If you’ve been praying for a blog post about an awesomely violent movie, you’re in luck!

Though I question your prayer priorities.

Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior (inexplicably subtitled “The Thai Warrior” for US release) is not quite an all-time classic in the martial arts genre, but it’s not far off, either. It takes too long to get going, a few of the battles are less-than-inspiring, and the film often dawdles too long in well-meaning but tiresome attempts at drama and comedy. If anything, the film feels like the dry run for greatness; upon seeing it, the inevitable response is “I can’t wait to see what this guy does next!”

That’s because so much of what makes this movie work is the amazing skills of lead actor Tony Jaa (born Panom Yeerum). A wunderkind student of his native Thailand’s Muay Thai (a martial arts discipline putting heavy emphasis on the use of elbows & knees), Jaa performs all manner of mind-blowing physical feats. And as I can’t speak the language it’s hard to gauge his acting skills, he’s certainly eminently watchable even when he’s not cracking skulls, possessing an expressive face and likeable demeanor.

“You’re damn right I’m likeable.”

In the ten years (!) since this movie first opened, Jaa has inexplicably not become an enormous Hollywood star, to the detriment of both parties. The Protector (aka Tom Yung Goom) his follow-up collaboration with Ong Bak director Pracha Pinkaew, was often superb but threatened to collapse under its own silliness. After a falling out with Pinkaew (a competent director who seems to overestimate his cinematic prowess), Jaa made a few Ong Bak prequels that I haven’t seen but are generally regarded as a few amazing sequences drowned out by incomprehensible nonsense. Apparently Jaa is slated to appear in the seventh entry in the Fast & Furious franchise, which might be just the right type of ridiculous he needs.

Anyway, since Ong Bak is a fairly action-packed movie, we’ll be taking the Retrospective approach, breaking the post into two halves for purposes of length. The film’s premise is that someone has stolen the head of the titular Ong Bak, a stone Buddha statue that the denizens of a humble Thai village regard as a sort of deity all its own. Ting (Jaa’s character), the village’s humble Muay Thai champion, volunteers to go to Bangkok and track it down. This leads to lots of “humorous” hijinx with village outcast Humlae and a conflict with a mob boss who speaks with an electronic larynx, not to mention lots of fighting.

1) Alley Scramble

Ting Fights: Peng, a small-time drug dealer and his gang of thugs. Peng is after Humlae and his platonic gal pal Muay Lek, over some scam or another. Ting gets in the middle of it after he puts a slight but intimidating beating on a handful of the goons, which only leads to Peng returning minutes later with serious reinforcements.

“Me and THIS army!”

The Fight: It’s more of a chase than a fight, really, because due to a combination of pragmatism and pacifism, Ting decides that discretion is the better part of valor, and books it. Humlae and Muay follow suit, which splits the bad guys up.

Comic relief Humlae has a couple fun moments here, such as throwing spices into his pursuers’ eyes, and scaring more off with a handy meat cleaver… until, in a well-timed bit, a little old lady walks by selling more big knives, canceling out his advantage. But this sequence is mostly Ting’s game, and what a merry game it is.

From Buster Keaton down on to Jackie Chan (one of Jaa’s idols), there’s a grand cinematic tradition of foot chases through urban landscapes littered with all sorts of delightful obstacles, and Ong Bak makes an honorable new entry to it. There’s an absurdly improbable amount of creative hazards in the open-air markets that make up all these alleys, and Jaa navigates them beautifully. He demonstrates not just a trained martial artist’s agility but also his skill as a high jumper, casually leaping several feet either vertically or horizontally.

For instance, there’s the old standby of two men walking through with a sheet of transparent glass (enough of a cliché that Wayne’s World 2 was already mocking it twenty years ago), but Pinkaew puts a nice twist on it by making it two sheets of glass and turning them sideways, so that Jaa can squeeze a backflip between them.

“I could totally do that too,” you didn’t just say.

Also just so happening to pass through one alley are two men carrying a bunch of rolled-up barb wire, which Ting naturally leaps right through, tucking his limbs as far forward as he can so he can just barely fit. Ting leaps over moving cars in a single bound. He gets cornered at one point and escapes by simply climbing around on the shoulders of his surprised foes. He gets around a rack full of upturned, sharp gardening instruments by jumping over them while doing the splits.

You just got Van-Damme’d!

And, of course, he fights here & there, whenever he has no other choice. The most extended fisticuffs sequence comes near a multi-story scaffolding, which Ting of course fights all around, flipping on & off it as necessary and looking so cool.

The various beatdowns thin the number of bad guys, but there’s still plenty left when Ting & Humlae end up together again, cornered against a high wall. Ting is agile enough to bounce up to safety, but chunky Humlae can’t follow. Ting has had near enough of Humlae’s crap at this point but relents and assists his old pal when Humlae offers to finally take him to his one lead on Ong Bak’s missing head. Which leads to our next entry, but we’ll get there.

It takes a while for the movie to get to this, its first true action scene, but it’s pretty much worth the wait. We’ve already seen Ting’s raw skill as he demonstrated various Muay Thai stances in a solo exhibition early in the movie, so it’s nice to see a little diversity in his skill set; besides, if you’re looking for extended scenes of pure fisticuffs, the next sequence is most definitely going to fulfill your quota and then some.

Pinkaew films ably and surely deserves some credit for many of the clever sequences. Stylistically this also sets the scene for a trick that Pinkaew will return to again & again: the inclusion of successive takes. Basically, if a certain move or stunt was particularly tricky or impressive, Pinkaew is damn sure going to make sure you watch that move two, three, maybe even four times, and always from multiple angles. Not exactly original and it breaks the fourth wall a little bit, but you can hardly blame him: if you had that much footage of Tony Jaa doing awesome stuff, wouldn’t you want to share it too?

Grade: B

2) Ting Takes On All, part 1

Ting Fights: “Big Bear” (presumably not his Christian name), a big, muscled Australian with long greasy hair. Bear declares that he’s a “freestyle” fighter– i.e., an undisciplined brawler. But still plenty tough enough for the average guy… which Ting isn’t. Played by Nick Kara.

Control yourselves, ladies.

Ting enters the local seedy fight club with Humlae, as that’s where the latter said their thief hangs out, while Big Bear is beating down some schmuck. The announcer sees Ting (he’d been there before and laid a guy out with one sweet kick in order to retrive his stolen money) and tries to egg him on into a match with the Aussie. Bear’s up for it, but Ting demurs. Bear does everything he does to provoke Ting, shouting various curses & slurs at him (in English), and battering a skinny Thai fighter who tries to stick up for his homeland. It’s when the burly man starts harassing a Thai waitress that Ting decides it’s time to put the bear down.

The Fight: Very nearly a curb stomp.

And definitely a face stomp.

Ting surprises Big Bear with the above kick into his ugly mug, dropping him to the ground for several seconds– long enough for Ting to call out a taunt via recitation of the form he’d just done: “Foot strokes face!” Hell yes it does.

Dazed but determined, Bear comes at Ting again, but gets beaten back with a series of brutal kicks, knees and elbows– some while propelling himself through the air with alarming speed. The Aussie’s bluster quickly turns to panic, most hilariously when he briefly backs out of the “ring” (a square of jeering onlookers) not to dodge Ting’s blows but merely as he scrambles away from his threatening offensive stances.

Big Bear gets only the briefest of advantages when he distracts Ting by tossing a random audience member at him. Inexplicably, the bystander decides to help Bear out, namely by restraining Ting from behind while Bear lands a few blows on him. Before Bear can follow up with a devastating charge, Ting smartly cancels out his momentum with a knee to the chest, then elbows him in the head. As Bear stumbles back, Ting launches himself into the air, knees tucked in and lands on Bear’s shoulders, finishing him off with double elbows to the big guy’s skull. Bam!

A nice opening bid in terms of somewhat extended combat. Ting is shown to be great but not completely invincible, able to cleverly extricate himself from bad situations. Like most of the great movie heroes, he doesn’t want trouble, but when he has to dish out the pain he does so with the right mix of humility, professionalism and enjoyment– you can tell that even this aspiring monk relishes the opportunity to take a thug down a peg.

Jaa is of course the centerpiece of it all, moving with a perfect combination of speed, power and surprising flexibility.

Grade: B+

Ting stops to pray, thinking he’s done. But as he gets up to leave, he’s stopped by a sudden kick….

3) Ting Takes On All, part 2

Ting Fights: Toshiro, according what I can find on IMDB/Wikipedia. But I could have sworn that the announcer refers to him as “The Cheetah,” which would work well with his fighting style, and also fits the animal theme of the other two club fighters. An incredible fast & agile fighter who relies almost entirely on amazing legwork. His name is Japanese so he’s presumably using some sort of karate. Played by Nudhapol Asavabhakhin, who is not Japanese.

Even if he does have hair like Naruto.

The Fight: It’s one that Ting tries to avoid, but the crowd’s thirsty for more blood and won’t let him leave (more importantly, two rival mob bosses, including our main villain, our upstairs taking bets on the proceedings). One crowd member even brandishes a gun to “encourage” Ting to get back in the fight.

Toshiro is much more of a showboat than Big Bear, even vogueing a bit with some high jumps and landing in a wide split. Throughout the fight he keeps swishing his legs back & forth in an effort to confuse and unnerve Ting.

It’s not super effective, however. The Cheetah is fast, but Ting is, for the most part, faster. The rural champion avoids the larger part of Toshiro’s lightning kicks and knocks him around with some strong counter kicks. Other times he just calmly blocks Toshiro’s strikes with his own feet & shins. The two have a rhythm together that’s both impressive and comical.

