On March 5th, 2019, Samuel Goldwyn Films is releasing the DVD for Buffalo Boys, an actioner set during the Dutch occupation of Indonesia.
When all seems lost in a small town overrun by colonialist violence, two revenge-seeking brothers arrive, meting out bloody justice that leaps effortlessly between brutal Western gunslinging and stylized Eastern swordplay.
Directed by Mike Wiluan – producer of Macabre, Headshotand Beyond Skyline – Buffalo Boys stars Ario Bayu (Macabre), Tio Pakusadewo (The Raid 2), Pevita Eileen Pearce (Single), Happy Salma (Capres), Donny Damara (2014), Mikha Tambayong (Fallin’ in Love) and El Manik (Carok)
Director: Wang Lung Wei Producer: Jackie Chan Cast: Ben Lam Kwok Bun, Jackie Lui Chung Yin, Sun Chien, Leung Yuen Jing, Mai Kei, Edward Mok Ga Yiu, Benny Lai Keung Kuen, Danny Chow Yun Kin, Johnny Cheung Yiu Wah, Anthony Carpio, Christopher Chan Sai-Tang, Mai Kei Running Time: 87 min.
By Martin Sandison
Once one of the premier members of the Jackie Chan stunt team, whose greatest role in a Chan movie came with the classic Police Story 2 (he actually appears in two roles, one as an innocent fireman and the other as nasty villain Hung), Ben Lam is one of the great unsung heroes of Hong Kong cinema. Like Yen Shi Kwan (Once Upon a Time in China) or Kim Wong Jin (Operation Scorpio), he appeared in numerous classics such as Legend of the Wolf and Love on Delivery, but unfortunately didn’t make the transition to leading man. There is one movie, however, in which he starred and conveyed his true talent as an onscreen fighter, and as an actor: Angry Ranger. The film has all of the elements that we all love about golden age Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and is also notable as being one of the few movies that legendary Shaw Brothers villain Johnny Wang Lung Wei (Martial Club) lent his directoral hand to.
Peter (Lam) is an ex-con just released for hospitalising some thugs who attacked his friend Hsing (Bruce Mang Lung, Stool Pigeon) and gets a job as a fish vendor. His wild and reckless ways have not been put to bed, and one night him and Hsing steal a car belonging to gangster Lun (Jackie Lui Chung-yin, The Mission). Soon Peter becomes embroiled in a web of gangster double crosses, mainly because, as he puts it, he will beat up anyone that bullies him. It doesn’t help that he becomes romantically involved with gangster Han’s (Sun Chien, Five Venoms) girlfriend Jane (Leung Yuen-Jing, Hard to Kill). Soon the situation comes to a head with what we all wanted: a huge martial arts showdown.
Previous to Angry Ranger, Lam had shown sparks of greatness in his onscreen fighting abilities, but they were all too brief. From the off, Lam’s controlled ferocity, martial arts chops and technique in the film are truly impressive, and make the viewer beg for more. It helps that the film was made right at the heart of the golden age, in the early 90’s, and that choreographing are the Jackie Chan stunt team, coming off the back of Chan’s classic Operation Condor. There are three stand out fight scenes, all mini masterpieces in themselves. The first is the most vicious and cathartic, as Peter has been wronged by the gang for the first time and must bring the smack down. The impact of his punching and kicking places him high in the pantheon of screen fighters; every blow connecting with such power that it jumps off the screen.
The most sustained one-on-one fight comes next, with Lam facing off against gangster Macau Hua (Cheung Kwok-Wah, Shaolin Prince) in an intense duel that sees Cheung using some traditional kung fu techniques against Lam’s kickboxing. The give and take, petering off of the styles here is a wonder to behold, with both fighters adapting brilliantly.
Unfortunately the end fight between Lam and Sun Chien, a mouthwatering match up on paper, is short and scrappy. It’s the most disappointing aspect of the film. But previous to that Lam takes on a bunch of fighters, most tellingly Benny Lai, who kicked Jackie’s ass at the end of Police Story 2. The build up to money shots here is truly transcendent, with two shots especially that blow my mind; one has Lai side kicking Lam, with the latter flying through the air like a rag doll. The next features Lai again showing his masterful kicking, as he performs some wire assisted kicks that fuck up Lam big style.
Aside from the action, Angry Ranger is surprisingly strong in other departments. Lam is a decent actor, and the role brings out his strengths in this regard, with a quietness that erupts in to wildness and violence. Jackie Lui (whose full name in the film is AIDS Lun! Come on, this is early 90’s Hong Kong cinema, so anything goes!) commits to an interesting part, and lends depth to what could have been a very one-dimensional character. A movie like this wouldn’t be complete without a hefty dose of cheddarish romantic montage, terrible-but-charming music, and Leung provides the romance in a sexy and arresting way, despite having no depth to her character at all.
Unfortunately there is a blandness to the aesthetic at times, with little thought being put in to the camera set ups and lighting. It is a case, at times, of the screen going dead when there’s no action. Perhaps it’s not surprising Johnny Wang only directed one movie subsequently, the trash classic Escape from Brothel. That film’s most notable achievement is a scene when a completely starkers Sophia Crawford (Beauty Investigator) fights Billy Chow (Miracles: The Canton Godfather).
Angry Ranger can be forgiven for its lapses in to bad taste, but a scene wherein frogs are stomped to death goes too far, and is completely unnecessary. The execution of the fight sequences is what we’re here for, and with such a high quality on offer, any martial arts movie fan will be in seventh heaven. Seek it out, my brothers and sisters!
As Paul Bramhall says in his 2017 article: Just like Hollywood believed that a western audience would rather watch a western (re: Caucasian) cast, so countries like Japan, Korea, and India have followed the same thinking, that local audiences would also be more likely to watch local stars than check out the foreign original.
