Jesse V. Johnson appears to have supplanted Isaac Florentine as the director of choice for Scott Adkins, still the best-kept secret in action movies even after critics finally appeared to discover his existence with 2019's astonishingly feral AVENGEMENT, an instant cult classic that should've opened on 3000 screens. Johnson's been plugging away in the world of DTV for 20 years, but he's found a niche with fellow workhorse Adkins, and DEBT COLLECTORS marks their sixth collaboration since 2017. These two can blow the doors of the joint with stuff like AVENGEMENT and ACCIDENT MAN, but DEBT COLLECTORS, a sequel to 2018's THE DEBT COLLECTOR, suffers from the same issues as its predecessor: it's trying to be a Shane Black movie but Johnson and co-writer Stu Small's script doesn't quite have the chops to compete. After being mentored in the first film in the ways of debt collection for loan sharks by '80s ninja movie washout Sue (Louis Mandylor), French (Adkins) is sucked back into that world when Sue asks him for a favor: he needs backup for a road trip from L.A. to Vegas to collect three vigs for his boss Big Tommy (Vladimir Kulich, also returning). One of those includes getting $155,000 from ruthless club owner and Sue's pegging-enthusiast ex-flame Mal Reese (Marina Sirtis), but as soon as they collect it, they're nearly ambushed by Mal's own crew trying to get the money back. Then they get $95K from gym owner Estaban Madrid (Cuete Yeska), and pay a visit to obnoxious Cyrus Skinner (Vernon Wells), before all hell breaks loose and people start trying to kill them. It seems Big Tommy's operation has been taken over by Molly X (Louie Ski Carr), the vengeful brother of the dead Barbosa Furiosa, French and Sue's double-crossing nemesis from the first film (where he was played by CANDYMAN's Tony Todd), and he's got scores to settle with all of them.
Johnson and Adkins finally unleash the mayhem in the third act, but too much of DEBT COLLECTORS is just endlessly talky, and once again, the repartee between French and Sue just isn't that snappy or witty. If anything, DEBT COLLECTORS is much darker and more serious than the first film, which makes the crazy action, especially a comically long alley French-Sue alley brawl that's a blatant riff on THEY LIVE, seem at odds with the overtures to real drama. Much of the time, this actually feels like more of a Louis Mandylor loan shark drama than a Scott Adkins actioner, with Mandylor really getting some room to work with Sue talking about his dead daughter and stopping at nothing to display his loyalty to the fatherly Big Tommy. A lot of Adkins fans liked THE DEBT COLLECTOR--with some citing it as a Walter Hill homage--but it just didn't click with me, and DEBT COLLECTORS really didn't either. A couple of nicely-delivered zingers land (Brit French trying to talk some rednecks out of a bar fight, only to be dismissed with a "Fuck off, Harry Styles!") and the action definitely takes center stage by the end, but it's hard to get excited about this when there's both better Johnson/Adkins projects and enough real Shane Black movies that we don't really need another middling imitation of one. (Unrated, 97 mins)
ROBERT THE BRUCE (US - 2020)
A long-in-the-works passion project for Angus Macfadyen, ROBERT THE BRUCE is an unofficial spinoff of Mel Gibson's 1995 Oscar-winner BRAVEHEART, which featured Macfadyen as Robert the Bruce, the eventual King of Scots from 1306 to his death in 1329. Set not long after the 1305 execution of William Wallace, ROBERT THE BRUCE's title character has been met with one defeat after another, and goes off on his own as some defectors from his army are opting to hunt him down and turn him in for a handsome reward. He's seriously injured and nearly killed by a trio of traitors led by Will (ALMOST FAMOUS' Patrick Fugit), but he makes his way through the snowbound wilderness and takes refuge in a cave near the cottage of the peasant Macfie family, headed by the widow Morag (THE CABIN IN THE WOODS' Anna Hutchison). Morag's late husband and her brother were killed in battle in Robert the Bruce's army, and now she's raising her young son Scott (Gabriel Bateman) and her brother's teenage children, Carney (Brandon Lessard) and Iver (Talitha Bateman, who played Hutchison's daughter in the Nic Cage thriller VENGEANCE: A LOVE STORY). It isn't long before the family is visited by Brandubh (DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY's Zach McGowan), Morag's husband's younger brother, who's on the hunt for Robert the Bruce while making his designs on his sister-in-law quite clear ("My brother was a lucky man...until death claimed him"). The family finds Robert the Bruce near death in the woods surrounding the cottage and realize it's their duty to nurse their king back to health, even though young Scott initially resents him and blames him for his father's death. Soon, the entire family bands together to protect and fight alongside the king, even if it means turning against one of their own when Brandubh inevitably tracks the Bruce to the Macfie home.
