Force of Execution (2013)

I looked at this film back in February or March before I moved down to DelCo, PA, with the idea in mind that I would use it to get back to doing more posts again after a hiatus. Instead, it sat on the shelf until June, when, after telling Moe at Drunk on VHS and Jon at the After Movie Diner that I would do a podcast on their night of programming, I was stuck without a movie and a guest for my second show. So I decided to do an hour, solo, on this film and Steven Seagal in general. It wasn't pretty, which is why you won't find that episode on our archive page. What did happen in that episode though, was my guest from the first episode (Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark), Jamie, was commenting in the chat, helping me out, and from that episode on she was our regular cohost on the DTVC Podcast up through the 2015 episodes.

Force of Execution has Mr. Seagal as a crime boss in New Mexico or something, who sends his number one guy, Bren Foster, in to take out a snitch in the local prison. Problem is, Ving Rhames tells him to kill the wrong guy, and the people who wanted the snitch dead are pissed at Seagal's guy. This leads to the guy getting his hands smashed and Seagal retiring him for awhile, living in a studio above Danny Trejo's restaurant, which is owned by Seagal and is where Seagal's daughter works. Long story short, Rhames gets out of prison, tries to start a turf war to take over from Seagal, Trejo uses scorpions to fix Foster's hands, and after the daughter is kidnapped they save her and live happily ever after.

I don't know what happened with this film. It was okay in the early going, the Bren Foster going into the prison to take care of business was awesome, and I thought, "hey, I can live with this." Then it was left turnsville all over the place. We got Foster with crippled hands, then Trejo uses scorpions later in the film to fix them. What? Was there any point in the film that it looked like Rhames would beat Seagal? No. Then we have the damsel in distress trope mixed with the gross, "protect our blond white women from degenerate black men" trope that those espousing a so-called "post-racial" US will tell you shouldn't exist anymore, but there it was in all it grossness. Ultimately I'm left wondering "where was that film I used to know when Bren Foster was kicking ass?"

Let's start with Seagal. When I was writing this and also preparing for that ill-fated podcast, I went into it after watching this film with the idea that all of Seagal's recent DTV stuff was crap. That's not really true, in fact he's had some good ones. For example, 2009's Driven to Kill. Okay, I guess that was 5 years ago now, so who knows. The biggest problem here was that the film was setting up as a Bren Foster vehicle with Seagal perhaps passing the torch, or maybe being the number one but giving Foster the bulk of the fights. Either one would have worked, instead of this muddled thing we had here. Is it possible that Seagal isn't able to pass the torch? That he can't let a potential talent like Foster really take the film and run with it? I can understand that, but if that's the case, don't set it up like Foster is the main guy, or the one the story is centered on. This film started in one direction, a direction that worked, and then went in an entirely different direction that didn't work, and that was the biggest disappointment. Seagal still has some more films coming down the pike. We'll see what they look like.

I want to get back to Bren Foster and his character. He had a sweet scene in the beginning, proving beyond anything that he can get after it. Also, the having his hands crippled I don't think was a deal breaker, that has happened before--Yojimbo for example. What would've been cool is if he could've gone all Yojimbo to get his revenge on both Seagal and Rhames, like he starts a turf war between the two and they kill each other and he comes out on top. Again, Seagal couldn't let that happen, he had to be the omnipotent leader, he had to be a good guy despite being a crime boss, and he couldn't let anyone, especially not Bren Foster, get over on him, even if he was playing a baddie. And then we have the scorpion thing, which made no sense. We had a good fight where Foster took out some guys with no hands. Why couldn't we do that? Have a guru train him to fight without his hands, and then he gets his revenge, fooling people by playing the part of the helpless crippled man. Instead we got a mess.

