Bangkok Dangerous (2008)

As we continue in our series of exploring box office bombs, our next film is Bangkok Dangerous. It's probably no secret that I've been waiting to get my hands on a Nicolas Cage film. It's nothing personal against him, I just feel like his movies, like National Treasure or The Family Man, can be so soul sucking, yet so many people come to me and say "did you see National Treasure? It was so good!", and I die a little bit inside.

Bangkok Dangerous is a bigger budget, Hollywood produced, Nicolas Cage starring version of a movie made by Hong Kong directors the Pang Brothers. It follows the exploits of Cage, an assassin, sent to Bangkok to do four jobs. While there, though, he starts to lose his hard edge, falls in love with a deaf woman who works at a nearby pharmacy, and decides to train the kid who's been working for him as his messenger. As we all know, though, a hit man who loses his edge is not long for this world, and Cage has to make peace with the deeds he's done and try to make amends before it's all over.



I really wasn't expecting this, but for the second week in a row, I actually like the box office bomb. Now, don't get me wrong, there was plenty that didn't work: Cage's voice-over narration, Cage as a cold-blooded assassin, and Cage with that haircut. But I can't fault Cage for going out of his element and trying this picture, or for putting his name behind a project intended to get the word out about two up-and-coming directors from Hong Kong. The story was slightly flawed, in that I couldn't reconcile the cold-blooded assassin with the human being awkwardly taking a deaf woman out on a date, or teaching his messenger how to be an assassin too; and maybe that was the point, but it just didn't work organically for me. That being said, the action was very stylized, and Bangkok as a setting was perfect for a movie like that. It had a modern Old West feel to it.

When the movie began, and Cage was doing his silly voice-overs, I thought "oh, I'm going to enjoy this. It'll be like taking candy from a baby." Throw in the hairdo, and over-the-top cold-blooded assassin routine, and this looked like a slam dunk. But then there's the scene where Cage goes to the pharmacy to care for a wound on his shoulder. Suddenly, there was the guy we loved in Moonstruck, the guy we wanted to see in Wild at Heart, the guy that won an Oscar in Leaving Lost Vegas. Out of all the films to allow him to use his range, it was Bangkok Dangerous. The problem was, perhaps he was too good in the scenes with the deaf woman. Maybe he needed to infuse some of that awkwardness into his role as the cold blooded hit man. What we forget is, he has the chops to pull off John Cusack's character in Gross Pointe Blank.



But we forget that because he's let us forget that. Next, Knowing, Ghost Rider, National Treasures 1 and 2, The Family Man, The Weather Man, The Wicker Man... should I continue? When I watched the making of featurette, and he discussed wanting to go outside his element and do something he doesn't normally do, with directors he doesn't normally work with, in a country he's never been to, and in a genre he's never worked in (unless you count Face/Off, but I don't), I can see why he needed a break from all that other crap. I really want to see what the new Bad Lieutenant film, directed by Werner Herzog, is like. Bangkok Dangerous had glimpses of what made Cage great, and at the very least, reminded me that I shouldn't completely write him off.

I'm not completely familiar with the world of Hong Kong cinema, nor am I that familiar with the work of the Pang Brothers. Their only other major release in the US was The Messengers, and Bangkok Dangerous was definitely better than that. This movie definitely had elements of John Woo's better work, like Hard Boiled, which Cage said was something that interested him about this project. I also saw a lot of Cage's character based on one of my favorites: Le samourai. Where the French film was better, though, was the main character was better-- more natural. This movie shouldn't have tried to remake the lead in Le samourai, it should've replayed on Cage's strengths as an actor, which we saw in full display in his scenes with the deaf woman. Here's where Bangkok Dangerous ultimately fails for me, because it's not original enough, and where it is original, with Cage, it doesn't make as great a use of that as it should.



I haven't seen the original Bangkok Dangerous, but from what I understood, the main character was deaf, not the woman he meets. I have it in my queue and want to see it, but I wonder if that element would've made it enough of a departure from it's forerunners to make it original for me. How many times have we seen the cold-blooded assassin with his rules and his attention to details? I get that the action is really where I'm supposed to go in this film for the excitement, and I found that part fun, but I could get that out of any movie. I also wonder if the original had the horrible voice-overs. I hope not. They were silly and useless, and actually made for lazy storytelling. Everything the voice-overs told us we would've found out in a much more subtle and interesting way just by watching the movie and having it revealed to us organically.

