The Killer: A well-crafted slayride

The Killer (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and frequent strong, bloody violence

Available via: Peacock

By Derrick Bang

I’ve of two minds about this film.

 

On the one hand, I respect the feelings of purists; goodness, I’m one of them.

 

On the other hand, we must acknowledge the march of time, and changing styles.

 

Onward, then:

 

********

 

Directors don’t often remake their own films, although notable exceptions exist: Cecil B. DeMille (The 10 Commandments, 1923 and ’56), Frank Capra (Lady for a Day and Pocketful of Miracles, 1933 and ’61), Alfred Hitchcock (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and ’56), George Sluizer (The Vanishing, 1988 and ’93), and Michael Mann (L.A. Takedown and Heat, 1989 and ’95) leap to mind.

 

Veteran cop Sey (Omar Sy) may think that he has the handcuffed Zee
(Nathalie Emmanuel) under control, but he reckons not with her cunning, quick wit
and lightning-fast resourcefulness.

Celebrated Hong Kong action director John Woo now joins their ranks, with this English-language remake of his 1989 classic: widely considered one of the greatest action thrillers ever made, and which strongly influenced filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. (And Woo’s 35-year gap tops all the others mentioned above.)

When asked about his two versions of Man Who Knew Too Much by fellow filmmaker François Truffaut, in the latter’s influential 1966 book-length interview, Hitchcock/Truffaut, the Master of Suspense immodestly replied, “Let’s say the first version is the work of a talented amateur, and the second was made by a professional.”

 

The same can be said of Woo’s two cracks at The Killer. This new version boasts Mauro Fiore’s vastly superior cinematography, and is a brighter, sharper “daytime experience,” as opposed to the original’s grainier, dingier “nighttime look.” The split-screen touches and cleverly presented flashbacks also are quite cool.

 

The new film’s gender switch is a novel touch. Scripters Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken also modified and expanded Woo’s 1989 screenplay, making the plot more relevant to real-world events, and altering interpersonal dynamics in ways that definitely improve the story. It’s easier to like these characters.

 

(Although ... should we?)

 

The original’s brooding, almost overwhelming atmosphere of Shakespearean tragedy has been replaced with a greater sense of fun and dark humor, which likely will play better with modern audiences.

 

However...

 

Woo’s longtime fans are certain to decry the loss of that relentless sense of foreboding, and with justification. More crucially, this new version lacks the breathless, chaotic energy of the first film’s multiple melees, chases, and mano a mano face-offs. The stunt work may be cleaner and more inventively edited here — credit for the latter to Zach Staenberg — but only a handful of sequences possess the thrilling, balls-to-the-wall mayhem that occurred more than half a dozen times in the original, which — let’s not forget — put Woo on the cinematic map.

 

That’s a shame.

 

(However, we do get a welcome reprise of the tense, straight-armed handgun pas de deux between the two primary characters, which is so iconic in the first film)

Avatar: The Way of Water — Waterlogged

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for strong violence, dramatic intensity, partial nudity and occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.23.22

Well, it happens to the best of us.

 

James Cameron has run out of ideas.

 

Realizing that their presence puts the entire Na'vi clan in peril, Jake (Sam Worthington,
far right) insists that his family — from left, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), Neytiri (Zoe
Saldaña), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton) — must leave their
home, and move far away, to another part of Pandora.

There’s no shortage of opulent, eye-popping imagination in this long-overdue sequel to his 2009 hit; this is sci-fi/fantasy world-building on a truly monumental scale. Every frame could be extracted and admired, for the meticulous detail and all the “little bits” that you’ll likely overlook during first viewing.

That said, sitting through this semi-slog a second time, won’t ever make my to-do list.

 

Writer/director Cameron, with a scripting assist from Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, has basically recycled the first film’s plot, along with — thanks to cloning — the exact same primary villain: Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). He and his elite team of kill-crazy mercenaries have been transformed into “recombinants” : artificial 9-foot-tall avatars embedded with the memories of the humans whose DNA was used to create them.

 

The character template has broadened a bit, and the setting has shifted from the forest-dwelling Omatikaya Na’vi clan to the ocean realm of the Metkayina clan. But the conflict is identical: Earth’s nasty-ass Resources Development Administration (RDA) returns in force, this time determined to colonize all of Pandora, as the new home for humanity.

