"Blind Side" director John Lee Hancock's authentic, Depression Era, road-trip, manhunt thriller "The Highwaymen," (*** OUT OF ****) co-starring Oscar-winning actor Kevin Costner and Oscar-nominated Woody Harrelson, serves as the flip side of the classic Warner Brothers' gangster epic "Bonnie & Clyde" (1967), with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Told from the perspective of the two seasoned manhunters who tracked down the bloodthirsty young Texas couple, "The Highwaymen" confines their quarry Bonnie & Clyde to the periphery of the mayhem, out-of-the-limelight, depicting them in either far-off shots or close-ups, so audiences cannot sympathize with these trigger-happy desperados who had gunned down policemen without a qualm. "Young Guns" scenarist John Fusco has provided far more history about this pugnacious pair in this Netflix movie than its celebrated theatrical predecessor. Often, when we see Bonnie, we are given only glimpses of her feet encased in ruby red shoes. She walks with a limp that she acquired after Clyde drove off a bridge under construction when he missed a detour. This mishap injured Bonnie so severely that she resorted to laudanum, a concoction of opium and alcohol, to relieve the agony until she died in May 1934 in a hail of gunfire from two former Texas Rangers--Frank Hamer and Manny Gault--along with a posse in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. Throughout this chronicle of their pursuit, Hamer and Gault were amazed by the relative lack of height of the two criminals in comparison to the media attention that transformed them into titanic celebrities during what was termed 'the Public Enemy era' between 1931 and 1934. In the final scene, Hancock gives us a lingering glance of the two felons, looking like two clean-scrubbed, fashionably attired cherubs, with an arsenal of firearms at their fingertips.
As depicted in "The Highwaymen," the beginning of the end for the notorious duo started with a prison breakout that Bonnie & Clyde orchestrated to free accomplices from the Texas-based Eastham Prison Farm in 1934. Warden Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch of "Shutter Island") of the Texas Department of Corrections got the green light from Governor Miriam "Ma" Ferguson (Kathy Bates of "Primary Colors") to hire Hamer to stop the crime spree of these two twentysomething renegades. Privately, Ferguson had nothing but contempt for the Texas Rangers, recently disbanded under a cloud of corruption, and warned her own duly appointed constabulary that they would face repercussions if the two former Rangers nabbed Bonnie & Clyde. Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner of "Dances with Wolves") comes out of retirement and accepts Simmons' offer despite the misgivings of his socialite wife. Hamer chooses an old friend and former Texas Ranger Benjamin Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson of "Natural Born Killers") to accompany him. Neither Hamer nor Gault is in good enough shape to chase a teenager around the block near Bonnie's mother's house. Hamer hasn't fired his revolver in such a long time that he cannot obliterate bottles with bullets. While immaculately dressed officers of the state of Texas as well as the FBI rely on the latest modern crime-fighting technology to pursue the elusive Bonnie & Clyde, Hamer counts on his frontier savvy about human nature and maps charting the couple's whereabouts to ferret them out. Comparatively, this evokes memories of the turn-of-the-century John Wayne western "Big Jake" (1971) where Wayne tracked down the dastards who kidnapped his grandson, while law enforcement handicapped by modern technology could do little despite their apparent advantages over him. Ultimately, Hamer and Gault put everybody, including FBI with their aerial searches, to shame. Essentially, our heroes qualify as underdogs who manage to triumph despite incredible odds to stop the Barrow gang.
Mind you, "The Highwaymen" certainly isn't the most exciting manhunt melodrama. At times, the going is mighty slow because Hamer and Gault painstakingly gather clues and develop leads based on their bloodhound instincts. Although most of the action involves Hamer and Gault, they have few encounters with Bonnie & Clyde until the finale. The scene that highlights best what our heroes must contend with occurs when they tail Bonnie & Clyde out of a town and then lose them in the middle of nowhere. Clyde careens off the highway into a barren field and swerves in circles around Hamer and Gault. Clyde churns up a blinding dust storm and loses the two Texas Rangers. Eventually, after he learns that the felons are cruising off for 'greener pastures,' Hamer decides to pursue them into Louisiana where the authorities have issued no warrants for their arrest. During the manhunt, Gault agonizes about his ability to shoot a woman. Later, they learn Bonnie Parker has been as just as cold-blooded and homicidal as Clyde. This is a far cry from the vintage Warner Brothers movie. Hamer follows a lead involving one of Clyde's accomplices in Louisiana. He cuts a deal with the father of one of Clyde's cronies that culminates in the inevitable ambush of the twosome. The posse catch Bonnie & Clyde as they approach their accomplice's father who is seeking roadside assistance. Reportedly, in real life, the posse poured so many volleys of gunfire into the couple that the barrage deafened them.
Clocking in at two hours and twelve minutes, "The Highwaymen" aims for the older demographic that loved "Unforgiven." Nevertheless, it ranks far above anything that Costner has made in many moons. Costner and Harrelson lend their considerable gravitas to Hancock's authentic looking film. The $49-million production does a commendable job of recreating the utter despair and destitution suffered by too many people during the Great Depression. Some critics and historians have accused Hamer of overstepping his authority after he shadowed Bonnie & Clyde into Louisiana, and he could have taken them alive. Hancock and Fusco show that Hamer was prepared to do whatever was necessary to kill the couple. Despite its impressive adherence to history, "The Highwaymen" will always lay in the shadow of the Oscar-winning Warner Brothers' classic, but it does provide greater insight into Bonnie & Clyde.
CINEMATIC REVELATIONS allows me the luxury of writing, editing and archiving my film and television reviews. Some reviews appeared initially in "The Commercial Dispatch" and "The Planet Weekly" and then later in the comment archives at the Internet Movie Database. IMDB.COM, however, imposes a limit on both the number of words and the number of times that an author may revise their comments. I hope that anybody who peruses these expanded reviews will find them useful.
Showing posts with label Texas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Texas. Show all posts
Monday, April 22, 2019
Saturday, April 22, 2017
FILM REVIEW OF ''THE RETURN OF JOSEY WALES" (1986)
The people who produced "The Return of Josey Wales"
should have changed the hero's name. "Return" went straight to video
in 1986 without significant theatrical release, while "The Outlaw Josey
Wales" was released in 1976. Ten years is a long time to delay a sequel,
though "Star Trek" fans weathered decades before their cult NBC-TV
show finally reached the big-screen. Reportedly, Clint Eastwood had considered
making Forrest Carter's second Josey Wales novel "The Vengeance Trail of
Josey Wales" as a sequel. Nothing came of the project. Anyway, only the
fictional characters from the original show up in "The Return of Josey
Wales." None of the original cast members reprised their roles, and Clint
Eastwood had nothing to do with the low-budget oater. Forrest Carter, author of
both "Josey Wales" western novels received screen credit for both
story and screenplay. The producers changed
the ending. Several characters from the
original novel reappeared in the second novel in an early chapter. Nevertheless, “The Return of Josey Wales” is
at best generic from fade-in to fade out compared not only with the previous
movie as well as Carter’s novel.
Producer/Second Unit Director R.O. Taylor
received credit as "writer: special scenes."
"The Outlaw Josey Wales" qualified as an
indisputable magnum opus. Meanwhile, "The Return of Josey Wales" (* OUT OF ****)npales
by comparison, more of a drab, saddle-sore, horse opera with little to distinguish
it. According to IMDb.COM, the produced lensed on location at the Alamo
Village, in Brackettville, Texas, where John Wayne filmed his own magnum opus "The
Alamo" in 1960. A large percentage of the cinematography is master shots.
Master shots are typically long shots with actors shown from head to toe in
their environment. Star/director Michael
Parks, who graces himself with an adequate number of close-ups, should have
known he was setting himself up for a fiasco. The original "Josey Wales"
overshadows this threadbare sagebrusher. Had the protagonist's name been
altered, "The Return" wouldn't have found itself at such a tremendous
disadvantage compared to its lofty predecessor. The Internet Movie Database
lists no release date, but I remember a trailer at a drive-in movie theater
advertising it. Like another reviewer, I bought a VHS copy through Amazon so I
could say that I have seen it. The
picture quality is mediocre, and the film may have been cropped to accommodate
the standard 1:33.1 screen ratio.
Despite the somewhat brutal events in the prologue, you're going to feel like you're watching a conventional television western. Tame, lame, with little of the same from the original, "The Return of Josey Wales" ranks as an uninspired sequel. Repeated viewings of the Eastwood original allow you to appreciate its perfection. Eastwood did a marvelous job when he condensed the entire Civil War in the prologue after Union sympathizers slaughtered Josey’s wife and son, and later he joined Bloody Bill Anderson. "Return" doesn't raise the stakes, boasts few surprises, breaks no new ground, and doesn't leave you wanting more. Character actor Michael Parks—an outstanding thespian in his own right—replaced Clint Eastwood. Indeed, some resemblance appears between the two, and Parks looks persuasively authentic in his black sombrero, white shirt, and dark britches. Aside from preserving Josey's tobacco spitting routine, Park's Josey Wales isn't as interesting as Eastwood's character. He has no love interest in this film, and he doesn’t have any memorable showdown scenes. Parks packs one revolver in a standard, low-slung, right-sided holster, like a prime-time, TV cowboy, and wields an occasional Winchester. Eastwood's Josey Wales armed himself to the teeth with as many as four revolvers. Eastwood knew how to make an entrance, whereas Parks ambles into and out of scenes as if by accident without a trace of charisma. He mumbles in his dialogue scenes like Marlon Brando. Occasionally, he says something insightful.
As director, Parks stages the western shenanigans without fanfare. Watching it once is probably more than enough. I've seen it several times for this review. You'll have to wait patiently about 20 minutes for the first gunfight. The gunfight is minor like something out of a Randolph Scott western. Rafael Campos is the only other recognizable cast member. Campos gives the best performance as a liquor-loving vaquero. Everybody else, even in speaking parts, looks and sounds like amateurs. Some of the male extras wear atrocious hats that resemble party favors instead of Stetsons. Basically, like Clint Eastwood's "The Outlaw Josey Wales, "The Return of Josey Wales" has a savage prologue involving a heinous atrocity. The hero's extended family of friends suffers at the hands of the slimy villains. "The Return of Josey Wales" doesn't deliver an eye for an eye western with an icy-cool looking hero. Parks can be heroic. Happily, he does handle himself acceptably in the first shoot-out both on foot as well as horseback. Appropriately enough, the villains—Mexican Rurales who scalp Indians for the bounty--are unrepentant devils.
