Drably-shot and about as polished as someone's first DIY effort funded by successfully talking their dad into cashing out his 401k, the dreary, amateurish, and cheap-looking BEYOND THE LAW marks a reunion of sorts for Steven Seagal and DMX, the duo previously headlining 2001's EXIT WOUNDS, one of Seagal's last gasps of box office success. "Reunion" might be stretching it, since they don't have any scenes together here, making it quite possible that Seagal has no idea that DMX--or for that matter, Steven Seagal--is even in BEYOND THE LAW. Both have supporting roles, with the real star being Johnny Messner (returning for more Seagal duty after 2016's THE PERFECT WEAPON) as Frank Wilson, an alcoholic ex-cop who we can assume played by his own rules. He goes on a rampage of revenge after his son falls in with the wrong crowd and is killed by Desmond Packard (one-time Uwe Boll semi-regular Zack Ward, further away than ever from A CHRISTMAS STORY's Scut Farkus), the sniveling, dirtbag son of former crime boss-turned-legit businessman--and lemme check and make sure I get this name right--Augustino Finn Adair, played by a cigar-sucking Seagal with his usual N'awlins accent and total indifference to the proceedings. BEYOND THE LAW then turns into a DIPSHIT JOHN WICK--only with a slovenly drunk as its vigilante killing machine--as Wilson goes after Desmond, who's also mounting a challenge to topple his father and restart his old criminal empire (and we know Desmond is intense because he constantly flicks his Zippo while glaring menacingly), a plan probably egged on by his old man trying to tell him to straight up his act and muttering "I feel like I'm talking to a retarded child."
In his first film since spending a year in prison for tax fraud, DMX periodically turns up as Munce, the detective supposedly investigating the murder of Wilson's son (of course admonishing the enraged father with "Look, you're not a cop anymore!") but secretly on Desmond's payroll before he gets the clumsiest death scene since Michael Madsen in BLOODRAYNE. Written by DTV vet Chad Law (DRIVE HARD, CLOSE RANGE, JARHEAD 3) and director James Cullen Bressack (13/13/13 and some other very low-budget Asylum and Unearthed Films horror indies), who also throws in some incongruous jump scares when Wilson keeps imagining seeing his dead son, BEYOND THE LAW leaves no cliche untouched. You get B-movie drinking game staples like Wilson yelling "This ends tonight!" and Munce telling Wilson "You're not an easy man to find," to which Wilson mutters "Sometimes when you can't find a man, it's because he don't wanna be found," a philosophy that must explain Johnny Messner continuing to appear in modern-era Steven Seagal movies. But there's also some real head-scratchers, like Munce getting angry with Desmond because he's never seen GREMLINS ("It's a classic!") and--again, lemme make sure I get this name right--Augustino Finn Adair mumbling to his chief flunky that a meeting with a new "supplier" has to be postponed a day because "I gotta clean up my house." The kind of movie where someone in a bar orders a vodka shot and gets it in a regular-sized red plastic Solo cup because real shot glasses apparently weren't in the budget, BEYOND THE LAW might succeed in fooling some casual Seagal fans who haven't seen anything he's done since HALF PAST DEAD into thinking it's a belated sequel to ABOVE THE LAW upon a cursory glance at the Redbox kiosk. It also shamefully wastes veteran character actor Bill Cobbs as Wilson's fatherly friend, and DEATH WARRANT's Patrick Kilpatrick appears in a thankless role as a bouncer. (Unrated, 90 mins)
I SEE YOU (UK/US/UAE - 2019)
It's surprising that Saban Films didn't give I SEE YOU any kind of a push beyond an ambivalent VOD release. Maybe it's a little too much of a slow-burner for the multiplex, but it's filled with so many twists and turns and rugs being pulled out from under the viewer that you just know it's desperately hoping you don't question its implausibilities until it's over. It's best to go into this knowing as little as possible, but the basic set-up goes like this: in a greater Cleveland suburb, two young boys have gone missing in the woods, with the opening scene showing the second kid seemingly yanked off his bike by an unseen force. The focus shifts to an upper-class neighborhood and the Harpers, a well-to-do family fraught with the kind of simmering tension we haven't seen since HEREDITARY. Therapist mom Jackie (Helen Hunt) is popping pills and trying to repair the damage caused by a brief recent affair. Teenage son Connor (Judah Lewis) is bitter and resentful and wants nothing to do with her, and husband Greg (Jon Tenney) is dividing his time between the couch and the guest room and isn't quite ready to forgive her. Greg's preoccupied, however, since he's the lead detective in the disappearance of the two kids. Evidence is found in the woods that indicates a copycat of a case several years earlier where local boys were targeted by a now-incarcerated pedophile whose victims described him living in "a magic house that disappears." Strange things have been happening in the Harper house: the TV turns itself on, all of their silverware disappears, photos are missing from frames, and when Jackie returns home to find a repairman in the house, he claims a very polite young girl let him in.
At just around the midpoint, director Adam Randall (the British Netflix acquisition iBOY) and first-time screenwriter Devon Graye (an actor probably best known for playing the teenage DEXTER in flashbacks during the show's first two seasons and was later The Trickster on The CW's THE FLASH) deploy their first major twist, and from then on, you never know what to expect with I SEE YOU. It seems like it's not going to stand up under scrutiny, but there's always something happening that shifts your loyalties or puts things in a new perspective that you never saw coming. Yeah, maybe that one bit hinges on a garage door taking an improbably long time to close, but these are hiccups that you just have to roll with, because every time Randall and Graye make a decision that seems like too big of a leap, they manage to steady the ship, almost like they sense your incredulity and are saying "No, wait...just hear us out!" I SEE YOU doesn't go for jump scares and its bigger concern is a slowly mounting sense of eerie dread and unease, but at the same time, it's surprising that Saban didn't even try to sell it. It might've had potential to be a small word-of-mouth sleeper hit like SEARCHING, and it's got an Oscar-winning headliner in Hunt. I SEE YOU is a film that has to be taken on its own terms, and no matter how preposterous it gets on occasion, it's surprisingly effective and often genuinely chilling. (R, 98 mins)
THE COURIER (US/UK - 2019)
THE COURIER is the kind of dumb thriller that feels the need to accompany an aerial shot of an illuminated Tower Bridge at night with the caption "London, United Kingdom," and soon follows it with an establishing shot of the Washington Monument with the caption "Washington D.C." The opening credits play over quick shots of newspaper headlines that can't settle on whether its main villain is named "Manning" or "Mannings." It's also apparently the kind of movie that Gary Oldman does now, despite winning an Oscar for 2017's DARKEST HOUR, a title that, in retrospect, seems depressingly prophetic considering his 2019 had him in the unwatchable "support group for assassins" comedy KILLERS ANONYMOUS, the possessed yacht horror trifle MARY, and now THE COURIER, a straight-to-VOD DIPSHIT DIE HARD IN A PARKING GARAGE. Sporting a scarred face and an eye-patch like he took a wrong turn on his way to playing the bad guy in a JOHNNY ENGLISH sequel, Oldman puts in a couple of days work as powerful and bizarrely-accented NYC real estate mogul Ezekial Manning(s), who's under house arrest in his luxury penthouse overlooking Central Park while facing charges of fraud and murder, the latter witnessed by lowly office worker Nick Murch (Amit Shah) during Manning(s)'s last trip to London. Murch is under Interpol witness protection and en route to a secret location in London to give video testimony to a hearing in DC when the independently-contracted courier (Olga Kurylenko) hired to deliver the video link is ambushed by the agents, who are secretly on Manning(s)'s payroll with a plot to kill Murch and frame The Courier.
