Tag Archives: Action

Movie Night: Stop or my Mom Will Shoot

Year: 1992

Director: Roger Spottiswoode

Production Company: Northern Lights Entertainment

Leads: Sylvester Stallone, Estelle Getty

stop-or-my-mom-will-shootThis was a strange movie, and I have a feeling it was an attempt to capitalize on Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s foray into family comedies (e.g. Twins). Sylvester Stallone should not do family comedy.

Sylvester is a New York cop in L.A. with everything going for him…until one day his mother decides to visit. Sly obviously has mother issues, because he spends the first twenty minutes of the movie trying to call her – to tell her not to come.

It turns out he can’t stop her. How could he? She’s a New York jew (yes, that’s right; Sylvester Stallone, the Italian Stallion, is playing a jew). She arrives, and of course all sorts of chaos ensues. Never mind that she tries to stick her nose into his love life (with his superior on the force, no less), she also vacuums at three in the morning, makes breakfast for twenty, and washes his gun.

It turns out this is an important plot point, because she tries to make it up to him by buying semi-automatic weapons for him from a truck in a back alley. Unsurprisingly, she ends up witnessing a drive-by shooting, and becomes pivotal in tracking down arms smugglers. She, of course, won’t say anything until her son is put back on the case.

Eventually Sly and his mother begin to reconcile, and when the bad guys capture her, it’s time for him to burst in, guns a-blazing. Sort of. The showdown of the movie involves Sly on the ground incapacitated, and his mother blowing away the bad guy with a gun larger than her head. Oh, and he finally makes it with the captain, and they get married. Or something.

The absolute honest truth is that this movie didn’t have a lot going for it. It’s a shame; Sylvester Stallone is an under-rated actor, and Estelle Getty was reasonably humorous. The problem is that the screenwriters didn’t have the guts to push beyond the comfort zone of stereotypes, clichés and tired one-liners. There weren’t any really bad moments in the movie…there just weren’t any really good ones, either. The cast is entirely predictable; the sexy love interest, the overbearing mother, the over-manly protagonist who can’t express his true feelings, the peer who’s got it out for the good guy, the bad guy bent on smuggling those weapons and getting away with it too, if it weren’t for that pesky mother.

I can’t say it felt like a waste of a movie night, but there just wasn’t anything special about it. Oh well. Better luck next time, Sly.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

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Movie Night: Project A

Year: 1983

Director: Jackie Chan

Production Company: Authority Films

Leads: Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo

ProjectAOne thing Netflix does have a lot of is old Jackie Chan movies. I have to be careful to avoid the R-rated ones with Little Satis (it’s usually just for Chris Tucker‘s foul mouth), but there are plenty that are pretty much just harmless fun. A particular joy are those from the eighties before he moved to Hollywood, because some of them just don’t make any sense. We watched The Accidental Spy once (fair enough, that one’s from 2001), which is about a salesman who just happens to be a karate master. Fair enough.

At least in Project A Jackie Chan is an ex-cop turned sailor, so the martial arts is a little more explainable…maybe? Anyway, long story short, pirates are attacking the Chinese navy in Hong Kong, and despite all their efforts, they always seem to be one step ahead of the navy’s plans. The admiral, a kindly old man, is discharged, the ships abandoned, and naturally all the sailors become police officers. It turns out, however, that it was the police who were giving the information to the pirates in the first place. With the help of a shadowy, overweight kung-fu-chopping madman friend and a haughty police officer who nonetheless has his heart in the right place, our hero manages to fool the cops, bust an arms trade with the pirates, sneak into their island cove, duke it out with the super-badass pirate bad guy and escape just before it all blows to hell.

Frankly there isn’t a whole lot to be considered here. The whole thing feels a little bit like a Chinese James Bond film with martial arts. IMDB labels it as a “costume drama”, and the costumes certainly couldn’t be more dramatic. The pirates are wonderfully stereotyped, complete with swords and bare chests and pantaloons and drooping pencil mustaches:

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All in all, the main reason to watch this movie – the main reason to watch any Jackie Chan movie – is for the stunts, and of those there are numerous and spectacular examples. The cycling stunts through the back alleys of Hong Kong are splendid, and when Jackie Chan manages to climb to the top of a forty-foot flagpole, jump onto a roof and crash through a loft window, all with his hands manacled, my heart did actually do a little leap. Every fight scene is beautifully choreographed, which is simply a pleasure to watch. There is humor, but often the true laughs are at the attempts to deliberately be funny – the crudeness of the slapstick is itself amusing (for example, when Chan’s bicycle seat falls off without his knowing, and he sits down on the bare pole).

