Freakin’ robots, man.

3) The Incredibles and Frozone vs Omnidroid

The Fighters:

• The Incredibles: Bob/Mr. Incredible, Helen/Elastigirl, Dash and Violet. An ersatz Fantastic Four family that’s finally embraced their destiny as a crime-fighting team– an old job for the parents and a new one for the kids.
• Lucius Best aka Frozone, a close friend of the Parr family (he was best man at their wedding) and another superhero. Although retired and adjusted relatively well to civilian life, he’s been going on occasional covert vigilante outings with Bob, and is doesn’t hesitate to spring back into action when he sees the Omnidroid wreaking havoc in the city– there’s a very funny segment where he argues with his wife about where she put his old superhero gear.
  • Armed with: Roughly analogous to Marvel’s Iceman, Frozone’s powers are related to ice and cold. He can instantly freeze nearby water or even moisture straight out of the air, and failing that can use the moisture in his own body. The boots on his super suit can transform instantly into a sort of high-tech snowboard. Voiced by Samuel L Jackson, who’s clearly having fun.
• Omnidroid version 10.0, the biggest & baddest one yet.
  • Armed with: In addition to being the size of a large house, this Omnidroid has SIX weaponized tentacles (the claws of which can detach or be manually launched) and a swiveling laser cannon near its sensor.

The Setup: The end-stage of Syndrome’s plan with the perfected Omnidroid is to launch and then re-drop it from orbit into a populated area so that people will assume it’s an alien craft, then eventually have it attack everything in sight– it’s kind of the inverse of the plot of The Iron Giant, come to think of it. Syndrome will then show up and “defeat” his creation, passing himself off as a new superhero. It goes off pretty well at first, but the robot has actually grown sentient enough to rebel against Syndrome, and before knocking him out was able to separate the villain from the wrist-gauntlet he’d been using to control Omnidroid. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Syndrome, the Incredibles have escaped from captivity and made their way to the site of Omnidroid’s debut.

There’s a really beautiful moment between Bob & Helen, where the big guy shows his vulnerable side as he reluctantly reveals that he’s “not strong enough” to face the very idea of losing his family. Unfortunately this nice family discussion is interrupted by the arrival of a giant murder-bot. I hate when that happens.

What follows is something superhero fans had been waiting to see actualized on the big screen for decades: a team of superheroes fighting against an honest-to-gosh giant robot attacking the city. In 2004, that was a revelation. Heck, it hasn’t been re-attempted since, though Joss Whedon deserves credit for having a team of superheroes fight off an alien armada that had been attacking the city, even if it’s not fair to the aliens because they didn’t have a Hulk.

The Fight: The initial onslaught from Omnidroid scatters the family and leaves the kids too frazzled to react properly. Violet gets her wits about her in time to save herself and Dash from the robot with a shield. She can withstand several blows from the machine’s limbs, but the force of it dropping its entire body on the shield is too much for her, breaking the force field. Mr. Incredible then stops the robot from crushing the both of them by bench-pressing it with all four limbs, which gets him seized and thrown through a nearby office building. He responds by jumping out and knocking Omnidroid down with a flying tackle. He’s helped by the arrival of Frozone, whose ice attacks against the machine’s joints don’t seem to do more than annoy it.

When Bob finds and realizes the importance of Syndrome’s remote, the tenor of the scene changes. Omnidroid does everything it can to keep the Incredibles from holding on to and using the remote (before the fight ends, random button-mashing will knock off another whole limb from the robot, and launch it several hundred feet in the air), which necessitates its changing hands a lot. In a clever callback to an earlier scene which combined their respective powers (a superhero twist on the typical “Dad tossing the football” thing), Bob tells his son to “go long” and throws the remote so far only a speedster like Dash could catch it. Helen– seizing a manhole cover and bending her arm around a light pole to create enough momentum to launch it, a rather awesome move– knocks out Omnidroid’s cannon, which is kind of too bad because it was cool as heck to watch Dash dodge all those laser blasts.

pew pew pew

The robot is still dangerous enough even with its offensive capacity diminished and pursues Dash onto a body of water, but fortunately Frozone is there to skate to Dash’s rescue, creating ice walkways for them to slide around on. There’s another fun bit where Frozone insta-freezes a giant splash from Omnidroid to cushion everyone’s fall.

We learn that the machine is still projectile-capable when it launches a claw at Robert to keep him from seizing the remote, though the loss of that claw causes the robot to stumble on one of Lucius’ ice slicks. An invisible Violet finally seizes the remote, and that, combined with Bob’s recollection that the robot’s shell is not strong enough to withstand blows from its own limbs, leads to the family launching the forgotten claw straight at Omnidroid’s metal heart, ripping its power source right out. Thunk.

Really great work is done here. The city setting is a change of scenery, since the majority of the film’s action having been on varying parts of Nomanisan. As with the previous dynamite sequence, everybody gets at least a thing or two to contribute, scoring lots of little victories against Omnidroid while never undercutting just how nigh-unstoppable and relentless it is. Giacchino’s jazzy music is as fun as ever.

As good as the staging is, I think there might be one or two “last minute saves” too many in this scene– a temptation that’s hard to resist in scenes with multiple protagonists moving in & out of the action. And as noted, the nature of the scene changes greatly when the remote is introduced: away from being a “fight” to more of a chase/defensive/keep-away sequence. After that, aside from Helen’s sweet move taking out the blaster, there’s not much in the way of back & forth with Omnidroid, just a lot of looking for an opportunity to exploit its weak point with one fatal blow. Still, it’s superheroes vs a giant robot attacking the city– how much can you really quibble with that?

Grade: A-

Recommended Links: It appears that Brad Bird felt a disturbance in the Force, because while I was writing the drafts of these posts he happened to mention that he might get to work on making an Incredibles sequel after all. I rather think we should already have had like one or two of those already, but I won’t complain.

Coming Attractions: I’ve been too easy on myself for a while now, what with these positive examples and all. For the next series my disappointment will be…

Whoa 2.0.

This movie was released just a little over ten years ago, to the delight of some, the disappointment of others, and the confusion of many. I won’t get too deep into my feelings on the film overall, at least not at first, because I still don’t quite know what to think about it. It presents a lot of ideas that are really fascinating or just plain neat, such as the way physical keys act as a way to access “back doors” within the computer world. It’s so stylistically overblown and needlessly convoluted that at times I half-suspect it’s deliberately satirizing itself/messing with its audience*. Similarly, depending on my mood I can’t tell if all the sequels’ endless philosophical blather is the filmmakers going over my head or or up their own butts, though I usually lean towards the latter. Still, the attempt is… admirable.

[*I more than half-suspect the third movie does so. When the Merovingian ominously tells the heroes early on that he'll help them only if they provide him with "the eyes of the Oracle," Trinity snaps and declares "we don't have TIME for stupid fetch-quest crap like in the last movie!" in almost as many words.]

Whatever The Matrix Reloaded is, it is quite definitely, for good and for ill, not The Matrix. The film’s fight scenes, though largely technically well-done and reasonably entertaining, provide one very interesting metric in this regard. Let’s get to it.

1) Trinity vs Unfortunate Security Guards

The Fighters:

• Trinity, master kung fu hacker and girlfriend of the digital messiah. Played by Carrie-Ann Moss.
  • Armed with: I do believe she’s packing some serious guns, but here she sticks with using her motorcycle helmet to devastating effect. Come to think of it, the motorcycle itself gets rather weaponized, too.
• Security guards, five of them. A bunch of meatheads in the wrong place on the wrong shift. Played by stunt men.
  • Armed with: Batons.

The Setup: This fight and Trinity’s bad encounter with an Agent that follows are revealed to be part of a prophetic dream that Neo’s having, the meaning of which won’t be clear until later. But even though we don’t know the context, it’s clear enough that Trinity is storming whatever building this chumps are guarding, just as the opening action scene in the first movie made it clear that she was cornered and running from dangerous forces.

The Fight: Trinity makes a strong opening move by literally dropping in on her motorcycle from atop a neighboring building. The bike itself crashes and makes quite a fireball out of the guard shack, but of course not before our ninja gal had time to jump off and land in a self-consciously Super Cool pose in front of the explosion:

Filmed in super slow-motion, just in case you somehow missed how COOL it was.

The surviving guards come at Trinity in a rush, but she makes short work of them, using a combination of her limbs and her headgear. She does pull off a few neat moves, the first being a slow motion high flip (during which she kicks a guy while upside down), and the second being the “scorpion kick” (so called because she leans her torso so far forward her kicking loops around the back way like a scorpion’s tail) she uses as her finisher.

Curiously, she only seems to hit each guy about once or twice each, and once they go down they stay down. Paying close attention to the fight you’re actually surprised to see how quickly it’s over, and in more of a “wait, she already beat them all?” sense than a “wow, look how quick she beat them!” one. The impacts aren’t sold like they should be. This will be a recurring theme for this film.

Speaking of recurrence, this sequence is, as alluded to above, quite clearly intended to invite comparison to the first Matrix. They both open with a brief but attention-grabbing action sequence starring Trinity in a mysterious situation, though as noted here her role is offensive rather than defensive. Here, though, it just doesn’t carry the same weight; no one seeing this movie is a stranger to this world and we’ve seen what people like Trinity can do.

Still, it’s not bad as whistle-whetters go. The pace will pick up from here, but looking back it’s easy to see the writing on the wall for how things are going to be different.

Grade: B-

Recommended Links: To be fair, here’s a thoughtful piece defending what’s good about the Matrix sequels.

Coming Attractions: Neo knows even MORE kung fu!

And a new tailor!

“Brooks Brothers Team… ATTACK!”

2) Neo vs Agents

The Fighters:

• Neo, hero of the first film and savior of the human race finally having claimed his destiny… or so he thinks. Played by Keanu Reeves.
  • Armed with: Neo’s powers as the anagrammatical “One” grant him superior strength, speed, durability, reaction time, etc. That’s just counting what he uses in this fight and not getting into his powers of flight, limited telekinesis, “code vision” etc. More on that in a moment.
• Agent Johnson, Agent Thompson and Agent Jackson. The three new Agents (replacing the first film’s Smith, Jones and Brown) are briefly recognized by Neo as “upgrades” to the previous model, presumably as a handwave explanation for why it’s not even MORE easy for him to beat them. I once read a Matrix wiki editor’s explanation that the upgraded Agent model traded advanced power for diminished intelligence/situational awareness, but I suspect that’s fanwankery because I doubt the machine overlords operate on a system of limited “skill point” distribution like in a tabletop RPG. Anyway, they *are* all noticeably taller. Played by Daniel Bernhardt, Matt McColm and David Kilde.
  • Armed with: Presumably they have the standard-issue Agent handguns, but they don’t use them. After all, Neo can stop bullets… and only bullets. So punching & kicking would still work, in theory.

This leads into one of the main gripes I (and few others, it seems) have with the Matrix sequels: the furious backpedaling the Wachowskis did about what being “The One” means. At the end of the first movie, Neo pulls off several seemingly impossible feats as part of assuming his destiny and completely transgressing the boundaries of his digital prison: he stops bullets because he “knows” they’re not real, he effortlessly parries all of Smith’s blows because he can bypass all the Matrix’s limitations on speed, and he flies away at the end because the world’s gravity has no meaning to him.

All those things he did were mere manifestations of his overall cyber-deity status, but the sequels posit that The One actually has a very narrow power set, limited mostly to what we saw him do at the end of The Matrix. Now we “learn” that Neo stopped bullets, moved fast enough to block lots of punches and flew because… he has the very specific powers of stopping bullets, moving really fast and flying. It’s a maddeningly obtuse way of rewriting the films’ history. I understand why the Wachowskis did it: if Neo had been basically God rather than merely another “superhero,” there would be no believable physical challenges for him in the sequels… but then, if the only way you can make an interesting sequel is to lie about what happened at the end of your first film, maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t be making that sequel. Sometimes I feel like Annie Wilkes: “He didn’t get out of the caca-doody car!”

Anyway.

The Setup: Neo, Morpheus, and many others are attending an in-Matrix meeting regarding some really troubling intelligence reports. Neo’s called out of it when he has a visitor at the door in the form of rogue Agent Smith, who left him a cryptic message in the form his old discarded earpiece. Neo misses Smith, but arrives in time to see through the door and realize that three different Agents are about to arrive. He warns off the rest of the redpills and faces off the new arrivals alone.

Neo’s faux-casual “Hiya, fellas” after they break the door down sounds a bit stilted, but the way the Agents talk amongst themselves in short, rapid-fire sentences– reminiscent of the way twins in kids’ movies finish each others’ sentences– is creepily amusing.

The Fight: Thompson first lunges out on his own with a few exploratory attacks, which Neo dodges & blocks with literally one hand behind his back. Many of Thompson’s moves seem unnecessarily fancy, in a way we never really saw the Agents behave during physical action scenes in the first movie– Smith came off as deadly and skilled, yes, but he was never ostentatious, at least not in terms of martial arts. Agents aren’t supposed to be badass martial artists, they’re supposed to be efficient killing machines. Some of that might be owed to the fact the power imbalance has changed, so it’s the Agents flailing desperately against the humans, but that only goes so far. Cool moves like spin kicks and so forth are all too human; it’s a bit incongruous to see an Agent using them. It’s one of many touches, both big and small, in these films that made audiences feel like the Wachowskis had lost their way.

How bored does the guy on the far left look?

Thompson finally grabs Neo’s wrist (the contact seems to be what clues him off to the trio’s “upgraded” nature) and the fight kicks off in earnest from there, with the other two joining the fray and Don Davis’ musical score kicking in.

Even against the superior models, the fight’s all too easy for Neo. He’s constantly one step ahead of them, avoiding their attacks and even using their few successful moves (mostly in terms of their throws & shoves giving him momentum; not once is he ever struck) against them. In fact, Neo’s SO successful that on closer examination of the fight, it’s harder to tell whether this is achieved by good he is or by how often his enemies seem to “coincidentally” happen to facilitate him. The most egregious example is also the most notable move of the fight, where Neo is launched in the air by an Agent but instead grabs a light fixture & swing around on it horizontally, using the momentum of the swing to kick an Agent who was jumping at him. Why was the Agent right there at that exact time in Neo’s brief airborne shenanigans, if not to line himself up perfectly to get kicked?

It’s all a bit over-choreographed, and self-consciously “cool.” This will be a running theme throughout the second and third movies: whereas the original drew strength from a seemingly effortless confidence, the sequels just seem arrogant or full of themselves– more like posers. Such a fine yet crucial distinction.

Also, as much as it works on a technical level (even when you can see the seams, the choreography still impresses), the fight feels a bit toothless, weightless, insubstantial. Neo’s out-maneuvering his adversaries and hitting them hard, but for some reason the impacts just don’t sell, they don’t look like they hurt. To a certain extent that’s understandable because the Agents are just computer programs and while they can be damaged they cannot feel pain, but you still find yourself missing a certain sense of punishment, of raw and visceral force being meted out. Paradoxically, the fight is disappointingly short AND boringly long; too brief to be a genuinely exciting struggle, but not brutal enough to be a gleeful beatdown.

Still, it is definitely a “Matrix” fight. Gravity is selectively defied via some well-applied wire work, slow-motion abounds, and plenty of kung is fu’d. It’s just not enough.

Grade: C+

Recommended Links: Long-time fans of the actor will remember that Keanu IS secretly an “agent,” himself.

Coming Attractions: Seraph apologizes to Neo. He ought to apologize to the audience.

