Genrebusters

Within the first two minutes of The Warrior’s Way, we get a narrator telling his tale, an assassin carving his way through masked assailants, heavy metal music, and this guy:

"I have the greatest profile shot. Ever."

At 3:00 in the AM on the tail-end of a social night, the message was clear: the people behind this film know their genres and their audience, and they want the latter to have fun. My ears, as the narrator (is that Geoffrey Rush? Yep: sounding like a close relative to his pirate character) requests, were open.

Our assassin hero is a dark, stoic man named Yang. After defeating the best swordsman in the world and taking over his title, Yang calls it quits on the cusp of an important mission, abducts a very important infant, and then heads across the ocean to the American West (like a lone wolf har har) for reasons that escape me now. He reaches a town that has sprung up around the remnants of a once-traveling circus (surprise: everyone here is weird!), finds a niche for himself, and settles into a routine that includes cleaning clothes, cultivating a flower garden in the desert, and training a young red-head (feisty, of course; what other kinds of reds are there?) how to “learn the sword,” as she puts it.

This looks familiar...

This is where the meditative connotations of the title take over and the story and characters put on some flesh and fat so that, when the later killings commence, there are reasons to care who fights and who dies. Thanks to some decent, emotive acting on the part of the two leads, Jang Dong Gun and Kate Bosworth, along with solid cinematography and some catchy music, The Warrior’s Way mostly succeeds in this effort, and makes a tired story convention (wicked bad ass finds momentary peace) worth following again.

Of course, it all comes down to more killing and clear examples of just how awesome our hero is, and The Warrior’s Way offers these in a long-winded climax with some novel set-ups—loved that bit with the Ferris wheel—and smart editing that makes it easy to see who’s shooting/blowing up/stabbing/slicing/beheading whom. On the swordplay note, I liked how the cinematography incorporated the “hero-moves-faster-than-everyone-else” style (a la Azumi) while keeping to clean framing and logical sequencing.

"Gentlemen, this is called a machine gun."

Is this genre-breaking material? No—but it is fun, and the perfect kind of film to watch on a laptop with headphones, as I did. It is notable that a leading Asian man has a dalliance with a Western woman on screen, though, alas, their romance is cut short after a sultry kiss by the return of a psycho bad guy, thereby nipping this multi-racial exception at a point just past Bollywood boundaries. The film also deserves applause for mixing ninja and cowboys without exposition or info-dumping: they stand side-by-side on-screen because that is where the story goes, and they fight for similar reasons. The Warriors Way is the kind of solid B movie that I would like to see more of in genre cinema: earnest, comfortable with its small-fry stature, and just reckless enough with stereotypes to be fun.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a despicable film, and I intend to say as little about it as possible. It is so terrible that, once this piece is written and posted, I will forget it entirely.

This film is a mess of conspiring talking heads, private character crises, and nonsensical action. Nothing in it coheres, and nothing even approaches cinema. In fact, this film is not cinema, but a gestalt of pricey set pieces that amount to one hundred and fifty-seven minutes of boredom.

What about the fighting robots? Forget about them: even their struggles are not worth watching.



Movies about assassins usually open with the same kind of scene: introduce a character and show some of her or his rhythms–then kill this character off by way of introducing the assassin. “The Mechanic” fulfills this tradition with an assassination that is claustrophobic and brutal. Montage and quick cuts set it all up, and a noisy, almost ambient soundtrack keeps the proceedings chill. By the end of this sequence, the filmmakers have promised two things: this is going to be a violent film–and its going to look and sound cool.

This film is a remake of the 1972 film by the same name, and just as the Charles Bronson vehicle is very much a product of the early 70s, this iteration is loudly present in 2011 in terms of both its composition and its content. Cuts are frequent and jarring, juxtaposing numerous scenes in a kaleidescopic causal chain that contemporary film-goers will recognize. Musical cues are also frequently applied to suggest (if not force) the intended mood of a scene. As for content, cars and guns and cell phones and clothes collectively establish the time and place of the action. So, too, do the fight scenes, which feature the now-popular mixture of styles and brutality.