Ving Rhames plays the baddie. Unlike Seagal, he doesn't mind being the bad guy who ultimately loses. He was awesome in this role, making sure he played a baddie that was entertaining but sufficiently bad enough that we want him to be taken down. In my mind though, while he can play a great villain, his best DTV turn was as the hero in The Tournament, and hopefully we'll get more of that in the future. Danny Trejo had a smaller role as, I don't know, The Noble Savage? As I mentioned above, this film did not do well with the way it injected race into it, and while Trejo with the whole scorpion thing wasn't as bad as the black degenerate gangsters and the need to protect the blond white woman from them, it was still a little off. I think Trejo as Foster's landlord as an independent character, apart from Seagal, would've worked much better--and get rid of the scorpions too.

This was what Seagal looked like in the final scene, SWAT gear, special ops, seemingly out of nowhere. "Oh, by the way, crime boss knows special ops too. What? What's wrong with that?" Maybe this is the future of Seagal though? No more slap-chop covered up by shaky cam attempt at a solid fight scene, maybe special ops is how he furthers his action career. We did have it in Maximum Conviction, and while it didn't necessarily work, I'm willing to withhold judgement. Let's see what happens, but if we get a Pistol Whipped with good shootouts based on this Seagal, I'll take it.

So this is a pass for me, it's just a muddled mess that seems to be more indicative of Seagal's recent DTV output. That's too bad, because if Seagal took a step back and let a Bren Foster take him down, we might have had the film we wanted. As he saw in Machete, it's okay to be the baddie, and for some movies, it works better. This film is one where it would have, and because he didn't play the baddie, the whole thing suffered.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2611626/

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Soldiers of Fortune (2012)

This one has been on Instant for a long time now, and I've been meaning to get to it.  The cast list is prodigious to say the least: Christian Slater, Ving Rhames, Colm Meany (we always want to do films with Star Trek: The Next Generation cast members), Sean Bean, Dominic Monaghan, and James Cromwell.  How could I possibly ignore that?  And how could that possibly be bad?  Well, we'll see.  Also, our buddy Mitch at The Video Vacuum hit this one too, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Soldiers of Fortune stars Slater as a special forces guy who's dishonorably discharged after he punches a CIA agent (Colm Meany) in Afghanistan that's about to kill a member of his unit.  Poor and in need of cash, a woman comes to him with a proposition: take four billionaires into battle, bring them home alive, and the money they get will be enough for him to fix his problems and enough for her and her brother to fund the resistance to liberate the small Black Sea Island she's from from the evil regime that's terrorizing it.  And it just so happens that that regime's security head is none other than Meany, Slater's old nemesis.  Sounds like two birds with one stone if you ask me.



This one is pretty rough.  To start with, we have this construct of training billionaires to fight that bogs the story down immediately.  It's an interesting idea in theory, but in practice it's a series of bad montages with off-beat music and bad comedic asides.  From there nothing else is ever developed.  The baddies aren't developed, Slater isn't developed, the woman who recruits him isn't developed; all we get are these billionaires, who are not people we really want to know that well anyway, and because there are so many of them, we never get to see any of them developed well either.  The problem with that is, we wonder why we're here, what the point is.  If it's for the action, what we get is not all that compelling beyond a few moments here and there.  For instance, when the rebel villages is raided by Meany and his men, it's supposed to be tense and action-packed, but instead we see the woman who recruited Slater running around ducking her head like we're watching a behind the scenes featurette-- it was that unconvincing.  Between the plot that was a mess, and the action that was hit or miss, Soldiers of Fortune is a skip for me.

I don't know what we're doing with Christian Slater here either, because he was really good, but his character was so sauteed in wrong sauce it wasn't funny.  He's playing a special forces guy that saw real action in Afghanistan trying to show these rich boys that it's not really a game out there.  The thing is though, he's doing the same thing in a real life way by acting in the movie!  I like the potential message to the consumer of films like this: that what you see isn't what the real thing is, and you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking seeing a bunch of action films makes you a soldier; but by having Slater be the messenger you cut his legs out from under him as a character, plus, the movie itself isn't realistic either, it's still a movie!  I can't blame Slater for that though, he did his best with the role.  As far as I can tell, as an actor, he hasn't had a DTV dud performance, even if some of the films like this one have been.