Or, make that "Courier? COUUURRRRRIIIIERRRR?!!!" as psycho Interpol agent Bryant (THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA's William Moseley, who's matured into an unbelievably terrible actor) keeps tauntingly calling her Luther-from-THE WARRIORS-style, adding other creative bon mots like "Run, rabbit, run!," "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" and "FFFFUUUUUUUCCK!" when the Courier gets the upper hand and takes it upon herself to keep Murch alive and take out the rogue agents one by one in a closed-off parking structure (it somehow took four screenwriters to come up with this shit), forcing Bryant to repeatedly call Manning(s) and inform him the job still isn't done. THE COURIER is just dull, predictable, and brain-dead from the start, and Kurylenko is a capable action star who deserves better material than the leftover table scraps of Milla Jovovich and Noomi Rapace. Dermot Mulroney also pulls some Bruce Willis duty, glowering and pacing around an office as a CIA honcho who may or may not be trustworthy (SPOILER: he's not). And then there's Oldman, who spends almost all of his screen time in one or two rooms of Manning(s)'s posh apartment, ordering the hapless Bryant to "Finish this!" while periodically doing some PROFESSIONAL-inspired shouting at his Ivanka-like daughter (Calli Taylor) and looking at his phone, perhaps waiting for his agent to call with something better than THE COURIER. (R, 100 mins)
Belatedly making its way to Blu-ray/DVD after its gala premiere on Roku last November, ATTRITION is one of former actor and probable Russian sleeper agent Steven Seagal's worst films, despite Seagal and his dwindling number of apologists in his online fan base touting it as his best work in years. Hyped as a long-planned pet project--he also wrote the script--it's really just an aimless, meandering Seagal home movie that briefly comes to life with some CGI splatter-abetted throwdowns in the last ten minutes. Until then, it's all talk, with Seagal as Axe, an ex-black ops badass who walked away from the death and destruction to devote himself to Buddha and is now a practicing doctor in a tiny Thai village. He's summoned back into action when a young woman named Tara (Ting Sue), who possesses some type of mystical powers that are never quite explained, is kidnapped by local crime lord Qmom (Yu Kang) and his henchman Black Claw Ma (Cha-Lee Yoon). Though he's now a man of peace, prayer, and healing, Axe teams with Chen Man (Louis Fan Siu Wong), the son of his martial arts mentor, and "puts the band back together," reassembling his mercenary team to rescue Tara. It takes about 55 of the film's 85 minutes before this crew of fourth-string Expendables--Infidel (APOCALYPTO's Rudy Youngblood), Ying Ying (Kat Ingkarat), Scarecrow (James Bennett), and Hollywood (Sergey Badyuk)--reunites, just in time for Axe to give them all recon and prep work assignments, which is really just a cover for Seagal's standard mid-film sabbatical, where he essentially says "I'm gonna duck out for a while...I'll be back for the climactic showdown."
Until then, it's a lot of Axe caring for patients, playing with little kids, talking a man (ONLY GOD FORGIVES' Vithaya Pansringham) out of suicide, showing a bad-tempered criminal that he's using martial arts the wrong way, and having visions of a topless Tara in his dreams, asking her "Who are you?" and being told "I am nothing...I am everything." It all ends with a long, ON DEADLY GROUND-style lecture about keeping the spiritual philosophy of martial arts alive (delivered by Seagal in a scene that's lit so strangely that it might actually be someone wearing a Steven Seagal mask), followed by live footage of Seagal and his blues band playing for the cast and crew over the closing credits. Props where they're due: Seagal dropped about 25 lbs prior to filming and looks noticeably more svelte than he has in recent years, but that's the nicest thing one can say about this. He probably figured ATTRITION would be taken seriously since about 75% of the dialogue is in Mandarin, which means everyone is speaking to him in Mandarin with English subtitles, while he speaks in mumbled Seagalese English, and everyone just understands one another. ATTRITION was supposed to be the flagship offering of "365Flix," a streaming service created by co-producer Philippe Martinez (who co-directed Seagal's recent GENERAL COMMANDER) that nobody's heard of, with their site still promising "Coming Summer 2019." When the initial launch of the service didn't happen, Martinez instead set up a distribution deal for 365Flix through Roku--offering ATTRITION and a handful of instantly-forgotten mid-2000s Martinez productions like LAND OF THE BLIND, HOUSE OF 9, MODIGLIANI, and THE GROOMSMEN)--in what sounds like one of the most poorly-crafted business plans in the history of home entertainment. Now, nearly a year later, ATTRITION is finally on Blu-ray/DVD courtesy of Echo Bridge Entertainment, which means it'll likely be in the $5 bin at Walmart by the end of this sentence. (R, 85 mins)
VAULT (US - 2019)
The 1975 Bonded Vault heist in Providence, RI is turned into generic mob movie Scorsese-worship with VAULT, a watchable but instantly forgettable chronicle that seems to be working more from a checklist of genre cliches than an actual script. Low-level hoods and childhood best friends Robert "Deuce" Dussault (SONS OF ANARCHY's Theo Rossi) and Charles "Chucky" Flynn (VIKINGS' Clive Standen) spend their time knocking off small businesses before graduating to banks, ultimately getting too cocky for their own good when they rob two in the same day in the same area and get pinched and sent to the joint. It's there that they meet Gerry "The Frenchman" Ouimette (Don Johnson), an underboss in the Providence branch of La Cosa Nostra, with close ties to Rhode Island mob kingpin Raymond Patriarca (Chazz Palminteri), who's also in the same prison and basically still running his organization unimpeded. Unable to be "made" because he's not Italian and disgruntled because a dismissive Patriarca has no appreciation for everything he's done for the family, Ouimette ropes Deuce and Chucky into a post-parole plot to rob the Bonded Vault, a "business" inside the Hudson Fur & Leather storage center that's used as a secret bank and stashing place for Patriarca's operation. While Ouimette remains at a distance, Deuce and Chucky meet up with his guys--all using aliases of "Buddy" and their hometown to keep their identities a secret--and successfully make off with what's later estimated as $30 million, making it one of the largest heists in US history.
It's here that VAULT essentially becomes GOODFELLAS JR, with Ouimette sitting on the money and Deuce and Chucky getting antsy about not getting their cut, plus the crew inevitably turning on one another, with "Buddy Providence" (William Forsythe) deciding to whack a few of them on his own, or perhaps on the orders of someone higher. Deuce turns into a trainwreck, going on sweaty, wild-eyed Henry Hill coke jags and getting increasingly paranoid that he's being followed as he and girlfriend Karyn (ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK's Samira Wiley) go on the run from one fleabag motel to another all the way out in Nevada. Director/co-writer Tom DeNucci gets things off to an interesting start as he builds the characters and sets the scene, but it takes a turn for the rote and predictable soon after, with the pace really lagging in the second half when it should be getting frantic and tense as Deuce starts to feel the walls closing in on him. The cast is fine, though it's too bad we don't get more interaction and ballbusting with the assorted "Buddys," like Forsythe's "Buddy Providence" and Andrew Divoff's bad-tempered "Buddy Woonsocket," and it's nice to see the great Burt Young in a brief bit as an aging Mafioso. The script also plays a little too fast and loose with the facts, to the point where it almost qualifies as Bonded Vault fan fiction, most egregiously with the character of Gerry Ouimette, who was 35 years old in 1975 and is being played by 69-year-old Don Johnson. But more importantly, Gerry Ouimette wasn't even involved in the Bonded Vault heist. His younger brother John was, but by using Gerry, who was directly connected to the Patriarca crime family, the filmmakers go off on a wild speculative tangent about the reasons behind the heist, which manifest in the form of a twist ending that only seems to be deployed because Palminteri was in THE USUAL SUSPECTS. (R, 99 mins)
CHARLIE SAYS (US - 2019)
The 50th anniversary of the horrific Tate-LaBianca Murders of August 9-10, 1969 has sparked a renewed interest in the Charles Manson saga, due in large part to Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate being a key player in Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD. This year also saw the lower-profile release of the indie THE HAUNTING OF SHARON TATE, with Hilary Duff in the title role, and CHARLIE SAYS, which focuses on Leslie "Lulu" Van Houten's indoctrination into Manson's "family." The latest collaboration between director Mary Harron and screenwriter Guinevere Turner, who previously teamed on 2000's AMERICAN PSYCHO and 2006's THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE, CHARLIE SAYS is a laborious misfire that, despite its POV, doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know about Manson and says even less about Van Houten, played here by Hannah Murray, best known as Gilly on GAME OF THRONES. It certainly doesn't go into details on what prompted Van Houten to abandon her family and throw everything away for Manson (a pretty by-the-numbers SNL-level impression by DOCTOR WHO's Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith). Van Houten seems incredulous at every turn--whether it's the lurid sex (she's introduced to Squeaky Fromme when she's in the middle of giving elderly George Spahn a handjob), the patriarchal nature of Manson's rule over his followers at Spahn Ranch, like men being served dinner before the women, or just his general craziness. The structure doesn't do the film any favors, as it's told mostly in flashback in 1972 by an incarcerated Van Houten, Patricia "Katie" Krenwinkel (Sosie Bacon, daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick), and Susan "Sadie" Atkins (Marianne Rendon) to USC grad student Karlene Faith (Merritt Wever), who teaches college courses to the inmates at the women's correctional facility where they're being held.
