ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD (US/UK/China - 2019) Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Luke Perry, Julia Butters, Damian Lewis, Mike Moh, Lorenza Izzo, Damon Herriman, Zoe Bell, Lena Dunham, Rumer Willis, Samantha Robinson, Costa Ronin, Rafel Zawierucha, Nicholas Hammond, Mikey Madison, Madisen Beaty, Maya Hawke, Michael Madsen, Clifton Collins Jr, Scoot McNairy, Rebecca Gayheart, Marco Rodriguez, Clu Gulager, James Remar, Martin Kove, Brenda Vaccaro, Daniella Pick, Harley Quinn Smith, Omar Doom, James Landry Hebert, Lew Temple. (R, 161 mins) An epic, freewheeling, kaleidoscopic wet dream for hardcore movie nerds, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD allows Quentin Tarantino to fly his geek flag like never before. What other director could get away with stopping a big-budget, wide-release summer movie cold for an impromptu lesson on the making of 1960s Italian spaghetti westerns and the Americanized pseudonyms that were often employed by their directors? A love letter to the Hollywood 50 years ago on the cusp of tumult and tragedy, HOLLYWOOD takes place in February and August of 1969 and centers on Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor desperately clinging to the fading fame brought by his starring turn a decade earlier on a TV western called BOUNTY LAW. The show was cancelled when he quit to do a pair of movies that ended up bombing (and he lost out to Steve McQueen for the lead in THE GREAT ESCAPE, a role he was up for along with "the Three Georges--Peppard, Maharis, and Chakiris") and has spent the latter half of the '60s doing failed pilots and bad guy guest spots on nearly every network TV show. He's desperate enough that he's seriously considering an offer by his new agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) to head to Rome to make easy money doing spaghetti westerns and 007 knockoffs. He's also gotten a bad rep around town for his drinking, and multiple drunk driving accidents have caused him to lose his license, forcing him to be driven everywhere by his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who's also his errand boy, confidante, drinking buddy, and seemingly his only friend. When he isn't driving Rick around, house-sitting for him, or being a handyman around his house, Cliff lives in a broken down trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In with his loyal pit bull Brandy. Cliff's fortunes mirror those of Rick's: where Rick can only land quick-paycheck guest spots because of two costly big-screen flops and a troubled personal life, Cliff has become persona non grata among the Hollywood stuntman community after the mysterious death of his wife Billie (Rebecca Gayheart). It was ruled an accident but rumors still persist that he killed her and got away with it.
There's a kinship among the pair, but the laid-back Cliff tends to spend much of his time consoling the insecure and depressed Rick, who has a slight stutter offscreen and laments that he's "washed-up" and doesn't want to do "Eye-talian westerns." The third figure in the story is Rick's next-door neighbor, promising VALLEY OF THE DOLLS co-star Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whose new husband, Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski (Rafel Zaweirucha), is the toast of the town with the huge success of ROSEMARY'S BABY. The lives of Rick, Cliff, and Tate will intersect in a variety of ways over the course of HOLLYWOOD's 161-minute running time, and while the specter of Charles Manson (played here by Australian actor Damon Herriman, also cast as Manson in the upcoming season of Netflix's MINDHUNTER) looms large over the proceedings, this is not another HELTER SKELTER chronicle of the Tate-LaBianca murders of August 9-10, 1969. Tarantino, with the help of veteran visual effects maestro John Dykstra (STAR WARS), vividly, almost obsessively, recreates 1969 Hollywood to the point where you feel immersed in the past. The period detail is often astonishing, from the cars to the movie marquees to the production design to its depiction of the counterculture and the perfect selection of needle-drops (bonus points for possibly being the first late '60s-set film involving hippies to not feature Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"). Rick's derisive scorn toward "the goddamn hippies" signifies his being stuck in the past of his heyday, while Cliff has a more accepting, come-what-may attitude, particularly in his recurring flirtaceous encounters from afar with hitchhiking flower child Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) until one fateful day when he finally decides to give her lift. As played by Robbie, Sharon Tate is the ingenue with a heart of gold, and the scene where she goes solo to a matinee at the Bruin in downtown L.A. to see herself in the Dean Martin "Matt Helm" adventure THE WRECKING CREW ("I'm in the movie!" she cheerfully tells the girl at the ticket booth) and gets quietly overcome with joy at the audience laughing at her comedic performance and cheering her kung-fu ass-kicking of co-star Nancy Kwan is truly touching.
