13 Assassins (***)

This samurai adventure from the prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike starts off being slightly confusing, with a bunch of characters being quickly introduced. But it actually follows the familiar formula, pioneered by The Seven Samurai and followed by The Dirty Dozen, Ocean’s Eleven, and so on, of having a cast of heroes join together to defeat a common enemy. That enemy is also a samurai, one poised to wield political power cruelly, but that’s of secondary performance once established. The second act is sort of a road movie, albeit one without motor vehicles, or any vehicles at all, as the assassins plan to meet the enemy. It’s occasionally gruesome, but with a minimum of actual battle scenes. The third act, the finale, is the payoff, at least if you like watching spectacular mass battle scenes with the dirty dozen plus one vastly outnumbered. Besides lots and lots of swordplay, some novel battle techniques aid the underdogs.

The film’s most notewortthy aspect is serving as an antidote to many of the mythic Asian period films that make warriors and aristocracy into larger-than-life figures, not to mention the sentimentalizing Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai. (It suggests that many samurai weren’t really great fighters, and least one of the warriors turns out to be scared of bugs.) This is set a few decades earlier than the Cruise drama* but also explicitly deals with the impending decline of the samurai. Despite having samurai protagonists, it also depicts the flaws of Japan’s feudal (pre-1867) system. The main characters, in fact, are explicitly violating the code of loyalty in order to protect the people. As the bloody finale foreshadows, that code would soon outlive its usefulness.

*in 1844, coincidentally just one year before the recently released Meeks Cutoff

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viewed 5/22/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/11

Hanna (***1/2)

Once upon a time, a girl was raised in the woods in a land where winter covered the forest in white. The man she called “Papa” taught her everything he knew, and he knew a great deal. He taught her hunting and other survival skills, but also books and literature, like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. He taught her to speak in the tongues of many lands. And finally, he taught her to want to leave.

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viewed 4/24/11 at Riverview and reviewed 4/25

Wild Target (**3/4)

Some fifteen million people went to see a movie featuring Bill Nighy and Rupert Grint this past weekend. For nearly all of them, that movie was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. But a much smaller number, whose fantasies presumably involve hired assassins, like the one Nighy plays, rather than teen wizards, would have seen this lightweight caper film. The essense of the caper film is to make the heroes criminal, if not by trade, then by circumstance, and to make the crime seem fun. Nighy is Victor, the middle-aged professional and Grint the callow “apprentice,” though he thinks his mentor is merely working “undercover.” In between is delightful Emily Blunt, who, though British, has somehow managed not to appear in any of the Potter films, perhaps because she is too young. Her character is neither assassin nor innocent. Having clumsily masterminded an art-forgery scheme, she is in fact Victor’s target.

If a threesome rather than a duo can be said to “meet cute,” and meeting cute can involve people getting shot in a parking garage, then that is how the professional, his target, and the bystander wind up teaming up. The bystander is Grint’s character, and although he is kind of a third wheel—Ron Weasley to Nighy’s and Blunt’s Harry Potter and Hermione—he does show some additional range. In predictable fashion, the other two bicker a lot, then suddenly not. The young lady’s change of heart is too facile, and the film is more fun when they are at odds.

A notable thing about this caper film is that the protagonist is a murderer, even if he is impeccably mannered, as is typical for the caper film. Usually we are encouraged to root for the hero of the caper film via the time-honored technique of making the villains scummy. That’s true here, as the targets are rival hit men, but it’s still unusual for the hero to be seen as having (mistakenly) shot innocent bystanders. In fact, part of the reason we are supposed to root for Victor is that he’s a better hitman than his rival, London’s top assassin. (However, he cannot bring himself to kill a parrot who keeps saying his name after he kills the owner. So he steals the bird.) When the apprentice—who feels bad even upon shooting a man in self-defense—finds out that Victor is not just a detective, one might suspect he’d feel some unease, but that would be more emotional heft than anything on display here.

Nighy, among the most ubiquitous UK actors (Love, Actually, Shaun of the Dead, Pirate Radio), gives credibility to the repressed Victor, who has always been a solo act ever since he took up the trade of his father. The humor is light, but generally on target, in this remake of a French film, but it is inessential.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/24/10

Wanted (***)

Slick action is the draw in this first big-budget American effort from director Timur Bekmambetov, whose Night Watch and Day Watch became Russia’s all-time highest-grossing movies. (A third film in the vampire/sci-fi series may be filmed in English.) Those movies showed he had a way with visually arresting action sequences and special effects, if not necessarily in crafting a coherent story. Here he adapts a script from Derek Haas and Michael Brandt (3:10 to Yuma, Catch That Kid, 2 Fast 2 Furious) with elements familiar from movies like The Matrix and V for Vendetta, only with fewer pretentions to significance, and less of a sci-fi angle. In other words, it’s a solid action movie with a ridiculous yet intriguing plot in which a regular person (James McAvoy) turns into an action hero via the time-honored technique of having the crap beat of him.

