Other than the fact that we do have a person “hunting” -and being hunted!- by another person, these films have very little else in common. Here’s the movie’s trailer:
Those familiar with director William Friedkin no doubt are familiar with his two best known films, The Exorcist and The French Connection. Those who are really familiar with him know he made two other pretty damn good films beyond those, Sorcerer and To Live and Die In L.A.
But, like just about any creative soul out there, there are hits and there are misses and Mr. Friedkin has certainly had a few films that are simply not up to the caliber of those I mention above.
I would put The Hunted on that list but would quickly add that just because it doesn’t quite reach the level of “prime” William Friedkin doesn’t mean the film is bad.
In fact, I mostly enjoyed The Hunted for what it was, a for the most part straightforward action film which pits Mr. Jones and Mr. Del Toro’s characters against each other.
The plot goes like this: Aaron Hallman (Benecio Del Toro) was trained along with many other U.S. military men by L. T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones) to be a merciless, shadowy killer. He does his job only too well but in the hellish conditions of the Serbian war, he cracks.
Stateside, he brutally kills two hunters and the F.B.I., including agent Abby Durrell (Connie Nielsen), contact the now retired Bonham to help them hunt and capture the man responsible for these killings. They don’t know it, but Bonham recognizes the characteristics of the kill and suspects the person responsible is one of his trainees.
Bonham is an interesting character. He claims to have never fired a weapon (and, indeed, in the movie he never does) and while he trained people in how to kill, he himself claims to have never actually done so. Further, he now lives in a remote mountain cabin and appears uninterested in harming anyone or any animal (he helps one early on) despite the fact that he possesses the knowledge and skills to do so.
Though reluctant to join the F.B.I., Bonham does so and soon confirms the killer is one of “his”. He tells the F.B.I. to stand back and goes on the hunt for the killer, soon coming face to face with him.
I don’t want to get into spoilers here, so I won’t discuss more of the plot but it is very straightforward as I said above. Unlike some of the better Friedkin works, this one doesn’t have layers of meaning below the surface. The movie essentially plays out like a variation of the first Rambo film, First Blood, only the “bad” guy in this case is the one with the PTSD.
The action is for the most part well done but toward the film’s climax things got a little wonky. It seemed like there were scenes missing here and there. For example, one sequence has Bonham jumping on a train and in the background you can clearly see the police with drawn guns moving toward the train, yet at no point before that moment are they behind the train! Further, when Bonham heads out for the final confrontation between himself and Hallman, there are odd sequences interspersed, of the F.B.I. flying around the general area (it seems very unlikely these two wouldn’t notice helicopters near them) and the way Bonham tracks Hellman also seems a little disjointed. Further, it strains credulity that both Bonham and Hellman have the time -and are not bothered!- while they create weapons to fight each other. This is particularly silly in the case of Hellman’s weapon… I’ll say no more!
Still, as I said before, the film is for the most part an entertaining if not extraordinary action film which benefits from the charisma of the leads.
Back in 2019 the movie The Hunt was scheduled to be released but, after mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Universal Studios decided to pause the release of the film (you can read about that here).
If you go to that original article, I go into what this movie obviously is: Another riff on what I think may be the most adapted story of all time, Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game.
The story involved a shipwreck victim who washes up on an island only to realize the man who lives there has a peculiar habit: He likes to hunt human prey.
The story was first adapted into a movie with the same name in 1932 and since then I can’t count the times either movies or TV shows or books offer a similar story with that common theme: The idea that someone has decided to hunt humans.
Anyway, after a fashion The Hunt was finally released in March of 2020. This is one of the main trailers used for the film when it was finally released:
Earlier this morning I managed to finish the film off and… man, there is so much to like about it.
I loved Betty Gilpin as Crystal and Hilary Swank, in what amounts to a cameo, was wonderful as the hissable villain. The direction is crisp, the action presented bloody in a grindhouse way. And the concept, while once again owing to Richard Connell’s original story, manages for the most part to present an exciting variation of the well used hunter-hunting-humans concept.
Unfortunately…
The makers of the film, specifically screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, decided to add another element to the story. They decided to satire current right/left wing politics, presenting the “hunters” as stereotypical liberals and the hunted as stereotypical conservatives. I’m sure “on paper” it sounded like a clever idea, but for me that concept played out really quickly and soon became alternately off-putting and obvious while never quite being as humorous as I suspect they thought it was.
So we have scenes where the hunters talk about global warming or speak about racism while figuring out the proper way to call an African American and do this while gleefully murdering their “conservative” prey who we find slaughter endangered animals or have conspiracy podcasts… and it’s just not all that amusing.
John Carpenter in a few of his films takes on societal satire but manages to do so in a far more effective ways (check out Escape From New York or They Live). Here, I wished the film focused more on its main plot and, especially, Crystal and her fight for survival and not hit us over the head with so many too-obvious “jokes” about liberal or conservative silliness.
If the film had decided to accept and accentuate its Grindhouse elements more while toning down and/or eschewing the obvious -and after a while increasingly silly- political commentaries and not gotten so into the weeds about why the hunt existed (it is explained and, frankly, it was yet another dumb political element, IMHO), the film would have been much more successful.