Despite the somewhat brutal events in the prologue, you're going to feel like you're watching a conventional television western. Tame, lame, with little of the same from the original, "The Return of Josey Wales" ranks as an uninspired sequel. Repeated viewings of the Eastwood original allow you to appreciate its perfection. Eastwood did a marvelous job when he condensed the entire Civil War in the prologue after Union sympathizers slaughtered Josey’s wife and son, and later he joined Bloody Bill Anderson. "Return" doesn't raise the stakes, boasts few surprises, breaks no new ground, and doesn't leave you wanting more. Character actor Michael Parks—an outstanding thespian in his own right—replaced Clint Eastwood. Indeed, some resemblance appears between the two, and Parks looks persuasively authentic in his black sombrero, white shirt, and dark britches. Aside from preserving Josey's tobacco spitting routine, Park's Josey Wales isn't as interesting as Eastwood's character. He has no love interest in this film, and he doesn’t have any memorable showdown scenes. Parks packs one revolver in a standard, low-slung, right-sided holster, like a prime-time, TV cowboy, and wields an occasional Winchester. Eastwood's Josey Wales armed himself to the teeth with as many as four revolvers. Eastwood knew how to make an entrance, whereas Parks ambles into and out of scenes as if by accident without a trace of charisma. He mumbles in his dialogue scenes like Marlon Brando. Occasionally, he says something insightful.
As director, Parks stages the western shenanigans without fanfare. Watching it once is probably more than enough. I've seen it several times for this review. You'll have to wait patiently about 20 minutes for the first gunfight. The gunfight is minor like something out of a Randolph Scott western. Rafael Campos is the only other recognizable cast member. Campos gives the best performance as a liquor-loving vaquero. Everybody else, even in speaking parts, looks and sounds like amateurs. Some of the male extras wear atrocious hats that resemble party favors instead of Stetsons. Basically, like Clint Eastwood's "The Outlaw Josey Wales, "The Return of Josey Wales" has a savage prologue involving a heinous atrocity. The hero's extended family of friends suffers at the hands of the slimy villains. "The Return of Josey Wales" doesn't deliver an eye for an eye western with an icy-cool looking hero. Parks can be heroic. Happily, he does handle himself acceptably in the first shoot-out both on foot as well as horseback. Appropriately enough, the villains—Mexican Rurales who scalp Indians for the bounty--are unrepentant devils.
The Rurales rape a defiant saloon girl, Rose (Suzie Humphreys
of "Deep in the Heart") and beat a poor bartender to a pulp, while a one-armed
Mexican peon, Pablo (Paco Vela of “The Job”), witnesses these horrific acts.
Later, Paco relays his information to Josey Wales. Predictably, Wales saddles
up and hits the trail, but with considerably less gusto compared to its predecessor.
Furthermore, one of Josey's friends, a tin-horn gambler named Ten-Spot (Robert
Magruder of “Five Days from Home”) has been taken. Mexican Rurales commander,
Jesus Escabedo (Everett Sifuentes of "Selena"), plans to hang
Ten-Spot, and Josey tracks them down with his Mexican vaquero, Chato (Rafael Campos
of "The Appaloosa"), but Chato gets himself shot-up. Sadly, Ten-Spot catches a bullet in the
finale. Josey leaves Escabedo buried up to his neck in the ground as he rides
off with his friends. In Carter’s novel,
Wales repeatedly shot and killed Escabedo during a face-to-face confrontation
in a canyon. Furthermore, in Carter’s
novel, real-life Apache chieftain Geronimo played a peripheral role.
Josey Wales desired better than this grubby little western delivered.
Josey Wales desired better than this grubby little western delivered.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
FILM REVIEW OF "THE KEEPER" (2009)
“Sweepers” director Keoni Waxman keeps the serviceable Steven Seagal thriller “The Keeper” (**1/2 OUT OF ****) from bogging down in “Con Express” scenarist Paul A. Birkett’s formulaic but entertaining yarn. An honest L.A.P.D. detective, who has been put-out-to-pasture, serves as a bodyguard for one of his oldest friends in Texas after an attempt is made to kidnap his friend’s adult daughter. Obviously, Waxman and Birkett must have seen Seagal’s second theatrical release “Hard to Kill” about a cop who gets shot, winds up in a coma for seven years, and then makes a miraculous recovery to take down the dudes that did him dirty. The rest of the story concerns our hero’s efforts a la “The Bodyguard” to protect a woman from evil kidnappers who want to use her to extort millions from her father.
Twenty-five year veteran police officer Roland Salinger (Steven Seagal) and his partner Trevor (Brian Keith Gamble of "Felon") stumble onto about $20-million of illicit drug money after they blast a room full of villains to death. Trevor wants to appropriate the dough. He claims that nobody will care. Appropriately, Roland is surprised by his partner’s attitude. He is more surprised when Trevor puts two slugs through his chest. Unfortunately for Trevor, he doesn’t finish the job. Nevertheless, Trevor is so certain that Roland is kaput that he calls in a 911 “an officer down” alert. Imagine Trevor's considerable shock when he learns later from a uniformed cop on the scene that Roland has a pulse. Trevor decides to finish off Roland at the hospital. Before Trevor walks into Roland's room, Roland's niece enters and inquires about her uncle's condition. Roland steals a revolver from his niece's purse while she is looking the other way and talking to a nurse. At this point, nobody knows for sure that Roland will recover from his wounds. Roland conceals the firearm under his hospital gown. After his niece leaves, Trevor slips into the room and tries to suffocate Roland with a pillow Imagine Trevor's surprise when the indestructible Roland plugs him twice. The way that Waxman and Birkett set up and pay off this scene is as adequate as Roland’s stamina is remarkable.
Gradually, Roland recovers his lethal skills. Waxman turns Roland's recovery into a montage of our hero slinging knives into a board. Naturally, as Roland recuperates, the knives hit the board and stick in it instead of bouncing off it or other knives. Although Roland makes a miraculous recovery, the L.A.P.D. mandates that he take early retirement. Not long afterward one of Roland’s best friends who he calls "a stand-up guy,” Conner Wells (Stephen DuVall of “Driven to Kill”), asks him to act as a bodyguard for Nikita Wells (Liezl Carstens of “Jordan”) his party-hardy daughter. Earlier, Nikita and her obnoxious boyfriend, Mason "The Storm" Silver (Arron Shiver of "Swing Vote"), were leaving a party when a group of assailants posing as paparazzi surrounded Nikita’s limo and opened fire on her bodyguard, Jorge (Tomas Sanchez of “MacGruber”), killing him in a brief firefight in an underground garage. One of the first clues that Mason is a villain occurs when he gets out of the limo to talk to the paparazzi and then flees to hide in a corner of the garage as they try to kidnap Nikita. Of course, Nikita doesn’t realize what an obnoxious jerk that Mason is or that he is a part of a conspiracy to abduct her. What nobody knows is that Mason is tied in with Conner’s old nemesis, career criminal Jason Cross (Luce Rains of “Appaloosa”), who wants to steal the deeds to all of Wells’ real estate holdings. Indeed, Mason has been trying to arrange things so that Conner’s men can kidnap her Nikita. Eventually, we learn that uranium has been discovered on Connor’s depleted oil well lands and the avaricious Cross wants the property. During this second quarter of the film, Waxman cross-cuts between Roland’s recovery and Nikita’s botched abduction. Indeed, Waxman does an adequate job of pacing the action and preparing us for what inevitably lies ahead.
No sooner does Roland land in a private charter jet in San Antonio than he finds himself chatting with an irate local lawman, Detective Simon Pacheco (Kevin Wiggins of “Terminator Salvation”), who notices the arsenal of firearms that Roland has brought in as part of his bodyguard job. Pacheco informs Roland that he doesn’t need back-up from a retired cop. “This is my town,” he points out. “So I hope there’s no problem. You just remember while you’re here, I’ll be watching you.” Roland knows that he is stepping on toes, so he steps lightly. “Well, it’s nice to have somebody at my back.” Throughout “The Keeper,” Pacheco keeps close tabs on our hero. Indeed, Pacheco seems to interfere more with Roland than Cross and his men. Later, Mason takes Nikita with him for a ride without giving her a chance to tell Roland and Cross sends his men to kidnap. Roland gun downs a couple of guys and kills another with a knife in the biggest action scene in this low-body count yarn. Nevertheless, he cannot thwart the kidnapping. Predictably, when Pacheco and his ten-gallon hatted deputies arrive at the scene, they arrest Roland who was clearly within his rights. Roland and Pacheco have a love/hate relationship. Pacheco warns Conner about Roland’s trigger-happy, knife-slinging behavior. Conner fixes it so that Roland is released. Roland tracks down Mason, snaps the neck of one Cross henchman and shoots two others and finds Mason holed up with a prostitute. Mason confesses to Roland that he helped set up Nikita for Cross to kidnap. Meantime, Cross wants to exchange Nikita for $5-million in cash and diamonds along with the property deeds to all of Conner’s oil field properties that have "the richest deposits of uranium in the United States." Anyway, Cross and Connor met at a rendezvous to exchange the loot for Nikita and Roland calls in Pacheco for back-up. A brief firefight erupts and the bad guys are either killed or in the case of Cross arrested. Connor has to exercise great restraint from killing Cross when he has him at gunpoint.
Nothing incredibly surprising occurs in “The Keeper,” but it is always fun to watch Seagal decimate the opposition with his aikido martial arts skills. The shoot-outs are sufficiently bloody and brutal, and Liezl Carstens qualifies as a sympathetic by flighty heroine. The villains are appropriately scummy, but they lack the quality that make them larger-than-life and worthy of their comeuppance. Waxman plays everything pretty straightforward, and Seagal doesn’t utter any ironic one-liners. Seagal's varies his dialogue delivery between urban funkiness to a whispered business-like rasp. This doesn't necessarily mean that Seagal gives a flawed performance. There are times when he speaks the lingo of those around him as in the case of his corrupt African-American partner. Later, when he ends up in Texas, he doesn't make with the funky dialect. The close-quarters combat scenes are edited so that everything occurs so rapidly that you may miss a punch or two if you aren't looking. The sequence in the hospital when the nurses are rushing Roland into surgery is rather well-done in terms of angles and coverage. “The Keeper” is not as much fun as “Urban Justice,” but it surpasses many of the martial arts star’s earlier straight-to-video releases where his voice was dubbed in by other actors.