Here we have Sarah Ann Schultz being held by the woman who recruited Slater (if you see her real name on imdb you'll understand why I don't use it here), and I wanted to use this moment to talk about how this was indicative of a much bigger problem in the film.  Schultz's character was the daughter of the colonel who runs the island, and she's introduced to us as a psychotic femme fatale, and the one real weakness of the colonel, is you can get to him through her.  So we get that introduction that they go out of their way to give us at the beginning instead of getting on with the action, yet they only use it for a quick moment at a plot point near the end.  Why bother if that's all you're going to do?  And this was the whole film, things introduced and never fleshed out, so it's like our time is wasted constantly.  The thing is, this could've been a great underpinning for a better plot: kidnap Schultz earlier, create more tension, delve deeper into the characters, and then if the action scenes are still lackluster, at least they have more purpose; and if you're not going to go in that direction, forget these big introductions that lead us to believe you will.

All right, let's try to go through this cast.  Ving Rhames plays an African arms dealer, complete with a bad accent.  Why make Ving Rhames into a goofball?  He can't do it, he's too bad ass for us to believe it.  Sauteed in wrong sauce.  Colm Meany would've been a great baddie, had he been developed.  He was great at the beginning, but he only has a few other scenes.  Again, why are you giving him to us as this awesome baddie if you're not going to use him?  Sean Bean played a metal magnate or something.  He's Sean Bean if you're wondering.  Dominic Monaghan played a video game designer who creates really violent video games.  For some reason his character has a broken leg, but it was one of those "plot convenience theater broken legs", meaning it's broken when the plot needs it to be, and not when it's more expedient.  James Cromwell plays a cell phone mogul.  I think he's supposed to be the new fangled version of the Texas oil man, but, as much as he tried, it wasn't written well enough to come off.  Finally, imdb says DTVC favorite Tim Abell is in this, but I didn't really see him.  There's one scene that's an ad for the rich people go to war camp that Slater is recruited to work for, and I thought he could have been in there, but if that's so, it's a tiny non-speaking part.  On the one hand I think it might have been for the best because this wasn't the best movie, but on the other, it would've been cool to see him in this, and cool to see him act opposite all of these great names.



Finally, I noticed this great blue bird in one of the establishing shots.  When a film is the kind of slog this one was, an avian buddy like this can be a welcomed sight.  I wish we had more birds in the film, because we really needed them.  Just a big ol' bird sanctuary for 20 minutes of film would've been great.

Okay, I have no idea what's happening here, so I might as well wrap this up.  Even with the cast, even with the quick runtime, even with the availability on Netflix, this is a skip for me.  It was like a bad City Slickers paradigm, or worse, Soldier Boyz, and between the lackluster action and the bogged down plot, I was looking for all the avian friends I could find for support.  Unfortunately they were few.  (I believe I've officially lost my mind.)

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1678051/

7 Below aka Seven Below (2012)

I saw this was on Instant, and it had Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames in it.  That's it, oh, and it was 90 minutes long.  That helps too.  As an aside, did you know that Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames were born about seven months apart?  Both in 1959, Rhames on May 12, Kilmer on December 31.  imdb is a wonderful time waster, isn't it?

7 Below is about a house in which the family's adopted son kills them all in the early 1900s.  When a group of people in the present time, including Val Kilm and Luke Goss, take a bus trip into the Minnesota wilderness, and the bus crashes, local man Ving Rhames takes them back to his place to wait out a storm.  That place is, you guessed it, the house where the kid offed his family.



