BITE-SIZED: Those Who Wish Me Dead (Taylor Sheridan, 2021)

A veteran smoke jumper (Angelina Jolie) has to protect a young boy from hired killers as a forest fire rages.

After watching Firestorm, I was curious to check in on this more recent, spiritual remake. It almost plays like Firestorm’s more A-list competitor.

A straightforward, star-led action thriller, it is hard to realise how rare this type of movie has become. 

It has only a few villains, with a small plan with high stakes: murdering a child. In 2020s Hollywood, a boilerplate thriller like this is a unique object

Angelina Jolie is solid in the lead. One wishes this movie had been a hit - Jolie is a great action star, and should be getting more opportunities at bat.

While Jolie is the focus, the standout character is played by Medina Senghore, playing a heavily pregnant woman who becomes the film’s action hero, tracking the villains and killing the Big Bad.

The film ends up as more of an ensemble piece: Our heroes win by working together.

The villains might have the power of a (largely unseen) organisation behind them, but trapped in a raging forest fire, that counts for nothing.

Did I love it?

No. But it is an efficient programmer - it does its job. 

Related 

Firestorm

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BITE-SIZED: Maniac Cop (Bill Lustig, 1988)

A cop is stalking the streets of New York City. 

A maniac cop…

Written by Q the Winged Serpent’s Larry Cohen and directed by Maniac’s Bill Lustig, Maniac Cop is a solid eighties slasher.

It plays on assumptions about cops, their role in society and the way ordinary people act around them.

The ‘cop from hell’ reversal might have carried more of a jolt in 1988; in the age of increased visibility of police violence and over-militarisation, it feels almost quaint.

The New York City of the movie is the stuff of popular nightmares: the ‘Fear City’ popularised following its near-bankruptcy in the mid-seventies, filled with roving gangs and drug dealers. 

It is the NYC of reactionary fantasy, but it is also the NYC popularised by movies.

The cast are solid:

Genre mainstay Bruce Campbell is fine as an innocent man on the run, and Tom Atkins is great as the veteran cop on the case.

The film is pretty tense, although that head of steam starts to peter out once the menace is given a shade more explanation and Cordell is revealed.

I am usually a fan of unexplained antagonists, but I left the movie a little wanting. We never get a sense of how Cordell returned - he just appears to be an immortal zombie. It might be a taste thing - I am not the biggest fan of supernatural antagonists.

Ending aside, Maniac Cop is worth checking out.

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BITE-SIZED: Someone to Watch Over Me (Ridley Scott, 1987)

When a veteran cop (Tom Berenger) is assigned to protect a wealthy woman (Mimi Rogers) who witnessed a murder, he finds himself falling for the blue blood.

This entanglement puts both his marriage and his family’s lives on the line when the killer turns his sights on him.

Based on the movie’s pedigree, I was kind of hopeful.

Like all Ridley Scott projects, Someone to Watch Over Me looks great.

But the movie never has lift off.

It is a familiar thriller premise, with a love triangle lent interest by the class difference between the would-be lovers.

A better film would have lent into the layers of tension the story lays out: Betraying his wife, crossing professional and ethical boundaries, and then the variable of a homicidal killer jeopardizing it all. 

Tom Berenger is a relatively unknown quantity to me. The one film I have seen of his from this period is Betrayed, in which he plays a Neo-Nazi.

He is believable as a blue-collar cop and has decent chemistry with both Rogers and Lorraine Bracco as his wife.

Frankly, while he is believable as an unfaithful husband, the movie does not do enough with that complication.

There is nothing here - no great forbidden love. It just plays as a run-of-the-mill affair.

And the crime story is uninvolving. We get a couple of competent setpieces, but nothing that sticks in the mind.

The story feels so small and pointless.

Scott’s feel for creating a sense of place and character is the film’s standout element - you get a sense of Berenger entering a completely different world from the one he lives in. 

But that is about it.

The cast are good (Bracco is fantastic), but there is not much else to discuss.

Related

Black Rain

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Avenging Angel (Robert Vincent O'Neil, 1985)

After an old friend is murdered, Angel (Betsy Russell) returns to the streets to avenge him.

Eighties sequels are so wild. Look at the difference between the first and third Rocky movies. Or, using Sylvestor Stallone’s other iconic franchise, look at the contrast between First Blood and its sequel.

The original Angel is basically a gritty social drama. Avenging Angel is an action movie.

Even the recasting of Donna Wilkes with Betsy Russell makes sense for the pumped-up, cartoonish aesthetic of the new movie. Wilkes was believable as a teenager, working for the film’s more sombre and tragic tone.