As it is, if you are in the mood for some bloody fun and can ignore the annoyance of the “satire” that plays out much quicker than the writers thought, then you may find enough to enjoy in this film.
Sweetheart, released last year to home video to extremely good reviews from critics (95% positive by critics at Rottentomatoes!) versus a much cooler reception by audiences (52%, Rottentomatoes again), came on my radar around the time it was originally released and I’ve been curious to see it since. Here’s the movie’s trailer:
The movie is quite simple: Jenn (Kiersey Clemons, quite good) awakens on a beautiful island shore. She wears a life vest and realizes nearby is Brad (Benedict Samuel), a fellow castaway. He’s in bad shape, though. At some point his body slammed into coral and he’s got a piece of the jagged material sticking out of his stomach.
Soon, Brad dies (this all happens within the first few minutes of the film, so rest easy, I’m not spoiling much), and Jenn is left alone on the island.
She explores and assesses her situation and, come night, realizes the island is the hunting grounds for a fierce monster.
Will Jenn survive?
After seeing Sweetheart, I was curious to read some reviews and one of the more astute ones note the film is like a cross between Predator and Castaway.
Not a bad comparison, but the film’s DNA lies more distant than that, all the way to creature feature movies like the original Thing From Another World and The Creature From The Black Lagoon.
The movie is pretty bare bones, but I say this in a good way. There is very little fat and the plot moves forward. When all is said and done -and without spoiling too much- we have a total of four “speaking” roles but it is Jenn who takes up the majority of the screen time and she does make for an engaging hero, even if she may not be quite as resourceful and gutsy as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from the Alien films.
However, once all was said and done I felt there were a couple of head-scratching moments in the film that bear scrutiny. I’ll get to them in a moment as they do relate to SPOILERS.
So… thumbs up or down?
I recommend the film but bear in mind along with the fact that this is a pretty straightforward film it also does not reinvent the wheel. It’s well done, at times very suspenseful and the main protagonist is engaging and worth rooting for but Sweetheart is not a terribly original or searing presentation.
It’s a very good film, but not quite a great one.
Now then…
SPOILERS!
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!
Still there?
Hope you know what you’re doing…
Anyway, there were two things presented in Sweetheart -three if we count the movie’s title, which is explained in the course of the film but… come on! They could have come up with something more interesting, no?!- that bugged me.
The first one occurs when Jenn is attacked by the creature. She sustains a gash in her leg but that wound, magically, seems to disappear immediately afterwards and through to the end of the film. An odd thing, a very odd thing, to have happen in a film that seems to be otherwise very well thought out.
It makes me wonder if maybe they re-arranged certain scenes and her injury originally happened later in the story -like toward the very end- but was moved to earlier to create some sense of tension.
The second thing involves even more SPOILERS so, again, if you don’t want to be SPOILED…
All right then…
Through the course of the film Jenn encounters others who were in the ship she was in. Not many, granted, but she arrives with one survivor who dies quickly. She later finds the half-eaten body of another and then toward the later half of the film she sees a lifeboat and swims to it. She finds two people, a man and a woman, who have also survived the wreck.
Once they make it to shore, we realize they know each other. The man, Lucas (Emory Cohen), is her boyfriend and calls her “Sweetheart” (hence the movie’s title). Their relationship, we infer, was on the rocks even before the ship expedition. Both Brad and the woman, Mia (Hanna Mangan Lawrence), are elated to have reached shore but, understandably, have a hard time believing Jenn when she tells them a monster stalks the island.
This eventually leads to a confrontation between the two against Jenn, but before that Jenn borrows Lucas’ knife and notices blood on it.
Later on, when Jenn gets into the lifeboat, she notices bloodstains in it.
There is a clear implication that Lucas and Mia killed someone with that knife and did so in the lifeboat. My best guess is they killed the half-eaten man Jenn found before Lucas and Mia showed up.
It’s an interesting element, that Jenn may not only have to worry about the creature but also Lucas and Mia maybe being killers, but that element is shown -both with the blood stained knife and the blood within the lifeboat!- but absolutely nothing more is made of it.
As with Jenn’s wound, I wonder if maybe either they filmed more regarding this and ultimately discarded it or they had it in the script, filmed it, but decided to not bother with any further explanations.
For a film that is so razor sharp, though, its weird to have this dangling and ultimately unresolved plot element.
There’s a few bits of film trivia that really intrigue me, and several of them involve writer/director John Carpenter.
The first one is probably the juiciest, though it has nothing to do with the film I’m about to review: While John Wayne’s final film The Shootist (1976) is considered a beautiful wrap up to his career, Mr. Wayne actually set his sights on a follow up film. That film, Blood River, was written by a very young John Carpenter and Mr. Wayne intended to bring along Ron Howard (who was in The Shootist) to co-star with him in it. Mr. Wayne would pass away from cancer before the film was made, though and, years later and in 1991, Blood River was released as a TV movie starring Wilford Brimley and Ricky Schroder in the roles which were intended for Wayne and Howard.
The second bit of trivia, which does relate to this movie: Tommy Lee Jones has starred in two films written by John Carpenter but has not appeared in any John Carpenter directed films.
The first film is the 1978 Irvin Kirschner directed The Eyes of Laura Mars -the film he directed before directing The Empire Strikes Back!- and the second is the one I’m reviewing here today: 1986’s Black Moon Rising.
