The Fourth Protocol (John Mackenzie, 1987)

A veteran secret agent, John Preston (Michael Caine) becomes alarmed when a Soviet agent is intercepted carrying material for a nuclear bomb.

That material was intended for Major Valeri Alekseyevich Petrofsky (Pierce Brosnan), a deep cover agent who has been tasked with detonating a nuclear device near a US military base. The intention is to make it look like an accident so that the US will have to pull out of the UK.

Preston is in a race against time to find the bomb and stop it before Petrofsky sets it off.

I have been curious about this movie for years - Pierce Brosnan as an evil secret agent? Michael Caine? Based on a book by Frederick Forsyth (Day of the Jackal)? Sign me up!

This movie has a great eighties British pedigree - it was written by Forsyth and directed by John Mackenzie (The Long Good Friday). The photography is by Phil Meheux, who lensed Good Friday and a couple of great Bond movies.

The movie operates as an ensemble piece, but the key players are Caine and Brosnan.

Caine plays a vetern secret agent who is frustrated by his boss’s lack of imagination and support. He plays Preston with a sardonic edge - he is Harry Palmer with more years and a young son (he is widower). Caine is always good value and he makes his side of the movie far more involving than it probably read on the page.

The real surprise for me was Pierce Brosnan. It has been a while since I watched a Brosnan movie - I cooled on his Bond era and I found his acting choices florid (mouth noises, pain face yadyadayada). 

Thankfully I really liked him in this.

Brosnan is a super-cold fish - he is using all the elements which would make him great as Bond (the charm, the easy smile, the sex appeal), but there is nothing behind it. He is Death in a beautiful mask. 

His performance felt like a dry run for his first go as Bond in GoldenEye. There is a physicality and tension to both these performances that draws your attention. The key difference is that Brosnan dials back on the humour and the warmth. In Fourth Protocol, he feels like he is always holding his emotions back. That restraint is so good because the filmmakers offer key moments where the character’s mask almost slips. 

These brief moments of humanity only make him more disturbing - this is a man who is willing himself into becoming a killing machine. He was not born this way - he has made himself this way through sheer force of will.

Brosnan always feels like he is about to explode, and it is one of the film’s main strengths.

As far as the filmmaking goes, the film is pretty downbeat. I enjoyed the cool blues of the cinematography and the downbeat aesthetic of mid-eighties England. This movie feels closer to the muted tones and colour palette of a seventies thriller than the flashier aesthetic of the eighties.

I also enjoyed how quiet the movie is, and how much time it devotes to the tradecraft of espionage, from a staged burglary through an elaborate tail on a suspected turncoat. The filmmakers also dedicate a lot of time to Petrofsky’s mission, as he gathers the elements of the bomb.

For the first half, the movie works as a character-based thriller, with a welcome focus on process- in the second half, these scenes start to feel like padding and the suspense starts to dissipate.

I was not sure about why this movie does not work until I rewatched another Forsyth adaptation, Day of the Jackal. At its best this movie feels like a sloppy remake of the same premise.

That movie is fetishistic about process to a degree that feels far more built for suspense than this movie. Part of the reason may be that Jackal is based around shooting a single person with a gun. I have never used a gun but I can understand the stakes as the Jackal assembles his equipment. A nuclear bomb is a more complicated proposition.

The big problem I have with the movie is pacing - the movie starts to lose itself about midway through, just when it really needs to pick up.

I think the underlying issue may be that there are not as many moving parts - Jackal is a chase movie whereas this movie is more staggered.

Day of the Jackal is solely about its premise, whereas The Fourth Protocol takes more set up. The third act is also flat - which for this kind of tick-clock thriller is bad: 

The final confrontation between Caine and Brosnan is bizarre - the editing in this sequence is languorous, and the combatants are never shown in the same shot - it almost feels like they shot on seperate days. 

The movie is entertaining, but it never racks up the suspense in the way it should.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: The Bone Collector (Phillip Noyce, 1999)

Disabled investigator Lincoln Rime (Denzel Washington) and rookie cop Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie) team up to take down a serial killer prowling New York City.

Every time a nineties thriller pops up on Netflix, I watch it. I need to show some restraint because quality control is out the window.

I miss these kinds of mid-budget thrillers - you get a couple of high-profile actors, some solid filmmakers, and you have the makings of something enjoyable. Part of the enjoyment is definitely a product of the current movie landscape - while I can look to non-Hollywood cinema for thrillers, I do miss the days when Hollywood would churn out a couple potboilers a year.

