2010s

Let the Bullets Fly (2010)

Let the Bullets Fly [讓子彈飛吧] (2010)

Starring Jiang Wen, Chow Yun-Fat, Ge You, Shao Bing, Liao Fan, Du Yi-Heng, Li Jing, Zhang Mo, Wei Xiao, Carina Lau, Zhou Yun, Yao Lu, Jiang Wu

Directed by Jiang Wen

Expectations: Moderate. I’ve heard good and bad things.

Let the Bullets Fly is a very interesting multi-genre movie, but if you go in with expectations that Chow Yun-Fat will resurrect his past with John Woo by letting some heroic bullets fly, you might as well not watch it. It’s nothing like that at all. At its heart it’s a comedy, one which may or may not make it through the translation depending on your sense of humor, but it’s a comedy built on the framework of a town western with sprinkles of action mixed in very frugally. It’s also a drama, with some excellent back-and-forth dialogue scenes between the great actors. But none of these elements make the film great individually, it’s how they all work together to create a cohesive narrative that takes the film and makes it fly like the titular bullets.

A group of bandits led by Pocky Zhang (Jiang Wen, and also our director) hijacks a horse-drawn train transporting the new governor of Goose Town. He hopes to find a bounty of silver inside the cabin, but instead he only finds the snivelling governor and his wife. They tell Zhang that the money he seeks can be found in Goose Town, so the bandits, with the governor and his wife in tow, travel there and Zhang poses as the new governor. This raises the ire of local mob boss Huang (Chow Yun-Fat), and before we know it we’re locked into an intense, and hilarious, battle of wills between the two.

The Grey (2012)

Starring Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie, James Badge Dale, Ben Bray, Anne Openshaw

Directed by Joe Carnahan

Expectations: Fairly high.

The Grey is not a film that will rock your world, but it might make you thankful for that roof over your head and the problems you do have. No one wants to be in a plane crash, but to survive one and then be stuck in the Alaskan wilderness… man, that’s a hard argument whether the ones that died in the crash had the better way out. The Grey is this year’s early-year Liam Neeson film and it’s actually quite good. I get the feeling that Neeson will make most anything these days, but here is a film that he will most likely look back on as one of the good ones.

The Grey isn’t so much about story as it is moment-to-moment survival. There’s a slight back story with Neeson’s character that runs through the entire film, but all the other men are fairly shallow. They seem like they have lives behind their gruff exteriors, and a scene late in the film punctuates that, but for the most part they’re just dudes yelling at each other over the specifics of a given moment. This works well enough, but I think the film misses something of an opportunity in not exploring any character other than Neeson’s. Do we need that? Not really, but I think I would have liked it better if it had. The way it is, I was identifying characters by “the guy with the hat that looks like Marc Maron” and “the asshole guy”, so obviously that could have been improved upon.

Into the Abyss (2011)

Starring Fred Allen, Jason Burkett, Melyssa Burkett, Werner Herzog, Michael Perry, Jeremy Richardson, Adam Stotler, Sandra Stotler, Kristen Willis

Directed by Werner Herzog

Expectations: Very high. I love Werner Herzog’s documentaries.

Werner Herzog set out to document and interview the death row inmates of five murder trials for a TV miniseries, but while working on this project, one of the stories caught his fancy and he decided to expand that case into a feature-length documentary. This, obviously, is that case, and while it doesn’t immediately strike you as one worth devoting an entire film to, it slowly unfurls itself in ways you don’t expect and it becomes apparent why. At least, in so much as the reasons of a man I’ve never met can become apparent to me.

The case is a triple murder carried out by two teenagers, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett. I had typed out a fairly detailed description of the basic murder, but then I realized that in this case a basic plot synopsis would undermine the entire drive of the documentary for those looking to see it. So, these kids performed three murders in 2000, one of them was sentenced to death and Herzog filmed his interviews with this man, Michael Perry, eight days before his execution. Herzog also interviews people surrounding the murders, including the other family members left behind, prison chaplains, and ex-Death Row guards.

Underworld: Awakening (2012)

Starring Kate Beckinsale, Stephen Rea, Michael Ealy, Theo James, India Eisley, Sandrine Holt, Charles Dance, Kris Holden-Ried, Jacob Blair, Adam Greydon Reid, Catlin Adams

Directed by Måns Mårlind & Björn Stein

Expectations: Moderate. These are usually fun.

On the general scale:

On the B-Movie scale:

Before I jump into the review proper, a bit of background on my history with the series. I don’t intend to review them all, so this short paragraph will have to suffice. I saw the first Underworld in the theater when it dropped and kind of hated it, but still enjoyed it in a guilty pleasure sort of way. When the sequels came out, I laughed and turned up my nose. This was during my transitional phase from film snob to the cultured gentleman that loves all cinema you know and love today. A few years later as my tastes had started to descend into B-movies a bit more, I decided to run through all three of the Underworld films that precede this one. I was surprised to find that I thoroughly enjoyed the first two, but the third one was definitely a sub-par entry. This leads me to Underworld: Awakening, the newest but definitely not the final entry into the series. You wouldn’t expect a centuries-long war between the vampire and the lycan to end with only four movies, would you?