Supporting actors from beloved '90s classics making their own unofficial "sequels" decades later seems to be a thing this year between this and John Turturro's unwatchable BIG LEBOWSKI offshoot THE JESUS ROLLS. While it's easy to think of it as BRAVEHEART II: THE BRUCE ROLLS, ROBERT THE BRUCE isn't the fiasco you'd be inclined to assume it would be. Macfadyen produced and co-wrote the script, and while it obviously suffers from budget constraints, director Richard Gray keeps things polished and professional, with the snowy mountainous terrain of Montana doing a credible job of filling in for Scotland. It looks better than most DTV-level fare of this sort, and Macfadyen's intent is sincere (considering 25 years have passed since BRAVEHEART and he's still playing the same character at roughly that same age, he doesn't appear that much older, and he obviously hit the gym prior to shooting, looking noticeably slimmer than he has in recent years), but other than a journeyman actor finding a way to reprise his best-known role, what's the point? The story presented here is Robert the Bruce fan fiction, and the battles depicted in the 2018 Netflix film OUTLAW KING (with Chris Pine as Robert the Bruce) are only mentioned yadda-yadda-style in onscreen text before the closing credits, obviously since ROBERT THE BRUCE doesn't have the money to convincingly stage epic battle sequences. For the first hour, Macfadyen almost appears to be on Bruce Willis detail, offscreen for long stretches and periodically dropping in on his own movie to mostly lie in a cave grimacing in pain while we get caught up on the backstory of Morag's family. He almost seems to be erring on the side of caution to avoid the pitfalls of a vanity project--there's a big, rousing speech at the end, and Robert the Bruce isn't even the one delivering it. ROBERT THE BRUCE is far too long at just over two hours, Jared Harris is wasted in a brief cameo as John Comyn, and when MAGNOLIA's Melora Walters shows up as Morag's witch mother, apparently on furlough from a lost Shakespeare play, things get precariously close to IN THE NAME OF THE KING-era Uwe Boll territory. ROBERT THE BRUCE was scheduled for a one-night-only Fathom Events screening at theaters nationwide in April 2020 before that plan was nixed by the coronavirus, resulting in the straight-to-VOD premiere that was its destiny from the very start. All things considered, it's not bad, but perhaps this whole thing should be shut down before Jaimz Woolvett gets any bright ideas about UNFORGIVEN II: THE SCHOFIELD KID. (Unrated, 123 mins)
AGONY (Italy/US - 2020)
Completed in 2017 and likely shelved in the wake of star Asia Argento's #MeToo scandal involving sexual assault allegations by her HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS co-star Jimmy Bennett, AGONY (originally titled THE EXECUTRIX) looks a lot like a throwback Italian horror film but never quite gets its act together. At least, not in its current version. There's very little information on this thing, and the film logging site Letterboxd didn't even have it listed until two days ago (under the EXECUTRIX title), and as of this writing, I'm the only Letterboxd user who's actually seen it, but it apparently had a running time of 115 minutes at one point. AGONY, on the other hand, starts rolling its closing credits at 75 minutes, and after the director credit for Argento's ex-husband Michele Civetta (they divorced in 2013, but remained professional collaborators), there's an "additional directing" credit for screenwriter Joseph Schuman that's in a different font than the rest. Three additional cinematographers buried in the credits is another sign of a troubled production, but even without seeing that kind of evidence, whole chunks of AGONY seem to be missing in terms of character consistency, motivations, and basic continuity. There's a foundation for an interesting idea here about the dynamics of abuse and how they're sometimes unwittingly handed down from generation to generation, but it gets drowned out by one tired horror cliche after another, culminating in a final reveal that's an infuriating resurrection of the oldest cop-out ending in movies.
It's too bad, because you can see Argento is really throwing herself into this. She stars as Isidora, a New York artist married to Michael (Jonathan Caouette) and with a young daughter, Jordan (Claudia Salerno, who's been unconvincingly dubbed over). Isidora's life is turned upside down when she's notified that her mother has died and left her the executrix of the family estate in a remote area of Tuscany. That's news to Isidora, who's been under the impression that her mother died 30 years ago when her gallery owner father Arthur (Rade Serbedzija) brought her to NYC. It turns out Isidora's mother was insane and tried to kill her, and she was so young at the time that her father thought it best to just get her far away, start over, and hope the memory faded. Off the family goes to Tuscany, where things are weird right from the start, and it's clear that everyone--including prim, proper caretaker Angelica (a nice Alida Valli-esque turn by Monica Guerritore) and affable handyman Rudolfo (long-ago Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli)--is hiding something, and that's even before aristocratic local Carlo (Franco Nero, looking like a rock star with a ponytail and an earring) starts dropping clunky exposition about the area being a haven for heretics and her mother being a witch. There's a good buildup here, and Civetta (or Schuman) tries to go for some Dario Argento colorgasms but it just comes off as cheap, garish, and overly affected, and the crazier Isidora becomes, the more they start piling on disorienting Dutch angles like a Hal Hartley wet dream. There are some good things in AGONY--Argento's increasingly anguished performance is pretty harrowing by the end, the look of the estate, which screams "decaying Visconti," and Davoli's ever-beaming grin, so vital to his Chaplin-esque comic performances for Pasolini, is used in a subversively sinister way here--but it's a structural and tonal disaster. Caouette, a documentary filmmaker (ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES) who acts infrequently, has no chemistry with Argento, young Salerno's revoicing is distractingly bad in a "Bob in THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY" way, and the final shot just destroys any good will AGONY might've been accruing in its favor. And who thought it was a good idea to cast Rade Serbedzija as a guy named "Arthur?" (Unrated, 82 mins)
