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<i>Hot Fuzz </i>Is The Ultra-Rare Action-Comedy That Doesn't Suck
I don’t know who came up with the idea of the action-comedy, but that person deserves our entire scorn. The genre, which flourished in the late ’80s and early ’90s, was built around the idea that a comedy wasn’t really a movie unless it had a shoddily edited car chase at the end. This was the sort o...
<i>Vengeance </i>Proves That French Rock Stars And Hong Kong Hitmen Can Mix
Johnny Hallyday has a fascinating, crazy face. He’s old and rich and famous enough that of course he’s had work done: His eyes are unnaturally tight, and they have that weird skin-stretched-back thing that Sylvester Stallone has these days. But those eyes themselves were already something before any...
John Carpenter's <i>Assault On Precinct 13 </i>Is Ice Cold And Just Right
John Carpenter’s original Assault on Precinct 13 is one of the greatest zombie movies of all time, and there’s not a single zombie in it. The elements are all there: The chilling synth score, a cast of randoms thrown together by chance, an isolated siege site, the narrow escapes and eerie moments be...
John Woo's Mesmerizing <i>The Killer </i>Changed Action-Movie History Forever
The best John Woo movie, and the main reason action-movie dorks speak the guy’s name in hushed tones, is 1992’s Hard-Boiled. That’s the last one he made in Hong Kong before he came over to America and found ways to inject his bullet-riddled absurdism into Hollywood’s system, and it’s the one where h...
<i>Payback</i> Is Mel Gibson At His Nastiest, And Therefore Best
After one viewing, I’m ready to call Mad Max: Fury Road the best English-language action flick since Terminator 2, if not Die Hard. It’s a motherfucker of a movie, a new benchmark in violent cinematic mayhem. I’ve you’ve ever read this column and you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading and go now. You...
Hyper-Violent Cartoon Westerns Don't Get Better (Or Weirder) Than This
If you get hopelessly lost watching the 2008 South Korean adventure The Good, the Bad, the Weird, don’t worry about it. You’re not alone. In fact, during the absurd and complicated horses-and-jeeps-and-motorcycles chase that ends the movie, some of the bandits ask each other, “Who’s that?” when anot...
<i>The Professional </i>Is Deeply Problematic, Profoundly Cool, And Very '90s
Imagine the elevator pitch for The Professional. “Okay, so we’ve got this hitman, right? Only he’s not a cool hitman: He’s great at killing, but he’s also childlike, off-kilter, possibly on the spectrum. He doesn’t really have any friends or talk to anyone outside of ‘work.’ We’ll make sure he doesn...
<i>The Way of the Dragon </i>Is A Stone-Cold Classic For That One Fight Alone
There used to be this DVD store in the Times Square subway station. Maybe it's still there. Probably not. Why was there ever a DVD store in the Times Square subway station? Some things just make no sense. But one day, maybe seven or eight years ago, I was walking through that hellmouth, and I saw ...
<i>Skyfall</i> Isn't The Best Bond Flick, But It Does Kick The Most Ass
There's no good answer to the "What's the best James Bond movie?" question, since the best James Bond movie will always be the first one you saw when you were a kid. (I ride for Live and Let Die until death.) And there's no good answer as to which James Bond is the best James Bond, since everyone ...
<i>Chocolate </i>Is A Martial-Arts Classic If You Just Focus On The Kicking
So Chocolate is not Chocolat, the 2000 Johnny Depp/Juliet Binoche movie where people eat chocolate from a particular shop and it somehow makes them fall in love with each other. Chocolat is the sort of movie where you know it takes place in France because people speak English in French accents. It w...
<i>Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry </i>Is Acidic B-Movie Nihilism Done Right
The car-chase movies of the '70s really only had one plot: Someone drives a muscle car really fast, hoping to avoid police cars, some of which end up driving into streams or ponds. But each movie found a vastly different way to tell that one story. Vanishing Point, the genre's real masterpiece, to...
<i>Iron Monkey </i>Is An Underrated Goof From Hong Kong's '90s Golden Era
Somehow, in the early '90s, the Hong Kong film industry just had the action movie figured out. You'll see something like this every once in a while: A particular locale just going ham on some particular art form. It's like New York rap in the mid-'90s: All these classics coming out at a dizzying s...
Vin Diesel's Gloriously Absurd <i>XXX </i>Is Mountain Dew For The Soul
XXX, the fantastically stupid Vin Diesel vehicle from 2002, starts with a shaky premise: James Bond is done. The world has changed, and he can't survive. You can understand how someone might've arrived at that conclusion. The Pierce Brosnan era was nearing its bloated end, and Die Another Day, with ...
<i>Headhunters </i>Proves That Norway Is Secretly A Super-Messed-Up Place
For a non-fan, the whole idea of the Nordic noir phenomenon can feel a bit strange: An entire genre of mass-market paperback thrillers dedicated to the idea that people in some of the world's cleanest, brightest, richest, most polite countries are really doing unspeakable things to each other behi...
<i>The Running Man</i>'s Goofy, Violent Dystopia Hasn't Arrived Yet, Alas
Right around New Year's Day, I saw a bit of online chatter pointing out that we were entering the year depicted in Back to the Future II, and that to our great disappointment, we still don't have hoverboards or '80s-themed diners. Tragic as that may be, I'm more concerned that we're now only two yea...
The Loopy <i>Project A</i> Is Jackie Chan At His Most Violently Ridiculous
There's a moment in the 1983 Jackie Chan movie Project A where he's dangling from a clock tower's minute hand, clinging for dear life as people watch him from stories below. Chan has always been a big silent-comedy head, and the scene was directly inspired by a famous stunt that Harold Lloyd pulle...
Jason Statham Will Hopefully Never Stop Making Movies Like <i>Homefront</i>
There are things you expect to see in a Jason Statham movie, and 2012's Homefront has those things: kicks, headbutts, armbars, heads smashed through car windows, weary neck-stretches, imperiled little kids, muttered warnings not to fuck with Jason Statham. It also has James Franco banging Winona Ryd...
The Terse, Explosive <i>Drug War </i>Is Nearly As Hard As <i>Hard Boiled </i>Itself
The Hong Kong shoot-'em-up is a venerated cinematic genre, one that blew a whole lot of minds and changed the way all movies look, but it really had a pretty short shelf life. The halcyon era really only lasted about seven years: From 1986, when John Woo made the groundbreaking gangster flick A Bett...
<i>RoboCop </i>Is The Best Movie Ever Made
In fourth grade, I went to school every day with a RoboCop lunchbox. In retrospect, this seems insane. RoboCop is arguably the bleakest, most violent, most nihilistic movie ever made by an American studio. Every scene seems to drip with malice even when nothing especially dramatic is happening. It's...
Pretty Hurts: Why The Steely <i>Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon </i>Holds Up
There is a lot of fighting in 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but almost none of the blows look like they hurt. The one really painful attack here—the one where you sort of recoil from the screen—is when one woman tells another woman that they're not friends anymore, that they could never b...