They open the film with something of a “Last week on Underworld…” bringing everyone up to speed on the events of the first two films that this one sort of builds upon (in a clean slate sort of way). The humans have become aware of the monsters living among them, and as you’d expect humans to do, they immediately seek to wipe them out. Selene tries to steal away into the night with Michael, but instead an underwater grenade rips them apart and leads us into the film proper. Twelve years have passed and we are reunited with Selene in a cryo-tank; she has become a test subject for the human’s experimental monster vaccine program. It doesn’t take her long to bust out (thanks to some help from the mysterious Subject 2) and the action to begin.

Little Big Soldier (2010)

Little Big Soldier [大兵小將] (2010)
AKA Big Soldier, Little General, Junior Soldiers, The Big Soldier

Starring Jackie Chan, Wang Lee-Hom, Steve Yoo Seung-Jun, Lin Peng, Do Yuk-Ming, Ken Lo, Yu Rong-Guang, Jin Song, Xu Dong-Mei, Wu Yue, Wang Bao-Qiang, Niu Ben

Directed by Ding Sheng

Expectations: Low. Late-period Jackie Chan isn’t usually all that great.

Little Big Soldier has been a film close to Jackie Chan’s heart for roughly twenty years. It languished in development hell since the late 80s for some reason, probably the fact that at its core it’s not really a martial arts film. This is more of Jackie in a dramatic role than a straight action picture, although there is a lot of room for his distinct blend of action and comedy to burst forth. Who knows what might have been if this had been made when it was conceived (or what classic film we might not have), but I’m here to report that Little Big Soldier is pretty good. It’s not going to set your world on fire, nor will it become a modern-day classic Jackie film (like I’m hoping his latest Chinese Zodiac will be). It is simply a fun little road movie with flashes of excellent action and choreography.

The film opens on the aftermath of a huge battle between Liang and Wei forces. Jackie is the lone remaining Liang soldier, and while scouring the battlefield he finds that the Wei general has been wounded, but is still very much alive. The reward for the capture and return of a live enemy general is five acres of land and freedom from conscription, so Jackie ropes him up and the grand adventure home begins.

Piranha 3DD (2012)

Starring Danielle Panabaker, Matt Bush, David Koechner, Jean-Luc Bilodeau, Chris Zylka, Katrina Bowden, Adrian Martinez, Paul James Jordan, Meagan Tandy, David Hasselhoff, Christopher Lloyd, Paul Scheer, Gary Busey, Clu Gulager

Directed by John Gulager

Expectations: High. I’ve been very excited to see this, hoping for a sequel that recaptures the horror/comedy of the 2010 remake.

On the general scale:

On the B-Movie scale:

Long story short: This movie contains none of the guilty fun of the original. It’s not that Piranha 3DD is pure shit, it’s more that it’s a shameless cash-in, it’s obvious and it squanders an opportunity to deliver another horribly debaucherous, gory good time. I thought the 2010 remake, Piranha 3D, was hopelessly shitty, but it was made with such style and filled with such inventive gore that I couldn’t help but become enamored with it. It seriously had no business being as funny and gore-tastic as it was. So when I heard there was a sequel looming, I instantly become excited and hoped it could live up to its predecessor. Maybe if previous director Alexandre Aja was still around, but this time we get John Gulager, the man who brought the world the Feast trilogy, of which I have seen none (and based on the strength of this one, I won’t be changing that anytime soon).

Piranha 3DD opens with a scene that holds no significance or bearing on the tale that I can remember. It features Gary Busey and his buddy hunting around a lake in the dark of night for their cow. How or why their cow is in the lake we will never know, but when they do find said cow, it’s dead, rather gassy, and it involuntarily shoots a couple of piranha eggs out its ass. Oh, if only I had paid for the 3D! While fish eggs from a dead cow’s ass might whet your cinematic appetite, don’t be fooled! The film actually focuses on a water park recently taken over by a money-hungry dude who hires strippers for lifeguards and designates one of the pools as an “Adult Pool,” complete with condom dispensers poolside and a “Cooch Cam.”

Haywire (2012)

Haywire (2012)
AKA Knockout, Agent Mallory

Starring Gina Carano, Michael Angarano, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Julian Alcaraz, Eddie J. Fernandez, Anthony Brandon Wong, Michael Fassbender, Mathieu Kassovitz, Bill Paxton

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Expectations: High.

Why make the same tired genre film with the same tired genre conventions when you can do something different? This is essentially the Soderbergh manifesto, and he continues to display his ability to subvert the genre film with Haywire. I really haven’t delved deep into Soderbergh’s filmography, but I always think of his movies as either “the big A-Picture” or “the low-budget B-Picture”. He seems to like to bounce back and forth between the two, with the low-budget ones being somewhat experimental. His last released film, Contagion, definitely feels like the A (while still being somewhat daring and experimental), while Haywire definitely feels like the B. I don’t mean that as a slight in any sense, merely as a point of reference for fans that might be seeking a way to classify this somewhat hard to peg movie. The cast would suggest a giant ensemble movie, but it’s really much more reserved than that.

Gina Carano plays a black ops contractor tasked with rescuing a Chinese hostage in Barcelona. The job is a simple one, but as the film unfolds we find that there is more going on under the surface than it would appear. The film’s story is not told directly, requiring the viewer to piece it together themselves. It’s rather simple when you boil it down, but Soderbergh’s editing and somewhat fractured storytelling help it from getting too clichéd. On the flip side of that, the presentation of the story also gives the film an aloof quality that makes it hard to connect with. It’s not a spy picture, and it’s not a Bourne movie, but it is a bit of both. I just think that it’s in your best interest to leave any and all expectations at the door that this will be an action film, because in reality it’s something truly different.