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (Italy - 1998; US release 1999) Directed by Dario Argento. Written by Gerard Brach and Dario Argento. Cast: Julian Sands, Asia Argento, Andrea Di Stefano, Nadia Rinaldi, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, Istvan Bubik, Lucia Guzzardi, Aldo Massasso, Zoltan Barabas, Gianni Franco, David D'Ingeo, Kitty Keri, John Pedeferri, Leonardo Treviglio, Massimo Sarchielli, Luis Molteni, Enzo Cardogna, Itala Bekes, Ferenc Deak B., Sandor Bese. (Unrated, 104 mins)
Every bad movie has its defenders, and while a few people have gone to bat for Dario Argento's 1998 version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, it's almost universally regarded as his worst film, though it later got some stiff competition from 2012's DRACULA. A revisionist take on Gaston Leroux's classic novel, PHANTOM is usually cited as the point of no return in a decline from which Argento has yet to recover. It was recently released on Blu-ray by Scorpion, along with 2004's THE CARD PLAYER, another title from the director's much-maligned modern era, with 2001's SLEEPLESS on the way, because physical media is dead. Unfortunately, the passage of time has not turned THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA into an unjustly neglected gem that was misunderstood in its time. It's still the laughably awful, hopelessly misbegotten train wreck that it's always been, the only differences now being that a) the clarity of HD at least reveals a generally nice-looking film that's well-shot by the great cinematographer Ronnie Taylor, an Oscar-winner for his work on 1982's GANDHI and an Argento collaborator on 1987's OPERA, and along with the appropriately ornate production design by Antonello Geleng, reveal qualities that were significantly diminished when the film went straight-to-video in the US in 1999, courtesy of the lowly T&A and D-grade action purveyors at A-Pix Entertainment (though it must be said that 1080p doesn't do any favors for the primitive CGI and the embarrassing, Tommy Wiseau-esque greenscreen work), and b) Argento repeatedly having his daughter Asia disrobe on screen once she turned 18 for 1993's TRAUMA and then again for some violent rape scenes in 1996's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME has always been a little, well, weird.
For instance, here he depicts her, albeit briefly, engaged in a fully-nude, doggy-style, soft-focus sex scene with the title character that's prefaced with a leering, lingering close-up of her ass that takes up nearly the entire screen. This is followed later by the Phantom raping her character as she initially fights him off but eventually gives in and is shown enjoying it. Asia Argento has always cultivated a reputation as an edgy, hell-raising wild child, but these scenes were strange and ill-advised in 1999 and are completely uncomfortable and a little gross two decades later following her involvement in the Harvey Weinstein scandal and then with sexual assault accusations leveled at her by her HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS co-star Jimmy Bennett. Asia worked again with her father on 2007's MOTHER OF TEARS and 2012's DRACULA (his last film to date), and while most fans regard THE STENDHAL SYNDROME as his last front-to-back good movie (some go back as far as 1987's OPERA, but I might even say 1985's PHENOMENA), maybe there's some connection between the beginning of Dario Argento's slow, sad, ongoing decline coinciding with when he started having his daughter get naked in his movies.
Asia Argento is the ingenue Christine Daae, the understudy to obnoxious diva Carlotta Altieri (Nadia Rinaldi) in a production of Faust at the Paris Opera House in 1877. Christine finds an admirer in the Phantom (Julian Sands, in a role Argento initially pitched to John Malkovich), a notorious mystery figure who lives in the catacombs beneath the opera house, where he was abandoned as an infant and raised by rats (!). The Phantom--who isn't disfigured and wears no mask--develops a telepathic communication with Christine and the pair soon fall in love as Christine is powerless against seductive Phantom pick-up lines like "Your perfume...your female smell...it flows through my veins like the melody of the rolling ocean!" The Phantom offs various interlopers who get in the way of his love for Christine, with Argento wasting a ton of screen time on opera house staffers Alfred (David D'Ingeo) and Paulette (Kitty Keri), who are introduced with a sex scene (their copulation gets a reaction shot from a caged bird), then endlessly venturing into the catacombs where it takes forever for the Phantom to kill them. Competition arrives in the form of the lovestruck Baron Raoul de Chagny (Andrea Di Stefano), but Christine keeps their relationship platonic, even as the Phantom becomes possessive and escalates to violence, madness, and murder to keep her close to him.
