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What on earth is “Machete”? More properly, what in Texas is it? Originally one of the fake coming attractions that was part of the “Grindhouse” package—”You fucked with the wrong Mexican”—Robert Rodriguez’s expansion of his pungent “Mexploitation” joke to feature length is, surprisingly, an urgent political polemic that still pays tribute to violent and sexual eyeball kicks. In this way, it’s probably the first full-on pastiche of Roger Corman’s subversive play at his 1970s New World Pictures label that anyone’s ever assembled. Read the rest of this entry »

“Takers” is reportedly the largest-budgeted production ever from Sony’s Screen Gems division, at $32 million, and several action setpieces show where much of that money must have gone. Alternating between sun-streaked Los Angeles streets and glam, glum-lit club spaces, director John Luessenhop’s bitter, cynical cops-vs.-robbers-vs.-robbers-vs.-Russians über-mastermind heist movie resembles nothing so much as a late 1990s Hong Kong action entry. Luessenhop is sufficiently fond of the city to show street signs in each major scene, including full-on close-ups in one instance. The Hill Street setting of the story’s big caper evokes “Heat” (and “Inception,” shot after this film) but also the thriving exteriors of Kowloon in movies by John Woo and others in the last century. Luessenhop is fond of jerky camera motion that works against spatial sense, depriving some of the pleasures that extended location work should offer. And, in the increasingly operatic shootout in the film’s third act, the soundtrack is reduced to music and thudding sounds as gangsters systematically shoot up several hotel rooms and a corridor. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Nobody kills me until I say so!” There’s a gangster’s declaration for you, the tagline from the fictionalization of the life and exploits of French crime kingpin Jacques Mesrine. Told in two parts, drawn from a memoir, both directed by Jean-François Richet (“Assault on Precinct 13,” 2005), “Mesrine” takes the shape of a sleekly fitted suit for a plumped-up Vincent Cassel more than a fully-fashioned crime epic. But the movie doesn’t aim for “Godfather”-style complexity or Olivier Assayas-style impressionism (as in the forthcoming five-hour “Carlos”), but rather for a rapid-fire action bauble built on scenes of Mesrine’s rise, then ending abruptly in anticipation of the second film (due for release next Friday). Don’t expect the astringent experiments of a movie like Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” or the code-of-honor classics of Jean-Pierre Melville (“Le Samourai,” “Le Cercle Rouge”): it’s just a rapid-fire bit of brute pop gangsterism with chewy star turns (aside from the magnetic Cassel, there’s a nice cameo from Gérard Depardieu as a mentor to Mesrine). The latest foreign-language release from adventurous Music Box Films, “Mesrine” likely won’t be the success that “Tell No One” and the Millennium Trilogy (“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and autumn’s “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest”) have been fiscally, but if anyone is going to get mileage out of kicky big-screen foreign-language fare in the U. S. market, it’s that Chicago-based distributor. With Ludivine Sagnier, Cécile de France. 113m. (Ray Pride)

“Mesrine: Killer Instinct” opens Friday at Landmark Century. The second feature opens next Friday. The trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

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(Fuk sau, 2009)  Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To’s “Vengeance” finds Melville-style bursts of creative inspiration in a story that casts French superstar Johnny Hallyday as the criminal vengeur. Where Sylvester Stallone’s approach to action filmmaking in the twenty-first century is piling on with the violent elephantiasis of the setpieces of “The Expendables,” To’s approach is to take the possibilities of the frame, fracturing and reassembling them through inventive, vigorous editing, and taking the entire idea of genre and the artistic possibilities of moviemaking very, very seriously. Very seriously, especially when the subject is action. Logic comes not from plot or strenuous attempts at plausibility, but from kinetic choreography. Action is character. Motion is wit. The cartoonish is the everyday. And Hallyday’s a perfect raincoat man for his age, as Alain Delon, young and beautiful, was in Melville’s “Le Samourai.” Hallyday’s character is a French restaurateur who comes east when Triad gangsters shoot his daughter (Sylvie Testud) and kill her family. He’s named Costello, just like “Le Samourai”‘s Jef Costello; Hallyday was a last-minute replacement for… Alain Delon. With deep-set small eyes and a deeply lined face, Hallyday’s haunted from frame one, almost a reincarnation of the smaller, bulkier Charles Bronson, and once he’s on the streets of Hong Kong, and later, the more exotic streets of Macau, the former Portuguese colony, he’s all business, whether hiring a team of hitmen (the charming Anthony Wong, Lam Ka Tung and Lam Suet) or wielding a weapon himself. There’s some plodding plotting as well as the use of Polaroid pictures that evokes “Memento,” but it’s not worth the remembering: the bold moviemaking in bright, bold colors sears the mind instead. 110m. (Ray Pride)

