Three Films Make A Post: There are no partners in crime

The Invisible Guardian aka El guardián invisible (2017): For a time, Fernando González Molina’s serial killer procedural seems a decent enough entry into this particular genre, with some spectacularly moody shots of corpses in foggy and wet woods as its visual main attraction. The longer the film goes on, the more it goes off the rails, the family connections between the investigating police inspector and the case bringing out a lot of screeching melodrama that’s simply not well enough written or staged to evoke the emotions it so desperately wants to. The procedural bit becomes increasingly ridiculous too – this is the sort of film where our heroine cop is surprised and disgusted she can’t continue a case where her own sister is the main suspect, and the film agrees with bombastic nonsense on the soundtrack. For some reasons that may very well be clearer in the books this is based on, the film also shoehorns in a supernatural element that really has no place in the plot as it is whatsoever, as if the filmmakers were just adding random stuff to the already slow and ponderous thing.

Sentinelle (2021): A French soldier with PTSD sent home to now patrol public places with a loaded assault rifle (a thing that looks absolutely insane from my cultural perspective, and can only be bound to feel everyone less secure) gets violently upset at the rich guy who rapes and nearly murders her sister. Because she’s played by Olga Kurylenko, there’s a lot of scowling and actorly intensity before the outbreak of violence. Director Julien Leclerq seems genuinely interested in his main character’s inner life, so Kurylenko has much opportunity for a not original but pleasantly nuanced portrayal; that she’s also a good action actress certainly helps the Netflix film considerably.

Creature with the Atom Brain (1955): The main surprise about this Columbia cheapie directed by Edward L. Cahn is how thoroughly enjoyable it still is. A gangster uses the nuclear zombie (this seems to be part of the lineage leading directly to the Romero-style zombie, see also Cahn’s own later Invisible Invaders) creation method of a Nazi scientist for vengeance, with later plans for world domination. Mad science and evil gangster speeches are made! The hero’s intensely 50s home life is shoved into our helpless faces (it’s called horror for a reason)! Zombies with clever minimalist make-up attack in genuinely well-staged sequences that do their utmost to get around the tiny budget!

I have no idea what else I could ask of a movie like this.

In short: The Courier (2019)

A nameless black market courier (Olga Kurylenko) working in London is supposed to deliver some technical doodad needed for the secure off-site statement of one Nick Murch (Amit Shah) against crazy evil rich mastermind Ezekiel Manning (Gary Oldman). Turns out what she actually unwittingly delivers is a packet full of cyanide gas meant to kill Nick as well as those of his protectors not on Manning’s payroll and frame her for the killing. Fortunately, the good woman is a deserted Russian wet work specialist and really doesn’t like to be fucked with in this way, so she saves Nick and begins a game of “Die Hard in a Parking Garage” with Manning’s henchpeople.

Zackary Adler’s The Courier is a great example of the problems of many contemporary direct to home video action films, or really, the problems these things often have becoming actual movies (you gotta ask Martin Scorsese if that would make them “cinema”) instead of strange patchwork concoctions.

One of the biggest hurdles standing between a low budget action movie of this type and becoming good is the desperate need to get some name actors in. Sure, getting a couple of scenes of Gary Oldman looks good in the press material, and he’s certainly not phoning his stuff in here, but there’s also not enough Gary Oldman to sell him as the main villain of the piece – that he is never interacting with the The Courier’s heroine certainly doesn’t help with that either. So the film needs additional villains hanging on the phone with each other a lot, our villain’s daughter whose function in the plot is exactly zero, and whatever other filler it can come up with (like an insipidly written court scene), permanently cutting away from the actual business of survival in the parking lot at hand to things and scenes irrelevant or boring, repeatedly sabotaging its own potential at momentum. Frankly, as much as I love Oldman, and as much fun as he has chewing the scenery, as little has what he does to do with the rest of the movie. He could have been replaced by a voice on the telephone shouting commands without the film losing anything of import to its quality as a movie; its quality as a saleable product would probably suffer, but as a viewer I want a watchable movie much more than a saleable product.