Argento and co-writer Gerard Brach (a longtime Roman Polanski collaborator going back to REPULSION) opt to make everyone in Paris ugly and grotesque (the monstrous Carlotta's awful treatment of everyone, plus Eurocult stalwart Aldo Massasso as a pedophile arts patron who keeps trying lure little girls with chocolates) while giving the Phantom a relatively handsome visage. This is unlike every other interpretation of the character within the horror genre--most notably Lon Chaney in 1925, Claude Rains in 1943, Herbert Lom in 1962, and Robert Englund in 1989--though with his long blond wig and wailing away on an organ, Sands often resembles an emo Rick Wakeman. It's an approach that just never works, mainly due to the overwrought performance of Sands, who was appropriately menacing in the first two WARLOCK films--which altered the course of his career from Merchant-Ivory regular (A ROOM WITH A VIEW, MAURICE) to cult horror star for several years--but he makes an annoyingly needy, clingy, codependent Phantom here. It's too bad almost nothing works in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, because this is clearly a more prestigious production than what Argento was doing around this time, especially with revered names like Taylor, Brach, and composer Ennio Morricone onboard.
This most assuredly is not a junky horror movie, but Argento is having a really off day, even recycling what appear to be some unused steampunk-inspired props from the previous year's THE WAX MASK, which he intended to produce for Lucio Fulci but assigned to Sergio Stivaletti after Fulci died during pre-production. For all of his trailblazing success with his early gialli and his SUSPIRIA supernatural horrors, Argento stumbles badly when he ventures into classic horror: DRACULA, with its crummy digital effects, a whiny title vampire (Thomas Kretschmann) calling himself "an out-of-tune chord in the divine symphony" and transforming into a human-sized mantis while being pursued by a sleepwalking Rutger Hauer as cinema's dullest Van Helsing, is just about as bad as THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. Argento went on to make some OK-but-not-great films down the road, like SLEEPLESS (a back-to-basics giallo, basically an acceptable mea culpa after PHANTOM was flatly rejected by everyone), THE CARD PLAYER, and 2005's DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK?, but he's never totally regained his mojo or been anywhere close to "vintage Argento" strength since. The Blu-ray features a commentary by film historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, where both acknowledge the film's flaws and its extremely low standing among Argentophiles (even referring to it as the director's "folly") while offering a reasoned, rational defense of it that probably won't change your opinion, but refreshingly avoids resorting to desperate, hyperbolic, "Dario can do no wrong!" fanboy apologia.
THE CARD PLAYER (Italy - 2004) Directed by Dario Argento. Written by Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini. Cast: Stefania Rocca, Liam Cunningham, Silvio Muccino, Adalberto Maria Merli, Claudio Santamaria, Fiore Argento, Cosimo Fusco, Mia Benedetta, Giovanni Visentin, Claudio Mazzenga, Conchita Puglisi, Micaela Pignatelli, Luis Molteni, Jennifer Poli, Elisabetta Rocchetti, Vera Gemma, Antonio Cantafora, Gualtiero Scola, Robert Madison, Emanuel Bevilacqua. (Unrated, 104 mins) After his base's talk-to-the-hand rejection of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, the giallo throwback SLEEPLESS served as an acquiescing Argento's "give the fans what they want" movie. Continuing in that vein, THE CARD PLAYER is his attempt to bring the giallo into the 21st century. It's second-tier Argento without question, and looking at it again a decade and a half later, the film has taken on an even greater air of familiarity thanks to all the post-CSI police procedurals that your dad watches. From Claudio Simonetti's score that sounds like an alternate version of the NCIS theme to its high-concept plot that incorporates the internet in the most simplistic ways and doesn't really completely understand how computers work, THE CARD PLAYER feels very much like a two-hour pilot episode of a hypothetical CSI: ROME. Probably best known to American moviegoers for her supporting role in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, Stefania Rocca stars as Detective Anna Mari (whose name is similar to Asia Argento's Detective Anna Manni in THE STENDHAL SYNDROME), who's challenged by a killer via e-mail to a game of online poker for the life of an abducted British tourist, seen on a live webcam begging for her life. For every hand the killer wins, he amputates something, his ultimate goal being to murder her on camera. That's exactly what happens when hapless cop Sturni (Claudio Santamaria) volunteers to take him on and loses every hand. Mari eventually teams with John Brennan (Liam Cunningham, several years before playing Davos on GAME OF THRONES), a blustery, alcoholic forensics expert dispatched from the British embassy to assist in the investigation. Their luck doesn't improve when bull-headed police commissioner Marini (Adalberto Maria Merli) orders them to not engage and refuses to allow them to play when the killer abducts another girl, who's soon found floating in a river with a Joker card inserted into her vagina. They eventually resort to bringing in young poker expert Remo (Silvio Muccino), which proves helpful when Marini's daughter Lucia (Fiore Argento, Dario's eldest daughter) is the next woman taken.
There's a noticeable lack of "classic" Argento set pieces in THE CARD PLAYER, as most of the suspense sequences revolve around characters gathered around Mari's desk and grimacing at her computer screen as they wait for the cards to be revealed. It's an unbelievably silly story, and the killer's identity should be obvious to anyone who's seen a murder mystery before. But still, Argento, working with frequent writing partner Franco Ferrini (PHENOMENA, DEMONS, DEMONS 2), manages to squeeze in some inspired moments amidst the SE7EN-meets-ROUNDERS goofiness (we could probably use more of the tap-dancing, opera-singing, comic relief coroner). One vintage giallo bit has something in an ashtray on Mari's coffee table catching her eye, as she quickly realizes that it's a reflection of the masked killer watching her while hiding in the bushes right outside an opened patio door, the proximity very reminiscent of David Hemmings barely having enough time to lock the door into his music room when he realizes the killer is in the apartment with him in DEEP RED. And later, off investigating on his own, Brennan has one of those classic giallo realizations where he accidentally cracks the case after piecing together two seemingly unrelated details involving a mysterious sound in a public place and strange seeds from a rare plant, a stylistic callback to discovering the killer's identity in Argento's 1970 directing debut THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE.