Wow, we're already at the eighth paragraph. Usually I'm scratching to find things to write about, and here I'm running out of room-- and we're just talking about a Nicolas Cage film! Again, this isn't great, but it's not as bad as it seems at first blush. If you can survive the early Cage voice-overs and whatnot, you'll be treated to some scenes that are real vintage Cage, and remind you of why you liked him in the first place.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814022/

Assassination of a High School President (2008)

I first got wind of this movie when I saw a trailer for it on another DVD I was watching. I figured it was just an indie art house thing I didn't hear about, but when I looked it up on Wikipedia, I found out that, though it was screened at Sundance, it wasn't released in the theaters because its distributor went bankrupt. That means it fell right into the lap of the DTV Connoisseur.

Assassination of a High School President is a Film Noir comedy set in a Chicago prep school, and follows the exploits of Bobby Funke (Reece Thompson), a sophomore who writes for the paper. After the school's SAT booklets are stolen, he sets about investigating, and what he finds is much more sinister, even for a bunch of high school kids.

This was an amazing movie. It was a comedic Film Noir set in a high school. Extremely well written. The cast was great, including Bruce Willis, who plays the Desert Storm vet principle; Mischa Barton of O.C. fame, who plays the seductive hottie our hero shouldn't trust; and Michael Rappaport as the basketball coach. The rest of the actors were a bunch of twenty-somethings that I didn't recognize (though one was Zoe Kravitz), including the hero, but they all turned in solid performances as well. The story was more metaphorical than realistic, from the main character's detective rain jacket, to the in-school suspension room that acts as a de facto prison, but for fans of Film Noir, you'll love this fresh take.

There are many preconceived notions out there regarding movies. A classic one: if it's a foreign film or an indie art house flick, it's gotta be good. Another one I was reminded of that came up in the comment section of the previous post: if it's DTV, it wasn't good enough to make it to the theater. Here is an example of an indie art house flick that ended up being a DTV movie, and, though, for me it was definitely the former (a good art house flick), it brings home how dangerous both misconceptions are. Assassination of a High School President was good enough to be released, but circumstances that had nothing to do with its quality kept it out of the theaters. I can think of myriad art house movies that weren't so hot, yet got rave reviews (Buffalo '66), and many DTV movies (Streets of Blood with Val Kilmer), that were better than a lot of major release movies, and had very little fanfare. I definitely do this blog to showcase a lot of the bad action films from the 90s my friends and I love, but I also do it to look outside the mainstream of what Hollywood considers "good," or at movies that have been lost in the shuffle, like this one.

As a reviewer of Direct to Video movies, I haven't had occasion to do a Bruce Willis movie, so I was excited when this opportunity presented itself. I went through his IMDb bio, and I was amazed at how many things he'd done that I'd forgotten about (Look Who's Talking), wanted to forget about (The Whole Ten Yards), and was completely astounded to learn of (Spike in the Rugrats Movie). One thing I couldn't find was a role quite like the one he had here as the principal of a prep school. It's like the coolest concept ever: Bruce Willis as the high school principal, and he seems to understand that and delivers exactly what we want.

Mischa Barton plays the female lead, and it's interesting, because as a Film Noir leading lady, she played the role perfectly; but as a senior in high school, she came off as a 30-year-old trying to pass as a teenager, a la Luke Perry. That's why I was pretty shocked to find out she was only twenty-three years old. I know the idea of the high schoolers was that they were supposed to seem older than they were to make the imaginary world work, but she seemed more mature than the rest of the cast, and didn't really pass for a teenager the way the others did. Again, she felt more like Luke Perry on 90210. She has another film out right now, Walled In, and though it doesn't look great, I do need to do more horror films, so I probably should give it a look see.

This DVD had tons of deleted scenes and alternate scenes on it. Usually I look at some of them and think "why didn't they go with that?," but in this instance, I thought they were right in cutting every deleted or alternate scene. I'd be doing a completely different review had they gone in some of those directions. It shows just how important the right edit can be to a movie, and it makes me wonder how many movies I didn't like that had alternate beginnings or endings or whatever on the editing room floor that would've made them awesome. Just going back one post to Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior, there was a movie that could've been a lot of fun with better editing.