Twenty-five year veteran police officer Roland Salinger (Steven Seagal) and his partner Trevor (Brian Keith Gamble of "Felon") stumble onto about $20-million of illicit drug money after they blast a room full of villains to death. Trevor wants to appropriate the dough. He claims that nobody will care. Appropriately, Roland is surprised by his partner’s attitude. He is more surprised when Trevor puts two slugs through his chest. Unfortunately for Trevor, he doesn’t finish the job. Nevertheless, Trevor is so certain that Roland is kaput that he calls in a 911 “an officer down” alert. Imagine Trevor's considerable shock when he learns later from a uniformed cop on the scene that Roland has a pulse. Trevor decides to finish off Roland at the hospital. Before Trevor walks into Roland's room, Roland's niece enters and inquires about her uncle's condition. Roland steals a revolver from his niece's purse while she is looking the other way and talking to a nurse. At this point, nobody knows for sure that Roland will recover from his wounds. Roland conceals the firearm under his hospital gown. After his niece leaves, Trevor slips into the room and tries to suffocate Roland with a pillow Imagine Trevor's surprise when the indestructible Roland plugs him twice. The way that Waxman and Birkett set up and pay off this scene is as adequate as Roland’s stamina is remarkable.
Gradually, Roland recovers his lethal skills. Waxman turns Roland's recovery into a montage of our hero slinging knives into a board. Naturally, as Roland recuperates, the knives hit the board and stick in it instead of bouncing off it or other knives. Although Roland makes a miraculous recovery, the L.A.P.D. mandates that he take early retirement. Not long afterward one of Roland’s best friends who he calls "a stand-up guy,” Conner Wells (Stephen DuVall of “Driven to Kill”), asks him to act as a bodyguard for Nikita Wells (Liezl Carstens of “Jordan”) his party-hardy daughter. Earlier, Nikita and her obnoxious boyfriend, Mason "The Storm" Silver (Arron Shiver of "Swing Vote"), were leaving a party when a group of assailants posing as paparazzi surrounded Nikita’s limo and opened fire on her bodyguard, Jorge (Tomas Sanchez of “MacGruber”), killing him in a brief firefight in an underground garage. One of the first clues that Mason is a villain occurs when he gets out of the limo to talk to the paparazzi and then flees to hide in a corner of the garage as they try to kidnap Nikita. Of course, Nikita doesn’t realize what an obnoxious jerk that Mason is or that he is a part of a conspiracy to abduct her. What nobody knows is that Mason is tied in with Conner’s old nemesis, career criminal Jason Cross (Luce Rains of “Appaloosa”), who wants to steal the deeds to all of Wells’ real estate holdings. Indeed, Mason has been trying to arrange things so that Conner’s men can kidnap her Nikita. Eventually, we learn that uranium has been discovered on Connor’s depleted oil well lands and the avaricious Cross wants the property. During this second quarter of the film, Waxman cross-cuts between Roland’s recovery and Nikita’s botched abduction. Indeed, Waxman does an adequate job of pacing the action and preparing us for what inevitably lies ahead.
No sooner does Roland land in a private charter jet in San Antonio than he finds himself chatting with an irate local lawman, Detective Simon Pacheco (Kevin Wiggins of “Terminator Salvation”), who notices the arsenal of firearms that Roland has brought in as part of his bodyguard job. Pacheco informs Roland that he doesn’t need back-up from a retired cop. “This is my town,” he points out. “So I hope there’s no problem. You just remember while you’re here, I’ll be watching you.” Roland knows that he is stepping on toes, so he steps lightly. “Well, it’s nice to have somebody at my back.” Throughout “The Keeper,” Pacheco keeps close tabs on our hero. Indeed, Pacheco seems to interfere more with Roland than Cross and his men. Later, Mason takes Nikita with him for a ride without giving her a chance to tell Roland and Cross sends his men to kidnap. Roland gun downs a couple of guys and kills another with a knife in the biggest action scene in this low-body count yarn. Nevertheless, he cannot thwart the kidnapping. Predictably, when Pacheco and his ten-gallon hatted deputies arrive at the scene, they arrest Roland who was clearly within his rights. Roland and Pacheco have a love/hate relationship. Pacheco warns Conner about Roland’s trigger-happy, knife-slinging behavior. Conner fixes it so that Roland is released. Roland tracks down Mason, snaps the neck of one Cross henchman and shoots two others and finds Mason holed up with a prostitute. Mason confesses to Roland that he helped set up Nikita for Cross to kidnap. Meantime, Cross wants to exchange Nikita for $5-million in cash and diamonds along with the property deeds to all of Conner’s oil field properties that have "the richest deposits of uranium in the United States." Anyway, Cross and Connor met at a rendezvous to exchange the loot for Nikita and Roland calls in Pacheco for back-up. A brief firefight erupts and the bad guys are either killed or in the case of Cross arrested. Connor has to exercise great restraint from killing Cross when he has him at gunpoint.
Nothing incredibly surprising occurs in “The Keeper,” but it is always fun to watch Seagal decimate the opposition with his aikido martial arts skills. The shoot-outs are sufficiently bloody and brutal, and Liezl Carstens qualifies as a sympathetic by flighty heroine. The villains are appropriately scummy, but they lack the quality that make them larger-than-life and worthy of their comeuppance. Waxman plays everything pretty straightforward, and Seagal doesn’t utter any ironic one-liners. Seagal's varies his dialogue delivery between urban funkiness to a whispered business-like rasp. This doesn't necessarily mean that Seagal gives a flawed performance. There are times when he speaks the lingo of those around him as in the case of his corrupt African-American partner. Later, when he ends up in Texas, he doesn't make with the funky dialect. The close-quarters combat scenes are edited so that everything occurs so rapidly that you may miss a punch or two if you aren't looking. The sequence in the hospital when the nurses are rushing Roland into surgery is rather well-done in terms of angles and coverage. “The Keeper” is not as much fun as “Urban Justice,” but it surpasses many of the martial arts star’s earlier straight-to-video releases where his voice was dubbed in by other actors.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
FILM REVIEW OF ''PAYMENT IN BLOOD'' (ITALIAN-1967)
“Payment in Blood” qualifies as a violent, above-average Spaghetti western shoot’em up with a high body count. Like director Sergio Leone’s bigger budgeted “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the lower budgeted “Payment in Blood” (**1/2 out of ****) concerns the quest for buried treasure. The outlaw villains embark on a search for a fabled fortune, approximately $200-thousand, stashed at an undisclosed location by Confederate General Beauregard. Of course, anybody who knows anything about Civil War history knows Beauregard had no such loot. Typically, most westerns that appropriate this plot attribute the lost Confederate gold to President Jefferson Davis. Ironically, during the opening credits sequence, which contains a montage of Civil War photographs, Beauregard’s portrait is conspicuous by its absence, while pictures of Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses S. Grant proliferate. The protagonist, Stuart (Edd Byrnes), has a grudge to settle with the head villain (Guy Madison) and his gang of bloodthirsty gunmen.
Primarily known overseas as “Seven Winchesters for a Massacre,” “Payment in Blood” was writer & director Enzo G. Castellari’s third western. Castellari’s first western as a director was "Few Dollars for Django" for which he received no credit, and “Any Gun Can Play” was his second oater, with a bigger, better cast. “Payment in Blood” isn’t as good as either “Any Gun Can Play” or a later Castellari Civil War western “Kill Them All and Come Back Alone” with Chuck Connors. Long-time screenwriting collaborator Tito Carpi of "Few Dollars for Django" and "Bullets and the Flesh" scribe Marino Girolami penned the formulaic plot with Castellari for “Payment in Blood.” The difference between “Payment in Blood” and “Any Gun Can Play” is the latter is more elaborate than the former. “Payment in Blood” amounts to a rather contrived western that uses the venerable plot about an individual who goes undercover to infiltrate a gang of homicidal criminals and thwart them. The dialogue is neither as amusing as “Any Gun Can Play,” but “Payment in Blood” boasts a surprise ending. Although it seems like scores of men wind up with bullet holes during the numerous shoot-outs, “Payment in Blood” lacks the titular element that became such a fixture in later westerns like “The Wild Bunch.”
The action takes place in Texas in 1867 after the conclusion of the American Civil War. A renegade Confederate officer, Colonel Thomas Blake (Guy Madison of “Drums in the Deep South”), refuses to give up the cause. During the opening moments of “Payment in Blood,” writer & director Enzo G. Castellari introduces us to not only the pugnacious Blake but also the hellspawn riding with him. Included in this notorious gang are Chamaco Gonzales (Ennio Girolami of "The Hellbenders"), knife-throwing Rios (Aysanoa Runachagua of “El Cisco”), Fred Calhoun (Federico Boido of "Planet of the Vampires"), bullwhip wielding Zeb Russel , and Mesa Alvarez (Attilio Severini of “Massacre at Grand Canyon”) who likes to kill with his spurs. Blake and his marauders carry out indiscriminate raids. They steal horses, loot homes; kill men, women and children without a qualm. Nameless supporting players standing around wanted posters of Blake’s men impart most of this information when they aren’t complaining about Blake’s depredations. The reward on Blake’s head has risen to $5-thousand. Chamaco rides into a town one day and eavesdrops on a conversation between a crippled, former Confederate soldier and a cowboy. “What can you expect from a rotten war like ours? Brother against brother. When you teach a man it’s right to kill, how can you unteach him?” The other man observes about Blake’s killers: “They have learned to like being heroes. They’ve learned to like killing.” Chamaco confronts the crippled Southerner, Jeremy, because the latter had ridden with General Beauregard and may know the location of the lost treasure. Before he can learn anything from Jeremy, Chamaco has to kill him. A military tribunal sentences Chamaco to die in front of an army firing squad. Stuart surprises the military and rescues Chamaco just as the soldiers are about to execute him. You see, Stuart is driving a covered wagon past the firing squad when he delivers his ultimatum to the army. He shoots the tip off the officer’s sword and several Winchester rifles spring out from the wagon, suggesting that several riflemen are aiming those repeaters. As it turns out, nobody has their shoulders against these long guns, and Stuart has packed a crate of dynamite in the wagon bed so when one of the soldiers opens fire on the vehicle, the wagon vanishes in an explosion.