Sure, the filmmaker is repurposing some old ideas, but it's in these moments that THE CARD PLAYER gets some of that distinct Argento momentum going, something that's certainly lacking in the astoundingly dumb climax that literally has the killer securing Mari to the railroad tracks like a silent movie villain, but forcing her to play online poker for her life. THE CARD PLAYER has a great cinematographer in Benoit Debie (IRREVERSIBLE, ENTER THE VOID, SPRING BREAKERS), but doesn't really take advantage of it, as Argento opts to give the film a generally TV-like look to go along with CSI-ready dialogue like "We're playing by his rules!" It also has some pacing issues in the middle and has another jarringly abrupt final shot like SLEEPLESS, but it gets some much-needed gravitas from Cunningham and Rocca, who make a good team and are about as close as late-period Argento is gonna get to David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in DEEP RED.
BOARDING GATE (France - 2007; US release 2008) Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. Cast: Asia Argento, Michael Madsen, Kelly Lin, Carl Ng, Kim Gordon, Alex Descas, Joana Preiss, Raymond Tsang, Boss Mok. (R, 106 mins)
French filmmaker Olivier Assayas' sleek and glossy thriller BOARDING GATE was met with shrugs at best to outright hostility at worst when it opened in Europe in 2007 and then in the US in 2008. It shares certain similarities with Assayas' impenetrable corporate espionage thriller DEMONLOVER (2003), but is much more streamlined, straightforward work, even with all of its arthouse bells and whistles. Indeed, it wouldn't take much tweaking to turn BOARDING GATE into a commercial chase actioner, but that would be too easy for Assayas, the acclaimed auteur behind the deconstructionist filmmaking satire IRMA VEP (1996), the little seen addiction/recovery drama CLEAN (2004), the keenly insightful family saga SUMMER HOURS (2008), and the incredibly ambitious CARLOS (2010). BOARDING GATE was roundly criticized as Assayas feebly attempting to make a trashy erotic thriller, but such a labeling does it a huge disservice. Yes, it has tawdry and silly elements, but it's far too well-made and beautiful to look at to be so easily dismissed. It may be a tawdry and silly erotic thriller at its core, but BOARDING GATE does its damnedest to be the most hypnotic and compulsively watchable one you'll ever see.
Using the cutthroat financial sector wheeling-and-dealing as a backdrop, Assayas' focus on BOARDING GATE is Sandra (Asia Argento), a lone-wolf antihero with a mysterious past involving drug addiction and prostitution. She's currently working as a shipping and receiving supervisor at a Paris-based import/export shipyard run by Lester (Carl Ng) and Sue Wang (Kelly Lin). She's got a side business running off-the-manifest drug shipments, all part of a plan to ditch Paris and run off to Beijing to buy into a nightclub with Lester, with whom she's having a clandestine affair behind Sue's back. At the same time, Sandra is trying to find closure in her complicated, S&M-heavy relationship with American businessman Miles Rennberg (Michael Madsen), whose days as a power player in the world of global finance are behind him and now he's just looking to sell his stake in a French company to settle a debt with some shady Hong Kong investors. Years earlier, Rennberg was a major name in the business world, and Sandra was on his payroll as a corporate spy, seducing Rennberg's rich associates and investors and coaxing secrets out of them for her boss, who was less interested in the information than in what Sandra did to get the information. Rennberg's tendencies toward sexual sadism are at odds with his sensitive side, as he remains very much in love with Sandra even though he gets off on demeaning her ("I'm gonna handcuff you, and then I'm gonna fuck you"). Rennberg has his tender moments, but he's still the kind of guy who likes to play rough bondage games and have Sandra choke him with a belt while she straddles him and jerks him off. Out of nowhere, Sandra handcuffs Rennberg for what he thinks is a game but she instead shoots him in the back of the head, killing him. She flees his apartment and is picked up by Lester, who talked her into killing Rennberg and sends her and another employee, Lisa (Joana Preiss) to Hong Kong to lay low. Once there, Sandra has no idea who to trust, as she's faced with an embittered Sue--who's not all that oblivious about her husband's extramarital flings--as well as Kay (Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon), a shady American who oversees a sweatshop specializing in knockoff designer jeans and may have been part of the plot to eliminate Rennberg, which turns into a plot to eliminate Sandra.