Ting runs into some trouble when he tries to go on the direct offensive, as Toshiro seems to be able to dodge faster than Ting can strike. He ducks and side-steps an amazing amount of punches, until Ting realizes the best way to hit him is to draw him in. He lets Toshiro lunge in to attack and then clocks him with a twisty reverse-kick.

Ting presses his advantage from there and batters his opponent pretty badly, even canceling out Toshiro’s speed advantage (as he tries to regain control of the battle space) with some smart footwork and a well-placed jump. Eventually Toshiro goes down hard, and seems to concede to Ting. But as soon as the hero turns his back, Toshiro rushes at him, only to be met with a mid-air knee to the chest that puts him down for good.

“I was just trying to chest-bump you, gosh!”

This is a pretty sweet fight, showcasing us a very different challenge to Ting’s skills than Big Bear was. The Aussie was just a big tough thug who relied on strength, Tocheetah has some serious skills and has to be outsmarted. Ting is still unquestionably superior, of course, but he has to really sweat to make it happen. The next fight, however….

Grade: B+

4) Ting Takes On All, part 3

Ting Fights: The very aptly-named “Mad Dog,” a non-martial artist who relies not so much on his muscles (which are not insubstantial) but his wild, relentless and creative ferocity. When he finally drops his newspaper and saunters into the ring (he’d been shown casually reading while Ting fought Toshiro), the announcer doesn’t enthusiastically introduce him but appears genuinely panicked, and screams, “Oh God– not Mad Dog!” Played by David Ismalone, a veteran stunt man.

Wouldn’t you want your daughter to bring this fella home?

[Between this, The Raid, and Hard Boiled, there's a fine tradition of Asian action films with villains named "Mad Dog." This one makes a fine addition.]

The Fight: Mad Dog comes off like quite a good boy at first, walking in with a calm smile against the tense & wary Ting. The canine-esque man even offers a gentlemanly hand to his opponent.

IT’S A TRAP

Of course it’s a trap, if a fiendishly simple one. As soon as Ting reluctantly accepts the shake, Mad Dog’s other, hidden, beer bottle-wielding hand comes down on Ting’s head. Bad dog!

And from there, it’s on like Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Candy Kong, and even that annoying one with the surfboard. There is literally nothing Mad Dog won’t do or use against Ting in his effort to win. Ting keeps raining blows against the unpredictable freestylist but most of the time it’s all he can do just to keep up with the canine man.

As the battle between the two continues and moves all around the fricking building, the implements Mad Dog seizes and wields against Ting (either by throwing them, swinging them, or charging with them) include more beer bottles, wooden chairs, wooden card tables, a wooden bench, vases, a framed picture, several glass plates, an electric game board, and a live electrical wire attached to the wall.The last of those he rips out and uses to keep Ting at bay. Eventually he pulls it so far out that the building’s power short-circuits a little bit, causing the light to flicker and a shower of sparks to rain down.

Throughout the barrage Ting is working overtime just to survive: dodging, blocking, minimizing, and occasionally even absorbing Mad Dog’s assaults. Ting’s defense is quite an impressive sight all its own, as he blunts the impact of swung chairs with his knee, or whips back like a snake to evade thrown projectiles.

The fight continues on, but even the ferocious dog starts to get scared of Ting’s skill & resilience. He grabs a female hostage and drags her upstairs, Ting in hot pursuit. When they reach the top floor, Mad Dog lifts a freaking refrigerator and uses it as a weapon.

“THIS IS A VERY PRACTICAL WAY TO FIGHT”

Ting is only momentarily put off by the unconventional weapon, and kicks it until both fridge and Dog get smashed through a wooden wall.

Soon enough, in fact, the pair go tumbling into the room where the two mobsters and all their flunkies are hanging out. After a pause in which Ting locks eyes with both the villain and his right-hand man, the bad mobster (worse mobster?) tells Mad Dog “you disappoint me” and hands him a knife to finish the job. Now granted, it’s a pretty sick-looking knife, but considering Mad Dog’s ability to convert every last bit of the building into his arsenal, it’s a tad anticlimactic.

Anyway, the knife does little to faze our hero. He soon disarms the weary fighter, then hits him with a series of devastating knee strikes. He finishes off by throwing his foe through the glass window that overlooks the arena, and for good measure he follows along with him and knees him again during the fall, putting the dog down for good.

This fight is amazing, and a great end to the natural progression of the three back-to-back battles: slight challenge, moderate challenge, insane challenge (compare to most Bruce Lee movies, which start out at no challenge and gradually escalate to the slight level at the very end).

As wild as this fight is, there’s a strange element of realism to it. Real fights aren’t matches of pure skill– anyone can theoretically win, if they’re determined and psychotic enough. There’s no question that for all his skills, Ting is in genuine danger, and one slight mistake in defending against Mad Dog’s onslaught could have gotten him killed; as it is, he gets hurt plenty enough.

But more importantly, it’s ridiculously fun. All perfectly choreographed and executed down to the last millimeter and microsecond, it’s a scene notable not just for its invention but its pure audacity. Making a great fight is one thing, but how often do you see something like this?

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: Might be a bit slow in coming, since a trip out of town for a wedding has robbed me of some blogging/prep time. Plus this post is extra long so you have plenty to chew on for now. But soon…

This. This is happening.

The conflict finally comes to a head.

No one image could sum up the movie better.

After the bravura sequence where Ting fights three contenders in quick succession, there’s some silliness involving an extended chase on auto-rickshaws (golf carts, basically) that’s kind of cute but really out of place in a martial arts movie. Then Ting accidentally finds some of the stash of Komtuan (the villain), whose main gig seems to be stealing or unearthing religious relics and selling them. He tells Ting he’ll return Ong Bak if Ting fights a traditional Muay Thai bout with Saming, the villain’s Dragon and a fierce fighter himself. Ting readily agrees.

5) Ting vs Saming

Ting Fights: Saming, of course. He’s young, buff, really mean-looking, and basically a total psychopath. Before the match he’s seen injecting himself with a needleful of an unidentified substance that apparently makes him stronger or more pain-resistant or something. It’s completely ridiculous that such a wonder drug would exist (maybe it’s the same venom that Bane uses), but it’s a well-established cheesy action movie trope– much like how in older dramas, blind folks were always one “big operation” away from regaining their sight. Played by Chattapong Pantana-Angkul. Trying saying that five times fast. Or even once at normal speed.

The Fight: Almost completely one-sided. Komtuan asserts later that Ting deliberately threw the fight, though it looks like he’s struggling mightily here regardless. He could be faking the struggle and still taking a dive, but either way, between the drugs and the maybe-faking, Ting doesn’t really put a dent in his villainous opponent, and he definitely takes a brutal beating himself.

Saming first invites Ting to take several shots at him, and Ting delivers several strong-looking punches & kicks that Saming just shrugs off. When the bad guy fights back, he hits with devastating power.

Saming quickly knocks down the hero, and finishes off the round with a couple of devastating knee drives right into his mid-section– this could kill a man in real life.

Ting’s corner man tries to haul him off to recover, but Saming pursues even then and keeps wailing on him; it’s pretty clear that whatever aggression he usually has is amplified greatly by his Magical Movie Drug.

Ting rallies back briefly but is quickly beat down some more, even getting hit by a vicious clothesline that sends him spinning through the air an absurd number of times.

Humlae tries throwing in the towel, but Saming won’t take no for an answer and keeps up the beating. He does a running knee so hard that it knocks the hero out of the ring and onto the announcers’ table. He then pursues AGAIN and kicks the fallen Ting in the chest for good measure. That’s about the end of things.

One-sided fights are rarely all that interesting, but this one gains some extra points just for its sheer brutality and Saming’s unrestrained craziness. It serves mainly as a bit of darkening plot material, giving the hero a major stumble and obstacle before he is able to return triumphantly. And fortunately it’s smart enough enough to get its ugly business over with quickly.

Grade: B-

6) Gas Station Brawl

It is not, despite what this picture would imply, a poorly-attended daytime rave.

Ting Fights: A handful of Komtuan’s goons. After the fight, Ting & Humlae met up with the villain at an abandoned gas station in order to get Ong Bak’s head back. Of course, he reneges on the deal, and presents them with an empty box. Then he has his thugs hold the two at gunpoint and prepare to kill them while he leaves, for some reason. Don’t bad guys know you ALWAYS stay around to make sure the hero gets finished off? It’s like they don’t even watch movies.

The Fight: Ting manages to turn things around pretty well. A few goons stay inside to finish the job while a few others wait outside. Ting waits until the one who’s holding him face down tries to apply a silencer to his pistol (why? They’re in the middle of nowhere), then whips up and starts beating the guy. With some assistance from Humlae, they soon take out all the goons inside. At one point Ting punches a guy so hard that his face smacks hilariously against a wooden table.

The real fun starts when they get outside. The villains eventually figure out that all the noise they hear in the building isn’t good (their biggest hint is one of their buddies get kicked through the door), but when they check the room, Ting has apparently slipped out the window. He cancels out the gun advantage of one thug, who was waiting in the driver’s seat side of a truck, by jumping so hard at the truck’s open door that the force of it closing knocks him all the way through to the other side.

At least two more guys nearby have guns, though, so Ting avoids them by hiding amongst a bunch of wreckage off to the side. Their shots end up striking a drum full of oil and creating a significant explosion. As they approach looking for Ting, the hero suddenly emerges from the smoke with both of his legs on fire, and takes out the nearest one with a flying knee followed by a kick to the face. While, I’ll remind you, HIS LEGS ARE ON FIRE.

I’ll also remind you that Tony Jaa did all his own stunts.

Ting immediately jumps into a conveniently-located tub full of water, but is soon attacked from behind by another thug, who tries to choke him. Ting breaks free and immediately puts him down with a spinning flip. Possibly the most unrealistic moment in this movie is that the second bad guy actually had the presence of mind to attack Ting, rather than just standing there slack-jawed while going “THAT WAS THE COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN”

This is what happens to buzz kills.

