I didn’t start this blog with the intention of it talking about The Raid 2: Berandal every edition, but it’s kind of worked out that way. For 6 of the 8 entries thus far, anyway.
The Raid 2 has made it to New Zealand cinemas and I can say it delivers on the exceptionally high expectations. Simply put, action cinema doesn’t come any better than this, and I’m happy to have spent so much time writing about the film to then have it come out and be just as amazing as I’d dreamed.
It’s a very different film to the original, and for my money it’s a lot better. The action is more mindblowing, the violence more intense, the camerawork even more ingenious and inventive, the story and storytelling techniques far grander. The aesthetic of the film itself is a lot greater, too, thanks to vastly superior camera hardware.
Filmmaker Gareth Evans is a master at showing us action put together in wildly entertaining ways, many of which we’ve never seen before. I had the chance to ask him about how he accomplishes this in an interview for Flicks recently.
“I want to know what [my fighters] are doing, I want to understand the choreography as much as they do,” said Evans. “So when they’re trying every movement, every punch, every block, I want to know why they’re doing it. Then when it comes to doing the video storyboarding and the video design of the fight sequence, I know where the focus should be. In the same way as when I’m watching them do fight choreography and I have my head in close to them trying to look and follow the movement with my eye, that’s what I have to do then with the camera later on. I have to guide the audience so they have the same perspective I had when I was looking at that choreography for the first time. I want people to see everything, I want them to feel everything, I want to maximise their sense of speed, aggression and detail of the action.”
More than one notable critic that saw the Sundance premiere stated that Gareth Evans is the best of the best when it comes to modern action filmmaking. I think he’s easily one of the best, if not the best, for sure. If you can think of an action film and sequel that are together as good as The Raid and The Raid 2 from the last 20 years or so, please tell me about them.
As I was pondering Evans being the best of the best, I decided to dip back in to a great classic, Best of the Best 2. This is a spectacular film, a deadly underground martial arts tournament flick set in Las Vegas at the height of excessive early ’90s ridiculousness.
The main baddie is a Germanic chap named Brakus who makes even the most ludicrous Bond villain seem not so silly and Schwarzenegger’s acting seems Oscar-worthy by comparison. He’s also one of the most insanely masculine characters I’ve ever enjoyed on-screen, on a similar level to Deadly Prey‘s Mike Danton. After a long introductory tracking shot following behind him, when we finally see Brakus’ face for the first time and its cartoonishly evil scowl, his first words are scolding a man for carrying a gun because that is “unmanly”.
“Warriors fight here, get rid of it,” he spits at the scared Yank with a preposterously over-the-top baddie accent. He then enters the underground Las Vegas ‘Coliseum’ and beats someone to death as coked up revellers with big hair, crazy dance moves and screaming loud fashion gleefully laugh away. And warriors do indeed fight – warriors like Eric Roberts, Phillip Rhee and Chris Penn.
While they never come out and say Brakus is gay, his clothes and demeanour are about as camp as Slider in Top Gun at times, and Julian Clary at others. When he gets a cut on his oh-so-pretty face, he’s hilariously devastated, and spends much of the rest of the film looking at the scar in a handheld mirror and power-pouting about it, plotting evil ways to get back at the mean boys that did it. It’s amazing.
There’s that hard-R violence that was more abundant in the ‘90s than the ‘80s – older Kiwi readers will remember the pink R18 stickers gleaming attractively on the video store shelf alongside the yellow R16 ones, knowing pink meant at least one nasty bone break. There’s a lot of other stuff to love in this movie, from native American wisdom delivered by a drunk Sonny Landham (the warrior from Predator), to training montages in the Nevada sun, to Phillip Rhee’s awesome kicks, to gunplay and knife action as well as the martial arts. But mostly it’s Brakus, glorious Brakus that makes me love Best of the Best 2 more every time I watch it. Brakus owns.
I finally got my hands on Johnnie To’s Drug War and watched it for the first time, and holy shit was it worth the wait. This movie is awesome.
It’s a simple, fast-moving tale of cops fighting drug-running criminals in Mainland China and more of an expert exercise in taut tension than an out-and-out action flick. After a deliciously put-together set-up, the massive gunfight and car chase of the final 20 or so minutes is wildly thrilling. Mr To directs this action sequence spectacularly well, ensuring that you always have a clear idea of where all the multiple players are and what they’re doing, while also getting a sense of how chaotic and violent it all is. It’s a fantastic pay-off to a fantastic set-up that I really dug.
Drug War absolutely lived up to my expectations and I loved the Blu-ray of it, which is widely available around New Zealand.