Here’s the movie’s trailer
Featuring Linda Hamilton, Robert Vaughn, and Lee Ving (!), Black Moon Rising plays out very similarly, plot-wise, to of all things Escape From New York!
How? Welp, Tommy Lee Jones playing Quint, a thief who is hired by the government to break into a tech firm and steal a computer tape (this was the 1980’s) with their financial improprieties on it. He has a tight deadline to produce this tape to them, and has to deal with all kinds of difficulties -including a thief (Lee Ving) who the company hired to take Jones’ character out and retrieve the incriminating evidence.
Quint gets a hold of the tape but pursuit is hot and heavy after him. He manages to hide the tape in a super-high tech car called the Black Moon, but before he can retrieve it, the car, along with many others, is stolen by a high tech car thief ring. Among the thieves is Linda Hamilton’s Nina, who is only a couple of years removed from her classic role in The Terminator and looks almost exactly the same!
There’s romance, of course, along with a pair of hissable villains, but the reality is that the film makes very little sense and, if you think about those things, you may find yourself not liking what you see.
The tape the government needs for their court case, it struck me right away, would get tossed from any trial if the government couldn’t state how they got it, and I seriously doubt they’d admit to hiring a thief to steal it from them!
Later in the film, a character is murdered and no one calls the police or makes a report… the murder of this innocent person is pretty much used as incentive by his friends to work with Quint but otherwise, forgotten!
Robert Vaughn is good as the steely and evil head of the car theft ring, but given the fact that he owns what appears to be two skyscrapers, one wonders if a car theft ring could make that much money… even if they were the best out there.
These are but some of the things that one has to accept if one were to come away liking the film or, conversely, cannot swallow and therefore wind up walking out not liking the film.
For me, the problems were pretty clear yet the film has enough swagger provided by Tommy Lee Jones in what is a similar to (but not close to identical) Snake Plisskin-type of role, that of the loner thief who is hired to do something good. Quint isn’t the anarchist Plisskin was, but he does at times show a similar attitude, though Jones makes him a little less mythic. Linda Hamilton, similarly, is quite good as the car thief come love interest, though none of the characters in the end are given an incredibly large amount of depth.
Perhaps most intriguing of it all is that the car, the “Black Moon” doesn’t take up huge amounts of screen time, as one might have expected it to. It shows up and is the goal -because of what’s hidden inside it- but the film’s makers wisely don’t flood the movie with shots of the super-car doing super-car stuff, instead showing the way Quint slowly works his way to getting the car back.
Black Moon Rising isn’t some lost classic of the 1980’s. It’s an at times cheesy bit of popcorn filmmaking which, as I have stated over and over again regarding “older” films, may play too slow with modern audiences who are by now expecting a far quicker pace to their action films.
Yet there is enough within Black Moon Rising to offer enjoyment, especially if you are a John Carpenter fan. I don’t know how much of his original script ultimately made it to the screen, but the main plot, character, and antagonist sure do play out like other Carpenter works, and if you’re a fan of John Carpenter, you may want to check it out for that reason alone.
For the rest of you, its a decent film -provided the problems I outlines above don’t ruin it for you- that’s enjoyable enough especially if you long to see a young Tommy Lee Jones and Linda Hamilton.
I should be working on my latest draft of my latest Corrosive Knights novel but I was feeling a bit fried and wanted to let my head cool off a little before taking the plunge.
I checked out my voluminous DVR list (as opposed to my voluminous Digital Movie list… another day!) and found the 2018 film Annihilation there.
I’ve been curious to see the movie since hearing it was like a modern version of an H. P. Lovecraft story (I think more specifically The Colour Out of Space, which was made into a film with Nicolas Cage in 2019 and is another of those films on my list to see… when I get the chance!).
Annihilation has plenty of stars, the biggest names of which are Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Isaac, and Tessa Thompson. However, I recall it was released and didn’t do all that well in theaters and was gone pretty quick. Afterwards, though, when the movie reached home video it seemed to find some love and now and again I stumble upon people who offer good words about the film, which is the principle reason I recorded it and decided to give it a shot.
Here’s the movie’s trailer:
Based on a novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation is indeed similar, IMHO to other works, not least of which is Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space but also thematically very similar to the wonderful (and, if we’re going to go there, far better) 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker.
Just for the hell of it, here’s the trailer to Stalker…
Natalie Portman plays university biologist/ex-soldier Lena, a woman whose husband has disappeared a year ago after being sent on some top secret mission and who, we come to find out, tried cheated on her husband with a fellow professor but that went to hell (I have to be upfront here and say: This romantic subplot, IMHO, was totally unnecessary, at least in the context of the film proper. Maybe it meant more in the book).
So her husband’s disappeared and she feels guilty because maybe her husband knew she was cheating on him (this part is rather vague) and then one day, out of the blue, her husband re-appears.
However, he is… strange. He doesn’t seem to know where he was or how he got back home. Worse, he says he doesn’t feel well and spits up blood. An ambulance is called but en-route to the hospital some dark SUVs surround the ambulance and drug Lena.