Faith's 2001 book The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten: Life Beyond the Cult was one of two sources for Turner's script, and telling the story of Faith's viewpoint and having her get inside the heads of the three women might've been a more productive approach than what's on the screen. By the end of the film, Van Houten shows remorse for her participation in the LaBianca murders (she wasn't part of the crew that invaded Tate's home the night before), but she's still a blank slate as a character in this film. That's no fault of Murray's, as she does what she can with how little she's been given. Of course, Smith is able to overact to his heart's content, but his Manson seems more like a petulant child in need of a time-out than an insidiously charismatic cult leader, especially with the amount of time Harron and Turner devote to his musical aspirations and his hissy-fit over Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson (James Trevana-Brown) failing to land him a record contract with influential producer Terry Melcher (Bryan Adrian). Haven't we seen and heard all of this before? Isn't CHARLIE SAYS (drink every time Leslie makes a suggestion and a brainwashed Spahn Ranch space case cuts her off with a Mansonsplaining "Well, Charlie says...") supposed to be about Leslie Van Houten? For all its liberties with the Tate part of the story (she's only briefly seen here, and yet Mary Harron isn't being endlessly harangued in one article after another about Grace Van Dien's lack of dialogue), ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD did a much more effective job in one extended sequence of conveying the truly disturbing mindset of the "family" at Spahn Ranch and depicting the hold Manson had over them--with Manson barely even being in the movie--than Harron accomplishes in nearly two hours here. What a missed opportunity. (R, 110 mins)
The best-kept secret in action movies, Scott Adkins continues to pay his dues and delivers the performance of his career thus far in the stunning, blood-splattered AVENGEMENT. It's also his latest collaboration with director Jesse V. Johnson, another guy who's been plugging away on the fringes of VOD for several years now and is finally found his calling with Adkins. While THE DEBT COLLECTOR and TRIPLE THREAT weren't exactly the Adkins/Johnson duo's finest work, they really clicked on SAVAGE DOG, the terrific ACCIDENT MAN, and now AVENGEMENT, a film that should be playing on 2500 screens and turning Adkins into an A-list movie star. He stars as Cain Burgess, a convict in London's Bellmarsh Prison, a hellhole affectionately known as "The Meat Grinder." Given a supervised 12-hour, six-man security furlough to visit his dying mother in the hospital, he arrives 20 minutes after she passes--partially because the cops stopped for vanilla lattes, which really sours his mood. He manages to escape and embarks on a two-day rampage of revenge across London, settling old scores with everyone who had a hand in turning him into the violent psychopath he's become, with the ultimate target being his big brother Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass), a ruthless loan shark whose backstabbing machinations led to Cain's incarceration in The Meat Grinder.
Johnson and co-writer Stu Small arrange the story in a non-linear fashion through time jumps and flashbacks as Cain ends up at Lincoln's bar and holds a bunch of his flunkies hostage--including his right-hand man Hyde (Nick Moran)--and informs them what he's been up to over the last couple of days as he waits for his brother's arrival. Like an unholy alliance between Guy Ritchie (especially with Moran's presence), Steven Soderbergh, and longtime Adkins collaborator Isaac Florentine (the UNDISPUTED sequels and the two NINJA films among others), AVENGEMENT is a bit more imaginatively constructed than you normally see in VOD action fare, and in terms of style, ambition, and quality, it's a step up for Adkins and especially Johnson, following through on the promise of ACCIDENT MAN. But this is the Scott Adkins Show from start to finish. Outfitted with a grill after Cain loses most of his teeth in a prison brawl stair-stomping and with a face adorned with cut scars and burns after being splashed with homemade napalm by another inmate ("Looks like someone set fire to your face and tried to put it out with a shovel," Hyde snarks), Adkins looks like a feral, roid-raging Pete Postlethwaite in a performance of frightening intensity. A fundamentally good man--his boxing career ended when he became persona non grata after disobeying orders from Lincoln to throw a fight--Cain has been handed a shit deal by life at every turn, and the very person he looked up to is the one who continually threw him under the bus for his own personal gain and/or to save his own ass (watch the pain Adkins conveys with his eyes when his terminally mother visits him in prison for the last time and says "Thank God Lincoln is there for me"). Cain Burgess is a great movie character brought to vivid life by a seething, explosive Adkins. There are moments in this where he doesn't even look human. Filled with genuinely unpredictable twists and surprises and one of the great action sequences of the year once all hell breaks loose in the bar, AVENGEMENT is an instant cult classic and with its current 85% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it seems like mainstream critics are finally taking notice of Adkins. It's about fucking time. (Unrated, 88 mins)
GENERAL COMMANDER (UK/US - 2019)
The latest DTV excretion pinched off by former action star and probable Russian sleeper agent Steven Seagal has an even shakier foundation than usual. GENERAL COMMANDER was conceived in 2017 as a 12-episode TV series, but the project was abandoned by creator/co-director Philippe Martinez (JCVD's WAKE OF DEATH) after just two episodes were shot. The solution? Just put those two 40-minute episodes together and release it as a new Seagal movie. That certainly explains the abrupt non-ending that probably served as a cliffhanger to the third episode, along with the credit "Created by Philippe Martinez," the TV-style opening credits, a GENERAL COMMANDER logo that looks like Martinez should be expecting a cease-and-desist order from Van Halen's lawyers, incredulous technological capabilities that make the CBS prime-time procedural lineup look like John Le Carre tutorials, plus an overwrought but not-completely-terrible theme song performed by co-star Mica Javier. As if it even matters, Seagal *IS* Jake Alexander, the leader of an elite CIA black-ops unit specializing in hunting down the world's richest and deadliest criminals who rule the "dark web" and trade in untraceable cryptocurrency. After one of their own is killed in Cambodia in a botched raid on a black market organ harvesting operation, Alexander's handler (Martinez's wife Megan Brown Martinez, who's maybe a worse actor than Seagal) grows tired of his cowboy methods and disbands the unit. Alexander goes rogue, getting financing from wealthy Russian investor--wink wink--Katarina Sokolov (Evgeniya Ahkremenko) to set up his own freelance operation to track down Gino Orsetti (Edoardo Costa), the wealthy and powerful Malta shitbag and apparent Maximilian Schell cosplayer who's behind the black market organ outfit.
There's a couple of go-through-the-motions action sequences, and Seagal has about a 12-second, badly-edited fight scene with a CIA assassin played by Ron Smoorenburg, but even factoring in the extremely diminished expectations of a present-day Seagal movie, GENERAL COMMANDER is a crushing bore. Much of that is due to all of the exposition and background that must be established in any premiere episode of a TV series, which just makes it all the more obvious that this is just two episodes crammed together (Ross W. Clarkson is credited as a second director, the assumption being that he helmed the second episode, which relies far less on the ridiculous, wanky flourishes and pointless echo effects on some dialogue in the first half). Seagal is still the laziest actor alive, but at least he isn't obviously doubled like he usually would be (I guess this is him showing "commitment") and is actually there in most of the shots with his co-stars. Don't think he's turning over a new leaf, though: Seagal does disappear for unusually long stretches throughout, which is pretty much on-brand for a Steven Seagal TV series. (R, 85 mins)
2013's ESCAPE PLAN was an enjoyable prison-break pairing of aging '80s action icons Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger that failed to generate much interest and flopped at the box office. Like some other underperformers, it proved to be a huge hit in China, which explains the existence of the needlessly convoluted, partially Chinese-financed ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES, the first of two sequels shot back-to-back for DTV release in the States and a theatrical rollout in Asia. Schwarzenegger is out and top-billed Stallone is back, albeit in largely a supporting role, but the nominal lead is popular Chinese actor and singer Huang Xiaoming as Shu, the newest member of security expert Ray Breslin's (Stallone) Atlanta-based team. After a botched extraction from a Chechen prison results in the death of a hostage, Breslin fires one of his men, Kimbral (Wes Chatham), for deviating from their set routine. A year later, Shu is in Thailand visiting his tech mogul cousin Yusheng Ma (Chen Tang) when both are abducted and thrown into Hades, a super high-tech prison nine stories underground that holds regular fighting showdowns (that's original) in "The Zoo," where the victor earns time in "The Sanctuary," a room with virtual reality imagery that provides a brief respite for the prisoners. Jake (Jesse Metcalfe), another Breslin staffer, goes rogue and tries to investigate Shu's disappearance on his own only to end up in Hades himself, where he and Shu encounter an incarcerated Kimbral. It then becomes clear--to them but perhaps not to the viewer--that it's all a set-up against Breslin as revenge for him escaping from "The Tomb" in the previous film, which means one thing: Breslin must do what he does best and get himself thrown into Hades, essentially breaking in to find a way to get his guys out.