“Vengeance” plays at Siskel Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. The Hong Kong trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

Another all-boys, bang-bang, blow-up-stuff action film distinguished only by the unusually large number of action stars on the poster and payroll. In its juvenile fear of females, “The Expendables” beats the recent mercenary camaraderie films “The Losers” and “The A-Team.” Although talk of feelings is off limits, feeling “dead inside” is a badge of honor for these guys, both the good ones and bad ones. Sylvester Stallone directs and stars as a leader of a freelance special-ops team. Their hangout is a tattoo parlor that serves as a bikers clubhouse when they’re not hired to neutralize Somali pirates or to do other dangerous out-of-town errands. Stallone boasts he did “over 100 drafts” with co-writer David Callaham, who calls their collaboration “by far the most unbelievable experience of my career–something I will never, ever forget… it’s a story I’ll get to tell for the rest of my life.” Their characters quote Nietzsche, read “The Survivors Club” and dub a plot point “Bad Shakespeare.” The most fun must have been making up names such as Hale Caesar, Lee Christmas, Toll Road and Ying Yang. And my favorite: James Munroe for the ex-CIA suit who hijacks a Latin American island country to cultivate coca. Paine is his cruel enforcer. “They came with money. Some Americans,” reports the local generalissmo’s daughter (Brazilian actress Giselle Itie, who’s proud of doing her own water-boarding stunts.) Much explodes and many nameless stuntmen die. All to a numbing, hammering score with breaks for retro rock classics by Mountain, Thin Lizzy and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Takeaway truth: “Friends die together.” With Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, David Zayas and cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. 103m. (Bill Stamets)

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Two hardbody NYPD gloryhounds, played by Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson, open this cop buddy comedy with a high-speed chase, shoot-out and fireball at Trump Tower that amps up their celebrity status. (Outlets covering the subsequent press conference on the steps of city hall include “New York Observer, uh, online” and “TMZ, print edition!”) Way back in the background at the precinct are another duo, accountant Allen (Will Ferrell) and his partner Terry (Mark Wahlberg), who’s overeager to get out of the office and into the street. These two detectives get on the case of a global investment conman (Steve Coogan) on the verge of gutting the NYPD pension fund. Adam McKay directs a crack-up script co-written by Chris Henchy. McKay has made earlier comedies with Ferrell—”Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights” and “Step Brothers”—that draw from the same persona and playbook. “The Other Guys,” though, may get more and smarter laughs than earlier projects aiming for younger audiences with grosser tastes in yuks. The expected homosexual panic, for instance, is notably more refined in bits about ballet dancing and harp playing. (And no one gets it in the nuts.) The single vomiting occurs out of frame. This is superior “Saturday Night Live” style, without the fatal link to particular characters or routines that tripped earlier “SNL”-branded films. Linking setpieces about Ferrell’s signature insecurity and improbable potency works better in features than live sketches on the small screen, where McKay is credited with contributions to 125 “SNL” episodes. If the machinations of undoing the bad guy are underplayed, due diligence is found in end credits packed with recent statistics on bailouts, bonuses, salary ratios, 401Ks and NYPD pension payouts. With Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Ray Stevenson and Derek Jeter as himself. 107m. (Bill Stamets)

