He uses soft style in a hard way.

Man of Tai Chi

(2013)

Keanu doesn’t know Tai Chi. At least, his villainous alter ego in Man of Tai Chi doesn’t. Keanu Reeves’ directorial debut is a star vehicle for fight choreographer and diminutive chum Tiger Chen (with whom he worked on The Matrix trilogy). Chen, who bears a passing resemblance to John Cazale, more than holds his own as a leading man, in a rudimentary but effective narrative that finds him overcome with yin and battling to regain his yang. This, naturally, involves a lot of fighting.

This premise is recognisable anywhere, any time; Tiger (Luke) is trained by a master (Ben Kenobi/Yoda) but is tempted by the dark (Yin) side that is Donaka (Reeves; Darth Vader/the Emperor). His master is even called Master Yang (Hai Yu); it’s up there for all to see in orange highlighter. It’s no secret that Lucas’ films consciously blended Eastern and western religion and mysticism in order to tap into universal themes.

Here, right from the start, Master Yang is worried about the disruptive forces within Tiger (“You are not controlling your Chi. Your Chi is controlling you”). Tiger is attracted to power, to prove that Tai Chi is effective for fighting (and so to disprove the pronouncement of his opponent in a local competition; “Tai Chi is just for show. You’ve already lost”). In so doing, Tiger attracts the attention of Reeves’ super-rich Donaka, owner of a private security firm. He runs an illegal fight club in which the contestants may end up dead, one that is under investigation by police officer Sun-Jing Shi (Karen Mok).

Of course, it’s necessary to provide Tiger with motivation to sign up (fighting for money is not honourable, so he requires the lure of a threat to his master’s temple). When he does, a series of escalating encounters ensue. Reeves the director, aided by Woo–ping Yen designing the action, has learnt well. He ensures the fights are brutal and vital, complemented by a driving soundtrack that adds a touch of the oriental to Matrix style beats. Michael G Cooney’s script embraces the archetypes and furnishes a few modern touches; Tiger’s life becomes a Truman Show, filmed at every stage to a paying audience; when it is played back for his edification/horror, it feels like a strange mash up of Peter Weir’s film with The Parallax View test reel.

There wouldn’t be any movie if Tiger accepted his master’s wisdom at the outset, so evidently it’s much more fun to pursue the yang path in filmic terms. This is coloured, however, by having rigid, succinct Donaka (Reeves playing to the minimalist, an effective choice) root for Tiger to become all he can be. Donaka’s methods are merely an inversion of his own master’s teaching, and ultimately there is a blurring of the lines of attainment. Tiger rejects Donaka’s path, refusing to kill for him. But Donaka has his way in the end, when he confronts Tiger and the latter calls upon Yang’s technique of palm striking his opponent. So Tiger delivers Donaka the life he is owed, while Tiger, in so doing, acts with the control Master Yang saw as essential to development.

While the Tiger fights are consistently engaging, Reeves is responsible for the occasional misstep. The Raid’s Iko Uwais is wasted in a cameo as one of Tiger’s opponents, while Reeves is stiff and unconvincing of pose during the climactic confrontation. His appropriation of martial arts worked when conveyed within the stylistic trappings of the Wachowskis’ Matrix universe, but, paired with Tiger, he’s more akin to a lumbering giant. Additionally, the investigation subplot never justifies its inclusion.

Reeves is willing to indulge supernatural elements (the palm strike, the beast like snarl Donaka emits when roused), but he stops short of fully embracing elemental forces. As such, there’s a wee bit of a hodgepodge going on, the director and writer straddling stools at any given moment. Still, this is a decent and modest spectacle, and hopefully Reeves will get back in the director’s seat again soon.

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I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

It’s like an angry white man’s basement in here.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)
(SPOILERS) The reviews for Bad Boys for Life have, perhaps surprisingly, skewed positive, given that it seemed exactly the kind of beleaguered sequel to get slaughtered by critics. Particularly so since, while it’s a pleasure to see Will Smith and Martin Lawrence back together as Mike and Marcus, the attempts to validate this third outing as a more mature, reflective take on their buddy cops is somewhat overstated. Indeed, those moments of reflection or taking stock arguably tend to make the movie as a whole that much glibber, swiftly succeeded as they are by lashings of gleeful ultra-violence or humorous shtick. Under Michael Bay, who didn’t know the definition of a lull, these pictures scorned any opportunity to pause long enough to assess the damage, and were healthier, so to speak, for that. Without him, Bad Boys for Life’s beats often skew closer to standard 90s action fare.

Welcome to the future. Life is good. But it can be better.

20 to See in 2020
Not all of these movies may find a release date in 2020, given Hollywood’s propensity for shunting around in the schedules along with the vagaries of post-production. Of my 21 to See in 2019, there’s still Fonzo, Benedetta, You Should Have Left, Boss Level and the scared-from-its-alloted-date The Hunt yet to see the light of day. I’ve re-included The French Dispatch here, however. I've yet to see Serenity and The Dead Don’t Die. Of the rest, none were wholly rewarding. Netflix gave us some disappointments, both low profile (Velvet Buzzsaw, In the Shadow of the Moon) and high (The Irishman), and a number of blockbusters underwhelmed to a greater or lesser extent (Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Terminator: Dark Fate, Gemini Man, Star Wars: The Rise of the Skywalker). Others (Knives Out, Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum) were interesting but flawed. Even the more potentially out there (Joker, Us, Glass, Rocketman) couldn…

To defeat the darkness out there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
Easily the best of the Narnia films, which is maybe damning it with faint praise.

Michael Apted does a competent job directing (certainly compared to his Bond film - maybe he talked to his second unit this time), Dante Spinotti's cinematography is stunning and the CGI mostly well-integrated with the action.

Performance-wise, Will Poulter is a stand-out as a tremendously obnoxious little toff, so charismatic you're almost rooting for him. Simon Pegg replaces Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep and delivers a touching performance.
***

How many galoshes died to make that little number?

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
(SPOILERS) Looney Tunes: Back in Action proved a far from joyful experience for director Joe Dante, who referred to the production as the longest year-and-a-half of his life. He had to deal with a studio that – insanely – didn’t know their most beloved characters and didn’t know what they wanted, except that they didn’t like what they saw. Nevertheless, despite Dante’s personal dissatisfaction with the finished picture, there’s much to enjoy in his “anti-Space Jam”. Undoubtedly, at times his criticism that it’s “the kind of movie that I don’t like” is valid, moving as it does so hyperactively that its already gone on to the next thing by the time you’ve realised you don’t like what you’re seeing at any given moment. But the flipside of this downside is, there’s more than enough of the movie Dante was trying to make, where you do like what you’re seeing.

Dante commented of Larry Doyle’s screenplay (as interviewed in Joe Dante, edited by Nil Baskar and G…

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

You’re a slut with a snake in your mouth. Die!

Mickey One (1965)
(SPOILERS) Apparently this early – as in, two years before the one that made them both highly sought-after trailblazers of “New Hollywood” – teaming between Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn has undergone a re-evaluation since its initial commercial and critical drubbing. I’m not sure about all that. Mickey One still seems fatally half-cocked to me, with Penn making a meal of imitating the stylistic qualities that came relatively naturally – or at least, Gallically – to the New Wave.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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