Ting and Humlae then take out the last jerk just before he escapes on a motorcycle. Just before the thug passes out, Ting gets Ong Bak’s location from him.

A fun and breezy bounce back from the ugly beating Ting took last time (really, he should be in the hospital), something which both the music and the staging reflects. There is some solid physical choreography here but really the martial arts takes a backseat to outrageous stunts for this scene.

In conclusion, Tony Jaa set his legs on fire.

Grade: A-

7) Cave Rumble, part I

Ting Fights: A handful of Komtuan’s goons. Well, two handfuls: Ting sneaks up to the entrance of the cave where there’s four chumps with guns, but he takes them out so quickly it doesn’t really count.

Here, now you’ve pretty much watched it.

Then not far into the cave, he runs into some tougher resistance. For some reason almost all of them are armed with machetes, odd implements for a digging crew.

The Fight: The hero is immediately ambushed by the half dozen or so machete-wielding fools, and he soon grabs a long pole– between the pole’s appearance and the odd sounds it makes when struck, it’s hard to tell if it’s wooden or metal or what– and evens the odds. He smacks them around with the improvised staff for a while, but eventually it gets hit hard enough to break in half. Naturally, Ting just immediately adapts and fights with two sticks– escrima– for a while.

Then he trades that for one of his foes’ dropped machetes, but apparently his inner pacifism takes over and he discards that as well. That leaves him unarmed against a couple lingering thugs, but fortunately he finds a few tonfa, or at least some sort of implement that can substitute for them. Tonfa are almost tailor-made for Muay Thai’s elbow-heavy style, so the rest of this particular ass-beating is like Christmas for Ting.

That pretty much finishes up this batch, as well as a few late-comers. The last chump is apparently the smartest, since he just up & runs away.

Once again Prinkaew and Jaa have changed up things a bit, this time by showcasing a weapons-heavy fight. And quite a variety of weapons at that: swords against unarmed, staff against swords, escrima against swords, sword against sword, tonfa against sword. And since the alley chase doesn’t really count, this is the first time in the movie Ting has taken on such a large amount of people in close quarters at once. Some cracks are starting to show in the choreography, namely when you can see a few instances of stuntmen moving their bodies into position to receive the simulated blows (the fact that Prinkaew keeps switching to slow motion makes it even more apparent).

Still, it’s an ambitious & fun scene, and nobody’s perfect. Jaa’s performance has the character more determined & fierce than ever. He’s a man on a mission, and this mission is just getting started.

Grade: B+

After this, Ting makes the inexplicable decision not to take ANY of the weapons he’d been using into the next room. Apparently every fight for him is like a whole new video game is for Samus Aran. Anyway, he goes deeper into the cave and discovers Komtuan and Saming high up on some scaffolding, waiting as their crew saws through the neck of an enormous Buddha statue. Komtuan sees Ting and taunts him with Ong Bak’s own head, which he has handy next to him in a bag for some reason. But first the hero has to get through….

8) Cave Rumble, part II

Ting Fights: Another half-dozen or so of the gangster’s thugs. Some of them are even wearing flak vests, for some unknown reason. And at least one of them is not a native Thai but a white guy, so points to the villain for diversity, I suppose.

The Fight: It’s the penultimate battle and the last real melee brawl of the film, so it pulls out all the stops. Unlike last time, weapons are mostly left out (with one notable exception), but the mooks are tougher than ever, and Ting accordingly ups his game with a surprising amount of tricky aerial moves and devastating blows. Some particularly memorable tricks involve Ting laying out two thugs in quick succession with a continuous series of spinning jump kicks, or the time one baddie ducks under a jump kick so Ting just lashes out with his other leg while still airborne.

It really does take a while for Ting to take all these guys out, though, and you can see him taking a few wallops himself. Sometimes it’s because he’s distracted with one of the other five combatants, but a lot of times he’s simply not ready– the guy’s worn down like nobody’s business. Real-life physical endurance is of course out the door before we started, but Ting’s even pushing past the point of action movie physical endurance.

Our tiring hero gets it worst of all just after he saves Humlae from being hung to death the slow way. The last baddie, who has a glass eye (or maybe it’s just weird-looking), gets ahold of a long, serrated saw and hurts Ting pretty bad with it, first whipping him across the face and back with the flat end, then charging at him with the blade out. With no objects at hand to block with and no time to dodge, Ting is forced to prove the limits of his dedication to rescuing a freaking chunk of stone.

I’d… I’d say he’s proven it.

They stand off for a little while, until they’re interrupted by Humlae. The eye-guy soon gets the best of the comic relief, though, and breaks his arm in a very painful-looking way. Fortunately, when Ting recovers, he pays the guy back by breaking his leg in an even more painful-looking way.

Ouch.

As the middle part of the climax, this spout of violence does succeed at continuing to ramp up the action from its already-absurd levels. The weapons-craziness from before has been jettisoned in favor of pure martial artistry, at least until that saw gets whipped out– and oh, how mean that is. All very well done. Except for the music, it doesn’t really work; very light & silly.

Grade: A-

Ting knows the final battle’s coming now, so he takes a quiet moment to himself, wrapping his wounds in tape and putting rope around one fist. Like a man.

9) Cave Rumble, part 3: Ting/Saming rematch

Ting Fights: Saming, duh. Plus a couple goons whose digging he interrupts. Humlae and Komtuan get mixed up in there briefly as well.

The Fight: Whew.

Either due to his resolve or just not faking it this time (and despite having just exercised enough to drop an elephant), Ting fares WAY better than before. Nevertheless, Saming is still quite fierce, with the two having a nice back & forth. It’s apparent that Ting has the edge, slight though it may be, and he slowly gains the upper hand. Sometimes the two actually just take turns hitting each other, which is so awesome in a very macho & hilarious way.

But Ting only gets more angry, and soon enough he starts willingly absorbing blows without even trying to dodge or counter them– he’s so far into Beast Mode now he may never come back.

Finally, a double-punch to the head seems to put Saming down for the count. Ting goes up to stop the workers who are still dutifully sawing off the enormous Buddha head, and while he’s beating them up (not too hard), Saming jabs like six needles full of that magic drug into his stomach at once. Ruh roh.

Once Ting finishes up, he comes down to head for Komtuan, and gets blindsided by a flying double-kick to the head (!) from Saming, a blow bad enough it leaves him defenseless against Saming’s assault for a while. The uber-henchman (now red-eyed and even crazier than before) tries to finish Ting off by choking him to death, but just before he blacks out he gazes at the giant stone head, and instantly gains enough BUDDHA POWER that he’s able to break free and put a hurt on Saming. Then, in a moment that would be the insanest part if it happened in most other movies but here it barely cracks the Top 5, the camera zooms in ultra-close on Ting’s eye as it becomes consumed with flame….

Eye of the Thai-ger

… and does a jumping elbow smash on the top of Saming’s head that’s so tough it cracks his skull open.

“I’ve got a SPLITTING headache!”

I mean… damn.

Saming collapses under the impact of Ting’s Limit Break, but when the hero turns his attention to the mastermind once more, the villain calmly produces a gun and shoots him through the shoulder. He had that gun the whole time and he didn’t use it? What the crap?!

One-armed Humlae then shows up and has a brief tussle with Komtuan that involes the villain getting knocked out of his wheelchair and the comic relief taking repeat sledgehammer blows to the face & torso in order to protect Ong Bak’s head. Meanwhile, Saming, never one to let a fight go the first or second time it’s over (whether he won or lost) comes back for some more, necessitating Ting to put him down by doing a knees-first jump into his stomach that crashes them both through the entire scaffolding.

“GERONIMO!”

From the bottom floor, Ting can’t do much to help his friend, but a little Buddha ex machina steps in, as the enormous stone neck finally gives away, letting the head fall off onto the evil & blasphemous villain (Humlae rolls away to relative safety, but dies of his wounds soon after anyway). The word “karma” doesn’t flash in huge letters on the screen, but it might as well.

It’s not quite mind-blowing, but still an appropriate finish to a series of dazzling setpieces– remember, the last four or five fights happen practically back-to-back. If anything the last battle might suffer a bit because the viewer is just plain fatigued by a solid 30 minutes of climax. Err, you know what I mean.

Grade: A-

Well, that’s Ong Bak, one of the more impressive debut films in recent martial arts history. It’s not perfect but it’s a shame we don’t see more like it. Perhaps one day Tony Jaa will team up with the guys who made The Raid and all our heads will never stop exploding, but until then we can only hope.

Recommended Links: The one & only Seanbaby on the absurdity that is Ong Bak’s first sequel. “Luckily, all Thai hospitals have a Tony Jaa wing where they treat victims of Tony Jaa.” I certainly hope so.

Coming Attractions: Come out to play.

And now for a highly accurate depiction of urban gang life.

Well, more or less.

Walter Hill’s perennial cult favorite The Warriors lives in a surreal world all its own. Part outsized comic book adventure, part defiant social commentary, and part hard-edged 70s action cinema, there’s really nothing else like it.

The film (based loosely on the ancient Greek tale of the Anabasis) takes place in a 1979 New York City that’s insane even by pre-Giuliani standards, living as it does in fear of hundreds of thousands of warriing youth gangs decked out in colorful costumes. One such group, the titular Warriors, sends nine delegates to attend a peaceful conclave thrown by the largest gang, the Gramercy Riffs, in Van Cortland Park. Representatives from all over the city arrive and end cheer for the Riffs’ leader, Cyrus, when he preaches a gospel of unification that would give the collective gangs control over the entire city.

