In short: Lethal Weapon (1987)

Having watched quite a few films written by Shane Black in the last couple of months, I very much saved the best for last, and have now come up with my own private theory (not to be confused with my own private Idaho) about him: Black is a much better writer when he has clear constraints to work in. At the early stage of his career when he wrote this, he just couldn’t quite indulge himself as he can do now most of the time - I assume one reason Iron Man 3 is as great as it is because there are constraints in working with Marvel getting in the way of most of Black’s flaws while helping his virtues as a writer - so he couldn’t indulge in endless variations of having characters mumble “life is pain” but instead had to show us this philosophy (as far as it goes) through the actual plot of the film. There’s also no room for his four-letter word based humour to become obnoxious – there are about half the fucks and bad jokes as in a contemporary Black film in Lethal Weapon, but here all those fucks are perfectly placed and not everyone seems to suffer from Tourette’s, and the jokes are expertly timed at moments when levity is actually useful to the film. Also very atypical for the writer today: the third act is as well constructed and as tight as the rest of the film.

Sure, the action scenes are somewhat more constrained in their dimensions then they would quickly become deeper into Black’s career, but they are tightly constructed and effective, and there’s nothing as lazy needed to set them up as to have a little girl crawl into a truck loaded with explosives. Things are still larger than life, mind you, they are just larger than life in a more effective manner. And the action on screen is great,  showing off stunt work as good as you’ll see it in a US film of any era.

But the human parts of the film work just as well, with leads that are just slightly larger than life (it’s a big screen they are on after all) but have human problems; and when their life is pain, it’s much more believable, and actually a bit touching, which always comes as a surprise in an action film. But then, Black’s script really does seem to know most of the time that the macho culture particularly Riggs breathes is not a healthy place to live.

Acting-wise, this is mostly Danny Glover’s show, who projects a plethora of nuances and feelings through posture and slight changes of the timbre of his voice; Mel Gibson clearly has no idea how to play a guy with Riggs’s problems (as if the first Mad Max didn’t exist) but does his best, even though he tends to default to bug eyes and is usually drawn in useable directions by a Glover who clearly is the Carl Weathers to Gibson’s Schwarzenegger, to stay in 80s action cinema that pairs an excellent black actor with a not that excellent white dude.


This thing is a classic of US action cinema for a reason.

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

A couple of years ago, Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) was found with amnesia. Today, she’s a mild-mannered school teacher, a suburban wife and mother, and seems very happy with her lot.

Alas, a couple of things happening at now put a stop to her happiness. Her old personality starts to surface after she gets a good hit on her head in an accident, and her old self clearly wasn’t a very nice person, trained in all the arts of the movie spy assassin. Which turns out to have been exactly what she was when her old associates start trying to kill her after having seen her on TV in a small town Christmas parade (as you know, all Shane Black films are bound by law to take place around Christmas). At the same time, the last private detective Samantha hired to find out who she was before her amnesia, the decidedly shady Mitch Hennessey (Samuel L. Jackson), finds some actual clues to her past. After Samantha, who is in truth called Charly, has fought off a first assassination attempt, she and Mitch go on a road trip together that will culminate in a lot of violence but will make clear who Samantha really was.

Put two lovers of excess in cinema like director Renny Harlin and writer Shane Black together, and you do indeed get a pretty excessive film. There’s violence I was really surprised a mainstream action film in the mid-90s got away with, there are explosions, there are so many people killed by our protagonist it’s difficult to describe this aspect of the film as anything but cartoonish. However, all this excess is based on what is to my mind probably Black’s most interesting script. It does of course contain his usual shtick about how horrible life and people are, but he’s exploring these ideas through an at first and outside of the action scenes very noir-ish and clever set-up that also concerns not just Samantha’s search for identity but also asks questions about what “identity” might even mean, and how fluent what we call our personalities are even when amnesia doesn’t come into play. Where did “Samantha”’s ethics come from exactly when she was birthed from the brain of a ruthless killer? This intersection of identity and ethics is also of interest to the film when it comes to Henessey, a guy who is as much of a con-artist as he is a private eye now, but who finds himself drifting back towards the better man he once was at the same time Samantha is going back towards the worse woman she was.