I was too young to watch most of these movies when they were released, but even now I still associate them with ‘grown-up’ entertainment. Most of the time, that feeling dissipates as soon as I watch them.  

The Bone Collector is a prime example of this. I have known it was bad for years - I cannot remember where this label came from, but I knew somehow that this thing was not good.

But absence makes the heart grow fonder - plus I thought it might be trashily entertaining. But The Bone Collector ended up being a stranger beast, in that regard.

There is something missing from this movie.

It has a slick look, the direction is solid and the acting is not terrible. But there is nothing going on underneath.

The skeleton is typical thriller hokum but the hook of this movie is meant to be Lincoln Rime (Denzel Washington), a disabled investigator, and his relationship with his field agent, rookie cop Amelia Donaghy (Angelina Jolie).

It was not until the end of the movie that I realised the filmmakers were trying to establish a potential romance. It is a pity a couple of accounts - the stars do not have that kind of chemistry, and the script does not develop their relationship enough to make that romance feel like a possibility.

The movie also never feels unsafe - I do not mean that we need to see gore, but great thrillers make you feel uncomfortable - this movie always feels like it is on rails.

What is frustrating is that this movie could have been good.

If this movie was better written; if it was based on the relationship rather than the case; if the chemistry between the leads was electric...  

This movie is a collection of ‘ifs’. In the end it just kind of lies there. It is not even scary.

I kind of enjoyed it for a while, mostly on the level of nostalgia, but in the end it just felt like a bore. The quest for a fun 90s thriller will continue.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

OUT NOW: F9 - The Fast Saga

Cipher (Charlize Theron) is back. And this time she has backup: Dominic Toretto's brother Jakob (John Cena).

Can the Fast family survive this reunion?

PRE-VIEWING SCRIBBLE

I have a theory about the Fast franchise. It has taken a while to percolate, but a couple of recent things cemented it in my head. Vin Diesel is a big fantasy nerd. He has tried to create fantasy epics in the past (Chronicles of Riddick, The Last Witch Hunter) and they have not taken off. Fast & Furious meanwhile has prospered, in spite of his seeming indifference as a performer.

As part of his return in 2009, Diesel was savvy enough to ensure he was a major creative force on the movies going forward. 

Watching Dom's final duel with Shaw at the end of Furious 7, something finally clicked. It happened at the point where Dom brandishes two pipes and adopts a fighting stance: Vin Diesel is trying to bring the epic fantasy he wants to play into the Fast & Furious franchise. 

It even extends to the titles of these movies: Fate of the Furious; the rebranding of The Fast Saga. One of the most out-there images in Fate is Diesel in a futuristic suit and helmet lumbering towards the Russian foreign minister's limousine.

POST-VIEWING

The fantasy theory turned out to be a bit bobbins - yes the Family go to space and yes, Dom brings down a building on an army of bad guys ala Samson, but for the most part this movie felt a little more reigned in than the last couple instalments. It feels a little less imaginative than the previous movies.

It might be the result of how I watched it. After watching the previous eight films, F9 feels like a damp squib. 

That title has been bugging me. That word ‘saga’ in the title is key - it feels like the franchise has become too big for its britches. Rather than a sign of broader ambition, it is a movie about being a part of a bigger narrative.

Framed by flashbacks, F9 is a movie obsessed with its own history. We get to see scenes that were only ever referenced - the death of Dom’s father; the murder which sent him to prison - but these scenes are used as the basis for introducing Jakob (Cena), a previously unreferenced younger brother.

 

This movie is also a response to the fanbase - fan favourite Han returns and the idea of cars in space is finally actualised.

There are also some ham-fisted attempts at self-awareness: Roman gains an awareness that the Family might be more invincible than ordinary people. This kind of humour feels like a step too far, but what makes it worse is that there is no real payoff.

 

The overriding sense with F9 is of a franchise that has passed its peak - the introduction of a new Toretto, the fan service and the celebrity cameos all feel like desperate  grasps to stay on top.

The film features plenty of set pieces, jokes and melodrama, but it lacks the elan of previous instalments. Previous movies seemed to be assembled from the ground up, one at a time. You never felt like they heals to reckon with previous plot threads. The wear was starting to show in Fate of the Furious, but in this movie all freshness is gone

F9 feels calcified to its formula.