But when Cyrus is shot down by a deranged member of the Rogues, the Warriors are blamed and have to hike all the way back to their native Coney Island (about 30 miles according to Google Maps), with every gang in the city hunting for them… and their leader Cleon a casualty before they can even leave the park.

The movie’s odd, funny, mean and unpredictable, but strangely compelling and exciting at the same time. As the subtitle of this post indicates there’s not much in the way of actual fighting– the Warriors have to employ a lot of evasion and intelligence to survive, picking only the battles that are absolutely necessary– it’s still an action classic that can’t be overlooked. Besides, we needed a break from strictly martial arts movies.

1) The Warriors vs the Baseball Furies

The Fighters:

• Four Warriors:
  • Swan, the group’s new “War Chief” (leader), after the loss of Cleon at the rally. Strong, lean and level-headed. Played by Michael Beck.
  • Snow, another solid fighter and the group’s designated “music man.” Played by Brian Tyler, who looks like a 70s version of Donald Glover.
  • Cowboy, not as impressive physically as the others, and so-called because of his trademark cowboy hat. Played by Tom McKitterick.
  • Ajax, one of the gang’s best fighters. Though unfortunately he’s stupid at everything else; Ajax is short-sighted, confrontational, and sexually aggressive. Played by the great James Remar.
• The Baseball Furies, another gang who’s answered the call to collect the Warriors. In a movie full of outlandish characters, the Baseball Furies are perhaps the most outlandish of all, sporting pinstripe baseball jerseys and full face paint. They’re simultaneously completely ridiculous yet also undeniably creepy. They’re also all armed with wooden baseball bats, which puts our heroes at a distinct disadvantage, at first. All played by stunt men, including their apparent leader, veteran stunt coordinator Jery Hewitt.

“How ’bout a magic trick? I’ll make this bat DISAPPEAR!”

The Setup: The machinations of their chase have split off these four Warriors from their companions, and they exited a train station to discover seven or eight of the Furies waiting for them. The Warriors run into a nearby park with the Furies in hot pursuit, and Swan wisely breaks to the right with Snow, letting the rest of the Furies chase Ajax and Cowboy along the main path. Swan & Snow soon double back and pick off the slowest, lagging Fury from behind, putting him down for the count and taking his bat for their own.

Meanwhile, their friends run until Cowboy declares he can run no more, which Ajax thankfully takes as an opportunity to turn & fight.

The Fight: Ajax lays out his first foe almost as soon as he stops, catching him in mid-stride with a two-hit combo. Cowboy gets put down by their leader. Things slow for a moment after that, as the rest of the Furies settles into position while Ajax and their leader face off. It’s here that Remar growls out his famous line, “I’ll shove that bat up your ass and turn you into a Popsicle.”

The man’s bluster is not misplaced, for once (though thankfully he did not mean his threat literally), as he ducks under the first bat swing and quickly dominates the head Fury, doubling him over with a shot to the gut and finishing him off with a knee that sends him flying in a cool behind-the-back shot.

Swan and Snow then show up, whereupon it becomes a free-for-all, the three active Warriors against the remaining four or five Furies. Some of it’s cheap shots and team-ups, but there’s some good old fashioned fisticuffs, and Swan even engages in couple “bat duels” with his weapon chocking repeatedly against his opponents’. Though well-done it’s too quick and intense to describe at length. Still, the staging does convey not just the Warriors’ skill but how well they work as a team, cooperating almost as if by instinct.

Most of it is not terribly complicated, either, but there is an odd, awkward and simple grace to the proceedings. It’s the kind of unpolished violence you don’t see so much in movies anymore, exploitative but not indulgent. Cheap, mean and quick, like a lot of the 70s classics.

The fight finishes as mighty Ajax swings a charging Fury overhead, and Swan finishes off his final dueling session. Cowboy rises, bruised but okay, and all four leave with some handy new weapons.

Not much else to say. There’s lots of action and suspense in The Warriors, but as far as fight scenes go this one is basically all you get until near the end. It’s not about fighting so much as it is survival, and the Warriors surviving this fight– with some new weapons to show for it!– is a much-needed boost for the story.

Grade: B+

Recommended Links: A summary of the true Greek legend The Warriors is based on.

A pretty good Salon article (from 2005) on the movie’s enduring cult status. The differences between book and movie are of particular interest.

Coming Attractions: Rumble in the Bathroom.

“Which one of you guys is ‘Sea Bass’?”

The Warriors are about to have their climactic battle. Can you dig it?

How could you say no after seeing this image?

2) The Warriors vs The Punks

The Fighters:

• The Warriors, or at least the six remaining. In addition to Swan, Snow and Cowboy from before (Ajax was arrested for attempting to rape an undercover female cop not long after the last fight), we have:
  • Cochise, another able fighter and a guy with some fashionable head choices. Played by David Harris.
  • Vermin, one of the less impressive Warriors. Played by Terry Michos.
  • Rembrandt, the smallest and seemingly the youngest of the Warriors. He’s also their resident graffiti artist (hence the name). Played by Marcelino Sánchez.
  • Mercy, a troublesome street girl who abandoned the mediocre “Orphans” gang to roll with the Warriors earlier (and has since developed a weird relationship with Swan), is also on hand, and contributes a small bit. Played by Deborah Van Valkenburgh.
• The Punks– yes, that’s their name. Somehow managing to look more laughable than the Baseball Furies’ “clowns in sports outfit” thing, the Punks’ uniform is long-sleeved striped shirts underneath full overalls. They’re supposed to be tough inner-city New Yorkers but they look more like prep-school jocks dressing like farm hands for a tacky Halloween party. Oh, and a couple of them are wearing roller skates. They do have an assortment of bats, knives & chains, so there’s that.

“A motley band of ruffians, we!”

The Setup: The disparate Warriors have finally re-united at Union Square Station, but soon discover they’re being tailed by several Punks (when they finally gather it ends up being nine). Ever the savvy tactician, Swan guides his crew into a men’s room and waits for them to follow.

The Punks enter to find two rows of closed stalls, and one scout begins to methodically search each door while the rest either block the exit or take up positions in front of other stalls. But one of the first doors checked reveals Rembrandt, who swiftly raises his can of spray paint and lets the Punk have it right in the face.

It could only have improved his hair.

The other Warriors take that as their cue to bust out en masse, and the brawl begins immediately.

The Fight: Pure chaos.

Basically, everything happens at once. Much like the last fight, it’s hard to provide a blow-by-blow, but even more so– instead of three-on-five, now it’s six-against-nine, and in a more confined space to boot. But amidst the insanity, there’s a vague progression of the Warriors’ slow crawl to victory, even if things are dire enough it looks like they could lose. And as frantic as it is, you still get a definite sense for how each of the protagonists is doing, and nearly everyone gets at least one memorable moment.

(It’s not perfect, however– there’s one edit of Snow having, then losing, then suddenly having his bat again, that’s particularly noticeable. But absolute perfection is a big ask in a scene with this many moving pieces, especially on Hill’s low budget.)

Cowboy breaks his bat with a tough swing against one opponent, as does Snow towards the end. Despite his dirty pool with the graffiti, the tiny Rembrandt gets taken down early. Vermin gets in some good hits but gets thrown nastily into the mirrors above the sink.

Or at least his stunt man does, but who’s counting?

Cochise pulls off a brutal-looking, wrestling-type move when he puts a Punk in a side headlock and runs that head straight into a wall. Later he chokes another Punk with his own chain and flips forward bodily. Snow seems to be a particular MVP, getting in lots of cool karate moves on multiple opponents (Brian Tyler was a practiced martial artist at the time of filming). Even Mercy helps out a little bit.

Almost as deadly but less well-known than the Vulcan Neck Pinch is the Skank Shoulder Bite.

Swan dishes out a lot of punishment, but takes a lot as well, at one point getting ganged up on by two assailants. But it all works out for him in the end– indeed, whenever Swan or any other Warrior starts looking rough, a teammate is usually nearby to swoop in and help. It’s clear these guys have had a lot of practice kicking ass together.

The leader actually gets in the last blow of the fight, diverting a charging punk’s momentum into a throw that sends him crashing through a stall door. Warriors 2, New York 0.

Again, we see the amazing skill (both in the actual fight and quiet tactics that set it up) which make the Warriors so formidable (“Good. Real good” you might say), but this time in an even more intense and brutal setting. There’s a palpable excitement to this fight that’s hard to convey, but it really does work on all levels. Epic without being flashy.

Grade: A-

Recommended Links: A who’s who of the Warriors and the rest of the cast, complete with optional Where Are They Now.

Coming Attractions: Confusion conclusion.

“No, EDWARD is the best!” “You take that back!”

“Be a man and see it. See it and be a man.” - Chapel 3929

“Is there a fund we can give to for the families of all these stunt men who clearly died while filming The Raid: Redemption?” – Seanbaby

At the very least, you can see it so they didn’t die in vain

The Raid: Redemption (gratuitous & inaccurate subtitle added for US release, I will not be using it again in content of posts) aka Serbuan Maut in its native Indonesia, is an action-lover’s dream in all the right ways: it provides consistently entertaining and varied scenes of stylized but gritty violence, puncuated by dramatic sequences that are just enough to make you care while not dragging on so long as to waste your time (how many otherwise spectacular action films have been ruined by “dramatic” beats that were clumsy, pretentious, overlong or all of the above?). It’s confident without being cocky, writer/director Gareth Evans being a true genre auteur rather than a winking fanboy.

Longtime readers may remember that I cited this film as the main reason why it’s sometimes necessary to switch to the “retrospective” format and indeed I planned to do that here; however, upon re-watch I was surprised to learn that, despite remembering the movie being almost non-stop action after it finally revs up (minus a few necessary breathers), there are actually only five sequences amongst all that action that could be reasonably described as fight scenes. But every one a masterpiece.

