NEMESIS (US - 1993) Directed by Albert Pyun. Written by Rebecca Charles (Albert Pyun). Cast: Olivier Gruner, Tim Thomerson, Deborah Shelton, Brion James, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Merle Kennedy, Yuji Okumoto, Marjorie Monaghan, Nicholas Guest, Vince Klyn, Thom Mathews, Marjean Holden, Tom Janes (Thomas Jane), Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Gatti, Borovnisa Blervaque, Mabel Falls, Branscombe Richmond. (R, 96 mins) In the late '80s, Imperial Entertainment was primarily known for acquiring Italian (DEMONS 2, THUNDER WARRIOR 3, SPECTERS) and low-budget American genre fare (BLACK ROSES, THE DEAD PIT). Run by brothers Sundip R. Shah, Sunil R. Shah, and Ash R. Shah, Imperial eventually expanded to film production with the 1988 Sho Kosugi actioner BLACK EAGLE, which co-starred Belgian full-contact karate champ Jean-Claude Van Damme. Van Damme, who played the bad guy in the 1986 camp classic NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER, already had BLOODSPORT in the can when he shot BLACK EAGLE, but they were ultimately released two weeks apart, with BLOODSPORT coming first and becoming an unexpected hit. Though he only had a supporting role in BLACK EAGLE, Van Damme's presence was hyped and it served as a symbolic passing of the torch of action B-listers from ninja icon Kosugi to kickboxing poster boy Van Damme. Van Damme was already committed to Imperial's WRONG BET, which was ultimately retitled LIONHEART when it was picked up by Universal in early 1991 after Van Damme scored three more B-movie hits with CYBORG, KICKBOXER, and DEATH WARRANT. And with that, the "Muscles from Brussels" moved on to the big leagues and was out of Imperial's price range, though they still had another project intended for him. Enter Olivier Gruner, a French kickboxing champion with a passing resemblance to Van Damme and little else. Imperial plugged Gruner into Van Damme's starring role in 1990's ANGEL TOWN (more on that below) and in 1993, Gruner teamed with Van Damme's CYBORG director Albert Pyun for NEMESIS, which would ultimately be the star's first and last great film.
Pyun's best days came early, directing 1982's surprise hit THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER but never really capitalizing on it. He ended up doing several films for Cannon in the latter half of the '80s (DANGEROUSLY CLOSE, DOWN TWISTED, ALIEN FROM L.A.), which led to CYBORG and, post-Cannon, the troubled CAPTAIN AMERICA for Menaham Golan's doomed 21st Century. Pyun's career after NEMESIS and into the 2000s was incredibly prolific but largely inept (best represented by his trio of Bratislava-shot rapsploitation outings affectionately referred to as his epic "Gangstas Wandering Around An Abandoned Warehouse" trilogy by film critic Nathan Rabin). In recent years, he's been slowed down by multiple sclerosis but maintains a strong presence online while trying to get his latest dream project--a self-referential Pyuniverse tribute titled CYBORG NEMESIS--off the ground. NEMESIS was an idea Pyun had been working on since his Cannon days, though with a teenage girl as the hero. He already had Megan Ward in mind to star, having worked with her on the Full Moon sci-fi film ARCADE (shot before NEMESIS but released after). With Cannon on life support and 21st Century faring even worse, he took the idea to the Shah brothers at Imperial. They liked the script but had one demand: lose the teenage girl and retool the character for Olivier Gruner, and in exchange, you'll be left alone to make the movie you want to make.
In a perfect world, NEMESIS would've catapulted Gruner and Pyun into the big leagues, but it wasn't meant to be. With the possible exception of THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, it's arguably Pyun's best film. NEMESIS opens in the future Los Angeles of 2027, with cybernetically-enhanced cop--he's still "86.5% human--Alex Rain (Gruner) in a brilliantly-choreographed shootout with freedom fighters from a rebel faction known as the Red Army Hammerheads. Severely injured, Rain undergoes repairs and an upgrade and goes off the grid in New Baja for nearly a year. That's where he tracks down and kills prominent Hammerheads figure Rosaria (Jennifer Gatti), before he's found and reactivated by his old boss Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson) and his two flunkies Maritz (Brion James) and Germaine (Nicholas Guest). The assignment: retrieve stolen, top-secret national security intel needed for a US-Japan summit that's scheduled in three days. The culprit: Jared (Marjorie Monaghan), an android and Rain's former lover, who plans to sell it to current Hammerheads leader Angie-Liv (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who's based on the Pacific Rim island of Shang-Lu. In true ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK fashion, Rain has until the summit to find Jared and the intel or a bomb implanted in his heart will explode. In addition a surveillance unit implanted in his eyeball will monitor his activities and ensure he doesn't go rogue.