Don’t act all confused. You know what you did.

In which we find out that Agent Smith is not just the president of the Agent Smith Fan Club…

… he’s also EVERY member

4) Neo vs Agent Smith(s)

The Fighters:

• Neo, who you know by now. Played by Keanu Reeves.
  • Armed with: Nothing at first, but eventually he seizes a metal pole to use as a club/staff.
• Agent Smith, the chief antagonist of the first film, now turned rogue and able to reproduce at will by over-writing himself onto other humans and programs. Played by Hugo Weaving with his signature awkward-cool.

The Setup: Fresh off the useless fight with Seraph, Neo has found his way to the Oracle and “talked” with her for a few minutes on a mostly empty playground. The most direct help she provides involves pointing him toward the Merovingian, but much of what she says is arguably a lot of papered-over psychobabble about “choice” and various techno-jargon that is only saved by the smooth delivery of the late Gloria Foster, a fine actress. I have a friend who actually walked out of the theater during this conversation when he heard Keanu say the line “programs hacking programs,” which I still laugh about to this day.

Anyway, it’s not spelled out but it’s pretty clear the Oracle and Seraph know that The Smiths (heh) are coming, because he ushers her out of there with visible urgency. Indeed their exit door barely closes when the old villain belts out his now-famous “Miiiiiister Anderson” from off-screen and is revealed in a slow-motion shot amongst a flock of scattering black birds.

Screw John Woo and his doves; crows are where it’s at.

The two have a bit of a macho staredown and discussion, though once again Neo is left mostly reacting for his half of the conversation. Reeves comes off a bit stiff but Weaving deliciously chews through his share of the dialogue, drawling out his lines in a way that’s so fun you almost don’t mind that the exposition about his new state raises more questions than it answers. The Wachowskis would have fit in quite well with the writers’ room on Lost.

“ahm in ur matrix, overwritin ur codes”

As Smith starts in on a mini-monologue about “purpose,” he reveals the presence of all his cloned selves, who move in on Neo one at a time and take turns picking up lines from the speech. When there’s enough of them surrounding Neo, they seize the hero and attempt to assimilate him, but for once, resistance is not futile; Neo, it seems, is uniquely able to counter the virus’ infection process. As soon as he finishes with that, things get physical.

[I'll note that this is the FOURTH fight in the movie, with the previous three basically amounting to different arrangements of Nothingburger. An action audience oughtn't have to wait so long for a genuine setpiece.]

The Fight: We go from zero to Fight Scene in no time flat. Don Davis’ unique and frantic musical accompaniment for the sequence (known to the production crew as “the Burly Brawl”) kicks in immediately, as does the crazy-intricate choreography.

It’s hard to provide an accurate blow-by-blow because there are just so many blows. The fight almost never stops moving, and neither does Neo: every Smith he defends against leaves him open to another, every hole he opens up is instantly filled, and every new bit of ground he goes to only gets him re-surrounded. It’s brutal.

But in a way, it’s not. As with some of the previous fights, Neo never looks like he’s all that hurt by this, just stymied. Certainly this can be partly attributed to the fact that Neo is easily more powerful than any one (or any dozen) of his adversaries here so all they can do is chip away at him slowly, but still, a bit of that visceral thrill is lost. Neo’s blows don’t seem to really hurt Smith either, but of course that makes sense and was already the norm in the first movie.

So what you have here is a fight with a million unhurtable guys teaming up against one super guy whom they can barely  hurt. What the fight loses in viscerality it has to make up for in technical complexity, which it largely does– with a few outrageous exceptions, but we’ll get there.

As stated earlier, it’s chaotic. Neo’s constant motion and even his taking of the occasional blow never convey that he’s anything less than a powerful & brilliant fighter. No matter how close they get to him he always seems to be ready with a clever counter or reversal; it looks as if he’s planning his attacks when he actually should be entirely reactive to the army of bad guys around him. Smiths get kicked, punched, bashed into the scenery and thrown into each other. It’s like a big, silly, intricate ballet. All the while, ever more Smiths are streaming in; the fight starts with about a dozen and finishes with nearly a hundred.

It’s not perfect, though. Some of the wire work is a bit floaty and obvious, many times the various Smiths seem more intent on simply grabbing Neo rather than actually hitting him, and throughout the entire fight you never once see a bunch of Smith corpses lying about. Do they flicker away like defeated foes in a video game?

There’s a nice little interlude early on where a bystander comes through and, registering the impossible scene, is immediately transformed into a regular Agent. The Agent is immediately accosted by an arriving Smith, and the dialogue that ensues is just so cheesily memorable, again largely thanks to Hugo Weaving’s delightful arrogance:

Agent: “You!”

Smith: “Yes, me!” [punches into Agent and assimilates him] “Me, me, me….”

New Smith: “Me too!”

As more reinforcements arrive things start to get a bit desperate for Neo, and he is able to temporarily even the odds a bit by ripping a tetherball pole from the ground and using it as a makeshift weapon. It’s quite effective, especially when he does this thing where he shoves it back into the ground and kicks all the surrounding Smiths as he spins along it horizontally, turning himself into a sprinkler of violence:

The pole, however, brings about the scene’s most crippling flaw: awful CGI. As soon as Neo jumps into the crowd with his new whoop-ass stick, both he and all his adversaries are rendered into computer-generated simulacra. It’s the kind of thing that works well enough in brief doses and especially for shots like the aforementioned spinning move that would have been near-impossible to pull off in live action, but inexplicably, the filmmakers choose to KEEP using it even for things they could have had the actors do on their own.

So while Neo and the Smiths are merely jumping around and kicking each other, they’re bouncing around unrealistically like something out of a Gamecube cut scene/Polar Express movie/Gumby cartoon. It was pathetically unconvincing ten years ago and is even more so today. There are several instances where the action nearly grinds to a halt in the Wachowskis’ trademark super slow-motion, almost like it’s deliberately rubbing in how fake this all is.

Oof.

The filmmaking goes back to live-action eventually, but insists on diving right back into that Uncanny Valley repeatedly– in fact, after Neo grabs his makeshift staff, the remainder of the fight is more CGI than real. More machine now than man, twisted & evil.

Through all this, Neo puts up a good fight with his staff but eventually loses it to the ever-increasing attack of the clones. Unarmed, he’s quickly overwhelmed and attempts to escape, but is stymied by the fiendishly simple tactic of all the Smiths dogpiling him at once. In a deliberate recall of the first film, one of the Smith legion speaks a little bit about the “inevitability” of Neo’s defeat, but he’s as wrong this time as he was last time. In a rather cartoon-like burst of strength Neo repels all his adversaries at once, and even tosses a lingering clinger into his fellows with an accompanying “bowling ball hitting the pins” sound. It’s so overtly silly you can’t help but love it.

Neo takes advantage of the brief respite to summon enough energy to launch into the air and fly away, leaving the army of Smiths to sulk on the ground quietly. Close one.

The fight’s a strange mix of awesome and infuriating. In certain ways the scene is a special effects marvel, because (as far as the non-CGI scenes are concerned anyway) not once do you ever doubt that every single one of the Smiths is Hugo Weaving, even though you know intellectually that there is only ONE Hugo Weaving and he can’t have been in all those places at the same time. Often, the best type of special effect is the one you can’t even tell is a special effect, and the face-swapping techniques &  camera tricks the production team pulled off are that kind of perfect (eat your heart out, Parent Trap). But they shouldn’t have been so proud of the technological terror they constructed here, because the full-body simulation CGI is as obtrusive as the face-swapping isn’t. It’s one of those decisions that’s such a colossal miscalculation you can’t believe it showed up in a major motion picture.

Bloodless yet beautiful chaos, painfully marred by a hubristic faith in their tech. It averages out to…

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Good times with weapons.

In which Neo is a very messy house guest.

You won’t be grinning for long, Frenchie

5) Neo vs Merovingian’s Henchmen

The Fighters:

• Neo, again. Played by Keanu Reeves.
  • Armed with: nothing to start with, but eventually employs several weapons including dual sais, a broadsword, and a spear that gets broken in half and he subsequently uses the two halves as short clubs (or Eskrima).
• The Merovingian’s henchmen, six of them. One of them, Cain (he was partnered with a guy named Abel. They’re named after the famous Biblical brothers because of no good darn reason I can think of) was in an earlier scene heavily implied to be a vampire, or perhaps a werewolf. The others are also refugee programs from previous versions of the Matrix, most likely encoded as other supernatural creatures. Though they’re no match for Neo they seem to be superior to even the upgraded Agents, even if the Agents dress better. The Merovingian himself is there but he just hangs back and acts snooty. Played by stunt men, with Lambert Wilson hamming it up as the Big M.
  • Armed with: They enter with automatic weapons, but discard those for hand-to-hand combat and, soon enough, a variety of short-range weapons including swords, a trident, a spear, a flail, a staff, dual hooks, a spiked club, etc.

These weirdos.

The Setup: Neo and his crew came to the Merovingian’s hideout asking for the Keymaker, for reasons that make this movie sound more & more like a video game the longer you get into it. He refused and sent them off, but was betrayed by his wife Persephone (Monica Belluci aka the Platonic Ideal of sexuality) because she’s sick of how much of a dick he is. In a story development that literally not one single audience member thought was a good idea, Persephone exchanged the Keymaker’s whereabouts for a “loving” kiss from Neo, but before all of them could leave the chateau they’re confronted by a furious Merovingian and half a dozen men. In a spacious foyer conveniently decorated with a couple dozen weapons, of course.

Neo volunteers to hold off the bad guys while Trinity & Morpheus run the other way with the Keymaker, a decision I always questioned. Instead of Neo staying behind to fight out a protracted but ultimately easy battle against these Rodeo Drive rejects, why not have Neo fly off with the Keymaker (after all, Neo is their strongest asset and the Keymaker’s help is paramount) while Morpheus and Trinity struggle desperately in a frantic 2-on-6 battle? Don’t know how it would have affected the following freeway sequence, but ah, what might have been.

Speaking of which, you know who gets left out of this battle entirely? These guys:

They arrive with the rest of Merovingian’s gang, but are immediately dispatched to float after the Keymaker. Presumably some sort of ghost programs, the Twins have one of the most fascinating powers out of anybody in the movie: they can “phase” back and forth out of intangibility. Although as a superpower it’s hardly original, it definitely would have been a game-changer for this series’ fight scenes (and was teased as such in the trailers)– a way to give Neo trouble that didn’t involve “slightly stronger enemies” or just “lots of enemies.” Instead the Wachowskis opted to pretty much leave these guys out of fight scenes altogether: they trade a couple blows with Morpheus in the garage and have some shenanigans with a razor blade inside a cramped automobile, but the majority of this pair’s screen time is spent on a car chase, of all things. Hey, we all like a good car chase, but using a power like this in a car chase is like putting Wolverine in your movie and making his primary weapon be a gun. Matrix Reloaded wastes so much potential I can never decide if it does so recklessly or willfully.

Anyway, once Neo’s alone the Merovingian has his goons open fire. Which doesn’t work because, once again, Neo has the ability to telekinetically stop bullets. Not punches, kicks, swords, or anything else– just bullets.

In fairness, he can stop a LOT of bullets.

With that failing, they all try to take him on physically. Which they also fail at, only slower.

The Fight: Whereas the previous setpiece was chaotic, this one’s actually more dynamic, graceful even. While still as (not literally) bloodless as the rest of the film’s punchifying, there’s a certain smoothness to the movement that the Burly Brawl lacks. (A smoothness reflected in Don Davis’ music, of course.)

Neo and everyone else starts out unarmed, but the goons start picking up weapons pretty quickly. Neo holds out as long as he can trying to go on his own (pride?), but taking a nasty a cut on his hand after using it to block a sword (the moment creates a nice little pause in the action) is more than enough inspiration to follow his new friends’ example.

The gang explores the chateau space here in a way that would make Bruce Dickinson proud. Everyone’s constantly dancing around each other, going back & forth between the two floors (sometimes by stairs, sometimes by jumping), getting knocked into things or even hitting each other inadvertently. As always, the camerawork of the Wachowskis and cinematographer Bill Pope is more than dynamic enough to match, with no shortage of stylistic and well-staged shots. Except for the two goons who die early on, nobody gets stuck with one single weapon, as the implements are constantly getting broken, knocked aside, thrown or just plain left in corpses.

It’s not entirely perfect. Cain, the one goon we actually recognize due to his prior scene with Persephone (and who had a larger role in the contemporary, glitch-filled companion video game Enter The Matrix), doesn’t just exit the fight scene early on but does so puzzlingly: Neo knocks him through a stone statue in slow-mo, and after he hits the ground you don’t see him again. The injury doesn’t look fatal, especially considering the punishment Cain’s buddies absorb here and how a few minutes ago we heard Persephone talk about how incredibly hard to kill he is. A later death, caused by a baddie getting stuck with a trident Neo dodged, is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. And one guy gets a sword slice to the back of his neck that doesn’t seem to do more than bother him.

Still, that kind of sloppiness is the exception rather than the norm; the majority of the fight is meticulously staged and filled with a number of small, clever moments.

Neo pinning the weirdly androgynous henchperson to the wall, his fun little pose after summoning two sais from either end of the room (the hero’s single act of non-bullet-stopping telekinesis), the way the hero controls the movement around the space and turns his opponents’ weapons against each other. Probably the best moment is the last, when Neo faces off against the final goon, Eskrima against long club, and uses his sticks to throw the opponent’s weapon into the air. While it’s up there, Neo kicks the guy (girl?) down onto the ground, catches the falling club, and smashes it in his/her face (said smashing is directly preceded by a funny yet muted “oh crap” look).

The final, static shot of Neo standing victorious amongst the mess he made is a nice little beat as well.

In a way, the chateau fight is less ambitious than the Burly Brawl, but in others it’s more so. The environment (multiple floors) is a more interesting one, and the presence of everyone using short-range weapons is a new element for Matrix fight scenes. The unique weapons combined with the six unique characters presents a much different logistical hurdle than did a hundred identically-dressed Hugo Weavings.

As with that previous brawl, the excitement is technical rather than dramatic; at no point do we really sense Neo is in danger (either of getting hurt or of losing); sure, it takes him a while to kill all these guys, but just because it takes me a while to finally hit a fly with a flyswatter doesn’t make us evenly-matched. There are also the aforementioned nagging issues, and of course the wasted potential, but you can only fault a movie so much for what it doesn’t do. This fight genuinely was experimental for the franchise, and escapes the typical sequel-itis problem of “the same thing, only more so.” Effort counts.

Grade: A-

Recommended Links: The entry on this fight (as well as the entry for the last one) over at the Matrix Wiki have been very helpful in reminding me of details even my extensive notes didn’t cover.

Coming Attractions: “Morpheus is fightin’ a boring guy!”

He already lost the battle against the Green Filter, unfortunately

In which Zorro gets his “faithful” horse.

2) Alejandro vs Montero’s Soldiers

The Fighters:

• Alejandro Murrieta, the young urchin from the prologue, all grown up. A semi-reformed bandit under the tutelage of escapee Diego de la Vega. He will, spoiler, soon assume the mantle of Zorro, but based on his woefully incomplete outfit and un-professionalism here, it’s safe to say he hasn’t graduated yet. Played by Antonio Banderas, who isn’t in enough movies lately if you ask me.
  • Armed with: goes into battle with a rapier here, but loses it and improvises with what he can find, including a sword and knife from his opponents, a mounted bull’s head, a pair of cannon balls, and an actual cannon.
• A barracks full of soldiers, over a dozen or so of them. Working for Don Rafael Montero and under the direct command of professional soldier Captain Love. More cannon fodder, presumably played by stunt men and local actors. The skeezy-looking leader is played by (near as I can figure) Pedro Altamirano, and the only other notable one is a rather enormous fellow, played by Óscar Zerafín González.
  • Armed with: They may have some guns about but none of them really come into play, mostly swords and fists.