 

“Earth is about to become inhabitable,” RDA’s Gen. Francis Ardmore (Edie Falco, appropriately callous) intones, “so Pandora’s natives must be … tamed.”

 

And, as if this bit of déjà vu all over again weren’t enough, Cameron’s climactic third act includes a re-tread of Titanic’s ultimate fate … except, instead of a sinking ocean liner, our heroes wind up scrambling about the shifting decks of a 400-foot-long attack vessel, as it slowly slips beneath the sea. Heck, we even get the same “climb this way … now this way” scramble involving two key characters.

 

All that said, this still could have been a reasonably engaging 150-minute film … were it not expanded into an insufferably self-indulgent 192 minutes. Cameron clearly didn’t trust his three co-editors.

 

The second act, in particular, accomplishes little beyond filling time. So many tight close-ups of slow, thoughtful takes; so many half-baked lines delivered with measured, melodramatic intensity.

 

Hacksaw Ridge: A cut above

Hacksaw Ridge (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for graphic war action, gore and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.4.16

Factual war dramas often are remembered for seminal sequences: the badly outnumbered British soldiers at Rorke’s Drift, who withstood the final onslaught by native warriors, in 1964’s Zulu; George C. Scott’s electrifying opening speech, in 1970’s Patton; and the Omaha Beach assault that kicked off 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, to name a few.

Once word spreads that Desmond (Andrew Garfield, right) refuses to wield or even touch
a weapon, Smitty (Luke Bracey, left) is the first to register contempt and hostility: How can
he — or anybody else in their division — trust a man who smacks of cowardice?

Indeed, the latter set a new bar for gripping, ghastly, battlefield intensity.

Until now.

Director Mel Gibson’s impressive Hacksaw Ridge is another reminder that, even with a long string of inspiring World War II dramas stretching back to the 1940s, fresh stories remain to be told. The best are those able to personalize the ordeal, by focusing on a few unforgettable individuals, or perhaps just one.

Hacksaw Ridge is the first dramatic depiction of American Army medic Desmond T. Doss’ experiences in the war: specifically his actions with the 77th Division — dubbed the “Statue of Liberty Division” — when it was ordered to take the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa, as part of the Allied push to mainland Japan.

Frankly, I can’t understand what took Hollywood so long; Doss’ story screams for big-screen treatment.

Scripters Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan didn’t even have a mainstream biography on which to base their film treatment (although an obscure small-press book — Booton Herndon’s Unlikeliest Hero — was published in 1982). They were able to draw from Terry Benedict’s award-winning 2004 documentary, The Conscientious Objector. That title cuts to the core of Doss’ unique status: He was the only American soldier in World War II to fight on the front lines without a weapon.

As a Seventh-Day Adventist, Doss believed strongly that killing was against God’s Sixth Commandment. But he also insisted on serving his country in a meaningful way —obtaining a deferment, due to his employment at a naval shipyard, seemed cowardly — and therefore viewed a role in the army medical corps as a logical compromise.

It wasn’t to be that simple.

Gibson opens with a brief flash-forward to the chaos on Okinawa — a pointless foreshadowing of the carnage to come — and then takes us back to Desmond’s youth and young adulthood. He came of age in a household terrorized by his alcoholic father, Tom (Hugo Weaving): a man unable to forgive himself for surviving his WWI service, when so many of his friends and fellow soldiers died. Weaving makes Tom a forlorn and unstable — even dangerous — wreck, but not an entirely unsympathetic monster. In fact, Tom gets his shot at redemption, later in the story.

A couple of seminal events harden Desmond’s decision never to wield a gun, or take a life by any other means. We don’t doubt his resolve.

Everest: Grim, heroic tragedy

Everest (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Human grit and determination know no bounds, even to the point of neglecting experienced judgment and common sense, in pursuit of ... what, precisely? Bragging rights?

Seems a pretty thin return for risking one’s life.

Granted clear skies and ideal climbing conditions, the members of two teams — from left,
Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly) and Beck Weathers (Josh
Brolin) — begin their final assault on Everest's summit. Alas, conditions won't remain
mild for long...

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest persuasively conveys the jovial, devil-may-care resolve and physical grit that characterize those bent on conquering Earth’s highest and most dangerous summit. The international cast is convincing, particularly while depicting the 24/7 adrenaline rush that fuels such folks during the weeks of preparation leading up to an ascent.