I know Val, it hurts.  I don't know what we're doing here.  Too much nothing happening.  Too much almost happening but not happening.  So many loose ends flying together near the end that I needed a pair of safety goggles.  Maybe most egregious: our heroes do nothing to figure out their own plight or how they can fix it.  They stumble around aimlessly in the dark, though we're supposed to believe they know what they're doing, but they never get close to what's happening to them, and need it revealed in the last 10 minutes.  That's lazy in my book.  There was an attempt to affect a Stephen King style secluded location creepiness, but the characters don't buy in, which means we lose it; and the Vincent Price haunted mansion style film falls flat too when, despite Rhames's best efforts, his Price-like character is written too flatly to keep us intrigued.  By the time we see a ghost in a sheet attack the hero (I'm not kidding, it was almost bad Halloween costume ghost in the sheet), I was done.  This is a pass for me.

Val honey, I know, what is your agent doing?  How did you end up in this?  Yes, if you close your eyes enough maybe it'll all be a dream and you'll be back playing Jim Morrison.  His role in this isn't as big as you'd like, and while I'm giving some of the plot away, I think it's better to warn you going in that, while he's good, he barely makes it through the first third of the film.  A surprising development?  A plot twist keeping us on our toes?  Or a Kilmer bait-and-switch?  You decide.  (Oh, and I will not make any jokes about how former Batman Kilmer looks primed to play the Penguin in the next film.)  (Didn't you just say you weren't going to make that joke?)



I don't know if this movie was trying to be original or hit us with an original concept, but it was pretty paint-by-numbers, right down to the classic White Man Will Save You trope.  Latina?  White Man will save you.  What reason do you have not to trust me?  There is not 500 years of history telling you you're making a mistake, this is a movie, and White Man is good, very good.  Yes, statistically speaking, if a woman is stranded on the side of the road with car trouble and a straight White Man pulls over to help her, things are more likely to end badly for her than good for her-- but not in Movieworld, where White Man is good and he will hug you and love and protect you from Bad Men.  Save us White Man!

Ving Rhames does his best to pull what he can from his character.  He tries to make it a cross between his own aesthetic and that old Vincent Price haunted mansion character, but there isn't much there for him to work with.  Man it was fun watching him try though.  Maybe that's why he took this role, for the challenge of pulling that off.  If you really want to think outside the box though, have the blond-haired blue-eyed hero play the Vincent Price character, and Ving Rhames be the guy that picks up the hot Latina who's having car trouble.  Now that's a plot twist for an American movie.



Among the other stars, we had Matt Barr as our hero, Bonnie Somerville as Kilmer's wife, and Rebecca Da Costa as the woman Barr picks up by the side of the road.  They all do the roles you expect them to, though Somerville as Kilmer's wife was fun when she and Kilmer were arguing early on, and it was too bad she couldn't play off him more.  Then there was Luke Goss and Barr's brother.  We've seen him in a fair amount of DTV roles, and he seems to have carved out this niche for himself playing the early-thirtysomething all-American jackass.  He has it all down, the mannerisms, the speech (though his accent does peek out from time to time) the boot-cut designer jeans with rips in all the right places, the gaudy belt buckle, the knit cap, and the four-button muscle-fit henley.  The thing is, in real life he's a fortysomething man from London.  I guess if his twin brother Matty can carve out a niche playing gigs at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, Luke can carve out a niche as the all-American jackass, and I think he being removed from it like he is, he can bring a sense of self-awareness to his rendition of the character that a real all-American jackass wouldn't have.  In that sense, Goss may have been the most consistent character, in that like the others it was so one-dimensional, but he's going for that and nailed it.

Obviously this is a pass for me.  My girlfriend told me that when she looked it up on Netflix after I told her I was reviewing it, that one of the reviewers on there asked for the ol' temporal refund-- you know, "I want my 90 minutes back."  I never demand the temporal refund, because good or bad I get a review out of it, but you might, so I'd avoid it, because we all know no one has ever been made whole on that temporal refund in the history of movies.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988781/

Death Race 3: Inferno aka Death Race: Inferno (2012)

When last we visited the Death Race series, we were on prequel 1, Death Race 2.  That one I thought would've been good had it not been for the nausea inducing split-second MTV edits that gave me a migraine.  Part of me went into this one, the sequel to the prequel, even more apprehensive.  That 105-minute running time didn't help.  Also, our buddy at Explosive Action did this one too, so you can go there to see what he says about it.