The Setup: After twenty years, Don Rafael has returned to California with some sinister scheme afoot. Upon learning of this, Diego escapes his hellish prison (he didn’t think to do that earlier?) to thwart his old rival. But after being stymied in his post-escape efforts to kill Montero, de la Vega instead takes up the cause of rehabilitating Alejandro, himself despondent and suicidal after the death of his brother (courtesy of Captain Love). Diego blows the dust off his old Zorro lair and gives him a crash course in badassery, honing his swordsmanship, strength and agility in order to help him take revenge on Love… and, Alejandro gradually deduces, to groom him as a successor.

I’ll note here that few things in movies are cooler than post-jailbreak Diego during this middle part of the movie. Good old Anthony Hopkins plays the man as a long-haired, cigar-smoking, wine-guzzling, open-shirted bohemian who uses his whip to flick out candle flames for fun.

And also just because he CAN, presumably.

He’s a retired superhero but he’s also the weirdly cool uncle you never had. It’s a riot.

Anyway, after a few training montages, Alejandro spies Montero’s soldiers with a freshly-purchased and unbroken black Andalusian horse, similar to Zorro’s old steed Tornado. Seeing a chance to irk Love’s men and still a thief at heart, Alejandro dons a subpar Zorro mask and sneaks off an unsanctioned mission to steal the stallion from the soldiers. Along the way he has his first meet-cute with the also-grown up Elena, whose natural passion and righteousness weren’t repressed even after two decades of being raised by Rafael. He sneaks into the stable adjoining the barracks (it can’t be great trying to sleep next to that smell every night, come to think of it) and locates his target easily enough, but there are… complications.

The Fight: Alejandro gets on the horse, but as soon as he tries to ride it out, it objects, and the wild bucking eventually sends the pair crashing into the soldiers’ sleeping area. The new Tornado inadvertently handles just a bit of Murrieta’s work for him by kicking a few panicked soldiers out of the way, but when the horse smashes through the wall like the Kool Aid Man, his new “owner” falls off, and is left utterly surrounded by a lot of very pissed off Mexican soldiers.

What follows is a good bit of fun. The fight signals its intentions early, as that traditional Looney Tunes bit goes down where everybody dogpiles on the hero at once, only for him to calmly climb out from underneath the teeming mass. Ridiculous, but it establishes that this is meant to be an amusing scene rather than an exciting one, and for better or for worse it certainly plays out differently than the rest of the film’s action.

And it’s inventive. After pulling off the tried & true method of swinging on the chandelier and using roped counterweights to ascend higher, the hero seizes a mounted bull’s head and uses the horns as a weapon, then ducks inside an open jail cell and when his pursuers on the other side try to stab him through the bars, he uses the sliding door to trap & mangle their swords.

Throughout the whole thing Murrieta never stops moving, constantly punching, kicking and dodging. Soon enough he grabs a couple blades of his own (sword & knife) and does even better, but he backs into a giant soldier who shakes him free of his weapons. The guy looks enormous– seemingly over seven feet tall, but possibly more in the 6′ range since he’s mostly contrasted against the relatively diminutive Banderas.

The remaining soldiers step back to gleefully watch this monstrous Mexican man-mountain take out Alejandro on his own. Backed into a corner, Murrieta grabs the nearest weapons at hand– two cannon balls– and when the giant gets close enough Alejandro bashes them simultaneously against both sides of his foe’s face. The giant is not visibly stunned at first, but after repeated blows, he eventually turns around in a daze and, rather comically, spits out a whole mouthful of teeth at once. Ouch.

While the remaining soldiers were watching dumbfounded, Alejandro loaded and primed the nearby cannon, so that when they looked back up at him the fuse was ready to light.

Now they’re LITERALLY cannon fodder.

The guards scamper away and Alejandro blows a new hole in the wall, spastically proclaiming that he is Zorro and that “the legend has returned!” Of course, since we can’t leave the scene without one last joke, the hero accidentally blows up the whole building (due to all the exposed gunpowder) and barely escapes alive.

As mentioned, not much to it and more silly than thrilling, but still a lot of fun, and most importantly, a nice bit of action filler to pass the time until the next real fight sequence (which won’t be for a while). Banderas is quite capable, acting cocky but not as cool & competent as he will be later on. The actors playing the faceless goons sell everything well and the music is appropriately mischievous.

(What’s WITH this building, come to think of it? It seems to be a combination barracks/jail/arms room, adjacent to the stables. Logistically impractical.)

Grade: B

Recommended Links: If the Puss-in-Boots films don’t work out, Antonio can always go back to his– how do you say? Ah yes– talk show.

Coming Attractions: Are you ready for the fun part?

Time to play dress-up. No, not like that….

Oh, I’m ready for the fun part.

Ready for Love?

3) Zorro vs Captain Love, Don Rafael, and Soldiers

The Fighters:

• Alejandro Murrieta aka Zorro 2.0. After finding vital intel on Montero’s plans, Alejandro receives Diego’s blessing to don (heh) the full Zorro regalia: mask, hat, sword, whip and sexy Spanish ninja outfit. His training complete and his passion forged into a focused determination, Alejandro– and Zorro– are cooler than ever. Played by Antonio Banderas.
• Captain Harrison Love, the professional soldier (and real person) who leads Montero’s men. A real sadistic SOB with whom Alejandro has a personal score to settle. Quite a skilled fighter, too; Love is a battlefield, after all. Played by Matt Letscher.
• Don Rafael Montero, the film’s main villain, who you remember from before. Twenty years older but no less deadly or determined. Played by Stuart Wilson.
• Montero’s men, about six or so of them. Again here as ballast. The enormous one is missing; presumably because he’s at the dentist.

All are armed with rapiers or sabers. Some of the soldiers have single-shot rifles that prove useless against the speedy fox, and Captain Love carries a pistol but he is immediately deprived of it.

The Setup: Alejandro has just returned from an extended undercover mission, impersonating a young nobleman in order to get in Montero’s good graces and find out his plan: he plans to buy California from Santa Anna, using gold from a secret Mexican mine run by slave labor. Though his performance was impeccable, Alejandro still had to suffer through a few tense confrontations with the man who hunted down his brother: Captain Love, an amoral mercenary with the face of a date rapist:

His mercenary business’ slogan: “Money CAN buy you Love!”

Frustrated at having had to restrain his bloodlust, Alejandro is encouraged by Diego to hide his rage behind the mask of Zorro. On the eve of the would-be California Purchase, the determined hero sneaks into Montero’s home to abscond with the map to his hidden mine. Meanwhile, Diego, in a distant but visible field, puts the fear of God into the villains with some not-so-subtle imagery:

After effortlessly stealing the map, Zorro surprises Love in a hallway. Holding him at sword-point, he deprives Love of his weapons, and when two guards approach, he holds their captain hostage and forces them to let him kick them out the window. He doesn’t want to deal with them; all he needs is Love. Once they’re alone, Zorro steps back and returns the captain’s sword so that they can duel, and he can give Love a bad name.

The Fight:

Who’s holding the other sword? Love, actually.

This Love has taken its toll on the hero, so he clearly relishes the opportunity to defeat and embarrass him. They start out tentatively at first, with Zorro almost teasing the villain with tiny little gestures. But soon the fight begins in earnest and it’s wonderful to behold. Love, being a many-splendored fighter, is quite good, but the power of Love is no match for Zorro. The hero easily dominates the captain and finally sends him sprawling to the ground with a brutal punch. But before Zorro can finish the job and become a murderer of Love, our old pal Don Rafael comes rushing out to the hallway, ready to fight.

Even though the apparent return of his old bete noir surely rattled Montero’s nerves, he hasn’t missed a step in the fencing department, putting up a worthy fight for Zorro.

“Rafael, without your Love, you are nothing!”

Things get even trickier when we’re reminded that despite a good decking Love is all around, and the captain rejoins the fray. Even outnumbered Zorro is still deadly, picking up a second sword and driving his opponents back. That’s a bad long-term strategy, though, so the fox escapes from the hallway and out into a larger courtyard/foyer area, pursued by his two adversaries and with yet more soldiers streaming in.

It gets even more fun from there. Zorro outfences and outmaneuvers the faceless goons even more easily than he did the main villains (who also join the battle). Even more before, Alejandro is always in motion, always in control, always too cool for school. If he’s ever anxious at all during the fight, he doesn’t show it; on the contrary, the look on his face betrays that this new hero is having the time of his life. Swashbuckling hasn’t looked this good since Errol’s days.

The fight is packed with all sorts of delightful incident. Zorro controls the terrain by jumping off & on a large table and bringing the fight up there, he clocks Love again after being momentarily disarmed, he duels Montero from the other side of a huge candle stand, he does Olympic-level gymnastics on a series of tree branches. It’s not until the fight’s end that he’s even briefly put out, when he’s literally up against the wall with all the surviving soldiers ready to close in.

But just as they charge, Zorro sidesteps from the wall and cuts loose the enormous hanging map behind him so that it falls on top of his pursuers, leaving them in a state of confused chaos so he can escape with the goods. (There’s bit of poor staging here: Banderas steps away from his foes a few seconds too early, and the careful viewer can see the soldiers would have had ample time to stop or change course on their blind charge. Ah, well.)

Zorro is quite rightfully pleased with himself, but he doesn’t see that his escape has been witnessed by Rafael’s “daughter,” Elena….

Except for the most minor of errors, very little not to love here. The choreography is fantastic, James Horner’s music soars, Banderas’ devilish charm dazzles, and the pacing is perfect– like many of the great fight scenes, it goes on long enough that you don’t feel cheated but short enough that want more. Plus there’s some excellent comic timing at work in the moments before the fight, as Zorro dispatches of Love’s would-be rescuers. If you’re not cheering for the movie now, you’re in a coma.

Grade: A

Recommended Links: Antonio Banderas hung on to his sword prop from this movie, and once used it to scare off a burglar. It’s not quite as cool as burglars being scared off by the very IDEA of Dolph Lundgren, but still.

Coming Attractions: Best. First. Date. Ever.

And here I am, fresh out of “love” puns.

In which we meet monsters.

(SUBTLE DOUBLE MEANING)

2) Superman and the Elite vs Pokolistan monsters

The Fighters:

• Superman, duh. Prior to this event he hasn’t met or heard of the Elite before; this is where they make their debut. Voiced by George Newbern.
• Manchester Black (sometimes shortened to “Chester”), leader of the Elite and a lower-class Brit with a punk look. Gifted with inherent psychic abilities. Black’s telepathy lets him read (most) people’s minds, project his thoughts to others, and launch mental attacks directly at the victim’s brain. His telekinesis allows him to lift objects and people with his own mind, as well as project waves of raw force (portrayed in the film as a glowing green energy). Quick-talking and humorous, but also crude and more than a little shady. Mostly an analogue of the Authority’s Jenny Sparks. Voiced by Robin Atkin Downes.
• Coldcast aka Nathan Jones (real name never said in the film). An American and the Elite’s bruiser, Coldcast’s powers are electromagnetic in nature. He can absorb and discharge many different types of energy, an ability which also seems to enhance his physical strength and durability greatly. Voiced by Catero Colbert.
• Menagerie, aka Pam– unlike Coldcast, her superhero name is the one never used in the film; everyone seems particularly chummy with her. The team’s lone woman, she has a reptilian appearance, with leathery bat wings that allow her to fly with surprising speed and dexterity. Her real value, though, comes from the seemingly unlimited number of deadly slugs she can generate from her body and control remotely. The slugs (apparently the result of bonding her to an alien weapons cache) have a surprising number of offensive capabilities, and she can even use them to briefly enhance her senses. She’s supposedly Puerto Rican, which I don’t buy because not ONCE does she have a hilariously dramatic outburst of anger. Mostly an analogue of the Authority’s Swift. Voiced by Melissa Disney (yep, from those Disneys).
• The Hat, an Asian man (Japanese in the comic but implied to be Chinese here, and he speaks perfect American English anyway) with mystical powers seemingly centered in his normal-looking hat. The hat’s powers are vague but vast; he generally uses it to summon enormous creatures but it can produce other effects as well. The Hat’s body is also said later to be protected by a magical field, thus minimizing his potential for injury. Clearly an analogue of the Authority’s Doctor, with whom he shares not just similar magical powers but also a substance abuse problem– the Hat is clearly an alcoholic. Voiced by Andrew Kishino.
• An enormous monster. The product of Pokolistan’s biological weapons division. Resembling nothing so much as a giant, weird, weaponized cockroach, the monster walks on four enormous legs and has an extra limb in its mouth, as well as dual retractable laser cannons on its back. Incredibly strong and durable. Apparently capable of multiplying itself at will. It’s… well, it’s like something a child would design. Voiced by a bunch of inarticulate sound effects.

“rarr,” etc

The Setup: In the aftermath of the previous tussle with Atomic Skull, Superman showed up in person at the United Nations in order to attend to some sort of debate/lecture about the role of superheroes in society (because that’s the sort of thing the UN does, I guess?). Superman admirer Professor Efrain Baxter plays devil’s advocate for the crowd, pondering if these repetitive battles (the previous one cost millions of dollars in property damage, apparently), marked by restraint are really the best way to defend against evildoers. Should those with power not be more proactive and seek more definitive solutions? Is it time to take the kid gloves off? Superman answers in the negative and says that his ideals are worth sticking to, even when things get difficult.

The event is interrupted by news that violence between Pokolistan and Bialya (two fictional Middle Eastern countries; presumably the writers made up fake ones so as to avoid offending any *actual* Middle Eastern countries by suggesting they’re constantly locked in pointless wars) has flared up again. Superman flies off to the war zone, seeking to do what he can to minimize damage. Instead, he arrives to find that rumors of one side deploying WMD in the conflict are true, except that in Pokolistan the “M” stands for “monster,” as Gamera’s retarded cousin is tearing things up left and right.

The Fight: Superman gets some Bialyan regulars (their weapons are no match for the creature’s thick hide) away from the thick of things, and is surprised to find that Coldcast is already blasting away at one of the beasts, albeit ineffectually. Menagerie flies by and lodges about a dozen slugs along the back of the creature’s spine, which causes it to split in half right down the middle. This apparent victory is short-lived, however, as each half grows another new half, forming two monsters each the size of the previous.

Whoops. Superman is able to fly in and knock one monster on its back, but it recovers and cheap shots him through a building just as he goes to town on the other one. It seems like a stalemate, but the hero is soon contacted telepathically by Manchester Black, who, while watching from a distance, tells him that the monsters are brainless and technically not even alive (which he confirms with X-ray vision), so he’s free to use extreme force. A few passes with super breath freezes one monster solid, leaving Superman free to shatter it in a thousand frozen chunks with a single blow.

The second creature is dispatched when it’s swallowed by an enormous magical dragon, which then shrinks down to hand-held size and returns to its summoner, the Hat. The battle finished, Superman approaches the Elite as a friend and they, for all their too-cool attitude, are actually a bit star-struck. The conversation doesn’t last long, however, as they soon teleport out. (Transportation provided, it will later be revealed, by the team’s dimension-hopping sentient ship– another nod to the Authority.)

