Falcon Rising (2014)

This is one I covered on the podcast way back on episode 29 in January of 2015, and had been meaning to review it on here ever since, but Michael Jai White has had so much new stuff come out since then that it was lost in the shuffle. In addition to us, this is a Superfecta Movie, as Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have all covered this as well.

Falcon Rising has White as a special forces veteran dealing with PTSD whose sister (Laila Ali) is nearly beaten to death down in Brazil in the favela she's working with as part of an NGO or something. He gets on the first plane down from "New York" to investigate, where his old war buddy Neil McDonough is there working for the State Department, and happy to help. As he digs deeper, what was initially sold to him as her getting involved in a dispute between drug dealers in the favelas, doesn't quite wash, and that's when the classic 2010s boogie man of trafficking rears it's ugly head. Add in some Yakuza and crooked cops, and Mr. White has a lot to contend with. That's okay, he's a pretty big guy, he can manage.

This is a pretty sweet deal. It has that mix of action and character development we've seen from other Ernie Barbarash films like Pound of Flesh, as the film starts with White playing Russian Roulette while remembering fallen comrades, and then going to the classic liquor store armed robbery scene where he needs to beat the two robbers senseless. We then lose the action a bit, but once we get it back, it's some of the best stuff of the decade, with some great fight scenes anchored by White's immense skills. In one scene, he's fighting off five Yakuza and doing all kinds of holds with his legs, like locking a leg around their necks while shooting other guys. This also employs a bit of the Gun Fu that John Wick was popularizing at the time, though with this coming out in 2014 too, maybe it was more of a polygenesis. We also get a nice reverse over-the-shoulder neck break for people who are connoisseurs of neck breaks in movies. It is a little long at 100 minutes, but once the film picks up its momentum, it's a series of one great fight scene after the next.

We're now at 29 movies for Michael Jai White, so he's one away from the 30 Club, which is something we'll probably make happen for him sometime in April (the movie I have in the can for him, MR9: Do or Die doesn't have him in it much, so we won't do that one.) This is the electric stuff we want from MJW, and in looking over his IMDb bio, I was trying to see where this fit all-time for him. Definitely below Black Dynamite and Blood and Bone, but from there, he has some great movies where he's more of a supporting player, like Accident Man and Triple Threat, ones like The Hard Way that aren't horrible but not classics, and then some rough ones that he tries to make better, like Chain of Command or The Commando. So does that make this third all-time for him among the ones I've seen? Maybe Don't Mess with Grandma is above this too because of how much fun it is, but that might be it. If it is his fourth-best, it's worthy if only for his great fights. One of the knocks on him--and I've made it myself--is that he doesn't take any hits, but here we get a better sense of why that is. Recently Ty and I watched Shrapnel, a film where Jason Patric walks around with an assault rifle and shoots Mexican cartel members who can't hit him despite shooting hundreds of rounds of CGI bullets. In that sense, I get why White is like "why can't I be afforded that same luxury?" And to that extent, this movie fits that pattern, we could've swapped out White for any number of Jason Patric, Cam Gigandet, or Kellen Lutz, but what makes this work is that White is such a great martial arts practitioner. We have a ton of recent stuff of his I need to catch up on, and since a chunk of it is on Starz, maybe I can make it happen while I have the cheap subscription for it.

This is our fifth Ernie Barbarash film, which means it's probably time he gets tagged, the only thing is, I don't know how many more movies of his we'll do. Abduction with Scott Adkins might be the last one, because now he's doing Christmas movies and schlock "go back to the old family farm in a Southern red state and see what really matters most in life" kinds of films--which, I'm sure those movies don't get into the family farms that are struggling due to market consolidation or companies like John Deere that prevent them from fixing their own farm equipment, but that's neither here nor there. For the other four films of his we've covered, there's the three he did with Van Damme, Pound of Flesh, 6 Bullets, and Assassination Games, and then Hardwired with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Val Kilmer. The thing I noticed though is, other than the last of those four, they're all longer, at least 100 minutes, but some nearing two hours, which is not something I see with his Christmas movies, as those need to be 90-minute get in and get out affairs, so I do wonder if while he's doing these Christmas movies if he wishes he could do the more substantial actioners he used to do. I guess the market's not there for it anymore, so Christmas Under the Northern Lights with Jill Wagner of late 2000s Mercury commercials fame is his best bet to make a living now.

