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<i>Red Cliff </i>Is The Crazed War Epic John Woo Was Reborn To Make
It’s probably fair to say that John Woo went limping back to Hong Kong. In the ’80s and early ’90s, Woo changed the Hong Kong film industry by making some of the best action movies of all time: Hard Boiled, The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head. He then spent a decade in Hollywood, where...
The Grisly, Goofy <i>Starship Troopers </i>Played Dumb To Make Hollywood Look Even Dumber
The moment when you discover what Starship Troopers is really about is one of the great eureka moments in the life of any young movie dork. I’ve got vivid memories of staggering out of a suburban multiplex in 1997 and sputtering, “What the fuck was that?” To my teenage self, it was basically Saved b...
<i>Skin Trade </i>Lets<i> </i>Dolph Lundgren Cook, And For A Dumb Action Flick, That's Enough
Dolph Lundgren has had a couple of cups of coffee with the American pop-cultural psyche: haughtily sneering over Apollo Creed’s death in Rocky IV, wearing a necklace of severed ears in Universal Soldier, that sort of thing. But he never crossed over to the upper tier of action stars, and it’s hard t...
<i>Infernal Affairs </i>Can't Escape <i>The Departed</i>'s Shadow, But Watch It Anyway
Hong Kong action-movie directors have picked up a lot from Martin Scorsese. Think of John Woo in particular: the brotherly criminal-underworld bonding in A Better Tomorrow, the gliding camera moves of The Killer, that endless and amazing tracking shot in Hard Boiled. When you consider that Woo basic...
<i>The Wild Bunch </i>Is Still Nasty, Unrelenting, And Pretty Goddamn Great
Imagine being alive in 1969 and going to see The Wild Bunch when it was new. It was released in an era when American movies were changing, and when audiences were getting more and more used to seeing gruesome violence onscreen, like in Bonnie & Clyde. Granted, it was still a time when movies would t...
<i>The Avenging Eagle </i>Is A Great Shaw Brothers Flick For Kung Fu Novices And Experts Alike
Sometime in the last month or two, a whole pile of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies suddenly appeared on Netflix. The Shaw Brothers studio started making movies in Hong Kong in the ’20s, but it’s most famous for the incredibly huge catalog it cranked out during the ’70s and early ’80s. At its peak, the ...
Jason Bourne Is The Paranoid-Assassin Hero America Needed, And Deserved
I don’t know if I can call Matt Damon’s Bourne movies the best action franchise that’s come along thus far this century. After all, the original Fast and the Furious came out in 2001, a year before The Bourne Identity, and the idea of picking between Fast and Bourne is the kind of thing that makes m...
<i>The Bank Job</i> Is A Great Jason Statham Flick, Even Though He Hardly Kicks Anybody
The Bank Job is a movie that stars Jason Statham, but it’s not a Jason Statham movie. The chief attributes of his persona, as established in a long line of mostly-pretty-great action B-movies (like, say, this one or this one), are just not there. We don’t get the cold-eyed and square-jawed stare, or...
<i>Elite Squad: The Enemy Within</i> Is The Next Stop For <i>Narcos</i> Fiends
There’s a very good chance you’ve spent some time in the past few week binging on Narcos, the new Netflix show about the unlikely career of one Pablo Escobar. It’s a great show, one that goes as wide as possible in considering all the effects of the U.S.’s war on drugs and its appetite for them. May...
<i>First Blood </i>Is A Darker, Sadder, And Better Rambo Flick Than You Remember
The climax of 1982’s First Blood isn’t a gun battle or a knife fight. It’s Sylvester Stallone, as John Rambo, breaking down into big, blubbery tears, trying to make sense of the world around him. He’s learned that he’s the last surviving member of his elite fighting force, that America has no furthe...
<i>Shanghai Noon</i> Is The Goofy Kung-Fu Western You Didn't Know You Wanted
Rush Hour was a silly little action-comedy B-movie that blew the fuck up in 1998, and it was easy to get the sense, watching things play out, that Hollywood wasn’t quite sure how to deal with that level of unexpected success. The studios could make more Rush Hour movies, of course, which they absolu...
<i>Kung Fu Hustle </i>Is Goofy, Referential, And Totally Insane
The whole point of the Jim Carrey movie The Mask is the idea of using CGI to combine a pretty standard and amiable zero-to-hero comedy with the antic, absurdist slapstick of Bugs Bunny cartoons. Stephen Chow’s 2004 movie Kung Fu Hustle came a decade after The Mask and from a different side of the wo...
<i>Kickboxer </i>Is Even Sillier Than You Remember, And Even Better, Too
I’m pretty sure the first animated gif I ever saw was Jean-Claude Van Damme dancing in a Thai bar in Kickboxer. The image is the sort of thing that sticks with you: his khakis hiked up to a near-Urkel level, his spaghetti-strap tank top just barely managing to exist, his face contorted into what I g...
<i>Fallen Angels </i>Has The Prettiest, Artiest, Most Nonsensical Gunfights Ever Filmed
When I was in high school, Hong Kong art-film superstar Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 classic Chunking Express was one of those weird movies that became a cornerstone of my whole idea that I was a Smart Person Who Appreciated Smart Things. I watched it over and over and over, and started telling people it was...
<i>The Guest </i>Is Nasty, Violent, Thrilling, And Best Served Cold
A little while into the brutal 2014 indie The Guest, we get one of the most viscerally satisfying bully payback scenes in cinematic history. There’s this kid, this meek and quiet and doughy high school kid whose only friends are online. His family’s cool, ultra-capable, mysterious new adult friend s...
The First <i>Mission: Impossible </i>Movie Is Very '90s And Very Necessary
There has never been a bad Mission: Impossible movie. They’ve all been ridiculous. They’ve all strained credulity. They’ve all had dense, convoluted plots that don’t really stand up to any scrutiny. They’ve all functionally served as Tom Cruise stunt reels, the plots reduced to incoherent connective...
<i>The Warriors </i>Gives Us The Best Fantasy Version Of NYC Ever Filmed
When Bill de Blasio was running for the New York mayor’s office a few years ago, Matt Drudge expressed the fear that de Blasio’s New York would look like the great 1979 gang movie The Warriors. The obvious retort to that: Wouldn’t that make you want to vote for de Blasio? Who wouldn’t want to live i...
<i>Road House </i>Is Patrick Swayze's Finest Hour, And Also America's
Here’s something fun: Imagine the conversations that Terry Funk, the eternally grizzled pro wrestler, and John Doe, the co-leader of the great art-punk band X, had on the set of Road House. By 1989, the year that this beautifully ridiculous action flick hit theaters, those two were legends in their ...
All White Everything: The Glorious Badness Of <i>Enter The Ninja </i>
Ninjas tend to wear all black because they want to move around in the dark without being seen, right? Like, that’s the whole point of being a ninja? I’m asking this because the hero of 1981’s Enter the Ninja is a white ninja, in both senses of the word: He’s a Caucasian man who’s become a ninja, and...
Jet Li's <i>Fist of Legend </i>Is One Of The Best Fight Movies Ever Made
In the very first scene of Fist of Legend, a group of Japanese karate students burst into a college engineering classroom. They’re mad because there’s one Chinese student in the class, and they think Japan should be for Japanese people only. Their idea, I guess, is that they’re going to find that on...