This one’s a bit underwhelming, and more than a bit silly. Giant bug-monsters as a form of warfare is a kind of bonkers-fun idea, but the creatures themselves are, for all their strength, a bit underwhelming. Not to mention they’d probably be inefficient in traditional combat. Plus they present all sorts of logical/science Fails: if they don’t have brains, how are they controlled? If they can multiply at will, why not send in two (or more) to begin with? And when they multiply, where does all that extra mass come from?

They’re dispatched a little perfunctorily as well. The freeze/smash thing is a nice, but the Hat’s swallowing act is a  abrupt, and this, the first combat use of his power, is shockingly broad: if he can simply absorb anything he wants into his magical hat, you wonder why he doesn’t just do that every time.

The fight does a handy enough job of introducing the Elite one by one, with a nice if hardly thorough demonstration of their abilities. Too bad it’s short and a touch on the goofy side. Fortunately there’s better to come.

Grade: C+

Coming Attractions: Your second-favorite flaming skeleton returns.

Your first favorite damn well better be this guy.

An Atomic rematch.

Who NEEDS Kryptonite?

3) Superman and the Elite vs Atomic Skull

The Fighters:

• Superman, who’s been running hot & then cold with the new team. Voiced by George Newbern.
• The Elite: Manchester Black, Coldcast, Menagerie/Pam, and The Hat, who’ve risen in popularity lately. Voiced by Robin Atkin Downes, Catero Colbert, Melissa Disney, and Andrew Kishino, respectively.
• The Atomic Skull, the radiation-powered supervillain. Although basically still the same, he’s quite obviously bigger (possibly eight feet tall or more), badder and a whole lot more dangerous, not to mention pissed off.

The Setup: During Atomic Skull’s incarceration he’s been hooked up to a reactor, siphoning off his unlimited energy supply and using it to generate free electricity for, apparently, a sizable portion of Metropolis. Unfortunately some sort of power outage/surge brings the whole system down (seems flimsy) and he’s escaped, looking for blood.

Meanwhile, since their initial meeting, Superman and the Elite’s relationship has deepened. He sought them out and received a brief history from Black, then the five were brought together in an impromptu rescue mission as they worked together to save the victims of a terrorist attack on the Chunnel. After that, however, Superman has been increasingly troubled by the group’s methods, not to mention their attitude– they’ve already fatally intervened during the most recent flare-up in the Middle East. Superman is out in Smallville, grousing with Pa Kent, when Lois calls with the word that the Skull is stomping around Metropolis.

The Fight: Although Superman speeds off, it’s the Elite who arrive first– just in time to save Lois & Jimmy from getting crushed by a falling car, actually. Seeing on the news that his new heroes the Elite are in town, Efrain Baxter’s rebellious son, Terence, runs off to see the action in person, with dad in pursuit.

The Elite’s cocky attitude fails to impress Atomic Skull– he dismisses them as “the interns” before scattering them with a major blast. He easily shrugs off Menagerie’s counter-attack and beats on Coldcast pretty hard. Black catches him with a telekinetic surge and gets assisted by an arriving Superman. The two rivals slug it out pretty hard, but Skull’s time away has improved his power so much he’s able to uppercut Superman into the sky and through several buildings.

Manchester is left alone with Skull, and when they go head to head, Black’s telekinesis against Skull’s radioactive energy, the Brit is no match, and gets knocked back pretty hard. He’s saved by a returning Superman, but when Skull gets the upper hand again and unleashes another devastating blast on the hero, the resulting shockwave kills several people in the nearby area… including Efrain Baxter, absorbing the pulse that would have hit his son. He’s turned into a statue of dead ash right before Terence’s eyes.

Superman recovers and, buying some time by blasting Atomic Skull with his heat vision, orders the Hat to form a perimeter and prevent further collateral damage. The Hat– whose vast abilities are apparently only useful under close supervision, because he’s been sitting around uselessly up to this point– complies by summoning up a bunch of huge terracotta warriors to scare away pedestrians. He also asks if Coldcast can absorb energy as well as direct it, which he can.

Though Black bristles at Superman taking charge of his team, everyone sort of silently agrees to a loose plan where four of them take turns hitting the Skull with harassing attacks while Coldcast finds an opening to get in close. This is probably the best part of the fight, with each superpowered titan having a quick skirmish with the villain before getting batted away, only to get replaced by another hero. The Skull is one heck of a blunt instrument, but he’s quickly outclassed by a coordinated effort. And when Coldcast lunges in and lays hands on the beast, there’s little he can do (thanks to Superman and Pam holding down his limbs) to resist as his excess energy is leeched out, leaving him shrunken and helpless on the ground.

The aftermath, however, is what’s important. Black wants to execute Skull on the spot, which Superman naturally resists. But it’s Terence Baxter who turns the whole crowd against the rule of law, as he urges Black on and blames Superman for his father’s death, saying that this wouldn’t have happened if the hero had put down the Skull for good last time. With the mob’s approval, Manchester sends a point-black psychic pulse that explodes Atomic Skull’s skeletal head– Superman just barely fails to stop him, as he’d stepped away from Black to console Terence. The vigilante group quickly teleports out, leaving Superman to cover up the corpse of the person he’d failed to save.

A lot of improvement here. The Skull’s dramatic change in appearance and his casual murder of even more innocents– notably Baxter, who we’ve gotten to know a bit by this point– really raise the stakes. This isn’t fun & games, people’s lives are on the line. Things get ugly and desperate enough here that it’s less like a superpowered romp and more like a war.

Unlike the previous tussle with Skull, it’s set at night, which is a rather simple but effective way to accompany the thematic with a literal one. And the staging is subtly different: unlike the city-spanning and building-hopping antics of last time, this all goes down on, basically, one street, making for a more tight and intimate feel. The music score (by Robert J Kral) is exciting but plays out in a slow, moody, rhythmic and low-key way, conveying an ever-growing dread.

By the end of the fight, you yourself hate the Skull and rather feel like killing him– when Superman cries out for restraint you see it being almost as pathetic and ineffectual as the crowd in the movie does… yet simultaneously, you pity him. You know the deck is stacked against him, that this is the time when principles are tough to hold onto. We’ve all been there.

Superman is left alone in many senses of the word. Pretty dark.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: It gets darker.

THIS dark.

“Is that… Superman?”

“Not anymore.”

4) Superman vs The Elite

The Fighters:

• Superman, voiced by George Newbern.
• The Elite: Manchester Black, Coldcast, Menagerie/Pam, and The Hat. Voiced by Robin Atkin Downes, Catero Colbert, Melissa Disney, and Andrew Kishino, respectively.

The Setup: Since their last tango, the Elite have decided that Superman is yesterday’s news, and declared themselves to be the new world police. They announced they’d settle the Bialya/Pokolistan conflict once & for all, which Superman tried to head off by (in an excellent sequence) non-lethally destroying a squadron of jets that had been sent to attack a civilian population center… only to discover that while he’d been doing so, the Elite had assassinated the bloodthirsty leaders of each nation. An enraged Superman decked Manchester Black over this, which resulted in the miffed Brit issuing a grudge match between the two forces, tomorrow.

Superman spends an anxious night pondering his options– even Lois thinks he might not be able to win– and leaves at dawn to face them. They arrive on the streets of Metropolis but, at his request, the fight is moved to a less-populated area. Flashy as ever, the Elite teleport all five combatants to the moon (Alice), in which the Hat’s magic has thankfully created an artificial atmosphere. But the group has brought along several floating cameras, which they use to broadcast the  conflict to the entire world.

Superman tries one last time to reason with the Elite, but they laugh it off and get right to business.

The Fight: Really, Superman fights against only three of the Elite, while Black hangs back and monologues. Addressing the watching world via camera (and implicitly the viewer, since the speech mostly plays over our view of the battle), Manchester lectures about how the time of old-fashioned “capes” like Superman is over, it’s the 21st century and the world is more complicated than dropping off bank robbers at the police station and getting kittens out of trees. The Elite are an authority (ahem) unto themselves, and they’ll punish as they see fit. “He who has the power makes the rules,” and so forth.

Superman performs well against the other three but like Atomic Skull was in the last fight, he’s overwhelmed by sustained, alternating attacks from multiple opponents– not to mention visibly hamstrung by his moral restraint.

And crazy reptile chicks on his back.

The staging here is probably the most viscerally exciting portion of the whole fight: incredibly smooth animation does a great job with cool stuff like Coldcast smashing away at the hero’s face, Pam straddling him and trying to bite his head off with a giant slug, the Hat summoning rock formations out of the ground to crush him and missiles for him to dodge.The music here is different than anything that’s come before: exciting, but filled with a sense of desperation and sadness. There’s an overwhelming sense of wrongness to seeing these smug punks pound on the Man of Steel.

Finally a tired but determined Superman makes a lunge at Black, who halts his narcissistic speech to hit the Kryptonian’s mind. Superman has adequate mental defenses to keep his mind from being read, but he seems helpless against a direct psychic attack. Manchester induces a stroke that gives him Superman a major nosebleed and sends him to the ground, shouting in pain.

He’s just defenseless enough to be seized Coldcast, who unleashes a full-force, all-out blast of power (it’s unstated but safe to assume he’s stronger than ever after stealing the Skull’s energy) right in Superman’s face. A massive explosion (visible from space) rents the ground, and when the smoke clears there’s nothing left of Superman except the tattered end of his cape.

Smug about their apparent victory, the four re-unite (Black’s telekinetic shield protected them from the area of effect on Coldcast’s blast) and prepare to leave, when suddenly they hear their enemy’s voice. He sounds… different, unlike he has this whole time. He doesn’t even sound angry; he merely speaks with a steady and terrible calmness.

“I finally get it. Thank you… I made the mistake of treating you people like… people. Now, I understand better… I understand now what the world wants, what it NEEDS. The world needs people in charge, willing to put the animals DOWN.”

As he speaks there’s a slow pan around the Elite as their dread mounts. Not only are they thrown off-guard by the fact that they failed to kill their enemy, they also have a palpable sense that the rules have changed. The worst kind of bullies are the ones who derive their advantage from their targets’ innate decency, and it’s clearly no more Mr Nice Superman.

Out of nowhere, Menagerie gets hit by a dart, with Superman’s Kryptonian crest on it. The effects are immediate: she howls in pain and falls to the ground as her slug symbiotes forcibly come out of her. Coldcast picks her up and he can’t tell if she’s breathing. The truth hits home for the rest that they might not get out of this alive (“He’s playing it our way!” Black frets), and suddenly a whirlwind forms on the moon’s surface, courtesy of Superman’s incredible speed. He briefly appears in the center of it, a dark silhouette with glowing red eyes.

As the tornado approaches, the Hat cockily levitates higher and begins a spell to undo it, but suddenly chokes off in mid-word, clasping his throat. As he’s carried off into space, the others deduce that magic barrier or no, the Hat still needs to breathe, and Superman’s vortex sucked the air right out of his lungs.

Black and Coldcast teleport back down to Metropolis, thinking that Superman won’t be so destructive in the midst of his favorite town. Black plans to “flatten the whole city” (some protector!) the moment their opponent shows up, but his team’s numbers dwindle yet again when a red & blue blur collides with Coldcast and sends him out of view in the blink of an eye.

Crashing to the ground like a meteor (and sending debris flying everywhere, including apparently on people), Superman informs Black where his teammate went. “Orbit. He went into orbit at Mach 7. If you had super-hearing, any second now you’d hear the… pop.” Superman shows his face for the first time since “dying” and the beating he took has only made him MORE intimidating. He’s streaked with blood, his costume is torn up, and a burst blood vessel has made one eye go red. He looks– and acts– more than a little deranged.

Above: WAY better than how they handled this in Superman III.

Black bellows about Superman having killed his whole team, to which he calmly replies “Your team of killers. Now they won’t be killing anyone else.” As he does so, Black uses telekinesis to throw piles of debris at Superman, which the hero casually sidesteps, so fast that his actual motion can’t be seen, only the still moments in-between. It’s super cool in a way that’s hard to convey in words, so:

Manchester puts up a green force field that Superman wears down with repeated blows, the last one knocking him backward. He summons up debris from all over and tries to crush Superman in the middle of it, but the Kryptonian calmly frees himself and sends several tons of car and concrete out into the crowded area around him… one batch of rubble actually seems to land on Lois, which Superman doesn’t even notice. Or care about.

As Superman slowly walks through a sustained psychic pulse that Black lashes out with, he asks the Brit how it feels to be deconstructed, to be the victim, to watch his dreams die. Manchester responds with an enormous telekinetic blast that pushes Superman farther away, so the hero plays his trump card. His eyes glow briefly, and although Black thinks he was attempting to melt his face off, Superman had actually launched a microscopic ray of heat straight through Black’s eyes, found the abnormality in his brain that’s responsible for his psychic abilities, and cut it out. “Instant lobotomy.”

Black is now utterly helpless, a fact which Superman underscores by calmly approaching and slapping him around. Literally slapping.

Super Pimp.

The fourth and final slap knocks some blood and probably a few teeth loose from Black’s mouth. In tears, he snuffles out “This isn’t you, you don’t do this!” to which Superman replies “I do now.”

It’s ugly and it’s mean. Everyone sees it and is distressed. Even Terence Baxter, the pissed off little urchin who was so enamored of lethal vigilantism earlier (and is nearby this fight too, in an odd coincidence), begs Superman to stand down and not stoop to his opponents’ level. But the hero lets it sink in– the fact that he’s giving them what they think they wanted, and showing them what it would really look like.

Superman can move at the speed of thought, he can level mountains with a blow, he can count the molecules in the air, he has a whole fortress full of advanced alien technology, and he’s nearly impossible to kill. If he abandons his principles, if he believes that life is cheap, if he arbitrates rather than enforces justice, if he decides that his might makes him right, then he’s no longer a protector or a hero. He’s an angry god. And this is what he was actively arguing and fighting against the whole story, if anyone had cared to listen. They’re listening now.

But fortunately for all involved (especially current crybaby Manchester Black), Superman didn’t give up the fight against his dark nature. With a deservedly smug grin, he reveals to all how he’d planned this show right from the beginning, with more than a little help from the Kryptonian robots he has stashed in his fortress. His helpers were always there to sneakily protect bystanders so that it looked like he was being reckless with collateral damage, and they’ve similarly whisked off the  remaining members of the Elite– they’re all chilling in the fortress as he speaks, imprisoned and unconscious but alive. Superman’s helpers had even enlisted the Elite’s bio-ship, Bonnie, by promising that they’d free it from the team’s enslavement.

It was hard work, just like the difficulties Superman faces every day when he clings to his principles in an ever-harsher world. Meanwhile, hatred and violence are easy, but worse for everyone in the end. So Superman threaded the needle and maintained his code while still getting everyone real familiar with what they’d see if he didn’t… and what they’d probably see from the Elite, after enough time of unchallenged rule.

Black tells Superman if he thinks this is over, he’s living in a dream world. To which, corny as ever but still right, Superman replies:

“Good. Dreams save us. Dreams lift us up and transform us into something better. And on my soul, I swear that until my dream of a world where dignity, honor and justice are the reality we all share, I’ll never stop fighting. Ever.”

The people cheer. Superman wins, and more importantly, his dream does.