We often talk about what I call the "baddie in a can," bad guys that can appear out of anywhere and don't require any development for us to know they're bad. This film employs two, the armed liquor store robbers, and the dreaded traffickers. The armed liquor store robbers is your classic fare. I don't remember the last time an action lead went into a liquor store to grab a fifth of Jack Daniels, that the place wasn't robbed while he was in there. And kudos to the stuntmen who play the robbers in these scenes, your work taking a beating from the hero is commendable, because without you we wouldn't have the action amuse bouche that is the thwarted liquor store robbery. With the trafficking, the film decides to go in a more realistic direction. Instead of young, upper-middle-class white women, they went with young girls who live in the forgotten lower classes of society, humans that are considered expendable, but who are the real victims of trafficking. And the decision to go that route, while more realistic, is hard to watch. No, they don't anything graphic, but seeing 10-12-year-old girls sitting on the floor of a basement is rough enough. In that sense, maybe we want this fake, urban legend version of trafficking that most films today employ, because it's easier to stomach in the 90-minute escape from reality we want out of these DTV actioners. Maybe, but I can't fault this film for depicting it in a more realistic way like they did.

Finally, while this was filmed in Puerto Rico, it takes place in Rio de Janeiro and New York City, two of the five biggest metro areas in the Western Hemisphere. Other than some establishing shots, the New York was definitely not New York, and it always fascinates me when people try to have other places pass for New York, but I imagine it must be the same thing for Rio if someone's familiar with it too. I also get why they would've filmed in Puerto Rico instead of Rio. I don't think there are any direct flights from the US to Rio outside of Carnival season, and even if there were, that's like a ten-hour flight. You definite save money and ease logistics if you can find locations in Puerto Rico that are good enough. That doesn't explain the New York thing though. While Rio's favelas played a key role in the film's story, New York played no part. White's character could've lived anywhere in the US, and it would've worked for us--in fact, they didn't even need to say where he lived, and we would've been fine with it. I get the budgetary limitations of shooting in New York, but considering how New York is a character in itself, doubling it but not needing it would be like having Seagal's stunt double in the film, but just having him sit there and mumble something in the early scenes, and never appear in the film again.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on many streamers here in the US, including Tubi. Despite the longer runtime, it has some great MJW moments, so for a free streamer it's worth checking out. And you can also check out the podcast episode in the archives, episode 29.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2295722

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Angels of the City (1989)

Continuing our trend this year of doing a PM post to start the month, I wanted to do something with Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, and decided the first of the two he directed would be a good way to go. (We've done the other one before, Coldfire.) Now you might be thinking, wasn't 57 Seconds the first February post? I'm still under he delusion that I'm posting on Saturdays instead of Sundays, and maybe I need to give up the ghost on that. Anyway, in addition to us, Mitch at the Video Vacuum covered this as part of his "It Came from the Thrift Shop" series, and Jon at PM is looking to cover this one soon too.

Angels of the City is about a group of kids in their late 20s going to USC, but acting like they're in their early 20s. They get an assignment from their sociology professor to interview people from another level of society from themselves, so two guys  decide to interview a lady of the night. Their girlfriends (Kelly Galindo and Cynthia Cheston), on the other hand, are pledging a sorority, and part of their initiation is to pretend to be ladies of the night for an evening. Both the guys and the girls end up in the middle of a turf war between two rival pimps, though the ladies get it much worse when they're kidnapped by one of them, and have to fight for their lives in some of the worst places of LA. Will they make it home alive?

This is quite a movie. Yes, it has the low-budget look of early PM, and you definitely see them trying to make the best of limited resources, like in an early scene where a lady of the night is being chased by some baddies on Hollywood Boulevard, and we see reused footage and locations being looped to extend the chase. But the thing is, the scope of what LHJ and company were trying to do here is admirable, and I think they pull it off in a lot of ways. Essentially it's a darker version of the 80s teen romp film, where a bunch of rich kids run up against the seedy underbelly of the city, but instead of that underbelly being a bunch of caricatures and stereotypes, they're complete people, while the kids, especially the two young ladies, see just how much they've started life on third base. I think the other issue is this movie has a 30-minute epilogue, and while it resolves itself well, there is a sense of "how did we end up here?" Grading PM on a curve though, between the ambition to want to do this commentary on 80s teen romp comedies, and the novelty of watching early PM--including a great death scene for Cole S. McKay--this is worth checking out.

Usually we start with the Hall of Famers, but I wanted to spotlight the film's director, co-writer, and co-composer Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs. In his review, Mitch mentioned that the same year this came out, his Welcome Back Kotter costar John Travolta had Look Who's Talking released in theaters, and while I know LHJ would've loved to have had a film like that himself, I liked that he took advantage of the platform PM was giving him to try to do something deeper. And it felt like everyone else at PM was into it and onboard, perhaps because it's the story of LA that wasn't often told. It's not just that there's a seedy underbelly, but that seedy underbelly exists right next to places like USC where some of the richest kids live; but also that that seedy underbelly is composed of actual human beings who didn't have it as lucky as those rich kids at USC, and to see that juxtaposition come through in every scene, even in what felt like a tacked on epilogue, was really impactful. The only other film he directed after this was Coldfire, but considering the kind of social commentary he demonstrated here, it would be nice if someone else gave him the platform to do more of this.

