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<i>Blood and Bone </i>Treats Michael Jai White Like The Badass Miracle He Is
America has failed as a society in many ways, and one of them is this: Michael Jai White is not a titanic movie star. There is no reason why Michael Jai White is not a titanic movie star. He can act. He has a calm, still, intimidating presence. He's handsome enough to play the love interest in a...
Keanu Reeves, B-Movie Auteur: The Badass Excellence Of <i>Man Of Tai Chi </i>
Neo is more interesting than you realized. Last year, Keanu Reeves, once one of the world's biggest movie stars, released Man of Tai Chi, his directorial debut. It's a hard, unpretentious, generally frill-free martial-arts movie about an underground fighting ring, and it was released direct-to-VOD i...
<em>Battle Royale</em>'s Wincing Nastiness Can Never Be Duplicated
Once upon a time, seeking out a way to see Battle Royale, the 2000 Japanese movie about little kids killing each other on an island, felt like finding a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook or something. This movie was never banned in the U.S. the way it was (and still is) in Germany. But even though it q...
<em>Total Recall</em> Was Fucking Awesome
During the first scene of the original 1990 Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger's head explodes. It's just a dream sequence, and the camera cuts away before his face actually pops open. But the fact remains: One of the biggest summer blockbusters of its era opens by forcing you to contemplate the mo...
<em>Django Unchained</em> Gave Us The Quentin Tarantino Gunfight Of Our Dreams
Quentin Tarantino loves action movies in all their forms: ritualistic Hong Kong martial-arts epics, '70s car-chase odysseys, terse and meditative Japanese gangster flicks. He hires the stars of those old movies, and he peppers his own films with references in just about every way he can manage. But ...
<em>El Mariachi</em> Is A Feast Of Bloody Micro-Budget Silliness
There's a moment early in El Mariachi, the micro-budget 1992 movie that introduced Robert Rodriguez to the world, where our hero, an unnamed wandering musician, asks a bartender if he can work there, singing for tips. The asshole bartender laughs in his face and says that he'd never pay one guy ...
The Rad '90s Western <em>Tombstone</em> Is Val Kilmer's Finest Hour
Since I started writing this column, I've been wondering what to do with westerns. They aren't quite action movies, but they're action-adjacent. It feels a bit ridiculous to discuss Once Upon a Time in the West in the same space I'm using for stuff like Dredd and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning....
Jet Li, Ass-Kicking Jerk: The Amazing Absurdity Of <em>Fearless</em>
There are early scenes in the 2006 martial-arts epic Fearless that require Jet Li to play an asshole. These are some pretty funny scenes. Assholism isn't, generally speaking, his thing—pained nobility is his thing. He is a legitimately world-renown ass-kicker, of course: Before he made a single mo...
<em>Red Dawn</em> Is Delusional Right-Wing Porn In The Best Possible Way
The best scenes in the original 1978 Dawn of the Dead aren't the early bursts of urban confusion or the biker-zombie rumbles. They're the scenes where the four isolated survivors giddily run through an abandoned shopping mall, balling out with the artifacts of a just-dead culture. They use mannequ...
<em>Blue Ruin</em> Is A Great Revenge Thriller About How Dumb Revenge Is
Every revenge movie eventually has to address the idea that, hey, maybe revenge is a really bad idea, that maybe you shouldn't organize your entire life around killing the person who wronged you. Usually, this notion is rejected immediately: A supporting character will say something like, "Wait, you...
<em>The Man From Nowhere</em> Is The Fucked-Up South Korean Blockbuster For You
The villains of the 2010 South Korean movie The Man From Nowhere are bad, bad people. How bad? They kidnap unwanted kids for use as drug-lab slave labor. When one passes out in the smack sweatshop, a heavy rolls his eyes and says, "Kids are so dramatic." Then he barks at the rest of 'em to get back ...
<em>Face/Off</em> Is Even Weirder And Radder Than You Remember
The great Hong Kong action director John Woo got to make a handful of English-language movies during his '90s Hollywood period. But he only ever got to make one true John Woo Movie here. That'd be 1997's Face/Off, an absolute nutball mega-budget pileup of all his favorite images (guys flying thr...
You Need More Bruce Lee In Your Life; Start With <em>The Chinese Connection</em>
The most iconic moment in 1972's Bruce Lee vehicle The Chinese Connection, and maybe of his entire career, comes when he walks into a Japanese dojo with a sign that the Japanese, as an insult, left at his teacher's funeral. He says he'll take on anyone in the dojo, and when one guy steps up, Lee s...
Watch This Bonkers <em>Universal Soldier</em> Sequel, But Skip The First Scene
Universal Soldier, you may remember, was a blast of pure 1992 cheese in which Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren play reanimated Vietnam super-soldiers who fight each other. It was pretty good! It was, in fact, the only pretty good movie ever made by German director Roland Emmerich, and its su...
The Gonzo <em>District B13</em> Proves That Parkour Was Good For Something
Right now, someone, somewhere, is trying to turn Ice Bucket Challenge: The Movie into a thing. That's how it works: These little movements bubble up from nowhere, briefly seize the collective imagination, and then disappear in a ball of smoke before some asshole figures out a way to monetize the t...
Gene Hackman Does Rambo: The Emo Machismo Of <em>Uncommon Valor</em>
Gene Hackman made a Rambo movie, and only a year after the original. Maybe it's best to think of 1983's Uncommon Valor as the missing link between The Deer Hunter and the first Rambo sequel, two extremely fucking different takes on the idea that there are still prisoners of war in Vietnam, and we ne...
<em>The Heroic Trio</em>: A Female-Superhero Classic For Stoners Everywhere
Recently, news circulated that we are finally getting a full movie about a female superhero. It's going to be a spinoff of the current not-great Spider-Man series, and we don't yet know if the female superhero in question is going to be Spider-Woman or Silver Sable or the Black Cat or what. It's a f...
<em>Safe</em> Is The Best Jason Statham Movie
You can learn a lot about someone from his or her favorite Jason Statham movie. For instance, if your pick is Crank (or, fucking hell, Crank 2), I know you don't really like Jason Statham movies that much. Those are built on a fun concept, and they have a few great ideas, but they're Mountain Dew co...
Drive Angrier: The Bleak Mayhem Of Mel Gibson's Original <em>Mad Max</em>
For someone who's never been to Comic-Con, the whole idea seems a bit baffling—waiting in line all day to attend a half-hour promotional junket for a movie that won't be out for another year, getting to say you were there when Robert Downey, Jr. said he had a pretty good time making this next Aven...
Donnie Yen Is The Tom Hanks Of Kicking Ass In <em>Ip Man</em>
On a good day, Hong Kong's Donnie Yen is the greatest working movie star on the face of the earth. Even in bad movies, he has a light charm, a gracefulness that shines brighter than anything his Hollywood peers can offer. There's a warmth in his presence, a gliding dignity. The sparkle in his eye ri...