That exploring this through a big loud American action movie with conspiracy elements actually works as well as it does is a little wonder. But then, it also happens to be a fun and highly accomplished big loud American action movie delivered with all the excessive panache Renny Harlin (at this time still the second-best Hollywood mainstream action movie director after John McTiernan) is best at. But, perhaps because Harlin happened to be married to Davis at the time and really wanted to let her show off her considerable abilities after their curious pirate movie flop together, and clearly respected Jackson’s perfect rendition of the struggling private dick, he’s also giving the actors ample space to shine even when they are not murdering anyone. Add the horde of well-known faces and character actors (honestly too many to count) and you have yourself quite a bit of substance beside the explosions.


Really, my only actual caveat when it comes to The Long Kiss Goodbye is the set-up of a couple of its final action scenes where the wheels of the plot mechanics become so visible, it’s impossible not use the word “lazy” to describe the construction there. Fortunately, you’re not going to be able to hear me complain over the sound of stuff exploding.

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

Once, Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) was a secret service agent who took a bullet for the president. Today, he’s a washed-up, alcoholic private eye with a marriage on the rocks, a mad-on for the senator who fired him, and a love for potty-mouthed witticisms minus the wit, because this was written by Shane Black. The plot will throw him together with younger, yet still washed-up, former American Football pro Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans), who shares his love for talking crap, if little else. When they are not flirting with each other and verbally comparing their dick sizes, they are set against a really complicated plot to legalize gambling with the help of a little assassination and a bit of the old ultra violence that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Which honestly is not much of a problem for this Tony Scott directed big, loud, expensive US mainstream action buddy movie, because nobody expects the evil plans in a film like it to be probable or believable. As long as an evil plot is fun and a helpful framework to hang various action sequences on, it’s all good in this genre. In this particular case, more sensible villains with a sensible plot would just not fit scenes like the one in the finale where Wayans, riding through a football stadium on horseback, throws a ball to catch a bullet meant for the assassination target (who, dramatic irony alarm, is the guy responsible for Hallenbeck being fired from his old Secret Service job). And really, who’d want to miss out on that?

I’m actually a bit surprised how much I wouldn’t have wanted to miss anything happening in the film, seeing that I usually have quite a few problems with its director and often at least some problems with its main scriptwriter. Both men, though pretty maligned by quite a few people at their height, are by now highly beloved by a certain type of middle-aged, male American nerd movie critic (all things that apply to me too, apart from the being American thing), often to my bewilderment. Scott to me always was the prime example of a director with obvious technical chops who tended to put these chops in service of not very much – well, there was that one time when he made a feature-length ad for the US Airforce, but that’s not the thing to endear anyone to me, either. To my eyes, Scott mostly made films in genres I usually enjoy that slicked away all the rough edges, the grit and the strangeness I love about these genres, leaving something that feels much more like “product” than any Marvel movie I’ve seen.

And Shane Black? Can write a good one-liner, sometimes even a dozen, but can just as often annoy me endlessly with his fixation on male asshole characters he clearly admires for being violent pieces of shit and therefore mostly never allows to truly change or learn from their experiences (at their core, his assholes are always right), sprinkled with a bit of casual misogyny, the kind of lame cynicism most of us grow out of once we get into our twenties, and the belief that having characters say fuck (etc) a lot makes your writing somehow “edgy” instead of going for the most obvious, and least shocking, kind of shock value. To be fair, if we ignore The Predator, he is genuinely great at plotting abstruse narratives with great conviction, has quite the hand for pacing, and more often than not manages to deliver a script that still makes for a fun (sometimes even good or great) movie.

Truthfully, all these criticism can be applied to The Last Boy Scout too, but through some weird kind of alchemy, the combination of Scott’s soulless slickness and Black’s try-hard yet certainly not soulless edginess somehow turns all the flaws into sources of great fun, an amusement ride of a movie that uses its director’s and writer’s respective shticks (and tics), and a metric fuckton (to keep in the vernacular) of explosions, to bludgeon all the critical faculties of a viewer’s brain into blissful submission.


Is it a good movie? Well, it’s certainly one made with the highest level of craftsmanship, diving joyfully into all sorts of excess, and featuring a whole lot of awesome violence, so definitely yes.

In short: The Predator (2018)

One of the more puzzling phenomena in mainstream genre cinema is the inexplicable inability of all sorts of filmmakers to understand the core draw of the Predator as very clearly laid out in the first, and hell, even the second movie of what alas has become a franchise of ever repeating mediocrity. If you don’t know (which would make you a Hollywood screenwriter, I guess), the core of the Predator is that he’s hunting the most deadly prey available – usually competent violent action movie machos - while being invisible, creepy, and mysterious, destroying the hubris of competent violent machos even if they should survive the movie at hand.