There's more, including a duplicitous android named Sam (Marjean Holden); Rain forming an unholy alliance with Rosaria's vengeful sister Max Impact (Merle Kennedy); and Julian (Deborah Shelton), a cyborg associate of Jared, whose intentions are not what Rain has been told. Little is what it seems to be in the world of NEMESIS, a film that takes elements of cyberpunk and Hong Kong-inspired action and mashes them up into a wholly original film that feels like it was directed in tag-team, relay fashion by John Woo, Ridley Scott, Charles Band, and Cirio H. Santiago, and that's meant as a compliment. Though it may look like a B-grade BLADE RUNNER knockoff on the surface (even borrowing James, memorable as escaped replicant Leon in the 1982 classic), NEMESIS is overflowing with more ideas and imagination that it can handle (note how several of the male characters have female names, and vice versa, and how one major male character is revealed to be a reconfigured female cyborg--is NEMESIS the world's first non-binary existential sci-fi action movie?). In many ways, it's the 1990s equivalent of TRANCERS, Band's 1985 cult classic that starred Thomerson and utilized key elements of BLADE RUNNER and THE TERMINATOR but was more inventive and intelligent than it had any business being. Like TRANCERS, NEMESIS got a limited theatrical release but never went wide, topping out at 86 screens in late January 1993. And like TRANCERS, NEMESIS spawned a series of straight-to-video sequels of precipitously declining quality (two featuring future JOHN WICK director Chad Stahelski), all but one directed by a stumbling Pyun and none starring Gruner.
NEMESIS ended up finding a cult following once it hit video, though its devotees did a good job of keeping it to themselves (it's also of interest today for brief supporting turns by Jackie Earle Haley, over a decade before his comeback, and a then-unknown Thomas Jane, billed as "Tom Janes"). But with Van Damme enjoying significant A-list success at the time, Hollywood studios decided they didn't need another European kickboxer, leaving Gruner vying for video store shelf space with Don "The Dragon" Wilson (BLOODFIST) and Loren Avedon (THE KING OF THE KICKBOXERS and NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER 2 and 3). He had a busy career throughout the '90s as a C-lister whose films could be regularly found in the one-copy "Hot Singles" section of the new release wall at Blockbuster: 1995's kickboxing western THE FIGHTER was an early effort by DTV action maestro Isaac Florentine and paired Gruner with BEVERLY HILLS 90210 and future SHARKNADO star Ian Ziering; he had the title role in 1997's MERCENARY, opposite an unlikely John Ritter, which led to 1998's MERCENARY 2: THICK AND THIN, teaming him with HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE's Robert Townsend. There were also titles like INTERCEPTOR FORCE, THE CIRCUIT, INTERCEPTOR FORCE 2, and THE CIRCUIT 2: THE FINAL PUNCH, and he capped off another tenuously-connected DTV action trilogy with 2000's CRACKERJACK 3, which was probably a shock to fans of the Thomas Ian Griffith-starring CRACKERJACK as the second installment--where Griffith was replaced by Judge Reinhold (!)--was retitled HOSTAGE TRAIN. Gruner also co-starred in the one-season, 1999 TV series CODE NAME: ETERNITY, a Canadian import that aired on what was then known as the Sci-Fi Channel.
Born in 1960, Gruner isn't headlining these days, but he's occasionally directed himself in titles even the most ardent Redbox devotee probably never heard of, like SECTOR 4: EXTRACTION and EXECUTIVE PROTECTION, and he still turns up in bottom-of-the-barrel fare like Pyun's ABELAR: TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE, and had cameos in garbage like DIAMOND CARTEL and SHOWDOWN IN MANILA, where he turns up about an hour in with Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Cynthia Rothrock as part of a team of mercenaries that may as well have been called THE AVAILABLES. Early in his career, Olivier Gruner served a purpose as a second-string Jean-Claude Van Damme, at least until Van Damme started going straight-to-DVD, thus negating the need for a Gruner, which is clearly reflected in the declining quality of the gigs he started getting in the 2000s. And unlike Van Damme, Gruner never evolved into a good actor. But for a brief moment, he got to headline a legitimate cult classic with NEMESIS, which has just been released on Blu-ray in an extras-packed edition with two (!) alternate versions, because physical media is dead.