But this isn’t action-oriented melodrama, in the mold of (for example) Sylvester Stallone’s laughably improbable Cliffhanger. Scripters William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy have based this film’s narrative on the ill-fated 1996 Everest expeditions that turned tragic with the arrival of a particularly nasty blizzard. Allowing for modest artistic license — and with Nicholson and Beaufoy doing their best to adapt sometimes conflicting accounts from the five (!) books written between 1997 and 2014 — the resulting story feels both authentic and even-handed.

But if some of this film looks familiar, there’s good reason: We’ve been here before. The 1998 IMAX documentary of the same title, the giant-screen format’s biggest hit to date, devoted a chunk of its 45-minute running time to this catastrophe; indeed, Kormákur’s new film references the presence of the IMAX production team.

More recently, documentarian David Breashears’ Storm Over Everest focused exclusively on this 1996 climb.

But even the most successful documentaries never achieve the mainstream penetration of a big-budget, Hollywood-type production, and there’s no denying that these events cried for just such treatment. Kormákur’s heartfelt drama likely will be the final word on this subject, and it’s a worthy historical document.

More than once, in fact, I was reminded of British director Charles Frend’s superlative 1948 drama, Scott of the Antarctic, with John Mills starring as the British explorer whose team tried to become the first to reach the South Pole. Kormákur’s new film is in worthy company.

Sabotage: Vicious, vulgar trash

Sabotage (2014) • View trailer 
No stars (turkey). Rating: Rated R, for strong bloody violence and gore, relentless profanity, nudity, drug use and sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.28.14

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Our rough 'n' tumble "heroes" — from left, Neck (Josh Holloway), Breacher (Arnold
Schwarzenegger), Pyro (Max Martini) and Tripod (Kevin Vance) — infiltrate a drug cartel
safe house, taking down all opposition while cracking wise. Because real DEA agents
behave like this all the time, donchaknow.

Once upon a time, in the 1980s and early ’90s, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger vied for the crown of box-office action champ: the former riding the momentum of his Rocky and Rambo franchises; the latter embracing a string of solid sci-fi/fantasy entries such as Conan the Barbarian, Predator and — needless to say — The Terminator.

Now they’re in a race to the bottom.

I was astonished — and saddened — when Stallone popped up about a year ago, in the loathsome Bullet to the Head. Exiting that bit of distasteful junk, I couldn’t imagine any (former) big-name star doing worse.

Color me surprised, because along comes Schwarzenegger and this repugnant turkey.

Back in the day, you’d have had to stay up late on a Friday night — at home — to see this sort of grade-Z shoot-’em-up on Cinemax. No self-respecting actor would have signed on for such grindhouse trash, and no self-respecting studio would have dared release such a thing theatrically.

My, how times have changed.

Sabotage isn’t merely offensively, viciously, gratuitously violent; it’s also stupid beyond measure.

Director David Ayer has made a minor splash with gritty urban thrillers such as Harsh Times and Street Kings — don’t feel bad, if they escaped your notice — but his primary Hollywood rep results from his impressive one-two punch as a writer, in 2001: collaborating on The Fast and the Furious, and as sole scripter on Training Day, which brought Denzel Washington an Academy Award.

Based on his subsequent career, Ayer has been chasing the belief that amorality for its own sake is what sells in these United States. Why bother with plot or character, when one can wallow in the sleaze of ghastly depravity?

He has teamed here with co-writer Skip Woods, who also made some noise in 2001, with the stylishly nasty Swordfish, and more recently got involved with glossy action junk such as The A-Team and A Good Day to Die Hard. Nothing to brag about, to be sure, but also nothing to be ashamed of. Until now.

The Debt: Honorably paid

The Debt (2010) • View trailer for The Debt
Four stars. Rating: R, for violence, profanity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.2.11


Until this film came along, I hadn't realized how much I've missed intelligent, well-acted espionage thrillers.

The Debt hearkens back to the best of the 1960s and '70s spy entries: The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Three Days of the Condor and anything made from a John Le Carre novel. Wonderful stuff.

Stuck in an East Berlin apartment, responsible for guarding a bound and gagged
Nazi villain for an unspecified period of time, three Mossad agents — from
left, Rachel (Jessica Chastain), Stephan (Marton Csokas) and David (Sam
Worthington) — find their nerves fraying, as they begin to argue about how
best to handle the situation.

