Three Films Make A Post: LONDON IS ABOUT TO GET A TASTE OF TEXAS

Gate aka 게이트 (2017): Shin Jai-ho’s comedic heist movie suffers from the general lowbrow-ness of its humour, a certain tackiness in the presentation of its melodramatic moments, and never gets to the point you find in so many South Korean genre movies when they just straight out break iron-clad genre rules to go and do their own thing.

It’s still watchable enough: Shin certainly is a slick director, and the cast do their best to fill out their thin characters enough to at least make them halfway fun to watch.

Freeze (2022): Clearly, Charlie Steeds never stops making movies for a second. This time around Steeds and his usual ensemble go for a tale of Arctic horror with clear traditional Lovecraftian signifiers like murderous, weird fish people, and books that should not be read. Between the wonderful hand-made gore, this one puts particular emphasis on Steeds’s brand of home-made surrealism, turning parts of the proceedings so dream-like, the film’s weaknesses – some of the sets really only suggest what they are supposed to be instead of portraying it, and the acting is often decidedly un-naturalistic – only emphasize the peculiar mood of the whole affair. Half gory low budget fish people action and half surrealistic cheap nightmare is a pretty irresistible combination, if you ask me.

One Ranger (2023): Jesse V. Johnson is certainly one of the better directors working in low budget action today, so there’s always at the very least a solid standard to the basic filmmaking in his movies, as well as action sequences that tend to look much costlier than they are.

This time around, Johnson seems to have been able to work on a slightly better budget than usual, but the resulting film isn’t one of his best. I appreciate the film’s peculiar sense of humour, its attempts at giving its villain an actual character arc, and I’m certainly happy to see a “The Expanse” reunion with Thomas Jane (pretending very hard to be Texan) and Dominique Tipper in the leads, as well as short appearances by John Malkovich and Patrick Bergin.

However, the structure of the film as a whole just seems off, rather as if this wasn’t shot following a proper script but a first draft of one – and while people who have no clue will tell you action movie scripts only need action scenes, flow is incredibly important for the genre. And flow is what One Ranger lacks.

Three Films Make A Post: Taking Them One Mishap at a Time.

Accident Man (2018): House favourite Scott Adkins stars in the adaptation of a Pat Mills/Stu Small comic I haven’t read, directed by frequent Adkins collaborator Jesse V. Johnson. Adkins plays a professional killer specialized in murders that look like accidents or suicide. Things go a bit out of control when he learns that his ex-girlfriend (who happens to be pregnant by him, too) is murdered by some colleagues. A whole lot of hand to hand fighting and murdering ensues. The film, typical for the Johnson/Adkins combo, goes for the pop-coloured and cynically humorous, with a load of pretty eccentric characters (played by beloved action movie character actors like Ray Stevenson, Ray Park and Michael Jai White) fighting it out in not always completely serious ways, in between scenes of often genuinely funny one-liners and dialogue that at least sounds of a piece with some of Mills’s writing.

That the action sequences are budget conscious yet also excellently choreographed and genuinely fun is rather par for the course for projects from this particular circle.

Meurtre à Montmartre aka Reproduction interdite (1957): Self-important whiny art dealer Marc Kelber (Paul Frankeur), falls in with a pair of art forgers to pay for stuff like his step son’s (whom he clearly despises) piano lessons. Because everybody is incredibly high-strung, and really bad at planning, things quickly go wrong.

There are moments when Gilles Grangier’s crime movie is visually effective and captivating, but it self-sabotages with a melodramatic streak as wide as the ocean, where everybody’s emotions are always at eleven, and no single character has ever seemed to have learned even the tiniest bit of self-control. Worse, the film clearly wants the viewer to sympathize with Kelber’s plight, but neither makes any effort to provide reasons for empathy, nor makes him interesting.

Run a Crooked Mile (1969): This TV movie by Gene Levitt aims for a twisty take of weird conspiracy (like The Prisoner minus the depth, the surrealism and the look) that’s mostly aimed at a viewer’s suspense glands. This works well for the first half or so, but once our hero (played by the seldom interesting Louis Jourdan) gets conked over the head and wakes up two years later in Switzerland as a polo playing playboy married to the yawn-inducing Elizabeth (Mary Tyler Moore), things become bogged down in exactly the things I’m least interested in: the marriage problems of two painfully flat actors, a conspiracy that seems to be run by complete idiots, and suspense plotting that misses out on the whole “suspense” thing.

In short: Avengement (2019)

One scarred and pissed-off man with very frightening metal teeth we will soon enough learn to be called Cain Burgess (Scott Adkins), walks into a pub (after knocking out some guards) to hold a bunch of gangsters hostage. In flashbacks, he tells the gents what made him so angry.

Turns out, Cain once was a retired boxer, making the mistake of asking his gangster-brother Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass) for a loan to open a gym. Lincoln, apparently a man of principles, doesn’t lend money to his relations, though, and, apparently also being a prick, he asks Cain for a little criminal favour in return for the money. Cain’s just supposed to steal a bag from a particular woman. An unfortunate series of events leaves said woman dead and Cain in prison for manslaughter, where his brother, thinking Cain wants to squeal on a criminal business he knows very little about, sends wave after wave of killers after him.