The original, which was directed by Ding Sheng (Railroad Tigers), is based on the 2004 real-life celebrity kidnapping of Mr. Wu (played by Andy Lau), who was kidnapped by six criminals disguised as police officers.
At this time, no other stars or directors are attached to the project, but as soon as we learn more, we’ll update you.
Filmmakers Alan Mak and Felix Chong – the duo behind Infernal Affairs and The Lost Bladesman – have a new crime film in post-production titled Integrity (read our review), which will be the first installment in a planned trilogy.
The story follows a leading anti-corruption agent who is forced to team up with his ex-wife to salvage an investigation in which both the defendant and the whistleblower have disappeared (via SD).
Integrity hits domestically on February 5, 2019. Don’t miss the Trailer below:
Today’s Deal on Fire is the Blu-ray for Jingle Ma’s The Assassin’s Blade (aka The Butterfly Lovers), starring Wu Chun (14 Blades), Charlene Choi (The Twins Effect), Hu Ge (1911).
In The Assassin’s Blade, Zhu Yanzhi (Choi), disguised as a man, seeks to learn martial arts with an elite clan. Once she begins her intense training, Zhu finds herself at odds with her trainer and superior, Liang (Chun).
A darkness looms over ancient Korea: murderous creatures known as Night Demons have overrun the country. Returning from a long imprisonment abroad, Prince Ganglim discovers that it will take the strength of his entire kingdom to stop the bloody rampage spreading across the nation.
On February 26, 2019, MVD Rewind will be releasing the Special Edition Blu-ray for Showdown, a 1993 martial arts flick directed by Robert Radler (Best of the Best).
Check out the official details below:
Ken Marks (Kenn Scott, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze) finds a dangerous enemy on his first day at his new school; an enemy who makes his living as the champion of an illegal fighting operation. School janitor and ex-cop Billy Grant (Billy Blanks, King of the Kickboxers) trains Ken to defend himself. What Billy doesn’t know is that the man behind it all is the one man from his past who wants him dead.
This VHS favorite features an all-star cast that includes Christine Taylor (The Wedding Singer), Patrick Kilpatrick (Death Warrant), James Lew (Ninja Turf) and Brion James (Blade Runner) in the movie the proves there’s not a problem in the world that a good roundhouse kick to the face can’t solve.
Bonus Features:
Original R-Rated version of the film (98 min.)
Interviews with Director Robert Radler, writer Stuart Gibbs, and star Billy Blanks & Patrick Kilpatrick (more to be announced)
Director: Malene Choi Writer: Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen Cast: Thomas Hwan, Karoline Sofie Lee Running Time: 85 min.
By Paul Bramhall
Out of all the many characters that frequent Korean cinema, the one which is arguably the most underrepresented is that of the international adoptee. So it came as quite a shock when I watched the recently released Champion, a mainstream production starring Ma Dong-seok as an adoptee raised in the U.S., who returns to Korea both to take part in an arm-wrestling competition (yes, it’s an arm-wrestling movie) and also attempt to find his biological mother. Champion marks the first time for an international adoptee to be the lead character in a Korean movie, with most other examples relegated to either minor roles (Choe Stella Kim in Ode to My Father), or stories that focus on life before the adoption takes place, such as the Kim Sae-ron starring A Brand New Life and Barbie.
The wider issue of international adoption in Korea is a much more complex one. Originally triggered after the Korean War in 1953, the practice is attributed to a gentleman named Harry Holt, who adopted 8 so-called ‘G.I. Babies’ in 1955 after seeing a documentary on TV in the States. However there’s a darker side to Holt’s good intentions, one he could never have been aware of at the time, which is that of Korea’s obsession with racial purity (a facet of their society which, while significantly less prominent than it was 65 years ago, still remains). A huge percentage of the babies adopted overseas, in the years immediately following the Korean War, were fathered to American soldiers who left once the war ended. Usually leaving a mother and child in poverty, the Korean government was happy to offload these mixed race babies back to America.
In the decades that followed things changed a lot. The mixed-race issue faded away as a bi-product of the armistice, and instead most babies put up for adoption were from single mothers, still unfortunately viewed as a source of shame in Korea. With a Confucian society so focused on ancestral bloodlines, domestic adoption has never been much of a viable option, with the concept of raising someone else’s child seen as an alien one. By the mid-1960’s, Korea wasn’t just sending babies to the U.S. but also Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and Germany. It became a common quip to say that Korea’s biggest export was babies, and it was only in the mid-80’s that the government looked to start quelling the amount it was sending overseas, with the most recent law putting further restrictions on international adoption introduced in 2013.
Which brings me to director Malene Choi’s feature length debut with The Return. Choi is an international adoptee raised in Denmark, and has created a unique docu-fiction hybrid that speaks on a level beyond the subject matter on the surface.The loosely structured plot focuses on Karoline, a thirty-something adoptee raised in Denmark, who comes to Korea hoping to track down her biological family. She stays in the Koroot guesthouse, an actual guesthouse in Seoul, dedicated to introducing Korean culture to adoptees wanting to know more about their home country. While there she meets another Denmark raised adoptee in the form of Thomas, also in his thirties, and the pair form a kind of bond as they explore a land and culture which feels completely alien to them.
What makes The Return so unique is that both Karoline and Thomas are not only characters, but rather the actual actors playing variations of themselves. Karoline Sofie Lee and Thomas Kwan are both actors who came to Denmark as children adopted from Korea, and their roles in The Return embody both the directors own experiences, as well as their own, blurring the line between fiction and reality. Blurring the line even further, is that the supporting characters we meet in the guesthouse are actual guests that were staying there at the time of filming, their own stories interwoven into the narrative. This decision gives The Return an inimitable sense of authenticity, with moments of unexpected poignancy often arising out of simple conversations that take place within the comfortable surroundings of the guesthouse.