Though Stallone is playing the same character, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson is back as his right-hand man Hush, and co-writer Miles Chapman also returns, ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES seems like it takes place in a different world than its predecessor. It's got such heavy futuristic sci-fi leanings that it could almost pass as a FORTRESS or CUBE reboot, and at the rate this franchise is going, ESCAPE PLAN 3 could very well be set in space. Director Steven C. Miller, who's helmed several chapters of Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, churned this out in an undistinguished fashion, with constantly jittery cinematography and motion-sickness inducing shaky-cam in the action scenes, and some of the most unacceptably shoddy CGI in recent memory (a couple of iPhone-app-level explosions and Stallone administering a CGI neckbreak that's just atrocious). Huang is a dull hero, though to his credit, he's not acting in his first language. Half-asleep and sporting a terrible rug, Stallone is largely relegated to the sideline, almost-but-not-quite-Willis-style (Breslin actually leaves his office), until he ends up in Hades about an hour in and more or less becomes the focus. Dave Bautista has little to do but manages a couple of laughs as a fixer colleague of Breslin's who gathers intel for their search for Shu, strong-arming assistance from a hacker played by Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz (and speaking of pointless cameos, Atlanta Falcons RB Devonta Freeman can briefly be glimpsed as a Hades inmate). ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES is lazy, cheap-looking, and laughably cliched, right down to its (ostensibly) chief villain, evil warden "The Zookeeper," played by Titus Welliver. A reliable ringer when it comes to character roles, a glowering Welliver looks like he's in physical pain being forced to gravely intone lines like "I know everything about my animals...I'm the Zookeeper," while one inmate helpfully waxes poetic with "That's why they call it The Zoo...we're all animals here...survival of the fittest." Between these hastily-shot sequels that were only made to satisfy the demand of the Asian market and the apparently ill-advised direction CREED 2 seems to be headed from the sound of things (why is Ivan Drago back?), it looks like Stallone is completely squandering the serious cred he got from that CREED Oscar nomination. Had he won it like he should have, we might've been spared ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES. Or at least Miller could've rewritten the script to keep Breslin completely confined to his office so Bruce Willis could've stepped in and taken over the role. (R, 93 mins) CHINA SALESMAN (China - 2017; US release 2018)
It's pretty clear from the moment CHINA SALESMAN begins that it's gonna be something special. There's an opening certification stating that it's commissioned by the Chinese government, one of the 16 (!) production companies is represented by a typo ("Gloden" God Video & Culture), there's 72 (!!) credited producers, and former action star and current sleeper agent Steven Seagal is listed as "Steve Segal" in the opening credits. A $20 million epic that tanked in China a year ago, CHINA SALESMAN was picked up for the US by Cleopatra Entertainment, the company that gave us the Kazakh shitshow DIAMOND CARTEL, and prominently features Seagal and Mike Tyson in its advertising, making it a veritable Who's Who of #MeToo. But, like ESCAPE PLAN 2, the Hollywood guest stars have relatively minor roles, with the focus on Li Dongxue as Yan Jian, an ambitious representative from Chinese tech company DH Telecom, who's in Uganda trying to negotiate a lucrative contract to establish 3G wireless communication at newly-constructed cell phone towers in the civil war-torn country. Pretty scintillating stuff, with a lot of screen time devoted to captivating meetings and boardroom backstabbing as Yan Jian and his associate Ruan Ling (Li Ai) are in constant danger of being railroaded by duplicitous Eurotrash shitbag Michael Duchamp (Clovis Fouin), who's also trying to close the deal for his company and seems to be on the good side of Susanna (Janicke Askevold), the head of the independent committee charged with deciding the victor in the 3G bidding war. But Susanna eventually sides with Yan Jian, who's heroically depicted as the only person who can save Uganda, right down to a patently ridiculous scene where he risks life and limb to plant a Chinese flag, which he and Susanna then passionately wave as they drive past cheering Ugandan soldiers.
Tyson, who relooped his dialogue but still can't match his own lip movements, plays Kabbah, a religious mercenary from an unnamed African country who ends up as a flunky for Duchamp. Seagal has little more than a cameo as Lauder, an expat bar owner ("Of all the gin joints in the world...") and arms dealer on the side who, for some reason, has a framed action still of Steven Seagal on his desk. CHINA SALESMAN shows its only signs of life in the first ten minutes during an out-of-nowhere bar brawl between Tyson and Seagal's double, which starts when Kabbah refuses a drink for religious reasons, prompting Lauder to have one of his goons piss in a mug and try to force him to drink it. There's an admittedly amusing moment when Seagal('s double) flicks Tyson's ear in a way that has to be an Evander Holyfield dig, but what perfectly caps the scene is an enraged Kabbah shouting "You serve me pee...YOU DIE!" Beyond that, CHINA SALESMAN is an oppressively overlong bore, filled with the kind of crummy greenscreen and CGI that only Chinese visual effects teams can pull off, and populated by actors so stiff and uncomfortable with English (even Tyson) that Seagal ends up looking like a world-class orator by default. (Unrated, 111 mins)
THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 (US - 2018)
It's rare that you encounter a movie that has no reason to exist. One of the most self-defeating films of 2018, THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 initially appears to be a B-grade, Redbox-ready take on HELL OR HIGH WATER by way of the Coen Bros., with nitwit sheriff's deputies Jim Doyle (FREAKS AND GEEKS' Martin Starr) and Thurman Hayford (Jake McDorman of CBS' LIMITLESS spinoff) idling their days away in the sleepy and sparsely-populated rural town of Shandaken in upstate New York in the late 1960s. They have little to do but play cops & robbers in the woods and get on-the-house pie at the local diner, and without a single arrest in the last year, the stern, no-nonsense sheriff (Ron Perlman) comes down from Albany to fire them. But they find a way to regain their jobs when they get word of an escaped convict known only as Prisoner 614 (George Sample III) on foot and headed their way. They hike deep into the woods--idiotically wasting all their bullets in a pissing contest where neither of them can shoot a beer can at ten paces--finding 614 and taking him into custody. 614 is wanted for killing a deputy from a neighboring county, but insists he's innocent and that the deputy died of a heart attack, and as time goes on, Jim and Thurman believe him. Once they get back to Shandaken, they can't convince the sheriff, even with a sworn statement from a witness that the obese deputy had a heart attack while 614 was simply standing near him. Their actions get Jim and Thurman rehired, but then they risk it all by going against the sheriff and aiding and abetting a fugitive to get 614 to freedom in Canada.
It's hard telling who this movie is even for. Nothing sums up its utter futility like having a character unknowingly guzzle Ipecac in a set-up for what must be a showstopping comedic projectile vomiting set piece, but then it has that very character drop dead of a heart attack before the Ipecac kicks in. Is that like making a porno where two people are about to fuck and then just watch TV? THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 subverts your expectations to the point where the entire movie just feels like one long dick move. Is it a comedy without laughs or a thriller without suspense? And is it that way by design? Starr and McDornan seem like they'll be playing affable goofballs but then just seem to wander aimlessly through the movie with no real character arcs or progression, while Sample has even less to do, even when writer/director Zach Golden throws in a cursory mention of the charges against him being racially-motivated. Perlman pops up here and there to slow burn at the deputies and basically be "Ron Perlman," but Golden doesn't seem to know what kind of movie he was trying to make, so he plays it too safe and makes what amounts to a movie about nothing that goes nowhere. The period detail is atrocious, and you can only gauge that it's 1967 or thereabouts from Jim mentioning that he recently saw COOL HAND LUKE (you should probably do the same). There's a few old cars and people chain-smoking indoors, but no one looks or sounds like they're in the late '60s. Speaking of sounds, if this is upstate New York in the Catskills, why is everyone breaking out overbaked Southern drawls like they're auditioning for a community theater version of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT? (PG-13, 97 mins)
Shot back in 2015 under the title KILLING SALAZAR and probably retitled to cash in on Netflix's NARCOS, CARTELS "stars" Steven Seagal but was held from release as six more Seagal movies were shat out ahead of it in 2016 (I'd list them but that would surpass the effort Seagal put forth in all seven movies total). It's hard to fathom the existence of a present-day Seagal joint that's so bad that Lionsgate delays releasing it, but CARTELS is maybe the least terrible of the bunch, though that's in no way meant to be interpreted as a recommendation. As usual, Seagal is a top-billed guest star who was probably on the set in Romania for a couple of days, while another actor--in this case, Luke Goss, still cornering the market on second-string Stathams--is the real lead. Seagal and his double are featured in a framing device as John Harrison, a covert CIA black ops mastermind interrogating US Marshal Tom Jensen (Goss) over a botched assignment involving Mexican-Russian cartel boss Joseph "El Tiburon" Salazar (Florin Piersic Jr), who's introduced ruminating over a chess board as he tells his top underling "You know why I love this game so much? Because there can only be...one king!" The CIA fakes Salazar's death in order to take him into custody after he offers to flip and go informant, turning him over to a crew of US Marshals and military personnel and holing them up in a luxury hotel in Romania to await extraction for 24 hours. Knowing Salazar has turned on them, his betrayed crew, led by second-in-command Bruno Sinclaire (Georges St-Pierre), lead an assault on the hotel, going up floor by floor in pursuit of their old boss--somehow, the hotel remains open for business--and taking out the Marshals and soldiers one by one until, of course, only the disgraced Jensen, seeking redemption after a previous assignment went south, remains to kill them all.