McAvoy plays an office drone who learns that his absentee father was an assassin for a secret “Fraternity” who go around killing people so the world will all be balanced or some such nonsense. He doesn’t know it, but he’s inherited his dad’s physical gifts, which explains why they want him to help finger the traitor in their midst. These gifts include the art of shooting bullets around corners, slowing time, and other such things that make no sense but make for cool effects. Angelina Jolie plays the bad-ass chick who gets to train him in this unfamiliar skill set, mostly by, like I said, beating the crap out of him. Morgan Freeman also shows up as—guess what—the all-powerful head of the organization. Because the first ten minutes of the movie have deeply impressed on us what an unhappy loser our hero currently is (complete with quick-cut snippets of his girlfriend getting pounded on the kitchen table by his best pal), the idea is that he now feels alive for the first time. (See also Fight Club.) Whatever. The chase sequence where the Jolie character does a controlled flip of her vehicle will almost be worth the price of admission for action junkies. Bekmambetov’s ostentatious, slam-bam quick-cut style makes literal believability beside the point. Visual panache is what he’s going for, and a video-game momentum. Ultimately, it’s an empty exercise, and the plot twist is basically familiar, but for what it is, Wanted is exactly that.

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viewed 6/28/05 and 7/5/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 8/9/08

War (**1/4)

Jet Li and Jason Statham have made a number of above-average action movies between them. Li has appeared in Fearless and Hero, which incorporated stunning martial-arts sequences into mythical storylines. Statham is best known for the Transporter films and Crank, no-nonsense action films that hardly slowed down and didn’t clutter their stories with sentimentality. Both are non-Americans, which may or may not be why they rarely seem as cocky as American action stars.

Here Statham plays a San Francisco FBI man who obsesses over the mysterious and little-seen assassin who three years earlier killed his partner. He spends the movie hunting down this assassin, who is called Rogue (Li). Rogue has shifted his allegiance from the Chinese Triads to their Japanese rivals and is ensured with the safe transfer of some valuable antiques that are to finance the expansion of the yakuza empire to the new world. Rogue is deadly but seems violent by trade rather than by nature. His motivations seem shrouded. There’s more to the story, but that’s the gist. The movie is quite violent—lots of shooting, lots of cutting—without there being a great deal of action. Li barely displays his martial arts skills. One decent chase sequence stands out, but the movie feels long. The twist ending, which you may or may not guess, isn’t enough to redeem a turgid movie with a higher body count than intelligence quotient. The way Rogue plays off his enemies against one another would be of more interest if those enemies were less one-dimensional.

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reviewed 8/30/07

Shooter (**3/4)

? A US special-forces marksman (Mark Wahlberg), hired to thwart a presidential assassination, winds up a target of the would-be killers. Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) directed Jonathan Lemkin’s adaptation of the Stephen Hunter novel.
+ I was into this movie for the first half, although I figured out who the villains were. (No big deal, as that gets revealed early.) Here we see the hero display all the tricks of his trade. Like so many criminals, he figures out that Philly is a good place to kill someone and get away with it, so the pivotal scenes take place around Independence Hall, and there’s some impressive aerial footage of the city. With the help of one of the feds and a schoolteacher, he takes on platoons of unfriendly types with just some household items. The main appeal, besides huge explosions, is watching the lone wolf use his superior training to outwit and outfight everyone.
- An exciting setup, but both the premise and the outcome become implausible, then absurd, as the movie goes on. The villains are so cartoonishly evil that I was expecting one of them to shout “Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” One actually does say, “I win; you lose.” Twice. But by then the movie has descended into trite formula.
= **3/4 Worth a look for shoot-’em-up fans and conspiracy-movie buffs. Sort of similar to The Sentinel, which is a better movie.

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reviewed 3/29/07

Smokin’ Aces (*1/4)

? Rival teams of assassins target a magician/gangster (Jeremy Piven) who’s holing up with hookers and bodyguards in a Lake Tahoe penthouse after agreeing to turn state’s evidence against his mobster cohorts. Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta are the primary FBI agents

+ The movie’s obviously set up to end with a spectacular orgy of violence, and the one thing I liked is that the inevitable shoot-out actually comes before the end, which features a revealing plot twist that some may find clever (if far-fetched), though I’d long since stopped being interested. There are a couple of good performances, including singer Alicia Keys as one of the assassins, and Curtis Armstrong as the witness’s lawyer.