In an age where cinema is in many ways growing stagnant, The Raid is something truly special, and that’s why I timed it to be the subject of this, the 100th post of the blog. Happy Birthday, Grading Fight Scenes.

1) Hallway Brawl

The Fighters:

• Rama, the film’s noble hero. A young but extremely capable (and lucky) member of the local police force. Rama is, like the actor who plays him and also like many other characters in the movie, an expert at pencak silat. Being as that’s an umbrella term for all the varied martial arts in Indonesia, it’s hard to pinpoint any one thing that makes it unique, save for perhaps its flowing, constant motion. Played by Iko Uwais, who is destined for great things.
  • Armed with: a standard-issue police baton and combat knife. He had an assault rifle and hand gun, but has discarded both after running out of ammo. Also still wearing most of his riot gear: flak vest, elbow & knee pads, but no helmet.
• Bad Guys, like 20 of them (it’s hard to keep count). Denizens of the apartment building where the titular raid occurs, they’re all foot soldiers loyal to the film’s villain. All ruthless thugs but most of them here don’t seem to have much more than rudimentary skill. Played by stunt men.
  • Armed with: Various small sticks, blades and even a machete.

The Setup: Although the plot does eventually produce a couple interesting twists, The Raid’s basic premise is refreshingly simple: 20 cops in full SWAT gear storm a building that’s run by a sadistic crime lord. From up in his perch where he has access to dozens of security cameras, the villain sics the building’s inhabitants (most of whom work for or are in some way beholden to him) on the police. Although the protagonists are largely competent and virtuous, they find themselves quickly overwhelmed, their numbers dwindled and the survivors separated.

After a fantastic action sequence that culminated in an exploding refrigerator (I love this movie), our main hero Rama is stuck with his wounded but living comrade Bowo (whose only character development prior to this was “annoying jerk”), searching for safe harbor while the other remaining crew hide elsewhere. Rama drags his non-friend through a hallway on the seventh floor, but the two are quickly discovered.

The Fight: Fast, mean and complex.

Fortunately for Rama’s sake, the bad guys keep coming in one or two at a time. But for once this old action cliche is justified: the thugs here have mostly been conducting a spread-out, disorganized search, and all of them except for the first few are drawn by the noise, so they rush in at non-coordinated intervals.

Not that these small bursts of baddies give Rama much of a chance to rest, of course; he’s constantly moving and attacking nearly the whole time, a frenzy of focused violence. He wields his baton in one hand and knife in the other, using the two weapons sometimes separately but often in concert, such as when he pulls one guy in by hooking him with the baton’s handle and then stabbing him with the knife.

There’s all sorts of inventive nastiness on Rama’s part. Several times he uses the baton to “deconstruct” opponents, delivering a lightning-fast series of small blows to various points on the body, quickly & systematically overwhelming the victim. Others get slammed harshly into walls and doors. Rama stuns one thug with a club to the chest then reaches around to stab him in the back of the thigh. He stabs another in the upper thigh and then pulls the still-inserted blade nearly down to his knee. He stabs another right in the knee and then twists the knife. Throats get not just sliced but also clubbed. Over & over the knife is used for all manner of quick, punch-like stabbings, and the accompanying sound effect is suitably sickening.

Rama is one ruthless SOB, but not sadistic; he’s just doing what he has to. While many if not most of the wounds he delivers are fatal, often he’s satisfied just leaving a defeated foe injured enough to not get back up again. Indeed, during one of the fight’s few lulls, as Rama creeps his way warily to a T-section of the hallway, he leaves behind a handful of groaning cripples along with all the dead & dying. One of those injured seizes Bowo just as the latter crawls to keep up with Rama, and the visibly agitated cop repeatedly stabs the thug in the chest– it’s Bowo’s sole contribution to the action and one of the film’s few moments of humor.

When baddies rush in again and Rama has to take them on from both sides, things get a bit hairier. First he loses his baton in a close-up scruff, and not long after that he has to abandon his knife when he gets yanked away from behind just after he’s stabbed one poor sucker right in the shoulder. Fortunately he’s almost as deadly unarmed as he is armed, and, wouldn’t you know it, none of the remaining bad guys in this scene happen to run in with weapons either. Rama cleans up the remainders, and takes out the last one with an epically brutal finishing move that was rightfully included in most of the trailers:

“Knock knock.”

Yep, he grabs the man, slams his head into a hallway light fixture, and then slams his head FIVE MORE TIMES down the side of the wall before dropping him. It’s… it’s beautiful. Unfortunately, Rama does not take the time to recover either of his weapons before picking up Bowo again and moving on. That will prove to be a mistake.

This fight, however, is anything but. Though it’s definitely not the first bit of excitement in the movie it’s the first extended physical fight we’ve seen, and as such is as powerful a mission statement as an opening fight can be. Evans smartly turns the limited scope of the hallway into an effectively claustrophobic environment. The choreography switches seamlessly between multiple weapon types and pure hand-to-hand, and the constant stream of bad guys makes for an unpredictable threat. The filmmakers manage to find that sweet spot of being complicated without seeming complicated– there’s never really a moment where you stop and say “wait, why didn’t he just do that more simply?” or suspect the characters are showing off, it all feels very organic.

Much of the credit of course goes to all the meticulous stunt work behind the scenes, but a large amount is due to Uwais as well, who sells the entire thing as natural and unforced. Physically impressive and with a highly sympathetic face, the audience is always rooting and fearful for him, because he’s not some Superman. Although he comes out here miles better than he does in any upcoming battle, Rama does absorb a couple blows here, and has a few of his own attacks stymied one way or the other. He’s awesome, but not invincible.

And you know what the crazy part is? This is the least impressive fight in this movie.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: Machete kills.

Rama don’t text.

Eat your heart out, Jason Voorhees.

It looks like he’s reeling just from being yelled at, which actually makes this even better.

2) Machete Chaos

The Fighters:

• Rama, once again. Played by Iko Uwais.
  • Armed with: Not a darn thing.
• The Machete Gang, as the credits oh-so-accurately call them. They’re a band of five (soon to be four) particularly tough thugs who have been roving the building together for stragglers. If this movie were a video game (and it is SO a video game), these guys would be the miniboss squad. Their leader (“Machete Gang #1″) is particularly aggressive and deranged; he may well be hopped up on some amphetamine or another, given his demeanor and resilience. Played by Alfridus Godfred, Rully Santoso, Melkias Ronald Torobi, Johanes Tuname, and Sofyan Alop.
  • Armed with: Hint’s in the name.

The Setup: After successfully unloading Bowo in the home of the one decent man in the entire building (and just barely hiding in the walls from the Machete Gang while he was at it), Rama has resumed his mission alone. But it’s not long before he encounters the gang again in a hallway. One of them is significantly closer than the others, so when Rama flees, he’s the first to catch up. Our hero of course beats the crap out of him, though it takes significantly longer this time, and finishes him off by tossing him down the building’s main stairwell, where he lands on a concrete ledge a few floors down, back first. Ouch.

Rama runs up one more floor and gets chased for a while, but when he finds himself at a dead end, he knows he has no choice but to do this the hard way.

The easy way does not exist in this film.

There’s a brief stare-down between the two factions, and then before you can say “ki ki ki, ma ma ma” everyone rushes in to get some killin’ done.

The Fight: Rama works harder here than ever before, being careful to stay inside the swing radius of his foes’ blades. It largely works, but he has a couple close calls that he barely dodges, including at one point when one of the gang (the one with impressive dreadlocks) almost stabs his face off after pinning him to the ground with a running leap onto his chest.

And for being the only unarmed guy, Rama does kick a decent amount of ass here, scoring lots of blows that temporarily incapacitate an opponent or two at a time, only to leave him to go right back to the remaining ones. He also briefly lays hands on a machete himself and proves fairly adept with it, but loses it in an up-close suffle after only getting to deliver a painful-looking but superficial wound. There’s even a mildly funny bit where he tries to pick it up off the ground but his hand gets machete-slapped away by the gang’s leader.

At one point Rama gets caught between two thugs on either side of the narrow hallway (Evans switches to a cool overhead shot for this) but is able to turn the situation around by beating them both soundly. He kicks one bad guy hard enough to smash him through the door of an apartment, then grabs the other one by the neck and leaps them both backwards so that the thug’s neck lands on the protruding shards of the broken door, killing him instantly.

This happens. This is a thing that happens.

There’s enough of a lull in the action that Rama takes time to pause, seemingly shocked at his own brutality. Possibly more so because the thug he just killed looks all of 17 years old.

But the fight picks up again soon enough. Rama is quickly able to kill another of the gang by taking his machete, using it to slice him through the gut and side of his neck, and then bury it in his chest. After that, he’s unarmed again as he squares off in hand-to-hand with the dreadlocked guy, who proves surprisingly adept at martial arts. He hits Rama with some pretty fancy moves, knocking him over a couch and following up with several mean-looking blows.

But the hero rallies, and when Dreads tries to jump up so he can deliver a devastating knee to Rama’s face, Rama tackles him in mid-air and swings him into the corner wall like a sack of wet garbage. It seems to put him down for the count.

This frees Rama up to tussle alone with the leader, who proves alarmingly resilient and capable. There’s a real vicious push & pull between the two as each struggles to take the other out. The villain very nearly executes a mean suplex on Rama, who actually changes his own momentum in mid-air so he only flips forward to land on his feet (and then falls on his face). Then Rama almost gets his neck-snapped before he can break free, head-butt him and attempt a choke of his own. They trade some more blows, screaming at each other wildly the whole time. If the first fight was a complex ballet the whole way through, the second one quickly devolves into a desperate struggle for survival.