What Shane Black’s Predator is all about: umm, wacky comedy crazy people, autism as “the next step in human evolution” (because everyone on the Spectrum is a genius Hollywood kid I suppose – insert the sound of a head hitting a desk repeatedly here), some evil government conspiracy whose actions make little sense in connection with their supposed goals, and competent violent machos kicking Predator ass without learning a single thing, even though most of them die. Because it goes with the territory, Black just can’t resist giving the aliens more backstory than they already have, destroying every possibility of them being, you know, alien, or mysterious, or threatening instead of just another CGI monster, while adding some random noise about global warming that has of course no actual point in the script at hand.

Otherwise, the film is all the worst parts of Black’s usual shtick without the good one’s. So everyone speaks exactly the same, which of course is like a potty-mouthed naughty twelve-year old boy who thinks he’s particularly clever, the characters are too thin even for the SF action film with heavy emphasis on the action this is supposed to be, and the plot and its solution are clearly of little interest to anyone involved (or they might have come up with a decent climax or an ending that doesn’t promise the next movie to be Super Sentai Predator). It’s all so perfunctorily done I can’t even enjoy it as cheap pulp SF like Aliens vs Predator.


In short, it’s crap. Let’s not even talk about the charisma free zone that is the film’s so-called “ensemble” of actors, or Black’s bland direction. Sure, the action sequences are competent, but in a film on this budget level, technical competence surely isn’t an achievement deserving praise?

Three Films Make A Post: Seduction. Submission. Murder. Tonight . . . evil goes over the edge

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005): Despite being a friend of the darker kinds of humour, I often find myself nonplussed with comedies when they become too cynical, or rather, when they seem to dislike their own characters so much they can’t seem to find any shared emotional ground with them. Consequently, I have a complicated relationship with Shane Black’s stuff as a writer as well as a director. Here, at the start of the man’s career in the latter role, I find myself rather taken with what he produces. While the characters are certainly not all around loveable, Black doesn’t only wallow in their misfortunes, and his tendency to fourth wall breaking and ironic distance is very controlled and indeed responsible for many of the film’s funniest scenes. It’s also remarkable how good Black here is at scenes that are at once playing with genre conventions in funny ways and actually highly effective expressions of genre.

Add to that charming performances by Robert Downey Jr., Michelle Monaghan and Val Kilmer, and a lovingly absurd mystery plot kinda-sorta based on a Brett Halliday story, and you’ll find me with very uncomplicated feelings towards this particular Shane Black film.

The Big Sick (2017): Staying with comedies for a bit, Michael Showalter’s film based on a script by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon that’s based on their own early relationship, with Nanjiani playing himself and eternal indie romance heroine Zoe Kazan as Emily should by all rights be a mess of a film, or a terrible tear-jerker. As a matter of fact, it is anything but, and rather ends up being a highly successful quirky romantic comedy where that “quirky” isn’t code for “too twee”, a film about the specific problems of the children of immigrants, a sometimes drama about family, and a film that may on paper sound like a bit of an ego trip but that’s very much about people not called Kumail Nanjiani too, showing every character as complex and complicated trying to manoeuvre through the messes of life, love and so on.

It’s a fantastic film. The script is funny and moving and clever and so well plotted it feels completely natural, the acting (with people like Holly Hunter and Anupam Kher giving support) is great, and Showalter’s direction is all brilliant pacing and timing, so much so you might forget it’s there – which is an art to achieve.


The Guard (2011): And while I’m at it, why not finish up on another comedy, this time around John Michael McDonagh’s very Irish homage to buddy cop movies – or is it his answer to 80s action movies as a whole? Anyway, the film’s a showcase for the copious talents of Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle and others, and feels like a bit of an ode to the virtues that might be hidden under very dubious surfaces, with some excursions into actual tragedy (the scenes between Gleeson’s character Gerry Boyle and his dying mother played by Fionnula Flannagan are absolutely heart-breaking; also funny), realpolitik, and the sad fact that in some places, the abrasive, politically un-correct man of dubious morals in little things might just be the only moral guy in big things around.