Countless familiar faces play figures--both real and fictional--who wander in and out of the story, sometimes in the blink of an eye. On the entertainment front, there's Timothy Olyphant as LANCER star James Stacy, who would lose his left arm and leg in a motorcycle accident in 1973; the late Luke Perry, in his last film, as LANCER co-star Wayne Maunder; Nicholas Hammond as TV director and character actor Sam Wanamaker; and Rumer Willis as Tate friend Joanna Pettet. Emile Hirsch is Tate's ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring, who still remains close to her, patiently waiting for her to leave Polanski; Damian Lewis is an uncanny Steve McQueen getting stoned at the Playboy Mansion; Mike Moh is Bruce Lee in possibly the film's funniest scene; Kurt Russell and Zoe Bell are husband-and-wife stunt coordinators on LANCER (Russell is also the film's occasional narrator and is not playing his DEATH PROOF character Stuntman Mike as some speculated); Dakota Fanning is Manson follower Squeaky Fromme; Lena Dunham, Harley Quinn Smith (Kevin's daughter), and Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) are other Manson disciples; and in a role intended for Burt Reynolds, who attended a table read with Pitt and Fanning but died just before he was scheduled to shoot his scenes, Bruce Dern is elderly and blind George Spahn, the owner of Spahn Ranch, a long out-of-commission 55-acre movie and TV western location set that was taken over by Manson and his "family."
Tarantino treats ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD as his cinematic playground, and the more well-versed you are in obscure TV and Eurocult titles of the day, the more fun you'll have with it (I would love to see Rick Dalton and Gordon Mitchell in an Antonio Margheriti Eurospy thriller called OPERAZIONE DYN-O-MITE!). As has been the case with latter-day Tarantino (never more than in the bloated THE HATEFUL EIGHT, a story that didn't need to take 168 minutes to be told), his tendency to meander does rear its head every now and again. While it's important to the story in terms of Rick's bottoming out and eventual path to redemption, the painstakingly laborious recreation of long takes and sequences from LANCER, where Rick has a guest spot as a bad guy, is the filmmaker at his most self-indulgent. At the same time, Rick's interaction on the set of LANCER with a committed, eight-year-old method actress (Julia Butters) provides HOLLYWOOD with one of its most genuinely moving moments, along with the final scene, which actually had people in the audience applauding. As good as DiCaprio and Robbie are, the secret weapon here is Pitt, who delivers a possible career-best performance. He's at the center of one of the film's strongest sequences--a visit to the Spahn Ranch that's every bit as intense and stomach-knotting as Jake Gyllenhaal's journey into the film programmer's basement in ZODIAC--and he's the key element of a shocking climactic showdown for the ages in a startling bit of revisionist history that makes this a great companion piece to Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.
Luke Perry (1966-2019)
Though mournful and elegiac at times, ultimately, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is surprisingly wistful and uplifting in its own strange way, and even though it exists in an insulated, alternate universe of make-believe (Vietnam is barely mentioned), it's indicative of an older and more reflective Tarantino. Granted, it's jaw-droppingly outrageous at times, but in the redemptive arcs of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth in an industry that's leaving them behind, there's a certain parallel with Pam Grier's and Robert Forster's characters in JACKIE BROWN, and for all the game-changing influence that PULP FICTION had 25 years ago, it's JACKIE BROWN that's looking more and more like Tarantino's best work with each passing year. Like most Tarantino films, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is compulsively rewatchable--maybe fast-forward through a couple of those LANCER scenes on subsequent revisits--and filled with several moments that are instantly etched in your moviegoing memory. In spite of his self-indulgent tendencies--which some believe came about after the unexpected death of his regular editor Sally Menke in 2010, but he was getting pretty tough to rein in way back around the time of KILL BILL--and his omnipresent foot fetish (he seems really taken with Robbie's and Qualley's), he's one of the few American auteurs for which each new film remains a legitimate and wildly unpredictable event, and to that end, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD delivers the goods.
