John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following his rather unwise decisions during the course of the second movie, everyone’s favourite dog-loving assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is on the run, hunted by the rest of the series’ weirdo assassin underworld, and excommunicated from all useful services of their underground world. He’ll have to call in old favours and murder an astonishing amount of mooks and mid-level bosses to perhaps get a chance at survival.

My first time watching Parabellum (which, adorably, will turn out to be a Latin/ammunition-based pun), I really loathed the film (and I’m not going to link to that short piece, because Now-Me is obviously right, until I’m going to change my mind again in the future). Clearly, that's not the case anymore. In fact, I’ve come around to really rather loving it.

I still believe it is not an ideal choice to finish an action film with epic ambitions like this on several fights between Keanu and actors who are simply much better screen fighters than he is - the man certainly has the right spirit, but even in his Matrix days, he has always been a bit stiff and awkward when tasked with unarmed fights, which does tend to look worse when he’s set against more naturally limber opponents like Mark Dacascos or Yayan Ruhian. But then, he does throw himself into the fights with full conviction.

Otherwise, today’s me finds it difficult to argue with Parabellum’s digital neon aesthetics, its commitment to absurd body counts achieved via complicated choreography, or its increasingly pulp baroque world building that’s at once absurd and wonderous.

Even the circular there and back again of the plot that irritated me the first time around makes thematic sense on my second go at the film. It is emblematic of how our dubious hero is trapped in an endless cycle of awesome/pointless violence and rules that only serve the rulers, with the added irony that it is exactly his historical adherence to these rules that lets others in his subculture cut Wick rather a lot of slack.

DNA (1996)

aka Genetic Code

Borneo. Dr Ash Mattley (Mark Dacascos) has found some bug based enzyme that – if synthesized – could result in completely undetailed and unexplained medical progress that will save millions of lives. How? Why? Huh? The film ain’t telling. Alas, Ash has found no way whatsoever to actually synthesize said enzyme, which, given that his research is a side project he’s doing while he operates an underfunded and understaffed free clinic, is not too much of a surprise.

One day, one Dr Wessinger (Jürgen Prochnow) walks into Ash’s life. Wessinger has found the solution to Ash’s problem, and really only needs his help to find another of those wonderful bugs to realize Ash’s dream. Of course, Wessinger is no mere scientist but a mad scientist, and in truth only wants to use Ash’s enzyme to clone (or whatever) the bones of an ancient, unidentified beast the locals saw as a demon. After the following sudden and inevitable betrayal by the German madman, a cave explodes, and Ash believes Wessinger to be dead as his enzymatic dream.

Two years later, Claire Sommers (Rob McKee) arrives in town. She’s positive Wessinger is still alive and has come to stop whatever he’s up to, and she needs Ash’s help to find him. The expected mix of old jungle movie tropes, an antagonistic “romance” and a monster suit that badly rips off H.R. Giger’s most popular creation ensues.

If a viewer is willing and able to make their way through what William Mesa’s DNA laughingly calls its plot, can survive a long game of trope bingo, and is okay with the film’s bizarre ideas about human relations, speech, and general patterns of behaviour, they could actually get quite a bit of enjoyment out of this one. Really, it’s only the plot’s insistence on pretending to be complicated and deep that could get in the way of enjoyment, for the character work (such as it is) and dialogue are often very funny indeed. There’s really something to be said for a film whose creators genuinely seem to believe 50s B movie mad scientist dialogue is still a good idea in the mid-90s.

To be fair, they then make the good move to hire Jürgen Prochnow for the mad scientist role and somehow manage to convince him to go all-out on it. He’s thundering his lines with greatest conviction and enthusiasm, as if this stuff were Shakespeare or Das Boot, putting so much physical effort into his line delivery, he’d put Ben Kingsley in his “vigorous vicar” mode to shame.

Poor Mark Dacascos has it rather worse than Prochnow. Where the bad guy at least gets all the most ridiculous lines, Ash is such as straightforward white hat kind of good guy, there’s really very little he can do with the role. Apart from showing his expected and typical competence in unarmed fights, knife fights and shoot-outs. Ash, it turns out, must have studied jungle warfare and melee fighting as a useful side-line to medicine sometime. This way, he’ll never be without patients. Alas, he’s also pretty boring. Which seems rather symptomatic for the career of Dacascos, a guy who never really seems to have gotten his fair shake - and no, having to pretend to get beaten up by Keanu Reaves is not what I mean - despite talent and looks and the ability to not be an asshole in public.