This new film, tautly paced by director John Madden, is an English-language remake of Israel's equally engrossing 2007 original, Ha-Hov. Madden's interest in the material is understandable; the Israeli screenplay — by Assaf Bernstein and Ido Rosenblum — is clever and suspenseful, while also confounding expectations on several occasions.

In other words, it keeps us on the edge of our seats and keeps us guessing. You can't expect more from a well-crafted espionage saga.

This remake — scripted by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan — covers the same essential territory, with just a few modifications; the new writers obviously saw no reason to mess with a winning formula. Madden's contribution is plenty of tension: from events as they unfold, and also from twists that set up an entirely unexpected third act.

Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) is introduced in 1997, as she attends a book-launch party for her daughter, Sarah (Romi Aboulafia). Sarah, an investigative journalist, has documented a clandestine 1960s Mossad operation that resulted in the apprehension and death of Dieter Vogel, the notorious "surgeon of Birkenau" who killed and maimed thousands of Jews during World War II.

The mission put three young Mossad agents behind the Berlin Wall in 1965: Rachel, Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkinson) and David Peretz (Ciarán Hinds). They returned to Israel as heroes, although — we soon learn — the emotional cost was high. When Rachel is pressed to read a section of her daughter's book, during the launch party, her stance is anxious and uncomfortable; Mirren's face conveys considerable unease.

Her reaction is understandable, as we're swept back to 1965, and to the moment that her younger self — now played by Jessica Chastain — was forced to deal with an unexpected hitch in the assignment.

Madden subsequently cross-cuts between these two time periods: at first concentrating mostly on puzzling encounters in 1997 — the tension between these three former colleagues clearly having reached a boiling point, over the intervening years, for reasons as yet unknown — and then taking us back to the mission itself.

Clash of the Titans: Far from Titan-ic

Clash of the Titans (2010) • View trailer for Clash of the Titans
2.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for action violence and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.8.10
Buy DVD: Clash of the Titans • Buy Blu-Ray: Clash of the Titans [Blu-ray]

Most sword-and-sandal epics are notoriously stodgy and creaky.

The dialogue is invariably arch and cornball, the testosterone gets splashed across the screen in buckets, and the actors rarely feel authentic to the era. We too often get a sense that we're watching 21st century men and women dressed up in togas, who declaim in the manner of third-rate stage companies doing bad Shakespeare.

Scrambling to avoid getting skewered by the tail of a monstrous scorpion --
such a genre cliche! -- Perseus (Sam Worthington) and Io (Gemma Arterton)
dodge through rocky crags while trying to find better cover in a mostly
desert landscape. And things are about to get worse, because that huge
scorpion isn't alone ... and the next one's even larger.

Such films just can't help looking and sounding like a product of far more innocent times, back when Steve Reeves made his Italian Hercules flicks in the late 1950s and early '60s, or when stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen wowed audiences with epics such as 1958's The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and 1963's Jason and the Argonauts.

The new Clash of the Titans makes an additional mistake, also common to this sub-genre: Director Louis Leterrier doesn't even try to control the various accents emanating from his cast, leaving us to believe that these gods and heroes came to Mount Olympus and ancient Greece by way of central casting in England and Australia.

Granted, this film's production values are top-notch, and modern special-effects technology translates into bigger, better and badder monsters ... but everything plays out with an air of silly bravado.

Probably not the mood Leterrier had in mind.

Exceptions exist, of course; Gladiator is a magnificent drama, and even the flawed Troy had its moments. And while the artificial CGI environment of 300 was distracting, the human passion came through pretty well.

Not so with Leterrier's Clash of the Titans. This is a mostly silly children's film, just like the 1981 original, which similarly strove for "respectability" by dragging a few famous faces into key roles. Thus, while Harry Hamlin's Perseus traded florid speeches with Laurence Olivier's Zeus and Claire Bloom's Hera back in the day, now Sam Worthington's Perseus gets bounced between Liam Neeson's Zeus and Ralph Fiennes' Hades.

Avatar: Myth-making

Avatar (2009) • View trailer for Avatar
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violence, sensuality, brief profanity and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.18.09
Buy DVD: Avatar • Buy Blu-Ray: Avatar (Three-Disc Extended Collector's Edition + BD-Live) [Blu-ray]



This is cinematic world-building on an epic, jaw-dropping scale.