An adoptee from America explains how he instantly felt at home in Korea as soon as he arrived a couple of years prior, but it strained relations with his adopted family to the point that they asked him to choose between them and relocating there. A lady explains the complete lack of emotion she felt upon meeting her birth father for the first time, while everyone else that was in the room was reduced to tears, but how the opposite happened when she met her birth mother. An artist explains how she uses her experience as an adoptee to create. All have a different story to tell, and while the scenarios themselves are specific to their own experiences, the emotions behind them are relatable to everyone, as feelings of both regret and reconciliation bubble to the surface through their words.
Choi takes a leaf out of Park Chan-kyong’s Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits in her choice to employ a fictional framework rather than make a full-fledged documentary, allowing for a much broader range of creative freedom than the talking head format would have allowed. The feeling of disorientation that both Karoline and Thomas carry around with them is playfully achieved through both the visuals and sound design, as scenes are rapidly edited together allowing for brief glimpses of someone just walking out of shot, around a corner, or closing a door. Meanwhile playful blips and the sound of a disconnected phone line whir over them, invoking a feeling of disjointedness and dissonance.
Indeed the most awkward scenes in The Return are those that involve the Korean language. Watched on mute it could well look like any other Korean production, however with sound there’s a discomfort in watching Karoline’s attempt to help the guesthouse cook make a meal, who only speaks Korean, as she struggles to maintain the balance between patience and frustration. Only when the common languages of English and Danish are spoken does the tension dissipate, with the scenes between Karoline and Thomas having an air of natural realism about them which is pleasant to watch. At one point Thomas candidly admits that he has much less in common with the other guesthouse adoptees than he expected to, while Karoline is visibly happy to have another Danish person to talk to, leading to both giving the other a small part of what they feel they’re missing in Korea.
Events culminate with Thomas being notified that his birth mother has been located, and that she’d like to meet him the following day. Choi’s handling of the meeting is masterful, opting to forego the easy route of a tearful reunion, instead the meeting begins awkwardly, in a scene that almost feels drowned out by the silence, with only the accompanying translator intermittently translating the odd moments of small talk. Played out in real time, when the questions do finally come up about the past, the emotional weight they carry with them is fully felt, and just like in reality, the full impact of them isn’t felt on Thomas until the meeting is over, and he reaches a decision on what he’ll do with the rest of his time in Korea.
While The Return speaks powerfully to the experience of being an international adoptee from Korea, its triumph really is that it achieves much more than that. For anyone that’s lacked a sense of closure, or sought somewhere to belong, the understanding of the lengths we’ll go to as humans to seek a resolution to such longings, is perhaps what it speaks to the most. In the final scenes Karoline hasn’t found exactly what she came to Korea for, but in the unspoken final moments, it could just be that she’s found something more.
It all comes back to Blockbuster Video. Sure, when you think of the former franchise’s early 2000’s heyday, you might resent them for ordering and taking up so much shelf space with 200 copies of Vin Diesel’s xXx that nobody wanted to rent. But in the midst of all the would-be Hollywood hits and Casper Van Dien Direct-to-DVD flicks, you would occasionally find a foreign film diamond in the rough. Such was the case when I took a chance on the 1999 South Korean action film Shiri, which made its way to North American DVD in early 2002.
“xXx” DVD in a “Full Screen Special Edition”
In a way, it’s almost a marvel that I rented the film at all – much like Miramax’s notoriously awful art for Infernal Affairs in 2004 (boasting a minidress-wearing Shu Qi lookalike who appears nowhere in the film), Sony’s DVD release of Shiri features a misleading cover, in this case a faceless Korean woman holding a pistol in a barely-there dress. Who knows, this blatant attempt at sex appeal may have helped Sony move more units, but it completely mischaracterizes the film for prospective viewers.
Stylish and fast-paced in the Jerry Bruckheimer mold, Shiri is a race-against-the-clock spy actioner modeled after the successful Hollywood blockbusters that came before it, only this time with a tragic romance tossed in for good measure. Even the soundtrack by composer Lee Dong-jun (Save the Green Planet!) shamelessly riffs on Hans Zimmer’s score for The Rock. What gives Shiri its particular flavor is the focus on North Korean and South Korean relations. In what is perhaps it’s most effective sequence, Shiri opens with a montage of North Korean soldiers engaging in some absolutely brutal training, training that involves mercilessly slaughtering nameless captors and even their own comrades. This is our first indication that, despite director Kang Je-kyu’s attempt at mass appeal, Shiri is not a film to shy away from hard-R violence.
From there, we soon discover the North Koreans have sent their most capable soldier to infiltrate the South and carry out various assassinations and other acts of espionage. Leading man Han Suk-kyu and a very young-looking Song Kang-ho are the two South Korean government agents on the case. If you don’t think the spy’s identity will be revealed in a surprise twist involving Han Suk-kyu’s fiancé (played by Lost’s Yunjim Kim), then you may want to pay closer attention. It’s worth mentioning that Yunjim Kim’s handler is played by Choi Min-sik, just a scant four years before he became the Oldboy we know and love.
Watching Shiri in 2018 is an almost quaint experience. The film wears its Hollywood influences on its sleeve, playing out like a remix and reworked version of James Cameron and Michael Bay’s greatest hits. There’s the military themes and emotive music of Bay’s aforementioned The Rock, while Han Suk-kyu’s attempts to keep his secret agent day job a secret from his fiancé recall Cameron’s True Lies. Unfortunately, the action sequences – often a highlight of Korean genre cinema – are far cry from the elegance and intricacy of a Cameron setpiece. While the North American DVD claims to be in 1.85:1 widescreen, the tight camera angles and shaky handheld photography during shootouts frequently made me feel like I was watching something shrunk down to a 4:3 aspect ratio. The action scenes here feel positively claustrophobic as a result, and spatial geography quickly goes out the window, as during a kitchen gun battle in which Choi Min-sik seems to have turned on some kind of video game cheat code so that he never runs out of bullets.