This movie was great. It deserved all the buzz it received at Sundance and after. Smart, funny, and dark in places, it hits all the marks. Hands down, one of the best films I've seen this year.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1018818/

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The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (2008)

This movie came out in August of last year, and I'm not entirely sure how it escaped my radar. I'm definitely better now at getting to newer DTV films when they're released, but what's great about a site that reviews films people find at the video store or on Netflix, those movies are still there, and my reviews of those films are still relevant, even a year later.

Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior is a prequel to the earlier film that had The Rock in it. A young Scorpion King, before he learns to fight, is the son of a great warrior, who is killed by some black magic unleashed by the Evil Randy Couture (I know, it's weird to say). He's enrolled in the Scorpion King Academy, and comes back a fierce warrior, ready to avenge his father's death. Problem: Couture's magic is too strong. I smell an adventure! The young Scorpion King now must venture into the dreaded Underworld and retrieve a sword that will counter Couture's magic, thus helping him win his revenge.



Wow, was this long. 108 minutes, of which 35-40 minutes was superfluous filler. Why did the evil goddess of the underworld speak in long, breathy tones? To fill time. Why did two members of the supporting cast have trouble getting the spinning sword we knew they were going to get eventually anyway? To fill time. Why did our hero fight Couture at the end, only to have Couture lose and turn into a scorpion so our hero would have to fight him again? You guessed it, to fill time. This had roughly the amount of material of a Hercules or Beastmaster episode, but it was stretched into something over twice as long.

And that's too bad, because, other than some dubious casting decisions, this could've been pretty fun, like in that Beastmaster/Hercules kind of way. It had a cute story, cute characters, and some action. I didn't like Randy Couture cast as the baddie, or the CW heartthrob cast as the hero, but I could've gotten past those things. Using annoying cinematic devices to keep the story from moving at an entertaining pace in order to make the movie longer, though, I couldn't get past.



The main character's female cohort was a total hottie named Karen Shenaz David. She had a very small role in another DTVC film, Flight of Fury, which also starred Steven Seagal. I think her fight scenes were better done than the CW heartthrob's, which makes me wonder why the film wasn't centered around her. What if it was a real Scorpion King prequel, where she played the Scorpion King's mom before he was born? Would've made for a better movie.

Randy Couture would've made a great baddie, except for his voice. He sounded too nice. I know he could kick my ass any day, and when he stares, he looks menacing, but the voice just reminds me too much of the guy I root for in the UFC. We've done a lot of UFC fighters in movies lately, and I would put Randy right behind Rampage as far as the best goes, but this just wasn't a great role for him.



I was going to put two pictures of Ms. David on this blog, because she was so hot, but I felt that might not be fair to my female readers (if I have any). I'm also not always good at determining which members of my gender women or gay men find the most attractive, so forgive me if I've made the wrong decision. My options were the CW heartthrob hero, or the precocious English poet guiding the hero on his way. Knowing the tastes of the women I know who like bad action and sci-fi, they usually go for the precocious Englishman, so that's who I chose, one Mr. Simon Quaterman (very guest on the new Dr. Who sort of name, don't you think?)

I would recommend this movie if it wasn't so long. I found it really tedious when it should've been fun. You'd be much better off going through your old Hercules DVDs. I've always personally gone for the episodes that have Bruce Campbell in them, but that's just me.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104123/

Shadow Man (2006)

Not long after completing the Dolph Lundgren DTV catalog, we are now doing the same with Steven Seagal. Again, it feels great to have every film reviewed on this site. If you need to know about a Steven Seagal DTV film, the DTVC is your source, as it is with Dolph Lundgren.

Shadow Man is another Romanian DTV actioner, this time placing Seagal as a former operative on his way home from Bucharest, when his father-in-law is blown up in a car at the airport, and his daughter is kidnapped by a mysterious cabbie. Now he's tearing a swath through the city searching for his daughter, and every clue he finds also uncovers the mystery as to what his father-in-law was carrying that made him a target for bombing. The CIA and the Russian Mob are hot on his tail, but really, they're the ones looking for trouble if they think they want a piece of Seagal.