Of course, given the amount of other filler, I’m not terribly sure the film could actually afford Kurylenko and Shah for more shooting days, which is a particular shame since Kurylenko is fully applying herself even in her worst movies, and Shah’s only one good role away from a really decent career.

All of this is particularly disappointing – again all too typical for this kind of action movie - because whenever the film gets around to Kurylenko doing her Bruce Willis bit (with Shah in a nice twist consigned to the kind of role action movies traditionally cast with women), Adler turns out to be a pretty fine director of action in a minimalist setting, finding a surprising amount of action set-ups for a rather small space, and using the always game Kurylenko well, too.


Alas, forty minutes of fun and sixty minutes of filler do not a (good) movie make.

Past Misdeeds: Centurion (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

It's the year 117. The Roman conquest of Britain is going rather badly. Rome has been forced to a standstill by the Pictish tribes under their king Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen), because her military isn't able to adapt to the guerrilla fighting techniques of her enemy. In a desperate last attempt at winning the war and saving his position, governor Agricola (Paul Freeman) decides to send the 9th legion under general Virilus (Dominic West) north to find and kill the Pictish king.

The only additional help Agricola gives Virilus is the female, tongue-less tracker Etain (Olga Kurylenko). This turns out to be a costly mistake. Etain leads the legion into a trap, and so its first contact with the enemy remains its last. Most of the men are slaughtered, Virilus captured and only a handful of Romans (like Liam Cunningham and Micky from Doctor Who - yes, we are in the usual "all Romans spoke with various UK accents" territory here) escape with their lives. Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender), who had just escaped Pictish captivity, decides to lead the survivors into the Pictish camp to free their general.

That plan doesn't work out too well. Virilus stays in Pictish hands and one of Quintus' men - without any of the other Romans realizing it - murders Gorlacon's little son. The soldiers manage to flee and begin a long and difficult trek back into their territory, having to survive the wilderness as well as repeated attacks by Etain and a small band of Picts who are following them to avenge the king's son.

People who disliked Neil Marshall's Doomsday (and really, what's wrong with you?) will probably not like the director's new movie much better. Sure, Centurion is a bit more thoughtful and intellectually ambitious than Marshall's last movie (which doesn't say too much if you keep in mind that Doomsday seemed mostly interested in being awesome dumb fun, more Italian than any Italian post-apocalypse movie ever made), but it is still more interested in action and testosterone poisoning than in being subtle.

Centurion has a few things to say about how the systematic violence of warfare in the name of empire produces said empire's worst enemies, who in turn perpetrate their own acts of violence which in turn lead to new retribution and so on and so forth, with everyone's deeds of slaughter done for very good reasons. Gorlacon for example had begun his fight against the Romans after they had killed his first child, and Etain was driven into insane violence by being the victim of Roman rape and torture. Unfortunately, the film doesn't put as much emphasis on these elements as it probably could. Although Marshall makes sure his audience understands that violence and empire are Very Bad Things that will only lead to more dying and suffering, he still won't stop himself from revelling in at least the violence. So his film is full of scenes of intense, blunt, bloody violence, staged in scenes as exhilarating as they are brutal, subtly choreographed not to look too much like it, not evoking the dance of a martial arts movie but something less pretty and more visceral.

And the violence here is so well done that it's hard to blame Marshall for losing himself in it. There is something to be said for the handful of films that try to put something like the historical adventure stories of the pulps on screen and it's the preference for the cutting and the slashing before the thinking is very much a part of that genre you can't escape.

The actors are doing fine jobs throughout, even though they are hampered by sometimes less than satisfying dialogue (note to scriptwriters: never use the word "she-wolf" unironically) and understandably basic (it's just this sort of film), yet sufficient, characterization. Poor Michael Fassbender also has to do some overblown and completely unnecessary voice-over that is only there to add bathos the film doesn't need and tell us things we are seeing on screen anyway, in the great tradition of useless voice-overs throughout film history. It's not the only time its script lets Centurion down a little. Especially the ending seems a like it was done in short-hand and - for once in this film - more out to prove a point about the despicableness of the concept and practice of empire while still giving at least one of the characters a happy end than to make for a truly satisfying (or depressing) and logical conclusion. This is one of the rare cases where I would have preferred a film to be ten or even twenty minutes longer just to let its ending feel less hasty.

