Tag Archives: action

The Karate Kid (2010)

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What happened was, I sat down to watch Child’s Play 2. This is because except for the first one and maybe Bride of Chucky[1], I never saw any of the movies in that series, and it seemed like it was time to give it a go. But then, when I pulled up my search bar to find what service it’s showing on, I saw an old search that had revealed a new Karate Kid movie set after Cobra Kai.

Is that compelling? Okay, maybe not, even though I truly loved Cobra Kai. BUT, my son also just started a karate class, because of how he needs something that will calm him and center him and give him a modicum of discipline, and martial arts sounds like the right thing for that. And so this new Karate Kid movie also somehow pulls in Jackie Chan from The Karate Kid remake, and I never saw that one, except now I have I suppose.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

So anyway, this is a straight remake of the 1984 original, with different characters and setting, but somehow the precise same story beats. A 12 year old black kid and his mom move from Detroit to China, where he has no friends and where being friendly with a girl gets him beat up by some kids who know kung fu. (To be fair, he probably egged it on with some poorly thought out posturing.) He does something dumb to get petty revenge after they continue picking on him, and right when they are about to truly beat him up, the handyman at his apartment jumps in and wins a six on one fight without throwing a single punch.

So then Mr. Han agrees to teach young Dre kung fu[2] so he can enter a tournament and fight against the kids who are being trained at a “No Mercy” dojo(?) during said tournament instead of out in the streets, and that should settle everything. And then there are some montages, some 12 year old flirting, and a kung fu tournament, which was probably but not definitely bigger than All-Valley.

Yep. That’s the Karate Kid alright.

Now I can watch the new movie, in which Mr. Han and Daniel Larusso join forces for some reason to teach a new kid something. Possibly about karate.

[1] Huh. According to here, I’ve seen Seed of Chucky. Boy do I have no memory of that. Best part: still no idea whether I saw Bride.
[2] That’s the biggest problem with the fact of the remake. At no point is anyone a karate kid.

Olympus Has Fallen

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Here are a series of weird things about my experience of watching Olympus Has Fallen that have nothing to do with the actual movie.

  1. I thought I had already seen it. I did the thing I do now and then where I decide, I’ve seen enough Shudder movies in a row, what’s on my Netflix queue? And the oldest thing on that queue was London Has Fallen, which is what I thought I would be watching, until I realized, huh, never saw the first one.
  2. But so then I found it was on NBC/USA, but not on Peacock, which is stupid. Which made me nervous that it would be edited, but nope, not edited, tons of adult language and violence. And yet, with commercial breaks edited in. Does that mean if you’re watching cable on the actual USA channel, they just air it uncut now?
  3. When I say commercial breaks edited in, I mean there are fadeouts / fadeins that clearly were not part of the movie in the theater. Which stood out to me because they did not line up with the streaming commercial breaks in any way. How is it possible that we’ve reached a place where commercials are worse than they were in my youth? How is this possible?

Anyway. There’s this secret service guy not on active duty because of reasons that are explored in the first act, but he happens to be looking out his window when the White House is attacked by terrorists and/or foreign powers. So he runs down the street and crashes the party, John McClane style, and before you know it he’s the only good guy in a completely captured government facility.

Pretty much everything else happens the way you’d expect, it’s an action movie after all. I liked it well enough to be a movie, but I am skeptical that there’s enough here to support a trilogy, you know? We’ll see, someday!

G20

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Having watched the film, here is what I know about the plot of G20.

President Viola Davis is trying to solve world hunger and feed farmers in Africa, or something like that, at the expense of American voters (her opponents say) or to keep the dollar from collapsing (her other opponents say). It was never clear to me how these facts interact, nor how switching to a new worldwide currency[1] would fix hunger. Or necessarily how it would destroy America, for that matter.