The thug is able to pick up his machete again and misses with a few wild swings. Rama gets in close, softens him up with a few blows, get around behind him and put him down with a hard punch to the back of the head. Visibly shaken, Rama checks the AO, wary of any lingering or new threats. When the gang leader stumbles shakily to his feet, our hero panics and tackles him with a wild surge of energy, sending them both plummeting out the window.

This is what you’d call a “hail Mary play,” I believe.

They fall several stories, clip a ledge on the way down and stop on a metal balcony. Rama lands on top of his foe, so he’s relatively okay, but still pretty roughed up. Worse so when some of the bad guys stationed outside the building open fire on him. Most of the bullets bounce off the balcony’s bars, but at least one round makes its way into his flak jacket, and when he crawls inside he has to desperately remove the vest to get the heated bullet away, sacrificing yet another layer of protection. But at least he’s alive. Any fight you can walk away from….

Another piece of extended awesomeness here. As mentioned there’s a whole different vibe to this scene, as Rama is up against stronger odds right from the outset– not to mention that the first battle had to have taken a lot out of him. The bad guys here are not just more threatening but more distinctive visually, with their crazy-eyed leader having already established himself as being particularly ruthless and hateable.

One of the movie’s more subtle yet distinctive triumphs of choreography is also apparent here: reversals. In several clashes between hero & villain, one party will attempt a move that the other reverses, escapes or otherwise defeats. It’s not always something simple like a punch or kick, either, but a complicated throw or some such. And even though the move doesn’t work you can always tell what the first person is trying to do, which makes it even more impressive when you see the target cancel it out. Just one of the many little things that help make this movie so amazing.

And for all that The Raid is so wild & intense, there’s an interesting undercurrent of realism that grounds it, exemplified here. Rama’s physical condition degrades visibly as the fight goes on, and once it ends, between the exhaustion and the multi-story fall he’s quite out of it. His vision is blurred and he’s stumbling around like an Irishman at four a.m. the morning after St. Patrick’s Day. If not for the timely intervention of an unlikely ally he’d have been easy pickings.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: No time for sergeants.

This is even less friendly than it looks.

Drug bust.

Face bust.

3) Drug Lab Assault

The Fighters:

• Rama, our hero, now patched up and rested a bit from his previous encounters. Played by Iko Uwais
• Wahyu, the police lieutenant in charge of the mission. Older and in worse shape than any of the other team members (and sporting hilarious bleach blonde hair), but plenty mean enough. It’s come out by now that Wahyu is deeply corrupt and has outlived his usefulness, which is why he’s ordered this raid as a sort of last-ditch shot for leverage. His companions know he’s dirty, but they keep him around because it’s important to stick together. Played by Pierre Gruno.
• Dagu, another SWAT member who we don’t know much about. Basically only around because he’s lucky enough to have survived. Played by Eka “Piranha” Rahmadia. No idea what the nickname is all about.
• Drug lab thugs, about 15 or so. They’re spread out all over the place given the huge nature of the lab, and probably a few are also coming in from other rooms so once again it makes sense that they’re attacking our heroes at irregular intervals. Most seem to be there to make drugs but several are probably guards, so their individual skill levels vary.
  • Armed with: Some have knives.

The Setup: After getting some help from the crime lord’s other lieutenant, Andi (who turns out to be Rama’s brother. Ze tweest!), Rama lays low for a while and eventually re-unites with the other two wandering survivors. They decide that since the exits are being watched by snipers, the only hope they have is to complete the mission as planned, so they head onward and upward. This will take them through the rather large drug lab (unspecified what kind of drugs, could be multiple types) not too far from Tama’s perch on the 15th floor.

While Wahyu and Dagu act as bait, Rama takes out the lone roving guard on the stairwell, tossing the gun-wielding thug over the edge. Here’s where the sountrack (or at least the US version, enhanced by Mike Shinoda and Joseph Trapanese) kicks into high gear with a rhythmic, jaunty, techno-esque tune. We see a long pan over the many workers in the lab going about their business, until they’re suddenly interrupted by Rama bursting through the door and tackling another guard. Time go all Nancy Reagan on this biatch.

The Fight: On many levels this is the most ambitious fight of the movie yet. It’s three allies with different fighting styles loosely cooperating against a numerically superior but disorganized opposition, in a very large space with lots of obstacles. Of course as you might have guessed by this point, Evans and crew pull it off masterfully.

There’s a wild, popping energy to this scene that sets it apart. The last fight was a vicious duel to the death and the one before that was a desperate struggle for survival, but this one’s just a smorgasboard of hyper-kinetic, high-speed violence. In this way it’s closer to the first fight than anything, only a lot more so because there’s more combatants, more space to play in and more energy at work. The fighters here run and jump and pull all sorts of crazy stunts. Evans goes back & forth between all three protagonists as they put down henchmen left & right, with varying degrees of difficulty.

Dagu proves surprisingly capable for a guy who’s basically just lucky cannon fodder. He fights a lot like Rama but seems to be faster and more wiry, getting in several good beatdowns in this sequence.

But strangely in this fight it’s Wahyu who comes off as the most memorable. Despite being a paunchy middle-aged man amongst a crew of young, ripped martial artists, Wahyu is still quite the badass. That’s in spite of his dearth of martial arts prowess, rather than because of it: while Dagu and Rama pull off dazzling acrobatics and surgical beatdowns, the crusty lieutenant is just a big simple beast of a man. He throws wild haymakers and topples down huge objects around him as diversions. At one point he even channels his inner bad guy wrestler when he uses a chair to sweep the legs out from under a charging foe, then brings it crashing down on him brutally when he’s on the ground. He’s a bull in a china shop and it’s delightful to watch.

Rama, of course, is the fight’s MVP and rightfully gets most of the focus. Even though he’s still kicking ass in fine form, he absorbs a healthy amount of punishment from the tougher thugs, but he keeps coming back. At one point he’s able to seize a foe’s knife and starts his old slash & stab routine, but he loses it soon enough when he opts to throw it across the room to skewer a baddie who’d been choking Wahyu from behind.

The final showpiece of the sequence involves Rama and the last bad guy leaping onto opposite ends of a very long, thin table. Like, “I said, could you PASS the SALT?!”-long. They charge each other at full speed, and Rama gracefully leaps over what would have been a deadly slide kick.

“Why aren’t we fighting on the ground?” “Shut up, this is awesome!”

They have an extended battle and the last guy does pretty well for himself, until Rama is able to deliver a stunning kick-punch-sweep combo that drops the thug so that he lands with his back slamming against the table’s edge. Ouch.

The only thing “wrong” with this fight is that in comparison with the last two it’s relatively inconsequential: there are no recognizable faces amongst the sea of interchangeable bad guys here, and none of them rise above moderately threatening. Even the final table duel, while neat-looking, doesn’t end with quite the level of “oomph” the movie has subtly trained us to expect from this sort of thing.

On the other hand, that’s kind of the scene’s strength. This sequence comes during a particularly harsh stretch, storywise: Jaka has died, the remaining heroes know they’re cut off & alone, and Andi’s treachery has just been discovered by his criminal colleagues. The heroes, and the audience, need something light, fast-paced, and fun. They need a good clean win, and boy is this ever that. From the moment the high-paced music kicks in you begin to feel like it’s Comeback Time, and know that the movie’s starting to come into the home stretch.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: An unfair fight.

Definitely not fair, they should have at least three more guys.

Another fight filled with tragedy.

And not just because Striker never got any beads for this.

If Pacific Rim has any major weakness it’s that it sags in the middle. Not terminally– what does transpire is watchable enough if a bit cliche-ridden and predictable, plus there are a couple of human physical sequences we’ll get to later– but if you came for giant robots fighting giant monsters (and of course you did), there’s a huge stretch of time where that is inexplicably not happening.

Fortunately the movie makes up for it when the action finally does rev back up, giving the audience three big fight sequences that are practically back-to-back-to-back, and a climax not too long after. This is where the movie starts to make its money.

2) Typhoon, Cherno and Striker vs Otachi and Leatherback

The Fighters:

• Crimson Typhoon, a robot made and by piloted by the Chinese (the jaeger program is an international effort). Unlike the other machines it has a third arm, made possible by its number of pilots. Rather than hands, each arm has a large spinning blade attached to the end of it, making this the jaeger’s primary offensive attack. Typhoon uses the blades in a technique called the “Thundercloud Formation,” the specifics of which are vague but is apparently designed to allow a continuous and seemingly unblockable offense. The robot’s head is also smaller than other models’ but more easily moved, increasing the pilots’ ability to see at the expense of heightened vulnerability, since the head is where the pilots are located. This will turn out to be a bad trade-off.
  • Piloted by: Cheung Wei Tang, Hu Wei Tang, and Jin Wei Tang, Chinese triplets and martial artists. Played by Charles Luu, Lance Luu, and Mark Luu, who are, you guessed it, real-life identical triplets. Good thing for them they’re Chinese and not North Korean. Supposedly Guillermo del Toro wanted quadruplets for the role but couldn’t find any so he had to settle for triplets… which is mystifying because the Wei Tangs are on-screen for so little time a fourth could have easily been simulated using movie tricks that have been around since at least The Parent Trap. Heck, they could have done it all with just one guy.
• Cherno Alpha, the Russian jaeger and one of the oldest around. Big and simple in a very stereotypically Russian way: ugly, but it gets the job done. Unlike the other jaegers (especially Typhoon), its head is a thick, heavily protected tin can connected directly to the torso, with no “neck” or other vulnerable spots– you know, like the guy who used to beat you up in high school. Doesn’t seem to have any offensive powers besides its extra-large fists.
  • Piloted by: Aleksis and Sasha Kaidonovsky, a Russian husband & wife team. Like the Wei Tangs, they’re not much of a presence in the movie, but they still make a strong impression with their imposing size, stoic attitudes and outrageous bleach blonde hair. Played by Robert Maillet and Heather Doerksen, the latter of whom probably had to endure a lot of taunting in primary school.
• Striker Eureka, an Australian jaeger with the highest kill count on record. A newer, sleek and speedy model. Like Gipsy, Striker largely gets things done physically (aided by some sharp-looking prongs at the top of its wrists), but it also houses six short-range missile launchers behind a retractable chest cavity. It’s unknown just how powerful the missiles are, but one barrage was enough to finish off a tough-looking kaiju earlier in the movie (in a battle so fleetingly glimpsed via news report earlier in the movie it’s not worth writing up), which makes you wonder why cities don’t just set up similar missile batteries near their coastlines.
  • Piloted by: Herc and Chuck Hansen, a father & son Aussie team. Herc, the dad, is a veteran jaeger & military pilot. The son, Chuck, is fairly young but a talented hotshot. He’s also another of the film’s irritations, because he’s a cartoonishly arrogant and needlessly vindictive prick. Apparently the screenwriters felt the film needed an element of drama it could only get from a designated jerk, so they made a bully straight out of a bad 80s high school movie to hiss nasty stuff at Raleigh every time they’re on-screen together. There’s a moment toward the end where Pentecost casually diagnoses Chuck as having “daddy issues,” which is bizarre because Herc is incredibly nice & respectful to everybody. Played by Max Martini (from The Unit!) and Robert Kazinsky, respectively
• Otachi, a more lizard-like kaiju who prefers to crawl about on all fours. In addition to the deadly claws & jaws that all these beasties seem to come equipped with, Otachi (Japanese for “big sword,” apparently) also has an extra-long & thick prehensile tail, with another large gripper claw on the end of it. It can also spit large amounts of corrosive blue acid which it stores in a sac underneath the chin. And this won’t come into play until later, but Otachi also has a set of strong wings hidden in its forearms.
• Leatherback, a fat kaiju with a gorilla-like body who walks dragging the knuckles attached to his enormous forearms. Big & strong, of course, and he has some sort of alien device on his back that can release an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

Whew, that was a long one.

The Setup: After their first attempt at forming a neural bridge went all kinds of wrong, Raleigh and his would-be partner, Mako, are grounded, so when two more kaiju are detected (the first time more than one has attacked at once), it’s up to Cherno & Typhoon to defend the city (Striker is held back in reserve, because it’s needed for an important mission later). Though actually as we shortly find out, the kaiju’s primary mission here is to hunt down a human scientist working for the jaeger program, because he’d gone rogue and neural-drifted with a piece of kaiju corpse, getting the hive mind’s attention. (The scientist, Dr. Geiszler, is made to feel bad for “provoking” the enemy, but since they were intent on showing up in cities and wrecking things anyway, I don’t see what the big difference is.)

So Striker hugs the coast while the two other active jaegers venture out to find the approaching kaiju. It doesn’t take them long.

Peekaboo.

The Fight: Otachi, not one to beat around the bush, pops out of the water directly in front of Crimson Typhoon. After a brief holler, it spins around and floors the jaeger with its massive tail. Sweep the leg!

NO MERCY!

Typhoon pauses and actually shakes its head a little bit before getting up, the way a human would after taking a hard knock. Presumably this is because the pilots are a bit dazed from the fall and the jaeger is only following their movements, but it’s still a funny touch because it looks like the robot is dizzy, which is hilarious.

Typhoon arises and attacks Otachi using Thundercloud, all three blades spinning madly. The brothers get in a good five or six swipes, ripping several tears across the kaiju’s ugly gut, before Otachi seizes two of the jaeger’s hands in its own claws, crunching the blades good. Rather than just going to town with the remaining third limb (this would kind of seem to be what it’s there for, no?), Typhoon responds by using the jets on its back to leap into the air above Otachi’s head, but remains vertical and still with its hands caught in the monster’s claws. It looks like the world’s biggest, slowest suplex, except it’s self-inflicted.

While Typhoon is briefly suspended above Otachi’s head, the pilots swivel the entire lower half of its body (that’s nifty) so that it lands with increased leverage, which it then uses to fling Otachi several hundred feet through the air.

The kaiju stumbles in the shallow water, where it finds Cherno Alpha ready for business. The beefy jaeger wastes no time charging in and delivering an elbow drop (more rasslin’ moves!) to Otachi’s long neck. Cherno segues right into a headlock and follows up with a few blows to the monster’s face. It can’t finish the job, though, because the creature’s tail swipes in to knock it down.

The Hansens sees this and want to help, but are told to stand down by command. Meanwhile, Typhoon closes back in on Otachi, so the beast is surrounded and seemingly in trouble. But that damn tail is still too unpredictable for the pilots: it whips in and smack Typhoon, and the claw at the end of it grabs onto Typhoon’s head/cockpit. This spurs the Hansens to finally disobey orders and start rushing over to help, but it’s too late to save Typhoon’s noggin: after a little bit of wrenching, the entire thing gets yanked clean off, and flung carelessly into the sea. Just like with Yancy we don’t see what happens to the triplets inside after that, but they almost certainly didn’t survive. As for Crimson Typhoon, well, now he’ll never be the head of a major corporation.

Too soon?

Really, as I said earlier, that was a serious design flaw. Surely they could have found a way to increase the jaeger’s visibility (cameras embedded in the sides, or something) without leaving its pilots so exposed. This is twice now in the movie a jaeger has been quickly compromised by a direct attack on its cockpit. That’s not the way to get ahead in life.

Anyway, Cherno Alpha’s pilots see this and are pissed. The jaeger clangs its fists together in anticipation, and rushes at Otachi. Unfortunately, Otachi does its Linda Blair impression and hits Cherno square in the face with deadly acid. The jaeger is damaged but not down, even though the acid quickly leaves the pilots directly exposed. Otachi bites into Cherno’s arm and the jaeger starts to fight back, but his fate is sealed when Leatherback decides to make his entrance.

Leatherback clings onto Cherno’s back and starts tearing it up from behind, even as Otachi keeps at it from the front. Soon enough the latter decides that Leatherback can finish things off on its own, and goes off to engage Striker Eureka. Indeed, Leatherback does make short work of things, seizing Cherno and shoving it into the ocean. There’s a strangely personal & chilling malice in the way the monster simply holds the robot down, waiting for the inevitable to happen. Water floods not just the pilots but also the reactor, shortly triggering a muted explosion that saves the pilots the indignity of a slow drowning death.

Meanwhile, an enraged Striker has been ruthlessly pounding on Otachi. The jaeger finishes up by hefting the kaiju above its head and giving it a mighty toss– maybe not the smartest move on the pilots’ part, since the landing in deep water doesn’t really hurt it, and Striker would have been better off pressing the advantage. Maybe they only did that so they’d have a safe distance from which to fire Striker’s missiles… but that doesn’t work either, because a freshly-unoccupied Leatherback sees the danger and activates its EMP.

To slightly paraphrase War Machine: Why didn’t they lead with that? Really, it could saved the kaiju a lot of hassle. Getting all their targets in range couldn’t have been an issue, because the pulse extends at least all the way to the shore.

As Striker stands inert, the two monsters have a brief exchange. Otachi charges off to find Dr. Geiszler while Leatherback stays behind to menace its motionless enemy. There are a couple cuts away to headquarters and the doctor’s misadventures in the city, but soon enough we come back to the two pilots in their useless robot. They leave their harness just as Leatherback gives Striker’s head a playful smack, which leads to Herc falling and hurting his arm.

There’s some macho arguing, but ultimately the two decide to “do something really stupid”: rather than sit there and wait for the inevitable doom, the Hansens climb outside to almost literally spit in Death’s eye. Armed with flare guns, they wait for a curious Leatherback to examine them up close, and fire a couple shots right at some of his six eyeballs. The monster is none too happy and raises his fists to take them out, when suddenly a spotlight hits him from behind….

SURPRISE MOTHERF—ER

Well. All kidding aside, this is some pretty harsh stuff to watch. Probably not as much as it would be if we’d actually gotten to know some of these now-dead characters (and their awesome jaegers) on anything but the most surface of levels. To be sure, some of the mystique surrounding the Russian & Chinese pilots is owed to them being more on the periphery, but it’s possible to flesh out a supporting character while still maintaining his or her mystique. As it is, these folks are barely cameos before this.

The way the fight unfolds also underscores the problem of the movie’s necessarily rushed storytelling. This is the first really extended monster combat we’ve seen so far, yet it’s filled with at least three “this has never happened before!” moments: two kaiju attacking simultaneously, a kaiju using projectile spit, and a kaiju with a sophisticated technological attack. We have minimal grounding here, jumping into this war just as it’s starting to get truly interesting and desperate.

All that being said, the fight is astounding. With five combatants constantly shifting back & forth and some unexpected attacks (not just the obvious ones like the EMP and acid spit either; Otachi’s crazy tail is another game-changer) this is a WAY more dynamic fight than the opening number. We get to see a few more tricks from the jaegers as well, and of course there’s that crazy sense of scale that Pacific Rim’s fights operate on. This battle puts a very effective cap on the tail end of the second-act doldrums, and excellently sets things up for the big turnaround.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Looks like Team Elbow Rocket’s blasting off again….

Feel free to make your filthy sexual jokes about “disappointing climaxes” here.

Gipsy and Striker will be hiding from them at the bottom of the ocean.

