In this weekend’s American Assassin a Cold War veteran trains undercover executioners. Movies like “The Mechanic” and “The Professional” have breathed similar air, but the new movie updates the tale, adding in a terrorism subplot.
Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Vince Flynn, the film stars Dylan O’Brien as Mitch Rapp, a student whose life is changed forever when his girlfriend Katrina (Charlotte Vega) is killed by terrorists while on vacation. Stricken with grief and hungry for revenge he trains himself in the art of counter terrorism to the point where he is able to go undercover and infiltrate an Islamic terrorist cell.
Turns out, however, he’s not as undercover as he thought. The CIA, have their eye on him, impressed by his MMA skills and general hatred of terrorism. To fine-tune his kill skills he is teamed with black ops expert Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). Why did they bring him on? “To kill people who need to be killed.”
Hurley teaches his student the fine art of slicing and dicing for fun and profit, prepping him for a giant mission involving a nuclear device and an ex-American Navy officer (Taylor Kitsch) turned bad and looking for revenge on his fellow service members.
The opening scene is harrowing. The full-scale attack on a beach is so tense because we’ve seen footage like this in real life in recent years. It kicks the movie off with a realistic bang. Too bad everything that follows barely rises to the level of cartoon cliché that borrows heavily from everything from “The Karate Kid” to the JBs—Jason Bourne and James Bond.
In as generic and unmemorable a role as Keaton has ever played—and that includes a bit of cannibalism—he redefines tough guys, spewing platitudes word for word from the 1984 edition of the Macho Man Handbook. O’Brien is stoic, yet reckless in the most profoundly uninteresting of ways. There’s sullen and then there’s this guy.
The action scenes have a bit a snap to them, but would have benefitted from the “John Wick” treatment; fess frenetic editing, more focus on the handiwork involved.
“American Assassin” has one too many revenge plots but not enough thrills.
“The Great Wall” is not the story of Donald Trump’s relations with Mexico. It’s a $150 million historical epic from Chinese director Zhang Yimou that garnered a lot of criticism for the controversial casting of Matt Damon in a major role.
Detractors called the choice an example of a “white saviour” from the West appropriating Chinese culture and stepping in to save the day. Constance Wu of “Fresh Off the Boat” voiced her disapproval, accusing the film of “perpetuating the racist myth that only a white man can save the world,” adding, “our heroes don’t look like Matt Damon.”
Zhang fought back. “Damon is not playing a role that was originally conceived for a Chinese actor.”
“As the director of over 20 Chinese language films and the Beijing Olympics,” he said in a statement, “I have not and will not cast a film in a way that was untrue to my artistic vision.”
More on that later, but having seen the film, a more blatant criticism would be the generic, formulaic filmmaking.
On the run, mercenary soldiers William Garin (Damon) and Pero Tovar (Pedro Pascal) are captured at a Great Wall outpost by a band of Chinese soldiers called the Nameless Order, led by General Shao (Zhang Hanyu) and Strategist Wang (Andy Lau). The interlopers are due to be disposed of until they offer up a claw Garin separated from a mysterious beast days before.
Turns out, the creature is a Tao Tie, a nasty breed of beast that attacks the Imperial Court every sixty years. The walleyed creatures look like a smooth green werewolf- Komodo Dragon hybrid and are very difficult to kill. When the Tao Tie attack days earlier than expected Tovar and Garin’s bravery earn them privileged spots in the battalion—“We’re honoured to be honoured,” says Garin.—but the pair are secretly only interested in the local “black powder.” “It turns the air into fire!” they gasp. If they can smuggle the gunpowder out of the battalion it will make them rich men in the West.
It’s a great plan until Garin opts to leave his mercenary ways behind join forces with General Lin (Jing Tian), the only female English-speaking commander at the outpost. Her bravery turns his head, reminding him of why he became a soldier in the first place. “Let me fight with you,” he says. “If this is where you choose to die, good luck to you,” scoffs Tovar. If the Tao Tie breach the wall, we’re told several times, nothing can stop them.
“The Great Wall” uses every epic monster film trick in the book. Cameras sweep and swirl, flames lick the screen, there’s slow-mo galore and loads of Zhang’s unique wuxia style action but despite the grandeur and the lushness of the cinematography and costume details it is all rather dull. It’s “Lord of the Rings” without the engaging fantasy and “Game of Thrones” sans the lusty carnality that keeps people watching between dragon conquest scenes.
There is some humour between the battle scenes. Garin and Tovar are awfully quippy for a pair of Song dynasty soldiers. “I’m the one saving you,” Tovar jokes on the battlefield, “so I can kill you myself.” It’s “Hope and Crosby on the Road to the Imperial Court!”