Anyway, what’s important is her plan is somewhat unpopular, her teenage daughter is extremely rebellious and tech savvy, and the whole family is headed off to South Africa for a G20 summit where she will try to convince the other major nations of the world to sign off on her plan, whatever it actually is. Unfortunately for her and other world leaders[2], Homelander (but without his powers and with a non-specific accent that is later claimed to be Australian, but I dunno about that) has a plan to kidnap all of them and destroy the world economy so he can make some money off crypto.

Premise established, now it’s time for the explosions and gunfire. The only thing that separates this from any other political action movie is that Viola Davis is the action star. Gonna be honest, that’s what won me over here, and now that I’m out the other side? No regrets. (But I doubt I would have gone to a theater for it, so nicely done, Amazon, for going straight to streaming.)

[1] If that’s even what was being proposed? I am forced to admit that I must have missed some of the early film exposition, or else this never even tried to make sense. One of the two.
[2] Including Russia, China, Turkey, Britain, South Korea, implied Saudi Arabia, and 13 unspecified others, though one supposes the actual Group of 20 is fairly static and it would be easy to learn who would be expected present.
[3] Depending on how you count, there were either a lot more than 19 captives, or there were 18. But that doesn’t flow as well I suppose.

The Gorge

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A few days ago, before I got entirely sick, I watched The Gorge, whose preview I had been intrigued by while watching, I don’t know, probably an episode of Severance? I cannot say with any certainty if it was entirely a popcorn flick or if the fault is my being sick, but yesterday when I was preparing to write this interview, I had no idea what I had watched, only that I was pretty sure it was, y’know, something.

So there’s this guy who’s a sniper who is completely detached from his life and his job, just adrift, you know? And Sigourney Weaver offers him the chance to get away from it all via a year-long, top secret, completely isolated assignment. Like, too secret for her to even explain it, but when he gets there (via parachuting and a several mile hike), the guy he’s replacing is there to explain the deal.

Here, then, is the deal. Two towers, on opposite sides of a gorge. He is on the western side, representing the countries of the west, who have been tasked to guard the gorge from there. Also, there’s an agent in the eastern tower representing the countries of the east, who presumably has been offered the same deal, but since the two towers are not allowed to have contact, it’s impossible to be sure. In the gorge is… something. Perpetually clouded, but things crawl out sometimes, and the whole mission is to prevent them from escaping. Premise: set.

Execution: well, mostly good? Lots of exciting action set pieces, yay. Anya Taylor-Joy as the eastern agent was just fun all the way around. The main dude was… well, okay, more than a little wooden, and I could not decide if it was the character or the actor, so that’s at least better than it could have been on average, but honestly a wooden character isn’t much fun, either, so. Effects were, I was going to say A+, but all special effects these days are either great or (rarely) abjectly terrible, such are these days of the future.

Mostly worth checking out, with one caveat: the last line of the film is just an awful stinker. Be warned!

Fast & Furious

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Finally, after one side movie that was only a sequel for one character and one side movie that was basically its own thing (and for no apparent reason), The Fast and the Furious has a true sequel with all of the original characters involved[1]! It is, how you say, about time.

The wildly original title, Fast & Furious, conceals a halfway decent plot. Paul Walker has been reinstated to law enforcement, as part of the FBI. (Or maybe he was in the FBI in the first place? Impossible to know.) He is honestly still no better of an FBI guy than he is an actor, even though five years have passed in the story world and eight I suppose in the real world. But that’s okay, because he can still drive. Vin Diesel is still on the run from the law and still using fast cars to jack trucks. So nothing much has changed, despite the two prior movies that would pretend a lot has happened. I’m not saying they are eminently skippable, but… oh, wait, no, I totally am saying that. It’s the central thesis of this paragraph, in fact.

“Halfway decent plot,” I said. So, after being on the run for all these years, Diesel’s Dominic is back in LA investigating the murder of a close friend. Meanwhile, Walker’s Brian is investigating a Mexican drug lord who is trafficking a lot of heroin across the border, somehow. They are suddenly thrown together when Dom’s murder and Brian’s infiltration end up at the same street race audition to be one of the drivers for the drug lord’s smuggling operation.

