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<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...
<i>Conan the Barbarian</i> Is Schwarzenegger At His Darkest, And Maybe Best
There’s a moment, early in Conan the Barbarian, when Arnold Schwarzenegger is wandering around some ancient city, high on some mysterious substance, giggling with his Mongol archer sidekick. He takes a few steps backwards and then stumbles into a camel. Without really looking at what he’s doing, he ...
Netflix's <i>Wet Hot American Summer </i>Prequel Will Thrill Fans, At Least
Even in this brave new world of micro-niches and fan service as a legitimate business model, the very existence of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp is unexpected, somewhat unnecessary, and more than a little odd. But these are exactly the circumstances in which creators David Wain and Mich...
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...
<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...
Supercut: <i>Daredevil</i>'s Gumshoe-Journalist Subplot Is Butt
Netflix’s Daredevil is mostly bad. Sure, there are some good fight scenes, but the corny story arcs and bad acting that burden the first season makes it a better fit on the CW or ABC Family. And nothing in the first season is more cringe-worthy than the storyline concerning a grizzled old newspaper ...
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...