Triple Threat (2019)

When I saw this was on Netflix, and I saw all the names involved, I had to make it happen. How could this not be good, right? Our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has also covered this, so you can go to his site to see what he said.

Triple Threat has Michael Jai White as a bad mercenary who leads a team, including Tiger Chen, Tony Jaa, and Michael Bisping, on a raid in a small Thai village to free their leader, Scott Adkins, from a secret service prison they were holding him in. In the process, Iko Uwais's girlfriend is killed, and he wants revenge. Also, White, Adkins, and Bisping turn on Jaa and Chen, so they want revenge too. Seems like a natural fit that Jaa and Chen would team up with Uwais, but Uwais doesn't trust them, so he gets them arrested, then busts them out at the same time White and Adkins go to bust them out. Oh, and a Chinese heiress and businesswoman gets involved, and Jaa and Chen have to protect her, and then the mercenaries are in trouble, because they were supposed to kill the heiress, and if they don't, they get killed. Through all that, will the good guys win?

Where do I go with this? It's 96 minutes long, which should be a good number, but with the prodigious cast where we want to let everyone shine, and still have a big, unfolding plot, there's not a lot of room for everything we need. There were some great fights, but some didn't quite give us what we needed. After Uwais and Chen get after it in an underground fight ring at the beginning, and Uwais joins Jaa and Chen at their place after, I was thinking this was going to be these three unleashed, chasing down the baddies for revenge, bar fights, outdoor market fights, fights wherever we can get them. When Uwais gets Jaa and Chen arrested though, we lose that, and while what we get wasn't bad, it ended up being something that was hard to fit everything in. Like Thanksgiving, I got the turkey, the stuffing, mashed potatoes, rolls, vegetables, maybe a stuffed acorn squash, then apple pie and pumpkin pie--next thing you know, you're full in 15 minutes and all of that ends up as leftovers, except with a movie, you can't have leftovers, you've only got those 96 minutes to make it work. As much as I hate to say it, I could've done this on turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes with gravy all over it. Leave the rest and let me take a nap after.

The thing is, revenge for killing Uwais's girlfriend and for trying to kill Jaa and Chen would have been enough to drive this movie as they went after Adkins and White. Either that, or this needed to be 130 minutes and done on a Fast and Furious movie scale to make it work. Just the same, for 96 minutes, if you just go fight scene to fight scene, it's not a bad deal. That early one between Chen and Uwais for example was great; and the one at the end where Jaa and Uwais go at Adkins was great too. I also liked how they used White's size to his advantage against Uwais, but I would have liked to have seen them go even further, maybe having Uwais go into an enclosed space like Jet Li did against Dolph in The Expendables and use White's size against him.

One of the things that happened while I was on hiatus, was Iko Uwais blew up, and I'm still catching up to where everyone else has been long before me. He's the youngest in the cast but more than holds his own and stands out among them as an equal, which is remarkable considering the talent involved here. After this I watched the Netflix TV show Wu Assassin, which suffered from the standard Netflix TV series issues: it was more like a 10-hour movie, meandered, and fleshed out and spent time on characters we didn't need, at the expense of more Uwais action. This was similar in the sense that we had too many characters, but as much as I wanted to see Uwais, I also wanted to see Jaa, Chen, White, Adkins, and Bisping more too, so, say, a 5 episode Netflix miniseries with this cast would have actually worked--assuming they didn't go all Netflix on it with too much plot, or course.

The thing about this cast is all of these are guys--apart from Bisping who I think needs a bit more work as a supporting character before he can carry his own lead--are the next wave of the DTV world. As the old guard are either in their late 50s, 60s, or in some cases pushing 70, someone needs to come in and carry the torch in the high octane action movies we love, and these guys are all it. In that sense, it almost is like having them all in one film is too much, because we want them all to be the leads, and the result is none of them end up being that. If you peeled off any two from this cast and put them in a buddy cop movie, 88 minutes, nice compact plot about a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, it would be a runway hit. Even something like Skin Trade that had White, Jaa, and Dolph worked really well, in that we got a good amount of all three. I think if this was supposed to be a showcase film for all six of these stars, maybe it needed less plot, and more of that showcase element, like what we got when Uwais fought Chen in the underground tournament.

This is one of five Scott Adkins that came out in 2019, the other four being the spectacular Avengement, Ip Man 4, Abduction, and Altar Rock. I joked on Twitter during Oscar night that he could have had his own category! And 2020 doesn't look like he's slowing down much, because he already has 4 in various forms of development for this year. Because he has so much out there, often my tendency is to grab something like this that has a bunch of other people in it, so I can get them all some of the spotlight on the site. It was the same mentality that caused me to focus on more of Fred Williamson's 90s and 2000s work over his great stuff from the 80s, because I was like "oh, this movie from 1996 also has Ice-T and Gary Busey in it, I've been meaning to get more of their films up too." It didn't work for Williamson, and I don't know that it works for Adkins. I'm going to stop stalling and get Avengement up next for him.