ANGEL TOWN (US - 1990) Directed by Eric Karson. Written by S.N. Warren. Cast: Olivier Gruner, Theresa Saldana, Frank Aragon, Tony Valentino, Peter Kwong, Mike Moroff, Lupe Amador, Daniel Villarreal, Jim Jaimes, Gregory Cruz, Mark Dacascos, Claudine Penedo, Lorenzo Gaspar, Tom McGreevy, William Bassett, Nick Angotti, Robin Ann Harlan, Julie Rudolph, Linda Kurimoto, Bruce Locke, Stephanie Sholtus, Lilyan Chauvin. (R, 106 mins) Gruner's career began inauspiciously with ANGEL TOWN, a project initially developed by Imperial Entertainment for Van Damme. Set in the mean streets of East L.A., it's essentially a SHANE scenario that drops a JCVD-like, former Olympic-qualifying kickboxer into the middle of a low-budget COLORS ripoff. Gruner is Jacques Montaigne, who arrives in Los Angeles to pursue a graduate degree in engineering. Unable to find any decent student housing, he ends up in a barrio neighborhood, renting a room at the home of Maria Odones (Theresa Saldana), a widow who lives with her son Martin (Frank Aragon) and her grandmother (Lupe Amador). Maria lost her anti-gang activist husband to a driveby shooting six years earlier, and since then, feared gang leader Angel (Tony Valentino) has persisted in harassing the family and trying to coerce Martin into joining his gang. Maria refuses to leave, finding an ally in embittered, wheelchair-bound Vietnam vet neighbor Frank (Mike Moroff). Jacques is hassled from the start, and quickly makes enemies after beating the shit out of several of Angel's crew, but as the violence escalates and the body count rises (starting with Grandma having a fatal heart attack after a home invasion), Jacques calls in a favor from Henry (Peter Kwong), an old Olympic buddy who now owns an L.A. gym. They work with Martin, teaching him to defend himself and after Maria is gang-raped by Angel's goons, Jacques, Martin, Henry, and Frank prep for the inevitable RIO BRAVO siege at the Odones house.
ANGEL TOWN has the makings of a solidly formulaic martial-arts outing, but until an admittedly lively finale, it's mostly awful. Director Eric Karson had made perfectly competent action movies before with Imperial's BLACK EAGLE and the 1980 Chuck Norris vehicle THE OCTAGON, but he's having an off-day here. Amateurishly-shot flashbacks set in France make little effort to hide that it's still Los Angeles, whether it's a cemetery with visible American names on the headstones or Karson's seemingly spur-of-the-moment solution being to plaster a misspelled decal reading "Parisien" onto a cab and having guys running around in checkered pants and berets in a depiction of Paris that's about as convincing as a Pepe Le Pew cartoon. Gruner being a terrible actor doesn't help, but for the most part, the fight scenes seem stilted and awkward (why is one brawl on a tennis court accompanied by wailing jazz trumpet?) and the dramatic elements sometimes have an almost surreal, Tommy Wiseau-like quality to them. Every scene at the university is mind-bogglingly bad, with a bizarrely misanthropic dean who openly insults the graduate students with no provocation and comes off like a woke doomsday scenario today, telling one young woman "I knew your father...he always wanted a boy...what a disappointment you must've been," and another "How can you be expected to bleed and think at the same time?"
Like a less hysterical companion piece to MIAMI CONNECTION, ANGEL TOWN is the kind of movie that feels like it was made by people who don't get out much, and where the serious drama comes off as unintentionally funny, while the intentional humor falls completely flat, particularly one bit that probably would've seemed cringe-worthy in 1990, let alone today: a Middle-Eastern student calls Jacques "frog," to which Jacques replies by grabbing the kid's tie and informing him "That's Mr. Frog to you, rag-head!" I realize this was a time of escalating Middle East tensions with Saddam Hussein, but even Cannon handled their shameless jingoism with a little more dignity and grace. It's Gruner's debut, so you almost have to cut him a little slack for having no acting experience and with a small-time outfit desperate to find a new Van Damme after he left them for greener pastures, but he's just in over his head here. Not even an experienced pro like RAGING BULL co-star Saldana (right before she enjoyed a bit of a career resurgence as Michael Chiklis' wife on the acclaimed ABC series THE COMMISH the next year) can elevate the C-listers around her, including Valentino, who, for the most part, comes off as the poor man's Trinidad Silva. ANGEL TOWN generated a minor controversy during its limited release in early 1990 when rival gangs caused a riot on its opening night at an L.A. drive-in, but that's really the most noteworthy thing about it. It was a fixture in video stores throughout the '90s, but with Gruner's deer-in-the-headlights thesping and its many moments of MST3K-worthy yuks, perhaps MVD's recent Blu-ray resurrection can give it a second life on the midnight movie circuit.