Seagal's usual director Keoni Waxman is on hand, and for what it's worth, he does an acceptable job handling what's basically a RIO BRAVO/ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13/THE RAID scenario. Goss is actually trying, for some reason, and creates a surprisingly credible hero, and while the fight scenes and gun battles are mostly an incoherent, quick-cut blur, Waxman at least uses a decent-looking mix of practical and CGI splatter that looks a lot wetter and splashier than in most films of this sort. CARTELS starts stumbling when it tries to get tricky, doling out increasingly ludicrous twists and double-crosses before abandoning logic altogether: the team has obviously been infiltrated by at least one mole, but when that person's identity is revealed, it certainly begs the question of whether CARTELS' version of the CIA has ever heard of a background check and wait, Seagal's character knew this person was a mole all along? Then why are you interrogating Jensen? It's no surprise that Seagal is once more the epitome of laziness, mumbling and wheezing, sporting his standard tinted glasses and a bushy goatee dyed with shoe polish, doubled in every shot where he's not facing the camera and in an embarrassing fight scene with GSP, where the MMA champ is forced to pretend he's getting his ass handed to him by the three-decades older and almost completely immobile Seagal, master of the timeless "wave your hands around and let your opponent run into them" move. CARTELS would've been an ordinary and perfectly watchable B-movie had Waxman just focused on Goss and the siege of the hotel and shitcanned the framing device. But the need to shoehorn Seagal into the movie ends up being its biggest detriment, stopping things cold every time he or the double pretending to be him shows up. The age-old question remains: Seagal doesn't give a shit. Why should we? (R, 100 mins)
THE RECALL (Canada/US/UK - 2017)
A muddled jumble of a sci-fi thriller, the Freestyle pickup THE RECALL can't figure out what it wants to be: alien invasion saga, CABIN IN THE WOODS ripoff, sensitive YA weepie, conspiracy movie, superhero origin story, or Wesley Snipes comeback vehicle. There's three credited writers plus someone else credited with "additional writing," so there's a big tip off to the indecisiveness and lack of focus. THE RECALL can't stop tripping over its own feet, shifting tone and direction so many times that it constantly stonewalls any momentum it generates. Five uninteresting college-age kids--two couples and a nerdy fifth wheel played by BREAKING BAD's RJ Mitte--head to a cabin for a weekend getaway only to find their plans ruined by an inconvenient alien invasion. Hothead Rob (Niko Pepaj) accidentally shoots and kills his girlfriend Kara (Hannah Rose May) and promptly gets pulled into the sky and zapped aboard a spacecraft, leaving heartbroken Charlie (someone calling himself Jedidiah Goodacre), who's still grieving after his girlfriend's death in a car crash ten months earlier, Kara's friend Annie (Laura Bilgeri), and Brendan (Mitte), to seek the protection of a local survivalist (Snipes) with a complicated backstory who's been preparing for "the arrival" for over 20 years. Snipes' character has some kind of psychic connection with a Russian prisoner (Graham Shiels) being held at a remote military base in Alaska in one of several subplots that never quite come together.
Top-billed Mitte has little to do and Snipes gets more screen time than you might expect for his "and Wesley Snipes" billing (he's also one of 22 credited producers), but the real stars are Goodacre and Bilgeri, which requires director Mauro Borrelli to frequently stop the film cold to establish their love connection and his emo bona fides. There's nothing like a violent attack by a seven-foot-tall, lizard-like alien brought to a screeching halt by a guy who picks the most inopportune times to wallow in self-pity over his dead girlfriend. Sorry for your loss, brah, but is this really the time? Borrelli has made a few low-budget DTV horror movies over the last decade in between his far more lucrative day job as a conceptual artist and illustrator on any number of big budget movies going back to the late '80s--THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, BATMAN RETURNS, a couple PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN entries, THE HATEFUL EIGHT, and the upcoming STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI just to name a few--and early on, some of the visual effects and the creature design are surprisingly well-done, which isn't a surprise considering he probably has some friends in the business who did him a solid. But those guys must've had other things to do midway through production, because the effects get much shoddier as the film goes on, but it's right in line with everything else in THE RECALL that starts falling apart around the same time. The only reason to bother checking this out is Snipes, who turns in a far more spirited and amusing performance than he needed to, putting forth much more effort here than he did in most of the films leading up to his stretch in the hoosegow for tax evasion. Snipes turns the character into a bitterly sarcastic smartass ("Come on, sissy boy!" he keeps telling Brendan), though that could just be a coping mechanism once the veteran actor realized he was merely a supporting actor in a Jedidiah Goodacre movie that ends with three young characters newly imbued with otherworldly powers, looking in the distance at a gray sky with one actually saying "Looks like a storm's coming." (R, 91 mins)
The last and probably least of seven (!) Steven Seagal movies released in 2016 (in what must be considered an act of mercy, KILLING SALAZAR has only been released overseas with no US debut as of yet), CONTRACT TO KILL is the former action star's worst film in years, and that's not a statement to be taken lightly. With his mumbled line delivery and his reliance on painfully obvious Fake Shemps for any shot that's not a close-up, Seagal's unparalleled laziness has become the stuff of legend among gutter denizens of the VOD/DTV cesspool, but he's a truly depressing sight here. He looks bad, he sounds bad, he fills spaces in lines with "uh"'s and "um"'s, his speech is garbled and he seems winded, like he's having trouble catching his breath. He wheezes his dialogue with a kind of hesitation that indicates someone might be feeding his lines to him off-camera, and that he might not be sure what he's saying or what the movie is even about. CONTRACT TO KILL is a muddled, Romania-shot mess with Seagal as John Harmon, yet another of his off-the-grid CIA/DEA assets who's reactivated, this time to thwart a partnership between the Mexican cartels and Islamic extremists. He assembles a team--far too young CIA protege and improbable love interest Zara Hayek (Jemma Dallender of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE 2) and hacker/drone expert Matthew Sharp (Russell Wong)--as the story goes from Turkey to Mexico but is mostly shot on the same minimally redressed Constanta block, with a seedy bar whose graffiti logo actually says "Seedy Bar." This leads to more of the typical Seagal fight scenes, meaning people run right into him while he flails his arms, grimaces in a close-up, and his overworked double does all the heavy lifting.