While Russell is actually younger than her predecessor, she reads as older, and she is costumed to foreground her physique. Whereas Angel shied away from trying to sexualise its heroine, Avenging Angel foregrounds it.

Indeed, shorn of the aspirations (or pretensions?) of the original, Avenging Angel is more of a straight genre piece.

Aside from a few cast members (Kit Carson, Susan Tyrell), you could be forgiven for thinking this was a completely new movie. 

It would probably play better that way.

I watched the two movies back to back, and the difference in style and tone is not immediately apparent.

The moment the movie really jumps the shark, when our heroes try to break Kit Carson out of the sanitarium. 

 Filled with pratfalls and overtly “comedic” music, the scene basically re-sets the table for the film (Susan Tyrell goes for broke pretending to be a grieving widow).

Everything in the film is cranked up to extremes. The heroes are super-good looking and super-virtuous, the violence is over-the-top and the whole movie takes place in a cartoonish day-glo environment that feels more like the Girl Hunt sequence from The Band Wagon, than the gritty real-world locations of the first movie. 

The whole movie is goofy - one bad guy slips while running away and slides out a window.

Though made by New World, this movie feels like a Cannon picture. It feels like the camera could pan into Exterminator 2 or one of the Death Wish sequels.

And unlike the original Angel, this movie has proper action movie villains: OTT yuppies.

In a skewed way, these villains sum up the movie: the film creates a bizarre class dynamic, as Angel gathers a collection of outsiders to take down these wealthy killers.

 

In the lead, Betsy Russell is gorgeous but a little flat as Angel 2.0. It does not help that the character seems to have been smoothed out - she appears to be completely well-adjusted, and her dynamic with her friends lacks warmth and sense of history.

Angel is presented more like a vigilante, getting into costume (hairspray, tank top, hot pants, an oversized peacemaker) before returning to her old haunts to take down the bad guys. She looks like an action figure, and is about as deep.

Overall, the characters feel like archetypes, which works for this movie. I cannot say I enjoyed it, but the movie seems to know exactly what it is.

It feels like the filmmakers want to replicate the ridiculousness of the original’s finale, and extend that for the entire movie.

If that was their aim, they succeeded.

The original has more bite, but on its own terms Avenging Angel is junky fun.

Related

Angel

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BITE-SIZED: Black Rain (Ridley Scott, 1989)

Nick Conklin is a corrupt cop on the fast track to nowhere when he is tasked with bringing rogue Yakuza Koji Sato (Yūsaku Matsuda) back to Japan.

When Sato escapes, Conklin is forced to join forces with local officer Masahiro "Mas" Matsumoto (Ken Takakura) to track him down…

I was born in Japan around the time this movie was being made.

I have not been able to go back since.

This movie always felt like a snapshot of the world when I was born. Not the exact location (I was not born in Osaka), but it carries a specific charge for me - like one of those ice-core samples with atmosphere from a millenia past.

In this case, some of that atmosphere is pretty toxic: Black Rain is one of the primary cinematic texts for capturing the anti-Japanese sentiment from the period. Ironically, this was the end of Japan’s postwar economic boom, but as Japanese companies made their way into the American market, it was accompanied by fear of a peaceful Japanese take-over of industry and technology.

For Ridley Scott, it feels like closing a loop, as Scott places his action against contemporary backdrops of neon and hi-tech media projection that evoke the look he developed for Blade Runner.

This is a movie where the story is beside the point.

Beyond its aesthetic pleasures and atmosphere, Black Rain is a pretty generic cop thriller.

Michael Douglas is good casting as a corrupt cop, less as a fish-out-of-water we are supposed to empathise with. He is too convincing as a xenophobic asshole and I never bought his redemption.

I found it hard to track his arc, and it feels like the movie has been cut down (Douglas’s relationship with Kate Capshaw’s character seems to be significantly chopped down). 

The real standouts are Andy Garcia and Ken Takakura - Garcia might have been better casting as the lead, and Takakura is affecting as the local cop who joins forces with Douglas.

A good-looking movie about the place of my birth, and that is about it.

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Dirty Angels (Martin Campbell, 2024)

When a group of Pakistani students are kidnapped by terrorists, a group of mercenaries led by grizzled veteran Jake (Eva Green) head across the border into Afghanistan to rescue them.

Released last month, I had no idea Dirty Angels had come out until someone mentioned it on a podcast. Ah, the joys of contemporary distribution!

I am a big Martin Campbell fan. I think it fully solidified after watching his 1985 miniseries Edge of Darkness.

He has been on a bit of a tear recently, directing programmer action movies every other year. He has a new film, Cleaner with Daisy Ridley, due out later this year. 

While I am happy to see him working regularly, I have not been the biggest fan of this latest stage of his career.

That being said, this might be the first film of his in this run where there is nothing to latch onto.

The Protege suffered from some slight cheapness in terms of seemingly rushed staging and production design. Dirty Angels features a lot of location work, but suffers from a visual flatness that is surprising for Campbells’ work.

One thing I liked about Campbell’s past work is the sincerity he brings to genre fare - his deft hand with Bond, and embrace of the classic swashbuckler in Mask of Zorro. That sincerity seemed to be matched with an awareness of the genre’s cliches, and a certain willingness to deconstruct them. 

Spun as a gender-flipped take on The Dirty Dozen, Dirty Angels leans into the genre’s cliches, but with no sense of irony or imagination (beyond the casting). Sadly, it is the first movie where Campbell gets a writing credit. 

There is nothing in Dirty Angels where it feels like the filmmakers are aware of the cliches of the soldiers-on-a-mission format, or the cinematic signifiers Hollywood has used to paint Middle Eastern and Central Asian locations.

The score is a collection of familiar tropes that sounds like missing cues from Team America - World Police. The villains are cartoonish caricatures straight of a Cannon movie.

The film has one interesting line of conflict - our heroines have to thread a path between the battle lines of the Taliban and ISIS.

That dynamic might have made for a more interesting film, but the film is more interested in playing like a simple action movie. Which is a problem.

Action movies are built on clear moral lines, with protagonists and antagonists resolving their differences through violence.

It is hard to make an entertaining action thriller in a real-world context. The real world does not operate like an action movie - and this movie wants to have it both ways.

It wants to show the power dynamics of contemporary Afghanistan (let us put aside whether it is accurate at achieving that goal).

This film is too beholden to its context, but not nuanced enough to be making a serious statement about the situation in Afghanistan (or the West’s involvement in the region).

It is too grim to be fun.

And the set-pieces are so blandly, awkwardly staged, it never succeeds as a dumb action movie. The film is often shot in wide, flat compositions that make the actors look like they are cosplaying soldiers.

Even the cast cannot save it.

Eva Green is usually interesting to watch, but here she gives herself fully over to playing an emotionally scarred war veteran. It is the kind of stoic, contained performance that is familiar to the genre - but Green feels like she is playing an impersonation of one of those characters. 

The rest of the cast do not get enough to make an impression - the characters’ labels are meant to hide their identities, but they are nothing more than their functions.

The third act is fine but suffers from some confusing geography. And not enough of the titular angels die.

A dour, underwhelming action thriller.

Related

Edge of Darkness: Compassionate Leave

Edge of Darkness: Into the Shadows

Edge of Darkness: Burden of Proof

Edge of Darkness: Breakthrough

Edge of Darkness: Northmoor 

Edge of Darkness: Fusion

No Escape

Mask of Zorro

Casino Royale

Edge of Darkness (2010)

The Foreigner

The Protege

Memory

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BITE-SIZED: Angel (Robert Vincent O'Neil, 1984)

Teenage sex worker Angel's (Donna Wilkes) life is sent into a tailspin when her profession is publicly exposed.

I first watched this movie years ago. I had not thought about it in years until I watched MaxXxine last year.

Despite its premise, Angel is pretty tame. It is also more empathetic toward the central character.

We never see Angel at work, and the movie does not try to titillate the viewer with the tease of seeing our (underage) lead naked.

It is a gentler movie, but it feels like a sibling to Vice Squad - no surprise, since writer-director Robert Vincent O'Neil co-wrote that picture.  

What it shares with the earlier movie is the empathy for its sex worker protagonist. 

Donna Wilkes is solid in the title role. At times her delivery comes off a little forced, but it works for the character’s age.

Cinematographer Andrew Davis (later director of The Fugitive) captures some great shots on the streets. These seemingly found moments help to create a sense of verisimilitude.

The streets where Angel works are not an environment - this is a real place populated by real people trying to get by.

While Vice Squad aims for authenticity, it features more explicitly genre elements, such as WIngs Hauser’s demonically evil pimp Ramrod. By contrast, Angel’s closest analogue is a serial killer who is not the focus of the film until the third act.

The focus is on Angel, her trans friend Mae (Dick Shawn) and the other people who make up her found family.

Even when the movie goes wild in the climax (with our heroine chasing the villain with a huge peacemaker), it does not play like an action movie. 

It is not some searing social drama, but Angel has better intentions than its poster tagline implies.

Related

Vice Squad

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