THE DARK TOWER (US - 2017) Directed by Nikolaj Arcel. Written by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen and Nikolaj Arcel. Cast: Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley, Katheryn Winnick, Dennis Haysbert, Abbey Lee, Claudia Kim, Fran Kranz, Nicholas Hamilton, Jose Zuniga, Nicholas Pauling, Eva Kaminsky, Robbie McLean. (PG-13, 94 mins) After a decade in assorted stages of development and pre-production hell, with both J.J. Abrams and Ron Howard attached to direct at various times, the long-planned adaptation of The Dark Tower, a series of Stephen King novels that began with the publication of a short story in 1978, is finally a thing. And they mostly blew it. A labyrinthine series of books that get larger and more unwieldy and self-indulgent with each new volume, going so far as to include King himself as a character by the time it's all over, the entire saga is nearly 5000 pages long. Something that complex, with its own internal mythology and the large cast of characters, is impossible to streamline and still be effective and probably needs to be a TV series along the lines of GAME OF THRONES to realize its full potential in a visual medium. But in the hands of Danish director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel (best known for helming 2012's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner A ROYAL AFFAIR and scripting the original film version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO as well as the three DEPARTMENT Q movies), making his Hollywood debut, THE DARK TOWER is a jumbled, confused pastiche of the book series and other King tropes and references (a kid who "shines," someone walking a St. Bernard, a framed photo of the cinematic Overlook Hotel, a portal labelled "1408") that goes off on its own tangent, with the closing credits rolling at just under the 90-minute mark. At times feeling like a really long "Previously on..." recap of a DARK TOWER TV series that doesn't exist, Arcel and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen (MIFUNE, WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF, BROTHERS), who reworked an existing script from Abrams' and Howard's time with the project by, respectively, Jeff Pinkner (LOST, FRINGE) and human focus group response Akiva Goldsman, try to cram in as many recognizable "Dark Tower"-related things as possible to keep the die-hards happy. King adaptations don't need to be faithful to work on their own terms--THE SHINING is proof of that--but the makers of THE DARK TOWER blowtorch through the exposition so quickly, with no context or frame of reference, that the whole thing will come off as either completely incoherent to anyone who hasn't read the books (I stopped after the third) or as pointless Dark Tower fan fiction to those who have. Arcel keeps the pace fast to a fault--almost certainly so you don't have a chance to ask questions until it's over, by which point you'll have forgotten most of it--and he gets a lot of mileage out of a well-cast star, but this thing is a total mess, and what could've been the beginning of an ambitious, epic big-screen franchise (that was the plan under Howard) ends up being 2017's JONAH HEX.
Still dealing with the death of his firefighter father in the line of duty, 12-year-old Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is haunted by visions in his dreams of another dimension where a huge tower keeps order in the universe. The tower is what stands in the way of the master plan of the nefarious sorcerer The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey), who rules Mid-World, a world of monstrous creatures in human masks who abduct psychic children, the only beings capable of destroying the tower, which is the Man in Black's plan to unleash the ultimate evil. No one believes Jake--not his sympathetic mother (Katheryn Winnick), his asshole stepfather (Nicholas Pauling), or his psychologist (Jose Zuniga)--and a vision of a dilapidated house leads him to a condemned building in Brooklyn, where he discovers a portal to Mid-World. After going through, he encounters Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), the last Gunslinger, sworn to avenge the death of his father (Dennis Haysbert) at the hands of the Man in Black. Armed with pistols forged from Excalibur (yes, that Excalibur), Roland takes Jake under his wing as they're pursued through Mid-World into Manhattan, on what Mid-Worlders call "Keystone Earth," just one of many dimensions that exist in the universe, of which the Dark Tower is the center of all planes of existence.