There was one thing about the film that stuck out to me, and it was something that I personally was very appreciative of. Unlike many of his more modern films (and unlike most films these days), the on-location filming in the streets and back alleys of Hong Kong lends a wonderful authenticity that is so often missing these days. No spectacular sets, no jumping out of airplanes or off skyscrapers; the story is a simpler one, and so the locations are simpler. It makes one realize that huge sets are very impressive and all, but it can actually take away from what you’re supposed to be impressed by: the actors, and the action.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Movie Night: The Avengers

Year: 2012

Director: Joss Whedon

Production Company: Marvel Studios

Leads: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans

avengers-assemble-poster-500x742Well, well, well. Here is a movie both Little Satis and I have been dying to watch for I don’t know how long, and finally decided it was just time to get it out of the way.

I should start by saying that I am a fan of good superhero movies; that is to say, movies that both respect the style and material of the original comic book, while at the same time humanizing the characters by giving them flaws deep enough to destroy themselves, never mind the bad guys. In essence: The Crow = good; Batman & Robin = bad.

One of the most successful of these in recent years has been, of course, Chris Nolan‘s Batman trilogy (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight & The Dark Knight Rises). We are introduced to a Bruce Wayne who fights not for a noble cause but for revenge; a man who has no desire to continue his crusade against Gotham’s underbelly other than for his own self-flagellation, driven by hate and guilt.

But this is the DC Comics universe. Responsible for the two most formidable superheroes ever created – Superman and Batman – Marvel ought to be the underdog, always caught in the shadow of their larger-than-life siblings.

But not so. Other than the recent Batman films, D.C.’s output has been mediocre, at best; meanwhile, Marvel Studios has had nearly incessant success over the past decade with the Blade trilogy, the insanely popular X-Men franchise, Iron Man and Captain America: The First Avenger (I’ll let them off for the first Hulk and Fantastic Four). More than this, though, they’ve carefully built an entire universe of co-existing and overlapping story lines, threading the continuity between Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America in so deft a way that there was really nowhere left to go but: The Avengers.

Though obviously distorted by necessity for Hollywood, The Avengers retains a remarkable affinity for the comic book origins; though many of the characters are different, Iron Man/Tony Stark and Captain America/Steve Rogers are core members of the group, and this is evidenced in the film by the focus of drama on these two (and indeed the conflict that arises between them). Even the story is retained: demigod Loki comes to earth seeking revenge on his brother, Thor. Loki’s power of illusion and manipulation causes near-fatal rifts between the fledgeling group’s members, until they realize that they can only defeat Loki together.

To be perfectly honest, there’s not a lot else you need to know about this movie. In the past, Marvel Studios has done a good job of digging deep into their characters’ history and bringing out the ‘person’ behind the superhero, something that is particularly noticeable in the X-Men films as well as Captain America. While there is an attempt to retain this in The Avengers, the very fact of having an ensemble cast of superheroes dooms this from the beginning: it would be nearly impossible to focus equally on six different characters and still have room for self-reflection.

Not that it matters. Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about The Avengers is that, frankly, it doesn’t try to pretend to be anything other than a mindless, visually thrilling romp of destruction. And at this, it is very successful. Despite the knowledge that at least half of what’s on screen at any given moment was created by ILM, the visuals are nonetheless stunning, and – astonishing, really, in an era of CGI-anything – there are a few moments that are quite literally jaw-dropping, including the ridiculous aircraft carrier scene (if you’ve seen it, you know what I mean).

This is not an intellectual movie. In fact, it doesn’t even advance the stories of any of the individual heroes (something Kurt Vonnegut would understand), and no one leaves any different to how they entered. It’s basically good guys kick bad-guy ass. The genius of this movie is that it works anyway; having come to know the characters so intimately through their previous filmic incarnations, it’s actually kind of relaxing to sit back and watch them blow shit up.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