She awakens at some army outpost and is told her husband is dying. Turns out a year or so ago a meteor fell by a lighthouse (we see this in the movie’s opening seconds) and since then a weird color field has been expanding out of it. Turns out Lena’s husband and a group of soldiers entered that field and didn’t come out… so how did the husband show up?
Further to that, Lena learns a new group of women are going into the field. She asks to join them and is allowed to.
What follows is a journey into some serious weirdness, tragedy, and death…
By and large I enjoyed Annihilation. While it shares the “group goes into the weird zone to explore it” plot found in Stalker, Annihilation presents a far more grounded and simple story when all is said and done.
That doesn’t mean its a bad film, not by a long shot.
There are some brilliant moments in the film, including a couple of truly eerie and horrifying ones, and the mystery of what is going on -which, again, when resolved proves rather simple- is nonetheless intriguing enough to keep you interested during the film’s runtime.
The problem, for me, is that when it ends -indeed how it ends, too- seemed so very… blah. I don’t want to spoil things, but when all was said and done I felt as I said above: This film, while eerie and at times haunting, simply wasn’t all that deep in its conception and resolution.
In other words, it kinda ended like I thought it would.
Still, I can’t fault the producers/director/writers/actors for this film. They obviously put in a great effort and, again, there are some very startling scenes.
The film is certainly worth a look but if you want to try something really head-spinning which features a similar concept, you’re better off checking out Stalker.
I don’t think there’s a film out there that had worst luck upon its release than Bloodshot.
Officially released on March 13 of this year, it was put into theaters -if memory serves- on the very week that they were shutting down because of fears of transmission of COVID-19.
Such incredible “luck”, no?
Needless to say, the film didn’t do all that well. Then again, with the theaters closing off around them as it was released, how could it?
The film was relatively quickly released to VOD and, last week, it popped up on Starz! so, curious to see it, I set the ol’ DVR up and a couple of days ago I sat down and watched it.
To begin, the film certainly isn’t terrible, but on the other hand it sure feels like the studios imposed their will upon the movie’s creators and forced them to take what I suspect was an “R” rated action film and water it down so that it could be released as a more “family friendly” PG-13 feature.
The movie begins with a no-named soldier (Vin Diesel), dealing with a terrorist situation, then returning for R & R, meeting up with his wife, having an idyllic get together (all PG:13 rated!) only to then be kidnapped by associates of the terrorist he dealt with. His wife is brutally -well, as brutally as a PG:13 rating will allow- murdered and our no-name soldier swears vengeance before the terrorist associate kills him, too.
These early sequences, frankly, turned me off. They were so very, very idyllic and cliched as to be groan inducing. But as it turned out, the film was far more clever here than I thought (More following the SPOILERS!).
Our hero wakes up to find he died and his corpse was donated to a top secret tech agency that has revived him. He doesn’t have any memories of what happened to him before but comes to find he is now super powered: His blood has been replaced with nano-particles which fix him up when he’s injured, making him pretty much immortal/invincible.
He’s stronger, faster… and essentially an updated version of The Six Million Dollar Man. Only this Steve Austin actually died before he was “fixed”.
But then the memories of who he was comes back to him and our hero takes off… to kill the man who killed him as well as his wife.
To get into more I’d have to deal with SPOILERS and, as I said before, I’ll do that in a moment. But before I do, let me say Bloodshot, while far from a great film, isn’t too bad. Again, the problem lies in the fact that it felt to me the film was originally intended to be an “R” feature but the studios forced the movie’s makers to soften it up and that, IMHO, ultimately let the film down.
There is hardly any cursing. The action scenes, while competently done, never become terribly bloody or gruesome even though, especially toward the film’s climax, it looked like they could and should have been.
Is the film worth your time? In the end I can only offer a mild recommendation. Bloodshot wasn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen, not by a long shot, but it quickly settles into a mild presentation and never really wows you like it should have.
Now then…
SPOILERS!
Still there?
You’ve been warned!
As is depressingly too common, this trailer for Bloodshot, which I thankfully never saw before seeing the film proper, gives away the movie’s biggest plot surprise.
Once again: If you know nothing about Bloodshot and want to see the film, I urge you not to see this trailer. You’ve been warned, redux!
If you’ve just spoiled yourself by seeing the trailer, you’ve come to realize the big twist in the film: Those opening sequences which depict our nameless hero taking on a terrorist and then subsequently being kidnapped and watching his wife murdered before he’s killed and which are cliched to the point of parody… are false memories.
Our hero never faced off against a terrorist. He certainly never was captured and, we find out later in the film, his “wife” never was killed. In fact, she’s still alive and apparently the two broke off their relationship -they may not be husband and wife at all- some five years before and she now has a husband and kids and no desire to get back with her ex.
We never learn how Bloodshot -or rather his body- came to this high tech organization, but we do realize he’s been fed these thoughts with the object of having them be revealed so that he will go out and kill the person he thinks was responsible for he and his wife’s murder.
See, each time he has those memories “come back”, the person who murders him and his wife is different. Turns out the head of this high tech company, Dr. Harting (Guy Pearce, not too bad as the eventually revealed bad guy), is getting rid of his tech rivals who helped him conceive this super soldier nanites, and he wants his rivals gone.
I’ll be blunt here: I think that’s freaking brilliant.