The one element that feels fresh is John Cena as Jakob. He brings a swagger and arrogance that is welcome. I wish the movie did not blunt him - he actually feels like a legitimate threat.

The flashbacks are interesting. It is cool that they cast two actors who vaguely fit the character, rather than de-ageing. I liked the fact that the actors do not look or act too much like the actors we know. I bought the characters. But something about it felt predictable, like filling in gaps that we did not need filled in. 

Diesel seems most energised in the movie but mostly when he is having to deal with the new faces - he seems genuinely excited to be acting with Helen Mirren (yes, she is in it). 

Some of the characters actually start to show some weakness - super-hacker Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) cannot drive, but has to be the key driver during one of the set pieces. 

Tyrese Gibson remains the only vaguely relatable character in the movie - unlike Diesel, Gibson seems genuinely afraid and affected by the ridiculous antics they do. My favourite part of the movie is at the end of the chase through the mine field, when he is struggling to get out of his vehicle before it hits a mine. His dazed stumble away from the carnage is the most real and funny moment in the movie. 

I do appreciate that they have dialled back Tej and Roman’s rivalry over winning Ramsey - it feels like the only way forward after her final line in Fate of the Furious. Here is hoping they find something for Roman to do in the next movie - he is turning into the franchise’s CPU.

 

The big problem I had with the movie is that I could see where the story was going - I knew that Jakob would be converted to the side of the angels, and I was not proved wrong. This has been a major issue with the franchise’s antagonists and reached its peak with dual rehabilitation of the Shaw brothers in Fate.

And thus we reach the end of the road - at least for now. I cannot believe I sat through nine of these things. It has had its up and downs, but after three months of Fast-ing, it has been fun. I always find it interesting to analyse franchises, particularly how they figure out what their specific ingredients were. 

Fast & Furious took a couple of gos to figure out what it was about, but once it did - family; cars-as-superpowers - it turned into something weirder and more sophisticated than it initially appeared. There are aspects of F9 that concern me - death is meaningless; villains are placeholders - but I am still in the bag for whatever goofy stuff they come up with next. I am not willing to call myself a fan, but I am very, very curious about whatever happens next.

Previous posts

The Fast and the Furious

2 Fast 2 Furious

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift 

Fast & Furious

Fast Five

Fast & Furious 6

Furious 7

Fate of the Furious

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

xXx: The Return of Xander Cage AKA xXx: Reactivated (DJ Caruso, 2017)

When his old boss Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) is killed, Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) is brought out of retirement to retrieve a device called Pandora’s Box which has been stolen by an elite band of daredevils. 

Xander gathers his own team to chase down the group, who turn out to be a group of rogue xXx agents. 

In the end, Xander and this team join forces to defeat the government forces who wish to use the device to dominate the world.

In the words of Ice Cube, “Thank God the Gangsta’s back”. After three movies, just like Bond, xXx finally figured out what it is. Yes, I’m saying this is the Goldfinger of xXx movies.

When I first reviewed this movie in 2017, I did not care for it. After a couple years away, and after watching the previous movies, it finally clicked. This movie is what xXx should have been all along.

The opening scene with Sam Jackson is more fun and energetic than the first two movies combined. His death segueing into the title credit feels like the ultimate ego flex - the other famous name in this franchise is dead; Vin has returned!

This movie feels like a remake of the original, except the filmmakers know how ridiculous the premise, and lean into that silliness with tongue in cheek. The scene of Xander skiing through the jungle, hi-fiving bus passengers; Xander seducing a roomful of hackers/models to retrieve his wooly jacket; the introductions of the other xXx agents; every line of dialogue that Nina Dobrev has… this movie has no pretensions to be anything other than a string of ridiculous stunts, characters and one-liners.

The other thing that makes this movie hilarious is how much of a Vin Diesel ego trip this movie is. While DJ Caruso’s name is under the director title, this is a Vin Diesel movie (‘DJ Caruso’ sounds like his directing alias).

I could use the same list of examples to point out how this movie is meant to make Vin look like the coolest guy in the world. Maybe this is just me knowing that Vin is a big DnD guy,  but every time he is with a woman it feels like a 13 year-old writing himself into an action movie: “And I do sick turns on a skateboard. And I can ski through the jungle. And every woman loves me”.

It is Vin rebuilding the franchise on the formula of his other gig, but this time it pays off. Diesel seems to recognise that he works when he is growling and stomping around as part of an ensemble.

