Seagal montaging his way back to full health. His state of recovery is symbolised by his knife-throwing abilities, which was neat but I suspect it was because it required as little physicality from Seagal as possible.

The plot starts proper when he gets a call from an old friend in Texas. He wants Seagal to be a personal bodyguard for his daughter, who was recently the target of an attempted kidnapping by some criminals disguised as papparazzi. The bad guy behind the kidnapping attempt is a crooked real estate developer named Jason Cross, who is also a racial separatist although it never comes up as a plot point or is even mentioned again. When Seagal asks why he can't just go to the police, he replies "There are some people who think a man's race should determine his worth. These people control everything. Except me". This apparently explains everything, even though the police seem more eager to nail Cross than Seagal does.

The girl Seagal is looking after is a spoiled heiress, but I liked that they didn't push the Paris Hilton angle too hard. She's reasonably intelligent and acquits herself pretty well during the attempted kidnapping. They could have easily made her into an annoying bimbo, but instead she's sympathetic and even kind of sentimental. At one point she tells Seagal how she kept a gift he gave her when she was a little girl. She tells him that right after drunkenly barfing in an alley, but it was still kind of a sweet moment. I was worried for a moment there because it seems like she was hitting on him, but luckily Seagal Keeps it in his pants.

Her boyfriend is a showboating obnoxious asshole named Mason Silver, who is apparently a professional boxer although he sure doesn't look like one and you never see him do any fighting aside from a brief training scene at the beginning. Seems like a missed opportunity not to have him fight Seagal or at least one of the bad guys. He is a massive douchebag, so much so that you wonder if he's a red herring, but it turns out that he had some dealings with Cross in the past and now he's willing to sell out his girlfriend rather than have his hands crushed by Cross's goons. What a prick.

Actually, Seagal is kind of a prick in this one too. He's a massive dick to a limo driver, flat-out ignoring him when he tries to make conversation and then sarcastically berating him for whistling. It's okay though, because Seagal gains his respect when he stops to help the limo driver's cousin from being harrassed by a couple of thugs. Probably the most dickish moment is when Seagal breaks into Mason's house to question him and kills three of his bodyguards. At first I figured they were Cross' henchmen, but apparently not. Seagal just straight up murdered three dudes for no reason. And the cops don't even care.

The plot is some nonsense about a crooked real estate deal and a hidden uranium deposit, but it's pretty straight forward and I won't bother talking about it. The action is what's important, and it's alright I guess. The film tries it's best to convince us of Seagal's lightning fast aikido moves, but sound design and editing can do only so much. Plus the main bad guy is an old man, so it doesn't really lend itself to a thrilling final confrontation. The gunfights have lots of bloody, overfilled squibs, which is good, but they are over-edited with a general lack of geography. There's also decent car chase, even though it's clear that Seagal was being greenscreened on a soundstage somewhere.

I don't know if it's because I haven't watched these types of films in a while, but Seagal's acting seemed distractingly bad here. He wears a big cowboy hat, uses words like "pod'ner" and speaks a little Spanish, but I think those efforts used up the bulk of his acting abilities. He's never been good, but here he's struggling just to even articulate himself. A lot of his lines are awkwardly phrased, as if he only just glanced at the script and refused to do a second take. His shirts are increasingly oversized and baggy to disguise his weight and his hair is becoming more creepily fake and Dracula-like. It's rough.

That aside though, the quality level isn't among his worst. It gets off to a shabby start, with some obvious dubbing in the opening scene, plus halfway through the film Seagal's character's name changes from "Sallinger" to "Ballinger" for no reason, but at least it mostly makes sense. The plot holes are just plot holes rather than supermassive black holes that threaten to suck the whole movie into oblivion. I guess that makes it less interesting than something completely batshit like Out of Reach, but at least I felt like someone gave a shit. Someone was at least half-assing it, rather than the one eighth of an ass normally given to this kind of thing. Adequate job, guy. You did it.

Rage and Honor 2: Hostile Takeover (1993)

It's been a couple of years since the events of Rage and Honor. Kris Fairchild (Cynthia Rothrock) has made the baffling career move from schoolteacher to CIA agent and Preston Michaels (Richard Norton) is still on the run from the bogus murder charges he was framed with in the first film. Kind of a bummer that Kris didn't do more to clear his name after all they'd been through together, but I guess she's been pretty busy, what with her two whole years of specialised spy training.