Sinks Titanic…
The DVD’s Special Features include a behind-the-scenes documentary that I think really underscores what a film like Shiri represents circa 2018. Throughout the doc, both newscasters and members of the production team express their hope that Shiri’s success will pave the way for more Korean films to perform well at the domestic box office. Clearly, this is a wish that has come to fruition, as just a few short years after the colossal success of Shiri (it outgrossed Titanic from, you guessed it, James Cameron), Korean cinema begin to flourish with the numerous titles we now regard as modern classics, from Memories of Murder to A Bittersweet Life and beyond. It’s oddly touching to look back and realize that, only twenty years ago, a movie likeShiri – with a budget of $5 million dollars, considered massive at that time – was seen as a gamble in South Korea. In other words: you’ve come a long way, baby.
I doubt anyone would make the case that Shiri is a great movie, or at least not a “great” movie in the same way Oldboy is, but it does prove well-acted, the production values are slick, and the storyline hits the right notes of tragedy by its denouement. The real-life stakes of North and South Korean relations also lend the film a particular gravitas it would not otherwise have as just another spy vs. spy tale. Its influence in that regard can still be felt in recent North-meets-South flicks like Confidential Assignment and Netflix’s Steel Rain. But these days Shiri is arguably most interesting as a time capsule, a snapshot of the last moment before the Korean Wave took hold and transformed the country into what many cinema fans, myself included, consider to be most exciting film industry in the world today.
Director: Jang Hun Cast: Song Kang-Ho, Gang Dong-Won, Jeon Kuk-Hwan, Park Hyuk-Kwon, Yoon Hee-Seok, Ko Chang-Seok, Lee So-Yun, Jung In-Gi, Bae Yong-Geun, Jo Suk-Hyun, Park Yong-Jin, Kwon Bum-Taek, Choi Jung-Woo Running Time: 116 min.
By Z Ravas
Secret Reunion opens at a fever pitch most action movies hope to achieve during their climax. Gang Don-won’s character has been living in South Korea as a sleeper agent for the North when he receives orders to meet up with a ruthless assassin codenamed Shadow in order to take down Kim Jung-il’s second cousin. It appears the relative of the Northern dictator wrote a tell-all book about the regime and the diminutive leader is not happy about it. This leads to an exciting setpiece in a crowded apartment climax as Gang Don-won’s loyalty to the Communist party is tested by his crisis of conscience at so much wanton slaughter (“I can feel the bloodbath” is Shadow’s favorite catchphrase). While most of the hand-to-hand combat during this sequence is neutered by choppy editing, the setpiece still excites thanks to a racing, BourneIdentity-esque score and effective sound design as the screams of bystanders are punctuated by gunfire. The mission, which goes awry thanks to a traitor in Gang Don-won’s ranks, puts him squarely in the crosshairs of Sang Kong-ho’s South Korean government agent. The stage is set for a thrilling cat-and-mouse game between Northern spy and Southern G-Man.
..and then Secret Reunion takes a hard detour into laid back, buddy comedy territory. More than any Korean film I’ve seen in recent memory, Secret Reunion embodies the kind of tonal dissonance that can occur when a movie seems to change genre from scene to scene. It’s as though co-writer and director Jang Hoon wants to have his cake and eat it too; the film asks, “Why can’t this be a spy thriller? And then a slapstick farce? And then a political melodrama? And then back again?” Clearly, Jang Hoon must be onto something, as Secret Reunion was one of 2010’s biggest box office hits in South Korea, and he’s since gone on to direct the award-winning The Front Line and last year’s incredibly successful Taxi Driver. But viewers who, like me, settle down in front of Secret Reunion expecting an action-packed espionage tale are in for a rude awakening.
Fortunately, the film is mostly able to skate by on the charisma of its two leads (mostly). At this point, Song Kang-ho needs no introduction, as he’s arguably South Korea’s most recognizable leading man thanks to turns in movies like The Host and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. His role here, as a somewhat buffoonish and disgraced government agent, isn’t exactly a stretch for the actor, but Kang-ho proves charming as ever, whether he’s pretending to practice martial arts in his boxer shorts or accidentally handcuffing himself to a pole in his apartment. Contrasting Song Kang-ho’s clownish antics is Gang Don-won’s ‘soft spoken but lethal’ badass, the kind of archetype we’ve seen in the likes of The Suspect and The Man From Nowhere. I’ve always found Gang Don-won a likable presence onscreen, and a subplot involving his attempts to rescue his wife and daughter from North Korea adds some much needed dimension to his character.
Through circumstances I won’t spoil, Song Kang-ho and Gang Don-won end up living together, as improbable as that sounds. Most of the film’s runtime is comprised of the two of them gradually forming a bond, even as they suspect each other of working for the enemy. As the movie builds to a conclusion, it attempts to change lanes back into the action-thriller mold, but by then much of the tension is gone – Secret Reunion’s focus on our lead duo’s comedic antics and buddy chemistry means the stakes feel that much lower by the climax, even when the deadly assassin Shadow remerges to face down Song Kang-ho and Gang Don-won. Clearly, director Jang Hoon’s interest is in delivering crowd-pleasing entertainment and not designing elaborate action sequences.