This is pretty sweet. Again, extremely ridiculous, but what else do you expect from Seagal. One thing that frustrated me was how, in the beginning, they showed Seagal teaching a martial arts class on the importance and power of Chi, and he was like busting watermelons and blowing people through walls with his hands. I wanted him to be Chi-ing people all over the place, but he didn't until the very end, when he took out one dude. There was one scene, where, only in a Seagal film, he's locked in a room of a mansion, supposedly as a set-up to be taken out by some dudes. Of course, that room has shotgun shells and various items and devices he can use to turn that room into a fortress, and he can do all that in about five minutes. I just didn't get it, when he should've just Chi-ed the door open, ran into the hallway, and taken out the bad guys Apache style, only using Chi instead of knives. I guess I feel if these movies are going to be so ridiculous, why not just go all the way with the ridiculousness.

There's no concrete word on when The Keeper, Seagal's next film, is supposed to be released. Imdb has it listed at 9/22/2009, but we're well beyond that now. Who knows, between distributors, etc., these films can be passed around and left on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere for years. That means, though, that Shadow Man will be our last taste of Seagal for a while, and I think that's okay. He was pretty good. His martial arts were solid, and his use of Ebonics was sublime. My favorite scene came when he was talking on the phone to some guy he knows that hacks into things, and he ends the conversation with "Do yo' thaaaaang," in a slightly high pitched voice. I'm considering ending all of my phone with that line from now on.



We all know Seagal often gets his share of women in these films, and in many cases it makes no sense. Women tend to just have sex with him, while he keeps his sweatshirt on. In this movie, he has a really hot girlfriend, and then the woman who kidnaps his daughter is a hot chick from England. When he and that hot chick link up to find his daughter (long story), for no apparent reason, as they're waiting overnight in an apartment for something to happen, she takes her shirt off and approaches him. She has this weird look on her face-- not of seduction, but rather Steve Perry in the Run DMC video for "Walk This Way" when the rappers break into his concert. Then Seagal says, apropos of nothing, "I know you, you want us to believe you cold as ice, but you got a heart in there," and she starts crying, and he's like "come here," and he holds her-- end scene. Come to Daddy, that's right, Steven will make it all better.

As in many Romanian action movies, parts of this film are shot in a discotheque. I don't know what it is, but the idea of going to a club in Eastern Europe scares me. Okay, I do know what it is: the Russian mob, angry vets of the Balkan Wars, and various other unsavory characters that can't wait to get their hands on a naive American like me and force him to give them everything he has on him. If I ever make the trip to Bucharest, Bratislava, Budapest, etc., you best believe that I won't be going anywhere near a club, unless someone like Man Utd. star striker Dimitar Berbatov is going with me.



The fact that we've covered every Steven Seagal film is big in a different way from Dolph Lundgren, because with Seagal, he was someone I wasn't as big a fan of. I still don't like him as much as Dolph, but this journey through his DTV catalog has made me appreciate him more than I once did. Sure, I loved Out for Justice and Hard to Kill as a kid, but his DTV stuff just never really did it for me. Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of clunkers and disappointments along the way, but just the same, it's been a fun ride. Looks like Jean Claude Van Damme would be the next one to have his whole catalog up, but I can't find a cheap enough copy of either No Retreat, No Surrender or Black Eagle on Amazon, so it'll be a little while before that happens.

If this is the last Seagal film I review for a while, it's a good one. You'll have plenty of fun with this, so put it in your Netflix queue or pick it up if you see it at the video store. Seagal in Romania or Bulgaria is a good look for him, especially when it's done as ridiculously as it is here.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448114/

Basic Instinct 2 (2006)

This is the first in what will be a new weekly feature where I look at films that were released theatrically, and bombed big time. We'll see how it goes. I first came across the idea when I reviewed Streets of Blood, which starred Val Kilmer and Sharon Stone. I was curious to see what Basic Instinct 2 did in the box office, and found out it grossed a staggering $5 million. Still, I felt like it wasn't exactly a DTV film, because it was in quite a few theaters, and had a nationwide advertising campaign. That got me thinking about some others, like this year's Bangkok Dangerous, or 2007's In the Name of the King, that I'd really like to take a look at as well. Again, it's just a trial thing for the month of October, but if people like it, and if I like it too, we'll keep it.