For Kris' first mission she's sent to Jakarta, where she's to meet up with a colleague who is investigating a money laundering operation. When she gets there the agent is missing, so Kris is instructed to continue the investigation alone, taking up a temp job at a bank owned by the suspected criminal. While she's there she befriends the bank owner's son Tommy, played by Melrose Place alumni Patrick Muldoon. Kris finds out that Tommy's dad is working for a powerful criminal named Buntao. There's also something about a rival criminal named Dazzo and diamond smuggling etc.

Coincidentally Preston has found his way to Jakarta as well, taking up a part time job as a bouncer/bartender at at Willy's Bar. Willy's Bar appears to be a touristy seafood restaurant and not the kind of place that would require the services of a Swayze-eqsque cooler, but sure enough a bunch of goons walk in demanding protection money. This must happen frequently because the whole time the thugs are roughing up Willy the restaurant patrons don't even bat an eyelid. Eventually Preston starts beating up the goons with anything handy... a fish, an oar, a life preserver etc. Dude could do some real damage in a T.G.I. Friday's.

Tommy just so happens to witness this spectacle and begs martial arts instruction, but Preston refuses. You see, he's a renegade. A lone wolf. You know this because he wears a long trenchcoat and rides a motorcycle. Dead giveaways. Eventually though, Tommy wears him down and Preston takes him under his wing. Tommy even invites Preston to his awesome pool party, which is where Preston and Kris finally meet. Unfortunately it's one of those scenes where Kris is undercover and has to pretend she doesn't know him rather than an awesome mistaken identity fistfight.

So naturally the two of them team-up to take down Buntao, but unfortunately he's a pretty boring villain. I liked the part where he is so happy about his diamond deal that he starts singing, but apart from that he's pretty forgettable. He does, however, have a beefy henchman named Thor who, like Conrad Drago before him, has a kickin' blonde mullet. Thor has one up on Drago though, because his hair is the genuine article and not a ridiculous wig. Early in the film Thor gets out of his car and gives a little hair flip, like he's saying "Fuck you, Conrad Drago. Look at the silkiness, the managability. This is the real deal right here." I don't know what it is with this series and platinum blonde hockey hair, but I approve. At least his haircut is memorable.

I was weighing up whether or not to spoil the film, but I figure it's an 18 year old DTV action film so fuck it. It turns out that the rival criminal Dazzo is actually Tommy working under an alias. Tommy says it took a long time for him to think of the name. He wanted something "snappy and scary", and I guess it is if you find bogans named Darren terrifying, which is understandable. I don't know if it's because my brain automatically switches to standby mode in this kind of thing, but this twist actually caught me by surprise. Once Tommy's true nature as a ruthless criminal is revealed he keeps quoting all these rules of business. You know, "rule one: surround yourself with talent", "rule two: consolidate your assets" etc. It's pretty annoying, so it's probably a good thing that he was only the villian for the last half hour or so.

The final fight takes place at the construction site where they were doing the diamond exchange. It was either that or an abandoned steel mill I guess. Preston's fight with Tommy ends with Tommy hanging off the edge of a big crane. They must have read my review of the first film before travelling back in time to make the sequel, because rather than do the thing where the bad guy attacks when the hero's back is turned, thus sealing his own fate, Tommy just flat-out surrenders. Preston decides to open another Willy's Bar in L.A and reveals to Kris that he's pinched one of the diamonds. She reacts with a sly chuckle which doesn't seem particuarly realistic, but I guess turning a blind eye to diamond theft is hardly the biggest injustice the CIA have perpetrated.

I looked up the director Guy Norris, if only to see if he was any relation to Chuck, and it turns out he's a pretty awesome Australian stunt man. Fucked his leg up pretty bad on Mad Max 2. Not too many director credits, aside from some Australian TV stuff and a martial-arts themed FMV game for the Sega CD (also starring Richard Norton) which looks amazing in a terrible-FMV-game kind of way. Anyway, he does a decent job here. I think the fight scenes are choreographed and shot a little better than in the first one. I especially liked the bit where Cynthia Rothrock headbuts a guy in the nuts. I don't know if she learned that little number during her high-school teaching days or her CIA training, but it sure was effective.

I probably liked this a little more than the first one. The fights were more plentiful, the locations were more interesting and the mullets were more convincing. Rothrock and Norton are good together and this time the quality of acting surrounding them is so egregiously awful (minus one dreamy Patrick Muldoon of course) that they seem quite good in comparison.

Rage and Honor (1992)

I can't go on like this.
Your hair... it's too awesome.