The script takes ideas from various points in the books and mashes them all into a barely coherent story. The Man in Black is also known as "Walter Padick," but it's not clear when he became the force of evil that he is (it seems like something pretty big has to happen to turn a guy named Walter into the ultimate manifestation of demonic evil), and the movie never even bothers to mention another of his identities in the book: Randall Flagg, the name of the antagonist in both The Stand and The Eyes of the Dragon. The Man in Black (this is not one of McConaughey's better performances) has some kind of sci-fi command center where he makes pithy comments to his underlings, all of whom seem to be completely incompetent, since he's constantly being beamed into Keystone Earth to take care of everything himself (example of how sloppy the finished film is: at one point, he makes a special trip to interrogate someone for information he was already made aware of a couple scenes earlier). The film was rushed through production and after some bad test screenings, underwent some hasty reshoots in an attempt to make sense of everything (three editors are credited), and about half of McConaughey's scenes appear to be from this second round of production, the major tell being that he has spiky bedhead in some scenes and a slicked-back, helmet-like wig in others, the production in such a mad rush to get done that they didn't even carefully monitor J.K.Livin's hair continuity. Other characters drift in and out with little purpose--Abbey Lee (MAD MAX: FURY ROAD) was described as "the female lead" in initial reports when she signed on, but her character is a mostly silent sidekick whose primary function is to stand beside by the Man in Black (or, if you prefer, Walter), and Jake's bullying school nemesis Lucas Hanson (Nicholas Hamilton) is reduced to about 30 seconds of screen time where he swipes Jake's sketch book and we never even get his name. Arcel essentially turns King's saga into a post-HUNGER GAMES/DIVERGENT/MAZE RUNNER YA adaptation, wasting a strong performance by Elba, who's very good in the action sequences and in the fish-out-of-water section when Roland goes through the portal and ends up in Manhattan. He and Taylor are apparently committed to a DARK TOWER TV series planned for 2018, which will hopefully be a more faithful take on King's saga than this misfire, which doesn't seem so much completed as it does abandoned. As far as Arcel is concerned, add him to the always-growing list of European filmmakers with cautionary tales of being seduced by Hollywood studios and a bigger budget than they've ever had only to find the film subjected to compromises, business decisions, and the fickle whims of test audiences, neutering any of the individuality and vision that got them the job in the first place, and sending them back home to regroup and focus on a small-scale, back to basics project.
LONDON HAS FALLEN (US - 2016) Directed by Babak Najafi. Written by Creighton Rothenberger, Katrin Benedict, Christian Gudegast, and Chad St. John. Cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Jackie Earle Haley, Melissa Leo, Radha Mitchell, Charlotte Riley, Colin Salmon, Waleed Zuaiter, Patrick Kennedy, Sean O'Bryan, Clarkson Guy Williams, Bryan Larkin. (R, 99 mins) This sequel to 2013's OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN has a giant "America! Fuck yeah!" boner swelled to a degree the likes of which we haven't seen since the flag-waving RAMBO sequels and Chuck Norris action movies of the Reagan era. Playing out like what your conservative, Fox News-watching uncle imagines the war on terror to be, LONDON HAS FALLEN has a script that took four credited writers to assemble and may have even been given a final polish by Donald Trump, judging from shouted dialogue like "Just assume everybody is one of those terrorist assholes!" and "Why don't you boys pack up your shit and go back to Fuckheadistan?" Like the first film, it's an acceptably dumb action time killer and yet another attempt to make Gerard Butler a thing, with the star and producer dropping endless action hero bon mots as Mike Banning, the top Secret Service agent to President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart). Banning and his wife Leah (Radha Mitchell) are expecting their first child and he's just started his vacation and is considering resigning his detail when the President receives word that the British Prime Minister has died of a sudden heart attack following knee surgery. With all the world leaders and dignitaries converging on London for the funeral (of course, the establishing aerial shot of Big Ben, the London Eye ferris wheel, the Palace of Westminster, and the Westminster Bridge over the Thames is accompanied by the caption "London"), the time is right for a massive terrorist attack, which Banning's Spidey Sense naturally detects ("What's wrong?" he's asked, grunting "Nothin'...bugs the hell outta me"). Almost every landmark in London is blown up using what appears to be an explosion app on director Babak Najafi's phone, and when every world leader is killed except for the new PM and Asher, Banning and the President are on the run, pursued throughout London by the interchangeably swarthy, ISIS-like flunkies of Yemen-based terror mastermind Aamir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul). Barkawi has spent two years planning this highly coordinated attack as revenge for a US military drone attack that took out his daughter on her wedding day and left one of his sons a double amputee. Banning manages to get Asher to an MI-6 safe house run by Agent Marshall (Charlotte Riley), who correctly assumes that someone in the British government is a mole working for Barkawi and that the Prime Minister was murdered.