As for Garin as the Saviour from the West, I have to agree with Wu. There are several heroes in this movie but Garin eats up the most screen time and in the end is instrumental in (SPOILER ALERT) keeping the nasty beasties from having their way with the Emperor. Damon is an agreeable actor, although here he dons a flat and ever-changing accent that simply amplifies how completely out of place he seems in ancient China.
“The Great Wall” feels more like an exercise in marketing than it does a movie. The size and spectacle of it appear geared to appeal to an audience used to avenging superheroes, while the casting of a white American star at the heart of another culture’s tale looks to be a blatant attempt at creating a tentpole film for a world audience. What they forgot about was including compelling characters and story.
Cobie Smulders has been in action movies a plenty, but she’s rarely part of the action. That changes in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
Opposite Tom Cruise, Smulders plays Major Susan Turner, a decorated solider accused of espionage. To prove her innocence she teams with Jack Reacher in a battle for the truth.
“I was really excited about doing some action scenes,” says the Canadian born actress who played former director of the planetary intelligence service S.H.I.E.L.D. Maria Hill in various Avengers movies as well on television.
“I’d done some quote, unquote action movies before, through The Avengers and the Marvel Universe. I’d be part of some of their stuff but I missed out on most of the fun fight sequences. Jumping on this, I knew I would get to do more fighting, hands on, rather than standing next to the superheroes while they do all the fighting.”
She has more than her share of up-close-and-personal battle sequences, bare knuckling her way through the story at a breakneck pace, but were the scenes as fun to shoot as she thought they would?
“That’s a great question because sometimes they are not,” she laughs. “They are quite technical and they can drag on. When it is fast and intense, they’re really fun because it’s like an adrenaline rush. It’s like doing a choreographed dance with somebody. But when they drag on and it becomes about the minutia of like, ‘We have to do the insert of the picking up of the meat tenderizer and we have to do it from this angle and that angle,’ it takes the magic out of it.”
A magical experience or not, Smulders, who will next be seen in the action comedy Why We’re Killing Gunther opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, says the scenes helped her performance.
“For me all the training and all the fighting helped me get into the character,” she says. “There were days when I would push past breaking points and think, I can’t take this anymore, and then I would go further. It got easier and easier. It was really painful at first but I always kept that in the back of my mind, what this woman would have had to go through, and what women and men in the military have to go through.
“I think anybody who decides to enlist in the military and do all the work it takes to become a major is somebody who is much stronger than I will ever be.
“She’s a woman we say has graduated Ranger School. When we started shooting the movie that hadn’t happened yet; no women had graduated from Ranger School. Then during the shoot the first two women graduated. If I am playing a woman who can endure that type of training, then this should be like a piece of cake, what I’m doing on set.”
Cruise and Smulders play a sort of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a deadly duo who never allow romance to get in the way of their appetite for bodily destruction. Their relationship is a mix of Roadhouse style fighting and humorous rom com dialogue.
“To not have these characters get together romantically,” Smulders says, “was more interesting to watch than having a love scene in the middle of the movie.”
Who exactly is Jack Reacher? If you are a reader, he’s the protagonist of twenty books by British author Lee Child. If you’re a moviegoer, he’s a bone crunching former Major in the United States Army Military Police Corps who looks a lot like Tom Cruise. According to the new movie “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back,” he’s “the guy you didn’t count on.”
When we first see Reacher it’s four years after his exploits in his eponymous debut film. With the help of Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders) he has just broken up—and beaten up—a ring of smugglers. When he arrives in Washington to thank her, and possibly wine and dine her, he is shocked to discover she’s been court-martialled, accused of espionage. His efforts to get to the bottom of the case suggest she was arrested because she had a hard drive with sensitive info. “What did you expect,” he’s asked, “a picture of her in a Burka and having drinks with the Taliban?” After a daring prison break, he and Turner hit the road, trading quips and punching faces with a deadly ex-military hit man (Patrick Heusinger) hot on their trail. Their efforts to clear her name and uncover a far-reaching conspiracy are complicated by the presence of Samantha (Danika Yarosh), a fifteen year old who may or may not be Reacher’s daughter.
The addition of a kid changes the dynamic of the film. The first Reacher movie was a fun but violent ride, designed to keep fans of Cruise’s actionman persona happy until the next “Mission Impossible” instalment came along. It was an old fashioned movie, the kind of flick that Steven Seagal might have starred in circa 1992. It was a bare-bones action movie and predictable but Van Dammit, taken for what it was, it was also a bit of fun.
The movie rips along at a fast pace, bareknuckling its way through the story at a breakneck pace. Cruise and Smulders are sort of a Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a deadly duo who never allow romance to get in the way of their appetite for bodily destruction. Their relationship is a mix of “Roadhouse” style fighting and cutesy rom com dialogue.
It all adds up to an action movie for those who like a dose of sentimentality with their spinal injuries.