One the more positive side, Centurion's script also does a few relatively clever things that demonstrate that Marshall's not going through the motions of action movie scripting like a machine. Those are never big things the film is pointing out at us, but I still found it nice that (for example) the character who is set up (after a frighteningly racist introduction as a professional runner) to be the "black guy who only looks out for himself and will get killed by trying to pull one over his friends" isn't actually going in that direction at all and instead cynically killed off when he is going against that particular annoying archetype. It's the sort of thing that doesn't sound like much, but put half a dozen moments like this into your historical action movie script like Marshall does here, and you suddenly have something that feels specific and sometimes even a little human instead of automatic and generic.

Friends of bleak nature photography will also have a field day with the film's beautifully photographed outdoor locations in Hampshire and Scotland. The desolation of the locations gives the film a mood befitting the grimness of what's happening in them, sometimes pulling the brutal fighting into the direction of the dream-like, more often lending it a feeling of particularity, of everything we are seeing happening in a real place instead of the imagination. After this, I'd walk miles to see a nature documentary shot by Marshall and his cinematographer Sam McCurdy.

All criticism aside, I had a lot of fun with Centurion. Despite its flaws, the film is as physically exhilarating as movies come, beautiful, and less dumb than it could get away with. That it's also not always as successful at being clever as it could be is a problem, but not one big enough to ruin the movie, or the fun.

Momentum (2015)

Alex Farraday (Olga Kurylenko) is helping out her former boyfriend with a little bank robbery on demand. It’s the sort of affair where one dresses in what we in the business call space ninja suits. Despite Alex being really good at penetration (yes, that’s what the film will later tell us, and not with a joking face on), things don’t go too well: one of the other bank robbers loses control so much she rather shoots him than let him kill an innocent. To add insult to injury she loses her mask during the altercation.

Afterwards, when our heroine is trying to relax a little before she can flee the country with her own little sack full of diamonds, things go from bad to worse. Turns out, the evil US senator (Morgan Freeman with a screen time of at least three minutes) who hired them wasn’t actually interested in diamonds or money so much as in a little USB drive that contains information he’d really rather not see going public. He’s also little interested in having loose ends, so he sends out evil Mr. Washington (James Purefoy overacting rip-roaringly and assuming an accent that might supposed to be German or Afrikaans or Dutch or Elvish) and his multi-racial, gender-progressive gang of henchpeople to cut them off.

Boyfriend doesn’t survive the night, but Alex – no surprise with her action movie protagonist name – makes Washington’s business very, very difficult. Turns out she isn’t just good at getting into places but has superior ass-kicking powers as well as a penchant for improbable plans that somehow work against all sanity and logic.

Basically, Stephen S. Campanelli’s Momentum already had me at least half way at Olga Kurylenko and James Purefoy, both the sort of somewhat luckless actors who’ll appear in just about anything and always put their game faces on – no matter if they are in a mid-level action movie like this one or a mid-brow costume drama. As a viewer of much crap, I appreciate actors who do get their hands dirty to make my life that much more enjoyable.

In Momentum’s particular case, Purefoy goes the well-worn route of portraying his bad guy exaltedly insane to the border of high silliness I generally hope for from the big bad in my silly action movies, while Kurylenko once again demonstrates she makes for a pretty fun action heroine and can act other emotional states than angry and determined your typical male action movie star will have his troubles with (I love my Jean-Claudes, and Dolphs and so on, but you gotta be realistic). Fortunately, the film uses that ability rather sparingly and doesn’t fall into the horrid mistake of making an action movie with a female lead “more relatable” by having her cry a lot, because girls are supposed to be like that.

In fact, and to my delight, Momentum doesn’t play up Kurylenko’s gender at all but just – correctly – assumes it’s normal for a female character to go through the same action movie hero tropes and plot beats a male character would have to. Why, the film even gets away with a bit of child protecting business without drawing on the typical and often very annoying mythical “motherly feelings” supposedly slumbering in all of them thar wimmin.