One of the cheapest-looking $60 million films you'll ever see, LONDON HAS FALLEN has plenty of shoot 'em up action sequences that are fairly well-done, especially a few longer ones that try to go for the CHILDREN OF MEN-type set pieces. Najafi (who directed the Swedish crime thriller EASY MONEY II: HARD TO KILL and episodes of the Cinemax series BANSHEE) can't resist presenting Butler's Banning as a gun-toting, knife-wielding, indestructible smartass killing machine who resembles the John McClane of the later, terrible DIE HARD movies, a crack shot who can take out dozens upon dozens of terrorists who fire straight at him and somehow always miss. The bush-league CGI courtesy of Millennium's usual Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX is just an embarrassment throughout, almost Asylum-level chintzy and frankly unacceptable for a major, nationwide theatrical release--it doesn't matter how many big stars Cannon cover band Millennium rope in or how much money they spend, their visual effects and CGI splatter have never progressed beyond their DTV inception in the '90s when Frank Zagarino was the biggest star they could afford. As incredible as it seems, Worldwide FX's craftsmanship is getting worse. Even with all the rampant xenophobia and over-the-top jingoism, the shitty effects are the most off-putting part of LONDON HAS FALLEN, unless you count Butler's incessant one-liners constantly clanging to the ground (on Asher's bad driving, Banning quips "The car's bulletproof, not politician-proof!" and when Asher, hiding in a closet in the safe house, storms out and blows a bad guy away, Banning snarks "I was wonderin' when you'd come out of the closet!"), the completely illogical plotting (Barkawi spends two years planning the attack at the funeral as if he knew that far in advance that the Prime Minister would need knee surgery) or the unfortunate wasting of a slumming and visibly bored supporting cast.
London
Several OLYMPUS alumni return for some easy paychecks and a visit to scenic Bulgaria at Millennium's renowned Nu Boyana backlot: Angela Bassett briefly returns as Lynne Jacobs (all of the characters get pointless name-caption intros), the director of the Secret Service and Morgan Freeman's Speaker of the House Trumbull has been promoted to VP, essentially serving the same function running the War Room, which looks like the backup conference room at the Sofia Holiday Inn. A sleepy-looking Freeman gets to pretty much be Morgan Freeman and gets a decent amount of screen time (he has one scene with Butler, but they obviously weren't there at the same time). Also returning are Melissa Leo as the Secretary of Defense and Robert Forster as the Joint Chiefs chair, and along with new addition Jackie Earle Haley as the White House Chief of Staff--three veteran, rock-solid character actors with four Oscar nominations and one win between them who have maybe a combined 100 words of dialogue as their sole purpose seems to be grimacing at the events in London being displayed on a giant monitor, though from the looks of it, they could just as easily be reacting to the CGI. Moving fast, with the credits rolling at 90 minutes and the new definition of "It is what it is," LONDON HAS FALLEN is a junk movie that nobody other than Butler's agent was really demanding but it at least knows to not overstay its welcome.
CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES (US - 2015) Directed by Jackie Earle Haley. Written by Robert Lowell. Cast: Michael Pitt, Dan Stevens, John Travolta, Jackie Earle Haley, Christopher Abbott, Rob Brown, Edi Gathegi, Travis Aaron Wade, Alan B. Jones, Tyrone Jenkins, Chris Haley, Morgan Wolk. (Unrated, 93 mins)
Or, GET SHORTY III: THINGS FOR SUICIDE KINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE KEYSER SOZE FOR 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY. As generic as its title, the Cleveland-shot straight-to-VOD dumpjob CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES plays like any number of post-Tarantino/post-USUAL SUSPECTS-meets-Elmore Leonard knockoffs that cluttered the new release shelves of video stores in the latter half of the 1990s. Former Bad News Bear Kelly Leak-turned-LITTLE CHILDREN Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley, whose unexpected late '00s renaissance led to his being cast as Rorschach in WATCHMEN and as Freddy Krueger in the awful NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET reboot, makes his directorial debut here, and it's mostly by-the-numbers and undistinguished. The script is credited to Robert Lowell, who may or may not be the poet who died in 1977 (IMDb and several reviews seem to think it is, and that Haley extensively rewrote it) and has familiar situations and even more familiar dialogue from several noir thrillers of two decades ago. Less than five minutes in, and one of David Della Rocco's more memorable lines in THE BOONDOCK SAINTS is repeated almost word-for-word, and much later, a traumatized character proclaims "I'm pretty fuckin' far from OK," just like Ving Rhames' Marcellus Wallace did in PULP FICTION. But in CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES (shouldn't that be the title of a bad CBS police procedural?), it doesn't come off as a winking homage. It comes off as stale and lazy. Haley is a terrific character actor, but he doesn't come close to capturing the style and the flow of Tarantino. The script sounds like Haley cobbled it together after binge-watching a bunch of '90s Tarantino imitators and like most of those films (it really plays like a ripoff of a ripoff), CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES makes a lot of noise but it's all pretend and posturing, and seems a little too pleased with itself.
Getting drinks after the funeral of their buddy Matthew (Chris Haley, the director's son), who was run over by a bus, longtime friends Zach (Michael Pitt)--now a douchebag, coke-snorting investment broker with a trophy fiancee (Morgan Wolk) he suspects is cheating on him (foreshadowing alert!)--Bryce (Rob Brown), and recovering alcoholic Warren (Christopher Abbott) are joined by outcast and frequent bullying target Noah (Dan Stevens of THE GUEST). Noah is now a filthy rich real estate mogul, and in the course of their conversation, Bryce mentions he has a buddy who's got a hot tip on investing in a lucrative new pharmaceutical startup. After a month, the stock in the company is worthless following an SEC bust, and the four guys are out the $200,000 Noah borrowed from a benefactor who turns out to be Cleveland mob kingpin Eddie Lovato (John Travolta, wearing a shiny, helmet-like Big Boy wig). Lovato's got all of them on the hook for the investment plus interest, demanding $400,000 but offering them a clean slate if they kidnap Marques Flemmings (Edi Gathegi), whose brother is holding Lovato's niece for ransom and whose uncle is Demetrius Flemmings (Tyrone Jenkins), a top rival of Lovato's. Of course, putting four bickering incompetents in charge of an abduction never works out well, and of course the pragmatic Marques (Gathegi is the best thing in the movie) senses their weaknesses, manipulates them and attempts to turn them against one another, leading to twists, turns, buried secrets being revealed, and lots of dialogue that goes as follows:
Marques: "Shut the fuck up!"
Warren: "No, you shut the fuck up!"
Noah: "SHUT. THE FUCK. UP!"
Zach and Bryce: "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
The major plot twists are telegraphed pretty hard throughout, to the point where it becomes painfully obvious who's not who he says is, though the big reveal of why this person has gone to the lengths he's gone has a surprising degree of chutzpah and an admirable "Whoa...what?" factor to it. The finale and Gathegi's performance give CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES a big boost, and Travolta and Haley (who plays Lovato's chief flunky) seem to be having a good time. Travolta coasts through in a supporting role, probably as a favor for his buddy Haley, and gets to resurrect some of his Vincent Vega and Chili Palmer schtick, holding court with long-winded speeches (everybody in this movie has multiple long-winded speeches) on everything from economics to Macbeth to how much he hates drinking kale shakes. It's all cut from the same cloth as "Royale with Cheese," and like most of its '90s influences, there's some unexpected, darkly-comedic accidental death (like Marvin getting shot in the face because of a bump in the road in PULP FICTION). CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES is shamelessly derivative at times, and you really don't care at all about the four main characters, especially Pitt's obnoxious Zach, who seems like nearly every other obnoxious Michael Pitt character (if you want to see Pitt in a better mob movie, check out the little-seen and much more entertaining ROB THE MOB) but Stevens' portrayal of nebbishy dweeb Noah seems to be channeling a young Woody Allen at times. Except for the finale where it tries far too late to find its own voice, CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES is a minor and mostly forgettable film for Travolta completists and people who can't get enough of dated Tarantino ripoffs that instantly play like relics found frozen in ice after 20 years and just now thawed for viewing.