Chamaco takes Stuart to Blake’s camp after they sneak across the Rio Grande. The place is like a natural fortress and Blake has a Gatling gun covering the entrance. Chamaco and Stuart pass inspection by the various sentries. It seems that Stuart rode with Beauregard, too, and served as one of the general’s chiefs of staff. The scenes where Stuart meets each of Blake’s gang and matches them at their own expertise are entertaining. The filming and editing of Zeb snatching the revolver out of Stuart’s holster with a bullwhip is exciting. Interesting, Mesa doesn’t perform one of his trademark flips using his spurs as deadly weapons. Each of Blake’s men has something distinctive about them from their look, heritage, and choice of weapon. After he arrives in Blake’s camp, Stuart refuses to divulge the whereabouts of the loot to the cunning colonel. Instead, Blake and his men leave the sanctuary of Mexico, cross the Rio Grande again, but with inevitable bloodshed, and ride into Texas. Along the way, they run into their first surprise and her name is Manuela (Luisa Baratto of “"Bloody Pit of Horror"). She keeps them pinned down with gunfire in one scene before they get the better of her. Feisty women are not a convention of the Spaghetti western. Before Blake’s men do anything else, they orchestrate the massacre of all the men in Durango. Castellari does a good job of staging this massive gundown. What makes the gunfight memorable is that one of Blake's men bites the dust. Eventually, Stuart does reveal the location, but only after Blake has turned his men loose on him and beaten Stuart to the point of unconsciousness. Stuart mutters the words ‘White Eagle’ and they set fire to the room and leave Stuart to burn alive. Blake’s men find a strong box buried in an Indian cemetery. Blake’s men are poised to take the loot when their commander kills Zeb for insubordination. When they finally open the strong box, Blake and his men are disgusted to learn that the $200-thousand was in worthless Confederate bank notes. Meantime, the survivors of the Durango come after Blake for killing their husbands.
Edd Byrnes appears out of place with his clean-shaven features among a cast who sport some form of facial hair. The off-beat casting of heroic Guy Madison as the murderous, tight-lipped villain isn’t as delectable as Henry Fonda’s dastardly turn in “Once Upon a Time in the West,” but it represents a considerable change of pace for Madison. The first time that we see Madison as Colonel Blake, Blake rides out of a cloud of gunfire in a town that his men and he are shooting up. Blake’s favorite words are “kill them.” As savage as this western strives to be with its high body count, there are moments such as when Blake’s men tickle their prisoner’s feet with a feather that really stand out in this above-average oater. "Few Dollars for Django" lenser Aldo Pinelli creates several interesting shots of riders-on-the-skyline with his widescreen, color cinematography. Composer Francesco De Masi provides a charismatic orchestral score that perks up this western. Once you’ve heard De Masi’s flavorful score, you won’t forget it.
You need to get the Wild East DVD copy of this movie, because all other copies are going to be defective.
Primarily known overseas as “Seven Winchesters for a Massacre,” “Payment in Blood” was writer & director Enzo G. Castellari’s third western. Castellari’s first western as a director was "Few Dollars for Django" for which he received no credit, and “Any Gun Can Play” was his second oater, with a bigger, better cast. “Payment in Blood” isn’t as good as either “Any Gun Can Play” or a later Castellari Civil War western “Kill Them All and Come Back Alone” with Chuck Connors. Long-time screenwriting collaborator Tito Carpi of "Few Dollars for Django" and "Bullets and the Flesh" scribe Marino Girolami penned the formulaic plot with Castellari for “Payment in Blood.” The difference between “Payment in Blood” and “Any Gun Can Play” is the latter is more elaborate than the former. “Payment in Blood” amounts to a rather contrived western that uses the venerable plot about an individual who goes undercover to infiltrate a gang of homicidal criminals and thwart them. The dialogue is neither as amusing as “Any Gun Can Play,” but “Payment in Blood” boasts a surprise ending. Although it seems like scores of men wind up with bullet holes during the numerous shoot-outs, “Payment in Blood” lacks the titular element that became such a fixture in later westerns like “The Wild Bunch.”
The action takes place in Texas in 1867 after the conclusion of the American Civil War. A renegade Confederate officer, Colonel Thomas Blake (Guy Madison of “Drums in the Deep South”), refuses to give up the cause. During the opening moments of “Payment in Blood,” writer & director Enzo G. Castellari introduces us to not only the pugnacious Blake but also the hellspawn riding with him. Included in this notorious gang are Chamaco Gonzales (Ennio Girolami of "The Hellbenders"), knife-throwing Rios (Aysanoa Runachagua of “El Cisco”), Fred Calhoun (Federico Boido of "Planet of the Vampires"), bullwhip wielding Zeb Russel , and Mesa Alvarez (Attilio Severini of “Massacre at Grand Canyon”) who likes to kill with his spurs. Blake and his marauders carry out indiscriminate raids. They steal horses, loot homes; kill men, women and children without a qualm. Nameless supporting players standing around wanted posters of Blake’s men impart most of this information when they aren’t complaining about Blake’s depredations. The reward on Blake’s head has risen to $5-thousand. Chamaco rides into a town one day and eavesdrops on a conversation between a crippled, former Confederate soldier and a cowboy. “What can you expect from a rotten war like ours? Brother against brother. When you teach a man it’s right to kill, how can you unteach him?” The other man observes about Blake’s killers: “They have learned to like being heroes. They’ve learned to like killing.” Chamaco confronts the crippled Southerner, Jeremy, because the latter had ridden with General Beauregard and may know the location of the lost treasure. Before he can learn anything from Jeremy, Chamaco has to kill him. A military tribunal sentences Chamaco to die in front of an army firing squad. Stuart surprises the military and rescues Chamaco just as the soldiers are about to execute him. You see, Stuart is driving a covered wagon past the firing squad when he delivers his ultimatum to the army. He shoots the tip off the officer’s sword and several Winchester rifles spring out from the wagon, suggesting that several riflemen are aiming those repeaters. As it turns out, nobody has their shoulders against these long guns, and Stuart has packed a crate of dynamite in the wagon bed so when one of the soldiers opens fire on the vehicle, the wagon vanishes in an explosion.
Chamaco takes Stuart to Blake’s camp after they sneak across the Rio Grande. The place is like a natural fortress and Blake has a Gatling gun covering the entrance. Chamaco and Stuart pass inspection by the various sentries. It seems that Stuart rode with Beauregard, too, and served as one of the general’s chiefs of staff. The scenes where Stuart meets each of Blake’s gang and matches them at their own expertise are entertaining. The filming and editing of Zeb snatching the revolver out of Stuart’s holster with a bullwhip is exciting. Interesting, Mesa doesn’t perform one of his trademark flips using his spurs as deadly weapons. Each of Blake’s men has something distinctive about them from their look, heritage, and choice of weapon. After he arrives in Blake’s camp, Stuart refuses to divulge the whereabouts of the loot to the cunning colonel. Instead, Blake and his men leave the sanctuary of Mexico, cross the Rio Grande again, but with inevitable bloodshed, and ride into Texas. Along the way, they run into their first surprise and her name is Manuela (Luisa Baratto of “"Bloody Pit of Horror"). She keeps them pinned down with gunfire in one scene before they get the better of her. Feisty women are not a convention of the Spaghetti western. Before Blake’s men do anything else, they orchestrate the massacre of all the men in Durango. Castellari does a good job of staging this massive gundown. What makes the gunfight memorable is that one of Blake's men bites the dust. Eventually, Stuart does reveal the location, but only after Blake has turned his men loose on him and beaten Stuart to the point of unconsciousness. Stuart mutters the words ‘White Eagle’ and they set fire to the room and leave Stuart to burn alive. Blake’s men find a strong box buried in an Indian cemetery. Blake’s men are poised to take the loot when their commander kills Zeb for insubordination. When they finally open the strong box, Blake and his men are disgusted to learn that the $200-thousand was in worthless Confederate bank notes. Meantime, the survivors of the Durango come after Blake for killing their husbands.
Edd Byrnes appears out of place with his clean-shaven features among a cast who sport some form of facial hair. The off-beat casting of heroic Guy Madison as the murderous, tight-lipped villain isn’t as delectable as Henry Fonda’s dastardly turn in “Once Upon a Time in the West,” but it represents a considerable change of pace for Madison. The first time that we see Madison as Colonel Blake, Blake rides out of a cloud of gunfire in a town that his men and he are shooting up. Blake’s favorite words are “kill them.” As savage as this western strives to be with its high body count, there are moments such as when Blake’s men tickle their prisoner’s feet with a feather that really stand out in this above-average oater. "Few Dollars for Django" lenser Aldo Pinelli creates several interesting shots of riders-on-the-skyline with his widescreen, color cinematography. Composer Francesco De Masi provides a charismatic orchestral score that perks up this western. Once you’ve heard De Masi’s flavorful score, you won’t forget it.
You need to get the Wild East DVD copy of this movie, because all other copies are going to be defective.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
FILM REVIEW OF ''EXECUTIVE ACTION" (1973)
This landmark movie--the first to tackle this controversial issue--integrates authentic black & white newsreel footage of John F. Kennedy before and after his assassination with a dramatized conspiracy to kill the President. "Executive Action" (*** out of ****) unfolds with the following prologue:"Before his death, former President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a three hour interview to a well-known television commentator. On May 2, 1970, when the interview was shown on a national television network, it included the message that certain material had been deleted at President Johnson's insistence. It has been revealed that in the censored section, Johnson had expressed misgivings about the finding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, and that in fact, he (LBJ) suspected that a conspiracy had been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy." The fascinating thing about this modest little picture is that the protagonists are all villains. Typically, a hero arises to defeat the adversaries, but no hero emerges in "Executive Action." Indeed, it is interesting to speculate whether this film could not have been produced before 1973 under the inflexible Production Code Administration simply because the villains win and nobody punishes them for their horrendous crime.
Director David Miller of "Lonely Are the Brave," "The Flying Tigers," and "Billy the Kid" helmed this provocative yarn that consists ostensibly of distinguished gentlemen--Washington power brokers acting as intermediaries--who assemble behind closed doors and discuss the plan to terminate JFK with extreme prejudice. The first meeting convenes on June 5, 1963. Affluent businessmen James Farrington (Burt Lancaster of "Elmer Gantry")and Foster (Robert Ryan of "The Proud Ones")spend a third of the time trying to convince influential Southern businessman Harold Ferguson (Will Greer of CBS-TV's "The Waltons") that Kennedy has put America on the wrong course. A professor warns them about the enormous power that the Kennedy dynasty wields, and they have laid out a time table that has JFK serving two terms as President and his two brothers Robert and Teddy serving two terms. "And in each administration, the brothers who are not president will take over the most powerful cabinet posts. They have several hundred million dollars and the best brains on earth to carry them through. They have put together a powerful coalition of big city machines, labor, Negroes, Jews, and that press that will make him unbeatable in 1964." Initially Ferguson shows skepticism. He points out that Kennedy "has appointed Republicans to the Treasury, the Navy, and another is head of the CIA. His brother Bobby worked on Joe McCarthy;s committee." Finally, he observes that Kennedy's father Joseph "is farther to the right than I am." The professor states that JFK will call for a test-ban treaty with the Soviets, lead the black revolution which will trigger a white backlash and blood in the streets and withdraw from Vietnam.