But…
Unfortunately, the movie is soft when it should be razor sharp. It never draws (ahem) blood like it should. When Bloodshot eventually faces off against Dr. Harting’s goons, its presented in an incredibly bland manner, to the point where we don’t even know if the two are dead.
Man, if Paul Verhoeven had directed this film in/around the time he did Robocop, that would have been something!
But he didn’t and we’ve got what we’ve got. A movie with a damn clever concept but a rather bland presentation.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the Matt Damon starring Bourne films. In fact, the very last time I saw and thought much about those films was circa 2016-ish, when the fourth of the Damon starring Bourne films -but fifth of the “Bourne” films as there was the 2012 Jeremy Renner The Bourne Legacy– was released.
What perhaps is most memorable about those original three Bourne films (other than the fact that they were, SPOILERS regarding this particular review, pretty damned good) is that they seemed to revitalize the whole spy genre. When the first of the Bourne films, The Bourne Identity, was released in 2002, the last of the Pierce Brosnan Bond films, Die Another Day, was also released. While that franchise seemed to be on the rocks -if memory serves there was even talk this last Brosnan Bond film might also be the very last Bond film made- The Bourne Identity seemed fresh and new, exciting and action packed… something the last few Brosnan Bond films lacked… at least IMHO.
Over the July 4th weekend and over on the SyFy (I still have trouble writing this title) they had a movie marathon which included the Bourne films. I missed The Bourne Identity (indeed, I don’t know if they showed that one at all) but I did wind up catching The Bourne Supremacy, the second Bourne film and the first to feature director Paul Greengrass (who would direct the rest of the Matt Damon/Bourne films) and was intrigued, after all these years, to revisit this film world.
The Bourne Supremacy, unfortunately, starts with the death of a character who was very prominent in The Bourne Identity. This character’s death, which nowadays would be classified as a classic “fridging” of a character , is probably the one big negative against the film.
(I was delighted to discover the term “fridging” was coined by the great comic book writer Gail Simone and refers to a Green Lantern story which featured the then Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, discovering his murdered girlfriend left behind in a… refrigerator…!)
However, the film moves like lightning from that moment on, showing the grieving Bourne going after the people responsible for that killing as he also tries to remember things about his past.
For those unaware, that’s the big “hook” of the Bourne films and what distinguishes them from your average Bondian spy flicks: Jason Bourne is an amnesiac spy/assassin and he is trying to pierce together his past while dealing with those who are responsible for that past. These people, it turns out, want to keep the fact that the U.S. had an assassination Black Ops program going kept very secret.
So the first film has our hero losing his memory and discovering he was a top secret U.S. assassin.
The Bourne Supremacy has our hero trying to lead a “normal” life but he’s brought back into the thick of things because of the death of the character I mentioned above.
The plot winds up being somewhat a repeat of the original Bourne story -and, indeed, this is one of the main weaknesses, IMHO, of the Bourne films, but I’ll get into that in a moment- with Bourne playing cat and mouse with the bad guys while dealing with the “agency” which doesn’t know what he’s up to but fear the worst from him, as well as the memories he’s trying to get back while also dealing with a villainous assassin (in this movie’s case, played by the underappreciated Karl Urban) who is an equal to Bourne.
In the end, I loved The Bourne Supremacy despite the character that was “fridged” and thought the action sequences and the movie’s ending, in particular, was incredibly touching.
For there is one other element about the Matt Damon Bourne films I really love: While he was trained to be an assassin and, indeed, was one until he lost his memories, the post-amnesiac Bourne is a man who loathes killing and feels particularly guilty about his hand in the assassinations he did commit in the past. The Bourne Supremacy is ultimately a film about Jason Bourne coming to terms with his first sanction and making amends for it.
Very much recommended.
After seeing The Bourne Supremacy, I was all in and wanted to see The Bourne Ultimatum. Released a mere three years after The Bourne Supremacy and in 2007, The Bourne Ultimatum seemed like it was originally intended to be the conclusion to the Bourne saga.
Like the previous Bourne films, the plot is very much the same (see, I told you I’d get back to the whole “repeating” of plots): 1) You have an amnesiac Bourne seeking to get back his memories while you have 2) the “agency” trying to stop him and at least one of the people in the agency having a hidden -deadly- agenda. The agency fears Bourne may be either trying to get revenge/kill them all or expose their “evil”. And finally, you have 3) an assassin sent after Bourne who is essentially the man’s equal (in the first film the assassin was played by Clive Owen, the second featured the already mentioned Karl Urban).
So in The Bourne Ultimatum we have Bourne drawn into the work of a reporter who has uncovered the whole “Bourne” saga and this draws Bourne -and the agency, who wants to silence him- in. The two collide and the action explodes and the action -and intrigue- leads to the place where “Jason Bourne” was originally created.
What I liked the most -and found the most clever- about The Bourne Ultimatum is that they took The Bourne Supremacy’s ending and reworked it brilliantly within the context of this third film. I also liked the fact that they seemed to realize the films’ plots were reworked over and over again and that, with this third film, it was time to wrap things up.
As I mentioned in the previous reviews, I recall that Matt Damon himelf, upon the release of The Bourne Ultimatum, made a tongue-in-cheek yet very honest assessment that the films were essentially the same, plot-wise.