Can they get hired so their investigations can continue? Can they get over the sins of the past and learn to work together again? Can they stop destroying so very many fast cars? Can Brian finally seal the deal with Dom’s sister? Can Dom seal the deal with Gal Godot[2]? Oh, right, and can they solve their cases?

The answers to these questions might surprise you, but, well, I bet they don’t. That’s okay, though, as they are mostly not the point. The point is car stunts and an incremental progression in the lives and relationships of these characters. And, the movie finally delivers on that second thing, in a way that episodes 2 and 3 decidedly did not. Hooray!

[1] Okay, that was 2009, which is as of this writing a pretty long time ago. But it is “finally” in my personal chronology. So.
[2] In what is essentially her first role. Who knew?

Close to the Sun

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In the second half of December, right after I started the new Indiana Jones game and got my new PS5 Pro (halfway or more through the 5’s lifecycle), I… played none of those games, because I learned that a Nikola Tesla themed game I had been interested in was leaving Game Pass. Hence, another entry in my ongoing series of timely reviews for games you can no longer just get, as in for “free”.

Close to the Sun tells an extremely alternate history of the 1890s, where Tesla was successful enough with his electricity plans to corner that market worldwide, and then he built an enormous scientific research vessel, to which the main character has been invited by her sister. When the reporter sister arrives (as opposed to the scientist sister, you see), she discovers that nobody is home, but there’s a giant quarantine sign[1] and a lot of damage and weird shimmering images of people walking around.

Thus commences the barely not a walking sim exploration of the ship, to find and rescue her sister, figure out what went wrong, and ultimately escape, one hopes. As a game, it was I think only okay except for my interest in the whole Tesla / Edison thing, which elevated it somewhat. The four characters were all pretty good, the mysteries were mostly compelling, the ending was, I will say, “rushed”. All in all: decent and short enough to not crazy overstay its welcome, but marred by a truly awful save system that meant if for any reason I did not finish a chapter, I would have to start it over. So, be prepared to play for a while at a time whether you like it or not, since the XBox’s quick resume system is a complete failure on this game in particular as well as the lack of good saving I already mentioned.

In further conclusion, maybe it’s better as a game than I’m giving it credit for, and mostly the technical issues are why my estimation rounded downward a bit.

[1] I cannot explain precisely why, but it was particularly affecting to me that the quarantine sign was painted over the exit to the internal docks, in case anyone wanted to leave, but with no hint of any warning to anyone coming in.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

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I really do not understand how this movie got made. It’s just so so so implausible.

In the third Fast but also let us not forget Furious movie, a young drifter moves to Tokyo, only to discover that the title was actually a pun. See, he’s a drifter because he keeps getting into trouble for doing dumb high school racing things, and got sent to live with his father in Japan as a last ditch effort to keep him out of jail for driving through a house under construction and being assaulted by another high school car guy. None of which is how any of that would work, as far as I can tell?

Anyway, he drifts into Tokyo, I was saying, only to learn that it’s also called drifting if you left the back of your car skid ahead of you as a way to make 0 point turns instead of 3 point turns. Did drifting really not exist outside Japan before this movie popularized it? No clue, though it seems unlikely somehow. But so anyway, this kid gets mixed up in drift racing and the Yakuza, because of course he does, and that’s the rest of the movie. (Also, there’s a girl.)

Except for a brief cameo in which a previous character says he used to hang out with the only character in the whole movie who was worth the time of day, there’s nothing that would make you think this should have been tagged as part of the series. In fact, if I were to make a gamble on today of all days when my gambles in general are not going so well as I’d prefer, I’d bet that the secret cameo actor heard about this movie and thought, hey, if I can tie it into my series, maybe I’ll still have a series and get to make a third, no wait, it would be fourth now, wouldn’t it? movie.