Before Farrington and Foster win Ferguson over to their cause, they explain that Europeans kill heads of state with conspiracies. In America, however, lone assassins with no familiarity with firearms have consistently either killed or tried to kill Presidents. First, the conspirators design an elaborate scenario to incriminate a fall guy--Lee Harvey Oswald--as the assassin. They study Oswald's troubled history and even suspect that he has been used by intelligence outfits for his jaunts to the USSR. Second, they decide to kill Kennedy while he is riding in a motorcade. Foster explains that "motorcades are scheduled well in advance and they give you a chance to fire from cover and getaway in the confusion." Farrington states that they will use "trained, reliable professionals." He elaborates: "They only possible scenario is three rifles with triangulated gunfire. Two firing at the retreating target. The third firing as the target advances." Interspersed among these exposition heavy conference scenes are scenes of two sniper teams practicing on dummies in a car drawn through remote locations. Ed Lauter of "The Longest Yard" plays the Operations Chief of Team A, and veteran character actor Dick Miller of "The Terminator" plays one of the snipers on the B Team. Indeed, this semi-documentary approach creates some question about the findings of the Warren Report that concluded beyond a doubt that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, gunned down the President on November 22,1963.
The top-notch cast, headed by Academy Award winner Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan,and Will Greer as the conspirators, is seasoned with many familiar character actors populating the supporting roles. Producer Edward Lewis was no slouch either, having produced the volatile political thriller "Seven Days in May" with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, but the clincher is that former blacklisted Hollywood 10 scenarist Dalton Trumbo penned the script. Initially, Trumbo said that he did not believe in a conspiracy, but after he read several books on the assassination as well as the Warren Commission Report, he changed his opinion. No, "Executive Action" is not a conventional assassination thriller. Everything about it is pretty straightforward and suspense is lacking, but the audacious subject matter compensates for these departures from the norm. After all, we know that the assassins didn't miss and Kennedy died. Essentially, this is a clevely edited, quasi-documentary with a superb cast. Nevertheless, "Executive Action" did not stir up the controversy that the sensational Oliver Stone movie "JFK" with Kevin Costner generated many years later. Nonetheless, in light of everything, "Executive Action" constituted a bold move and there hasn't been a film comparable to it. Producer Edward Lewis claims that threats were made against him in an effort to dissuade him from making the picture. This was actor Robert Ryan's final film appearance. Randy Edelman wrote the haunting theme music. The film ends with the observation that an inordinate number of eye witnesses to the assassination died afterward of unusual causes. I remember seeing this movie when it came out originally in theaters.
Director David Miller of "Lonely Are the Brave," "The Flying Tigers," and "Billy the Kid" helmed this provocative yarn that consists ostensibly of distinguished gentlemen--Washington power brokers acting as intermediaries--who assemble behind closed doors and discuss the plan to terminate JFK with extreme prejudice. The first meeting convenes on June 5, 1963. Affluent businessmen James Farrington (Burt Lancaster of "Elmer Gantry")and Foster (Robert Ryan of "The Proud Ones")spend a third of the time trying to convince influential Southern businessman Harold Ferguson (Will Greer of CBS-TV's "The Waltons") that Kennedy has put America on the wrong course. A professor warns them about the enormous power that the Kennedy dynasty wields, and they have laid out a time table that has JFK serving two terms as President and his two brothers Robert and Teddy serving two terms. "And in each administration, the brothers who are not president will take over the most powerful cabinet posts. They have several hundred million dollars and the best brains on earth to carry them through. They have put together a powerful coalition of big city machines, labor, Negroes, Jews, and that press that will make him unbeatable in 1964." Initially Ferguson shows skepticism. He points out that Kennedy "has appointed Republicans to the Treasury, the Navy, and another is head of the CIA. His brother Bobby worked on Joe McCarthy;s committee." Finally, he observes that Kennedy's father Joseph "is farther to the right than I am." The professor states that JFK will call for a test-ban treaty with the Soviets, lead the black revolution which will trigger a white backlash and blood in the streets and withdraw from Vietnam.
Before Farrington and Foster win Ferguson over to their cause, they explain that Europeans kill heads of state with conspiracies. In America, however, lone assassins with no familiarity with firearms have consistently either killed or tried to kill Presidents. First, the conspirators design an elaborate scenario to incriminate a fall guy--Lee Harvey Oswald--as the assassin. They study Oswald's troubled history and even suspect that he has been used by intelligence outfits for his jaunts to the USSR. Second, they decide to kill Kennedy while he is riding in a motorcade. Foster explains that "motorcades are scheduled well in advance and they give you a chance to fire from cover and getaway in the confusion." Farrington states that they will use "trained, reliable professionals." He elaborates: "They only possible scenario is three rifles with triangulated gunfire. Two firing at the retreating target. The third firing as the target advances." Interspersed among these exposition heavy conference scenes are scenes of two sniper teams practicing on dummies in a car drawn through remote locations. Ed Lauter of "The Longest Yard" plays the Operations Chief of Team A, and veteran character actor Dick Miller of "The Terminator" plays one of the snipers on the B Team. Indeed, this semi-documentary approach creates some question about the findings of the Warren Report that concluded beyond a doubt that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, gunned down the President on November 22,1963.
The top-notch cast, headed by Academy Award winner Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan,and Will Greer as the conspirators, is seasoned with many familiar character actors populating the supporting roles. Producer Edward Lewis was no slouch either, having produced the volatile political thriller "Seven Days in May" with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, but the clincher is that former blacklisted Hollywood 10 scenarist Dalton Trumbo penned the script. Initially, Trumbo said that he did not believe in a conspiracy, but after he read several books on the assassination as well as the Warren Commission Report, he changed his opinion. No, "Executive Action" is not a conventional assassination thriller. Everything about it is pretty straightforward and suspense is lacking, but the audacious subject matter compensates for these departures from the norm. After all, we know that the assassins didn't miss and Kennedy died. Essentially, this is a clevely edited, quasi-documentary with a superb cast. Nevertheless, "Executive Action" did not stir up the controversy that the sensational Oliver Stone movie "JFK" with Kevin Costner generated many years later. Nonetheless, in light of everything, "Executive Action" constituted a bold move and there hasn't been a film comparable to it. Producer Edward Lewis claims that threats were made against him in an effort to dissuade him from making the picture. This was actor Robert Ryan's final film appearance. Randy Edelman wrote the haunting theme music. The film ends with the observation that an inordinate number of eye witnesses to the assassination died afterward of unusual causes. I remember seeing this movie when it came out originally in theaters.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
FILM REVIEW OF ''NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN''
“O’ Brother, Where Art Thou” co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen have created another classic melodrama with their modern-day western, road trip crime thriller “No Country for Old Men” (**** out of ****) about an inexorable killer and his quest to recover millions in illicit drug money. This art-house saga is a simple but powerful tale that involves four primary characters and a host of supporting characters. The action takes place in 1980. Indeed, if you use the zoom function on either your DVD or Blu-Ray player, you can spot the date on the phone bill. Moreover, if you look closely, you will see that the phone bill is $12.18. Ostensibly, the narrator, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, spends most of his time dwelling on the psychology of the characters as well as the changing times. “No Country for Old Men” isn’t your ordinary shoot’em up with cut and dried heroes and villains. The Coens have adapted the Cormac McCarthy novel and retained its pervasive sense of irony. Indeed, the moral universe of “No Country” is skewered because the villain survives, the protagonist dies, and the sheriff is so scared that he quits his job. Hired killer Anton Chigurh embodies the essence of pure evil. Despite the fact that he is a flesh & blood character, Chigurh could send shivers up the Terminator’s spine because he never gives up. Although the Coens may not realize it, Chigurh resembles another inexorable killer, the Lee Van Cleef gunman named ‘Angel Eyes’ in director Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Like ‘Angel Eyes,’ Chigurh always finishes the job no matter what the consequences.
The action opens with a sheriff’s deputy arresting Chigurh (Javier Bardem of “Collateral”) and taking him in hand cuffs back to the jail. The unsuspecting deputy leaves the cuffed Chigurh sitting in a chair behind him while he phones the sheriff and discusses the unusual weapon that Chigurh uses to kill people. At the end of the conversation with the sheriff, the deputy promises his boss that “he has everything under control.” Meanwhile, behind him, Chigurh has slipped his cuffed wrists up under his thighs so that he can hold his hands in front of himself. Immediately, he attacks the deputy and they leave boot heel scuff marks galore on the floor while they struggle. Chigurh kills the deputy, confiscates a police cruiser, takes his peculiar weapon that consists of a slim canister, a hose, and a firing mechanism and pulls over a motorist, kills him with this odd weapon and steals his car. Later, at a Texaco gas station, Chigurh takes umbrage when the attendant asks him about the weather. This is quite a chilling scene as Chigurh stares at the attendant with his opaque eyes and forces him to play a game that involves flipping a coin. The attendant–like many characters–isn’t the brightest bulb in the factory and he can never get Chigurh to spell out the stakes riding on the coin flip.
The ostensible protagonist, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin of “American Gangster”), is hunting deer antelope in the desert and wounds one. Setting out to track down the wounded animal, Llewelyn comes across a scene straight out of Hell, a circle of trucks in the middle of nowhere and a number of bullet-riddled bodies strewn about them with a dead dog. Earlier, Moss saw a wounded pit bull limping away the high weeds. He finds one Mexican still alive but bleeding to death. Eventually, Moss figures out that one Mexican got away and he follows him to a ridge clad with two trees and finds the man dead with a satchel and a shiny automatic pistol. The satchel contains $2-million dollars in cash. When Moss returns home to his trailer, his wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald of “Trainspotting”) is watching television. She inquires about the pistol but Moss brushes off all questions and threatens to take her to bed and have sex with her. She snorts derisively and quips, “That’ll be the day.” Later that night, Moss decides to return to the scene of the shooting because his conscience has gotten to him about the sole survivor that he found. Earlier, the dying Mexican had pleaded for a drink of water and Llewelyn brings a jug of cold water. No sooner has he set foot on the scene that some other Mexicans wheel up in a truck, slash his tires, pursue him and take shots at him. Moss dives into a river and the Mexicans dispatch a tenacious pit bull dog that leaps into the river and swims after him. Moss barely gets out of the river and clears his pistol before the dog lunges at him and he guns it down. You don’t often see dogs die in modern-day movies. By this time, Chigurh is on Moss’ trail and he rides out to his trailer park. He uses his cattle gun to blow the door lock off. In fact, this is Chigurh’s favorite method of entering a building; he blows the lock off the front door. However, Moss and his wife have already vacated the premises before Chigurh arrives. Chigurh searches the trailer and finds a telephone bill that contains all the phone numbers and he starts calling the numbers. Such is the weird attention to minute detail that the Coens show us the amount of the bill: $17.16.