THE HATEFUL EIGHT (US - 2015) Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum, James Parks, Zoe Bell, Lee Horsley, Gene Jones, Dana Gourrier, Keith Jefferson, Craig Stark, Belinda Owino. (R, 168 mins) Quentin Tarantino's second consecutive western (after 2012's spaghetti tribute DJANGO UNCHAINED) is a three-hour epic that's equal parts classic western, Agatha Christie mystery, Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, bitterly misanthropic screed, and a horrific, splatter-filled gorefest. It has everything you'd want in a Tarantino film--quotable dialogue, vividly-detailed characters, a spirited love of all cinematic genres, and some truly inspired creative violence. But it's also Tarantino at his most self-indulgent. THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a very good movie that could've been a great one if there was less of it. For the first time since the 107-minute European cut of DEATH PROOF, the shorter version of which was his contribution to GRINDHOUSE, a Tarantino film has moments of rambling, florid overwriting. Tarantino characters have a lot to say, but in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, they simply talk too much. And then they talk some more. It's the stagiest Tarantino film--even more so than his 1992 debut RESERVOIR DOGS, which had a lot more cutaways and flashbacks and was an hour shorter--but that's by design. For about 90 minutes, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is top-tier Tarantino, with a deliberate buildup that brings a group of wildly disparate characters together during a blizzard and the audience can just lean back and watch a great filmmaker get great performances out of his cast, letting the story gradually build into a stomach-knotting powderkeg of suspense and tension. But then Tarantino loses focus, a couple of major characters are Janet Leigh'd out of the film far earlier than you'd expect, and then it becomes a bit of an unwieldy mess, complete with the requisite Tarantino flashbacking, fractured timelines that bring both plot threads together. To call Tarantino self-indulgent is like calling water wet, but as a director, he's growing too enamored of the words of his favorite writer--Quentin Tarantino--to remain objective. DJANGO UNCHAINED ran a little long, but THE HATEFUL EIGHT starts to feel oppressive after a while, its story not nearly substantive enough to justify its bloated run time. It may sound like I didn't care for it, but I liked it quite a bit. I just would've preferred less of it.
Set several years after the end of the Civil War, THE HATEFUL EIGHT opens during a Wyoming blizzard as a stagecoach heads toward the mountain town of Red Rock. Bounty hunter and former Union Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), with the corpses of three outlaws in tow, hitches a ride on the coach transporting legendary bounty hunter John Ruth, aka "The Hangman" (Kurt Russell), who's taking his latest capture, outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in Red Rock (she's wanted dead or alive, but as Ruth says, "I don't like to cheat the hangman"). As the blizzard gets closer and travel becomes more treacherous, they decide they'll have to wait it out at a lodge called Minnie's Haberdashery. Warren and Ruth form a Leone-esque unholy alliance to have one another's backs with their respective bounties, and on the way to Minnie's, they're joined by another traveler, new Red Rock sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), on his way to being sworn in and whose horse broke a leg in the storm and had to be killed. Mannix is the son of a legendary Confederate officer and tensions flare with Warren over old North and South grudges. Coach driver O.B. (James Parks) gets them to Minnie's to find others stranded: former Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern); cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), who's penning his memoirs; the very British Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Red Rock's hangman; and Bob (Demian Bichir), a Mexican employee of Minnie's. Owners Minnie and Sweet Dave are nowhere to be found and Bob claims they went to visit Minnie's mother on the other side of the mountain and left him in charge. Warren is suspicious of their absence (Bob: "Are you calling me a liar?" Warren: "Not yet") and Ruth doesn't trust anyone in the group, remaining shackled to Daisy in the event anyone plans on collecting the $10,000 reward for her capture. Words are exchanged, war-era grievances exhumed, and alliances shift as it becomes clear that at least one person in the room isn't who they claim to be.