So it’s not perfect. The genuinely exciting portions of the fight are over by the halfway mark, and while the second half keeps up plenty of narrative excitement to make up for it, upon re-watch you find yourself wanting to see Superman take just a bit longer to dismantle the Elite. Though of course that’s probably the primitive lizard-brain part of you talking, the part heroes like Superman want you to overcome. Also, that “heat vision surgery” thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Newbern plays it terrifically here, especially interesting after years of hearing him as such a boy scout in Justice League (even the “bad” alternate version of him from one episode sounded pretty cheery). Parts of his performance are even better when you re-watch the film in light of the final revelation: when he lets loose an over-the-top melodramatic laugh during the tornado scene, it’s not because Newbern is hamming it up, Superman is.

And of course all praise due to the writing of Joe Kelly, adapting his own story here. Kelly is somewhat notorious for inserting overt and clumsy political messages into his comics (he even shoehorns them in this film a few times, retroactively applying a War on Terror angle to a March 2001 story), but his dialogue here shines. And he gets Superman.

This is the Superman I love, and the one the world loved for roughly 70 or so years of comic history. If, as the navel-gazers like to say, the old kind of Superman is no longer “relevant” in today’s world, then that’s the world’s problem, not Superman’s. He’s not a reflective figure but an aspirational one.

And this is not, Henry Cavill’s dazzling performance aside, the Superman we got in Man of Steel. (SPOILER WARNING for next sentence). That’s a Superman who not only kills his adversary at the finish, but also causes untold thousands of deaths in collateral damage as he callously tosses his foe through a surprising amount of buildings, taking down whole city blocks just so the filmmakers can aesthetically highlight the scale of superpowers involved. A Superman who exists not to protect or inspire but only to fight… and as the absolute last person on the Internet who should have to demonstrate his affection for fight scenes, I can safely say that I want something a little more from Superman. Something better. Man of Steel’s Superman resembles nothing so much as the act Superman puts on in this movie, in order to fool the Elite and prove a point.

(Not to dump on the movie relentlessly, but… speaking of those fight scenes–you know, the fight scenes that the movie sacrifices so much to portray and are supposed to be its major saving grace? Man of Steel basically has a whopping two fight scenes. Superman vs the Elite has, in case you missed the title cards here, four fight scenes of varying quality, plus a few neat sequences of Superman saving people and the like. And it does all that in half the time.)

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: You & I have unfinished business.

Killin’ time.

Practically kill-thirty.

2) The Bride vs Gogo Yubari, Johnny Mo and the Crazy 88

The Fighters:

• The Bride aka Beatrix Kiddo aka Black Mamba. Sporting a yellow track suit deliberately reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s in Game of Death. She was a mean biatch back in the previous fight, but here’s where we see just how deadly she really is. Played by Uma Thurman, with special stunts carried out by the excellent Zoe Bell.
  • Armed with: a samurai sword specially made by Hattori Hanzo, the blacksmith whose blades are legendary even in the Bride’s circles.
• Gogo Yubari, a young Japanese woman whose cheery demeanor and schoolgirl outfit belie a murderous psychopathy. Played by Chiaki Kuriyama, who caught Tarantino’s eye in the cult film Battle Royale.
  • Armed with: a flail (ball & chain) with a retractable razor blade.

• The Crazy 88, O-Ren Ishii’s personal army. There’s actually maybe 40 or 50 of them, not 88– as Bill says in the second volume, they just like to call themselves that, probably because it “sounded cool.” A bunch of hotheaded but not terribly skilled young men & women, all wearing fancy black suits and Kato (the Green Hornet’s sidekick, most famously played by Bruce Lee) masks. Played by various stunt folks.
  • Armed with: mostly katana swords, probably pretty cheap ones. One has a sort of whip/strap and another has two tomahawks.

• Johnny Mo, field leader of the Crazy 88. He’s dressed similarly but is visibly older and completely bald. Played veteran Hong Kong martial arts star Gordon Liu. The character is a replacement for the script’s “Mr. Barrel,” an imposing fighter who takes the Bride up on her offer of standing down if she’ll pay him a favor later on.
  • Armed with: what appears at first to be a wooden staff but turns out to be dual short samurai swords with wooden cane handles.

The Setup: Though it comes late in the movie, this is actually the second part of the Bride’s mission of vengeance. Which makes a twisted sort of sense: as the Bride’s ultimate target, yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (more on her next time), is the most protected of her former colleagues, going after her first is a great way of getting through the hardest part immediately. But more importantly, it’s O-Ren who still retains the services of Sofie Fatale, the DiVAS’ old executive assistant. It’s Sofie who will help (voluntarily or otherwise) the Bride track down all her other targets.

This fight is also probably one of the greatest arguments for splitting the movie in two. In terms of duration, complexity and sheer spectacle, no fight in either movie comes close; it absolutely feels like a climax. It’s much better placed at the end of one volume rather than the middle of a single movie. Sitting through two more hours of dialogue & cameos after this monstrosity would set even the most patient of audiences to fidgeting. If you want to know how audiences will turn on you if you drag out a movie too long after what seems like it ought to be the climax, just ask Steven Spielberg. (Or maybe not, since he seemed unwilling to learn that lesson.)

The Bride follows Ishii’s procession to an upscale Tokyo restaurant known as the House of Blue Leaves (it sounds like a really cool name for a restaurant, but for all I know in Japan that’s about as inspired as “Applebee’s”), where she’s relaxing with Gogo and a handful of Crazy 88s. After seizing Sofie in the bathroom and holding her at swordpoint, Beatrix summons her foe out of a private upstairs booth by bellowing out her signature line: “O-REN ISHII! YOU AND I HAVE UNFINISHED BUSINESS!”

(She says it in Japanese and I’ll note that even as someone who barely speaks it, Uma Thurman’s pronunciation is terrible. Simply atrocious. She seemingly made little to no effort to study the rhythms of the language, and is just reciting funny words she learned from a piece of paper. I saw this in the theater with a friend of mine who speaks it fluently and his native Japanese girlfriend; they couldn’t stop laughing whenever Uma spoke.)

After a brief staredown between the two old comrades (punctuated by the obligatory “siren” moment in the Bride’s head), the heroine casually slashes off one of Sofie’s arms, leaving her to writhe and scream on the ground while arterial blood sprays from her new stump. Nasty, but it’s definitely one way to clear a restaurant. After the terrified crowd stampedes out, the Bride is alone with her enemies. Tough luck for them.

The Fight: It starts out simple enough. At Ishii’s direction, the six members of the Crazy 88 try to take on the Bride: first one at a time, then three, and finally the last remaining pair. She makes quick work of them all, her Hanzo blade humming as she does so.

This leaves only Gogo, and although the Bride tries to talk the youth out of dying today, the psycho adolescent just laughs at her, and readies her chain.

She’s not as into it as this guy.

Sword vs flail is an unusual mash-up, but the choreography (a joint effort between Yuen Wo-Ping and Sonny Chiba, the famed Japanese martial arts star who also appears in the film as Hattori Hanzo) does a decent job of giving a sense of real back & forth here. Well, mostly “forth” because it’s Gogo who dominates, with her unpredictable and long-ranging weapon. The Bride tries to keep her sword up for a while but is eventually disarmed by the chain, and even takes a couple brutal blows to the chest from the swinging ball.

Yubari is enthused yet methodical, displaying astonishing precision & control of the weapon. A time or two she even kicks the ball in mid-swing to suddenly change its direction. The Bride can do little but jump out of her way, with Yubari chasing her and smashing tables in pursuit. In an echo/foreshadowing of the fight with Vernita, Kiddo grabs a table leg as a desperate means of defense, and swings it like a baseball bat to return the metal orb back to sender. Gogo dodges the volley but gets nailed in the back of the head when it ricochets off the wall behind her.

She falls but the Bride can’t get there in time to finish her off before she recovers and activates the razor blade attachment on the flail. One swing slashes the heroine on the shoulder, and although another embeds the weapon in a wooden pillar, the chain wraps around the Bride’s neck. Gogo yanks it tight to keep her from escaping, and slowly pulls up the slack in order to choke her enemy to death. Fortunately, the Bride picks up her chunk of a table leg and slams it, exposed nails outward, in Yubari’s white sneaker. Her follow-up blow hits the deranged teen in the side of the head, taking her out for good.

Crybaby.

[In the script, Gogo had a sister named Yuki who was not present at this showdown. The biggest departure the final product has from it is the deletion of an entire chapter called "Yuki's Revenge" where Yuki nearly derails the Bride's mission in her own quest for vengeance. It could have been a setpiece to rival this sequence, too; as described in the screenplay, an armed-to-the-teeth Yuki tears up half a suburban block (the scene immediately follows Vernita's death) trying to kill her.]

Though it’s just the Bride and O-Ren Ishii now, it seems that a distress call she put out earlier has just paid off. Whole cars full of the remaining Crazy 88 rush in, led by Johnny Mo. The two adversaries share a moment of black humor, and an old joke that doesn’t become clear until you learn her name later on (“tricks are for kids,” get it?). Of course it wasn’t gonna be that easy, silly rabbit.

The small army quite literally has the Bride surrounded, swords drawn and ready for blood. There’s a tense stand-off in which the 88 are clearly wary of her, despite their superior numbers; the first time she moves even a little, the crowd lurches back as one. But the Bride isn’t going to let all the sword-bearing idiots in the world stop her revenge, so she gets to work.

There’s only one expression that aptly describes the Bride in the chaos that follows:

Homegirl goes nuts. There’s just no stopping a pissed off mama lion with a Hanzo sword. Imagine Neo during the Burly Brawl, but with a samurai sword, and no terrible computer graphics, and landing blows that actually look like they hurt… but even better than that. She’s constantly slicing, slashing and stabbing. She almost never stops moving, and with seemingly every other sword movement she takes down an opponent either fatally or by removing a limb. Between her dancing sword and her sick aerial moves (she flips about, clearly on wires), no one can touch her. Attempting to walk through the fight in sequence would be a fool’s errand, so let’s just call out some of the more memorable details:

- the middle of the floor is made of glass, allowing Tarantino to film from underneath

- there are at least three distinct music selections accompanying the battle: one cheesy, one dramatic & tense, and one silly fun (the song “Nobody But Me” by the Human Beinz)

- Johnny Mo constantly comes in & out of the fight, being separated from the Bride by multiple factors. The longest time he’s away is when the Bride snaps a bamboo pole at him which knocks him out for a few minutes

- this fight was deliberately done using old-fashioned techniques, without the aid of modern technology. There are veritable geysers of blood

- the theatrical release of the film switched to black & white for the majority of the fight. While this is stylistically interesting, it also had a practical purpose: Tarantino had learned a while back that the MPAA is, oddly enough, much less skittish about on-screen blood when the blood is not red. Unrated home releases later restored the scene to full color.

- The Bride’s acts of mayhem include:

• ripping one gangster’s eye out
• ripping another guy’s throat out
• chopping off numerous limbs & heads
• catching one thrown axe, dodging the other to let it hit someone behind her, and returning the first into the head of the thrower
• splitting one man in half down the middle
• slashing three necks with one swing
• jumping on one man’s shoulders to get the high ground briefly, and cutting the hands off the man she was perched on when he tries to stab her from below
• doing a form of “breakdance fighting” that would shame even Derek Zoolander when she spins around on her back and feet, slashing at her attackers’ legs the whole time

Eventually the orgy of violence winds down to just the Bride and less than ten remaining Crazy 88s (what were they thinking they could accomplish that the last forty or so couldn’t?), who she lets pursue her upstairs into a smaller room. For unstated reasons, one of the restaurant owners turns off the building’s lights, leaving the fight to take place in silhouette.

It’s cool, a nice little change. As the Bride dispatches the last handful in style, the owner turns the lights back on (again, inexplicably) just before the Bride takes out the last gangster standing: a frightened boy, probably not older than 17. She’d previously sliced his mask off and let him live out of mercy, but he came right back. So this time she breaks his sword into little pieces, then bends him over and literally spanks him with the flat side of the blade, sending him off to momma in tears.

Kiddo leaves the room to find a revived Johnny Mo, who goes after her ferociously. Their fight ends up on the second floor railing, with her frantically defending herself as he deftly balances on the thin surface while spinning his whole body so he can slash at her with alternating blades. But as soon as she finds an opening she leans and cuts off one of his legs, dropping him to a small indoor pond below (already filled with blood from another guy she’d killed and left in there).

Surveying the carnage she’s caused…

… the Bride makes a small speech:

“Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives, take them with you! But leave the limbs you have lost. They belong to me now.”

Which, uh, sure. Whatever you say, ma’am.

Whew. This is a real monster on every level. The execution is nearly flawless and the tempo changes just enough to keep things from being repetitive; all in all it’s a grand buffet of grisly fun. A shame Tarantino has largely shied away from straight-up action filmmaking ever since.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: Lucy, I’m home!

I’m too proud of myself for coming up with that joke to think of a caption.

Welcome to The Rock.

Time to shine the spotlight on a little-seen gem, in this case 2003′s The Rundown. Released to little fanfare and poor box office despite relatively strong critical acclaim for a genre flick, The Rundown (an admittedly mediocre title) stars national treasure The Rock as a likable bounty hunter roped into some painful South American shenanigans. The film should have been the next step in the Rock’s burgeoning film career, but it seems that his much-predicted momentum took a stumble after The Scorpion King, his first starring role, was pretty underwhelming. And perhaps audiences in 2003 had similarly tired of the antics of Rundown co-star Seann William Scott, the once & future Stiffler; another shame, in my opinion, because Scott is truly hilarious. His sleeper hockey hit Goon from last year is under consideration as a future entry.

But the big shame here is that The Rundown performed so poorly at the box office and hasn’t even gone on to become a bona fide cult hit, because it’s just so much fun. Directed by the highly competent & unpredictable Peter Berg (check out that eclectic filmography), The Rundown has a solid sense of itself, managing to strike that ineffable balance between seriousness & silliness. It has stylized action & broad characters yet there’s a dark edge to it that puts some weight behind the proceedings. And there’s a real creativity in the action sequences, constantly signalling to the audience that this movie came to play.

[Note: Given that this movie was robbed of the popularity it deserves, finding images for the entries is going to be harder than usual. Bear with me.]

1) Beck vs A Whole Football Team

The Fighters:

• Beck, a bounty hunter aka “retrieval expert” trapped in indentured servitude with a wealthy boss of some nebulous criminality. Though Beck has an incredible talent for violence, he prefers not to resort to it; his true passion is cooking, and he hopes to open a restaurant one day. Played by Samoan Thor himself, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. (I’m going to try to refer to him as “Beck” in the entries, but I can’t guarantee I won’t slip up and occasionally call the character “The Rock.” Note that this is not out of disdain for Mr. Johnson’s talents as a performer; quite the opposite.)
  • Armed with: Nothing, though he does make use of some handy nearby implements. Beck, we will later learn, doesn’t carry a gun, not because he hates them but because he’s too good with them, and they take him to an emotional place where he might go too far. He’s a regular Atticus Finch, if Atticus Finch could kick Hulk Hogan’s ass.
• NFL Players, about five of them, from Beck’s favorite football team (he says it’s “the entire offensive line” which is probably an exaggeration but I don’t watch sports. Is the NFL the one where the hut-huts have to put the tackleball in the score zone?): the Defensive End, Fullback, Middle Linebacker, and Left & Right Tackle. A bunch of burly meatheads who look like they’re quite used to this sort of thing.
  • Armed with: one has a gun but he’s deprived of it before ever trying to use it.
• Beck’s eyebrows, played by The Rock’s eyebrows. They’re not an active participant in the fight but they’re always there, seeing over all. Even you. Right now.
  • Armed with: Hair, justice, Samoan magic.