Basic Instinct 2 is the follow up to the 1992 film that made Sharon Stone famous. Now she's in London, and she's in trouble with the law again, after she drives a car with a doped up soccer star off a bridge. She's taken to a psychiatrist to determine if she should receive bail, and she picks him as her new toy. The two go in circles, her trying to seduce him, him trying to to get in too deep; and all the while, people they both know are dying. He suspects her, but she keeps giving him other potential culprits. It's a collision course to wackiness, and the question is, will the psychiatrist keep his sanity, or will Stone's seductions win out.



Okay, are you ready for this? I actually liked it. I know, what the hell am I talking about? You must be growing senile in your old age, Matt! Hear me out. First off, it's plenty goofy, plenty Skin-a-max-y, and plenty over the top. But it has this cool Film Noir quality to it, like you could almost see the movie being made in the 1940s (except for the sex). This wouldn't be your top drawer Film Noir, but I'd put it in that Dead Reckoning category of not bad. It hit all the spots of what Film Noir should be, but then it also camped it up with outlandish dialog and overtly sexual scenes.

Sharon Stone was hot, too. She was 47-48 when this was filmed, but I think she almost looked as hot as she did in 1992. You could tell she was having fun in this role, and the way she delivered her lines made me think of Bacall and Davis in some of their Film Noir roles 60 years before. Of course, her "you know how to whistle, don't you? You put your lips together and blow" was more like "I want you to make me cum, doctor." The film is a reimagined 1940s-50s Film Noir in a modern setting, so why not have spice up the dialog some too.



One thing I loved was how everything was in a cramped space. The streets of London were cramped, the apartments people lived in were cramped-- even the large, open office the psychiatrist has, becomes cramped the moment Stone enters the room. As much as she imposes herself on everyone's space, the film has a way of doing that as well. It's one of the elements of good Film Noir that I've always liked. One of my favorite usages of this device was on the TV show Miami Vice. For all it's silliness, it was always well shot, and they had a way of taking a huge mansion and making it small and intimate. It also diverted from the classic Noir framework of dark, neutral colors, and replaced them with pastels. Basic Instinct 2 definitely held to the traditional color pallete we expect from a Film Noir, with it's use of blacks and reds. Again, one exception was the doctor's office, which was open and white.

As I'm sure you've figured out, I'm a huge fan of bad action, and as we know, bad action is always violent. Tons of gunplay, brutal beatings, stabbings, and a good death is often glorified if the hero can get creative. That being said, it blows my mind how violence and sex are treated in the film industry. Why is a vagina horrible, but a dude being shot to death is okay? This film was definitely violent, but it wasn't the violence that gave it problems with the ratings board, it was the sex. Why are we so afraid of sex in this country? I personally would much rather watch a porno than something as depraved as Last House on the Left, but one of them can be shown in a movie theater to underaged kids with parental consent, or better yet, bought in a more vicious version at a video store without parental consent; and the other is kept under lock-and-key in a shady shop with a sketchy guy behind the counter and no windows. Would there be a Saw 37 if in Saw 1, the guy made the people do each other?



Now that I'm off my soapbox, Charlotte Rampling was in this. You may remember her from Babylon AD, the Vin Diesel hit from 2008. Okay, maybe I use the term "hit" too loosely. It did make $22 mill, just shy of a third of it's estimated $70 million budget back, which is a lot more than the $5 mill Basic Instinct 2 got back on the same budget. $70 million just doesn't buy what it used to, huh? With the economy sagging, I wonder how many more $70 million flops will be green-lit (green-lighted?). One thing I do believe is this downturn will affect what films even make it to the theater, which will only mean more movies going Direct to Video. Sounds good to me.