Though it doesn't involve an alien creature, the scenario should sound familiar to any Kurt Russell fan who's seen John Carpenter's 1982 version of THE THING. That's one of the most obvious homages in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, right down to the film's use of unused cues from the legendary Ennio Morricone's THING soundtrack (one of the very few times a Carpenter film was scored by someone other than Carpenter). Though Tarantino uses his usual mix-tape approach to scoring the film, throwing in some Roy Orbison and The White Stripes as well as a memorable borrowing of Morricone's "Regan's Theme" from EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, the film also contains some original Morricone music written specifically for it. Tarantino's grandiose vision for THE HATEFUL EIGHT borders on hubris at times--who else would stage an overlong drawing-room mystery taking place mostly on one set while shooting in Ultra Panavision 70, a 65mm format that hasn't been used since 1966 (in keeping with that, a roadshow edition running 175 minutes (plus an intermission and an overture with some new Morricone music, debuted on 100 screens a week earlier than this general release version)? The snowy exteriors look incredible on a big screen, and Tarantino's the kind of gifted filmmaker who can make such lofty ambitions work in such a claustrophobic setting, also tossing in a few unmistakably De Palma split diopter shots to make the really hardcore movie nerds trickle a little with giddy excitement (guilty as charged).
From Tarantino's ego (the opening credits declare "The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino," and midway through, he can't resist giving himself the role of narrator) to the inflated length to the use of Ultra Panavision for what's mostly a single-set production, everything about THE HATEFUL EIGHT is grandiosely overblown, including--intentionally so--the performances. Russell fans will be delighted to see him resurrecting the John Wayne swagger he used as Jack Burton in 1986's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, though his better--and more restrained--2015 western performance can be seen in BONE TOMAHAWK. Jackson does his furious indignation schtick that no one does better, and no one drops an enraged "motherfucker" quite like him (and he gets to spit out his most vile Tarantino monologue yet with a story he tells Dern's Smithers about crossing paths with his son), and Leigh is positively feral at times, especially once she's missing some teeth and covered in blood and brain matter, looking like a possession victim in a '70s EXORCIST ripoff by the end. THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a film that's unmistakably the work of its mad scientist auteur creator, showcasing both his strengths and weaknesses, and operating at an estimated rate of 75% riveting to 25% tedious. Tarantino is one of the very few major directors whose new films constitute a legitimate event, but he could really stand to start taking a "less is more" approach.
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson, Kerry Washington, Don Johnson, Dennis Christopher, Walton Goggins, Laura Cayouette, David Steen, Dana Gourrier, Nichole Galicia, James Remar, James Russo, Russ Tamblyn, Amber Tamblyn, Don Stroud, Tom Wopat, Bruce Dern, M.C. Gainey, Cooper Huckabee, Doc Duhame, Jonah Hill, Lee Horsley, Ted Neeley, Zoe Bell, Michael Bowen, Tom Savini, Robert Carradine, Michael Parks, John Jarratt, Quentin Tarantino, and with the friendly participation of Franco Nero. (R, 165 mins)
Perhaps cognizant of the fact that the likelihood of lightning striking twice with another reinvention of cinema along the lines of 1994's PULP FICTION is slim, Quentin Tarantino has spent the last 15 years content with being a mad scientist DJ of sorts, fusing various genres and making each new film an homage to the cult cinema of his past. JACKIE BROWN (1997) was his love letter to Blaxploitation; the two-part KILL BILL (2003/2004) his tribute to martial-arts films; DEATH PROOF (2007) his '70s drive-in/car chase throwback; and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) his spin on WWII movies. DJANGO UNCHAINED is Tarantino's take on spaghetti westerns, namely Sergio Corbucci's DJANGO (1966), but reimagined as a pre-Civil War slavery/revenge saga. Like most Tarantino films after JACKIE BROWN (maybe his most restrained, disciplined film and one that just gets better with each passing year), DJANGO UNCHAINED is guilty of unabashed self-indulgence on the part of its creator, but it's filled with such inspired enthusiasm, crackling dialogue, and a heart-on-its-sleeve love of movies that its appeal--so long as you can get by the splatter and the constant barrage of racial slurs--is positively infectious. Tarantino's films of late aren't perfect and one could argue that there's some regression from the surprising maturity of JACKIE BROWN. But really, if he just kept trying to top PULP FICTION, he'd fail miserably. Films like BASTERDS and DJANGO UNCHAINED may not be reinventing the wheel (though they may try to reinvent history), but there's no denying that they're distinctly Tarantino and couldn't have been made with the same wit, style, and passion by any other director. Flaws and indulgences aside, DJANGO UNCHAINED is a captivatingly unhinged, over-the-top blast.