This film is one of a number of Cynthia Rothrock/Richard Norton team-up films that came out in the early 90s. Rothrock plays a school teacher named Kris Fairchild, who spends her evenings teaching underpriveleged kids "the art of martial science". Richard Norton plays Preston Michaels, a cop on transfer from Australia plus part time bodyguard. I don't know which one is Rage and which one is Honor, but they each demonstrate both qualities in abundance when they get into simultaneous yet unrelated brawls in the opening scene; Rothrock gets jumped at an ATM and Norton intervenes when a pimp starts slapping up one of his girls.

The plot kicks off proper when one of Kris' students accidentally films a drug deal gone wrong, implicating a local crime boss and the police department, including Norton who just happened to be there. The kid manages to stash the tape before he is caught and beaten to a pulp, and Rothrock and Norton bump into eachother while they are hunting around the crime scene trying to find it. This leads them to Baby, a former stockbroker who has since taken up the more respectable occupation of vagrant. While trying to track down the tape they run afoul of crooked nightclub owner "Fast Eddie" and the leader of a Warriors-esque all-female street gang named "Hannah the Hun", who has the annoying habit referring to herself in the third person.

You know, it's pretty easy to make fun of haircuts in a film like this. There's always a mullet or two and while these days it's considered a definitive white trash signifier on par with wolf t-shirts or urban wear featuring Looney Tunes characters, people tend to forget that it was quite a fashionable haircut for a decade or so. Even by the standards of the time though, this film features one of the most ri-goddamn-diculous mullets I've ever seen. It's so long and blonde that the albino guy from No Retreat, No Surrender 3 would weep bitter tears of jealousy. If mullets are truly a party in the back, then this guy is rock'n'rolling all night and partying ev-er-y-day.

The haircut in question is worn (and I do mean "worn" because it's an utterly unconvincing wig) by the chief villain Conrad Drago, played by Brian Thompson. He's the usual deep-voiced Frankenstein's monster that Thompson always plays, with an interest in pressure-point based martial arts and black turtlenecks. It also turns out that he is Kris' estranged brother, so I guess he must have changed his last name at some point. He has a partner-in-crime named Rita Carrion (Terri Treas), who manipulates him with the strategic application of blow-jobs. She's a pretty hot redhead and Norton's Angry Police Captain (tm) is played by Daisy Duke herself Catherine Bach, so the movie is pretty much wall-to-wall hot rangers, if that's your thing.

A lot of the time Norton's Australian accent goes unmentioned, but in this film it's explicitly commented upon. Norton uses Australian slang like "stone the crows" and there's a running gag about people asking him how he likes the States so far. Everyone seems to react in surprise when they find out and the bad guys refer to him almost exclusively as "the Australian". It's a little strange as I wouldn't think Australians would be that rare in L.A. The reason he's in the US is because his partner got killed on a drug bust in Victoria. Not because they both rushed in without calling for backup, but because Norton went to call for backup while his partner went in alone. I don't know, I thought it was interesting that his partner was killed because Norton dutifully followed police procedure.

For much of the film Rothrock refuses to fight her brother, but by the end of the film Norton gets a bullet in the thigh (which is completely ignored for about fifteen minutes until it becomes a plot point) and Rothrock is forced to step in and kick ass. They do the standard thing where Rothrock shows some mercy on her brother but he betrays her so she's forced to kill him, a genre trope I'm pretty sick of. Maybe I'm just too much of a pacifist, but I'd like to see more forgiveness and redemption in my action movies. They could finish on a montage of Rothrock and Thompson hanging out as bro and sis; sharing some ice cream, combing eachother's hair, doing charity work together. Finish on a high note, you know? Apart from that oversight, this was a reasonably entertaining DTV actioner.

Thor (2011)

If there were any doubt before, let this movie stand as conclusive proof that I don't know what the fuck I am talking about. Back in my Iron Man 2 review, I said that this was the one part of the Avengers franchise most likely to go tits up. Kenny Branagh has never had great success as a commercial director and Thor's outsized universe of Norse space-gods seems like the kind of Silver Age silliness doomed to epic failure. Yet somehow they turned a pretty good movie out it, grabbing bits and pieces from the comics that worked and grinding down the sharp edges that might make the Thor mythos a little difficult to swallow.