A basic synopsis makes BOARDING GATE sound like a predictable suspense thriller, but Assayas isn't interesting in following that path. Much of the first hour is devoted to showing the layers of complexity in Sandra's relationship with Rennberg. It ended badly and both know they can't go back, but that pull is still there, and Assayas lets that play out in a long conversation between the two of them in Rennberg's office, and again in and even longer sequence that takes over 20 minutes of screen time, leading to Sandra's murder of Rennberg. Assayas probably could've got an entire film just out of the relationship between these two characters, and though Argento's reputation as a provocateur and enfant terrible seems to at least partially be a youthful attempt to establish herself beyond being Dario Argento's daughter (it's worth noting that she's fast-approaching 40 and has settled down quite a bit in recent years), it's also done her a disservice even this far into her nearly 30-year career by still eclipsing her acting talent. Away from the drawn-out and depressingly funereal decline of her father's films and his strange habit of putting his daughter in nude scenes that's always left a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste, not to mention her ill-advised attempts to break into Hollywood (Vin Diesel's XXX was a huge hit, but it did nothing for her in America), Argento probably has her career-best role in BOARDING GATE. Sure, the poster art plays on her hellraising, wild-child persona ("She's losing control again"), and Sandra at first seems like another variation on Argento's similar corporate seductress (named "Sandii") in Abel Ferrara's cyberpunk misfire NEW ROSE HOTEL (1999). But she has an alluring, edgy. and intense screen presence that Assayas uses for maximum effect, whether she's parading around in skimpy underwear, touching herself in Rennberg's office, glaring intensely while pulling a trigger, or letting emotion get the best of her in her final meeting with Rennberg. Judging from her work in BOARDING GATE, somebody really missed the boat by not casting Argento as a cold, ruthless, badass Bond femme fatale of the Luciana Paluzzi variety during the Pierce Brosnan era.
Even if you hate BOARDING GATE, if nothing else, Assayas deserves some credit for being the last filmmaker (as of this writing) to cast the perpetually slumming Madsen in a serious, significant role. Though he exits at the midway point, Madsen's presence is felt throughout BOARDING GATE, and watching this now is both gratifying and depressing. Gratifying in the sense that it's a rare glimpse of the electrifying, early '90s Madsen that showed up for THELMA & LOUISE and RESERVOIR DOGS, and depressing in that today, he's lumped in with fellow promising actors-turned-mercenaries Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, Eric Roberts, Tom Sizemore, and John Savage, guys who simply can't turn down a gig, no matter how dubious it is, especially if they're on and off the set in a day or less. Other than SIN CITY and an occasional CSI or BLUE BLOODS guest spot, the last decade of Madsen's IMDb page is infested with the likes of NOT ANOTHER NOT ANOTHER MOVIE, FOREST OF THE LIVING DEAD, PIRANHACONDA, and tons of other instantly obscure and unreleased YouTube-quality titles that barely qualify as films. Watching BOARDING GATE again now, it's almost as if Assayas created Miles Rennberg as a sort-of intervention for Madsen about where his career was heading. The parallels between Rennberg and Madsen are impossible to ignore: a buzzed-about shooting star years earlier, now looking for quick cash and clinging to the fringes of his industry thanks to name recognition and past accomplishments, and with, as Sandra points out, "a body gone to seed." A pasty, schlubby-looking Madsen sells it perfectly with his slumped shoulders, his middle-aged paunch, and a lurching gait that makes him look like he's babying a chronically nagging back injury. The actor does appear in Quentin Tarantino's currently in-production western THE HATEFUL EIGHT, but until that's released, BOARDING GATE stands as the last documented example of Michael Madsen giving a shit onscreen.
BOARDING GATE's second half is where it splits off into its more commercial direction, but even then, there's enough ambiguity in the ending to completely eliminate it from "crowd-pleaser" contention. Assayas and cinematographer Yorick La Saux (SWIMMING POOL, ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE) masterfully capture the dizzying, disorienting feel of overcrowded Hong Kong, whether in shopping centers, markets, or just in the busy streets. It's brilliantly abetted by the droning ambiance of selections from Brian Eno's back catalog, like "Lizard Point" and "Music for Airports 2/2," and "The Heavenly Music Corporation," by Eno and King Crimson's Robert Fripp. It all reaches a stunning crescendo in a finale that's heavy on the complicated camera moves and long tracking shots as Sandra follows Lester with the intent of exacting revenge for hanging her out to dry and cutting her out of their club deal. As Eno's music drones and throbs, Assayas comes up just a split-screen and a split-diopter shy of going into all-out Brian De Palma worship. Nevertheless, Sandra's tailing of Lester brings to mind fond memories of similar De Palma sequences like Angie Dickinson following her anonymous hook-up through the art museum in DRESSED TO KILL or Craig Wasson's lovestruck pursuit of his doomed neighbor through an L.A. shopping mall and to the beach in BODY DOUBLE.