If you're a fan of old school Film Noir the way I am, you should definitely check this out, because it's a lot of fun. If you're not, then you'll probably want to take a flyer and see something else. I'm not sure why it had a budget of $70 mill, because I bet it could've been done just as well for a lot less and not been released in the theater. Maybe Stone's contract was for $68 million.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430912/

Freedom Strike (1998)

This movie was suggested to me by my friend at Movies in the Attic. I also vaguely remembered renting it with a buddy of mine about ten years ago, because we were on a kick to watch every Dudikoff film with two-word titles. Tone Loc, just so you're wondering, makes a movie like this a must rent when I see him on the cover.

Freedom Strike takes place in a near future where there's a war in the Middle East that the US is actually just a spectator in. Syria also has amazing radar busting technology and nuclear capability, and it's up to Freedom Strike, an elite special forces team, led by our own Michael Dudkioff to shut them down. Then a ceasefire is reached, and as the agreement is almost signed, the Syrian president is shot in an assassination attempt plotted by one of his military officials. Now the Freedom Strike crew has to take him down before the US nukes him, because they don't want him nuking us first.



This was probably one of the best films we've covered here at the DTVC. Okay... maybe not. But it wasn't all that bad. If American Ninja is the gold standard by which a Dudkioff film is judged, this was a bronze. There was enough action, I think, and though it could've been better, the movie was fun. Fun is not such a bad thing, and after seeing something as bad as Never Surrender, I'll take all the fun I can get.

It's good to have a decent Dudikoff flick again. Crash Dive was such a stinker, we needed something uplifting. I'm now trying to figure out where to go next. One thing I considered was revisiting American Ninja 2. When I originally posted it, I was just starting out, and hadn't instituted the policy I have now of watching the films I review again before I post, no matter how many times I've seen them. That American Ninja 2 post was from memory, but I hadn't seen the film since high school, so it was a foggy memory. I'm planning to do American Ninja 3, and 2 and 3 come packaged together, so that will give me a great opportunity to revisit both. As far as Freedom Strike goes, not a bad deal. Again, a bronze medal film from him.



The DTVC is no stranger to rappers. We had Treach in Art of War III; Flavor Flav in Confessions of a Pit Fighter; Snoop Dogg, Master P, et al in Hot Boyz; the Cash Money Millionaires in Baller Blockin'; Kid from Kid N' Play in War of the Worlds 2; and Mystikal in 13 Dead Men. There's also the seven films that had Ice-T in them. All that being said, we've never had a rapper as great as Tone Loc. "Wild Thing", "Funky Cold Medina". Do I need to say anymore? The only thing better would've been Young MC-- okay, no, the only thing better would've been Snow, remember him? Informer... I licky boom boom down. The key thing to keep in mind here is that Treach failed miserably as a special forces secret agent, but Tone Loc totally pulled it off. Don't get me wrong, he was still Tone Loc, and it was still hilarious, but he was more believable than Treach was.

Freedom Strike featured some aerial dogfights. I'll be quite frank, I'm not a big fan of them. I don't know, stock footage of fighter jets edited into shots of guys in cockpits saying someone's locking onto him, or he's got a lock, just doesn't do it for me. I'd rather have Dudikoff sneaking behind five Syrian soldiers and taking them out Apache style. Or maybe just having him duke it out with someone. The idea of the dog fight sounds great in theory, but when does it ever really work? Top Gun? I don't think so. Don't confuse silly with awesome.



I'm trying to remember, but I know I've seen the fake Tv news channel ZNN used in other films I've reviewed on here. Am I going crazy in my old age? Has anyone else seen ZNN in other DTV actioners? I want to say it was a Dolph film, but I can't be sure.

You could do a lot worse in the Dudikoff department than this one. If you like silly military action films, you're in the right place. I was a tad bored by the dogfights, but overall it wasn't bad. Plus, you can never go wrong with Tone Loc. That's what I always say.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119153/

Tsotsi (2005)

I just saw Tsotsi today, and because it came out in 2005, and won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2006, I hadn't planned on reviewing it here, because it's not all that current anymore. I even mentioned in my X-Men Origins: Wolverine post that Gavin Hood directed both films. That's what drew me to it: I wanted to know how a guy who won a best Foreign Film Oscar could make something so silly and blockbuster-y. Well, now I've seen it, and I'm stunned. Tsotsi was one of the most thought provoking films I've seen in my entire life. I'm not sure there was a comfortable moment in the whole thing. It just amazes me that a director can create something with so much depth and can move me so much, and then go ahead and create something so bad and so mind numbing. The best analogy I can make would be reading a Harry Potter book, and finding out Salman Rushdie wrote it.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468565/

Blood and Bone (2009)

My plan was to cover this movie when it was first released on September 15^th, but I was away the week before, so the movies I needed to send back to get Blood and Bone when it first came out were still at my home, unwatched. Then, I had to push it back another week, because of our Swayze tribute. So here we are now, better late than never, right?

