Month: July 2016

Released: February 2016

Director: Yuen Woo-Ping

Rated PG-13

Run Time: 96 Minutes

Genre: Action, Martial Arts

Distributor: Netflix

Cast:
Donnie Yen: Silent Wolf
Michelle Yeoh: Yu Shu Lien
Jason Scott Lee: Hades Dai
Harry Shum, Jr.: Wei Fang
Natasha Liu Bordizzo: Snow Vase

16 years ago, I got my first taste of the Wuxia(martial hero) film genre in the movie called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  The film was directed by then-unknown Ang Lee and starred Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi.  For American audiences, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a revelation.  We hadn’t seen a movie quite like this before, even though China has.  The film won FOUR Academy Awards: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Score.  It’s easy to see why.  From a visual standpoint, it was a stunning film, with incredibly beautiful backdrops and sets.  It also had some amazing acting, with Chow Yun-Fat in the lead as Li Mu Bai.  The story was intricate and intimate on multiple occasions while also being incredibly epic.  The fight choreography by Yuen Woo-Ping was astounding, featuring some of the best sword-fighting I’ve ever seen in any movie.  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon remains one of my favorite martial arts movies ever, and I will go to the grave defending it.  16 years later, we get an official sequel titled, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny.  That has to be one of the longest movie names ever.  How does it fare against the original film?  Not very well, I’m afraid.

The film opens as martial arts expert Yu Shu Lien is returning home from abroad when she’s suddenly attacked by a group of masked thugs.  Aided by a mysterious stranger, she repels the attack and continues her journey.  Meanwhile, evil warlord Hades Dai is plotting to overthrow Peking.  His desire for conquest gets stronger when he’s informed a powerful weapon that he could use to achieve his goals: The Green Destiny, wielded by master Li Mu Bai, who died years ago.  After arriving at the house of the person that she’s defending, she meets a young woman who takes an interest in the Green Destiny, and asks Lien to train her.  Before long, they come under attack by Hades’ thugs and Lien sends for help.  Responding, a mysterious warrior named Silent Wolf and a handful of other fighters take up the call.  It is soon revealed that Silent Wolf was the husband that Lien thought had died many years ago, which complicates things.  This movie works best when it focuses on certain characters like Lien, Silent Wolf and Snow Vase.  Their backstories are incredibly interesting and actually add some emotional weight to the goings-on.  The problem is that those stories are set inside of your basic and generic “fight against an evil warlord and his army” kind of story.  It’s something that’s been done a million times before and quite frankly, done better.  Most of the characters really aren’t that interesting or compelling, outside of maybe four or five.  The overall story is not really that compelling while hitting every single cliche in the kung-fu movie book.

The first thing that you’ll notice in Sword of Destiny, is that the entire film is done in English.  I’m not talking English dubbing, which would’ve been worse.  Everybody in the film is speaking in English, despite the fact that the film is set in China.  Ultimately, that actually works against the film in a number of ways.  One:  The idea of speaking English in a movie like this, especially where and WHEN it is set, is extremely ludicrous.  Two: Some of the actors struggle with the English language, as it is not their first language.  Michelle Yeoh and Donnie Yen, fare better than most.  I understand that when the movie was announced, the filmmakers weren’t sure that Western audiences were willing to read subtitles, so they did the entire movie in English.  I get that most Westerners have short attention spans and would rather not read subtitles while watching a movie.  In my honest opinion, you get better performances when actors are allowed to speak in their native languages.  Yeah, you have to have subtitles if you don’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese, but it really isn’t that distracting.  Not if you buy into their performances, which are all over the board here.  You’ve got good performances from Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Harry Shum, Jr, and Jason Scott Lee, but nearly everybody else is just…meh.  That’s two more strikes against the film.

However, from a visual standpoint, this is actually a very beautifully shot movie.  Like the first Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, there are shots that are simply gorgeous, even if they do use green-screen techniques.  It’s well-shot, and well-staged.  The fights are probably the best parts of the film.  They’re certainly wild and feature a lot of wire-work, but in a movie like this, I can let it slide.  Yuen Woo-Ping’s experience as a film fight choreographer serves him well here.  Some of the fights are very interesting and staged exceptionally well.  Donnie Yen is simply spectacular, especially during a night fight on a frozen lake.  That was very cool.  I loved that actually, and the final fight on and around a tower was pretty awesome as well.  So, the fighting is really good.  Woo-Ping pulls double-duty, not only as the film’s director, but also the fight choreographer.  Had it been anybody else, I think they would have needed somebody else to either direct or the fight scenes.  Woo-Ping is an exceptionally talented film-maker, but when you try to make an Americanized sequel to a very beloved film, certain things just aren’t going to be as good.

Ultimately, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny fails because it doesn’t follow-up on the themes and ideas that were present in the first film.  The entire film is also done in the English language which ruins the authenticity of the film, and is surprisingly cheesy.  The original film took itself seriously enough to be a drama first and foremost, with the fights taking a back seat to character development and story.  Here, the characters and story get pushed to the side while the fights take over.  Sword of Destiny feels cheap when compared to the original film.  So, my final score for the film is going to be a 6.5/10.  It’s mostly forgettable.  I don’t hate the movie, but I think it could’ve been done better, or not at all.  It doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.  It’s worth watching at least once, but no more than that.