Drenched in melancholy and yet alive with kinetic energy, BOARDING GATE seems to be held in higher regard now than it was seven years ago, and as a result, it's formed a minor cult following. By no means a secret masterpiece, it's still the kind of film that improves greatly on subsequent viewings, once you realize where the story is going and can further examine why Assayas has it play out the way it does. And in doing so, the viewer begins to unexpectedly empathize with Sandra and understand the devastation and resignation she feels in that deliberately open-ended final shot as a lifetime of self-destructive choices and terrible misdeeds hits her all at once. Most reviews of BOARDING GATE approach it from the viewpoint of Assayas offering a commentary on the state of global commerce and capitalism. That's all well and good, but it was also covered by the director in DEMONLOVER. Though it turns into a gripping thriller that's a tad esoteric and somehow manages to be convoluted and vague, BOARDING GATE is at its most intriguing in its first half, when it's a much more stripped-down and intimate film with devastating performances by Argento and Madsen...even if it does cleverly disguise itself as a tawdry and silly erotic thriller.
DRACULA (Italy/Spain/France - 2012; 2013 US release)
Directed by Dario Argento. Written by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, Enrique Cerezo. Cast: Thomas Kretschmann, Rutger Hauer, Asia Argento, Marta Gastini, Unax Ugalde, Miriam Giovanelli, Mariacristina Heller, Augusto Zucchi, Franco Guido Ravera, Giuseppe Loconsole, Giovanni Franzoni, Christian Burruano. (Unrated, 110 mins)
By now, there's no longer a question of whether a new Dario Argento film will be the comeback that his devoted fans have been anticipating for years. No, we now know not to expect it. The Dario Argento of today is not the Dario Argento who gave us an incredible run of classic Italian horror films from 1970 to 1987. Films like DEEP RED (1975), SUSPIRIA (1977), INFERNO (1980), and TENEBRE (1982) have transcended their cult status and are commonly embraced even by mainstream critics as important and influential films. After 1987's OPERA, it's been a near-continuous downward spiral for the legendary horror icon, with only 1996's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME standing as his last all-around good movie, and that's only if you watch the Italian-language version with English subtitles and even then, it suffers from Argento's then-21-year-old daughter Asia being completely miscast as a driven detective pursuing a serial killer (she could pull the role off now in her late 30s). Based on my love for his past classics, I've graded these Argento "lost years" on a generous curve, even finding things to appreciate in much-maligned films like THE CARD PLAYER (2004), DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK? (2005), and MOTHER OF TEARS (2007). But it's getting harder and harder for even a superfan/apologist like myself to keep making excuses, and after 2009's disastrous GIALLO, I gave up--not on watching new Argento films, but on the notion of expecting anything from them. The biggest problem with Argento's output over the last two decades is that, with each new film, they feel less and less like the work of their maker. MOTHER OF TEARS, his belated conclusion to the "Three Mothers" trilogy that started with SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, felt like a generic horror film that could've been made by anybody. It certainly didn't feel like an Argento film. The tracking shots, the inventive murders, and the grandiose set pieces of the past were nowhere to be found. And even something like THE CARD PLAYER felt like a gorier-than-usual TV police procedural that may as well have been called CSI: ROME. The last Argento film to feel like an Argento film was probably 2001's SLEEPLESS, which wasn't really anything special but was at least unmistakably Argento in its execution.
Irene Miracle in INFERNO
By now, in 2013, it's dispiritingly clear that Argento is never going to have another SUSPIRIA. He's never going to make another INFERNO. He may never even have another SLEEPLESS. His best days are behind him and they're not coming back. He's not the same filmmaker. Filmmakers both old and new continue to mimic the style of Argento's essential work (Brian De Palma's recent PASSION had a shot that was blatantly lifted from TENEBRE, and it's not the first time he's done it). Argento's films used to have a look, mood, and feel all their own. Now, his movies feel like everyone else's. He's still active, he still wants to work, but the fire's gone. The only way to approach anything new by him is to go in with the lowest possible expectations and let the chips fall where they may. If it were most other filmmakers, the solution would be simple: if his movies suck, then stop watching them. But Argento is different. There was a time when he was unstoppable. There was a time when he was the arguably the greatest living horror filmmaker. Anyone who appreciates his accomplishments and his significance to the horror genre can't just turn their back on him. Even if his bad films outnumber his good ones (and I think they do at this point), he's still Dario Argento. So, every few years, he makes a new movie and people wonder "Will this be the comeback?" But we know the answer and we brace ourselves and try to find something good in the latest work of a legend who's simply lost his mojo and shows no signs of getting it back. Good directors make bad movies all the time. It just hurts to see Argento floundering like this for the better part of 25 years. It would be a lot easier on the fans and even Argento himself if he just retired and enjoyed his emeritus status on the convention circuit and on horror documentaries, where everyone will just remember the good times and it'll be like nothing after 1987 ever happened.