What makes the experience better is that the cast all seem to be having fun. Donny Yen is the guy that Vin Diesel thinks Xander Cage is - here is hoping that he returns in the next movie because it would be nice to have at least one person who can actually do xXxtreme stuff.

Does Toni Collette want to be here, or is she leaning into the silliness of the movie? It does not matter because her archness/disinterest are a welcome bonus to the movie’s vibe. 

Deepika Padukone is a fine actress - she was great in Padmaavat from a couple years ago - but she seems out of place here. She seems a bit too highbrow for this nonsense.

The one actor who knows exactly what kind of movie she is in is Nina Dobrev. her character should be straight garbage - she spends her first scene mooning over Cage - but she brings a real enthusiasm to proceedings that is infectious.

Not everything in the movie is great. The series can still not work out how to create memorable action sequences - most of them are fine but they do fumble, particularly with Tony Jaa.

The filmmakers completely short-sell Jaa - they give him fight sequences which are so over-edited that you cannot tell what is going on. It almost makes me wonder if it was some BTS flexing from the movie’s star so he was not overshadowed.

The one fight scene that works is Donnie Yen’s one-man assault on the bad guys’ plane - it actually uses wide shots and a moving camera to show off the choreography. 

What is interesting about this movie is how it does not ignore Part 2, but (probably unintentionally) elaborates and improves upon its conceit that xXx is a codename which can be passed from agent to agent, by making lots and lots of xXx agents. When Ice Cube shows up, I was unnecessarily happy - it is so great that Vin brought him back in. And Vin looks like a good guy. The man is a genius!

Like The Next Level, this movie follows the second one in that it takes an idea from its predecessor and evolves it: here,  xXx is re-positioned as an independent organisation that will police the intelligence community and foil its various schemes - this feels more in keeping with the rogue credentials of the xXx idea.

After three movies, xXx has finally found a groove - it is seriously indebted to Diesel’s other gig, but it works. This movie shows that you need more than just extreme sports Bond, because James Bond technically does extreme sports. This movie is what the original thought it was, but better. At the end of xXx 3, Cage has basically turned into an xXxtreme version of Robin Hood, with a team of xXxtremely Merry Men/people.

You will be unsurprised to learn that I am xXxtremely xXxcited for xXx 4.

Related posts

The Fast and the Furious

2 Fast 2 Furious

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift 

Fast & Furious

Fast Five

Fast & Furious 6

Furious 7

Fate of the Furious

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

xXx: State of the Union AKA The Next Level AKA State of Emergency (Lee Tamahori, 2005)

After the NSA is attacked, Gibbons goes on the run and springs ex-SEAL Darius Stone (Ice Cube) out of prison to hunt down the perpetrators. Stone ends up discovering a conspiracy by his former commanding officer-now SecODef (Willem Defoe) to kill the president and take over the government in a military coup.

If I had watched this movie when it first came out, I think I would have hated it. I ended up watching it on Netflix after xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. It is not great, but with the benefit of 15 years and knowing where the franchise headed next, State of the Union is just a fun waste of time.

This movie feels so much more relevant now. At the time it felt like a supped-up version of 90s government paranoia. The movie is about as cartoonish as GI Joe: Retaliation, another movie that features a hostile takeover of the White House.

This movie does feature an internal coup by right wing warhawks but the movie never builds upon the paranoia of its premise.

According to the internet, the primary influence on this script were paranoid 70s thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View. Knowing this makes me kinda love this silly movie more.

Overall, while it has a better story and slightly more defined character, these qualities are botched by hamfisted execution. Lee Tamahori is a talented filmmaker who has been miscast as a big budget Hollywood entertainer.

I do like how the movie launches straight into the action - we are reintroduced to Augustus Gibbons as his base is attacked by a squad of hi-tech commandos. Featuring plenty of CG-augmented gadgets and explosions, this sequence comes across as live-action GI Joe. Maybe it is because of Tamahori’s work on Die Another Day, I was ready for the film’s simplistic, cartoon-like aesthetic - the movies are aesthetically from the same universe.

Straight off the bat this opening action sequence sets up one of my major issues with the movie: it looks way too overlit, like a car commercial. This scene would be far more exciting if it took place at night. 

While the movie is bobbins, the script is far superior to that of its predecessor. The plot is pure airport thriller but it is a fun one. And unlike the original xXx, Darius Stone has identifiable motivations and has a believable grudge against the villain - on that basis, his rebelliousness is more tangible than Xander Cage.