Death Race 3 takes place after part 2.  Luke Goss is back as Frankenstein, and he's one Death Race win away from his freedom.  Problem is, owner Ving Rhames sells the rights to tycoon Dougray Scott, which should be an awesome thing for Rhames because he's cashing in, but I guess he feels like he lost to Scott,or something, which makes no sense to me either.  Anyway, Scott isn't down with this whole let Frankenstein go thing, so he tells him he'll kill him or something if he wins the next Death Race, which is a three-day affair in South Africa, across the desert, even though the racers return back to the prison at the end of each leg, so it's not really across the desert, just three out and backs.  Now Goss needs some help from his friends if he's going to take the evil Dougray Scott down.



Wow, where do we begin?  The shaky-cam MTV edits thing from the last one is worse in this one.  Man, can I just say, I love watching a movie I can't see.  I love not being able to focus on anything for more than half a second.  From an action standpoint, we had a few good chases with some sweet crashes, and in those moments, I wanted to temper my bad review; but then we had three fight scenes that I couldn't focus on either, which was really frustrating-- again, I love being frustrated by my movies.  Story-wise, I don't what we're doing here.  We had too many racers-- actually, too many for the movie too, because they had this battle royale between the women navigators, where 14 (or 16, I don't remember, and it doesn't matter) fought to the death for 10 spots with ten racers, only to have 11 racers race-- but it was hard to keep track, and with the constant jump cuts, and all the characters and cars being similar and unremarkable, I couldn't make sense of anything.  Then Rhames sells the rights to Death Race to Dougray Scott, makes money on the deal, but now wants revenge on him?  Will the guy who sold Tumblr to Yahoo want revenge on Yahoo now after he personally made $250 million on the deal?  I don't know, this was a hot mess with a few nice crash scenes in it.

I watched the original Death Race 2000 for comparison to this one.  First off, I love the idea that an improvement on the original was making it so we can't see it.  "You know what I didn't like about that old one that I really want to improve?  The fact that it didn't involve rapid jumpcuts.  Seriously, you're not making a movie unless you're giving your audience a headache."  The original also had compelling characters.  Not only Frankenstein, but Stallone as the main heel was great, as was David Carradine's navigator.  Here, for the heel we had a guy that looked like a cross between Colin Hay and Danny Bonaduce, who had like three lines and did barely anything heelish, unlike Stallone; for the navigator we had Tanit Phoenix who, outside of a brief moment where she wields a flamethrower, does nothing but show off her cleavage and have silly romantic moments with Goss that were grafted in, all of it a total waste of her character.  Also, the original was almost 30 minutes shorter, yet covered much more ground from a story standpoint.  That one had the whole dystopian future, the rebels, and then the mysterious Frankenstein character.  We had none of that here, the best they could do was the Dougray hostile takeover that didn't make any sense.  This is not mere nostalgia factor rearing its head again, the original really did do a better job at making their movie than this one did.



In the last film Ving Rhames made up for a lot of that film's shortcomings, but unfortunately here he wasn't in it enough to do that.  As always, he's splashed across the cover, making it a sweet Rhames bait-and-switch. I understand maybe you couldn't get Rhames to shoot for the whole thing, and maybe you didn't want to wait for him to be more available, but that's when you show some integrity and put Dougray Scott on the cover instead.  I guess that's too much to ask though from a movie that's apparently so bad the people making it don't want us to actually see it, instead inundating us with rapid jumpcuts.  I wonder if the whole film is just cardboard boxes and tarps and the jumpcuts make it so we couldn't see that.  If so, I hope they recycled all that after.