When it comes to the action, Campanelli – and very rightly so – bets on variety, including the by now traditional cat and mouse game in a hotel, car chases, wild shoot-outs and some rather fine close combat, as well as scenes in classic thriller and suspense tradition (though louder) with a tiny bit of the conspiracy thriller for added flavour. Campanelli’s direction thankfully eschews the flash cut and whoosh zoom aesthetic that has ruined many a US action film over the last two decades or so. The action is fast, it’s professionally staged and generally exciting (if not breath-taking), and thanks to Campanelli’s efforts, you can actually see much of the stunt work. The man’s no Isaac Florentine, obviously, but he clearly knows what he’s doing, and does it in an enjoyable way.

I should probably comment on the plot and the characters, but as it goes with this sort of film, looking for a logical narrative and deep characterisation seems to me to be rather beside the point. Let’s just say the action scenes are connected via vaguely sensible (if you don’t stop and think about them) developments, Kurylenko’s character moments are well enough placed, and the ending’s a curious attempt at either being ambiguous or attempting to hawk a sequel that won’t come (because people rather preferred the showy and offensively stupid John Wick with that wooden puppet in the lead to a decent film, I suppose). That’s enough for me, particularly in a film that does its work of letting people die in creative ways and furniture explode as well as Momentum does.

Three Films Make A Post: Jet-hot action! Jet-hot suspense! Jet-hot thrills!

The Expatriate (2012): Philipp Stölzl's film about a former CIA operative (Aaron Eckhart) getting into trouble with an international conspiracy that includes his former handler (Olga Kurylenko) and threatens to cost the life of his daughter (Liana Liberato) is a neat example of the modern international (producing countries are the USA, Canada, Belgium and the UK, the director is German, and the actors are coming from everywhere) spy thriller. It's not a film that hits many surprising beats but it tells its story well, with the proper amount of violence and one of the more convincing variations on the "daughter and father come together through the father's talent for lethal violence" theme. Plus, the acting's more than decent and in the Europe of this film - quite unlike in that of Europa Corps. movies - brown people aren't automatically evil.

Killer Joe (2011): This is one of those cases where I absolutely understand the wave of approval a film and its director (in this case a William Friedkin absolutely not willing to coast on previous achievements or attempt to copy them) are met with, see the artistic value and the plain effort in every shot, yet still, when it comes down to it, can't get excited about the film in the slightest, and even feel rather annoyed by it. Large part of the reason for that might be an ending that works wonderfully on a subtextual level, less so as the tour de force where blackest comedy and violence meet I think it's supposed to be, and makes little sense when you try and see the characters as people. And here comes the other, much heavier, problem I have with Killer Joe into play - I have my doubts it sees the uneducated Southern poor it concerns itself with as actual people instead of as objects it can slyly look down on as so stupid and alien they deserve whatever shit is coming to them; at the very least, the film lacks any kind of sympathy with its characters, and without that sympathy, I don't really see a reason to care about a film be it as artful as it may.

Seven Psychopaths (2012): Yet another movie I'm not as in love with as I'm probably supposed to, even though it is full of things I love in my movies: Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, meta, the subversion of genre standards, an excellent taste in music, shaggy dog stories and direction that thrives on details. Problem is, I like my subversion of genre tropes rather more subtle, or at least less self-congratulatory. Martin McDonagh's film loudly points out that it's subverting tropes right now about every ten minutes, instead of just doing it and trusting in the audience to understand what it's doing. There's something self-congratulatory and smug about this approach that rubs me the wrong way and really doesn't fit the actual charm and intelligence that the film's script shows when it's not patting itself on the back. Of course, this is also a film that loves to stop its critique halfway, pointing out the absence and uselessness of women in action etc. cinema but then not doing any better by its own female characters, so maybe I'm just expecting too much of it.

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On WTF: Centurion (2010)

My weekly write-up on WTF-Film concerns Neil Marshall's Centurion this week, and not surprisingly, I kinda loved it despite all of its flaws.

I am a sucker for historical pulp adventure, after all.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,neil marshall,action,michael fassbender,olga kurylenko,reviews,other places,pulp