Even by the bottom-scraping standards of recent Seagal, there's no entertainment value whatsoever with CONTRACT TO KILL. His regular director Keoni Waxman, who once showed promise but is visibly regressing and now seems resigned to the fact that his long association with Seagal has probably deemed him unemployable anywhere else, has to stage action sequences around Seagal's minimal participation (even a shot of Harmon walking through a tunnel has to have Seagal awkwardly and obviously composited in). In what's either complete editorial ineptitude or the dumbest artistic decision ever, the final minute of the movie recycles bits and pieces of two random earlier scenes for no reason whatsoever. Waxman's script has more dialogue than any action movie should need, with a gasping Seagal given reams of exposition to recite in every other scene. Dallender isn't bad but no one can sell a character willing to have sex with Seagal, and other than the sad sight of the once-engaging Aikido icon, the biggest downer here is observing Wong slumming through this garbage. The veteran of numerous acclaimed and respected Wayne Wang films (EAT A BOWL OF TEA, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN), big Hollywood hits (NEW JACK CITY, ROMEO MUST DIE), and tons of TV guest spots going back to the '80s, Wong is a real actor and gives CONTRACT TO KILL its only shred of legitimacy. He's taking it seriously for some reason, and Waxman rewards him with a long, contemplative shot at the end where his character is either reflecting on what just went down or the light's going out of Wong's eyes when he realizes Seagal is getting the girl. There used to be some level of bad movie enjoyment you could get with a DTV-era Steven Seagal movie, and once in a while (A DANGEROUS MAN), one might actually be decent. The quality of Seagal's work has plummeted to such an unfathomable depth that willingly watching CONTRACT TO KILL leaves you with the same sense of ghoulishness a decent person should feel after they slow down to rubberneck a fatal multi-car pile-up on the highway. It's a new Seagal movie, kids. Cover your eyes and look away. You don't want to see this. (R, 90 mins)
OFFICER DOWNE
(US - 2016)
Based on the cult comics series by Joe Casey, OFFICER DOWNE is every bit as grating, obnoxious, loud, over-the-top, and headache-inducing as you'd expect a splattery comic book adaptation produced by Mark Neveldine and featuring numerous members of Slipknot on both sides of the camera to be. The directing debut of M. Shawn Crahan, aka Slipknot's "Clown," who has a lot of experience directing the band's videos, OFFICER DOWNE gets one thing right--casting veteran journeyman character actor Kim Coates in a lead role--but other than that, it's a chore to sit through. Set in, according to the onscreen caption, "Motherfucking L.A.," the film opens with Officer Terry Downe (Coates) going down on a woman while an onscreen "orgasm counter" quickly rolls to 14. Soon after, Downe is killed in a drug lab explosion set off by nefarious Headcase Harry (Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor), but through the miracle of science and reanimation, he's back on the street as an unstoppable killing machine. He works alone, but rookie cop Gable (Tyler Ross) is assigned to be his partner, which usually means going in and cleaning up after Downe's department-sanctioned massacres. Downe is hellbent on bringing down a crime syndicate known as The Fortune 500, overseen by masked figures Lion (Crahan), Tiger (Lindsay Pulsipher), and Vulture (Slipknot percussionist Chris Fehn), who dispatch martial arts mercenary Zen Master Flash (Sona Eyambe) to eliminate Downe for good.
There's also a convent of crazed killer nuns led by Mother Supreme (Meadow Williams) and Sister Blister (the once-promising Alison Lohman, who quit acting after marrying Neveldine and now just does cameos in the shitty movies he produces, like THE VATICAN TAPES and URGE), shameless '70s grindhouse pandering with Zen Master Flash introduced in a sequence filled with fake print damage and speaking in badly-dubbed English, tons of exploding heads and gory carnage, and shaky-cam action sequences scored to constant, pummeling metal riffs, all assembled in an eye-glazing blur by editor Doobie White, whose recent work on RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER was the object of universal derision. Crahan opens with a non-stop, in-your-face assault over the first 15 or 20 minutes, then the pacing is all over the place, with occasional bursts of cartoonish splatter countered with long stretches of tedious dialogue between Gable and irate police chief Berringer (OZ and DEXTER's Lauren Luna Velez, who also deserves better material). Slipknot fans may laud Crahan's "vision," but this has Neveldine's paw prints all over it. 2006 was a long time ago, and by this point, we can call the brilliant and inventive CRANK a fluke one-off, as everything Neveldine has been involved with since--CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, PATHOLOGY, JONAH HEX, GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE, etc.--ranges from awful at best to unwatchable at worst. OFFICER DOWNE is like ROBOCOP, PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, and DREDD for real-life Beavis and Buttheads who found something like HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN a little too complex and highbrow. There's a lot of the kind of anything-goes humor that made DEADPOOL a hit but if, like me, you're in the minority that hated DEADPOOL, then you'll find OFFICER DOWNE downright excruciating. Props to giving a well-cast Coates (who looks a lot like Vic Morrow in 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS here) a starring role in an action movie, but how about one worthy of his talents that doesn't sideline him for a long stretch in the middle? (R, 91 mins)
Only Steven Seagal could star in seven movies in one year and still be the laziest actor alive while still finding time to secure Russian citizenship from his BFF Vladimir Putin. Two Seagals have been released on DVD/Blu-ray in the last week, along with a third (CONTRACT TO KILL) hitting VOD. END OF A GUN is a rarity for present-day Seagal in that, while he's doubled in some fight scenes by his more svelte stuntman being shot from the neck down as bad guys just walk into him and get knocked on their ass, his character is actually in the whole movie and doesn't take the customary mid-film sabbatical where the star vanishes for 25 minutes of screen time. While Seagal is capable of colorful supporting turns (he did a nice job in as a cranky loan shark in the indie GUTSHOT STRAIGHT), he pretty much stopped giving a shit years ago. END OF A GUN is another one of his Romania walk-throughs, mumbling his dialogue in a barely audible whisper and keepin' it real by wheezing terms like "ho"'s and "y'all muh-fuckaz." Seagal is Michael Decker, a undercover DEA agent in Paris (of course, the city is played by Bucharest with repeated time-lapse stock footage shots of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe) who saves stripper Lisa (Jade Ewen) from a beating by a shitbag club manager, who pulls a gun on Decker and promptly gets shot in the head for his trouble. A grateful Lisa lets Decker in on her plan to steal $2 million from the trunk of a car being stored in a parking garage. The car belongs to the dead club manager's criminal boss Gage (Florin Piersic Jr.), who works for Vargas, a Texas-based meth lord who Decker's been trying to bust for years (so why is he in Paris?). Decker finds himself falling for Lisa and is forced to take action when she's kidnapped by Gage and his goons, as Gage understandably wants his money back. I probably don't even need to point out that all of this will lead to a climactic shootout at an abandoned warehouse.
Director/co-writer Keoni Waxman has helmed some of the (relatively speaking) better latter-day Seagal vehicles, like 2010's surprisingly solid A DANGEROUS MAN. But Waxman seems to have given up trying to get anything out of his star. Seagal is totally sleepwalking through this, which is a shame, because Waxman approaches this not like a Seagal shoot 'em up with some bits of what passes for the star doing Aikido (though it ends up there), but rather, a heist thriller with distinctly Steven Soderbergh/OCEAN'S ELEVEN touches. There's a bouncy jazz score, multiple characters followed via split-screen, and even a couple of half-hearted attempts at the kind of non-linear editing that Soderbergh famously used in OUT OF SIGHT and THE LIMEY. Waxman doesn't necessarily pull it off, mainly because he's not very gifted, the story's not that interesting, and his lead actor's range is somewhere between Mushmouth and Mannequin Challenge. But Waxman is at least trying to make something out of nothing, though perhaps he could explain why Vargas is always shot from behind and with a dubbed voice, deliberately hiding his face as if putting the pieces in play for a big reveal that never comes. Piersic plays a stock Eurotrash villain but he puts forth some effort, and the stunning Ewen is a gorgeous femme fatale, so everyone seems at least somewhat invested in this except the star who simply can't be bothered to wake up. Man, remember ABOVE THE LAW and OUT FOR JUSTICE? Where did that guy go? (R, 87 mins)
THE PERFECT WEAPON (US/UK - 2016)
Not to be confused with the 1989 martial arts actioner that served as the intro to Jeff Speakman's short-lived big-screen career, THE PERFECT WEAPON is set in the gloomy dystopia of America 2029. It's filled with rainy neon and sub-BLADE RUNNER cityscapes with the mandatory giant TV screens on the sides of skyscrapers. Here, Seagal is "The Director," the totalitarian overlord who rules this future world via surveillance and "conditioning" to control innate human weakness and emotion. Condor (Johnny Messner) is one of The Director's chief enforcers, a killing machine charged with taking out The Director's enemies, including a corrupt politico (Lance E. Nichols) plotting an insurrection. When Condor makes a heat-of-the-moment decision and chooses to not terminate a female witness to one of his hits, his handler Controller (Richard Tyson) is ordered by The Director to terminate him, as his innate humanity has made "reconditioning" impossible and he's simply outlived his usefulness. Going on the run after finding his presumed-dead-but-still-alive wife Nina (Sasha Jackson), Condor is branded a traitor to The Director and must deal with Controller as well as The Interrogator (an embalmed-looking Vernon Wells, best known as THE ROAD WARRIOR's Wez), the kind of sadist who puts out a cigar on Condor's chest ("That...was just foreplay!") and threatens to pay a visit to Nina while licking a razor blade and purring "I can be very persuasive."