Danny Trejo had a little more screentime than Rhames, which was good, and I think his character was a little better than the last time, but it wasn't a great Trejo style character anyway.  I've noticed that for Trejo to work, he really needs a bigger part, even as a supporting character, it can't be a few lines here or there.  Like in Recoil he was the main baddie, or in Machete he was the hero, he had a lot of room to work, and we got the full effect of what Trejo can do.  I think that's because he's kind of a reductive actor, he's said himself that he likes to say his lines in as few words as possible.  If he has a lot of screentime, he can make up for that in his presence, but in a few jumpcuts, we lose him and he might as well be anyone else-- though I guess not for him, because he gets a paycheck when he's in the movie.  Anyway, co-star Fred Koehler gets a hug from Trejo at the end of the film, and I was thinking that had to be a career highlight for him.  I would love to get an on-screen hug from Danny Trejo.



Here we have Tanit Phoenix as a total badass wielding a flamethrower (I noticed Explosive Action liked the same scene and captured the same image).  That's pretty much it for female badassery though, which was a disappointment.  With Phoenix, it's pretty much her cleavage and waiting to see what Goss will do next, not at all like the great navigator Frankenstein gets in Death Race 2000 who is trying to undermine Frankenstein as he drives because she works with the rebels.  Why not have her do something more, especially if you're going to hit us with that flamethrower scene to start.  We also had the producer of the show, who was played by Hlubi Mboya.  She was really good too, but she's really just playing second fiddle to Scott and Rhames; better though than the way the strong woman in the last film was dealt with, with her getting run over and Rhames saying "dumb bitch", which was not a good look.  They tried to include Olga Braun as a tribute to the original, but even that fell flat, with her just making a rookie mistake and getting killed as a result.  It's funny how this has worked out, that the original was made 37 years before this one, yet we've seen the imagery regarding women grow less progressive, not more.  That's not a good sign.  Maybe the next one will make up for all of that and have Michelle Rodriguez as Frankenstein.  How kickass would that be?

So that's it, outside of a few nice car crashes and explosions, this is pretty much a blah fest.  Probably a good 30 minutes too long, and in 105 minutes, the average shot was probably only a half a second long.  What a mess.  Is this what the action movie had become?  I need to sit through 100 minutes of bad jumpcuts and crap to see five minutes of good car chases in a movie about a car race?  

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988591/

Death Race 2 (2010)

I didn't know what to expect with this movie going in. It had some great names, including DTVC favorites Danny Trejo and Ving Rhames, but you just never know nowadays. A great idea for a film can be snatched from you, right before your very eyes, with a series of blinding jumpcuts, bad camera effects, and a droning cookie-cutter modern rock soundtrack. I'm just sayin'...

Death Race 2 is a prequel to the original. Ving Rhames runs a corporation that owns prisons and TV channels, and a woman working for the latter decides he can make money by combining the latter with the former in the form of Death Matches. They do all right to start, but not good enough, so the lady ups the ante to Death Races. Meanwhile, Luke Goss is a wheelman who kills a cop in a bank robbery, and is sent to Ving's prison. Sean Bean wants him killed for fear he'll testify against him, but the lady wants him to Death Race for her first. Quite the dilemma.



So, what I could see of the film, I thought wasn't bad. Yes, it had the inane modern rock soundtrack-- they couldn't even use the Ram Jam's version of "Black Betty", they had to modern rock cover that too-- but Ving Rhames was great, and Danny Trejo, though playing kind of a cornball character, wasn't bad either. I even didn't mind Luke Goss. What killed me, and ruined the film, was the camera effects. I think Lee over at Straight-to-DVD-Heaven coined the term "avid farts", and this movie did it to death. One millisecond I'm seeing a guy go to throw a punch, then I see his back, then I see a chainlink fence, then I see stock footage of a guy being shot in the stomach with a cannon ball, then I see Max Headroom. Dude, seriously, lay off the Red Bull. Then there were the 360 crane shots. Who are you, Ernest Haller, trying to win an Oscar for cinematography? Cut the shit, you're making me dizzy. Then there was the constant slo-mo, acting as if this was the first movie to ever have a car chase, or the first movie to ever blow up a car. It was beyond excessive, it was almost insulting, as if we viewers are so dumb that we can only appreciate an exploding car if it's done in super slo-mo.