Chigurh arrives on the scene with two other men later on, studies the site, shoots them and sets out to find the stolen money. “No Country” depicts his pursuit of Moss. These two guys are pretty obstinate characters. Neither one of them gives up, but Moss has no idea about the lengths to which Chigurh is committed to go. Moss sends Carla Jean off to Odessa, Texas, to be with her mother while he heads off in a different direction. Carla Jean has to quit her job at Walmart before she leaves to join her cancer-stricken mother. At the same time, Sheriff Ed Tom and his deputy investigate the killings and Ed Tom is clearly shaken by what he sees of this killer. In a border town, Moss and Chigurh shoot it out in the street after Chigurh storms the hotel where Moss had holed up and kills the night clerk. He wounds Moss, but Moss wounds him, too. Chigurh stages a car fire in front of a pharmacy to get the medical supplies to tend to his wounds, while Moss walks across the border at night and winds up in a Mexican hospital where he recuperates. Eventually, he makes it back across the border, but Chigurh catches up with him and kills him. Surprisingly, in a random act of violence, Chigurh’s car is struck by another car but he survives the accident. Two kids on bikes roll up and Chigurh buys a shirt from one of them to tie up his dislocated arm and then he vanishes as if he were never there. The film concludes with Tom Ed talking about a dream that he had about his father.
“No Country for Old Men” is a chilling tale of crime in the southwest about a killer who will stop at nothing to complete his mission. Nevertheless, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill action shoot’em up clever dialogue and cool characters. These are flesh and blood people who can and do receive wounds and have to take down time to recover. The scene where Chigurh obtains the medical supplies and then nurses himself in a motel room, swabbing his wounds, plucking out the buckshot pellets and injecting himself with shots is rather gruesome but reminiscent of Sylvester Stallone dressing his wounds in the original Rambo movie "First Blood." Nothing goes as it should in a regular crime melodrama. Good loses in the long run and evil wins out in the end. This movie justifiably received four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Bardem netted the Best Supporting Oscar for his killer.
The action opens with a sheriff’s deputy arresting Chigurh (Javier Bardem of “Collateral”) and taking him in hand cuffs back to the jail. The unsuspecting deputy leaves the cuffed Chigurh sitting in a chair behind him while he phones the sheriff and discusses the unusual weapon that Chigurh uses to kill people. At the end of the conversation with the sheriff, the deputy promises his boss that “he has everything under control.” Meanwhile, behind him, Chigurh has slipped his cuffed wrists up under his thighs so that he can hold his hands in front of himself. Immediately, he attacks the deputy and they leave boot heel scuff marks galore on the floor while they struggle. Chigurh kills the deputy, confiscates a police cruiser, takes his peculiar weapon that consists of a slim canister, a hose, and a firing mechanism and pulls over a motorist, kills him with this odd weapon and steals his car. Later, at a Texaco gas station, Chigurh takes umbrage when the attendant asks him about the weather. This is quite a chilling scene as Chigurh stares at the attendant with his opaque eyes and forces him to play a game that involves flipping a coin. The attendant–like many characters–isn’t the brightest bulb in the factory and he can never get Chigurh to spell out the stakes riding on the coin flip.
The ostensible protagonist, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin of “American Gangster”), is hunting deer antelope in the desert and wounds one. Setting out to track down the wounded animal, Llewelyn comes across a scene straight out of Hell, a circle of trucks in the middle of nowhere and a number of bullet-riddled bodies strewn about them with a dead dog. Earlier, Moss saw a wounded pit bull limping away the high weeds. He finds one Mexican still alive but bleeding to death. Eventually, Moss figures out that one Mexican got away and he follows him to a ridge clad with two trees and finds the man dead with a satchel and a shiny automatic pistol. The satchel contains $2-million dollars in cash. When Moss returns home to his trailer, his wife Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald of “Trainspotting”) is watching television. She inquires about the pistol but Moss brushes off all questions and threatens to take her to bed and have sex with her. She snorts derisively and quips, “That’ll be the day.” Later that night, Moss decides to return to the scene of the shooting because his conscience has gotten to him about the sole survivor that he found. Earlier, the dying Mexican had pleaded for a drink of water and Llewelyn brings a jug of cold water. No sooner has he set foot on the scene that some other Mexicans wheel up in a truck, slash his tires, pursue him and take shots at him. Moss dives into a river and the Mexicans dispatch a tenacious pit bull dog that leaps into the river and swims after him. Moss barely gets out of the river and clears his pistol before the dog lunges at him and he guns it down. You don’t often see dogs die in modern-day movies. By this time, Chigurh is on Moss’ trail and he rides out to his trailer park. He uses his cattle gun to blow the door lock off. In fact, this is Chigurh’s favorite method of entering a building; he blows the lock off the front door. However, Moss and his wife have already vacated the premises before Chigurh arrives. Chigurh searches the trailer and finds a telephone bill that contains all the phone numbers and he starts calling the numbers. Such is the weird attention to minute detail that the Coens show us the amount of the bill: $17.16.
Chigurh arrives on the scene with two other men later on, studies the site, shoots them and sets out to find the stolen money. “No Country” depicts his pursuit of Moss. These two guys are pretty obstinate characters. Neither one of them gives up, but Moss has no idea about the lengths to which Chigurh is committed to go. Moss sends Carla Jean off to Odessa, Texas, to be with her mother while he heads off in a different direction. Carla Jean has to quit her job at Walmart before she leaves to join her cancer-stricken mother. At the same time, Sheriff Ed Tom and his deputy investigate the killings and Ed Tom is clearly shaken by what he sees of this killer. In a border town, Moss and Chigurh shoot it out in the street after Chigurh storms the hotel where Moss had holed up and kills the night clerk. He wounds Moss, but Moss wounds him, too. Chigurh stages a car fire in front of a pharmacy to get the medical supplies to tend to his wounds, while Moss walks across the border at night and winds up in a Mexican hospital where he recuperates. Eventually, he makes it back across the border, but Chigurh catches up with him and kills him. Surprisingly, in a random act of violence, Chigurh’s car is struck by another car but he survives the accident. Two kids on bikes roll up and Chigurh buys a shirt from one of them to tie up his dislocated arm and then he vanishes as if he were never there. The film concludes with Tom Ed talking about a dream that he had about his father.
“No Country for Old Men” is a chilling tale of crime in the southwest about a killer who will stop at nothing to complete his mission. Nevertheless, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill action shoot’em up clever dialogue and cool characters. These are flesh and blood people who can and do receive wounds and have to take down time to recover. The scene where Chigurh obtains the medical supplies and then nurses himself in a motel room, swabbing his wounds, plucking out the buckshot pellets and injecting himself with shots is rather gruesome but reminiscent of Sylvester Stallone dressing his wounds in the original Rambo movie "First Blood." Nothing goes as it should in a regular crime melodrama. Good loses in the long run and evil wins out in the end. This movie justifiably received four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Bardem netted the Best Supporting Oscar for his killer.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
FILM REVIEW OF ''EL DORADO" (1967)
“Red River” director Howard Hawks’ “El Dorado” (**** out of ****) qualifies as a leisurely, old-fashioned oater that conjures up more hilarity with its frequent comic interludes than its serious moments. Mind you, this 1967 John Wayne & Robert Mitchum western possesses a couple of unsavory moments, principally when men brandish their six-guns and blast away at each other without a qualm. The violence here is nothing compared to the sadistic Spaghetti westerns produced in Europe during the late 1960s. Anybody who enjoys Hawks’ westerns should not be surprised that Hawks and scenarist Leigh Brackett dusted off the plot to “Rio Bravo,” essentially recycled scenes and characters from that film rather than from the cited source material, the novel "The Stars in Their Courses" by Harry Brown, published in 1962. Reportedly, Hawka retained one scene from the book and fell back on "Rio Bravo." The one scene involved the shooting of Luke MacDonald.
Hawks cast Robert Mitchum as the drunken that Dean Martin had played in “Rio Bravo.” Arthur Hunnicutt takes over for Walter Brennan, while James Caan substitutes for Ricky Nelson in a different role. Hawks changed Caan’s supporting role from Nelson’s accurate shooting gunslinger to the worst shot on the frontier. As in “Rio Bravo,” the heroes hole up in a jail with a prisoner and await the arrival of the territorial lawman while the villain’s henchmen keep them bottled up in town. This time, however, John Wayne plays a drifting gunfighter with an Achilles heel, while Mitchum wears the sheriff’s badge. Hawks and Brackett whittled down the female participation to an older woman, Charlene Holt, who walks in from time to time, but never intrudes on the action like Angie Dickinson did in “Rio Bravo.” Meanwhile, a young slip of a girl, cute Michele Carey, has a somewhat bigger part as a hot-headed babe who wounds our hero and later guns down the chief villain. Nevertheless, “El Dorado” is an immensely charismatic western with clever dialogue, interesting characters, and hilarious humor. Attention deficient audiences may complain this 126 minute melodrama drags and sags when it should raise hell and holler.
Hawks and Brackett provide the ground work for the plot in the opening scene when Sheriff J.P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum of “Cape Fear”) confronts Cole Thornton (John Wayne of “Hatari”) in the washroom of a local saloon. Cole has come to El Dorado to hire his gun out to ranch owner Bart Jason (Edward Asner of “The Satan Bug”), but Harrah dissuades him from taking the job. Harrah explains that Jason is a greedy rancher who wants to expand his spread, but he needs water. Incidentally, the Bart Jason character resembles Hawks’ “Rio Lobo” villain Ketchum in that Jason showed up in El Dorado with a lot of money when everybody else in Texas was dead broke. Harrah elaborates that Jason wants to run the cattle rancher Kevin MacDonald (R. G. Armstrong of “Ride the High Country”) out of the country because he cannot force MacDonald to sell out to him. Cole decides to accommodate Harrah and pull out. He rides out to Jason’s ranch and refuses to hire out to him. Meantime, Doc Miller (Paul Fix) has sent warning out to MacDonald that Cole Thornton is on Jason’s payroll. MacDonald and his men scatter and he leaves his youngest son Luke (Johnny Crawford of “The Rifleman”) to serve as a look-out and fire in the air if he should see Thornton.