Many of the PM names you know and love are here. We have Rick Pepin on cinematography, furthering a template that PM used with him, and later Ken Blakey, where you could have an actor without a lot of directorial experience take the helm, and lean on either Pepin or Blakey as their DP. It also serves to give us the "PM look" we know and love later on, even if the quality of the film stock on this early one isn't quite what they use later. We also see Cole S. McKay doing stunts, including a great death scene as one of the rival pimp's goons; plus I've finally tagged stunt coordinator Michael J. Sarna, who starts off with 28 tags! When we look at the PM stunt coordinators, he's right there with McKay, Spiro Razatos, and Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy, so his tag was long overdue. Paul Volk, someone who probably should also be tagged, does editing duties on this, which I think he earns his money on some of these scenes where things are happening in different locations, and he needs to make them appear to look like one. Finally, Addison Randall was an assistant director, a name we see a lot of in early PM. If you look at their first handful of films, other than this one with LHJ at the helm, all of the other films were directed by either Joseph Merhi, Charles Kanganis, or Addison Randall.

I was trying to think of teen romp films that this could be answer to, and the two that first come to mind are License to Drive and Adventures in Babysitting. Another could be Risky Business. There's a cutesy, Hollywood idea of what sex work is, and what it means to be pushed to the margins of society, and the main characters experience it, live through it, and end up on the other side sleeping in their comfortable beds, while the people who are struggling no longer exist. And I think maybe that's why LHJ wanted the 30-minute epilogue, because it wouldn't have felt right to him to just roll credits after the young ladies escape their ordeal. He adds another layer in that epilogue too, where the sociology professor is more fascinated by what the girls experienced than concerned, so even he's coming from a place of seeing sex workers and other people struggling as more a novelty than as actual people. Ten years later when I was in college studying anthropology, my professors seemed more sensitive to this, making sure we looked at people as fellow human beings, and not subjects in a case study for a paper, and maybe that was why I was more sensitive to what LHJ and company were going for with the professor character in this film.

Finally, at the beginning of the film the radio announcer mentions Magic Johnson, and later a guy delivering Chinese food is wearing a Magic Johnson jersey. In 1989, the Lakers were a year removed from winning their fifth title with Magic, and despite the rise of the Pistons and the Bulls, plus the Trailblazers in the Western Conference, there was no reason to believe that run wouldn't continue. Two years later they lost to the Bulls in the Finals, and then Magic revealed he was HIV positive, and that was it. Now, no one should feel bad for Lakers fans, because they've won six more titles since 2000, which puts them in a tie with my Patriots for the most among the US Big 4 sports during that time, but it is interesting to think how we get so used to the world being one thing--that Magic Johnson had to retire early because he was HIV positive--that it's hard to put into perspective what that time capsule looked like right before it. Yes, the Lakers were declining a bit from their 80s dominance, but there was a sense that they still had another six or seven years left with Magic, they just needed to retool and within a couple years they'd be back. But alas it never happened, and the 90s were a lost decade for the Lakers, until they drafted Kobe and traded for Shaq. Again, not feeling bad for Lakers fans, just saying the mentions of Magic Johnson here forced me to look back at that slice of time and think about how different things were.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this free on Tubi here in the States, which I think is a great way to go. Between the novelty of early PM, and just the scope of what Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs and company were going for, I think it's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099042

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

57 Seconds (2023)

This is one Ty and I covered on the podcast, back on episode 228 in the archives, "Morgy on the Skids." That's right, one of our most respected actors, Morgan Freeman, is in the DTV world, or as Ty and I term it now, "on the skids." But with The Hunger Games Josh Hutcherson, it can't be the dregs of DTV, can it?

57 Seconds has Hutcherson as a tech blogger who sneaks backstage at health tech CEO Morgan Freeman's big keynote speech. When a gunman tries to kill him, Hutcherson pushes Freeman out of the way, but at the same time, picks up a ring that allows the user to jump back in time by 57 seconds. The catch is, the ring needs to recharge, so you can't chain a bunch of uses to go back any further. Hutcherson uses it though to make a lot of money gambling, and manipulate a young woman (Lovie Simone) into falling for him. Evil pharma billionaire Greg Germann now has Hutcherson on his radar, and he wants to know what his secret is, so he gives him a job, unbeknownst to him that Hutcherson has his own vendetta against Germann that this new job will allow him access to carry out his revenge. At some point, will Freeman want his ring back?