What absolutely did not live up to my expectations is The Protector 2, also recently released on DVD and Blu-ray here. It has a lot going for it, being the re-teaming of star Tony Jaa with filmmaker Prachya Pinkaew for the first time in almost a decade. The pair worked on Ong Bak, one of the all time greats, and the first Protector, also known as Tom Yum Goong and a modern classic in its own right. Why is The Protector 2 not nearly as enjoyable as those two older films, despite featuring some great fight scenes? Almost entirely because of that nemesis of a good action movie, computer generated imagery.
Remember that on-foot chase through the streets of Bangkok early on in Ong Bak, and how amazing it looked, and the motorcycle chase in The Protector? There’s a motorcycle chase through Bangkok early on in The Protector 2 that shares some similarities, only it’s complete bullshit. There are a few moments of amazingly bad CGI used throughout it, alongside a whole lot of really average CGI. I think there’s a few real stunts in it, but those bits are lost in an ugly jumble of fake looking shit. Any human eye looking at this garbage can identify it as false immediately. In the road chase sequence and throughout the whole film there’s quite a lot of CG fire used and every time it is, it’s like Birdemic level hilariously bad shit.
Heaps of the movie is shot in front of a green screen, too, for reasons I don’t understand. It’s not done well and when seen with beautiful Blu-ray 1080p definition is mighty distracting – as is the shitty soundtrack and sound effects. How can everything in the film be worse than the films these guys made together over ten years ago?
Making all the shortcomings of The Protector 2 hurt all the more is the fact that I saw it shortly after seeing The Raid 2 (for the third time), a movie that surpasses it on all fronts. That The Protector 2 has “real action” emblazoned on the front of the packaging is an insult to the phrase, correctly used on films that favour choreography over lame digital effects like Ninja: Shadow of a Tear.
Despite being mad at most of The Protector 2 however, I still enjoyed some of the fighting in it. Tony Jaa is still fun to watch, though not nearly as much as he was in Ong Bak, and there’s also a chap named Marrese Crump who is really great too. I find it endearing that the plot revolves around people stealing Jaa’s elephant again, too – that’s kinda cute. This lady fighting in this costume is also cute:
It’s Pinkaew who must wear all the blame for The Protector 2 sucking so bad and if he is somehow allowed to continue to make films after this, I pray to Schwarzenegger that he never uses a single digital effect again.
Dwayne Johnson has started dropping bits and pieces for Hercules, including a trailer and a clip in addition to multiple stills. He looks so terrific in this film, in mouth-wateringly peak physical condition. The trailer, however, has him fighting a bunch of CGI animals, which isn’t very exciting. The clip looks cooler, suggesting that there is indeed man-on-man action as well as well as the man-on-CGI stuff.
What’s Scott Adkins been up to? Mostly getting ready for Undisputed IV, but also potentially the American remake of The Raid. I had previously been pretty negative about the idea of this film, simply because that film is really basic and it’d be so easy for an American filmmaker to come up with a similarly basic idea with which to showcase a shit-tonne of spectacular action sequences. But I’m much warmer to it given how genuinely excited some people are like Gareth Evans himself, and if he gets his way and has Adkins in the Iko Uwais role, it’ll be the most exciting action film in the world.
“I think he’s a super talented fighter, he’s just enormously talented,” says Evans of Adkins in my interview on Flicks.co.nz. ” And he’s a cool guy as well … I’m on a personal quest to push to get him in The Raid‘s remake, I think he would be great for that. And if then after that we could work on something together, that’d be great.”
I picked up Assassination Games recently, starring Adkins and Jean Claude Van Damme. It’s good. The action is hit and miss, but the story is surprisingly enjoyable. JCVD and Adkins play rival assassins in a familiar setup, but the way it plays out kept me engaged and excited. What was far less exciting was the ugly sepia effect fouling up the whole film. Ugh! Still, well worth a watch, especially for anyone who loves Scott Adkins, and by that I mean anyone with their head screwed on right.
Ninja: Shadow of a Tear is still not available in New Zealand. This fucking sucks. I’m sick of waiting and am ordering the Blu-ray from Amazon, which means annoyingly playing it through the PC with a region-remover tool instead of through my PlayStation, a shipping fee and waiting for it to arrive and all that nonsense. Would’ve loved to have popped down the road and paid money to shop locally for it, but whatever.
That’s been my second most anticipated action film after The Raid 2 for quite some time, so after it arrives I’ll write a whole blog on it, and a bunch of other ninja movies too. I’ll also continue to enjoy the photos Adkins posts online hyping his fanbase up for the upcoming Undisputed IV, and hoping to hell they do put Adkins in The Raid remake. Please.