Speaking of Jang Hoon, it’s interesting to note that the filmmaker began as a disciple of Korean iconoclast (and enduring figure of controversy) Kim Ki-duk. Ki-duk wrote and produced Jang Hoon’s first feature, Rough Cut, in 2008, before Jang Hoon spread his wings and signed a contract with one of South Korea’s largest film distribution companies. Jang Hoon’s increasingly commercialized output apparently lead to a rift with his former mentor, as Kim Ki-duk had nothing good to say about Jang Hoon in his documentary-style self portrait Arirang. I have to admit I find this behind-the-scenes drama a tad more compelling than Secret Reunion, which is not something you want to say about a movie involving spy games and lethal assassins, but as someone who was hoping for more bite than laughs, I have to say I walked away disappointed.
Fortunately, Song Kang-ho is an actor who can carry a movie on his shoulders, and here he’s playing a very different government agent than he did in 1999’s sober, straight-faced thriller Shiri. Backed up by Gang Don-won, Kang-ho provides the film with enough star power to ensure some entertainment value, but considering Secret Reunion was second to only The Man From Nowhere at the 2010 box office, the film proves curiously underwhelming for much of its runtime.
“Master of the White Crane Fist” Promotional Poster
Following HBO Asia’s successful 2016 release of Master of the Shadowless Kick: Wong Kei-Ying and Master of the Drunken Fist: Beggar So, the network, along with China Movie Channel, will be releasing Master of the White Crane Fist: Wong Yan-Lam and Master of the Nine Dragon Fist: Wong Ching-Ho on February 20th and 21st, 2019, respectively.
Guo Jianyong directed Master of the White Crane Fist: Wong Yan-Lam, which tells how kung fu master Wong disguises himself and cracks down on an opium-trafficking gang. The Si Xiaodong-directed Master of the Nine Dragon Fist: Wong Ching-Ho relates how the Nine Dragon Fist master turns enemies into friends and leads local martial arts heroes in Guangzhou to fight illegal British opium dealers (via CD).
Director: Peter Berg Cast: Mark Wahlberg, John Malkovich, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, Ronda Rousey, Sam Medin, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Chae Rin Lee, Poorna Jagannathan, Myke Holmes Running Time: 94 min.
By Kelly Warner
There’s a joke online that when an international breaking news tragedy occurs, Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg are first in line to get the movie rights. From terrorist attacks to environmental disasters, it would seem that the duo never read of a tragedy that they didn’t also see as a movie-making opportunity. With Mile 22, their fourth collaborative effort as director and star (they’re presently working on their fifth), somebody got their wires crossed. My theory is that someone read the screenplay and remarked, “This script is a tragedy,” and Berg and/or Wahlberg stepped up like ‘Fucking give that to me, it’s mine now’… I’m having fun. But I’m not. Mile 22 is an ugly, foul, mean-spirited movie that only makes itself look dumber in its repeated attempts to sound smart.
Mile 22 follows the super-secret CIA program known as ‘Overwatch’ which is operated in coordination with a ground crew led by Wahlberg and an analysis, eye-in-the-sky team led by John Malkovich (wearing a magnificent wig). In an early sequence, the team takes down a cell of Russian agents hiding out in plain sight in the US. The Overwatch crew moves onto their next assignment overseas, not knowing that this action pissed off the wrong Russian who finds a way to listen in on their future op.
In Indonesia, a supposedly low-level cop played by Iko Uwais (The Raid) turns himself in to Overwatch. He has information that could save the world from a WMD threat and all he asks is that Wahlberg’s team gets him out of the country alive. Sounds simple – just 22 miles to a runway where a plane is waiting – but then a whole armada of soldiers, hired guns, and government assassins step in to derail their plan and kill the Indonesian cop.
Structurally, I have no issue with the film. The basic concept is sound: a tough crew takes on seemingly easy mission that goes south and suddenly becomes an international incident as they rush to make their getaway. It moves pretty fast, too. And the ending ain’t bad. But this feels like praising the film’s storyboards or the screenplay’s outline. The broad strokes are fine but the execution is awful.
This is the most abrasive action movie I can remember watching in many years. It mistakes dehumanizing hostility for wit at every turn. Every character monologues if given half the chance. Wahlberg’s character is the worst of them. At one point, Malkovich tells him, “Stop monologing, you bipolar fuck.” And then Malkovich does one of his own monologues, quoting I don’t fucking know what at a time that doesn’t seem appropriate to be quoting fucking anything. There’s a scene in which Wahlberg badgers a woman who comes looking for help. The film treats its audience no better.
Wahlberg is intolerable in the movie. It’s no secret among those who know me that I am not one of the actor’s fans. In addition to having a history of racist violence, he is also an uninteresting actor with very few different performances across his filmography. Here, Wahlberg is doing a more amped up version of his performance from The Departed (to be fair, one of his best performances). In Mile 22’s opening credits sequence, we come to understand that Wahlberg’s hero is on the spectrum, was orphaned at an early age, and virtually raised by government agencies that wanted to use his gifts. It’s like ever since BBC’s Sherlock movies and TV have enjoyed using characters that were born with high-functioning autism and other such conditions as shorthand for creating characters that are brilliant assholes (sometimes they’re brilliant dangerous assholes). I’m not sure if Wahlberg’s character here is particularly brilliant (we’re told he is) but he’s definitely an asshole. Occasionally the film reminds us of his mental state, but it’s really just an excuse for him to be awful and for us to go, Oh, it’s because of his condition. It’s insincere.
The only other members of Wahlberg’s crew that get any sort of character development are played by Ronda Rousey and Lauren Cohan. Rousey is grating but Cohan is fine. Really, other than Iko Uwais, Cohan is one of the only actors that didn’t embarrass themselves in the movie. She makes a pretty convincing case for a film career post-The Walking Dead.