The Setup: Beck has been dispatched to a kickin’ nightclub to confront Brian Knappmiller, the quarterback of the local football team who has unfortunately incurred quite a gambling debt with Beck’s employer. Specifically Beck needs to retrieve Knappmiller’s prized Super Bowl ring as collateral, but Knappmiller is loathe to part with it and tells Beck to shove off, throwing drinks in his face.

There’s an added element of humor to the scene in that Beck wants even more than usual for this job to not turn violent, because Knappmiller’s posse consists of many of the team’s other star players. There’s a neat sequence before the meeting where Beck, talking with an associate, points out each individual player, and as he does so Berg plays a montage of football clips (ostensibly of the player described, but really NFL and XFL footage), ending with a graphic showing the player’s name and main stats. If Beck has to hurt them, there’s a good chance the key members of his favorite team could be sidelined. Hard break for a sports fan. (Say what you will about anime nerds but this is a problem they never have.)

After wiping off his face in the bathroom Beck calls his employer to plead for more time, but is told to press on right now. He storms out to the dance floor much less meekly this time, and gives Knappmiller his standard ultimatum: “Option A, you give me the ring. Option B, I make you give me the ring.” Predictably, Knappmiller chooses the one that’s going to force him to smell what the would-be chef is cooking.

[When Beck first walks into the building, he passes by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who slyly remarks "Have fun!" to a confused Beck. The mysterious Austrian's role in the plot is never revealed because he's really there as a meta-reference for the audience, symbolically anointing his cinematic successor. The cameo was apparently unplanned and done on the spur of the moment.]

The Fight: The club’s strobing lights and the bouncing rhythm of Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” provide an excellent backdrop for an excellently-staged little opening number. After Brian chooses the dumber option, the beefcakes immediately set in on him, and the Rock takes them down one at a time with brutal efficiency.

The fighting here could never be described as “real” but it is covered with a nice patina of realism. There are no extended tradings of punches or elaborate stunts, just quick bursts of effective violence. Beck is clearly established here as a guy who has almost-surgical precision to match his raw strength, as we see him strike at vulnerable spots and use his opponents’ momentum against them. Notably, the third jabroni who rushes Beck gets taken out with a Rock Bottom, one of the Rock’s patented wrestling moves. As far as I can tell this is the only one of those maneuvers used in the movie, so it’s nice they got it out of the way fast; plus doing so in the opening fight sends a signal not to take the rest of the movie too seriously.

Berg and his crew do more than their part to help sell Beck’s prowess, juicing up all his blows with painful-sounding thuds on the soundtrack and accentuating the movements with well-timed (read: not excessive) stretches of slow-motion. This visual style will prove to be a running theme through the movie. It works like gangbusters as it highlights some of the more complicated staging, and it’s also just, well, cool.

After calmly watching him take out their teammates, eventually the enormous Left & Right Tackle rise to face Beck simultaneously, which he greets with a sort of irritated resignation. When they line up against him, the POV is from just behind the two giants’ shoulders, the perspective making Beck look tiny in comparison– an interesting choice on Berg’s part, because while these two athletes are taller than the Dwayne Johnson’s 6’4 height, they’re not that much taller… and of course part of the Rock’s whole appeal as a performer is his own hulking size (as opposed to action stars like Bruce Willis or Chuck Norris). The Rock seems here (and in many other performances) as the best of both worlds: not a lion amongst men or a men amongst lions, but a lion amongst other lions.

Anyway, the People’s Lion makes quick work of the two Tackles opposing him, taking each out with short strikes and pounding their faces into nearby pillars. The one setback Beck suffers comes shortly after, when the Defensive End recovers enough to seize Beck in a charging tackle and slam him into the DJ’s booth. He nearly cleans Beck’s clock with a follow-up haymaker, but Beck blocks it by seizing the record player and using it to block the blow (the music comes to an end with an abrupt record scratch– which is actually appropriate here, unlike its cliched use in a million movie trailers). He actually used a turntable to turn the tables! … I’m sorry.

Knappmiller then tries to escape, but Beck hurls the record player in slow-mo at the QB’s back, dropping him like a sack of potatoes. As Beck angrily seizes the ring from Brian’s hand, he laments the idiot didn’t choose Option A. I would have. Then Beck’s own NFL-style title card flashes on the screen:

As we’ve said over & over here, one of the primary missions of the Opening Action Sequence is to set the tone for what’s to come, and this does exactly that. This scene does everything it needs to in terms of setting up what kind of movie is going to happen, and what kind of hero Beck is. Such sequences are also meant to grab the audience’s attention and provide them with a fun jolt to get ‘em in the right mood, and this scene does the hell out of that.

Oh, and I was a bit disappointed after checking up on the lyrics to the song that plays through most of the fight: it turns out the refrain is “go getcho freak on,” when I had always heard it as “Rock getcho freak on.” Arguably that would have been too on the nose but I liked the idea that the movie’s very environment is even cheering on the Rock. Ah well.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: The Rock meets The Walk(en).

“You have precisely the necessary amount of cowbell.”

In which the Rock enters a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

2) Beck vs Hatcher’s Goons

The Fighters:

• Beck, the retrieval specialist with apparently no other name, so it’s possible he’s related to Glenn. Once again he’s going to have to do things the hard way. Played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
  • Armed with: Again, nothing.
• Henchmen, four of them. Their field leader seems to be Hatcher’s brother Harvey, but the deadliest is the quieter man Swenson (not sure if he’s ever identified as such on-screen). Harvey is played by Jon Gries and Swenson is played by stunt man Stuart F. Wilson.
  • Armed with: Harvey has a knife and the two nameless others near him have handguns. Swenson carries two whips. Whips are kind of his thing.

The Setup: After returning pissed off from his last job, Beck demanded a mission with a payday big enough to wipe his slate clean. The mission is to “retrieve” his employer’s wayward son, Travis Walker (Seann William Scott), back home to daddy. The trouble is that Travis is putzing about in a remote mining town out in the Brazilian jungle.

The mine, and the town, are run with an iron fist by the eccentric villain Cornelius Hatcher (Christopher Walken, whose only performance notes from Peter Berg seem to have been “Chris, just do your thing,” because that’s exactly what he does). Hatcher and his small army of minions work the local populace basically as slaves, and although Hatcher initially allows (for a rather hefty sum) Beck the privilege of retrieving Travis, he later reneges when he learns that Travis has tracked down the location of a valuable jungle artifact, the Gato do Diablo.

Beck finds Travis easily enough in the local dive bar on a hot afternoon, where Travis had been conspiring with crafty bartender Mariana (Rosario Dawson, who hadn’t quite hit it big at this time). Beck gives Travis the old A&B choice, and although Travis predictably resists, Beck restrains him with minimal difficulty. That’s when Hatcher walks in with four goons (Swenson rather cannily enters through the back door, surrounding Beck) and announces that he had his “fingers crossed the whole time” on their recent deal, so Beck’s going to have to turn Travis over after all– no refunds. This will not go well.

The Fight: Beck is cool as ever, but given that two of Hatcher’s guys have guns drawn, he has to think creatively. First he trips Travis and sends him painfully to the ground, taking him out of the action. He throws a chair (wrestlers and their chairs, man) at Harvey and the two men near him– they’re foolishly clustered together– and escapes behind a pool table in the confusion. He takes cover as they fire off some rounds, then rushes with surprising speed when they get closer. Beck leaps and takes the first jabroni out with a nifty if gratuitously complicated flying corkscrew move with his legs, then immediately after landing he sweep kicks the other gun-wielding goon.

Swenson stands by passively in the background, wondering when the next Castlevania game will come out.

Having found time to disarm the two thugs during his amazing acrobatics, Beck then dismantles the knife-toting Harvey, and shoves one pilfered gun in the chump’s mouth while aiming the other at a rather impressed Hatcher.

Swenson should totally have this guy’s job.

Not wanting to cross the line into killing, Beck falls to the ground so he can double-kick Harvey into his two buddies and knock them down (again) like bowling pins. He sees Travis making a break for it and, with mathematical precision, releases the magazine from one pistol and slides it under Travis’ feet, tripping him. Dropping the other gun in an attempt to defuse the situation instead makes Beck vulnerable to Swenson’s whip, which the bad guy unfurls in a dramatically cool slow-mo shot.

But even whips are no match for the Rock, as he demonstrates when he catches Swenson’s initial strike, holding the end tight. By the time Swenson readies his other whip Beck has thrown a small wooden table his way, intercepting the blow so Beck can escape with Travis while the dust clears. To be continued, Mr. Hatcher.

Fun stuff here, even if some of the choreography is perhaps a little too silly for its own good. Though it’s a bit more creative in its staging, at heart this scene is really not much different than what the previous fight was: an abbreviated little scuffle to show what Beck is capable of. So at the end of the day it’s hard to be impressed with it much more. Of course, it’s hard to dislike it, too; more action movies should be this playful.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Remember this guy?

He grew up.

Let’s flip out.

This guy gets it.

3) Beck vs Manito and the Rebels

The Fighters:

• Beck, a bounty hunter who’s quite a bit out of his element. Played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
  • Armed with: Nothing. Poor guy.
• Brazilian rebels, a group of small but unpredictable freedom fighters opposed to Hatcher’s de facto despotism. To my amateur eye and also due to the fact that it’s Brazil, they seem to fight using a variant of capoeira, the martial art known for its fluid dance-like moves and ability to improve the lives of at-risk teens. About four or five of them take part in the impromptu “duel,” but for the first part it’s mainly the leader Manito, played Ernie Reyes Jr, the Fillippinio actor and martial arts champion most known for being the human co-star in the Ninja Turtles sequel.
  • Armed with: Knives and axes, but they also make deadly use of tree branches (including one that’ s on fire) and, more importantly, several handy vines for swinging.

The Setup: Their hasty retreat to the airstrip having taken a few jungle detours, The Rundown essentially becomes a buddy movie for a good stretch, with the Rock (who has serious comic chops of his own) mostly playing exasperated straight man to Seann William Scott’s antics. (The movie is clearly inspired by the classic action/comedy Midnight Run, so much so that’s practically a setting-switched remake.)

Eventually their trip through the wilderness gets them caught by the local resistance movement, who only speak Portuguese. Travis pretends to act as translator to just get the two released, but he secretly tells their leader that Beck is an assassin sent by Hatcher to kill them. Between that and Beck’s aggressive body language (courtesy of Travis’ misleading prompts), the little tribesmen decide they’re going to kick Beck’s ass. To death.

The Fight: Everyone backs off to create a large fighting space, and Manito is the first to square off against Beck, taunting him with a couple non-sequitur English phrases like “okay hip-hop” and “hey Kansas Cities” before screaming at him in Portuguese (not subtitled, but it’s “I’m gonna bash your face in!” according to an attempted translation by someone I watched it with). He opens up by swinging down on a vine from a tree he’d climbed up rather quickly, and punching Beck in the face on the way.

From there he takes on the enormous Samoan with surprising efficiency. Berg makes the most out of the size disparity between the two combatants, showcasing the short but ripped Reyes’ speed & skill as he batters Beck with blows. Manito flips, twists and turns about before Beck can lay a meaty hand on him, and landing multiple sets of rapid blows while he’s at it.

“Argh, this is worse than Surf Ninjas!”

From there the others join in and it becomes a real free-for-all, a sort of coordinated and gleeful chaos. Beck gets tossed around like a ragdoll, buffeted about by a constant series of moving targets. The group of compact little dudes almost seem to operate via some sort of hive mind, so synchronously do they move. One will stun him with a kick, another slides in to sweep his legs out so that a third will swing in on a vine and kick him in mid-fall. It’s not a complete shutout for Beck, though, as he gets in a couple painful-looking lumps of his own. But very few could handle this kind of sustained attack from multiple opponents working in concert. Plus, Beck knows this is all a misunderstanding and doesn’t want to fight, so he’s presumably holding back a bit.

They attempt to finish him off by having Manito and a pal swing in together on two vines (tied around their ankles so both hands are free) and each of them seizes one of Beck’s feet, then letting him go at the peak of their swing so the momentum launches him WAY high into the air, hitting half a dozen branches on the way down. Ouch.

Their celebration gets cut short when Beck opens his eyes and rises, looking rather pissed off. Perhaps worried about his durability, the rebels immediately get more serious and throw several axes at him (which he dodges) and the first guy comes at him with a knife. But Beck is in the zone now: angry, determined, more familiar with these little bastards’ tactics. The Beck from this point on is the guy we’ve seen as an incredibly effective neutralizer, not the muscleman blindly flailing about trying to score a couple punches.

The hero takes out the remaining handful with characteristic precision, even turning their own weapons against them when one seizes a flaming log from the campfire and brandishes it at him. After putting out the flame with a really painful-looking blow to the face, he side steps another incoming vine swing from two more foes and clotheslines them with the log. Taking out those chumps he’s alone with Manito, who draws his own knife after getting up from a nasty throw. He takes a few lunges but Beck is able to grab the rebel’s limbs and overpower him, taking the knife and declaring “I’m not your enemy!” but getting clocked in the face by yet another log-wielding rebel before he can prove it.

(Un)fortunately, that’s when the fight ends, courtesy of Mariana showing up and firing off a warning shot. Turns out she’s a mole for the rebels as well, and puts a stop to Hatcher’s mutual enemies fighting each other. Ah, fun while it lasted.

This is the kind of wild change-up the movie needed, after the far less ambitious skirmish at the bar. We’ve watched Beck go up against seemingly overwhelming odds (namely, half a football team and a handful of armed thugs), but these rebels are the first ones we’ve seen who operate at the level of physical competence that he does… and accordingly, this is the first time we really see our protagonist take a serious beating. Kudos to Dwayne Johnson for being quite willing to not just take a few blows but actually get knocked around comically– but of course, it’s fitting that a man who came from the world of professional wrestling wouldn’t be afraid of a little silliness tarnishing his machismo. If only more big action stars were as unselfconscious.

The staging really goes wild, too, with attackers coming from every angle and doing crazy circus acrobatics. At times the choreography is a little bit too cute for its own good, though, what with all rapid off-screen tree ascensions and too-perfectly-timed swings. Plus there are a few blows that are too ridiculous even for this movie’s stylized world, like when one rebel slide-kicks into Beck’s face and that somehow launches him ten feet through the air. Uh huh.

Speaking of stylization, Berg’s direction is more overtly playful than ever, constantly showing off the choreography and highlighting the painfulness of each blow. The fight’s soundtrack is ostensibly provided by the crowd of onlooking rebels, who play along with some primitive instruments, mainly drums. The whole thing pulls together quite well.

It just might be Ernie Reyes Jr who’s the scene’s MVP, though. A full footer shorter than the Rock and composed of lean muscle, Reyes is one compact badass, a coiled spring of aggression and hostility. As an actor he brings a kind of wild intensity to the performance as well, growling out his lines with bug-eyed craziness. Why isn’t this guy still famous?

All in all, though the fight’s ambition gets ahead of itself, it’s nonetheless chock full of kinetic goodness. Fits right in with the tone of the movie while still escalating the intensity.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: The big finish! Who’s gonna win?

The villains in the control room, maybe?

In which the Rock finally exercises his Second Amendment rights.

They still apply overseas, because AMERICA.

It was a bit hard to write about this one, given that even though there’s fighting it’s not really “a fight”– so much generalized chaos that it’s a bit hard to boil down, more of an all-purpose action scene. But there’s enough blows thrown and clever choreography that I couldn’t ignore it in good conscience.