The story is composed of typical plot points. Arthur Bishop is really good at what he does and a favorite of his employers. He takes on a protege, who serves as a viewpoint for introducing the assassin’s perspective of the world and the people (read targets) in it. The employer does a bad thing, the tables turn, and now Bishop and his protege have to take on the bigger fish. A few scenes are set aside to suggest the emotional state of both Arthur and his protege, but these, too, are subject to weighty music that dissuades any thought or reflection.

What is novel in this film is the execution of its tried material. Bishop is a taciturn man who brings intense concentration to what he does, and the film establishes this through visual cues that suggest the logic of his thoughts. The terse advice and instructions he gives his protege are employed as narration in the scenes where the latter puts these words to practice, and this combination of the verbal and the visual ties these scenes tightly together and invites both the eye and the ear. The action scenes unfold with the right mixture of control and chaos, playing out quickly while making it clear how Bishop and his second take out the opposition through skill and strategy. Most fortunately, Jason Statham’s genuine prowess in the martial arts is featured without being overused, and his  single extended fight scene is an example of fastidious choreography and smart camera work.

Full disclosure: I am partial to Statham, and I am always keen to see him in an action movie. That said, I went into this film with low expectations, so the fact that I had fun watching it was a nice surprise. The 21st century “Mechanic” is made to fulfill any viewer’s wish to watch a badass assassin go to work, and it accomplishes this through smart film-making and the strength of its lead. Even better, the film does so in a lean 82 minutes and change. This is the kind of action film I often crave, but rarely find.

The setup

Dom is a muscle man into muscle cars who cavorts with the wrong side of the law.

Brian is an undercover cop who’s more interested in what’s under the hood of a car than in following the letter of the law.

Mia is Dom’s slinky sister, who appreciates sunshine and puppies, and who knows how to dig a slug out of a non-fatal bullet wound.

The scene

Mia and Brian are sitting at the kitchen table. Since Brian’s re-appearance, Mia has been wondering why he helped Dom get away from the cops way back in the day (at the end of FF1). Brian, rather than answer with something witty (like: “Yo baby: bros before po’s.”) says, “Because Dom has a code.”

“What’s your code?” Mia asks.

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

The movie

In retrospect, it seems that the people who made this movie hadn’t figured out what to do with the “original parts” that they revived for installment the fourth.

I enjoyed FF1for its portrayal of a tight-knit group of motorheads who care about street racing and family, and who end up on the wrong side of legality due to the former. The dynamic established between Dom and his followers was simplistic but compelling, and the complicating factor introduced through Walker’s character made for decent drama. At the end of the day, FF1 was an entertaining diversion that succeeded through its characters.

Unfortunately, none of these strengths are apparent in this fourth outing. Instead of focusing on their family and the rituals of street racing, Dom and his family are pre-occupied with a drug-dealing scheme that is needlessly complicated and, ultimately, uninteresting. The secretive, underground racing community is here portrayed as dumb, clueless, and entirely ignorant of social networking (how else could a big bad dude kill off the top racers in the city without anyone connecting the dots?). The villains are bullies who mysteriously have access to tools and strategies well beyond their ken. If “parts” is the metaphor that we are using for the composition of FF4, then they are best described as cheap and poorly engineered.

The biggest strike against FF4, though, is that it omits all of the opportunities for character drama that it inherited from the first film. Dom and Brian’s meeting should be tense and angry and uncomfortable; it is none of these. Mia should hate Brian with a passion that flirts with manslaughter; she does not. And the street racing community at large should be furious (pun fully intended) with the drug dealers who are killing off their champions in large numbers; as stated, they are instead oblivious. Gone are the presence and the attitude that made characters stand out in FF1.

What is left to enjoy in this film? There is some decent (and preposterous) action. The return of Vin Diesel is the biggest draw, and even though his character is less interesting, it is good to see him in an action movie again. The film is well edited and easy on the eyes. FF4 is a watchable effort; it is just too bad that it is also a mediocre one.