Speaking of Iko: what a waste. His largely English-language performance is decent, even better than expected actually, but he was hired for his abilities in action scenes. The action in the film is edited in a frantic, choppy manner that could’ve made someone like Diane Keaton come across as a halfway convincing badass. Sometimes you can’t tell it’s Iko at all. It’s simply garbage. Iko Uwais pulls off a few good moves, enough to make him into the threat that the movie has designed him to be, but it’s nothing special compared to what we’ve seen him do before. If this was your introduction to Iko Uwais, you’d likely forget his name the next day. Beyond Skyline remains the action star’s best English language production to this point. (The rest of the action sequences beyond Iko Uwais kicking and stabbing people are mainly Call of Duty-style shootouts and none of these are edited with any commendable sense of style either.)
Though I have some issues with things he’s said and occasionally question his intentions, I’ve always found Peter Berg to be a more than competent filmmaker. Friday Night Lights is one of the best films about American football ever made. The Rundown was one of the first instances of a film using Dwayne Johnson correctly. And Deepwater Horizon, despite some reservations I might’ve had going in, is a legitimately good movie. Mile 22 is a huge step down from everything Berg has directed before. It’s like he took all the wrong lessons from Michael Bay action sequences, added some questionable politics to the movie (some are seriously just questions, like why the presidential bobbleheads locked away in a padded case? Is this prop comedy or…?), purposefully made virtually everyone in his action movie ensemble a total dick, and let his buddy Wahlberg run wild with the thing. One imagines that if the film was directed by almost any other individual, perhaps Wahlberg might’ve been more reined in and that Berg, being a friend and frequent collaborator of Wahlberg’s, couldn’t see how wrong everything was going until it was too late.
Mile 22 was envisioned as the first part of a series with a script apparently written with Wahlberg in mind. The actor based at least part of his character off the white nationalist and former White House strategist Steve Bannon (director Berg has tried to play this down). I can’t say that Bannon comes through in the performance. But I hated the character and I hate Steve Bannon, so maybe? If the movie seriously gets sequels – unlikely, but that was the plan – then God help us. Mile 22 is one of the very worst films I’ve seen this year.
Director: Yuen Woo-ping Cast: Max Zhang, Dave Bautista, Liu Yan, Michelle Yeoh, Tony Jaa, Kevin Cheng, Chrissie Chau, Patrick Tam, Philip Keung, Anthony Ho, Xing Yu, Adam Pak Running Time: 137 min.
By Paul Bramhall
While anticipation builds for the 2019 release of Ip Man 4, with all of its furore around the inclusion of Bruce and Boyka, it shouldn’t be forgotten that 2018 isn’t going to let us get away without an Ip Man fix either. Well, at least a fix of the extended Ip Man universe. For any kung fu fan that’s been living under a rock recently, Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy is the spin-off movie from Ip Man 3, which sees the third instalments anti-hero, played by Max Zhang, get his very own starring vehicle. It’s fair to say that there hasn’t been this much excitement for a spin-off movie in Asian action cinema since Michelle Yeoh headlined 1993’s Project S, a whole 25 years ago, which saw her reprise her character from Police Story 3. Yeoh is in Master Z (as I’ll refer to it from here on in) as well, but more on that later.
Following the same trend of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and its sequel, it’s Ip Man 3’s choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping that steps into the director’s chair for this entry. Woo-Ping’s directorial talents haven’t played to his strengths in recent years, with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny being painfully average, and The Thousand Faces of Dunjia bordering on the unwatchable. However his choreography on Ip Man 3 was stellar, so placing him at the reins of a tale that takes place in a universe he’s familiar with is as good a shot at redemption as any. If you’ve noticed I’ve used the term ‘universe’ twice by the way, it’s intentional. Lest we forget Ip Man was a real person, and while the franchise has increasingly moved away from factual representation, Master Z serves as the official stamp to confirm we’re no longer supposed to question if what we’re watching actually happened or not.
Woo-Ping certainly hasn’t skimped on bringing onboard the martial arts talent. Apart from the already mentioned Max Zhang and Michelle Yeoh, the screen is also graced by Yuen Wah, Xing Yu, Tony Jaa, and of course David Bautista. Whether all of them get to show off their skills is another question, but what can’t be argued is it’s great to see them onscreen together. What isn’t so great is Master Z’s plot, which is perhaps best described by saying it’s as flimsy as Ip Man 3 was meandering. I confess I kind of liked the meandering nature of Donnie Yen’s last outing though, but I didn’t feel the same way towards Master Z’s rather contrived excuse for a plot.
Basically it goes like this – after being defeated by Ip Man, Zhang has quit the martial arts world and is running a small grocery store with his son. One day, while making a delivery, he stumbles upon a couple of ladies (Ada Liu and Chrissie Chau) being assaulted by a group of triads. Being the noble guy that he is, of course he steps in and kicks all kind of Wing Chun ass, which causes the triads to retaliate against him by burning his apartment down. Zhang and his son are taken in by the ladies, and he starts to work at the bar Ada Liu’s brother, played by Xing Yu, runs. However when the same triads start getting involved in the business of dealing opium, Zhang teams up with Xing Yu to get to the bottom of where it’s coming from. This is a 2018 movie, so unsurprisingly, it’s coming from those damn foreigners, and naturally by the end the triads repent, and Zhang is left to take on the super evil Chinese hating David Bautista. The end.
Admittedly character arcs are attempted to be woven in. There’s the whole issue of Zhang not wanting to use or teach Wing Chun since he got defeated, which he does at least one of by the time the credits roll. The problem is character development has never been Woo-Ping’s strongpoint as a director, and such sub-plots only come across as clumsy, and mostly superfluous, to what boils down to a simple tale of beating up the foreigners that are bringing opium into China.
