jadortmunder Reviews

Extreme Prejudice (1987)

Great action movie with attitude to burn

[9/10 · 5 March 2007]

Yeah, yeah, the final gunfight is obviously staged in such a way as to tip the old Stetson to Sam Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch", but this is no remake of that classic western. It is, however, a witty, brutal re-imagining of "Angels With Dirty Faces" - childhood friends take different paths ending up on opposite sides of the law (Nolte one-ups O'Brien's two-fisted priest with a turn as the most stoic peace officer ever and Boothe shines in too little screen time as the charismatic bad-guy that Cagney always played so well) and as they confront one another, they're forced to deal with a bunch of rowdy troublemakers (Ironside's Ghost Squad of "dead" Spec Ops soldiers standing in quite nicely for the Dead End Kids).

Add Maria Conchita Alonso as the girl in the middle, Rip Torn as the ultimate Texas sheriff, a mess of great "badasses" as the soldiers and a fine mix of action and hardboiled dialog and you have a very entertaining tough guy film. Milius' concept is terrific; Hill knows how to stage these things better than anyone. This movie is a whole lot of fun.

Best one-liner comes from Torn: "Only thing worse than a politician is a child molester." But Boothe, Nolte and some of the soldiers get off some good cracks, too. And that shootout is tremendous. Up there with Hill's Hard Times, The Long Riders and 48 Hrs.

The Bourne Identity (2002)

Fine little action flick

[8/10 · 12 March 2006]

I can sympathize with reviewers who had read the book and were disappointed by this film and the liberties it apparently took with the story. I've had that happen with books I've enjoyed and it can spoil a film you might otherwise have liked. I never read the book, so I was able to appreciate this film on its own merits - slick, tough, fast-paced and refreshingly devoid of the kind of nonsense that has made the Bond films harder and harder to sit through.

I'm especially impressed by the fights, which, as other reviewers have pointed out, are among the most believable martial-arts-based fight scenes ever seen. No big grand gestures or Olympian kicks - just fast, nasty moves designed to inflict maximum damage with minimum effort.

The cast is uniformly good - even Damon, who is no fave of mine, comes across believably as a man who's trained to hold it all in, but isn't sure what it all is that he's holding in. Cooper, Cox and Owen shine in their all-too-brief screen time. Potente is attractive in a real person sort of way (sigh of relief for this genre) and possesses an inner strength that makes her character's actions and reactions ring truer than what we'd get from the traditional Hollywood eye-candy girlfriend these films normally feature.

From the gritty bowels of the trawler, where Damon awakens to his situation, to the field where he confronts his most deadly assailant, the locations are the antithesis of the travel poster hotspots that Bond so frequently visits. Despite its breakneck pace (handled so well by Liman and so poorly in the sequel by his protégé), the film manages to convey a sense of melancholy that lifts it a bit above the average action thriller. Sorry book fans - it may not be your cup of Ludlum, but it's still a damn fine little action flick.

Indestructible Man (1956)

Very entertaining guilty pleasure

[7/10 · 4 March 2006]

This is a film that, when I bring it up in film discussions, I always precede my remarks by noting that I cannot defend this film, I can only love it. And I'll freely admit that a lot of my affection is due to my having seen it repeatedly on television during my formative years. When you examine this little Grade C horror-noir by the objective criteria usually employed during the criticism of a film, it fails more often than not. However, it has its pluses and it does accomplish something that not even all "great" films can do; it entertains.

On the negative side of the ledger is the minuscule budget. Pollexfen handles this in an almost Edgar Ulmer-ish sort of way, reducing the sets to minimalist representations that add to the fever-dream quality. He is saddled with the abysmal presence of Casey Adams (aka Max Showalter), who gives what is easily the single worst performance in the history of monster movies (the recent wretched turn by Jack Black in "King Kong - The Unnecessary Remake" notwithstanding). His script's dialog contains some of the most atrocious groaners this side of an Edward Wood movie, but sadly they have none of Wood's mad verve. And there are gaping holes in the plot to match the gaping holes in the science, the logic and the motivations behind the behavior of some of the characters.