Like in the comics, the pantheon of Norse mythology are more like space-aliens than gods and the realm of Asgard is a glorious kingdom at the nexus of the galaxy where science and magic are "one and the same". Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is soon to be crowned king by his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) but in a reckless act of war he spoils the truce between the Asgardians and the Frost Giants of Jotunheim. Thor is banished to Earth and robbed of the ability to wield the mightly Mjolnir until he is deemed worthy. With Thor stranded on Earth, his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) engineers a plan to steal the throne from their dying father. You know, they probably should have seen this coming. He is the god of tricks and deception.

The movie is pretty funny, but it lacks the easy-going affability of an Iron Man. Most of the humour comes from the kind of fish-out-of-water bullshit that they used to like so much back in the 80s (see Masters of the Universe or Beastmaster 2 - The Portal of Time for examples, but it's probably best if you don't) e.g. Thor smashing a mug while demanding more drink or wandering into a pet shop looking for a horse. I chuckled, but part of me resents that kind of nudging and winking. Thankfully there's not too much of it and they don't use it to make any half-assed observations about modern society. More importantly, the parts on Asgard are played completely straight, with all the huge red capes and ridiculous horned helmets intact.

I was skeptical when I heard that Home and Away alumni Chris Hemsworth was playing the God of Thunder, but I've got to admit that he's pretty good in this. As far as blockbuster movie stars go, he's a far more worthy Australian export than, say, Sam Worthington. There's also Natalie Portman, in what seems like her millionth role in the past year, as an astro-physicist named Jane Foster. She's never particularly convincing as a brilliant scientist, and the romance between her and Thor even less so. After seeing her in Black Swan it's kind of disheartening to see her cast as this kind of underdeveloped, action-movie love interest, but I guess Nat's gotta eat. No seriously, she needs to eat. She's lost a lot of weight.

Most of the other actors are pretty good and their characters aren't too annoying. Kat Dennings as grad-student Darcy Lewis had the most potential to be ear-gratingly awful, being a youth-identification character who makes sarcastic quips and references to iPods and facebooks, but she's not in it long enough to fuck it all up. Stellan Skarsgård is good as Jane's colleague and obligatory Scandinavian Erik Selvig. I did like that although he was the first to recognise Thor's story as Norse mythology, but the last one to believe it. Usually this kind of character would be the superstitious foreigner who buys his story straight away. I guess that's because he's a white guy.

Speaking of racism, after all that stupid business with the white supremacists, Idis Elba doesn't get that much to do as Heimdall. Most of the time he's just standing there motionless with a big sword. Hell, when he finally does spring into action he gets frozen into a statue. I liked him, though. By the end of the film it appears he's out of the job so maybe we can get a spin-off movie where he gets a job as a security guard or something. Heimdall: Mall Cop. Jaimie Alexander's Sif adds a female to Thor's bffs The Warriors Three (Volstann, Holgun and Fandral, see imdb for actor's credits) lest we all die of testosterone poisoning, but they mostly hang around in the background until they are needed for the big action sequence at the end.

Far more than Iron Man 2, you can tell that this film was built with the Avengers franchise in mind. The S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff is integrated a lot more seamlessly and all of the little nods and references to other Marvel characters seem more like world-building than obligatory product placement. Having a shared universe is one of the main attractions of superhero comics, so it's pretty exciting to see people tapping that resource for the film adaptations. I'm actually looking forward to the Avengers movie now.

It's got the usual origin story teething problems that accompany any superhero franchise and some of the dialog is pretty bad, but as far as superhero movies go this is one of the better ones. It should feel no shame in clambering over the corpses of your Fantastic Fours, Catwomen and Elektrae, and taking it's rightful place in the pantheon of good superhero movies. I don't know where exactly. Somewhere below Iron Man but above Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk. And that ain't bad.

PS - There is a post-credits Easter egg with Nick Fury, but don't get too excited. It's not particularly surprising or interesting.

Sucker Punch (2011)

I really liked the beautiful, dialogue-free opening sequence of this film, which shows the chain of tragic events that lead to Baby Doll (Emily Browning) being committed to a mental institution by her evil stepfather and a crooked orderly (Oscar Isaac). As I've explained in other reviews, I'm a sucker for gothic, spooky mental institutions, so I was a little disappointed when it turns out that this setting is just a bookend for the bulk of the movie, which takes place in a Weimar-esque bordello of Baby Doll's own imagination (I think) where all of the orderlies, doctors and patients are recast as brutal pimps, sympathetic madams and dancers/prostitutes. Baby Doll is but one of the pretty young girls with silly names like Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie etc, who are forced to dance for the amusement of rich assholes and, by PG-13-approved implication, bone them.