After Cole leaves Jason’s ranch, he rides toward the place where Luke is stationed. A startled Luke awakens, leaps up and fires at Cole rather than shooting in the air. Without a second thought, Cole plugs Luke. Luke commits suicide because he has been gut shot and feels that he cannot survive such a painful wound. Cole takes Luke’s body to the MacDonald ranch. Joey MacDonald (Michele Carey of “Dirty Dingus Magee”) vows to kill Cole. She lays in ambush and wounds him. Doc Miller refuses to extract the slug because it lies too close to Cole’s spine and he fears that he would do more damage. He advises Cole to find “one of them new-fangled squirts” to remove it, “but don’t wait too long to do it.” Cole rides off to the border for a job and winds up in a border town where he runs into scar-faced killer Nelse McLeod (Christopher George of “The Rat Patrol”) and his gunmen. McLeod and his gunmen are heading for El Dorado to take the same job with Bart Jason that Cole turned down. Another young drifter, Alan Bourdillon Traherne(James Caan of “Redline 7000”) enter the cantina, picks a fight with a McLeod gunman, and kills him with a knife in a draw.
After Cole prevents Trehearne, whose nicknamed ‘Mississippi,’ from walking into an ambush by McLeod’s vengeful gunmen, the younger man becomes his sidekick. Cole advises Mississippi to get rid of his oddball hat and get a gun. Mississippi asks Cole to teach him how to shoot, but Mississippi is such a bad shot that Cole gets him a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun with the stock cut down to a plow-handle. Initially, Cole doesn’t want anything to do with Mississippi, but Mississippi knows that Cole is heading back to El Dorado. It seems that Sheriff J.P. Harrah tangled “with a wandering petticoat” and lost. Since his ill-fated romance, Harrah has retreated into a whiskey bottle and Cole fears that Harrah will prove easy prey for McLeod. When they reach El Dorado, Maudie (Charlene Holt of “Redline 7000”) brings Cole up to speed on the situation. Cole and Harrah tangle in the jail when Cole tries to awaken the drunken Harrah. Mississippi whips together a concoction to sober up Harrah and an old frontier scout Bull (seasoned character actor Arthur Hunnicutt of “The Big Sky”) helps him acquire the ingredients.
Jason’s men wound another MacDonald and Harrah takes Jason prisoner while McLeod lays siege to the jail. Cole’s Achilles heel gunshot wound strikes him at an inopportune time and McLeod takes him hostage and exchanges Cole for Jason. The heroes, both crippled from gunshot wounds, surprise McLeod and Joe mows down Jason in a savage shoot’em up. Christopher George doesn’t get much screen time but he makes a memorable villain. Hunnicutt steals the show with his homespun humor. The byplay between Wayne and Mitchum is hilarious, especially when Wayne awakens Mitchum in the jail scenes. Mitchum is quite good playing a drunk and he shares a scene in the saloon showdown with his brother.
“Bad Seed” lenser Harold Rosson gives “El Dorado” a warm, leathery look that adds atmosphere to the action. The shot where McLeod’s henchman plunges off a church belfry and falls into the camera is terrific! “Batman” composer Nelson Riddle furnishes this western with a lively jazz type orchestral score. Veteran characters Jim Davis of “Dallas” and Don Collier of “The High Chaparral” appear in supporting roles. “El Dorado” ranks as a more entertaining western that “Rio Bravo,” but “Rio Bravo” is justly considered more classical, if for nothing than he served as the inspiration for Hawks and Wayne to reteam with Brackett handling the screenplay. Hawks and Brackett dust off another scene for some of the more violent encounters in “El Dorado.” After Mississippi shoots a McLeod man, two of McLeod’s gunmen, Milt (Robert Donner) and Pedro lay outside to bushwhack Mississippi. Cole keeps Mississippi from being shot. Three-quarters to the way into the story, Cole and Mississippi chase a villain in to saloon and find Milt and Pedro waiting for them in front of a doorway. Cole pumps Milt full with three slugs before the reluctant villain agrees to exit by the rear door, only to be shot and killed by assassins waiting outside. Hawks and Brackett pulled this gag in the Humphrey Bogart film noir thriller “The Big Sleep.” The scene where a hung0ver Harrah pursues a wounded gunman into the saloon is similar to a “Rio Bravo” confrontation where Dude (Dean Martin) pursued a wounded killer into a saloon. The scene where James Caan’s knife-throwing sidekick pronounces his name for the benefit of a fuzzy-headed Harrah is side-splitting stuff.
“El Dorado” is worth seeing several times over.
Hawks cast Robert Mitchum as the drunken that Dean Martin had played in “Rio Bravo.” Arthur Hunnicutt takes over for Walter Brennan, while James Caan substitutes for Ricky Nelson in a different role. Hawks changed Caan’s supporting role from Nelson’s accurate shooting gunslinger to the worst shot on the frontier. As in “Rio Bravo,” the heroes hole up in a jail with a prisoner and await the arrival of the territorial lawman while the villain’s henchmen keep them bottled up in town. This time, however, John Wayne plays a drifting gunfighter with an Achilles heel, while Mitchum wears the sheriff’s badge. Hawks and Brackett whittled down the female participation to an older woman, Charlene Holt, who walks in from time to time, but never intrudes on the action like Angie Dickinson did in “Rio Bravo.” Meanwhile, a young slip of a girl, cute Michele Carey, has a somewhat bigger part as a hot-headed babe who wounds our hero and later guns down the chief villain. Nevertheless, “El Dorado” is an immensely charismatic western with clever dialogue, interesting characters, and hilarious humor. Attention deficient audiences may complain this 126 minute melodrama drags and sags when it should raise hell and holler.
Hawks and Brackett provide the ground work for the plot in the opening scene when Sheriff J.P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum of “Cape Fear”) confronts Cole Thornton (John Wayne of “Hatari”) in the washroom of a local saloon. Cole has come to El Dorado to hire his gun out to ranch owner Bart Jason (Edward Asner of “The Satan Bug”), but Harrah dissuades him from taking the job. Harrah explains that Jason is a greedy rancher who wants to expand his spread, but he needs water. Incidentally, the Bart Jason character resembles Hawks’ “Rio Lobo” villain Ketchum in that Jason showed up in El Dorado with a lot of money when everybody else in Texas was dead broke. Harrah elaborates that Jason wants to run the cattle rancher Kevin MacDonald (R. G. Armstrong of “Ride the High Country”) out of the country because he cannot force MacDonald to sell out to him. Cole decides to accommodate Harrah and pull out. He rides out to Jason’s ranch and refuses to hire out to him. Meantime, Doc Miller (Paul Fix) has sent warning out to MacDonald that Cole Thornton is on Jason’s payroll. MacDonald and his men scatter and he leaves his youngest son Luke (Johnny Crawford of “The Rifleman”) to serve as a look-out and fire in the air if he should see Thornton.
After Cole leaves Jason’s ranch, he rides toward the place where Luke is stationed. A startled Luke awakens, leaps up and fires at Cole rather than shooting in the air. Without a second thought, Cole plugs Luke. Luke commits suicide because he has been gut shot and feels that he cannot survive such a painful wound. Cole takes Luke’s body to the MacDonald ranch. Joey MacDonald (Michele Carey of “Dirty Dingus Magee”) vows to kill Cole. She lays in ambush and wounds him. Doc Miller refuses to extract the slug because it lies too close to Cole’s spine and he fears that he would do more damage. He advises Cole to find “one of them new-fangled squirts” to remove it, “but don’t wait too long to do it.” Cole rides off to the border for a job and winds up in a border town where he runs into scar-faced killer Nelse McLeod (Christopher George of “The Rat Patrol”) and his gunmen. McLeod and his gunmen are heading for El Dorado to take the same job with Bart Jason that Cole turned down. Another young drifter, Alan Bourdillon Traherne(James Caan of “Redline 7000”) enter the cantina, picks a fight with a McLeod gunman, and kills him with a knife in a draw.
After Cole prevents Trehearne, whose nicknamed ‘Mississippi,’ from walking into an ambush by McLeod’s vengeful gunmen, the younger man becomes his sidekick. Cole advises Mississippi to get rid of his oddball hat and get a gun. Mississippi asks Cole to teach him how to shoot, but Mississippi is such a bad shot that Cole gets him a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun with the stock cut down to a plow-handle. Initially, Cole doesn’t want anything to do with Mississippi, but Mississippi knows that Cole is heading back to El Dorado. It seems that Sheriff J.P. Harrah tangled “with a wandering petticoat” and lost. Since his ill-fated romance, Harrah has retreated into a whiskey bottle and Cole fears that Harrah will prove easy prey for McLeod. When they reach El Dorado, Maudie (Charlene Holt of “Redline 7000”) brings Cole up to speed on the situation. Cole and Harrah tangle in the jail when Cole tries to awaken the drunken Harrah. Mississippi whips together a concoction to sober up Harrah and an old frontier scout Bull (seasoned character actor Arthur Hunnicutt of “The Big Sky”) helps him acquire the ingredients.
Jason’s men wound another MacDonald and Harrah takes Jason prisoner while McLeod lays siege to the jail. Cole’s Achilles heel gunshot wound strikes him at an inopportune time and McLeod takes him hostage and exchanges Cole for Jason. The heroes, both crippled from gunshot wounds, surprise McLeod and Joe mows down Jason in a savage shoot’em up. Christopher George doesn’t get much screen time but he makes a memorable villain. Hunnicutt steals the show with his homespun humor. The byplay between Wayne and Mitchum is hilarious, especially when Wayne awakens Mitchum in the jail scenes. Mitchum is quite good playing a drunk and he shares a scene in the saloon showdown with his brother.