Despite the plots best attempts to be more than it actually is, what can’t be argued is that Zhang owns the role of Cheung Tin-chi. A real martial artist, Zhang has been on the scene since working as a stuntman on 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but really came onto the radar thanks to his turn as the unstoppable prison warden in 2015’s SPL II: A Time for Consequences (which also pitted him against Tony Jaa). He’s gone from strength to strength since then, with his roles in Ip Man 3 and The Brink cementing his reputation as the real deal, and here he’s clearly enjoying the chance to return to a character who can this time walk away the victor.
Unlike in Ip Man 3 though, Master Z’s choreography isn’t being handled by Woo-Ping, with action duties instead handed over to his brother and fellow Yuen Clan member Yuen Shun-Yi. Master Z marks the first time for Shun-Yi to take on fight choreography duties solo, however he has worked with Zhang before, when he was part of the choreography team for The Grandmaster 5 years earlier. What he brings to the table is a mixed bag. When the action’s confined to a restrictive space is arguably when the choreography shines the most – Zhang and Tony Jaa go at it briefly in the doorway of a closed store, and kung-fu fans will get a kick out of watching Zhang and Yeoh perform an exchange with a glass of whisky, that calls to mind a similar scene with Simon Yuen and Hwang Jang Lee in one of Shun-Yi’s few starring turns, Dance of the Drunken Mantis.
However when he’s faced with a larger canvas to work with, the action frequently becomes ludicrous, and far too reliant on unconvincing wirework. One scuffle sees Zhang take on multiple attackers in and around the exterior of various buildings and their protruding neon signage, parts of which are lifted wholesale from the finale of the Thai movie Chocolate, only here it’s done with unconvincing CGI. Almost every flying kick is also wire assisted to some degree. At best it’s possible to turn a blind eye, at worst people fly through the air like a feet first version of Superman. It looks bizarre. It’s a shame, as when the action stays grounded, it delivers, but all too often a move that defies every law of gravity is suddenly thrown in for no discernible reason, which immediately takes you out of it as the viewer.
As the bad guy of the piece, David Bautista is a fine choice of casting. Eschewing the overly shouty gweilo devil, that guys like the late Darren Shahlavi were forced to portray for Ip Man 2, here Bautista remains calmly spoken throughout, and he’s all the more intimidating for it. As a steak loving philanthropist, his collected demeanour means that when he does begin to unload the pain, you feel every blow. He gets to face off against both Xing Yu and Zhang on separate occasions, and while I still think the Donnie Yen vs Mike Tyson bout is the best example of Wing Chun vs a burly bruiser, what’s on display here is certainly no disservice to the talents of those involved.
In terms of everyone else, Tony Jaa continues to do exactly what you expect him to, only without that same burning anger that he had in his Thai productions. His character is essentially there as a piece of throwaway fan service, and could just as easily have been written out of the plot with minimum impact. If seeing Michelle Yeoh in Crazy Rich Asians during 2018 didn’t leave you satisfied, then her small but meaningful role here should provide the fix you’re seeking, delivering a nicely choreographed fight against Zhang. Kevin Cheng is also notable for his performance as Yeoh’s younger brother, an overly ambitious triad with anger management issues. As a piece of useless but tenuously connected trivia, Cheng played the young version of Ip Man in Ip Man: The Final Fight.
Overall Master Z is one of those movies that has as much wrong with it as it does right, possibly even a little more. In the final third scramble to establish all of the foreigners as the bad guys (and I mean all – Bautista, the police, the patrons of the bar), subtlety is thrown to the wind and it begins to feel a little overbearing. It’s for this same reason that the fight pitting Zhang against Bautista ultimately ends on a whimper rather than a bang, leading to an extended finale that’s both overly wordy and overlong. Is there potential for a Master Z II? Possibly, but get someone like Soi Cheang at the helm, Woo-Ping needs to stick to what he does best, and at this stage in career, directing isn’t it.
Director: Joseph Merhi Cast: Gary Daniels, Kenneth Tigar, Fiona Hutchison, Jillian McWhirter, Peter Jason, Mark Metcalf, Tim Colceri, Ramon Sison, David Powledge, Judith-Marie Bergan Running Time: 95 min.
By Paul Bramhall
Call me gullible, but when a movie comes with a tagline like “Somewhere between sanity and madness….there is RAGE”, you have me sold. Such is the case for the 1995 Gary Daniels vehicle Rage. Despite the bold tagline, there can be no denying that the 90’s DTV action genre in the States was a precarious minefield to navigate. The bastard genre spawned from the unholy pairing of Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal’s unexpected popularity as box office draws, it was PM Entertainment that stepped up to the table in the 90’s, one which was once presided over by Cannon Films. While Cannon dealt with their own financial woes and dwindling star roster, it was PM Entertainment that moved in to fill the void, filling the video shelves with movies that guaranteed explosions, car chases, and roundhouse kicks to the face.
British martial artist Gary Daniels became one of PM Entertainment’s go-to leading men during their tenure as the kings of DTV action. After working on various Philippines shot DTV movies (and even worse – Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson flicks), Daniels initially secured bit parts in a couple of PM productions, before receiving co-star billing in 1993’s Firepower (the same year he’d visit Hong Kong to fight Jackie Chan in City Hunter). Rage would pair Daniels with one of PM Entertainment’s top directors in the form of Joseph Merhi. At this point Merhi had already helmed two of what many fans consider to be PM’s crowning achievements, with Zero Tolerance and Last Man Standing (the Jeff Wincott flick, not the Bruce Willis one), so to see the British high kicker collaborate with the resident action maestro was a thrilling prospect.
