Double Tap (1997)

Undercover FBI agent Katherine Hanson (Heather Locklear) has been building a huge case against various drug lords by posing as the provider of an effective money laundering service. Apart from her falling apart psychologically – which the movies tell me is perfectly normal in her job – things go well until a mysterious killer we will later learn is called Cypher (Stephen Rea) disturbs one of her business meetings by killing her two customers; though not her, for some mysterious reason.

Cypher apparently has a habit of coming to various US cities to murder the drug lords there and go back on his merry way afterwards like a screwed-up western hero; the man’s got a bit of Punisher thing going on. Unlike Frank Castle, he’s not against letting himself be paid for his murder sprees by shady intelligence people or gangsters, mind you. For reasons, Cypher also likes to talk about proper lawn care etiquette a lot, which does add some educational value to proceedings.

Hanson clearly feels drawn to the guy and his methods, maybe his gardening tips, but she’s also rather miffed he’s getting between her and her job. Obviously, an eventual team up and affair is a given.

Greg Yaitanes’s Double Tap may very well be the most late-90s near-DTV kinda-action, kinda-crime movie imaginable. It’s stylish to a fault, though not all of its style seems to be so much thought through as a means to express something – even if “something” is only a mood – but vomited out by the collective subconscious of its genre and its time, Jungian psychology finally made film.

So expect a movie consisting nearly exclusively of woozy indoor shots, or light-pollution sky-less night shots. Most rooms seem to suffer under the sort of ventilation that leaves the air sticky and nearly foggy, also orange; editing and camera work is erratic and often slow, never shooting any character interaction straight when it can make performances look vague instead of precise; most of the action sequences manage to be unparsable foggy messes without Yaitanes needing to go the Michael Bay route of random fast editing. Here, confusion comes more naturally and organically, like a well fumigated lawn, one supposes.

The dialogue is a mix of cop movie clichés, non-sequiturs, and utterly bizarre speeches with an emphasis on peculiar similes. There is, for example, talk by the big bad of filling a nunnery turned warehouse (all sets look like the same warehouse anyway) with nuns again so that Cypher hasn’t got a prayer, or something equally bizarre. And lawn metaphors, of course.

At the same time, the cast treats the whole thing with utmost seriousness – if you ignore Rea’s attempt at an American accent that can only be meant as a weird joke – going through the plot as if it were just perfectly sensible and in need of proper acting. We can only salute them for that.

If all of this sounds as if I wouldn’t recommend Double Tap, nothing could be further from the truth: while it’s certainly not a good film in the normal person sense of the term, its mood of wooziness and general bizarrerie combined with the pretence of being a completely normal bit of genre filmmaking is absolutely irresistible to me. All the elements that might be meant to come together as a standard genre movie of the slick and stylish persuasion come together into a whole that’s hypnotically strange and individual. Which is all anybody can ask of a movie.

In short: The Purge: Election Year (2016)

Welcome to the third round of misadventures in a near-future USA ruled by a cabal whose rhetoric sounds a bit too much as if they’d fit right in with the actual near-future president of that particular country. There’s still the yearly Purge Night going on, where said twelve hours see all crime legal, leaving a lot of (mostly poor) people dead. Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) wants to change that and abolish Purge Night if she becomes president – she even has a change to win the coming election.

In fact, the senator’s chances are so good, the Purge-loving establishment of the New Founding Fathers decides to make good use of the coming Purge Night and get rid of their enemy while acquiring a particularly pleasant human sacrifice for their not-so-secret ceremonies. Fortunately, Roan’s security chief is Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo). You might remember Leo as a rather lethal and effective kind of guy from The Purge: Anarchy, so the senator still has a good chance for survival even when members of her staff betray her.

Roan and Leo end up being chased through the streets by purgers and the mercs hired to kill her alike, but rather sooner than later they find allies in form of corner shop owner Joe (Mykelti Williamson), his employee and friend Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria), and Laney Rucker (Betty Gabriel) who drives an underground triage truck on Purge Nights to make up for the bad shit she once did when she herself went purging.

Clearly, after the somewhat misguided home invasion movie that began it all, the Purge series had found its sweet spot with the near-future action of Anarchy, and writer/director/producer James DeMonaco continues with Election Year in the tone he left off with. So, the third Purge movie again offers blunt politics that suddenly look uncomfortably close to the spirit of the times, street level action in the spirit of Escape from New York, and about half a dozen warmed-up action movie clichés done well enough I don’t particularly mind how often I’ve seen them already.

While the film has some moments of semi-surrealist weirdness – mainly through many a mood-building vignette by the wayside of our protagonists’ path and a finale featuring fascist cultists who aren’t hiding their love for human sacrifices – its action tends to the more earthbound type. While calling it realistic would be absurd, the violence here does not go in for flying people (or cars) or big slow motion fests. As in the last film, DeMonaco is rather effective using this approach, so there’s a pleasant flow of diverse violence committed by a cast whose ethnic make-up puts the film’s money where its mouth is.

As an old leftie, I can’t disagree with the film’s politics much, either, even if it’s the sledgehammer version of a part of leftist thought sold to us by Universal, an irony that should probably bother me more than it actually does.