Blood and Bone has Michael Jai White as a mysterious dude in prison with amazing fighting skills. He gets out, and hooks up with an underground fight promoter, and he has only one goal in mind, beating pimp and crime boss Eamonn Walker's main man Bob Sapp. Eventually we find out he's on a revenge mission for a friend he met in prison, and though the film plays out as a sort of reimagined Lionheart, it differs enough to be entertaining in its own right.



I really dug this. Michael Jai White was off the chain. The action was great. The fight scenes were awesome. There were some crazy off-beat scenes too, which in some cases ended pretty brutally, in an almost Tarentino-esque fashion. One of them had Walker and his crew going to a man's house, at the request of Julian Sands, to kill him. They sit at the guy's supper table with his wife, and she turns on "Dance Hall Days" by Wang Chung. First the guy scolds his woman for her poor choice in music, but Walker asks "what, you think the brothers don't know Wang Chung?", and he sings along with them, then kills the guys with a sword hidden in his cane. I loved it.

One aspect of this film angered me though. Michael Jai White was so good, it made it all the more appalling that Treach was cast in Art of War III. Why would you cram a guy who isn't an action star and who doesn't speak Standard American English fluently into that role, when you have a Michael Jai White, who is fluent, and who has superb martial arts skill. It just blows my mind. The only other Michael Jai White film I've covered is Silver Hawk, which I did a long time ago. That needs to change. And it's not like I didn't know this guy was amazing before Blood and Bone, but now I'm fully on board. Let's just say, I can't wait for Black Dynamite to come out.



Eamonn Walker was perfect as the bad guy. If you can't get Clifton Powell, you certainly aren't settling with Walker. He has that ability, like Powell, to stare at someone in a way that isn't overtly menacing, yet strikes fear into one's heart just the same. Going back to Tarentino, Samuel L. Jackson managed that same effect in Pulp Fiction in the scene with Travolta where they're taking back their boss' property. If you look at Walker's resume, it runs the spectrum, from TV drama to feature film, and he's actually classically trained in London, where he grew up. It's always great to have someone of that pedigree in a DTV movie.

Speaking of that pedigree, Julian Sands has a small part as a bigger baddie to Walker. He kind of uses Walker's character to take care of problem people in his life. He was an excellent addition to the cast. I was looking through his recent work, and other than Cat City, which hasn't been released yet, his last movie was a Stargate DTV film. Is that a reoccurring character for him? I've never really watched Stargate. I have some friends that did, and I know it has MacGyver and the guy from House Party 2 with the amazing line "If you ain't givin' up the rhythm, you got to go."; but beyond that, it's all kind of a mystery. Maybe I'll check it out.



As I said in my last post, I'm a huge MMA fan. This movie has one of MMA's more controversial stars, Kimbo Slice. I won't lie, I was one of the people that felt like his rise was dubious, and it annoyed me that people talked about him who didn't know anything about the sport. It was like people saying an And-1 street baller would burn it up in the NBA. Seeing him on the Ultimate Fighter TV show, though, I've realized that he just went with all the hooplah, and he's actually a very down-to-Earth guy that just wants a shot to learn and be the best the best way he can. From what I can tell of the show so far, he's winning over Dana White as well. Anyway, I bring him up because he's in this movie as well, playing a prison thug. He was pretty good. He's no Rampage as far as mixed-martial artists acting goes, but he's better than a lot of other ones.

If you like martial arts and fighting, you can do a lot worse than Blood and Bone. Put it on your queue, or pick it up if you see it at the video store. It's worth the new release money you'll have to pay for it right now. Michael Jai White is sweet, Eamonn Walker is a perfect baddie, and the action is great. One of the better DTV films I've seen in a long time.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346631/