Starting with Messner's wardrobe and shaven-headed appearance, it's obvious from the start that director/co-writer Titus Paar (a Swedish music video director who gives himself two supporting roles and is credited with "harsh vocals" on the metalcore closing credits tune) has fashioned THE PERFECT WEAPON as a blatant and very tardy HITMAN ripoff fused with every bleak future dystopia cliche you can imagine. Seagal, also an executive producer, puts in a few sporadic appearances, barely awake, visibly bored, mumbling nonsense and interacting with his co-stars as little as possible. The storyline is muddled and there's about five endings, and that's before a ridiculous last-shot twist that rather presumptuously leaves the door open for a sequel. Filled with endlessly recycled genre tropes, crummy CGI, and laughable dialogue (Controller, to The Interrogator, as he hold a razor blade to Condor's junk: "I won't have you slicing off his manhood for your own amusement!"), THE PERFECT WEAPON is cheap, lazy, and doesn't even try. In other words, it's everything you expect from 2016 Steven Seagal. (Unrated, 87 mins)
The plot owes a lot to The Punisher, with Seagal starring as Col. Robert Sikes, a former Special Forces legend long MIA, who's resurfaced in Salt Lake City to take out the trash. Perching himself on rooftops, sniper Sikes takes out all the city's scumbags, from drug dealers to gang leaders to pimps to corrupt politicians, and every evil-doer in between, including powerful mobster Romano (James Russo). It's all part of an elaborate revenge plan after his wife and son were killed in a driveby. Irate cop Peterson (Louis Mandylor) is at a loss, and things aren't helped by the interference of eccentric, alcoholic, knife-happy FBI agent Porter, played by once-promising actor-turned-barely recognizable cosmetic surgery cautionary tale Craig Sheffer (remember when he got top billing over Brad Pitt in Robert Redford's A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT?). Ex-military Porter knows Sikes ("He's trained to be a ghost...a shadow!") and spent time with him in Afghanistan, so he knows what he's up against ("To stop him, I must become him"). But before you can say Porter is the Trautman to Sikes' Rambo, Winnick throws in a plot twist that's hilariously stupid but takes such chutzpah that you can't help but begrudgingly admire it, if for no other reason than it's the most inventive way yet that a Seagal director has dealt with an actor whose laziness knows no limits. As usual, Seagal is always shot solo and never directly interacting with a co-star, never more apparent than when he and Sheffer awkwardly come to blows and Winnick valiantly tries--and fails--to work around the fact that the actors in a fight scene aren't there at the same time. It's too bad Winnick doesn't have the balls to stick with the twist, introducing it and almost immediately walking it back in a way that's unsatisfying and makes no sense. Even if the twist worked and Winnick followed through with it, CODE OF HONOR ranks among the worst Seagal films, which is saying something. It's so sloppy and unprofessional--the CGI is bush-league; a shot of a rappelling Seagal against a Hanna-Barbera-looking greenscreen is laughable; the producers can't even gather a reasonable number of Salt Lake City pedestrians to create a convincing crowd shot (probably too cheap to give them lunch); recurring shots of newscasters on TV are just bad actors reading their lines off of laptops--that it's a Master P or Silkk the Shocker cameo away from being an I'M BOUT IT rapsploitation homage. (R, 107 mins)
TERM LIFE (US - 2016)
It's not every day you get Vince Vaughn in a combination Moe Howard/Beatles moptop rug with botched heists, corrupt cops, and bloody shootouts in a crime thriller directed by Ralphie from A CHRISTMAS STORY, so it's too bad TERM LIFE completely fails to live up to its batshit potential. Making his grand entrance into the world of VOD, Vaughn headlines this uneven and generic non-thriller that made it to just 50 screens after Universal kept it on a shelf for two years, eventually and inexplicably releasing it through their foreign/arthouse "Focus World" division. Vaughn and his hairpiece star as Nick Barrow, an Atlanta heist coordinator who plots elaborate break-ins and sells them to the highest bidder. His latest customer is Alejandro (William Levy), a seemingly small-time criminal whose cohorts rob the cash from police evidence room and are immediately massacred by a crew of corrupt cops led by Keenan (Bill Paxton). Unbeknownst to everyone, Alejandro's father is Viktor Vasquez (Jordi Molla), a major south-of-the-border cartel boss who arrives in town looking to avenge his son's murder. Sold out by the contacts who put him in touch with Alejandro, Barrow assumes he doesn't have long to live and takes out a huge life insurance policy to leave to his estranged 16-year-old daughter Cate (TRUE GRIT Oscar nominee Hailee Steinfeld). The policy won't go into effect for three weeks, so he and a rebellious Cate hit the road and lay low, attempting to evade both Viktor and Keenan. The chase leaves a trail of dead bodies and superfluous guest appearances: Vaughn's buddy Jon Favreau as his scheming go-between, Terrence Howard as a clueless sheriff, Taraji P. Henson as the insurance agent, Shea Whigham and Mike Epps as Keenan's partners in crime, plus a nice supporting turn by the great Jonathan Banks as Nick's fatherly friend Harper. In the hands of a renowned action thriller director like Peter Billingsley (COUPLES RETREAT), the plot is extremely predictable, with bland, monotone narration by Vaughn to cover up the holes and attempt to keep it moving. Far too much time is spent on father-daughter arguments and maudlin bonding, as the pair are supposed to holed up in their motel room to avoid being seen, but of course go out for ice cream and on the ferris wheel at a carnival and get seen. It's the kind of movie where people have to do incredibly stupid shit to keep the story advancing. This is about as run-of-the-mill and forgettable as they come, aside from Vaughn's ridiculous pelt, which would have even Nicolas Cage looking away in embarrassment. (R, 93 mins)
BY THE SEA (US - 2015)
BY THE SEA was supposed to be a major holiday movie season awards contender at the end of 2015, but then someone from Universal must've actually watched it and quite obviously saw this tedious, self-indulgent Brangelina vanity project for what it was. The studio pretty much bailed on it, stalling its release at just 142 screens in the US for a gross of $530,000. There's a reason you've probably never even heard of this Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie home movie: BY THE SEA completely fell off the radar and became an afterthought even to its own distributor, taking an unusually long seven months to hit DVD/Blu-ray. Now going by Angelina Jolie Pitt, the Oscar-winning actress also wrote and directed this scenically lovely but utterly inert exercise in channeling her inner Michelangelo Antonioni. She captures the look and feel of that sort of cold and distant late 1960s/early 1970s European art film (plus a good chunk of the dialogue--whenever Pitt or Jolie interact with the supporting cast--is in French with English subtitles) and fuses it with a presumably very personal John Cassavetes-style examination of marital dysfunction (Jolie cited the great Gena Rowlands as an inspiration, and the screen legend appears with the star couple in one of the bonus features). But when it's all said and done, it's a thoroughly empty experience, alienating but not in the Antonioni way Jolie likely intended. It's a well-crafted forgery that looks like a 45-year-old film, from the 1970s Universal logo that opens it to the characters chain-smoking while wearing gaudy, oversized eyewear, but to what end? Jolie nails the look, but the script is trite and predictable and the characters not only unlikable but completely uninteresting. It's a boring, ponderous slog, the kind of movie where Jolie's character returning from a walk and announcing "They made fresh pastries" constitutes a major plot development.
Arriving at a seaside French hotel, blocked writer Roland (Pitt) and his wife Vanessa (Jolie) are looking to get away, primarily from each other. She spends the days moping around the hotel room and sobbing while Roland drinks himself into a daily stupor at a nearby bar, getting sage advice from kindly widower bartender Michel (Niels Arestrup). Vague references to a recent tragedy and Friedkin-esque subliminal flashes hint at the divide between them, and it grows wider when they meet Francois (Melvil Poupaud) and Lea (Melanie Laurent), the newlyweds who've checked into the neighboring suite. Through a small pipe hole in the wall left by a removed radiator, Vanessa voyeuristically watches the young couple. Roland eventually joins her, the two becoming a peeper version of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, drawn together and taking tentative steps toward reforming their bond after observing Francois and Lea having anal sex (a LAST TANGO IN PARIS nod, perhaps?). It's still not enough for Roland and Vanessa to overcome their malaise, ennui, self-pity, self-loathing, and their general shittiness as human beings, as they continue to tear one another down in hurtful ways, with Vanessa going so far as to sabotage Francois and Lea's marriage as a way of dealing with her own pain. "Am I a bad person?" Vanessa asks Roland. "Sometimes," he replies, adding "We have to stop being such assholes." Not making BY THE SEA would've been a good start. (R, 122 mins)
A mega-budget franchise non-starter that arrived on a wave of bad publicity due to casting controversies--a ridiculous grievance, really, considering that it's not a remotely serious film--GODS OF EGYPT seemed doomed the moment the trailer hit the internet. By the time it was released, the pile-on had already begun, and director Alex Proyas (THE CROW, DARK CITY, I ROBOT) didn't handle it well, taking to Twitter and social media to excoriate critics and detractors. Regardless of how legitimate his complaints were, he couldn't help but come off as, in the parlance of our times, a little butthurt. Is the movie good? Sometimes. "Kinda, almost" might be a good answer. Despite its lofty ambitions, it seems by the end that its sole purpose was to be played continuously on rows of display TVs in the electronics department of a big box retailer. Working with the screenwriting team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (whose previous triumphs include DRACULA UNTOLD and THE LAST WITCH HUNTER), the visionary Proyas establishes a pretty clearly campy tone, with the early scenes featuring intentionally anachronistic dialogue for its ancient Egypt setting ("This old thing?" one female character sasses when asked about her dress) and a very deliberate sense of humor. But the tone changes from scene to scene, along with the quality of the visual effects. The film is wall-to-wall CGI and looks almost completely animated at times. There are moments where the visuals are jawdroppingly beautiful and others where it looks like it's not even Asylum-worthy. The schizophrenic tone coupled with the repetitive set pieces eventually turn the film into a slog by the midway point.