In spite of this and IMHO, both The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum are films that reach the same pinnacle and both are incredibly entertaining and know exactly what they’re up to and deliver the thrills and excitement in a wonderful way.
Both films are highly recommended and, I have to admit, I’m now interested in pulling out my copy of The Bourne Identity and seeing where the whole thing began.
But…
I have to admit after watching these two terrific films, I can’t help but remember what came afterwards. If you’ve clicked on the links to my reviews of The Bourne Legacy and Jason Bourne, you’ll read how I enjoyed the films well enough but felt neither was terribly spectacular.
If anything, they seemed to be far weaker retreads of these first three films which, as I mentioned before, were themselves repeating storylines, even if they managed to do so pretty damn effectively.
The Bourne films were a shot in the arm to the spy/action genre and when Bond returned with Daniel Craig with 2006’s Casino Royale, it was all too clear that the Bourne films had influenced those films and provided them a direction the Bond films sadly lacked by the end of the Pierce Brosnan run.
What is so sad, to me, is that the Bourne films wound up being short lived. The franchise, great as it was for those first three films released between 2002 and 2007, seemed burnt out by the time Jason Bourne rolled out in 2016. Meanwhile, the Bond franchise continues, perhaps stronger than ever.
Still, for a brief five year period, there were three terrific non-Bond spy films released which, even now, remain exciting, intriguing, and worth revisiting.
I’m glad I did.
Now I gotta find the time to see The Bourne Identity…
The history of cinema is littered with films that have done extremely well and in time been forgotten. Or, conversely, did poorly upon their initial release only to be re-evaluated over time and are now considered classics. There’s a swath that did mediocre/poor business and are justifiably -or not- forgotten today, just as there are those that were smashes upon their initial release and are viewed as classics to this day.
Then there are those films that are by and large forgotten today but deserve to be remembered.
Having just seen Across 110th Street, the 1972 feature starring Anthony Quinn, Yaphet Kotto, and Anthony Franciosa, I feel this is a film that deserves to be re-discovered by audiences today.
Here’s the movie’s trailer:
Way back in the stone age of the later half of the 1970’s, my family had a (gasp) betamax machine. Don’t remember the old betamax tapes? Here you go…
These tapes were smaller than VHS tapes, which came a little later, and were a video technology that VHS supplanted.
But in those days and while we were living in South America, families that hailed from the U.S. and were living there would trade betamax tapes among each other. These families would tape TV shows or movies or whatever they could find and bring them to South America and, over time, we’d get a hold of copies of copies (or original copies!). It was a way to entertain ourselves and see things that were in English versus the television shows/channels there which were all in Spanish.
Back then I very distinctly recall we had a copy of Across 110th Street but I never bothered (for whatever reason) to see the film.
So when it showed up on TCM and with memories of having -but not watching the film- waaaaaaay back then in my mind, I decided to record it (using the newfangled betamax of today, the DVR!) and, a couple of days ago, sat down and watched it.
Wow.
First though: I’m kinda glad I didn’t see the film way back when I originally could have, assuming the copy we had was the uncut/theatrical version of the film. I suspect it was, but its also possible it was recorded off TV and might have been a cut up version of the film. Having said that, considering much of what happens in the film, I can’t even begin to imagine a “TV” version of Across 110th Street.
Had I seen this film back then, when I was perhaps between 10-13 years old, it would have certainly done a number on me!
This film is very much an adult feature, a movie that takes a cold eye on Harlem of the early 1970’s and of the mob and crime and police corruption and decaying neighborhoods and hopelessness (for the most part African American) citizens bear… and presents it all in an unflinching -though at times pulpy- manner.
It is the pulp elements that keep the movie from being, say, another French Connection but I’d argue the film is damn close to that work and -this is high praise indeed!- it even predates some of the earlier works of Martin Scorcese.
The movie’s plot goes like this: A small group of Italian mobsters get together with some African American hoods to count out their take for the past week or perhaps month. The source of the dough is never spelled out, but one can imagine its for drugs or prostitution or gambling or “protection” or maybe all the above… and more!
While counting the dough, a car parks beside the building they’re in and two African Americans in police uniforms exit the vehicle while the wheelman remains in the car, waiting.
These bogus officers barge into the room where the money is counted intent on robbery. There is a nervous energy and you can tell things are about to go to hell… all that’s needed is a spark.
Then it happens. The suitcase of money falls to the floor and one of the African American hoods reaches for his pistol. He, along with all the other hoods/mobsters in the room are machine gunned down and our two bogus cops/thieves beat it out of there with most of the money.
When they reach their escape vehicle, they are confronted by two real police officers, both of which they kill while making their getaway.
What follows are three stories: The police and their search for the murderous thieves in the form of the young and idealistic Lt. Pope (Yaphet Kotto) and the man he is about to supplant, the veteran, racist, and at times violent -yet paradoxically at times very tender- Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn).
On the other side you have both the Italian and African American Mob under the cruel overview of Nick D’Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) also searching for the murderers/thieves.
Then you have the murderers/thieves themselves, who are, incredibly enough, presented as three dimensional people whose despair is palpable even if the methods they use to try to rise up from their lowly status are not.