The premise of this sounds okay enough, but the practice... I don't know. The biggest issue for me was Lovie Simone's Jala character falling for Hutcherson, and the question of consent. In their first lovemaking session, every time she sees something in his room that turns her off, he uses the ring to go back and hide it. Then he uses it after she tells him what things she likes to go back and make it seem like he just knew organically that she liked those things. If he could read her mind, or installed cameras and microphones in her apartment, and used what he found through that to win her over, it wouldn't feel right, but somehow here it is? And to be fair, they do touch on that a bit when she learns about the ring, but she gets over it really quick. Beyond that, there were some parts that I liked. For example, Greg Germann is an actual evil billionaire, a concept I feel like we'd gotten away from in recent times. I don't want to give the movie too much credit for that though, because he's a pharma billionaire, and there's almost an alternative health element to Germann's character being bad that could be just as worse, but still, pharma billionaires are bad. And then we have Morgan Freeman. He's there, he's gone, he comes back, he goes again, and then he returns to end the movie. I guess if he's going to skid, no need to skid too long. The deciding factor for me is that this is on Pluto, which normally would be a selling point because it's free, but I don't know it's worth sitting through the volume of commercials Pluto has. Maybe if Tubi gets it.

We're almost 1400 posts in, and we finally have Morgan Freeman on here. In 2009, when we were two years in on this journey, Freeman was getting nominated for an Oscar for Invictus, a movie I thoroughly enjoyed, and the idea that 14 years later he'd be in a DTV flick like this was the furthest thing from my mind. But here we are, Morgy is in fact on said skids, and in looking at his bio, I think this started with 2015's Momentum, which also starred Olga Kurylenko, so by 2023 he'd been dabbling in the DTV world for some time. The thing is, he is still every bit the Morgan Freeman we know and love in this movie, which would be hard to manage, except the inclusion of Josh Hutcherson, who himself is newly on the skids, at least makes it easier. I think almost every scene Freeman has is with Hutcherson, so it all doesn't feel as out of place. I don't know if Freeman will have enough films to make the Hall of Fame, but he's sufficiently on the skids to have more than this one, so this won't be the last time we see him here.

This is also our first time featuring the Hutch, Josh Hutcherson, on here--I don't know if anyone calls him "the Hutch," but it sounds like a fun nickname for him, doesn't it? Anyway, as I mentioned above, the main thing he does for me is mitigate the awkwardness of Morgan Freeman starring in a DTV flick. I think where Hutcherson does well is living up to the material he's given, like The Kids Are All Right, he's totally believable as one of Annette Benning and Julianne Moore's teenage kids. This ain't that kind of material, and I think that's a different acting toolbox to sell us on something far-fetched that isn't as well developed. And to be fair, I don't even know to what extent Hutcherson wants to sell us on this movie. He had Five Nights at Freddy's come out a month after this, and I don't know the timeline of when he did one or the others, but I wonder if he signed onto this then got Freddy's and wished he hadn't. At least he got to act opposite Morgan Freeman, that would be a selling point for me too.

I wasn't the biggest Ally McBeal fan, but when it came out in the late-90s, it wasn't like the world was any kind of monoculture then--and I think the concept of a "monoculture" is a bit of a reductive way to look at the past--but a hit show on network TV at that time was a big enough deal that, even if I didn't watch it, I knew it existed and knew Greg Germann was on it. Unlike Freeman, who's an Oscar-winning actor and one of the best of his generation; or Hutcherson, who was part of a blockbuster franchise; Germann is a professional actor with a lot of credits on TV shows and in movies, and from time to time we see him in something like this. And unlike Hutcherson, who can find a Five Nights at Freddy's, or a Morgan Freeman who has awards and all-time classic movies to his credit, Germann needs to keep being that professional actor, so he's not mailing anything in, not mentally installing a new kitchen island with his paycheck, and I appreciated that from him here. We needed a villain, he was up to the task, and he delivered. I don't know if Greg Germann's performance is enough for you to sit through myriad Pluto ads to see it, but it is enough for anyone looking to cast him in their next project to say, "yeah, Germann will give us a good run, call his agent."

Finally, I guess there's the question of, "Matt, what would you do if you could go back in time by 57 seconds?" I think I'd be too afraid to use it. Maybe the gambling thing, but like we see in this film, casinos will throw you out if you win too much. And even that scares me too much, I don't want to mess with Time at all. Like if I watch a roulette ball land on a spot, then go back in time 57 seconds and bet on it, what other eventualities am I changing with this new reality I've created? And just the idea of Time as this thing that can go backwards and forwards, thinking of that alone gives me a popsicle headache, forget actually doing it! No, if I found that ring, I'd give it back to Morgan Freeman and go about my life. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Pluto here in the States, but I don't know if it's worth dealing with the volume of commercials they have. If it ever makes it to Tubi, and you want to see Morgan Freeman on the skids, it might be worth it. As far as the podcast episode, you can check that out in the archives, episode 228, "Morgy on the Skids."

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18083578

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.