The director, Roel Reiné, has directed two films that I've seen, one, Pistol Whipped, which I enjoyed, and another, The Marine 2, which I didn't like. In neither case, though, did he go the MTV/avid farts route. Pistol Whipped was an especially great film, so to see this one turn out like Death Race 2: The Punchfighting was a disappointment. This was such a bad punchfighting film, in fact, that I was wondering where Tony Schiena and Hector Echevarria were. I don't know what this movie was, but had it been a little more straightforward and less gimmicky, I think I would've enjoyed it. I couldn't help thinking, while watching it, about a PM Entertainment film called The Sweeper with C. Thomas Howell, which I reviewed about 18 months ago. Just a good bad action movie. The people making this have a lot to learn from something like that. Stop thinking you're cooler than the 90s, because you're not-- not even close.



Luke Goss always has this squinty scowl on his face, like he's smelling something funny. The way the film handled his character finally getting scarred was interesting for a few reasons. First, he's badly burned while trapped in a flaming car. Before that, every car exploded on impact, but this one, for some reason (plot convenience theater), slowly immolated. Second, I thought in the previous film, his face was scarred from so many accidents, and I almost think it would've been cooler that way, say if he ends the film and has a big gash on his cheek, like it's just the start of things to come; though I do like doing it the way they did it too, especially so they could bring the mask into it. Finally, I don't know why they showed his face at all. By showing his face all burned and scarred, it ruined the impact of his putting the mask on. I know us Americans have to see everything, but sometimes less is more. What's the point of putting the mask on if you already have us used to seeing his burned face? That'd be like deciding three movies in to give Freddy a mask in Nightmare on Elm Street. Give us some mystery, leave something to our imagination.

I did like Ving Rhames, as I mentioned above. He has a great line, when he's telling Luke Goss that this his prison is like Ancient Rome. Goss asks him "then who are you?" "I'm Caesar." Yes you are. His character was betrayed by the bad script in something I'll be getting into next, when the woman who sets up Death Race is killed by Goss, he sees it on TV and says "That's a dumb bitch." It was crass and ignorant and totally not what Rhames's character had been throughout the movie. I guess it just showed that the people involved with this movie didn't have the capacity to understand how cool Rhames is.



This was supposed to be an applause scene, where Goss runs over the woman who started the Death Race, but it was a very dangerous message. Violence against women is never a good look, and I know she wasn't a nice person, but really all she did was jump in with the corporate sharks and become one of them too. No one else had a problem with using the prisoners for these twisted games, yet it's only the "dumb bitch", as Rhames so eloquently put it, who gets it? There were also messages about her using her body and having sex with powerful men to get by in life, as if the only way a woman can make it in the business world is on her back. The whole thing was just really chauvinistic, ignorant, and in poor taste. I know I shouldn't expect women's lib from a DTV action film, but maybe something a little less irresponsible. More 2010, and less 1950, is that too much to ask?

This had some potential, and there was some good action, it's just more often than not, that action was overly edited into something that was hard to focus on. I'm worried that this is the future of the action film, that I'll be doomed to gimmicky camera affects and cinematography that makes me sea sick, all set to a soundtrack of a bunch of Disturbed and Linkin Park wannabes. Lord help me!

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1500491/

The Tournament (2009)

You may have seen in the comments section last week that RepoGenetic suggested I check out The Tournament, which was released last Tuesday. Ving Rhames and the always hot Kelly Hu? Where do I sign up?