In 1858 Texas, Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave purchased by German dentist/bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Schultz is after the fugitive trio of Brittle brothers, and it's been brought to his attention that Django knows what they look like. So, the doctor offers Django a deal: travel with him as a "valet," and point out the Brittles, and receive a third of the reward money along with his freedom. The two make such a great team that the deal blossoms into a partnership and a friendship, and Schultz offers to help Django find his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), whose whereabouts are unknown after the two were split up by a vengeful plantation owner (Bruce Dern) when they attempted to escape. After doing some research, Schultz discovers that Broomhilda was sold to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the flamboyant owner of the plantation Candieland. Posing as a pair of slavers interested in purchasing slaves for "Mandingo fighting," Schultz and Django arrive at Candieland to rescue Broomhilda, but face an unexpected obstacle in elderly house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).
Tarantino's gift for the verbose is on full display here, and, as in BASTERDS, it's Waltz who benefits the most, even though he's playing a good guy here--probably the moral center of the film--who's capable of shocking violence. Schultz's mentor/student relationship with Django recalls Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood, respectively, in Sergio Leone's FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965). The pair make a memorable team and are given strong support by the villainous turns of DiCaprio and Jackson. Candie is the easily identifiable villain and DiCaprio relishes the chance to play such a pompously sneering scumbag, but Candie is frequently acting under the manipulative machinations of Jackson's Stephen, who arguably emerges as the film's true antagonist. One of the most diabolical representations of the "Uncle Tom" stereotype ever presented, Stephen's self-loathing of his race and his alternately pragmatic, humiliating, and malicious eagerness to constantly be in the good graces of the rich and powerful Candie makes him one of the most complex characters in all of Tarantino's films. It's a difficult role that Jackson essays very well while still dropping "motherfucker"'s as only Samuel L. Jackson can.
The supporting cast is filled with recognizable faces and Tarantino B-movie favorites, some of whom have little more than walk-ons. Original Django Franco Nero has a brief conversation with Foxx's Django ("The D is silent," Foxx says after introducing himself. "I know," Nero replies), and it's great to see guys like Dern, Don Stroud, Russ Tamblyn, Tom Wopat, and Lee Horsley again, however briefly. Going back to John Travolta in PULP FICTION, Robert Forster in JACKIE BROWN, and David Carradine in KILL BILL, Tarantino always seems to give a forgotten actor another shot, and here it's BREAKING AWAY (1979) star Dennis Christopher in a showy supporting role as Candie's weasally lawyer. Jonah Hill turns up as a doofus KKK member for apparently no other reason than Tarantino wanted to put him somewhere. The KKK bit and a later sequence with Tarantino attempting an Australian accent as a slave trading employee with Michael Parks and John Jarratt (two of the director's apparently 10,000 favorite actors) are probably the two most egregious examples of things that should've been cut and could've brought the running time down to something more reasonable than a bloated 165 minutes, especially with Parks/Jarratt/Tarantino sequence coming after a jaw-dropping, splatter-filled shootout (all glorious squibs! No CGI!) that paints the walls of Candieland bright red and would've made Sam Peckinpah hard.
Continuing his trend of anachronistic music cues (like David Bowie's CAT PEOPLE theme turning up in BASTERDS), Tarantino expectedly utilizes vintage Italian western themes by Luis Bacalov, Ennio Morricone, and Riz Ortolani, but also songs by Rick Ross, James Brown & 2Pac, and even Jim Croce, and the effect, while jarring, actually works. DJANGO UNCHAINED is an insane, freewheeling mash-up of cult movie/spaghetti western/exploitation madness that could only be a Quentin Tarantino film. He may not have another game-changer like PULP FICTION in him, but he really doesn't need one. There's nobody who does what Tarantino does with such unbridled glee and on such a grand scale. DJANGO UNCHAINED isn't his best film, but like most of his work (except for that dreadful first half of DEATH PROOF), it will likely prove to be an endlessly rewatchable one, and that'll do just fine.