The action sequences are generally competently done, Mesa usually staging and shooting them clearly and concisely. Whenever things are supposed to be scary, on the other hand, things do tend to get out of the director’s control.

But then, what could anyone do with a rip-off of the xenomorph this blatant (but crap and green)? Apart from showing it not quite as clearly and as often, of course. Or, just filming it in a way that would not suggest the size of its head will cause the poor guy inside the monster suit to lose his balance any minute now?

But then, what would be the fun in that?

Drive (1997)

The near future. Toby Wong (Mark Dacascos), a former Hong Kong government agent turned involuntary killer for a Chinese company/government/organized crime entity goes on the run from his employers and makes his way to the USA. Here, he plans to sell the biological reactor implanted into his chest that gives him basic super soldier super powers to a company and retire somewhere nice, free from the hassle of the violent life.

Of course, his former bosses do not take this sort of thing lying down, particularly since Toby’s reactor is still a one-of-a kind prototype. So they send a team of American assassins (led by characters played by John Pyper-Ferguson and Tracey Walter) on his trail, with orders not to kill him. Which is a bit of a problem for these guys, since Toby has no such orders holding him back, plus superpowers (though he always goes out of his way to protect civilians). Still, during the first encounter with his hunters, things escalate a bit, and Toby takes innocent bystander Malik Brody (Kadeem Hardison) and his car hostage for a little road trip to Los Angeles. Of course, the two will become squabbling buddies while being chased and shot at.

Among the connoisseurs of these sorts of things, Steve Wang’s Drive has the reputation of being one of the very best direct to DVD action movies, and it’s difficult to disagree when you look at the action scenes in the film. Unlike quite a few directors working in Hollywood at the time, Wang had clearly learned the right lessons from Hong Kong action films, realizing that it’s not the guns akimbo and the slow motion birds that make classic Hong Kong action cinema great, but a sense of dynamism, of mobility, a way to use the camera in fast yet clear ways, and an emphasis on movement. Well, that, and a whiff of madness, with stunts which often do not look the slightest bit safe for the performers.

So that’s exactly what Wang (and action director Koichi Sakamoto, a guy with extensive experience in the Japanese Tokusatsu realm) bring to Drive’s action, as well as a very Hong Kong cinema use of objects of daily life and gimmicks during fights to make things more interesting as well as funnier. And really, if you can’t laugh about Mark Dacascos making a classic kung fu movie “come on, fight!” gesture while wearing shoes on his hands, the problem’s with you and not the film.

Having said that, the film’s humour outside of the fight gimmicks is certainly an acquired taste, seeing as it is low-brow, goofy and often more than just a little annoying. On the other hand, the film’s humour is also often just plain weird, and therefor interesting. Just watch whatever the hell Brittany Murphy is doing in her part as a mentally disabled motel owner’s daughter who can not shut up for a second, and be weirded out completely or look puzzled at the film’s climax taking place in an Apollo 14 themed night club, including an inexplicable musical interlude with Dacascos before the fight starts.

I have to admit I would have preferred less humour and more melodramatic mugging, but there’s something so companionable about that humour’s goofiness and weirdness in combination with some of the most inventive action I’ve ever seen in US action cinema, I find myself completely unable to resist Drive’s rather peculiar charms.


Also: if you can find it, go for the film’s director’s cut.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

Following the events of the last John Wick, our hero, sensitive mass murderer John Wick (Keanu Reeves, upon whose greatness as a person I am now apparently bound by law to sing an ode, even though he’s still not much of an actor, which seems to be rather more relevant to me when talking about him, you know, acting) is on the run, hunted by the same goofy cabal/cult running the international underworld he murdered oh so many people for. If the end of the second John Wick suggested to you that John has a plan to somehow fight back against The High Table, during the course of the film you’ll learn that he really hasn’t one apart from seeking the overlord of his now-enemies to…beg him to take him back in. Whoa.

On the plus side, on his way to there (and back again), dear John is meeting up with various old and new acquaintances (among them Halle Berry doing quite a bit of dog-based gun fu) and killing a whole lot of people in front of very sexy looking backgrounds.

So yeah, if you expected the actual story of Chad Stahelski’s third John Wick movie to go anywhere, you might very well be disappointed on finding the whole plot of this third film could very well have been squeezed into the first half hour of the fourth John Wick film, for all the way it moves the not-so epic story forward. It sure doesn’t help the plot that John is quite so much of a one-trick pony, never actually learning anything, never really changing, and so when he actually tries something different, he seems to make his new choices at random. People (and I am sometimes one of them) make fun of automatic Hollywood character arcs often enough, but for John Wick as a character, that would be an actual improvement.