That doesn't mean it's the catastrophic washout that everyone says it is. Oh, it's an unwieldy mess, but Proyas has stretches where he seems possessed by an in-his-prime Terry Gilliam, and for that reason alone, one shouldn't just blithely dismiss GODS OF EGYPT as soulless schlock. This just looks like a film that got away from its maker and had too much riding on it in terms of becoming a studio's next tentpole franchise. In Egypt, where gods are ten feet tall, bleed gold, and coexist with men, beloved and benevolent King Osiris (Bryan Brown sighting!) intends to pass the throne on to his son Horus (GAME OF THRONES' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). That plan is thwarted by Osiris' scheming brother Set (a scenery-chewing Gerard Butler), who kills the king and gouges out the eyes of Horus, who goes into hiding as a power-crazed, despotic Set takes his nephew's intended, the Goddess of Love Hathor (Elodie Yung) for himself, enslaves the population, and destroys all the good Osiris has done like some ancient Egyptian Donald Trump. Bek (Brenton Thwaites), a wily young thief, also loses his love Zaya (Courtney Eaton) when she's killed by her owner, Set's architect Urshu (Rufus Sewell). Bek manages to steal one of Horus' eyes--the source of his godly powers--from Set's vault, promising him the other if he helps him find and restore Zaya to earthly life. Horus agrees, as he and Bek form an unholy god-and-man alliance to save Zaya and exact vengeance on Set...if they don't slay each other first! There's some fun in the early going, and it's hard not to get a kick out of Geoffrey Rush engulfed in CGI flames and hurling balls of fire as Horus' grandfather Ra, but GODS OF EGYPT is all over the place, and nearly every stop on their quest involves them being attacked by giant CGI creatures and fleeing an interior or exterior structure, outrunning the destruction as it crumbles around them. It loses its sense of fun and starts to seem more like a GODS OF EGYPT video game. The actors, especially Rush and Butler, came prepared to ham it up, but after a promising start, GODS OF EGYPT just switches to autopilot and becomes one eye-glazingly dull CGI action sequence after another. (PG-13, 127 mins)
THE ASIAN CONNECTION
(US - 2016)
A pretty generic Far East shoot 'em up that features one of Steven Seagal's more lifelike performances in recent years, THE ASIAN CONNECTION would probably be a forgettable but diverting enough actioner if it had better leads. As the nominal villain, a Cambodia-based crime lord named Gan Sirankiri, Seagal is as mumbly as ever but actually logs some significant screen time and even takes part in a few big action sequences without being doubled (surprisingly, he's also a participant in the making-of featurette, a good indication that, for whatever reason, he gave a shit about this one). While Seagal has an "and Steven Seagal" credit and a puffy-eyed Michael Jai White gets top billing for a one-scene cameo as a gun dealer named Greedy Greg, the real star is the thoroughly unappealing John Edward Lee--who resembles some kind of Frankenstein fusion of Stephen Dorff and Josh Duhamel, but somehow with exponentially less charisma--as Jack, an expat American living in Bangkok with his Thai girlfriend Avalon (Kempo black belt Pim Bubear). Desperate for cash, Jack and his buddy Sam (Bryan Gibson) decide to rob a bank in Cambodia and take the cash back over the border into Bangkok. The bank they rob is holding the money of Sirankiri, who understandably wants it back and dispatches his chief goon Niran (Sahajak Boonthanakit, memorable as the gregarious taxi driver "Kenny Rogers" in the otherwise pedestrian NO ESCAPE) to recover it. Niran has other plans, like blackmailing Jack by having him and Sam rob a bunch of banks that hold various amounts of Sirankiri cash and giving him the bulk of the proceeds behind his boss' back, lest something nasty happen to Avalon.
Boasting a story credit for none other than former actor Tom Sizemore, THE ASIAN CONNECTION suffers from a smirking Lee as a hero you never care about, plus an inept performance by Bubear, who may be a karate champ but she can't act. On top of that, director Daniel Zirilli takes zero advantage of her Kempo skills. The script is predictable from start to finish, with Sam turning into a humorless, trigger happy loose cannon with each successive job, a character arc that was obvious upon the first of many times he admonishes Jack with "Don't call me stupid!" when he does something stupid (which is a lot). And yes, it all ends up with a shootout at an abandoned factory. Seagal is in character actor mode here, not nearly as loose as he was in GUTSHOT STRAIGHT, but definitely not sleepwalking through it, either, perhaps a major sign that he's ready to hand over his long-held Laziest Actor in the World crown to Bruce Willis. Not good at all but hardly the worst VOD/DTV title out there, the biggest problem with THE ASIAN CONNECTION is that you've seen it all before, and most likely with better actors than Lee and Bubear. Some more White really could've helped, even though he looks like he got stung by a bee right before his scene was shot. Wasn't BLACK DYNAMITE supposed to take him to better places than this? (R, 91 mins)
JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE (US - 2016)
The third entry in one of the most unlikely DTV franchises, JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE has nothing to do with 2014's JARHEAD 2: FIELD OF FIRE and almost nothing to do with Sam Mendes' original 2005 film version of Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir. Unlike JARHEAD 2, JARHEAD 3 at least brings back one character from JARHEAD with a brief appearance by Major Lincoln, played by Allstate insurance salesman Dennis Haysbert. Lincoln was a minor character in the 2005 film and is even less significant here, usually observing the action from a chopper and shaking his head when something bad happens. Now an action franchise whose main connecting thread is that it involves Marines, JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE is budget-conscious 13 HOURS, as ambitious Corporal Evan Albright (HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER's Charlie Weber) arrives at the US Embassy in an unnamed-but-obviously-Benghazi-like location, where everyone gets along with the locals and the US Ambassador (Stephen Hogan) has it pretty easy. Albright quickly establishes himself as an impulsive cowboy during a botched training exercise, and he doesn't win himself any friends by reporting a suspicious cameraman lurking outside the compound to the Ambassador, going over the head of his commanding Gunny Raines (top-billed Scott Adkins). Of course, Albright is right: the cameraman is notorious terrorist Khaled (Hadrian Howard), who leads an assault on the Embassy in which Albright and the other Marines get to engage in some Benghazi fan fiction where tragedy is averted and America triumphs, all while referring to the locals as "Ali Baba" and bellowing things like "This is OUR house! Let's show these motherfuckers how we do it!" and "Locked & loaded!" and, of course, "Let's roll!"
It's mostly jingoistic right-wing military porn in the grand tradition of "America! Fuck Yeah!" but veteran DTV director William Kaufman (now going by the hipper "Will Kaufman") pulls off a few decent shootouts amidst the shaky cam and the iPhone app-level explosions. Weber is a pretty bland hero, and the film doesn't give Adkins much to do other than glower and lecture Albright before being killed off in an explosion about an hour into the movie. The characters are largely cliches, like loudmouth racist Stamper (Joe Corrigall), who goes full Hudson-from-ALIENS as soon as the shit hits the fan, but the worst by far is Blake, a grating comedy relief blogger/documentarian played by 41-year-old Dante Basco, who's a good 15-20 years too old for the role. Blake is constantly filming (cue found-footage scenes) and saying inane things like "When the ambassador is burning shit, you know like, heavy shit is going down" (Blake also has a gluten allergy, making him even more insufferable). As far as in-name-only sequels go, JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE is passably entertaining and never dull, but that still doesn't seem to be reason enough to justify its existence. (R, 89 mins)