- Every couple of years a movie comes along that I flat out can’t stand from the get-go, and this is one of them. It starts out with an FBI agent tossing about 50 names at you, and already I didn’t care and couldn’t remember, although that turns out not to be crucial. The main thing, though, is that nearly every moment of this movie felt forced and contrived, like a lesser version of a Quentin Tarentino movie, most notably Reservoir Dogs. Now there’s a movie with a bunch of loathsome and despicable characters who are nonetheless interesting. Here’s a bunch of loathsome and despicable characters (excepting the agents, who appear only occasionally) who are just unreal, like the lesbian assassin who’s so stealthy that she randomly lets loose a profane tirade on a hotel desk clerk. This is one of a few left-field attempts at comic relief. Two of the others involve the killers stopping to chat with the corpses of their victims. The witness (Piven) is sleazy, obnoxious, depressed, and unpleasant to be around. There’s a story to the movie, but most of it is explained in about three minutes at the beginning and end by having a character simply recite it. Lame.

= *1/4 The one thing I can say about this is that it’s not simply a Hollywood studio throwaway. That is, it has a personality, as you’d expect from something with a single credited writer-director, Joe Carnahan (Narc). I therefore expect that a fair number of people will disagree with me about the movie’s virtues. Carnahan utilizes overlapping visuals and speech and generally keeps things moving fast. He also delivers the heap of violence (with some degree of novelty) that viewers will be expecting. And that may be enough for some. But only really good writing can make a movie as stylized as this work, and I just found the characters both fake and irritating, and the plotting absolutely silly.

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The Proposition (***1/2)

 A morality play about brutal rape and murder set in the  frontier of Queensland, Australia, is the subject of this gorgeously shot, deliberately paced western, the debut screenplay by rocker Nick Cave.

A couple hundred years ago mostly British newcomers settled a new continent. There were some people there, but these they displaced, killed, or made servants of. In the dusty, rough-and-tumble interior, where a small-town sheriff might be judge and jury, they made a new civilization with little regard for outside authority. So it was on the Australian frontier. Nick Cave, the UK-based, Australian-born rocker whose dark albums include one called Murder Ballads, has published a novel, but this brooding western represents his first screenplay. Centering around a brutal rape and murder, it’s a kind of mystery whose relevations are mostly about motivation, not what happened, which turns out to be roughly straightforward. There are several well-known faces. Guy Pearce (Memento) is the anti-hero who, as the title alludes to, is offered the chance to save one brother by killing another. Ray Winstone is terrific as the lawman who offers him that chance, and Emily Watson is the loving wife whom he tries to protect from the ugliness of his work. The film is gorgeously shot, and, even though it may falsely set the viewer up for a more action-oriented movie, the shootout that begins the movie crackles with a frightening realism.

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posted 8/16/13

Lucky Number Slevin (**3/4)

A cleverly twisty plot about a regular guy (Josh Hartnett) mixed up with rival crime lords can’t completely overcome an air of contrivance.

Slevin, played by Josh Hartnett, is a regular guy who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, mistaken for someone else by not one but two rival crime lords. One, called the Boss, is played by Morgan Freeman. The other, called the Rabbi, is played by Ben Kingsley. Why is he called the Rabbi? “Because he’s a rabbi.” That’s the sort of movie this is. You can almost hear first-time screenwriter Jason Smilovic saying, wouldn’t it be interesting to make one of the kingpins a rabbi? The dialogue is like that too, so a lot of what you think about this movie will depend on what you think about lines like “Nick set me up like a bowling pin.” Kind of clever, kind of contrived. It sounds sort of like a film noir, but, with bright lighting and direct camera angles, doesn’t look like one.  Rather than a femme fatale, it has likable Lucy Liu as a perky, fast-talking coroner who pops in on Slevin like the kind of next-door-neighbor usually seen on TV. She’s a counterpoint to the dispassionate Slevin (or is that the passionless Hartnett?). Bruce Willis plays a killer whose relation to the other characters is a mystery. Lucky Number Slevin will appeal to people who like their thrillers with muted violence but lots of twists and turns, though it relies too much on having the characters explain the convoluted plot. You can almost hear them saying, “Please allow me to explain to you and the people in the theater why I’m killing you.” So, I can almost recommend this.

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posted 9/3/13

The Matador (**3/4)

Pierce Brosnan is a past-his-prime hitman who strikes up an unlikely friendship with mild-mannered businessman Greg Kinnear. Likeable characters and an intriguing conclusion make up for a contrived premise.

When Hollywood screenwriters want to make a criminal likeable, as often as not they make the character a hitman (see Prizzi’s Honor, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, etc.) So it is with Pierce Brosnan in The Matador, which pairs him up with mild-mannered businessman Greg Kinnear. The first part, set in Mexico City, especially is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino films, with its mixture of gaudy graphics, quirky/retro-cool soundtrack, and offbeat personalities. The violence, however, is much more toned down, and eventually the film settles down into a more or less likeable buddy comedy. Brosnan looks like a retired James Bond (which he is) with a constant two-day stubble. There’s something contrived about the scenario that I think kept me from rating this a little higher. But Brosnan and Kinnear make a nice pair, and the resolution of the story is intriguing.