And, as others have mentioned, that final scene in the (non-existent) drive-in burger joint - Good Lord, you can't believe your own ears. Times truly were different back then but not that different! One chauvinist platter, please, with a side of smarm.

I suppose that adds up to an insurmountable stack of bad points for most viewers and I can hardly blame them. But the magic of this movie is that it carries all that baggage and still gives the viewer a good time. The sleazy, low-rent ambiance of mid-50's L.A. is a perfect setting for the Americanization of the Frankenstein legend and (as at least one other reviewer pointed out) that's exactly what we have here: Mad scientist reanimates dead criminal who proceeds to go on a rampage. And for a nine-year-old who worshiped at the shrines of Famous Monsters magazine and low-budget L.A. cop shows like "Dragnet" and "Code 3", this movie was damn near ultimate, especially when you got to stay up late to catch it on the Saturday night Creature Feature.

Lon Chaney Jr. is clearly past his peak and he only has a few lines at the beginning, before the experiment that restores his life robs him of his vocal cords, but he manages to tap into the pain and rage that made his Lawrence Talbot so tragic a figure. His gift for pantomime may not equal his father's but he still does a great job of conveying the revenge-obsessed Butcher Benton's relentless forward motion and his utter disregard for anything or anyone that stands between him and his goals. The shots of Chaney, hunched over with hands thrust deep into the pockets of his workman's jacket, as he stalks the sewers beneath L.A. are forever etched in my cinema-memory, iconic images as powerful as any I retain from those formative years.

I saw this movie before I saw "Them!" or "He Walked By Night" or "White Heat" so the images Pollexfen cribbed were new to me and very powerful. The tingling paranoia of a huge organized search for one man; the ominous knowledge that a killing creature traveled below the streets, effortlessly eluding that city-wide manhunt; the machinery of the law in all its implacable strength; the grim horror of Chaney finally finding his money only to be interrupted by guns and flamethrowers; and the spectacle of the final suicidal flame-out - all these images, all that atmosphere, are as potent for me now as they were then.

Add to that the incredible busyness of the street scenes, as full of visual eye-candy as the indoor sets are bereft of it - the throbbing beat of the city that you feel outside the burlesque theater or during the sequence on Angel's Flight; the exhilaration of Chaney's attacks on his hapless former pals; the intricate maze of the power substation - all rooting the hallucinogenic tale in the kind of gritty reality that echoes the great hardboiled crime capers of the 40's. And, of course, the Bradbury Building - I'm just a sucker for that joint. Any movie smart enough to include that intricate interior is automatically lifted two or three notches in my estimation.

And then there were some great character turns - Inspector Henderson as a mad scientist assisted by Captain Binghamton (how my young mind reeled), Lassie sheriff Robert Foulk as the cynical, hardboiled bartender, Marian Carr as the good stripper and Peggy Maley as her greedy second, Ross Elliot as Benton's sleazy lawyer and Ken Terrell and Marvin Ellis as the accomplices (every 50's crime movie should have a guy named Squeamy in it), and the brief appearance of Eddie Marr as the huckstering Carney, who darn near made a career out of playing barkers in films like "The Hucksters" and "Roustabout" and TV shows like "Circus Boy" - all great stuff that just barely manages to make Adams and his wooden cop compadres bearable.

So, I'm rating this a seven, even though I know that only those who were struck by this flick during their salad days are apt to agree with me. For everyone else, all I can say is, "I guess you hadda be there". I'm sure glad I was.

King Kong (2005)

Total Monkey Dung!

[1/10 · 18 January 2006]

I hardly know where to begin. I had such high hopes for this film. I felt that Jackson was a good choice to reinterpret the story and there are brief flashes of what I was hoping for salted throughout the film, but they are few and far between. And what they are hidden in is as big a mess as I've ever seen.

Many of my biggest complaints are covered by other reviewers - too long; pointless characters and subplots that conveniently disappear; bad CGI scenes; lousy dialog; utterly inappropriate attempts at comedy relief; stupidly contrived situations where people absorb physical punishment that would cripple or kill a trained stuntman, but they just jump up and carry on as if nothing happened; inane inconsistencies (Watts in winter with no coat doesn't shiver on Empire State, ape that pulls down theater balcony can skate on thin ice, etc); the abominable performance by Jack (I can't act to save my life) Black; and, worst of all, the mind-bogglingly idiotic concept of having her love the ape more than she loves the guy.