Three Films Make A Post: Mary's Evil is Beyond Legend

The Dead Next Door (1989): For people with sympathy and tolerance for microbudget horror, and even though this one’s budget actually wasn’t quite as micro as you’d assume, J.R. Bookwalter’s film is one of the pioneering efforts of this particular type of indie horror. Not just because this is one of the early films of its kind, but because Bookwalter operates on a comparatively epic scale, with ambitious scenes and a plot that actually takes place in more than just a living room and someone’s garden. The script about the misadventures of the curiously accident-prone “Zombie Squad” in early post-zombie-apocalyptic Ohio (and a bit of Washington, D.C.) is certainly goofy and a bit silly, but the writing comes over as so good-natured and likeable these things become some of the film’s true virtues, as is pacing that doesn’t waste the audience’s time. The actors were overdubbed in post-processing, giving the affair a certain Italian genre movie vibe, while action and special effects are some of the best semi-professional work I’ve ever set eyes on.

It’s also certainly the best-looking film ever shot on Super-8.

The Nice Guys (2016): Rather on the other side of the budget divide dwells this Shane Black action comedy taking place in a fever dream version of the 70s. It’s a bit too nasty to its characters for my general taste in comedy (cruelty is only very seldom funny unless you’re a bully or a serial killer) but I do admire the way Black from time to time manages to move his – really rather well acted – lead caricatures Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling into some actually human emotional beats and scenes without breaking a sweat. And even soft-hearted old me can’t deny how well the film manages to create its world. Now if it were only populated by people I – or the film – cared about.


Mr. Right (2015): Paco Cabezas’s film does work better for me than Black’s does. It’s still full of the old comical ultra-violence but I find the black humour warmer, the characters definitely more likeable in their amorality. The way the film mixes the general absurdities of action movies with killers as heroes and your run of the mill romantic comedy is rather effective – and very funny – too, Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick making for a pleasantly odd couple. And who wouldn’t root for one of those, right? Particularly when they have to kill their way through a bunch of lovingly caricatured gangsters and Tim Roth looking to have a lot of fun doing his particular villain with a dash of tragedy. Why, even RZA brings his best acting game.

Three Films Make A Post: Heavy metal goes medieval

Iron Man 3 (2013): If someone had told me ten years ago that a few years later, some of the best non-stupid blockbuster movies around would be a series of interlocked Marvel superhero movies produced by Disney, I'd laughed him off, but there you have it. Shane Black's Iron Man 3 is a very fine example of its species, hitting all the mandatory Hollywood blockbuster beats with relish and talent, but adding some intelligent twists to certain parts of the formula without trying to completely deconstruct it. It's a film absolutely impossible for me to dislike, seeing as it - as most of the other Marvel movies - is the kind of pop high budget cinema the blockbuster concept should be ideal for; of course, far too often, we get Michael Bay movies or whatever that Green Lantern thing was even supposed to be instead. Happily, there's a difference between "far too often", and "always".

The Midnight Meat Train (2008): With hindsight, you can see this Clive Barker adaptation as director Ryuhei Kitamura's first step away from his old show-off direction ways towards tighter and moodier approaches to filmmaking. About half of Midnight Meat Train is a pretty swell tale of big city paranoia told in ways that often remind me more of 70s horror cinema than of video clips. The film's second half is a bit of a mess, though. Particularly the murders see Kitamura fall into his old direction pattern featuring too much CGI and braggart editing and camerawork distracting from what should be gritty and unpleasant. The film also suffers from a script that doesn't quite seem to know how to sell the film's supernatural aspect, nor how to make Bradley Cooper's increasing obsession with the true heart of the City believable. Neither Kitamura, never much one for actual humans on screen, nor Cooper himself seem to know either.

In fact, in true Kitamura style, most of the performances (except Leslie Bibb's lamely doomed girlfriend Maya) are rather drab, leaving as Midnight Meat Train a film lacking an emotional core.

Sleeping Dogs (1977): Believe it or not, before Roger Donaldson went to Hollywood, he made some fine movies in his native New Zealand. Case in point is this pretty bitter, very 70s sort-of thriller about Sam Neill trying his best not to get involved in or against a new and improved fascist New Zealand but ending crushed by the wheels of history anyway. The film does avoid heroic, mostly even defiant gestures like the plague and instead shows flawed incompetents like you or me as they stumble through a world that suddenly has turned nasty on them, with no way out and no control at all regarding their own fates. Not even violence does change much.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,new zealand movies,in short,superheroes,action,horror,sf,thriller,shane black,robert downey jr,gwyneth paltrow,ryuhei kitamura,bradley cooper,leslie bibb,roger donaldson,sam neill