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circulated via email 1/5/06; posted online and slightly revised 9/19/13

The original version of this review had The Grifters in place of Prizzi’s Honor. I had the plots mixed up.

Munich (***1/2)

Steven Spielberg’s thriller begins with a riveting, documentary-like encapsulation of the Israeli hostage-taking at the 1972 Olympics, then follows a Israeli counter-terrorist cell as they seek to assassinate the perpetrators. In the guise of a suspense thriller, it raises moral questions that remain unanswered.

In 1972, PLO operatives kidnapped and shortly thereafter killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics. These events, the subject of a well-regarded 1999 documentary, One Day in September, provide a riveting beginning to Steven Spielberg’s thriller. (The incorporation of contemporaneous news footage provides authenticity.) The main story, however, is the alleged plot by Mossad (Israel’s CIA) to assassinate the men who planned the attack. The early part of the movie—the attack, the meeting at which prime minister Golda Meir authorizes retaliation, and the selection of a cell leader (Eric Bana of Troy) to carry out the mission—is suspenseful, immensely sad, politically intriguing, and even funny. (Another John Williams score provides tension.) Only by comparison is the rest of the movie a letdown. The team—five fairly ordinary men—traverse much of Western Europe. We get more information about methods of killing than how everyone’s located. At some point a human font of information just appears. Perhaps this was a real person, perhaps a composite.

Excepting this, the film’s point of view never shifts from the Israelis, but it asks two questions. Does violence, even when justified, merely perpetuate conflict? And, can a person be an assassin and retain his humanity? As to the latter, Munich covers, though perhaps not as well, some of the same thematic turf as Walk on Water, an Israeli film about another Mossad agent that had a lengthy Philadelphia run last spring. That film, wholly fictional, had better-developed characters, while this one provides more of a sociopolitical angle. The screenplay is by Eric Roth (Ali, The Insider, Forrest Gump) and Tony Kushner (Angels in America); it’s based in part on a book by George Jonas, Vengeance, that had previously been adapted into a 1986 TV movie. (The book’s account has been disputed, it should be noted.) In retrospect, the Munich Massacre looms as a pivotal event in the escalation of terrorism. While Spielberg’s film doesn’t directly link the past to today, it asks questions that continue to have no good answers.

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circulated via email 12/29/05 and posted online 9/21/13

Aeon Flux (**1/4)

Sux is more like it in this live-action version of MTV’s 1990s animated sci-fi series; some amazing visuals don’t compensate for incoherent storytelling.

This was a film that made me think. I thought, what is it that makes Oscar-winning actresses decide that a poorly received action film is the way to cement a reputation as a serious actress? (See Berry, Halle, to say nothing of Frances McDormand’s disembodied cameo here.) The actress here is Charlize Theron. She’s an assassin of 400 years’ hence whose original incarnation was in 1991 segments on MTV’s animated Liquid TV. That led to a ten-episode series in 1995. (See mtv.com for a sample episode.) The film’s (sole) strength is some amazing visuals: lithe ninja moves, curvilinear production designs, and so on. It splits the difference between the dialogue-free shorts and the talkier series.

Theron was quoted as saying “I really like telling stories with my body.” The story her body tells here is that a nearly six-foot, rail-thin woman who crops her hair, walks stiffly, and wears a black costume resembling a wet suit will look surprisingly like a stick figure. To be fair, she’d have needed the mother of all boob jobs to resemble her cartoon counterpart. The grotesque bodies and kinky eroticism are toned down from the TV show. The violence remains, but the action scenes aren’t special, and the dialogue is pedestrian and delivered woodenly. At least until the second half, there’s hardly any plot or character development, and no moral complexity that characterizes good sci-fi. Watching the series would have provided details missing here, like, what was the “industrial disease” that preceded the events in the movie, and what is the “resistance” that Aeon Flux is part of? However, I doubt most of the people who see the movie will have seen the series, and they’re apt to get impatient with the story and annoyed at all the whispery flashbacks that hint that there is one, buried somewhere.

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viewed 12/3/05 at Moorestown and reviewed 12/05/05

Red Eye (**1/4)

In this Wes Craven-directed, airplane-set thriller, Rachel McAdams plays a passenger forced to assist in a plot to assassinate a politician. (The assassins’ objective is never explained.) The first half of the film had me interested, but, as things develop, there’s a hole in the bad guy’s (Cillian Murphy) plot you could fly a 747 through. Or perhaps McAdams’s character is too dumb to figure that out. My 18-year-old coworker gave it a big thumbs-up. She liked the part where the heroine gets to use her field-hockey skills to fend off the villain. By then, however, Red Eye was in a steep descent into formula.

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viewed 8/20/05; reviewed 8/23/05