Which eventually leads to a very scarred, hardened and angry Cain standing in Lincoln’s pub.

On a good day, Avengement’s director Jesse V. Johnson is one of the best filmmakers in the contemporary low budget made for whatever you want to watch it on that isn’t a cinema action movie sphere, helped along by a long association with Scott Adkins, as everybody should know one of the best actors/screen fighters working in this realm.

Avengement is certainly one of the better cooperations between the two, delivering the expected cheap yet crazed and excellently choreographed melee combats – Johnson fortunately belonging to the school of directors who actually want the audience to see what’s going on there – but also using the film’s episodic flashback structure to deepen the characterisation. Now, I’m not talking about the sort of psychological exploration French arthouse cinema loves (often to the detriment of being actually engaging to anyone not sharing a given director’s favourite psychological ideas), but Johnson does give Cain enough substance to make him rather more interesting than I expected him to be going in. It’s certainly an interesting move to provide the guy with more of an end goal than simply killing off his horrible brother, turning the usual vengeance business somewhat less egotistical than typical in this sub-genre, easily making it much easier to root for this particular tough guy once the film tells the audience what he has done beside murdering a lot of rude men.


For an action film, the whole affair has a lot of dialogue, too. Most of it is in a surprisingly fun post-Tarantino style mix of profanity and cleverness with a nice, quick, flow to it, spoken by actors who seem to enjoy the whole affair a lot, providing breathing space between action sequences that’s actually as entertaining as watching Adkins kicking ass (and getting his ass kicked).

The Package (2012)

Former special forces something or other Tommy Wick (Steve Austin) works as a thug and bouncer for moneylender and gangster Big Doug (Eric Keenleyside). Tommy doesn't enjoy his work much, but his brother - right now a convict - owes Big Doug so much money it's either Tommy working off his brother's debt or a dead brother.

Consequently, it's quite an exciting development for big meathead when Doug proposes a job that will wipe his brother's slate clean in one go. Tommy will just have to deliver a Kindle-sized package to a man only known as the German (Dolph "I'm from Sweden, damn it!" Lundgren) in Vancouver. Despite knowing the German from his black ops times, and not having parted ways from him on the best of terms, Tommy takes on the mission.

Of course, the small delivery job is more dangerous than Doug told our hero, so Tommy soon has his meaty fists full with various slightly freakish guys trying to kill him and steal the package. The way to Vancouver is long.

It'll come as no surprise to anyone even slightly acquainted with the field of contemporary direct-to-DVD action movies that second-billed and cover-sharing Dolph Lundgren is only playing a small-ish guest role in The Package, until the finale only popping in for a handful of scenes barely connected with the already quite episodically structured main plot. Fortunately, these few scenes are pretty great, at least if you like watching Lundgren (or a not always well-substituted stunt double) knifing guys, holding forth about vegetables to a guy who is bleeding to death or explaining the history of the martini to William B. "Cigarette Smoking Man" Davis. Seriously, what more could you want from Dolph Lundgren?

Surprisingly enough, director Jesse V. Johnson actually has even more to offer than just the opportunity of seeing Dolph do the same sort of thing his old colleague Jean-Claude Van Damme now earns his money with, just more bizarrely.

I'm not much of an admirer of Steve Austin. I don't like the meat-head type he embodies all that much, and - worse - I think he tends to dreg better action actors down when he's paired up with them with generally deeply mediocre performances in any and all non-wrestling based action scenes. It's also not very endearing that each and every one of his films has him sprouting some "patriotic" bullshit in at least one scene. So it's saying a lot that I not only enjoyed Austin's physical performance here, but actually sort of sympathized with his character, probably because the script does its best to make him vulnerable beyond "tough guy has a family". There's even a scene where our hero calls his boss and tries to just get out of the job like a real human being confronted with insane killers in his path would. It also helps that Johnson does actually know how to stage the scenes of people not killing one another quite effectively. Sure, the film won't ever win awards as a drama, but this is not one of those action movies where "dialogue scene" equals a reason to fast forward to the next shoot-out.

The action is frequent and entertaining, too. Johnson has a steady and straight-forward directing style that tends to put the emphasis on showing stunts instead of cutting to and fro so fast the audience can only assume there's some kind of stunt work or fighting going on, an old-fashioned and very satisfying way of filming the action.

The Package's secret weapon, and the main reason I truly enjoyed it, is its slight yet steady and utterly unrepentant weirdness. There's even a completely silly (and strange) idea making up the reason for Austin's travel towards Vancouver, though I'm not going to spoil that here. Yet even ignoring that very special element, and ignoring the perfectly strange scenes with Dolph, we learn a lot of remarkable stuff about the world and how it functions. Did you, for example, know that Steve Austin and his movie wife prefer to have sex to the lover's rock of Erik Satie?

There's a spirit of generosity running through The Package that is uncommon in the generally very stingy direct-to-DVD action genre. It's as if Johnson were some kind of action Santa Claus who just can't stop himself and not only pulls a decent number of good action scenes from his sack but then proceeds to add the weird humour and the technically accomplished filmmaking and a larger than usual number of locations and sets and some drama to try to ground everything. It might not be Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (what is?) but it sure is a fun film.

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