It turns out that Baby Doll has a super power to hypnotise men with her seductive dancing, so she comes up with a plan to distract the clients while the other girls gather up items for their escape (a map, a lighter, a key etc). It's a repetitive set-up that seems like a perfect basis for a shitty Hollywood musical, but instead of dance sequences, Baby Doll's internal struggle on the dance floor is symbolically represented by crazy action sequences involving giant stone samurai, Steampunk WWI soldiers (incorrectly identified as Nazis by many reviewers), orcs, robots and whatever other crazy shit that Zack Snyder thinks is awesome. Scott Glenn plays a wise mentor who appears as an expository device to set up each of her fantasies, which play out like mini (wo)men-on-a-mission action movies with Baby Doll and the other girls.

So, it's basically a series of crazy fantasy sequences that take place inside another fantasy sequence that takes place inside the mind of a young girl in a mental institution that is so exaggerated and stylised it might as well be a fantasy sequence. There's about ten levels of fantasy without any recognisable reality to grasp onto, and it's never really clear how or if things that happen in Baby Doll's head affect the real world. With Inception Nolan was careful to lay all this shit out, but Snyder just dumps you in it and expects you not to notice/care. I really enjoyed the action sequences as pure spectacle, but without consequence it's hard to build the tension and suspense that underlie a truly great action movie.

It's also pretty grim and relatively joke-free. Some people have complained about that but I really appreciate the sincerity of it. It's a lot easier to couch your movie in cynicism and self-referential snark, lest people accuse you of "taking yourself too seriously", but Snyder laid everything out in the open and exposed himself to the world. Even the creepy, fetishy bits that he probably should have kept private, like underage-looking girls swordfighting in miniskirts, pigtails and high heels. This movie has been accused of being a cynical attempt to bait the Comic Con crowd (a gamble that seems less and less of a sure thing every year) and maybe it was for some people higher up the food chain, but for Snyder it seems like it was a labour of love.

It doesn't surprise me that this film is getting terrible reviews, but it does surprise me how vitriolic a lot of them are. Yeah, the film has plenty of problems, but a lot of internet nerdos are acting like Zack Snyder fucked their dog and wiped his dick on their mint condition Star Wars action figures. Somewhere along the line people turned on Zack Snyder, and I don't really know why. Against all odds I actually liked the Dawn of the Dead remake, I enjoyed 300, I thought Watchmen was pretty good. None of them were all-time classics, but I can list plenty of things I liked about them. I didn't see that owl movie, maybe that's what did it. Some people are even dropping the atomic bomb of film criticism and comparing him to Michael Bay. Come on guys, I rolled my eyes as much as anyone when they called him "the visionary director of 300" on movie posters, but at least the guy knows how to put an action sequence together.

Anyway, I doubt Snyder-haters will have their minds changed by this film, as it's full of trademark Snyder-isms such as over-obvious, distracting musical choices and lots of slow motion ramping. Haters of the latter will be particularly annoyed by an action sequence where the girls fight robots on a train, which is a solid ten minutes of slow motion leaping and shooting, all done in one continuous take thanks to the sorcerous magic of pixel wizards. I loved it though, as I did all the action sequences. They are more chaotic than in his other films, but really well choreographed and edited. Snyder has this action stuff on lockdown. If he could figure out human emotion he would be unstoppable.

A lot of criticism seems to be centered about the sexual politics of the movie too. Snyder may have invited it on himself by using the word "empowerment" about fifty times in every press interview, but I don't really know why this is the movie where people have decided to take a stand. They showed the trailer for Furious Five before this movie, which had girls in shiny booty shorts waving their asses at the camera every four seconds (I timed it). Just because this film is centered around women people want to unpack every bit of creepy subtext. Honestly I think Snyder genuinely cares about these characters, but he also likes the aesthetics of comics books and anime, including pretty girls in skimpy outfits making cool superhero poses. This is something we have in common.

This is Snyder's first film that isn't an adaptation or a remake, and he must have sensed it would probably be his last because it seems like he put everything he had into this one. It's not great and it's too shallow to have any lasting impact, but I like that it's so ambitious and extreme. Snyder may not have proven himself beyond being, as every review seems to call him, a "bold visual stylist", but at least I dig his style and I can respect the care that went into it. Next it's back to adaptation with his Superman movie, which should at least have one up on Superman Returns in that it's bound to feature Superman actually punching a guy.