“Bad Seed” lenser Harold Rosson gives “El Dorado” a warm, leathery look that adds atmosphere to the action. The shot where McLeod’s henchman plunges off a church belfry and falls into the camera is terrific! “Batman” composer Nelson Riddle furnishes this western with a lively jazz type orchestral score. Veteran characters Jim Davis of “Dallas” and Don Collier of “The High Chaparral” appear in supporting roles. “El Dorado” ranks as a more entertaining western that “Rio Bravo,” but “Rio Bravo” is justly considered more classical, if for nothing than he served as the inspiration for Hawks and Wayne to reteam with Brackett handling the screenplay. Hawks and Brackett dust off another scene for some of the more violent encounters in “El Dorado.” After Mississippi shoots a McLeod man, two of McLeod’s gunmen, Milt (Robert Donner) and Pedro lay outside to bushwhack Mississippi. Cole keeps Mississippi from being shot. Three-quarters to the way into the story, Cole and Mississippi chase a villain in to saloon and find Milt and Pedro waiting for them in front of a doorway. Cole pumps Milt full with three slugs before the reluctant villain agrees to exit by the rear door, only to be shot and killed by assassins waiting outside. Hawks and Brackett pulled this gag in the Humphrey Bogart film noir thriller “The Big Sleep.” The scene where a hung0ver Harrah pursues a wounded gunman into the saloon is similar to a “Rio Bravo” confrontation where Dude (Dean Martin) pursued a wounded killer into a saloon. The scene where James Caan’s knife-throwing sidekick pronounces his name for the benefit of a fuzzy-headed Harrah is side-splitting stuff.
“El Dorado” is worth seeing several times over.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
FILM REVIEW OF ''WALKING TALL: THE PAYBACK" (2007)
Although Sony Studios designated it as a sequel to director Kevin Bray’s 2004 theatrical feature “Walking Tall” with Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson, “The Confidence Man” director Tripp Reed’s “Walking Tall: The Payback” (2007) with Kevin Sorbo qualifies as only an ‘in name’ sequel.
Sorbo plays a former U.S. Marine, Nick Prescott, who trains horses for living, while the Rock played Chris Vaughn. Furthermore, “Walking Tall” took place in Kitsap County, Washington, whereas “Walking Tall: The Payback” occurs in Boone County, Texas, not far from Dallas. Sorbo’s Nick totes around a big stick once for a couple of the minutes in the middle of the movie. Instead, he prefers a riot shotgun with a lever action grip to a big stick. Indeed, he uses a pool cue in the bar fight, but he never wields a club either like the Rock or much earlier as Joe Don Baker and Bo Svenson did in the previous theatrical releases.
On the other hand, “Walking Tall: The Payback” (* out of ****)explores corrupt in a small town. The screenplay by Steven Seagal collaborator Joe Halpin and newcomer Brian Strasmann borrows from Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West,” because the primary villain, Harvey Morris (A.J. Buckley) is trying to buy up land before a new highway is built through the town, and he isn’t particular about how he acquires the real estate. He walks into a hardware store with his henchmen and they smash up the owner’s arm and promise him more rough stuff if he doesn’t bow to their wishes. The opening scene shows one of Harvey’s thugs pumping gas out of the storage tank when the owner appears with gun in hand and threatens to kill the henchmen. They tangle, the henchman shoots him and the gas station owner lives long enough to touch off an explosion that wipes out everything. Later, the villains assault a city councilman on his tractor in his crop field and torch the tractor. When a waitress warns our heroes that the villains intend to force the city council to appoint an interim sheriff, the villains close in on her trailer and gang rape her. “This will put a smile on your face,” they chuckle as they bend her own her sofa and sodomize her. Despite its’ R-rating, the filmmakers shy away from nudity of any kind. The same is true for the violence. You see little blood and nobody is squibbed so that bloody explosions erupt when they are shot or wounded.
Despite Kevin Sorbo’s brawny presence, A.J. Buckley’s slimy villain, and its solid production values, “Walking Tall: The Payback” is a derivative, far-fetched, superficial thriller with no surprises except its narrative lack of closure. The heroes take the primary villains to task, but they ignore the larger villains that lurk in Dallas and churn up most of the conflict between the hero and the villains. One might think that the producers would have taken up where “Walking Tall: The Payback” left off in the sequel “Walking Tall: Lone Justice,” but Andrew Stevens and director Tripp Reed explore other areas. “Walking Tall: Lone Justice” updates the main characters from the first one without probing into the treacherous sidewinders that provided support to the villains. There is one good bar fight early on in “Walking Tall: The Payback” that passes muster, and Kevin Sorbo’s hero uses a horse to good advantage in the final showdown, but this movie lacks clout. Tripp doesn’t do anything revolutionary, and the best that can be said about “Walking Tall: The Payback” is that it clocks in at 88 minutes. Some of the dialogue is catchy. For example, the villain confronts the hero: "There can only be one big dog, everybody else, they just sniff" while the hero challenges the villain: "Are you all bark and no bite?”
Our hero, Nick Prescott, has a low opinion of the law and the justice system. We learn that his wife died when an inebriated driver ran into her and killed her. Says Nick, “Justice is about two things: power and money. With them you can just about get away with anything.” Nick and his father Sheriff Charlie Prescott haven’t seen each other since his wife’s death because Nick felt that his father didn’t press the case hard enough. The drunk driver got off with a fine and community service. According to Nick, “the system is broken.” He shrugs when his father tells him that he going to see the FBI in Dallas to find a way to bring down Harvey Morris and his Dixie mafia. “You really think that you can make a difference?”
Later, Harvey and his henchmen catch Charlie on the highway, wreck his car, flip it and kill him. At the funeral, Harvey drinks a beer from afar and watches the ceremony. This aggravates Nick so much so that his father’s deputy Hap catches Nick taking a shotgun from the rifle rack. Hap tosses him a badge and assures him that as a deputy he has more leeway. Nick starts his own campaign against Harvey. A few days later, the FBI agent, who told Charlie that the felons had not broken any Federal laws, arrives and looks into matters. It seems that Charlie took a revolver that he recovered from the gas station after it blew up and gave it to Detective Pete Michaels of the Dallas PD to run a ballistics test on it. The higher powers behind Harvey in Dallas bribe Pete to send the report to Harvey and this is what prompts Harvey to kill Charlie.
“Walking Tall: The Payback” is a synthetic, redneck thriller with enough action to keep you watching while you shake your head in disbelief at the audacious things that the citizens let the villains get away with in this lackluster 94 minute melodrama. Women should be forewarned that Kevin Sorbo keeps his clothes on the entire time.
Sorbo plays a former U.S. Marine, Nick Prescott, who trains horses for living, while the Rock played Chris Vaughn. Furthermore, “Walking Tall” took place in Kitsap County, Washington, whereas “Walking Tall: The Payback” occurs in Boone County, Texas, not far from Dallas. Sorbo’s Nick totes around a big stick once for a couple of the minutes in the middle of the movie. Instead, he prefers a riot shotgun with a lever action grip to a big stick. Indeed, he uses a pool cue in the bar fight, but he never wields a club either like the Rock or much earlier as Joe Don Baker and Bo Svenson did in the previous theatrical releases.
On the other hand, “Walking Tall: The Payback” (* out of ****)explores corrupt in a small town. The screenplay by Steven Seagal collaborator Joe Halpin and newcomer Brian Strasmann borrows from Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West,” because the primary villain, Harvey Morris (A.J. Buckley) is trying to buy up land before a new highway is built through the town, and he isn’t particular about how he acquires the real estate. He walks into a hardware store with his henchmen and they smash up the owner’s arm and promise him more rough stuff if he doesn’t bow to their wishes. The opening scene shows one of Harvey’s thugs pumping gas out of the storage tank when the owner appears with gun in hand and threatens to kill the henchmen. They tangle, the henchman shoots him and the gas station owner lives long enough to touch off an explosion that wipes out everything. Later, the villains assault a city councilman on his tractor in his crop field and torch the tractor. When a waitress warns our heroes that the villains intend to force the city council to appoint an interim sheriff, the villains close in on her trailer and gang rape her. “This will put a smile on your face,” they chuckle as they bend her own her sofa and sodomize her. Despite its’ R-rating, the filmmakers shy away from nudity of any kind. The same is true for the violence. You see little blood and nobody is squibbed so that bloody explosions erupt when they are shot or wounded.
Despite Kevin Sorbo’s brawny presence, A.J. Buckley’s slimy villain, and its solid production values, “Walking Tall: The Payback” is a derivative, far-fetched, superficial thriller with no surprises except its narrative lack of closure. The heroes take the primary villains to task, but they ignore the larger villains that lurk in Dallas and churn up most of the conflict between the hero and the villains. One might think that the producers would have taken up where “Walking Tall: The Payback” left off in the sequel “Walking Tall: Lone Justice,” but Andrew Stevens and director Tripp Reed explore other areas. “Walking Tall: Lone Justice” updates the main characters from the first one without probing into the treacherous sidewinders that provided support to the villains. There is one good bar fight early on in “Walking Tall: The Payback” that passes muster, and Kevin Sorbo’s hero uses a horse to good advantage in the final showdown, but this movie lacks clout. Tripp doesn’t do anything revolutionary, and the best that can be said about “Walking Tall: The Payback” is that it clocks in at 88 minutes. Some of the dialogue is catchy. For example, the villain confronts the hero: "There can only be one big dog, everybody else, they just sniff" while the hero challenges the villain: "Are you all bark and no bite?”
Our hero, Nick Prescott, has a low opinion of the law and the justice system. We learn that his wife died when an inebriated driver ran into her and killed her. Says Nick, “Justice is about two things: power and money. With them you can just about get away with anything.” Nick and his father Sheriff Charlie Prescott haven’t seen each other since his wife’s death because Nick felt that his father didn’t press the case hard enough. The drunk driver got off with a fine and community service. According to Nick, “the system is broken.” He shrugs when his father tells him that he going to see the FBI in Dallas to find a way to bring down Harvey Morris and his Dixie mafia. “You really think that you can make a difference?”
Later, Harvey and his henchmen catch Charlie on the highway, wreck his car, flip it and kill him. At the funeral, Harvey drinks a beer from afar and watches the ceremony. This aggravates Nick so much so that his father’s deputy Hap catches Nick taking a shotgun from the rifle rack. Hap tosses him a badge and assures him that as a deputy he has more leeway. Nick starts his own campaign against Harvey. A few days later, the FBI agent, who told Charlie that the felons had not broken any Federal laws, arrives and looks into matters. It seems that Charlie took a revolver that he recovered from the gas station after it blew up and gave it to Detective Pete Michaels of the Dallas PD to run a ballistics test on it. The higher powers behind Harvey in Dallas bribe Pete to send the report to Harvey and this is what prompts Harvey to kill Charlie.
“Walking Tall: The Payback” is a synthetic, redneck thriller with enough action to keep you watching while you shake your head in disbelief at the audacious things that the citizens let the villains get away with in this lackluster 94 minute melodrama. Women should be forewarned that Kevin Sorbo keeps his clothes on the entire time.
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