4) Beck vs All the Bad Guys

The Fighters:

• Beck, the would-be chef whose bounty hunting got him caught in the middle of a South American uprising. Played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
  • Armed with: Beck is determined not to go in guns blazing, but he soon discovers the limits of that approach and makes Charlton Heston proud.
• Travis Walker, not one of the main players here but is featured just enough to warrant his inclusion. Spoiled and silly but also unpredictable, he does prove a bit useful here. Played by the always-welcome Seann William Scott.
  • Armed with: Travis packs a gun right from the beginning. Also his pals Mr. Thunder and Mr. Lightning.
• Hatcher’s men, pretty much all the remaining ones– around 15-20. They’re posted strategically throughout the ramshackle little village. Including Cornelius Bernard Hatcher himself, hapless brother Harvey, and the awesome Swenson; played by Christopher Walken, Jon Gries and Stuart F. Wilson, respectively.
  • Armed with: all sorts of guns, and of course Swenson brought whips, as did his two buddies.

The Setup: Beck, Travis and Mariana found the Gato earlier, but she, wanting to sell it so her people could be free of Hatcher, drugged the other two just to be safe and left them in the jungle. Unfortunately she ended up getting snatched by Hatcher’s men while they were separated, and Beck gets word that the bad guy’s holding her in the town square and will likely execute her soon. [Also, after the last fight, Beck made nice with the rebels but the proceedings were interrupted by a raid from Hatcher, who personally shot & killed Manito. Boo!]

Beck is free to take Travis and fly out of there, but the pair’s consciences can’t allow the distressed damsel to meet her fate. Off to settle Hatcher’s hash it is, then.

The Fight: Beck kicks things off on an odd note, by sending his Scottish pilot-for-hire Declan in, blowing on bagpipes, to trash talk at Hatcher using Biblical rhetoric. He presumably  serves not as an omen but as a distraction, so that no one would hear the incoming stampede of bulls until it was too late.

Yep, bulls. A clever use of Chekov’s Gun, the presence of a nearby bovine herd had been set up early in the film. They rampage through the small town square, scattering (and in a few cases trampling) Hatcher’s men and tearing up structures. As the villain himself wryly remarks, “that’s a lotta cows.”

They also provide excellent cover for Beck to storm right into the midst of Hatcher’s men. He tears up several using his strength and creativity before they can take a shot at him– possibly my favorite bit is when he stomps the end of a loose floorboard to throw one bad guy’s aim off. He takes out a handful, depriving them all of weapons and even using their guns as clubs. Meanwhile Travis gets isolated in a small shop and has an epic length confrontation with one (1) squirrelly thug, who he eventually takes down rather humorously.

But eventually Beck’s non-projectile strategy reaches its limits, and with all the bulls having come through the bad guys have a clear line of sight on their adversaries. Both Beck and Travis are pinned down by sustained fire in separate locations, and there’s a long, desperate while Beck realizes he’s going to have to go his Bad Emotional Place and use guns again.

But once he does, it is on. The hero rises to triumphant guitar strings, bearing a shotgun in each hand, and engages Beast Mode as he strides across the battlefield and blasts down every henchmen in sight. Here I’ll defer to my gun nut readers’ expertise but I’m pretty sure many of the distances Beck is shooting from would be very hard to manage with a shotgun– a weapon hardly known for its precision from afar. Still, he looks cool doing it. Especially when he causes a leaky tanker truck to blow up and walks away from the fireball in slow-mo, as all action heroes have been required to do ever since the days of Mosaic law.

Out of bullets, Beck finds himself pinned down again across from a group of henchmen in a sniper’s nest, but no problem: the Rock simply leaps the distance between structures and starts punching out all the support pillars, bringing the whole rickety perch tumbling down.

His arm still smarting, Beck is confronted by Swenson and his two fetishist pals. Time to get kinky.

The three quickly surround Beck, and here Berg tries something ambitious, because it’s difficult enough to stage an inventive fight sequence (with a real sense of back & forth) involving a whip, and this fight has three whip-users. Four whips total, actually, because Swenson is dual-wielding.

It must have been a pain to block this fight out, but the result is a real blast. Beck gets knocked about and snapped at but still gives back pretty good as well. He manages to neutralize Swenson’s two cohorts simultaneously, seizing the guns from their belts while on the ground and firing after kicking them down. Why they (or Swenson, who also was shown to have a gun) did not just shoot Beck despite having ample opportunity, is not mentioned. It’s especially odd in light of Swenson’s own “you should have kept the gun” admonition to Beck during the bar fight scene.

After tangling a bit more with Swenson, Beck is able to disarm the knockoff Belmont and go hand-to-hand with him for a few rounds. And while I think Swenson’s tops as a henchmen, there’s no way their little scruff would even last this long if not for Beck being so visibly worn down during it. Hero finally subdues henchman, and Beck is nearly taken out by a lingering sniper, before that shooter is fortuitously shot by Travis. Beck grabs the man’s fallen gun and immediately blasts the pistol out of the hand of Hatcher, who’d been quietly approaching and nearly taken out Beck from behind.

From there, it all winds down. Walken gets a few more hammy lines as the character refuses to contemplate how he’s lost everything, and is ultimately shot by an anonymous villager. Oh, and Travis subdued Harvey by crashing his escaping car into a water tower.

Do you know what this fight is? It’s a video game. It’s SO a video game. Especially after Beck arms himself– just put the camera into first-person view and his unstoppable rampage will be a lot more familiar. I say this with affection, obviously.

A few demerits, however. Aside from the aforementioned Gun Accuracy Fails and Swenson’s men choosing to get suicidally physical, the big one is Beck’s own decision go all NRA Poster Boy. It works quite well as a badass hero moment, but there’s literally no payoff to Beck’s earlier reticence to use guns. He doesn’t seem to be any more bloodthirsty than usual (certainly no more than the situation requires) and has no trouble dialing himself back down once the danger has passed. Nobody has to talk him off the ledge. He even gives Hatcher multiple chances to walk away alive! There’s no emotional consequence for the character, or even the illusion of same. Of course, this is a self-consciously silly movie, but it still oughtn’t introduce “serious” character beats it has no intention of following through on.

But the action is still fast, creative and continuous. It may not be as outright fun and inventive as the big jungle throwdown, but the scale and intensity is ratcheted up to appropriate levels for the climax. Just a good ol’ fashioned ass-whoopin’ writ large. This is the Rock’s destiny.

I demand sequels. Or at least Peter Berg signed on for a Castlevania adaptation.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: I have a good feeling about this.

Creeper ninja is creepy.

“Who, me?”

4) Shijima

(voiced by Akimasa Omori)

Shijima is arguably the most ninja-like of all the film’s many ninjas: he employs stealth, deception and diversion over outright combat. Also, whereas most of the other devils only have one real “big” power or gimmick (Zakuro stuffs corpses with explosives, Tessai can turn to rock, etc) Shijima has four: he can create illusory copies of himself, he can control people’s minds, he has a sweet chain-claw, and he can fade into & transport himself via darkened areas– allowing him to quite literally strike from the shadows. Though he pops up more than many of the movie’s other villains, he has a such diverse skill set and is interesting enough he could have stood to play a much bigger part.

Armed with: The Claw!

No, not this one.

Not quite….

There you go.

It’s a huge, sharp claw on one hand that he can fire off on a chain at will. And, as I suppose is standard issue for ninjas, a supply of small darts.

The Fights: Shijima has one very brief encounter early in the film, where he attempts to kill Dakuan as the monk is separated from Jubei on a trek through foggy darkness. Through a clever trick, Dakuan just barely managed to avoid the villain’s claw bursting out of the shadows. Not much to it, but a nice way to establish the character early on and tease at his potential.

The second time our protagonists encounter Shijima, they’re all standing in a clearing as they suss out the villains’ overall plot and figure out what to do. Shijima makes his presence known with several furtive movements at their peripheral vision, then goes all-out by surrounding the trio with dozens of his illusion copies.

He throws a few darts at Kagero (which she dodges) to attempt to keep her from sending off her carrier pigeon message for help, and that move turns out to be what Jubei needed to determine which Shijima is the real one. The hero lunges in and cuts the devil’s leg right off. Taking it like a champ, Shijima hops away wordlessly with Jubei in pursuit.

While Jubei hunts down what turns out to be a fake trail, Shijima uses the shadows to double back and kidnap Kagero– it’s implied he got the drop on her because she was stunned after Dakuan dropped some particularly shocking news on her. When the two men return, they find that Shijima has carved a note into a nearby tree telling them to come and get her, if they dare. Dakuan figures it for a trap (duh) but Jubei heads in regardless.

Shijima had, it turns out, taken the unconscious Kagero to an abandoned temple nearby. Between the dilapidated condition of the building and the setting sun, the place makes both a cool backdrop for a fight as well as a tactically advantageous (i.e., shadow-filled) ground for Shijima. Before Jubei arrives, the creepy little devil does something quite lascivious to Kagero, which is implied to be what allows him to mind-control her. So when our hero shows up and finds Kagero, she awakes with a glassy-eyed stare and immediately attacks him.

Kagero was never a match for Jubei, really, but his efforts at defending himself are hindered by the escalating effects of the poison he’s infected with (long story) as well as Shijima hassling him from the sidelines. But mostly Shijima’s contribution here is to use his claw to grab Jubei’s sword, attempting to drag it with him into the shadows. Jubei has to wrestle for control over it, which causes him to get stabbed in the hand by Kagero.

Jubei decides to let him have it, releasing the sword so that it stabs Shijima as it comes in. The creeper slowly tumbles out of the darkness, dead. Jubei passes out and Kagero comes to her senses.

Shijima’s a lot of fun, so it’s a shame that after two really promising build-ups he had so little participation in his own final battle; pitting the two heroes against each other is an interesting twist, but it’s too brief and Shijima’s own presence in that fight is minimal. However, as a whole he’s a welcome and dynamic addition to this movie’s crazy little world. Thanks, Shijima.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Boss fight!

GEMMA SMASH

Only the strong(est) will win.

Not gonna be that guy.

Brotherhood of the Wolf is an odd bird, and quite definitely by design. It’s a French-language period drama action horror story about how a naturalist knight, his mystical karate Indian pal, and an Italian prostitute/Vatican assassin unravel a conspiracy involving a zealous cult’s use of an armored monster to spread anti-Enlightenment propaganda. It is, of course, based on a true story. It’s completely ridiculous and totally awesome. I wish there were more like it.

1) Mani vs Cross-Dressing Soldiers

The Fighters:

• Mani, an Iroquois warrior/shaman who’s left America to become the companion of the film’s main protagonist. Mani is friendly but taciturn, very spiritual, and an all-around good guy. His tragic backstory involves the white devil killing his tribe, before he linked up with the honorable Gregoire de Fronsac. He’s also the master of what looks a lot like Chinese wushu, which would have been tough for him to pick up in 18th-century America. It’s never discussed, so the implication may be that kung fu is indeed yet another one of the magic foreign powers that American Indians know (the movie really does have that level of willful silliness) or, as later revelations in the story might allow for, that he actually learned it from Fronsac (who presumably picked it up on his many travels). Played by Mark Dacascos, who never got to be as big a star as he should have. It’s funny that Dacascos should play a Native American, since that’s one of the few ethnicities that’s not somewhere in his rich genetic gumbo. Dude’s like the Tiger Woods of violence.
• French soldiers, about six of them. They’re all dressed up and nowhere to go like peasant ladies because, as we will later find out, the beast tends to attack females and the local magistrate is trying to draw it into a trap. Anyway, they’re tough & mean, but nobody short of Jet Li is a match for this karate Indian. Played by stunt men, presumably.

Everybody has wooden quarterstaffs. Well, Mani doesn’t at first, but he fixes that right quick.

The Setup: The king has sent his royal taxidermist to the province of Gevaudan to investigate a series of killings attributed to a mysterious “beast” stalking the countryside– the first thing we see, actually, in full-on horror movie style, is a poor woman get devoured by the elusive creature.

It’s a dark and stormy afternoon, with precipitation that Forrest Gump would describe as “big ol’ fat rain,” as our heroes arrive in town. They immediately come across the nasty sight of a bunch of thugs beating up not just a nice old man but also a young pretty girl, which is a twofer in the realm of “excuses to show how tough the hero is” cliches. The conflict is, we will learn afterward, about the soldiers’ refusal to pay the old man for medicinal services rendered to their horses (the girl, his daughter, has probably also instigated it to some extent, considering how much of a troublemaker we later learn she is).

Though the soldiers demand to know who these two strangers are, neither answers. Mani dismounts and casually strides into the group like a boss.

The Fight: It’s pretty clear that Mani means business, so the soldiers waste no time surrounding him. One charges in tentatively and gets rewarded with a kick to the gut, and Mani stealing his weapon.

“Now I have a quarterstaff. Ho, ho, ho.”

And from there on, it’s Mani’s world, and these skirted chumps just live in it. Nobody even comes close to grazing the Iroquois as he dispatches them all with ease. Since what they’re doing is not too complex, for the most part Dacascos doesn’t even have to show off some of his fancier kung fu– he just moves fast & hits hard. They also mostly try to rush in one at a time, but everything happens so fast, and Mani’s so unpredictably graceful, that you can’t blame them for not thinking to all rush in simultaneously.

As we’ve discussed again & again here, it’s the opening fight scene’s job to introduce what kind of movie we’re going to be watching, and BOTW definitely lives up to its end of the bargain there. In addition to the choreography by Phillip Kwok, director Christophe Gans announces his aesthetic intentions early on. The staging is melodramatic & hyper-stylized: the action speeds up & down to emphasizes hits & motion, blows are accompanied by loud crunches on the soundtrack, and even the raindrops splash out in glorious slow-mo. This film is one of the many to clearly live in the shadow of post-Matrix kung fu films, but still recognizably have its own style.

Anyway, Mani makes quick work of these chumps with several elegant hits. The last is the most notable, when he plants his staff and launches himself into the air for sweet double-kick.

“Zeut alors!”

After that, even the ones who aren’t too beat up to fight decide it’s time to give up on this one. The dispute is “settled” and the heroes have made some new enemies, although it’s the people they saved who they should be worried about.

(Notably, there’s a deleted sequence here where after Mani puts the hurt on a few of these guys, Fronsac also dismounts and kicks some more ass. It’s pretty cool, but Gans made the right choice in keeping his main hero’s martial arts abilities as a surprise for later.)

This is a lot of fun, and it sets the baseline for what we’ll be seeing throughout: Mani is not to be trifled with, and Gans came here to play.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Someone trifles with Mani.

Gevaudan is French for “slow learner.”

A little fun never hurt anyone.

But a little Mani always does.

2) Mani vs Gypsies

The Fighters:

• Mani, everyone’s favorite kung fu Iroquois. He’s now let his hair down in every sense of the word. Played by Mark Dacascos.
  • Armed with: Nothing.
• Several gypsies, including two women. They’re ostensibly here as part of the hunting party that’s being assembled to catch the Beast, but they’re actually working for the film’s villainous cult. The males are especially weird, with all sorts of feathers & braids in their hair, and they stick out their tongues a lot like a dime store Kurgan. It’s pretty silly. Played by a bunch of stunt people and bit actors.
  • Armed with: Most of the guys have these weird hook/claw attachments on their hands, but they don’t break them out until near the end.