But right now we need to wrap this up. While it's on Netflix, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to check this out, but I don't know that it's a buy or even a rent, which is too bad, because with this cast you'd think it'd be an instant classic. It might be a case of less is more, and probably the better thing to do is seek out the solo works from all of these guys instead.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6643972

Skin Trade (2014)

It's been a while since I've made a new post, and this film was a reminder that I hadn't intended to take as long a hiatus as I ended up taking.  I think I saw this sometime in 2015 or 2016, with the idea of writing a review on it that never materialized.  It's funny, because when word first came about this film back in 2012/2013, I couldn't wait to make it happen; but life took over and suddenly it became 2019 and nothing had been done.  Well, we're making happen now.

Skin Trade stars DTVC Hall of Famer Dolph Lundgren as Nick, a cop in Newark, NJ, trying to take down a Serbian mob boss played by Ron Perlman--which means we're already knee-deep in the hoopla of what is a great cast.  Perlman blows up Dolph's house, kills his wife and daughter, and almost kills Dolph in the process--but doesn't, so Dolph heads over to Cambodia to get his revenge.  At the same time, Tony Jaa is trying to take down Perlman's white slavery ring in Cambodia.  Looks like Dolph and Jaa are on a collision course to whackiness!

This wasn't too bad.  Dolph and Jaa were both great, there were some solid fight scenes; plus DTVC favorite Michael Jai White was in this in a supporting role, and his one fight with Jaa didn't disappoint either.  In addition to Perlman, we had DTVC Hall of Famer Peter Weller, and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa had a small part, making this the third film after Showdown in Little Tokyo and Bridge of Dragons he's done with Dolph.  I think you could do a lot worse than to stream Skin Trade for 90 minutes on Netflix if you're looking for a movie to watch.

We had had some misses with Dolph films lately, so to have something solid like this was a relief.  He co-wrote the script for this, and the movie had a strong anti-sex trafficking message he wanted to get across, but he made sure that in getting that message through to us that the plot didn't take away from the action.  While I have been on hiatus the past four years, Dolph has been busy, so we have a lot of catching up to do with him.  Hopefully we'll be able to take care of that.

I believe this film is Tony Jaa's America debut, and he was great as always.  The one thing I would say is, for the film that would be his US debut, I would want it to be more of a Jaa vehicle, not a Dolph-Jaa vehicle, if you know what I mean.  The fight scenes he had with Dolph were great, and then the one he did with Michael Jai White was fantastic.  There was a sense that White and Jaa were looking forward to shooting that scene, which is something I love in a DTV actioner, stars that enjoy putting out a high-quality product to such a degree that they look forward to what the end result could be on-screen for us.  In the current DTV age where stuff gets pumped out assembly-line style with a spate of big names flashed across the cover mailing in performances to pay off alimony and child support claims while scenes are cobbled together with split-second edits in post, it's refreshing to see some stars really get after it, especially the way Jaa and White did, and hopefully we'll see more of that in the future.

As I mentioned above, this film had a strong anti-sex trafficking message, which I think is great.  I don't know that you can make villains more despicable with less work than to have them selling young girls into slavery.  When Dolph and Jaa rampage through the warehouse that's holding the girls, the baddies can't die enough, or die painfully enough.  The film also tries to address two themes that adjoin the sex trafficking plague: one, that there's a market for it--Perlman's character tells Dolph that he's just giving his buyers what they want--; and then the idea that it's such a big problem, what is saving a few girls going to do when there are millions of others out there--White's character's rationale for why he sold out and took Perlman's money.  With the first one, it's a tepid message that the film tries a couple other times to drive home when we see Americans at the clubs in Cambodia where the trafficked girls are, but never really gets into enough.  Maybe we needed to see an America guy bring a girl out to a back room and then see Jaa kick his ass to fully flesh out that message more--what would it have taken, five more minutes of screentime?  The second one also isn't really addressed.  The fact that Dolph's family was killed gives him a motive beyond simple altruism to take these guys down.  To really rebut White's character's assertion that the struggle against sex trafficking is a futile endeavor, it would have been better if Dolph had no motives other than taking down a sex trafficker to make it stick.

Among the many DTV stars having a small part in this, one of my all time faves, Peter Weller, plays Dolph's boss.  I almost feel like they could have done more with the few scenes he was in.  I'm not saying give him a bigger part, but maybe give him better lines, really bring out the fast-talking, no-nonsense guy we've loved in his other films.  This is something I think could be done with a lot of DTV flicks that have big names in small parts.  We don't need everyone to be Brando in Apocalypse Now, but it would also be nice to say "only Weller could have done what we saw there," or "that's what we love about him, it's great to see him in this." 

Finally, before I wrap up, I wanted to mention one of the main baddies.  His character name was "Janko," which reminded me of JNCO jeans.  Did anyone have a pair of JNCOs back in the late 90s?  I did, a pair of wide-leg khaki ones that had back pockets so deep, I could literally fit a 40 in them.  I'm not kidding, I would walk across the UMaine campus on a Friday or Saturday night with a Bull Ice 40 in my back pocket.  God, those were the days...

Okay, if I'm digressing into JNCO jeans and Bull Ice 40s from twenty years ago, it's probably time to wrap this up.  My final verdict is that this is pretty good, certainly worth checking out through Netflix streaming.  Good cast, good fights, nice action overall.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1641841