Ip Man 2 (2010)

Sammo Hung, pushing 60 and still kicking ass.
Shame on you, Seagal.

Ip Man was a pretty great kung fu film and a big international success, so it's not surprising that they made both a sequel and a (Donnie-Yen-less) prequel. The sequel picks up a few years after the first film, with Ip Man and his family packing up their shit and moving to Hong Kong, where Ip Man hopes to open up a kung fu school and teach Wing Chun. His first student is a cocky young guy named Wong Leung (Huang Xiaoming), who agrees to call him master only after he defeats him and his friends in a fight. Ip Man is still untouchable, so soon he has a modest class of students. Still no money, though; he refuses to press his students for tuition payments even though he is destitute and his wife is up the duff.

So, like in the first film, Ip Man is a really nice guy, always trying to talk his way out a confrontation instead of getting into a fight. When Wong gets kidnapped by some rival students Ip Man is unwilling or unable to pay, but he still shows up to their hideout and tries to talk his way out. Jin Shan-Zhou (Fan Siu-Wong), a villain from the first film but now reformed, helps them escape. Now Ip Man finds himself an enemy of a coalition of kung fu schools, led by Master Hong (Sammo Hung).

Sammo Hung choreographed the excellent fights in the first film, so it's pretty cool to see him get a major role in the sequel. The highlight is during a scene where Ip Man is forced to fight all the masters of the different kung fu schools on a rickety tabletop without being knocked to the ground. I was very impressed by the Donnie Yen/Sammo Hung fight in 2005's S.P.L., and this rematch is just as impressive. There's a fair bit of wirework and creative editing, but that's understandable given Hung is pushing 60.

One of the things I liked about the first film was the relationship between Ip Man and his wife. It was a little more progressive and enlightened than I'm used to seeing in kung fu films, even if it did end with her realising that his kung fu is what's really important. Lynn Hung is still here, but she spends most of the movie in the background, pregnant and penniless. The "kung fu > family" message is re-iterated at the end, and this time she even refuses to let him know when she goes into labour because it would interrupt his training. She even gives birth while he is fighting. I don't know where they can go from here. Maybe for the next film she can throw one of their babies in the ring to distract his opponent.

Despite that, family is still a theme. Simon Yam has a small returning role as Ip Man's friend Zhou, who has since been shot in the head by the Japanese and is now a mentally deficient street bum, being cared for by his son as best he can. Fan Siu-Wong is now a good guy, attributing his change of heart to getting married and having kids. Sammo Hung has a whole bunch of kids and after he almost knocks over a fat little kid licking a huge lollipop, Ip Man manages to squash their beef by convincing him that family is more important than their grudge match.

With the Hong/Ip Man conflict resolved, they introduce the main villain, a Western boxing champ named Twister. Yes, like the first film it's about protecting the dignity of the Chinese from attacks by vicious foreigners, and if anything it's even more shamelessly nationalistic. It's not hard to see why this film got the rubber stamp of approval from the Chinese goverment. I mean, we are talking Rocky IV levels of heart-swelling patriotism.

Usually I can put up with this kind of thing (God knows Hollywood has produced worse propaganda) but somehow this one made me feel a little icky. At least with the first film there were some honourable Japanese to offset the villainous ones; here the British are almost uniformly evil. After Twister kills an opponent in the ring the British are more upset about bad publicity than anything else, and give a press conference where Twister makes a condescending speech about how the Chinese are too weak to withstand Twister's mighty punches.

At some stage I heard that this film was going focus on the relationship between Ip Man and Bruce Lee, but he only gets a tiny cameo at the very end, like Nick Fury appearing at the end of Iron Man. Wong brings a very young Bruce Lee to see Ip Man about training, but Ip Man tells him he is too young and that he should come back when he's a little older. The kid copies all of Lee's mannerisms, including the cocky chin tilt and the thumb-flick, and to be honest it's a little over-the-top. At least they didn't dress him in giant sunglasses and a Game of Death yellow jumpsuit. Actually no, that would have been kind of cool.

When I reviewed the first film I said that it would be a pretty enjoyable biopic even without all the awesome kung fu fights, but I'm not sure I can make the same claim about the sequel. In a lot of ways it's just a rehash of the same plot. The acting is still good and it's hard to ignore the greatness of the fights, but the drama just didn't grab me by the balls. Maybe just one ball, and even then it was the kind of weak and feeble grip unworthy of any Wing Chun practitioner. Hopefully the next film will be a two-fisted, ball-crushing death grip.