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.
No comments:
Post a Comment