5) Operation Pitfall

The Fighters:

• Gipsy Danger, heroic leader of the Autobots our main jaeger, a little banged up from the last fight, but after a quick repair job is good to go.
  • Piloted by: Raleigh Beckett and Mako Mori, who are played by Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi.
• Striker Eureka, the sleek new jaeger model with the highest kill count so far. Apparently the EMP didn’t do it any lasting damage.
  • Piloted by: Chuck Hansen and Stacker Pentecost, played by Robert Kazinsky and Idris Elba. Chuck’s father, Herc, broke his arm during Fight #2 and is unable to continue, so veteran pilot Stacker has volunteered to take his place and left Herc back in command at Shatterdome. In a completely gratuitous subplot, Pentecost has cancer due to his prolonged exposure to radiation in the poorly-shielded early-model jaegers. The cancer is said to be largely subsided as long as Pentecost doesn’t enter a jaeger again, so presumably the point of this plot element is to show how noble he is for stepping up for duty… but since there are no other worthy pilots on hand, if Stacker hadn’t helped out the apocalypse would remain un-cancelled so he’d die in a kaiju attack eventually, and besides that he (spoiler) dies by other means during the fight anyway. Guillermo Del Toro already pulled the exact same “give a cancer diagnosis to the older mentor figure who’s going to be killed off later” in the first Hellboy, so maybe he’s got a thing for that strangely specific trope. Oh and apparently Hansen and Pentecost are drift-compatible, but the movie is so nebulous about how that works it hardly matters at this point.
• Raiju, an extremely fast kaiju with a crocodile-like head. Very little is seen of this little beastie, but its body seems almost optimized for swimming. Named after a Japanese mythological beast that has thunder & lightning powers.
• Scunner, a large kaiju with four arms and a bull-like head. Beyond that, doesn’t seem to do anything special– besides being a huge monster, obviously. It’s named after a Scottish slang word for having a strong dislike for something. It’s never really clear who’s naming these things, incidentally: as soon as they’re spotted on radar, the way the guys at HQ call them out it’s like the names are pre-existing, even though the jaeger program people are the only ones tracking these things. This is such a weird movie.
• Slattern, the most enormous kaiju yet– he’s immediately identified as a “Category 5″ kaiju, even though there’s never been anything bigger than a 4. Again, weird. In addition to its ridiculous size, Slattern has three long tails and a devilish appearance, though given that the two have similar facial protrusions it can be hard to tell it apart from Scunner. The monster’s name (which I don’t believe is ever mentioned on screen, only gained from ancillary material) is taken from an archaic insult for women.

The Setup: Having fended off the assault in Hong Kong, Team Jaeger is now executing their planned operation to directly attack the inter-dimensional breach the kaiju are coming from by dropping a nuclear bomb in it. In a modification of the original plan (thanks to the demise of Typhoon and Cherno), this time it’s Gipsy pulling security while Striker goes ahead with the payload.

As the pair approach the breach, they get word of two large signatures emerging from it, and are on lookout. As they’re deep in the ocean, their visibility is terrible and they have to “switch to instruments” though it’s never clear what that means, and in any case it doesn’t seem to affect their performance. Raiju and Scunner begin to circle the pair, moving too fast to be seen.

As the robots get to the hole where the breach is, both kaiju stop their advance, which clues Pentecost into the presence of a trap. Just then, Dr. Geiszler and his frenemy Dr. Gottlieb burst into command, fresh off their drift with a dead kaiju fetus. The pair tell everyone that the plan won’t work, because whatever weird science that runs the breach will be able to tell monster from machine, and won’t let them through unless they bring a kaiju corpse along for the ride.

As if that wasn’t complicated enough, this is also when Slattern decides to make its appearance.

Ahem.

So: we know that each kaiju is harder to defeat than the last. The previous two monsters managed to easily take out three veteran jaegers, and only fell to Gipsy after it took them on one at a time while using some spectacular moves. This time it’s the good guys who are outnumbered, including one super-duper-jumbo-sized opponent. And it all takes place entirely underwater, where the monsters’ increased maneuverability will give them even greater advantage. How will our heroes overcome these odds?

Luck, mostly. Luck and some cheating.

The Fight: Striker fully extends its wrist blades (where were those in the second fight?) and gets ready. Gipsy tries to catch up and help, but gets attacked from behind by Scunner, who had been hiding nearby.

“I fear you are underestimating the sneakiness.”

We see Striker get knocked down pretty hard by all three of Slattern’s tails. Meanwhile, Gipsy has to tangle with Scunner. It’s able to pin down the kaiju with one hand, but before Gipsy can deliver a killing strike with the sword attached to its free arm, the jaeger gets rammed from behind by Raiju at high speed. The swift little beast knocks the whole limb off, chomping it in half as it swims away.

While Gipsy recovers, Scunner takes the opportunity to bite the robot’s… leg? It has to be the leg, considering what happens later, but the editing is so poor you would swear it went for the intact arm (I rewound multiple times and it really seems like the arm). The leg is also an idiotic tactical decision, because it is indeed the leg right underneath Gipsy’s remaining arm. The jaeger whips out the other sword and shoves it right through the back of Scunner’s head, pinning it to the ground. Attempting to finish it off for good, Gipsy slowly drags the kaiju over to one of several volcanic pits, where the fiery discharge gives it a good burnin’.

Anyone else having flashbacks to Tim Curry in Legend?

Unfortunately, Scunner is able to wrench free before it gets the full Freddy Krueger, and swims off to lick its wounds. Right about this time, Raiju has finally gotten far enough away to start up another charge, and heads straight for Gipsy to finish the job.

With miraculous timing, the one-armed robot is able to duck and lift its sword just in time to catch Raiju right in its ugly snout. The beast has so much momentum that the body just keeps on going, so Gipsy doesn’t have to do anything but stand still in order to slice the kaiju completely in half, length-wise. It’s a really cool kill, but in addition to being an abrupt exit for a brand-new foe, it’s also a bit too easy.

“Well, that was a freebie.”

We go back to Striker, who’s been damaged enough by that one blow it can no longer release the payload. Striker’s more pressing problem, though, is a tackle from the enormous Slattern. After some struggling, Striker’s claws are able to tear up the Cat 5 pretty good, forcing it to draw back and unleash a visualized sonic shout that draws Scunner’s attention.

The (comparatively) smaller kaiju rushes to the aid of its superior, and as the two slowly circle Striker to get into optimal position, the pilots come up with a new plan: they’ll set off the bomb right now to take the heat off Gipsy, who can then detonate its own nuclear reactor to blow up the breach afterward.

After some emotional radio moments straight out of Armageddon, Strikers sets us up off the bomb just before it would have been crunched between the two charging kaiju. Gipsy, at an apparently safe distance away (ha!), keeps from getting flung to Kingdom Come by planting its chain sword in the ground. Meanwhile, the blast displaces all the nearby water, creating a nifty Moses effect. Too bad it’s not to last, and Gipsy’s battered again as the water comes rushing back in.

Surf’s up……. and right back down.

Gipsy grabs a big chunk of Raiju to get through the gateway, and limps toward the breach’s location. (In one of the many humanizing touches the CGI work provides, Gipsy’s limping here, which of course is a natural result of the damage sustained, makes the unfeeling machine look like a human being in pain.) But despite sustaining a point-blank nuclear detonation, Slattern is somehow still alive and seemingly not much worse for wear.

Our heroes improvise accordingly, dropping the Raiju half-corpse and using Gipsy’s jets to tackle Slattern just above the hole leading to the breach. They struggle against each other as they sink, with Gipsy skewering the kaiju through the chin with its sword, and finally finishing the job by burning off a ton of excess fuel through the nuclear turbine in its chest.

“HEAAAAART’S ONNNNNN FIIIIIIIIRE…..”

After that, it’s pretty much a matter of simply playing out the thread. Gipsy passes through the portal, arms the reactor, both emergency pods eject back up through the portal– how’d they get back through without a kaiju corpse? For that matter, how did they get radio reception back to HQ through another dimension??– bomb goes off and closes bridge. Raleigh ends up surviving process, he and Mako embrace (but don’t kiss), blah blah blah.

Eh, who cares.

Well, this is not bad, per se, but it certainly pales in comparison to the level of carnage we’ve seen before. And it feels like a rush, a cheat. After all those overwhelming odds, the solution ends up being pretty underwhelming: a few lucky hits and a big explosion. Raiju goes down almost as quick as he showed up, getting so little screen time he makes Typhoon and Cherno look like stars in comparison. Scunner isn’t bad, but doesn’t leave much of an impression either. And the actual “boss” is most disappointing of all– after that excellent entrance, Slattern pretty much gives one big blow, then doesn’t do a whole lot else and only showcases one special ability the whole time. And that special ability is basically a glorified distress signal, which means the only noteworthy thing the biggest, baddest monster in the movie does is call for help.

In this, Pacific Rim indulges more in its “war movie” side than it does in its sentai/kaiju side. Which is the filmmakers’ right, but it’s disappointing nonetheless from the perspective of fight scenes. And it’s not without merit: the entrance of Slattern, the bisecting of Raiju, the skewering/cooking of Scunner, and the emotionally-charged sacrifices are all good stuff. But on the whole, it’s the weakest fight of the movie, which is always a bummer to say about the climax.

Grade: B-

Coming Attractions: Wait… more Pacific Rim?

Where’d all the giant robots go?

Girls, girls, girls….

Always fighting over a boy. Sorta.

3) Roxy Richter

The Fighters:

• Scott Pilgrim, as always. Played by Michael Cera.
• Ramona Flowers, Scott’s new girlfriend, joins in on this one. Turns out she’s a pretty capable and aggressive fighter in her own right. Played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
  • Armed with: A giant sledgehammer, which in true video game fashion she can produce at will from her deceptively small hand bag due to her skill at accessing sub-space (or perhaps more accurately, hammer space). She can wield the heavy weapon with surprising speed.
• