CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY (US/China - 2016) Directed by Yuen Wo-Ping. Written by John Fusco. Cast: Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, Harry Shum Jr, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Jason Scott Lee, Eugenia Yuan, Roger Yuan, Juju Chan, Chris Pang, Woon Young Park, Darryl Quan, Veronica Ngo, Gary Young, Shuya Chang. (Unrated, 101 mins) On the heels of last year's success of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, JURASSIC WORLD, and STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, and despite the disappointment of TERMINATOR: GENISYS, everything old is new again. 2016 is now the year of the belated and unnecessary sequel that you're getting whether you want it or not: we've already had ZOOLANDER 2 (following the 2001 original) met with shrugging ambivalence, with MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 2 (first film released in 2002), AMITYVILLE: THE AWAKENING (11 years since the remake), ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (MUPPETS MOST WANTED director James Bobin's followup to Tim Burton's little-loved 2010 ALICE IN WONDERLAND), INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (a Will Smith-less sequel to the 1996 blockbuster), KINDERGARTEN COP 2 (starring Dolph Lundgren, 26 years after the Arnold Schwarzenegger hit), THE STRANGERS 2 (eight years since the first one), and BAD SANTA 2 (13 years) on the slate. No one was really clamoring for further installments of any of these films (apparently, Nia Vardalos forgot that nobody gave a shit about the short-lived 2003 TV spinoff MY BIG FAT GREEK LIFE, cancelled by CBS after seven episodes), and such is the case with CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY, which arrives 16 years after Ang Lee's revered Oscar-winner, a perfectly-balanced mix of arthouse drama and mainstream action, and the key film in making Asian wuxia accessible in the US. None of the original film's primary creative personnel, from Lee on down, are involved in this sequel with the exception of veteran martial-arts coordinator Yuen Wo-Ping, who's been promoted to director in Lee's stead. Of the 2000 film's cast, only Michelle Yeoh reprises her role as the stoical, dedicated warrior Yu Shu Lien. Unlike the first Mandarin-spoken installment, the sequel was filmed in English, and other than a limited number of IMAX screenings, is debuting on Netflix.
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON is a great film, a masterpiece deserving of all its accolades and one that, aside from some sporadic instances of wonky wire work that was the best they could do at the time, has aged beautifully and lost none of its power. It is a timeless and heart-wrenching tale of honor and unrequited love and the inability to turn back the hands of time, with parallels drawn between multi-layered characters of different generations. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY is...not that. In many ways, it's a dumbed-down, less-complicated remake of the first film. Set 18 years later, the Green Destiny, the famed sword that once belonged to the late Li Mu Bai (played in the original by Chow Yun Fat), is again stolen from the compound of Sir Te, who has just passed away and Yu Shu Lien has arrived to pay respect to her mentor. While the sword goes through a number of hands throughout the film, the initial thief, Wei Feng (Harry Shum Jr) was sent by the nefarious Hades Dai (a scenery-chewing Jason Scott Lee), an evil warlord who has clashed with the Te family and with Yu Shu Lien in the past. Wei Fang is thwarted by young Snow Vase (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), who wishes to learn from the wise Yu Shu Lien. Meanwhile, Te's son (Gary Young) has hired enigmatic warrior Silent Wolf (IP MAN's Donnie Yen), a legend long presumed dead following an ill-fated battle with Hades Dai, and his ragtag group of mercenaries to track down the Green Destiny. Silent Wolf was also the fiance of Yu Shu Lien in the years after she grieved for Li Mu Bai, a love that was professed only in the final moments of Li's life.
Throughout much of SWORD OF DESTINY's running time, it just seems that screenwriter John Fusco (YOUNG GUNS, THUNDERHEART, and the Netflix series MARCO POLO) is simply recycling the events of the 2000 film. Parallels abound all over the place--the theft of the Green Destiny, Yu Shu Lien taking a young protege under her wing (Bordizzo looks exactly like the first film's Ziyi Zhang), an extended mid-film flashback that shows the connection between the two younger lead characters, and another case of a long-lost love breaking Yu Shu Lien's heart once more. Yuen is better known to American audiences for his martial-arts coordinator work on films like THE MATRIX and KILL BILL, but he also directed a number of early Jackie Chan films, like SNAKE IN THE EAGLE'S SHADOW and DRUNKEN MASTER (both 1978) as well as 1993's IRON MONKEY, which was retooled by the Weinsteins for its US release in 2001, which only came about following the success of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. Yuen's directing efforts have been sporadic over the last 20 or so years, but his action scenes remain curiously inert here, or at least pale in comparison to the work he did for Lee 16 years ago. Something's just missing from this sequel, and it's not just Lee, the writers, and the bulk of the cast. Lee's film was an immersive experience, while SWORD OF DESTINY leaves you cold and distant, and a lot of that is due to the distractingly digital world in which it takes place (even a potentially great battle on a frozen lake sees its impact drastically diminished by CGI artifice). Lee used as many actual locations as possible in the original, but with the exception of some exteriors shot in Auckland, New Zealand, everything here has that distinct and lifeless "actor standing in front of a greenscreen" look. Lee's film was breathtaking because it presented a world that, even with the wire work, was a living, breathing, tangible thing. SWORD never has a chance to achieve that.
It also doesn't have Chow acting opposite Yeoh, which gave the first film so much of its rock-solid foundation. Yeoh is very good here and ably carries the film--without her, the whole thing would likely be a lost cause--but her Yu Shu Lien doesn't have the same chemistry with Yen's Silent Wolf that she had with Chow's Li Mu Bai, and that's likely because despite his top billing, Yen is absent for long stretches and really only serves as a guest star in a supporting role. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY has more fantastical elements (yes, even more than flying up on rooftops and running across water), like an evil blind sorceress (Eugenia Yuan) and a general vibe that makes it feel more like CROUCHING TIGER, GAME OF THRONES. It looks and plays like a DTV sequel or the debut episode of a CROUCHING TIGER cable series spinoff, watchable and by no means terrible, but unable to accomplish anything more than being an inferior knockoff of something far more lasting and significant.
Billy Bob Thornton hasn't had a lot of luck behind the camera after his 1996 breakthrough SLING BLADE. Harvey Weinstein sent DADDY AND THEM straight to cable in 2003 after five years on the shelf. In 2011, Thornton made THE KING OF LUCK, a documentary about Willie Nelson, and it's still waiting for distribution. The tactlessly-titled JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR is Thornton's first narrative directorial effort since Weinstein forced him to cut over an hour from 2000's ALL THE PRETTY HORSES. He needn't have bothered. Reuniting with his writing partner Tom Epperson, with whom he scripted 1992's ONE FALSE MOVE, 1996's DON'T LOOK BACK, and 2000's THE GIFT, Thornton hits bottom and drags a great cast down with him. This is a complete embarrassment for all involved. It's poorly-written, atrociously-acted, and hardly a scene goes by without some mind-boggling disaster. It's hard to tell what any of these people were thinking, but I hope they had a better time making it than anyone will have watching it. Released on just 11 screens after gathering dust for two years, JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR may not be the worst film of 2013, but it's likely the most wasteful of a quality ensemble of actors.
In small-town Georgia in 1969, cranky patriarch Jim Caldwell (Robert Duvall) gets word that his ex-wife has died. She left him and their four adult children 20 years earlier, married Brit Kingsley Bedford (John Hurt) and moved to England. Her dying wish was to be buried back home, so Bedford and his children--Philip (Ray Stevenson) and Camilla (Frances O'Connor) are on their way to Georgia. This doesn't sit well with Jim or his uptight eldest son Jimbo (Robert Patrick), though the other two sons, battle-scarred war vet Skip (Thornton) and aging hippie Carroll (Kevin Bacon) seem to welcome them. Jim has spent 20 years hating Kingsley, but the two bond over their love of the same woman (Tippi Hedren played this character, but Thornton ultimately granted the legendary Hitchcock muse the dignity of having her scenes cut) and talk of Jayne Mansfield's decapitated head when Jim takes Kingsley to an exhibit where the actress' alleged death car is on display. Meanwhile, Skip falls for Camilla, convincing her to strip naked and recite prose in her British accent while he masturbates, and the Caldwell boys' sister Donna (Katherine LaNasa) is drawn to Philip as she grows tired of her blowhard, ex-football pro husband Neal (Ron White). JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR tries to be a culture-clash character piece, Vietnam-era period drama, and raunchy comedy, botching all three and only succeeding in being one of the most appallingly ill-conceived pieces of cinema in recent memory. Character behavior makes no sense from scene to scene and Thornton seems to almost intentionally sabotage any momentum he gets going. Stevenson has a terrific scene where Philip defends himself against his father's drunken accusations of cowardice in battle, but then Thornton has Jimbo and his wife (Shawnee Smith) start making out on the couch for no reason while everyone watches. Skip walks into his dad's bedroom at one point with his war medals pinned to the dead skin on his burned and scarred chest, and all Jim can say is "Why don't you go get yourself some ice cream?" Who are these grotesque people? What planet do they live on? Duvall is a national treasure, but even his reliable "crusty old coot" act is played-out and tiresome here. It's the kind of film where, after seeing the Jayne Mansfield death car, old Kingsley gets philosophical and mutters "We all have a crash of some sort awaiting us." Indeed. That's some advice Thornton would've been wise to heed before he shit the bed with this unbearable misfire. (R, 122 mins)
BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (UK/Germany - 2012/2013 US release)
Not so much a straight-up homage to the Italian giallo as much as a mood piece inspired by the subgenre, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is an impenetrable puzzle that fascinates and frustrates in equal measures. Writer/director Peter Strickland is clearly a fan who obviously did his homework in terms of period detail and the work that went into producing an Italian horror film in the 1970s, but it does have some tedious stretches. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), is a meek, introverted British sound mixer hired to supervise the dubbing and foley work for an Italian horror film titled THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX. With his sound-mix work history primarily in nature documentaries, Gilderoy can't quite figure out why director Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancino) is so eager to hire him. Gilderoy doesn't mesh well with producer Francesco Corragio (Cosimo Fusco) or the rest of the Berberian Sound Studio staff and can't seem to stop unintentionally offending them, whether he's adjusting some equipment or getting the run-around on being reimbursed for his plane ticket. He can't even eat a grape without pissing someone off ("it's a custom to swallow the seeds here"). With the lecherous Santini distracted by young starlets and tensions mounting with the bottom-line-watching Corragio, the homesick Gilderoy finds comfort in letters from his mum and starts growing increasingly paranoid and seems to begin losing touch with reality.
While not a giallo, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO uses giallo tropes to ambiguously detail Gilderoy's slow descent into madness, eventually seeing himself in the film in events that just happened moments before, and already dubbed into Italian. Strickland does a masterful job at capturing the details of sound editing, particularly in the way the Italian film industry had to dub everything in the days of no direct sound on-set. We never actually see any footage from THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX, a film ostensibly about the supernatural vengeance of a condemned witch (though Strickland does cleverly show its opening credits instead of BERBERIAN's opening credits; in retrospect, the first hint that fantasy and reality will fuse), but we see its profound effect on an increasingly disturbed Gilderoy as he hacks watermelons to get the right sound effect of a hatchet slicing through flesh, or recording the sound of sizzling grease to replicate the sound of a hot poker going into an accused witch's vagina. The horrors of THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX are never shown, but heard with precision and clarity, and if nothing else, BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is a triumph of cinematic sound. Jones, Fusco, and Mancino are excellent, Strickland undoubtedly knows his giallo history, and the score by Broadcast is very effective, but the film's languid pacing and general obfuscation sometimes do it a disservice. Highly recommended for cult film enthusiasts and those interested in the more technical aspects of filmmaking and genre history, but those looking for a mainstream horror film might find it a bit of an endurance test. (Unrated, 92 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
MAN OF TAI CHI (US/Hong Kong/China - 2013)
A surprisingly straight-faced and credible directorial debut for Keanu Reeves, MAN OF TAI CHI is a martial-arts film that doesn't go the predictable route of snarky, reference-drenched, tongue-in-cheek homage but rather, plays it largely legit and serious throughout. He even went with Chinese and Hong Kong co-producers and a good chunk of the film is in Cantonese with English subtitles. Universal put up some of the $25 million budget, but perhaps following the tepid response to RZA's '70s kung-fu homage THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, opted not to distribute the film in the US, where the Weinsteins' B-movie wing Radius-TWC acquired it and dumped it on 110 screens for a paltry $100,000 gross. Drawing from such influences as the "to the death" tournament video games and film genre and John Woo-inspired Hong Kong cop thrillers and fashioning it into a good vs. evil morality play, MAN OF TAI CHI has the titular student, Tiger Chen (Chen-Hu, who worked on the MATRIX stunt team), forgetting the peaceful Tai Chi ideals of his fatherly mentor (Yu Hai) as he's sucked into the underground fight club world overseen by the nefarious Donaka Mark (Reeves), an almost Satanic figure of such power that he can pause what's running on TV simply by pointing at it. Initially participating to get some quick cash so he can pay to restore his master's Ling Kong Tai Chi temple, which has been hit with code violations (!), Tiger gives into his violent impulses and becomes an increasingly vicious fighter in Donaka Mark's high-tech realm, where the fights are broadcast online to his obscenely wealthy clients. Will Tiger hit bottom and see that he's being led down the wrong path? Will he cleanse his soul and find redemption in a fight to the death with Donaka Mark? Have you ever seen a martial-arts flick before?
Working with legendary fight coordinator Yuen Wo-Ping, Reeves has put together an unexpectedly solid film, perhaps a bit overlong and draggy in spots, but the veteran actor must have been picking up tips from his directors all these years, because he makes MAN OF TAI CHI look like a film that cost much more than $25 million. Reeves probably could've trimmed 15 minutes from it and tightened it up a bit, and there's one laughable CGI car wreck, but he deserves some credit for being handed a large amount of money and not dicking off and turning it into an insufferable vanity project, opting instead to keep the focus on Tiger and only occasionally indulging himself with some overacting or an odd facial expression here and there. Also with Karen Mok as an obsessed Hong Kong cop trying to bust Donaka Mark, Simon Yam as the police superintendent, and THE RAID: REDEMPTION's Iko Uwais as one of Tiger's opponents, MAN OF TAI CHI is no classic, but it's better than anyone would've guessed upon hearing that Keanu Reeves was directing an Asian martial-arts epic. (R, 105 mins)