An evil cat conspired to unleash a virus that would make humanity allergic to dogs in “Cats & Dogs” (2001). In “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore” another evil cat conspires to broadcast an audio file via satellite to radios, TVs and cell phones that will drive all dogs mad so mankind will put down this “man’s best friend” business. “I will enslave mankind,” cackles the hairless, pointy-fanged Kitty Galore (voiced by Bette Midler). Tactical inter-petdom detente ensues as Cold War-style secret spy organizations of cats and dogs team up—”a first in our political history”—to take down this power-crazed cat before forty-eight hours go by. For this interminable PG-rated mixed-breed of live action, puppetry and computer animation, Ron J. Friedman and Steve Bencich write laugh-free riffs on James Bond and Hannibal Lecter films, along with lines that only connoisseurs of pet-food ad copy will get. There is an abject lack of wit about four-legged friends in this sub-Saturday morning kids fare directed by Brad Peyton. With the voices of James Marsden, Nick Nolte, Christina Applegate, Katt Williams, Neil Patrick Harris; and the voices and bodies of Chris O’Donnell, Sean Hayes, Michael Clarke Duncan, Fred Armisen. Reviewed in 2D; 3D in some theaters. 100m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

“The Salt Identity”? Many alternate titles would suit “Salt,” but it’s simplest to say that Bourne and Bond take a kicking in Phillip Noyce’s highly enjoyable double agent thriller. At a fleet, muscular ninety-nine minutes, “Salt” is the veteran director’s demonstration of what big budget Hollywood action entertainment can be: a crafted rush instead of indifferent mush. Working from a script by Kurt Wimmer that was once a Tom Cruise vehicle, it’s tightly wound storytelling that telegraphs conversational engagement with real-world issues, working less with story arcs than story trajectories. There are a half-dozen classic politically themed thrillers that could be cited in comparison to Kurt Wimmer’s script, but considering how gratifying the complications are, it would be spoiler-ish to cite them, or much of the story beyond the suspicion that the career CIA agent Evelyn Salt may be a Russian sleeper spy and that Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union is invoked. Read the rest of this entry »

The plots of the original “Predator” and the new “Predators” are rudimentary: chase, kill. Repeat until reduce prey to an American star, plus one. Adrien Brody (“Splice,” “The Pianist”) takes over Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role; the co-survivor, verging on a love interest, was played in 1987 by a Mexican-born actress and by a Brazilian-born one in 2010. (In between, a Cuban-born actress played the comparable character in 1990′s “Predator 2.”) The novelty of the first film was the extraterrestrial who hunts for sport on earth. Trophies ensue. By pluralizing the title, Alex Litvak and Michael Finch add a minor notion: the U.S. commando characters originally created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas who saw action in Afghanistan, Beirut, Cambodia and Libya are now combatants hailing from an updated roster of global hotspots, including Chechnya and Sierra Leone. This prey with its own predatory tendencies include a Japanese yakuza, a Mexican narco-enforcer, an American psycho killer on death row and an Israeli Defense Force sniper (Alice Braga). Nimrod Antal (“Armored,” “Vacancy,” “Kontroll”) directs this lively action with style, if little else. Read the rest of this entry »

Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington

By Ray Pride

On assignment for Vanity Fair, journalist Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington [pictured] traveled ten times to document the fifteen-month duration of the deployment of soldiers of the Second Platoon at an outpost in remotest Afghanistan, in the Korengal Valley. Financing their effort themselves, the co-directors returned home with 150 hours of footage, and the “Restrepo” is the result.

It’s a war movie, but it’s immersive: we’re embedded with the soldiers and witness what they experience. “Hearts and minds,” a soldier mutters: “Restrepo” commands both when you watch this remarkable documentary. “The movie’s interesting, it’s kind of a hybrid,” Junger tells me. “It has the dramatic structure of a Hollywood war movie, I mean, it’s not didactic, it’s not informative, it’s not ‘about’ Afghanistan. It’s an experience, the way dramatic features are an experience. You enter that world for ninety minutes, and then you leave that world. But it’s about a topic of national concern, so I think it has the best of both, in terms of commercial potential, it has this theatrical drama but it’s real. I think it has a very good chance of people going to see it, I don’t want to use the word ‘entertainment,’ but as an emotional experience rather than a learning experience.” Read the rest of this entry »