The filmmakers also reverse the dynamic between Gibbons and xXx - because they are on the run, Gibbons and co are at Darius’s mercy. It is more dramatically satisfying (in theory) than the relationship between Gibbons and Xander Cage. The original movie pivoted around a familiar premise of a civilian becoming a secret agent, but it means Cage is never as active as he should be - and feels less like the independent spirit he is supposed to be.

If this movie were directed more earnestly, Ice Cube’s casting might jostle. When I first watched the movie, I felt he had presence but not enough to work as the lead of this movie. Now, it just adds to the faux toughness of it all.

I do feel like the movie would work better if we were introduced to Ice Cube in the action that sent him to prison. He cannot play that backstory on his own. If Darius were played by an actor who could play that history - I was thinking Laurence Fishbourne - then the film might have worked as is. But the movie feels like it needs to establish the animosity between Darius and his former commanding officer Deckert (Dafoe) visually.

We also need to define how he is xXxtreme because the whole point of the original movie was having an extreme sports daredevil as a secret agent. Here we have a special forces soldier, which is a little cliche in this genre.

The acting is mostly earnest ham, but Scott Speedman is miscast as the good NSA guy on Darius’s tail. The character is bland and the actor does not carry any weight as a potential threat to Darius.

There are a couple of highlights in the movie.

The idea that an American president would want to cut the Pentagon’s budget is utterly ridiculous, but the idea that a warmonger would stage a coup to stop them feels completely reasonable today. But while its influences were 70s conspiracy movies, xXx 2 feels like one of those movies if it was made by eighties action movie house The Cannon Group - it is so simple and action-focused it feels more like a computer-generated remake of Invasion USA, The Delta Force or Cobra.

While I find most of the direction to be lacklustre, there are some good moments: Gibbons’ death scene is actually well-done - particularly the reveal of Willem Dafoe in half-shadow.

The scene where Ice Cube plays a reverend and cheerfully disarms a NRA rep is his best performance. It is OTT but he is so at ease and self-aware that the scene is funnier than it probably read on the page.

The set piece where Darius Stone infiltrates the Washington party as a waiter is almost making a point about race and class in America. The casting of the party is mostly old and white. When he escapes the party, henchmen follow him into the kitchen and realise that all the waiters are black. 

These are micro moments of near-intelligence that prevent me from dismissing it entirely.

But then the movie also features elements which are great because they do not work at all: The terrible nu-metal cover of ‘Fight the Power’ is the most emblematic thing of this movie. It might be the best laugh in the movie.

The interesting idea that they intro at the end is that there is going to be a new xXx in the next movie. While I do not regret there were no sequels, I do find it interesting that - like Fast & Furious - this is a series which accidentally backed itself into ideas which would be better utilised in later instalments.

The big problem with this movie is the same problem I had with the original, but for completely different reasons: bad action sequences.

While the editing and shot selection are not as sloppy, the action in xXx 2 is not constructed to increase audience investment: The set piece on the aircraft carrier is illustrative of the film’s approach to action - there is no build-up or attempt to create tension in Darius’s infiltration. 

The geography of the Capital Building shootout is terrible - I cannot tell where Darius is in relation to the bad guys. All the members of Darius’s unit are killed and its treated as a background detail - that is pretty callous.

The film feels like reheated cliches from the era’s action movies. The scene where Xzibit’s team hijack the truck from two black truckers feels like a sanitised version of a Michael Bay idea - even down to the cutaways to their OTT reaction when Xzibit’s crew reveal the weapons hidden under the cheese. It is such an obvious tired racist trope it just draws attention to how recycled the movie feels.

While I vaguely enjoy most of the movie, the third act is easily the worst scene in the franchise. The CGI in the car chase is only better than the CGI when the car jumps onto the train tracks. It all ends with the most boring villain demise I can recall - made worse by  Samuel L. Jackson’s line: “Your turn to do or die general” - it’s too long and they edit it in just before the missile hits the train. It feels off, like the missile would have hit the train as he said “your turn-”.

There is a reasonable idea for an action movie here, but it is not xXx. Two movies in and they have thrown the original concept out - thankfully the sequel would make up for this.

Ultimately, this movie illustrates the difference between an idea and a story. This movie has an interesting idea, but there is no story. 

Related posts

The Fast and the Furious

2 Fast 2 Furious

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift 

Fast & Furious

Fast Five

Fast & Furious 6

Furious 7

Fate of the Furious

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.