But here's a couple of things I didn't see mentioned (and I only made it in about 200 reviews before crying Uncle, so if someone did catch these, I apologize):

When they first go ashore to investigate the village, nobody thinks to bring a weapon? Are you kidding me?

One of the only bits of dialog retained from the original film is the "scene" Denham shoots with Ann Darrow and the ham actor recreating Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot's scene where Driscoll tells Ann that women are bad luck on a ship. Then, the new film takes pains to assure us that this was not the deathless dialog of playwright Brody/Driscoll but a bit of cheese made up on the spot by the ham "playing" the film-within-a-film's first mate. It's odd, but in every one of the few instances that Jackson (who calls himself a big fan of the original) references the first film, he does so in the most disrespectful manner possible, as if to say, "Yes, wasn't that a quaint, creaky old piece of junk I used as the basis for my superior cinematic achievement?" Only problem is that quaint old film is a classic and will still be entertaining audiences long after this new pile of dreck has mercifully faded away.

And about the ham actor - hasn't anyone ever taught Jackson that one of the most important rules of good cinematic storytelling is that a character undergoes a change in the tale but only once. The ham goes from sniveling coward to avenging Rambo on a vine with a tommy-gun, back to sniveling coward whenever it suits the plot.

I could go on but to what purpose. I've already given this film more time than it deserves and if you haven't gotten the point by now, you probably never will. But there is one last thing I'd like to address and it's the issue of suspension of disbelief.

I'm a pretty agreeable guy when it comes to buying into a film's universe. If you let me know up front that in this movie, pigs can fly, then I say fine, fly those pigs. But the filmmaker has to hold up his side of the bargain. And if his film is poorly conceived and badly made, before long, I'm going to be looking at those flying pigs (and every other element in the film) with a far more critical eye.

This leads us to a complaint I saw mentioned several times in the reviews I read where folks were incensed that Jackson skipped over the process of getting Kong on the ship and then showing the journey back to New York. But if you look at the original, it's done the same way. Denham talks about Kong's name being up in lights, how they'll all be millionaires, how he'll share it with all of them and BANG! we're back in NY outside a theater advertising the appearance of Kong - Eighth Wonder Of The World. The difference is: in the original, we're caught up in the story, entranced and ensnared, we willingly follow wherever the film leads us because we are under its spell. But in the new one, many of us have been looking at our watches for an hour or more. We're fed up with a boatload of unlikable characters acting like morons and monsters who act just as dumb. We're in a hurry to get this over with, but we know we're not going anywhere for a while so we resort to the time-honored sport of the bored film-goer - we start picking apart every single thing we see.

And that's really it in a nutshell. We didn't care. Jackson, for all his supposed gifts and his love for the first film, couldn't involve us. The good reviews this film has received baffle me. The only answer I can come up with is that a lot of people have been taught to have diminished expectations from their entertainment. Make it enough like a video game and they think it's fine. But it's not fine to anyone who grew up in the grip of great storytellers. I had supposed Peter Jackson might be such a storyteller. If, in fact, he is, then this is no more than a woeful misstep. But it is so poor, one is forced to entertain the thought that this is the true Peter Jackson - a hack with too much money and not enough talent.

What a bitter disappointment this film is.

Sahara (1995 TV Movie)

Interesting remake

[15 October 2004]

This remake is better than I expected. It sticks pretty close to the original but does change a few details here and there. Belushi is surprisingly effective in the Bogart role. The rest of the cast perform well. It's no substitute for the original but it is an interesting alternative take on the story.

I don't see this as anywhere near the debacle described by the other reviewer, who was obviously put off by elements of the story that were repeated from the 1943 original. Those were different times. And this film chose to honor those conventions rather than trying to rewrite history to kowtow to current thinking. Whether that was the right move or not is, I suppose, debatable. But I was expecting to hate this film, yet I found myself pleasantly surprised.