The plot of Rage is a masterpiece in itself. Daniels plays a 2nd grade school teacher, adorned with the largest shoulder pads ever put onscreen, and as proceedings open we’re introduced to him lecturing a classroom of enthusiastic kids about monkeys (and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer). Daniels is an all-round nice guy, and to emphasise it even more we get to listen to his rendition of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ while driving his daughter to her friends place. No sooner has he dropped her off however, when a pistol wielding Mexican jumps into his car, and holds him at gunpoint to act as a getaway driver from the pursuing cops. While the chase soon comes to an end, rather than being concerned for his well-being, Daniels ends up being pistol whipped by the cops, and taken to a top-secret government facility that’s using illegal migrants as guinea pigs to create a human super soldier.
Impressed at Daniels’ physique, the crooked cops and shady government agents decide he’s the ideal candidate to experiment on, and are soon injecting him with chemical concoctions intended to turn him into the ultimate human weapon. However they didn’t bank on him waking up, and soon Daniels is kicking the living daylights out of everyone in sight (while wearing a straitjacket), mowing people down with a machine gun in each hand, and withstanding cattle prods being thrust into his crotch. All of the above happens in just the first 10 minutes of Rage, leaving the remaining 80 as basically a non-stop chase flick, with Daniels being pursued by crooked cops, government officials, and a pair of journalists who want to know the truth.
Whatever Merhi was thinking when he started the cameras rolling on Rage, coherency definitely didn’t come into it, and frankly it’s all the better for it. Rage is simply 95 minutes of bombastic action, ridiculous plotting, and hilarious mise-en-scène. When Daniels is first taken to the secret facility, he witnesses other humans being experimented on, lying motionless in glass casing (the go-to storage option for human experiments in any movie). I’d assumed this was foreshadowing for what would eventually lead to a good super soldier vs bad super soldier finale, however the facility or any of the other human experiments are never seen again. We’re also left to assume that Daniels sudden adeptness at kicking people in the face, and knowledge of how to fire a machine gun (one in each hand!), is a result of the injections, and not part of the training he was given to be a 2nd grade school teacher.
It gets better though. My personal favorite is a scene in which the bare chested Daniels is captured and taken to be disposed of, and in the next scene when the bad guys open the trunk of the vehicle he’s been stuffed into, he’s fully dressed. You gotta love bad guys who are so considerate that, regardless of if you’re being taken to be thrown off a cliff, they put your clothes back on before doing so. Rage is at its most random when Daniels goes to visit an old sensei who lives on a boat, played by Filipino actor Ramon Sison, and the pair start conversing in a mix of English and (un-subtitled) Tagalog. Why does an elementary school teacher know a Filipino sensei that lives on a boat, and when did he learn to speak Tagalog!? It’s almost as if parts of Rage were being made up as they went along, and really, that’s ok.
The reason why it’s ok is mainly down to one thing – the action. Merhi, together with fight choreographer Art Camacho (before he became known for directing dross like Half Past Dead 2) and stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos (who most recently worked on Venom) are clearly having a blast with whatever budget they had at their disposal. There’s a wonderfully long vehicular chase scene, which has Daniels behind the wheel of a tanker, one that incorporates a gleeful amount of collateral damage against any cars standing in its path (plus who doesn’t love cars that explode on impact!?). I’d go so far to say that echoes of much of the stunt work on display in Rage, can be seen in some of the most popular mainstream action movies of the last 20 years.
The climax of the chase scene is more than a little reminiscent of the climax to the epic car chase from The Matrix Reloaded (just minus any CGI and a flying Keanu Reeves). Another scene has Daniels (well, his stunt double) dangling off a building with the rope of a window washing outrigger, which he uses to run across the buildings side to create enough momentum to launch himself towards a….well, I won’t spoil it for anyone who’s yet to see it. But the same concept would be used 16 years later when Tom Cruise would scale the Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Of course that’s not to say Rage is always original when it comes to the action, with a finale that clearly tips its hat to Jackie Chan’s Police Story, locating all of the key players to a shopping mall that’s fitted out with at least as much breakable glass as the movie which inspired it.
Ironically the 2 reporters are perhaps more current in their mission today than they were in 1995. To coin the American Dialect Society’s 2017 Word of the Year, they’re on a mission to get the truth behind the ‘fake news’ (yeah it’s actually 2 words), and see if Daniels really is the psychopathic killer the media is portraying him as. Hilariously, the finale kicks off by Daniels being interviewed by the pair in the middle of the mall, which is then rudely interrupted by heavily armed men in black sent to take Daniels out. Rage deserves points for its unique approach to dramatic build-up. The sequence segues into a satisfyingly lengthy barrage of fists, feet, and bullets, with the occasionally surreal sight of shoppers going about their day to day lives spotted in the background. Try not to smile when the action smashes through a VHS store, its walls covered in posters for other PM Entertainment titles (a smart, if not so subtle marketing move).
Today factors like piracy and access to CGI effects (no matter how cheap they may look) have largely made DTV movies like Rage a thing of the past, but thankfully they can still be enjoyed in retrospect, and there’s plenty there to enjoy. With references to O.J. Simpson, a fight against a towering dominatrix and her pan wielding submissive, and a matching denim love making scene, there’s not a minute that goes by in Rage in which it feels like it wants to do anything other than entertain the audience watching it. Entertain it does, with a performance from Gary Daniels that cements him as the most lethal 2nd grade school teacher to ever grace the screen. Yes, even when he’s singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’.
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It all comes back to Blockbuster Video. Sure, when you think of the former franchise’s early 2000’s heyday, you might resent them for ordering and taking up so much shelf space with 200 copies of Vin Diesel’s xXx that nobody wanted to rent. But in the midst of all the would-be Hollywood hits and Casper Van Dien Direct-to-DVD flicks, you would occasionally find a foreign film diamond in the rough. Such was the case when I took a chance on the 1999 South Korean action film 
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