Released: March 2016

Director: Babak Najafi

Rated R

Run Time: 99 Minutes

Distributor: Universal Pictures

Music: Trevor Morris

Cast:
Gerard Butler: Mike Banning
Aaron Eckhart: President Asher
Morgan Freeman: Vice President Trumbull
Alon Aboutbouli: Aamir Barkawi
Angela Bassett: Lynne Jacobs

A few years back, a nifty little action film from director Antoine Fuqua called Olympus Has Fallen was released.  It was pretty damn good action flick starring Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart.  It was about terrorists taking over the White House.  It was one of two movies that did so.  The other one was White House Down, which I haven’t seen.  Anyway, Olympus Has Fallen was a surprisingly effective and intense little movie.  It was like Die Hard in the White House.  In fact, Olympus felt more like a Die Hard 5 than the actual Die Hard 5.  They screwed the pooch on that one.  Part of what made Olympus work so well, was the relationship between the two leads, Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart.  It worked.  Was the film cliche?  Absolutely.  Was it realistic?  Not a chance in hell, but it didn’t need to be.  The action was awesome, brutal, and intense.  Did it really need a sequel, though?  The short answer, I’m afraid, is no.  I’ll get into that later, but in the meantime, let’s dig in to the follow-up film, London Has Fallen.

Following the events of Olympus, London Has Fallen follows Benjamin Asher as the President of the United States as he and his Secret Service agent Mike Banning are alerted that the Prime Minister of England has died.  They head to London to attend his funeral.  All the leaders of the free world are attending when the city comes under attack by generic Middle-Eastern terrorists.  Really?  A number of the world leaders have been assassinated while Mike and President Asher escape.  Apparently, the terrorists want to execute Asher for terrorist reasons.  It seems they have infiltrated a number of police units and other public services.  You know, a sequel is supposed to deliver what the audience expects plus something new to keep them guessing.  We don’t get anything new here.  London Has Fallen hits every single action film trope in the book, and not even the good ones.  It’s extremely predictable.  That’s not to say that the first movie was unpredictable.  It wasn’t.  But it wasn’t lazy.  The story in this movie is as generic as they come, with a generic enemy.  Maybe it’s the current political climate, but the use of Middle-Eastern terrorists is really old hat.

Babak Najafi takes the director’s seat here, and it really shows.  There’s nothing particularly surprising about what happens in the movie.  The action is…well….weak.  Most of the explosions that you see are CGI, and blatantly so.  Now, I understand that you can’t go around blowing actual landmarks in London, that would be…bad.  But you could build some models that  you could destroy.  It’s an old-fashioned technique but it’s always worked.  The problem is that you just don’t care about the characters.  Even in the first movie, you kinda gave a shit, but here, not so much.  Instead, you’re going to be wondering what kind of president is going to constantly get himself into trouble with terrorists.  Asher is a terrible president.  Honestly, Gerard Butler’s character should be fired for not keeping the president out of trouble.  The first movie worked, because you didn’t expect terrorists to actually hit the White House.  From the character’s perspective, he had no idea that the White House was going to be hit.  Here, he’s put into a situation with thousands of complete strangers looking on what’s going.  Why would you do that?  There’s a lot of stupid decision-making going on here.  Again, the action is serviceable but not entirely memorable.  The idea that a terrorist organization could pull of an attack this coordinated is a scary thing, but in this day and age of constant surveillance it’s extremely unlikely that these organizations could do something this coordinated.  It’s not handled well here.

The acting in the film is pretty much just….meh.  Yeah, Eckhart’s and Butler’s characters have chemistry for sure, but that’s because we have two fairly good actors in the lead, although, Butler’s American accent is pretty atrocious, but he gets the whole action-hero thing down to a tee.  He’s always fun to watch.  Everybody else, though, is completely wasted.  Half of them are nothing more than extended cameos.  Jackie Earle Haley is forgettable, and he’s a great actor.  Morgan Freeman’s character is just….there.  The villain isn’t over-the-top, which for a movie of this kind, needed to be over-the-top.  Alon Aboutbouli plays the main villain, but all he does is….talk and threaten.  That’s all.  Rick Yune’s character from the first movie, was more than up for shooting people and delivering spin kicks to people’s heads.  His character was MEAN.  Aamir Bakawi?  Ehh…

Overall, the film just feels…generic.  It doesn’t do or try anything new, it just retreads old ground that’s been better in the previous film and other films before it.  London Has Fallen isn’t an awful movie, I’ve seen a lot worse.  But there’s nothing here that you’ll remember in a day or two.  It’s an average movie, and in a year that has some of the biggest movies of the decade, London Has Fallen isn’t even close to being up to the task.  My final verdict for the film is a 6/10.  It’s extremely forgettable, unless you’re a diehard fan of Gerard Butler, but even then, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything worth-while.