That does not help me understand how such a gamble paid off, to be clear. Tokyo Drift isn’t a bad movie, but it is extremely paint by numbers, and I am once again left scratching my head as to how these three (now) movies could have resulted in a powerhouse franchise.

But, as I intimated already, tons of things I don’t understand today, aren’t there?

Jurassic World: Dominion

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I am really ambivalent about Jurassic World: Dominion, now that I’ve finally seen it[1]. If you are unaware, it’s the follow on to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which dinosaurs are now a worldwide phenomenon after the events of that movie saw them rescued from Isla Nublar and then let loose. My ambivalence is as follows: on the one hand, it was a perfectly serviceable dinosaur action movie, with thrilling set pieces and characters that we have collectively cared about for decades, all getting a deserved swan song.

But on the other hand, after 24 hours to think about it… it was obligatory without being hardly anything else. Here’s the thrilling velociraptor chase through the streets of Malta, because there was a bad guy with tech from the last movie! But really all it does is make it harder for our heroes to board a plane out of town. Here’s the ice lake dinosaur in the southern Alps keeping our heroes from reaching a door on the far side of the lake. And it’s like, obviously I want thrilling dinosaur chases and dangerous stalking dinosaurs, but… I guess it’s that for most of these set pieces, there were no believable stakes or sense of danger. And Chekov’s knife fight remains, as of this writing, unfought on the mantel, about which I am personally offended.

In the end, I’m not saying it was bad. I had legitimate fun, and it was nice catching up with old friends and seeing a vision of a fundamentally altered world. But I am saying that I’m glad this story is over. It seems like they’re moving on to a new story next year, and I’m good with that, because I like the world they’ve made. But yeah. It’s good to let stories end.

[1] Full disclosure: the only reason this movie bubbled to the top of the list is that we both want to see the new season of Camp Cretaceous on Netflix, which is set near or after the events of this movie, and certainly was released years after. (That said, it was pretty cool seeing technology from the original show referenced in Dominion, as though it really is all one giant continuity. I like those, and am annoyed when it’s not a two-way street between movies and streaming.)

2 Fast 2 Furious

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As you may but plausibly may not be aware, I laid out an intention to watch the Fast and/or Furious series. Said intention was laid out seven years ago, so I cannot really say I’m nailing it here. I started to watch the second one between 3 and 5 years ago, but something interrupted me like a third of the way through, I guess? Anyway, last night I came back for a second attempt, which was victorious!

In a way, this is exactly the same movie: blond guy, cars, crime. Paul Walker has been burned by the events of the prior movie and moved to Miami, where he is still a street racer. But due to his actions in the first movie, he finds himself beholden by Eva Mendez to do runs for a local cartel drug lord guy who likes to heats metals buckets so the rat inside will chew through the person the bucket is shoved up against. Because[1], you know, he’s good at driving now. Thanks, Vin Diesel!

The main things I get out of watching this movie are a simultaneous confusion that it will eventually turn into a juggernaut franchise and complete understanding of why the next movie has only new characters, on the other side of the world. It’s not that 2 Fast 2 Furious[2] is bad, exactly. It’s aggressively mid in most ways, excepting fun stunt driving to watch. There was a line by the secondary main character[3], and I heard it, and immediately knew that not only had it been used in the previews (which I later confirmed) but that it almost certainly was written to be a line in a preview. It’s just… how do I watch the two I’ve seen so far, and then a third one with no existing characters, and then somehow those three movies convince people to launch this successful franchise that I know for a fact now exists? It’s weird.

I wish they had made more movies about Suki and Tej, though. Them, I could have watched all day.

[1] Er, that is, he’s doing runs because he’s a good driver, not the drug lord guy is doing the bucket rat thing for that reason. That would be insane!
[2] I mean, except the title. Wow.
[3] “Guns, murderers, and crooked cops? I was made for this, bruh.”