Across 110th Street manages to present almost all the major characters well. We understand Lt. Pope’s indignation with Captain Matelli yet also understand Matelli’s impatience with Pope’s idealism, which at times slows the investigation. Nonetheless, we wonder if maybe when Matelli first joined the force he was not unlike Pope but after a lifetime of service in these means streets, he became the hardened man he currently is. As I mentioned, he’s not all sharp edges: In an early scene we see Matelli vouch for what are clearly a transvestite’s boyfriend and later on he gives, from his own pocket, money to the wife of one of the thieves, even as we learn he takes kickbacks and is not below beating suspects to get confessions. Considering he’s presented as a racist bigot, its interesting he helps out a transvestite -we are talking about 1972 here- and further helps out the widow of the wife of one of the thieves, who had a hand in killing two very real police officers.
Nick D’ Salvio is also a curious character. He’s a relatively young mobster and we infer from the opening minutes that the older Mafia members consider him a foot soldier. They show something of a disdain for him and put him in charge of getting the stolen money because they can’t be bothered to dirty their hands. Perhaps, too, the money isn’t as important to them as making sure those responsible pay dearly for daring to rob from the mob. In his first appearance, he looks nervous and unsure and, later on, overcompensates in trying to look like a fearsome mobster/enforcer.
The more veteran African American mobsters see through his veneer and, while they agree to do his bidding, show considerable disdain for him and even laugh in his face while eventually plotting to do him in.
Then there are the criminals themselves. Their boss, at first presented as a stone cold killer, is revealed to be a man who is desperately poor and cursed with thinking about where he and his girlfriend’s life is going. In one particularly poignant scene, where he justifies his theft/murders, he reminds his girlfriend that she has to frequent the bars where she works constantly dealing with crude propositions. One day, he says, when they get so desperate for money, he fears he will tell her to accept these propositions and sleep for money just so they can get by.
Across 110th Street is violent and foul mouthed and shows us a dog-eat-dog world where no one is an angel and where the mob and the murdering thieves and the police are all tarnished by their environment and the city and aren’t really all that different from each other.
The movie’s title refers to the point where Harlem begins, the “other side of the tracks” so to speak, and the place they are all imprisoned in their own way.
The film moves like lightning and there is virtually no fat to be found, though there does seem to be at least one sequence that was cut. We go from the mob finding the first of the thieves/murderers, beating him, then taking him away to -we assume- really work him over to Pope and Matelli in a ambulance hurrying to the hospital with the severely injured and on the verge of dying thief/murderer. They try in vain to get him to tell them who were the others in on that theft but we never know how it is they got him and got to the ambulance.
It’s a weird, abrupt scene shift and I wonder if maybe they filmed the police finding the man and getting the ambulance to take him but the whole thing might have been too bloody (what the mob did to him is pretty gruesome) in the end to use.
Regardless, Across 110th Street builds as it goes along, the tension increasing as we get to know the characters and feel sympathy for some and growing anger towards others, culminating in a climax involving all three factions along with more violence and death.
If you haven’t seen it, Across 110th Street is very much worth your while, a top notch crime drama that fits in well with some of the better New York-centric crime dramas of that era.
Highly recommended.
POSTSCRIPT: I didn’t mention it but several of the actors, most notably Yaphet Kotto, would go on from this movie to appear in the first Roger Moore James Bond film, Live and Let Die. I saw at least two, maybe three familiar faces among the many characters presented in the film and Mr. Kotto, of course, would be the most familiar as he would play the Bond villain Kananga.
Sheesh… am I in some kind of And Then There Were None loop here?
A few days back I saw the mini-series based on the famous Agatha Christie novel (you can read that review here), then yesterday I wrote a review of the 1985 movie Clue, which I realized was a comedic take on that same novel (you can read that review here), and last night I saw the 1968 film 5 Card Stud which, while not an obvious adaptation on Agatha Christie’s novel, sure seemed to have been shaped by it… to a degree.
Here’s the movie’s trailer:
The movie’s plot goes like this: One night in a small town in the wild west, a group of gamblers, including Dean Martin’s Van Morgan and Roddy McDowall’s Nick Evers, are playing a game of (I’ll give you three guesses) 5 card stud.
Van Morgan takes a breather and while he’s gone, the others continue their game. During that time, Nick Evers realizes the out-of-towner who is playing with the regulars is cheating. In a rage, he and the others grab the man and head out to lynch him.
Van Morgan returns to find the group of plays has just left and is aghast that they’re going to lynch the man.
He rides after them and arrives just as they’re preparing the rope to hang the unfortunate man. He tries to talk the lynch mob down but Nick Evers, revealed to be a nihilistic hot-head, knocks Van Morgan out and the unfortunate out-of-towner is lynched.
The lynch mob retreats back to the town, bringing along with them the unconscious Van Morgan. They unceremoniously dump him near the bar he lives in and where the out-of-towner played his very last game.
He’s taken to his room to recover and, the next day, the lynching is discovered by the law.
The 5 card stud players, including Van Morgan, keep quiet about whodunnit and Van Morgan, after confronting and knocking out Nick Evers, decides he no longer wants to live in this town and departs.
Once gone, a preacher (Robert Mitchum, in what amounts to a extended cameo, even though he’s listed as the movie’s co-star) arrives in town and sets up his parish.
Soon after, one of the poker players is found dead.