The Tournament is about a competition every seven years involving 30 of the world's top assassins fighting each other to the death. Ving wins the one that opens the film, and plans on retiring champion, but when his wife is murdered by another assassin, he signs up for revenge. There's also Kelly Hu, a Chinese killer, who stumbles upon a priest (the guy who played Begbie in Trainspotting), thinking he's another player. Turns out he's mistakenly swallowed one of the trackers all the assassins have in them so they can recognize each other, and so the people who run the game can keep an eye on them. She takes him along and protects him until he can pass the tracker through his system. The problem is, she protects him at her own peril, because after 24 hours of playing, if there isn't a winner, the tracking devices explode, killing all the remaining players.



This is pretty hot. It's very violent, so be careful if you get queasy easily. I had trouble with the finger amputations. I think the director had a fetish for that, because it happened like three or four times. That's my own personal issue, though, and it's hard to justify hating a movie for it when I had no problem with people exploding all over the place. The martial arts and shootouts were pretty sweet; Rhames, Kelly the Hottie Hu, and Begbie all turned in great performances; and the concept of a competition of assassins played out really well. An all around solid film. Thanks go out to RepoGenetic for recommending it.

Reviewing this film after Battlestar Galactica: The Plan works to provide some context for what I look for in a movie. I'm not saying I can't appreciate a great thought provoking film-- District 9 certainly was that-- it's just that Battlestar Galactica didn't do the job District 9 did, and if I have a choice between over the top action or mediocre sci-fi, I'll take the over the top action every time. Especially if it's got Ving Rhames and Kelly Hu in it. Don't get me wrong, Grace Park is hot, but she's no Kelly Hu.



Speaking of Kelly Hu, this is only the second film of hers we've reviewed, the other being the lack luster Succubus: Hell Bent. I looked at her bio, and realized she doesn't do a lot of DTV work, which would explain her absence here. That's too bad, because she's one of the hottest chicks of all time. I've rounded up a few others, and I'll try and review them sometime soon, but I think she needs to reevaluate her career path. Fewer USA Original Series and CBS Crime Dramas, and more Dolph Lundgren films.

Pulp Fiction is a big deal for anyone from my generation. It had such a huge impact on popular culture at the time, and has influenced so many films since. I have it as the second best film of the 90s, after Schindler's List. (If you're curious, Roger Ebert has Pulp Fiction second too, only he has Hoop Dreams first and Schindler's List 6th.) Anyway, after reviving the career of John Travolta, making Samuel L. Jackson a marquee name, reminding us why we think Bruce Willis is so cool, and introducing us to Uma Thurman (unless you count Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, but I don't), it also took a character actor by the name of Ving Rhames and made him larger than life. I think, fifteen years later, at least for people of my generation, that feeling remains, and I felt it the whole time Rhames was in this film. He was such a cool casting decision as the best living assassin, and I hope he does more DTV actioners.



This film is set in Middlesbrough, a city in the north of England. What a cool place to set a movie, even if some of it was filmed in Bulgaria. My buddy is a Sunderland fan, which is the working class neighbor to Middlesbrough, and both cities are right near Newcastle. Anyone who watches the EPL knows that both 'Boro and Newcastle went down last year, leaving Sunderland with no derby games. I'm an Arsenal fan, and I told my buddy he could borrow West Ham for the season if he wanted a rival. I still have to watch that Arsenal West Ham game from the weekend by the way. I know, I suck as a Gooner.

If you dig action, you'll like this. It's everything that Wanted wasn't, and everything Wanted was sold to us as being. Hu is hot as usual, and Rhames is as awesome as you'd imagine him being. It's a little gory, so you may want to check the tags on imdb to see if it has anything you have trouble with. I will say the "burnt face" tagged wasn't really that bad, so don't worry about that one if you don't like burnt faces (and I don't).

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0471041/