Berkeley Breathed, late of Bloom County and Opus, delivered an entertaining rant in the Nov. 19 Los Angeles Times, and complained about the rampant complacence of the modern movie viewer. Computer-enhanced graphics make the fantastic far too ordinary, he argued; movie patrons have seen it all before, and yawn at what should astound them.

I can think back to seminal moments in filmmaking history: the ones that generated a sense of wonder that only a well-crafted science-fiction film can deliver. For example, we've no concept — at this great remove — of how viewers went absolutely nuts over Walt Disney's 1954 adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Movie audiences simply hadn't been taken to the ocean depths before, and folks were utterly knocked out.

Thanks to the data gathered by Jake (Sam Worthington, left) while in his avatar
form, Grace (Sigourney Weaver, foreground) and Norm (Joel David Moore)
learn more about the fascinating symbiosis between this planet's indigenous
people and every plant and animal in their environment. Trudy (Michelle
Rodriguez, background), a tough-talking gunship pilot who has come to respect
this scientific work, waits for instructions about their next mission.

I was around, however, for the similar thrill afforded by the opening of 1977's Star Wars, as Princess Leia's consular ship was pursued by the massive Imperial star destroyer: so huge it seemed to emanate from the space behind us in the theater. The deep-space thrills only got better, building to the vertigo-inducing climax when Luke Skywalker made his strafing run on the Death Star.

Many years passed before another movie delivered a similar eye-popping jolt, when 1993's Jurassic Park had me half-convinced that Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton had found a scientist who really did grow dinosaurs with cloning techniques.

And now, with Avatar, writer/director James Cameron's crew has taken us to another whole planet, with its own extremely complicated eco-system. The breathtaking attention to detail covers everything from topography to the nighttime sky, from the tiniest insect to the most massive lumbering predator, from huge trees to the yielding moss that glows green when trod upon.

Some of this newness and strangeness, due to narrative necessity, is highlighted and commented upon. Most of it, however, is just there: alternately dazzling or simply different things to see and hear, which quietly contribute both to the otherworldliness of this environment, and the notion that we are, indeed, no longer in Kansas.

Enormous care has been taken, while creating an entire interconnected ecosystem.

Very, very impressive.

Terminator Salvation: Big and bad

Terminator Salvation (2009) • View trailer for Terminator Salvation
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for action violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.22.09
Buy DVD: Terminator Salvation • Buy Blu-Ray: Terminator Salvation (Director's Cut) [Blu-ray]


The explosive action in Terminator: Salvation — which is relentless and, frankly, exhausting — comes in two flavors:

• Intimate and often deliciously creepy skirmishes between one or two civilians and a single human-sized robot (think of these as the classic "Schwarzenegger models");

While investigating Skynet's primary production facility, John Connor
(Christian Bale, left) and Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) fail to notice a rather
nasty surprise looming just behind them. And that's nothing to the shock Reese
would experience, if Connor were to explain the precise nature of their
relationship...

• Frankly ludicrous battles between clumps of civilians and massive land-based or airborne killing machines.

The former sequences deliver plenty of suspense and serve as pleasant reminders of what made 1984's Terminator and 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day such great action epics.

The latter, alas, appear to have been snatched from the upcoming Transformers sequel: diverting as live-action cartoon chases, but impossible to take seriously on any level. It's preposterous to believe that our puny and quite vulnerable heroes could outrun, outmaneuver and ultimate destroy any of these behemoths, let alone do so on a fairly regular basis.

To be sure, director McG (Joseph McGinty Nichol) and editor Conrad Buff do their best to prevent us from being bothered by such details. After a quiet and deliberately mysterious prologue, their film kicks into high gear and never lets up. The action scenes are well staged, and they make excellent use of production designer Martin Laing's vision of an apocalyptic, post-nuclear California.

Writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris also deserve credit for adhering so well to the increasingly confused continuity demanded by the time-travel elements of three previous films and a just-canceled TV series. Terminator Salvation expands upon established Terminator lore, while adding some reasonable extrapolations and even setting up the necessary "future" elements that will bring the action "back" to what we've already witnessed in the 1984 franchise-starter.

The downside, of course, is that this new film will be utterly incomprehensible to anybody not exceedingly well-versed in what has come before.