But filmmaking is in his blood, so the now-73-year-old Argento soldiers on. His latest, DRACULA, was shot in stereoscopic 3-D and is getting a limited release in the US by IFC Films, a year after its release in Europe. Argento's last crack at classic horror was 1998's apocalyptically awful PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, almost unanimously reviled as his career nadir (it's no accident that SLEEPLESS was hailed as a "back to basics" thriller, almost as if he was apologizing for PHANTOM). Approaching DRACULA with the lowest expectations, the answer is yes, it's better than PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, but so are things like identity theft, herpes, tetanus, and the Jacksonville Jaguars. But, as is the case with Argento's recent output, it doesn't feel anything like Dario Argento. With its sometimes gratuitous nudity and abundance of Asylum-level CGI, it seems like "Dario Argento's DRACULA" could just as easily be called "Jim Wynorski's DRACULA" and no one would know the difference. Watching Argento's DRACULA as if it's premiering on SyFy in prime time on a Saturday night, it's acceptable enough and sometimes entertaining in a cheesy way. But there's nothing here that says "Dario Argento," unless you count his continued insistence on putting Asia in nude scenes, which used to feel weird (especially a topless shot in 1993's TRAUMA when she was still a teenager), but now it's just expected (yes, she has two nude scenes here). Where is Dario Argento? Does he even enjoy making movies anymore? Where are the elaborate set pieces and the creative kills? Where are the intricately choreographed tracking shots? The garish colors? The killer soundtracks? They're not here, and they haven't been for several years. Even having old collaborators like cinematographer Luciano Tovoli (remember that Louma crane shot in TENEBRE?), effects master Sergio Stivaletti, and a score by Goblin's Claudio Simonetti (that doesn't sound like Goblin or Simonetti, by the way) on board does nothing to convey that singularly unique Argento feeling. Are they all out to lunch? Are they all just punching a clock? Are any of them cognizant of their past accomplishments?
DRACULA follows the basic template of Bram Stoker's novel, with minor and often major tweaking throughout. Jonathan Harker (Unax Ugalde) arrives in the village of Passo Borgo to catalog the library of Count Dracula (Thomas Kretschmann, who previously worked with Dario and Asia on STENDHAL). Dracula and his busty vampiric minion Tania (Miriam Giovanelli) take turns biting Harker, who then disappears. Meanwhile, his wife Mina (Marta Gastini) arrives in the village and reconnects with her old friend Lucy Kisslinger (Asia Argento), the daughter of the mayor (Augusto Zucchi). Lucy is soon vampirized by Dracula and convinces Mina to go to the castle to look for Harker. Sensing danger, Lucy consults the local priest (Franco Guido Ravera), who summons psychiatrist and vampire expert Dr. Van Helsing (Rutger Hauer), who has battled Dracula before.
Aside from some character name changes, the essential plot is there--Giovanni Franzoni is Renfield; Dracula scales an exterior wall like a lizard; Kretschmann gets to gravely intone "Children of the night...what music they make"--but for every clever departure like Dracula having a deal in place with the village elders for them to look the other way while he goes about his business, there's ten howlers that have you shaking your head in disbelief. Chief among them is Dracula's ability to shapeshift into an owl (the Drac-owl attacks Tania in the opening scene in a way that looks suspiciously like Argento's tribute to THE COLBERT REPORT), a swarm of flies, and, in the silliest scene of Argento's career (yes, even sillier than a climactic online poker showdown in THE CARD PLAYER), a giant, human-sized mantis. Kretschmann is an OK Dracula, though it's hard to take him seriously when he gets all emo with Mina and actually utters the line "I am nothing but an out-of-tune chord in the divine symphony." Hauer is possibly cinema's dullest Van Helsing. Peter Cushing owns this character on film, but even when the vampire hunter was portrayed as an old man by the likes of Edward Van Sloan in the 1931 DRACULA or by Laurence Olivier in the 1979 version, he was a quick-witted, energetic guy. Hauer turns up 75 minutes in and plays him as half-asleep, and his halting, stumbling delivery sounds like he's being fed the lines and is hearing them for the first time. There's a couple of scenes where he's talking to Gastini but looking off to the side as if reading cue cards. All due props for NIGHTHAWKS, BLADE RUNNER, and THE HITCHER, but Hauer's having a really off-day here and turns in a terrible performance. Between the dubious, bush-league CGI splatter, the shapeshifting silliness, the ludicrous dialogue, the ornate but too-stagy sets, Hauer apparently guzzling ZzzQuil between takes, and the awkward dubbing of the supporting cast (Kretschmann, Hauer, Argento, and Gastini use their own voices; everyone else is dubbed, often badly), the possibility crosses your mind that Argento is trying to be funny and something's just getting lost in the translation. But no, that's not the case. This is just how newer Argento movies are.
I guess in the overall big picture, DRACULA is a better film than GIALLO and it's certainly an improvement on PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. But that's really all you can say about it. It's not as bad as its reputation, but it's not very good, either. With rare exception (Dracula's massacre of the cowardly village elders is a nicely-done scene), anything entertaining or memorable in DRACULA is entertaining or memorable for the wrong reasons. Imagine if the Dario Argento of 30 years ago did his own unique spin on DRACULA. Hell, an in-his-prime Hauer could've played the title role, and he would've been terrific. That's a film we'd still be talking about today. Argento's got several undisputed classics to his name and those can never be taken away from him. But it's hard to ignore the fact that 25 years of almost completely subpar output has more than slightly diminished his reputation. I think I'll watch DEEP RED or INFERNO again. (VOD version is not in 3-D)