However, while not much of actual import happens (John killing hordes of people is by now such a given pretending it might mean anything is preposterous), the film goes further in its direct predecessor’s attempts at building a cartoonishly-goofy yet also irresistibly baroque world made out of conspiracy theory, comic book ideas about organized crime that make the Kingpin’s organization seem plausible in comparison, and often eye-popping aesthetics. I do sometimes wish the film would use this world for more than creating mere backgrounds for its fights as if it were a level-bound videogame, but them’s the breaks.

Speaking of fights, the action sequences are of course the actual reason for the movie to exist, and for the most part, they do not disappoint, the series by now having progressed to a stage where animal-loving John inducing a horse to back-kick his enemies to death seems perfectly logical for the world it takes place in. It’s obviously silly as hell – I’m expecting he’s going to throw adorable killer puppies at his enemies in the next film – but presented with so much verve – often style, too – that it’s pretty difficult to not be on board with this sort of thing. Also damn great are Halle Berry’s dog kennel fighting style, and all kinds of absurd flourishes in nearly every action scene. The least impressive of them is probably the grand finale that sees John fight against a scenery-chewing Mark Dacascos, which depends a bit too much on an audience not noticing how awkward and stiff Reeves looks when compared to his sparring partner. But hey, at least John has been shot, beaten and cut so much at this stage, his slowing down and doing martial arts like Keanu Reeves does make some sense.


So, while John Wick 3: Electric Boogaloo is not quite as great fun as the second film, it’s also not the annoying waste of time the first one was, and still a very entertaining bit of movie videogame violence. Perhaps the fourth John Wick film will even get around to having a plot?

Deathline (1997)

aka Redline

aka Armageddon

aka The Syndicate

We are in some sort of mildly cyberpunk-y future where everybody’s a bit of a freak. Aging tough guy John Anderson Wade (Rutger Hauer, not doing much, but doing it like Rutger Hauer, which is what we came to see) is smuggling some kind of virtual reality implants into Russia. Alas, he is betrayed by his girlfriend (Yvonne Sciò) and his partner Merrick (Mark Dacascos). Not that his girlfriend has much joy of it, for Merrick guns her down right after Wade.

Wade’s corpse is recovered by corrupt elements of the Russian authorities who use some kind of experimental technique on him to revive him. I’m still not quite sure why, and am not willing to even start thinking about the how, but there you are. Anyway, once Wade’s alive and awake again, he quickly manages to escape captivity and goes on a murderous rampage, I mean, subtly tries to find and take vengeance on Merrick. Only without the subtlety. Merrick for his part is now a middle-sized wheel that would like to be a big one in criminal and corrupt circles, so there are goons to shoot before him.

Wade’s good at that sort of thing, though, so no biggie there. He also quickly acquires the help of one Marina K. (also Yvonne Sciò), who not only happens to look exactly like his late girlfriend but also shares her taste in older men. Oh, and she’s handy with guns and face-kicking, too.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone told me that an earlier script version of Deathline explained all of the weirdness going on in it by most of its plot being an Incident at Owl Creek Bridge-style fantasy in the brain of a dead man. As it stands, the finished version of Tibor Takács film doesn’t explain or excuse any of its weird shit at all; as a matter of fact, it doesn’t even bother to explain much of its plot. Which is fair enough, given that most of what’s going on is only meant to set up various pretty okay action scenes, some hideously bad CGI effects, and a really, really, really long sex scene.

Everything that’s going on between these scenes feels like variously successful attempts by the filmmakers to distract themselves and their audience from the most basic of plots and the vagaries of working on a small budget (but at least shooting in Hungary where you get somewhat more bang for your miniscule buck) by throwing as much random crap on the screen and at the audience as possible. It’s a time-honoured technique which can help enhance a film with snarky dialogue, bizarre satire, or just with a bunch of sight gags. Quite a few Roger Corman productions from the 70s and 80s became at least minor classics of various genres this way. Deathline never manages to do anything quite this successful, but for an action film that obviously can’t afford much action – and even less martial arts action despite casting Dacascos – its general weirdness and distractibility keeps it pretty entertaining. At least if you enjoy stuff like “The House of Culture” being a bordello, a TV re-enactment of Wade’s crimes that shows him gunning down a baby in its cart in a play on exactly the scene you’re thinking about just now, only with a pretty tiny flight of stairs, bizarre dream sequences that feel like set-ups for future psychological depth which will never arrive, and so on.


Too bad that Takács’s direction is atypically bland for most of the time, but I still had a reasonable amount of fun with Deathline.