Directed by RZA. Written by RZA and Eli Roth. Cast: Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu, RZA, Rick Yune, Byron Mann, David Bautista, Cung Le, Jamie Chung, Pam Grier, Gordon Liu, Daniel Wu, Kuan Tai Chen, Xue Jing Yao, Zhu Zhu, Dennis Chan, Telly Liu, Gang Zhou. (R, 96 mins)
Wu-Tang Clan leader and kung-fu movie superfan RZA makes his long-planned directing debut with this martial arts homage, co-written by Eli Roth (HOSTEL) and "presented by" Quentin Tarantino. It's a strange film that careens wildly between homage, spoof, and serious martial arts, never quite gelling but providing some occasionally entertaining moments. RZA's initial rough cut is rumored to have run nearly four hours, and a lot of material is clearly missing, which probably explains why Pam Grier is in this for about eight seconds with one word of dialogue.
In the Chinese town of Jungle Village in the 19th century, the treacherous Silver Lion (Byron Mann) murders a beloved clan leader, which sets off a chain reaction of clashes that will eventually bring together three lone warriors: the dead man's vengeful son Zen Yi, aka "The X-Blade" (Rick Yune), the Jungle Village blacksmith (RZA) who unknowingly forged the weapon that was used to kill Zen Yi's father, and mysterious British mercenary Jack Knife (Russell Crowe). The blacksmith, an ex-slave who fled America after killing a racist white man in self-defense, has ambitions beyond Jungle Village and is planning to run off with Lady Silk (Jamie Chung), who works in Madam Blossom's (Lucy Liu) brothel, where much of the action and carnage takes place.
Owing as much to spaghetti westerns as it does to badly-dubbed 1970s kung-fu flicks (and arguably Jim Jarmusch's 2000 cult classic GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI, which was scored by RZA), THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS is the kind of film that's made for fans, by fans, but it rarely seems as "fun" as it should be. RZA's blacksmith and Yune's X-Blade are pretty dour throughout, leaving most of the jovial antics to an uncharacteristically amusing Crowe, who's rarely cut loose like this on screen before. Playing Jack Knife as more or less a tribute to Richard Burton and, to some extent, his GLADIATOR co-star Oliver Reed, Crowe appears to be one of the very few cast members who seems to understand what kind of movie he's in, playing a wisecracking, cognac-swilling horndog with a big gut, working three of Madam Blossom's ladies at once in some rather perverse ways (there's one quick shot involving beads and another where he's holding a phallic-shaped device and says "Let's pretend to be Catholic"). Or a scene where he's revealed to be in a dubious-looking Chinese disguise accompanied by--wait for it--the sound of a gong. Crowe was apparently only on the set for ten days and there's long stretches where his presence would liven things up a bit. It's one of his oddest roles, and he likely did the film as a favor to RZA, who had a supporting role in 2007's AMERICAN GANGSTER, during which the two became friends.
Elsewhere, Mann approaches this the same way as Crowe as the ludicrously over-the-top Silver Lion, who looks like he belongs in a bad Asian '80s hair metal band. MMA fighters David Bautista and Cung Le have supporting roles as bad guys, and genre legend Gordon Liu gets to once again don his KILL BILL Pai Mei beard to play a wise old mentor. RZA's film is obviously made out of love and respect, but it ends up being mostly forgettable. He includes a lot of in-jokes for fans, like deliberately having some shots out of focus or the camera moving erratically for no reason, which come close to taking the film into spoof territory, but sometimes it's played totally straight, and the general feeling is one of unevenness. There's a jarring sense of video-game modernity to the hyper-stylized fight scenes and the overabundance of CGI splatter. This is a case where the old-fashioned ways would've made major improvements. As it is, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS is enjoyable enough for a discount matinee price, but even with the surprise participation of an A-lister like Crowe, the whole thing has a distinct and undeniable straight-to-DVD feel to it.