Then another…
Van Morgan reads about the killings and returns to town and the mystery of who is killing the card players …er… plays out.
(Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there you have your And Then There Were None similarities!)
So 5 Card Stud is essentially a wild west murder mystery. The screenplay, by Marguerite Roberts was adapted from a novel by Ray Gaulden is full of interesting bits of dialogue. Ms. Roberts, it should be noted, was a long standing Hollywood screenwriter. Her first work was Sailor’s Luck from all the way back in 1933 and she immediately followed up the screenplay for this film with that of the original John Wayne version of True Grit.
In fact, as I was watching the film I found myself more often intrigued with the at times quite meaty dialogue versus the at times very pulpy murder mystery.
Roddy McDowall’s Nick Evers, in particular, is a well developed character. As I mentioned above, he’s a nihilist, someone whose philosophy seems to be to burn it all down. And Roddy McDowall, who himself had a very long career as an actor, seems on the surface an odd choice for this role yet he nails it, becoming a truly hissable villain in the process.
But…
The limitations of the story and its pulpy nature do limit just how good this film is. There is a romance -two actually- linked to Dean Martin’s Van Morgan that don’t really add all that much to the story proper and seem like deviations meant to fill up time. Not, by the way, that the romantic love interests, played by Marguerite Roberts and the lovely (and tragic, in real life) Inger Stevens are anything less than very professional and charismatic in their roles.
I suppose the problem lies in the fact that it became only too obvious too soon who the murderer was and, as a viewer, I was left with a plot that seemed only too obvious play out despite some great characterizations and dialogue.
Still, 5 Card Stud is not a terrible film but instead a movie that is limited by its plot and tries hard to break through and become something more.
There’s nothing wrong with the attempt, even if the ultimate result is something only a little more than above average.
If I were giving stars, I’d give 5 Card Stud 2 and 1/2 stars out of 4.
The late writer Agatha Christie is rightfully considered one of the premiere dames of the murder mystery. In her very long writing career, she created two classic detective characters, the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot and the fussy Miss Marple as well as a slew of fascinating novels, short stories, and plays.
But if you were to stand back and rank entire œuvrer, there are two novels in particular which it seems almost everyone knows: The Hercule Poirot mystery Murder on the Orient Express and the standalone 1939 novel And Then There Were None.
There are many, myself included, who would point to And Then There Were None as Agatha Christie’s best overall novel. The plot is simple yet incredibly intriguing: A group of 8 individuals are invited to Indian Island under different -and they soon realize false- pretenses. There they find two servants, a butler and cook, bringing the total number of people on this distant, wind-swept island to 10.
And that night, they are each accused of different murders.
And that night, the first of them dies.
Followed by another.
Then another.
The original novel when released had the absolutely terrible name Ten Little Niggers, after the minstrel song. This was very soon changed, both in the title and in the book proper, to Ten Little Indians (not all that much better an alternative!) and settling on And Then There Were None, but the novel retained the Indian motif, with the island the group was on was called Indian Island.
There have been many adaptations of this book, the first being made in 1945…
That movie, IMHO, was delightful but they did change the novel’s rather grim tone and ending to make a much more pleasant “Hollywood” ending.
There have been other adaptations of the novel over the years and in 2015 the BBC made a mini-series adaptation, which is the focus of this review. Here’s the mini-series’ trailer:
I picked this up a while back and, like so many things, had it filed away and ready to be seen when I had the time. Over the course of two nights, the family and I watched it, and it was a most curious experience.
First off, the mini-series wisely decided to get rid of the “Indian” motif. Indian Island becomes Soldier Island, and the “Ten Little Indians” poem/song which is the basis for the mystery is changed to “Ten Little Soldiers”, to further remove the original source material from its unfortunate racial overtones.
Watching the series, I was struck by how… dull… the opening was. In fact, it was so laid back that I wondered if it would be any good at all.
However, once the characters were on (ahem) Soldier Island and the murders started, things hummed along. I was totally entranced with the rest of the first part of the series (originally the series was released in 3 one hour parts, but the version I was two parts, each 1 and 1/2 hour long).
After finishing that first part, I was more than eager to watch the second/concluding chapter. I thought it was so damn good, perhaps the very best adaptation of the book I’d seen.
Alas…
Yeah, the second part, IMHO, was something of a let down.
To be fair, it wasn’t a total disaster, but clearly the screenwriter decided to ventured into new and different areas. There was sex. There was a weird drug sequence. Neither was found in the original novel and, frankly, it didn’t fit in with the movie proper IMHO.
Worse, the ending, which I always felt was the strongest element of the novel (I’ll get to that soon, I’m re-reading the book right now and will offer a review of it presently), was botched in the mini-series.
So my ultimate review of this mini-series goes like this: Starts slow, turns really great, but then ends in a murky, not quite satisfying fashion, IMHO.
It is not the worst adaptation I’ve seen of a novel (in general), but considering how good the story was presented for a while, it hurts to see the screenplay side-roads taken which hurt the overall product.
Still, I’d offer a mild recommendation. The acting is good, the cinematography/scenario is excellent -I absolutely loved Soldier Island’s presentation- and the production in general is first rate.
If only they had stuck with the novel a little more closely and hadn’t gone off on more modernistic -and sadly silly- tangents.