The Setup: As our heroes prep for the big hunting party, Mani has another encounter with the strange lady he saved earlier. She starts getting harassed by a couple of the gypsy dudes, whom she seems to know, but her attitude about it changes from aggravated to aroused (?) when she catches Mani watching. The action cuts away from the meeting, but when we come back, Mani is brawling with the two knuckleheads who’d been pawing at her, while she cheers it on with the crowd.

This girl is one of Brotherhood of the Wolf’s more maddening aspects. She is never named in the film (the credits apparently list her as La Bavarde, which Babelfish says is French for “the talker”) and she barely speaks, yet she instigates a number of important events and the camera seems to treat her like an important character. It’s never really established what her “deal” is; her father seems to be a pretty nice guy who’s just caught up working with the villains, but she’s more or less full-out bad. Mani is inexplicably (and, eventually, fatally) intrigued by her, again for reasons that are never clear. She also seems to despise Mani despite him saving her & her dad, and she has this weird love/hate relationship with the male gypsies. Oh, and she has some form of epilepsy that only manifests once in the movie. You’d think that her character had a bigger role in some scenes that were cut, but if those scenes exist they’ve never made their way to a home release I’ve ever seen or heard of. As it is, La Bavarde just hangs around irritatingly on the story’s periphery, acting nasty and starting trouble like the 18th-century version of a Jersey Shore cast member.

The Fight: Mani first faces the pair of gypsies who’d been messing with La Snooki, and though he clearly outclasses them he actually takes his time to beat them up, using more elaborate & showy movements, and even returning their physical taunts.

Real mature.

He’s treating this like it’s a game, which is basically what it is. The crowd that gathers is rowdy but not really bloodthirsty, and even Mani’s friend Fronsac doesn’t try to stop it, though that’s mainly because he knows Mani is in no danger. The gypsies may increasingly feel their pride is at stake, but for everyone else this is totally schoolyard.

Mani finally takes the two chumps out of commission, and is almost immediately greeted by two new challengers– a couple of not-so-lovely ladies wearing men’s clothing. They stride toward him in faux-seductive slow motion, clearly relishing the challenge. Mani seems perplexed at this development, and trades a priceless glance with a visibly amused Fronsac.

Betcha didn’t know Kathy Griffin was in this movie

The not-so-ladylike ladies come off a bit better than their male counterparts and are nearly as agile as Mani, but still can’t measure up. After some cool, almost dance-like fighting, he knocks them silly and is greeted with four more male gypsies, this time with their claws out.

The music immediately switches up from playful to a bit more serious, but Mani is unfazed, dodging & smacking down just as before. He takes out the final two with a nifty flip move that puts them down hard. Mani stands around cockily enjoying himself, but doesn’t seem to see a fifth gypsy (presumably one of the original fight starters, but it’s hard to tell these guys apart) try to rush up and claw him in the back. But that gets the kibosh put in it by the mysterious Jean-Francois, who shoots the gypsy right through his claw hand. It’s all fun & games until somebody gets shot while attempting a dishonorable murder, so the fight ends after that and the crowd dissipates.

This is, once again, quite entertaining. It escalates the level & complexity of combat in the film and indulges in some fun silliness (as opposed to the previous fight in the rain, which was also silly but in a very melodramatic, po-faced sort of way). Although its primary cinematic purpose is to inject a bit more action into a scene that otherwise didn’t require any– there hadn’t been a fight in a little while and won’t be another for quite a bit more– this sequence also serves a clever secondary role of memorably introducing the gypsies, who serve as the villains’ henchmen. Two birds, one stone.

So a nice bit of action filler and some more groundwork is laid for what’s in store. Not too shabby.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: That freaking Bavarde ruins EVERYTHING.

“I am, how you say, le bitch.”

Here’s where le merde gets real, as they say.

“Venez à moi, mon frere!”

3) Team Fronsac vs the Beast and the Brotherhood

The Fighters:

• Gregoire de Fronsac, stepping into the action for the first time so far. A rationalist, scientist and knight of King Louis’ court, Fronsac had been dispatched to track down the Beast but ended up playing the patsy in a political game. Now he’s out to take care of business. Played by Samuel Le Bihan.
  • Armed with: An array of small firearms, which he proves adept with during a pre-fight preparatory sequence.
• Mani, Fronsac’s quiet Iroquois friend. This time stripped down to nothing but a loincloth, boots and some freaky ceremonial war paint. Played by Mark Dacascos.
  • Armed with: A sweet tomahawk.
• Thomas d’Apcher, son of the local marquis. Actually a pretty decent & brave chap, despite looking like a spoiled fop. Also the story’s narrator, so he’ll probably survive this. Played by Jérémie Renier, not to be confused with the guy who plays Hawkeye.
  • Armed with: A crossbow, which is kinda funny for the above reason.
• The Beast, a large jungle predator covered in tough and spiky armor. It’s well-trained and bred for viciousness, though its masters also apparently lets it roam free at times. There’s some ambiguity over exactly what the Beast is– we never see it outside of the armor, and the dialogue doesn’t make it explicit. All we’re told at the end is that its trainer brought back “a new kind of animal” (or “a strange beast” depending on which translation you’ve heard/how good my memory is). In interviews, Christophe Gans has claimed the beast is definitely a lion. It doesn’t really move like a lion (says me, the big lion expert), but then the CGI is so bad it doesn’t really move like anything. Others think it’s a rare hybrid between a lion and another large cat (like maybe it’s a liger, GOSH!). Personally I like the interpretation that it really is a new, heretofore undiscovered breed from the depths of the jungle, but YMMV. Played by various computer and animatronic special effects.
  • Armed with: Teeth, claws, sharp armor and a couple hundred pounds of predatory muscle.
• Those gypsies again, including La Bavarde. It’s their own home turf and they’re more threatened than ever, so they’re much more nasty than last time. Their mysterious leader also plays a small but pivotal role.
  • Armed with: Their hook claws and torches.

The real wolves of Gevaudan also make an appearance.

The Setup: After being coerced into a cover-up faking the death of the Beast to avoid embarrassing the government, Fronsac returned to Gevaudan in order to get all kissy with Marianne, a local young noble he’d met there. But their rendezvous was interrupted by a strangely targeted attack from the Beast, convincing him it was time to put the monster, and the men behind it, down for good. One late afternoon he, Mani, and young Marquis-to-be Thomas, form a small but determined hunting party and set a number of traps for the Beast. Mani even feeds d’Apcher a peyote-like substance to get his head in the game.

You’d accept an unknown hallucinogenic substance from this man, wouldn’t you?

A local wolf pack, who have some sort of connection with Mani, offer their assistance by swarming the Beast and driving it to the hunters. They have skin in this game too, since many are blaming wolves for the creature’s attacks.

Note: I’m combining the “battle” of the Beast with Mani’s subsequent human brawl, as they follow directly after one another and the former is too short for its own entry yet too interesting to skip.

The Fight: The first half of the hunt is ambitious, if not overly spectacular. The Beast gets corralled by wolves into Team Fronsac’s prepared area, and they do everything they can to nudge, lure or threaten it into the series of traps they’ve set up. Two of the traps, basically cages or walls made of flimsy bamboo, and don’t hold the Beast for long, if at all. But one device, an enormous swinging log covered with spikes, nails the monster but good and sends it flying.

THUNK

The heroes also give their prey some minor wounds in the form of a tomahawk to the snout and a pistol shot in the haunch. But it gives back pretty good by chomping down on Thomas’ arm and dragging him for a while. When the wounded creature retreats, Mani pursues while Fronsac stays behind to tend to the wounded aristocrat.

Mani tracks the creature to the catacombs that serve as its masters’ base of operations. Looking around, he sees evidence of the cult’s existence and even has a nice moment with some of the kenneled dogs the Beast uses for “practice.” But he soon realizes he’s in the belly of a more figurative beast, and he was probably wearing his Bad Idea Loincloth when he decided to come alone.

Should have brought Scott Wolf as backup

Now it’s the fight of Mani’s life, and if the gypsy punks aren’t holding back, neither is he. War Paint Mani is absolutely brutal in his dismantlement of the thugs ganging up on him, lashing out with deadly precision, often with his tomahawk. He punches, kicks, slices, and guts them one at a time. Most memorably, he chops off one enemy’s clawed hand and throws it in the torso of another.

But it’s not enough. Mani’s in a tight space and he’s surrounded. For the first time, he gets actually hurt, both by cheap shots: one a kick to the face and another by a claw raking down his back. He doesn’t slow down, and for a while it looks like he might survive… until he grabs one attacker who turns out to be La Bavarde, and while he hesitates to bring the axe down, he gets shot in the back by the group’s masked leader. Unable to move, he’s carried away by the surviving villains, laughing at their foe’s fate. We cut to an unknown amount of time later (the light levels haven’t changed much, but it’s implied the gypsies had “fun” with Mani before finishing him off), as a pair of baddies unceremoniously toss Mani’s broken body down a small hill. Fronsac finds him later, and doesn’t take it well.

“He was only two days from retirement!”

This extended battle marks a turning point for the movie, after which things are going to be not just more focused but even more intense in an already bonkers film. The plot thickens, even as some of the mysteries are being revealed (hey, you think that mysterious villain with the gross-looking right arm could possibly be the snooty, paranoid & hostile Jean-Francois, who claims to have lost his right arm while hunting big game in Africa? You get a cookie), and the action ratchets up from here on. Mani’s death becomes a catalyst for real changes, especially with Fronsac (see below).

Meanwhile, this whole sequence is really well-done. While it’s short and there’s not a lot to it, the showdown with the Beast here has some inventive staging and is a nice change-up from the rest of the film’s action. It’s almost a light version of the climax of Predator, so that’s hardly a bad thing. The second half, with Mani’s last stand, is more traditional but really intense, with the heavy violence and serious music really selling his desperation. It’s rough seeing such a likeable character go out this way, but it of course helps set up the retaliation to come.

All in all, an excellent mid-film mini-climax.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Gregoire lets his hair down.

“They see me lurkin, they hatin….”

Sometimes the toughest guys are the ones you least expect.

For instance.

4) Fronsac vs Gypsies

The Fighters:

• Gregoire de Fronsac, brilliant scientist and, apparently, a high-level asskicker. As with Mani, Fronsac’s martial arts abilities are never explained or addressed in any way, but unlike with Mani, Fronsac’s skills don’t pop until about the final third of the story. This actually works to the film’s credit: the audience had been misled into assuming that the Fronsac/Mani team was your classic Brain & Brawns pairing, but as it turns out, the brain has brawn to spare. That the movie doesn’t revel in or overly explain this delightful little surprise only helps even more. Played by Samuel Le Bihan.
  • Armed with: A very simple but mean-looking long knife, and a bow & arrow.
• The gypsies, again. I’m guessing that real-life gypsies were so offended by their portrayal in this movie they put a curse on Christophe Gans so he’d never make a good movie again.
  • Armed with: Their hook claws and a few other stabbing implements.

The Setup: Fronsac spent an unknown amount of time tearfully cleaning Mani’s body and examining his wounds, at one point uncovering a silver bullet. Once the initial grieving period is over, he plots out (using the locations of previous Beast attacks, the place where he had his encounter with it, and the place he found Mani’s body) where he guesses the villains to be: a hunting lodge deep in the woods. He exchanges his more traditional European outfit for some Goin’ To War clothes, applies some camouflage face paint, and sets out to get his kill on. Note that this is all on the same night that the guy had a close encounter with an armored super-lion and later found his best friend dead.

Gotta admit Fronsac strikes a pretty imposing profile, creeping through the woods like a bow-wielding Solid Snake.

“Be vewy, vewy quiet….”

The Fight: Fronsac is mad as hell, but still pretty tactically sound. First scoping out the lodge and finding that the gypsies are all inside having a party (presumably celebrating how awesome they are for killing a guy they outnumbered twelve to one and STILL had to shoot in the back) and noting that one has stolen Mani’s special bracelet, Gregoire decides to create a distraction.

He approaches the nearby stable full of horses and fires a few flaming arrows into the structure, causing several gypsies to rush out and try to save the place. Most are too frantic to notice him, but when one does, Fronsac calmly dispatches him in a very dignified manner.

He gives a similar treatment to the torso of a second unfortunate gypsy, then scurries away from the chaos and sneaks his way into the main building. Now most of the lodge’s occupants are out dealing with the crisis, and even if any of them return it’s not going to be all at once. Fronsac has effectively muted their advantage in numbers.

The hero doesn’t get far in the house before he runs into some confused baddies, and he is not shy about confrontation. He storms through the lodge, encountering his enemies either individually or in pairs, and just delivers them straight to the Reaper– no fuss, no muss. His work is efficient; there is no arrogance or flashiness to his physical skills here, just brutal and unflinching destruction… though he does occasionally take just long enough to prolong each victim’s pain.

And after each kill he calmly & purposefully strides on, grimly searching out the next target. Fronsac is a single-minded engine of merciless anger. He’s on a Rip Roarin’ Rampage of Revenge.

Fronsac’s knife (given its crude design it’s probably one of Mani’s) gets a lot of play here as he slices, stabs & chops his enemies down. Late in the fight he throws the blade across the room to pin one escaping villain (the only one who was sensible enough to try to run after seeing an enraged knight at the end of a trail of corpses) to the wall, through his neck. Another he flips over bodily, so hard the chump goes crashing right through the floorboards.

So much for the deposit.

And in my favorite kill, Fronsac seizes one attacker (defender?) and slams him against alternating sides of the narrow hallway– one, two, three, FOUR times– before chopping away at his collarbone with the knife and then slamming his head right through the opposite wall. Then he delivers a spinning jump kick that pushes the guy even farther into the wall.

Le crunch.

While he kills & kills, Fronsac descends ever deeper into the lodge, discovering multiple hidden copies of the cult’s treasonous books. As he pulls the knife out of the aforementioned skewered guy, he looks in the mirror to find that his would-be sneak attacker is none other than (of course) La Bavarde, whom he only delivers a strong backhand to, inexplicably deciding to just leave her stunned on the ground for a few minutes rather than coughing in a pool of her own bitch blood. If only he’d known how much of a role this French Snooki had played in Mani’s demise.

Soon enough the bad guys stop coming. Sniffing out some secret passages, Fronsac finds first the master villain’s personal chambers, and then the catacombs where the Beast resides. He even takes a moment at the torture implement (a St. Andrew’s cross) where Mani spent his final minutes. Visibly shaken, Fronsac then gets rushed by a lone gypsy, but he quickly turns the tables and runs the baddie through with a spear he found, pinning him up against that very same cross and leaving him there.

This is cathartic for him.

Gregoire then hears the gypsies coming back in force, and retreats, leaving quite a mess in his wake– eleven dead or presumed as such, plus the girl. To be continued.

This is ridiculously awesome. We feel Fronsac’s righteous rage and are whooping & hollering as he delivers ugly payback. The aforementioned added surprise of Fronsac’s is a pleasant one, and brings an added “wow” factor to the proceedings. Choreographer Phillip Kwok deserves extra credit for staging violence that’s not very flashy but still memorably brutal. Gans wisely pulls back the music for the main action portion and lets the beatdowns speak for themselves.

There’s a crazy, determined energy to this whole sequence and it works like gangbusters. It’s pretty much every guy’s fantasy, and unabashedly so: “If I were pissed off enough, I could kick ass through a whole platoon of guys, no problem!”

The plot still has a few wild left turns to take but this scene has already begun to propel the movie towards its big climax. As a bonus, here’s another angle on the arrow/head guy:

He looks a lot like Will Ferrell there.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: BOSS FIGHT!

“Je te VEUX!”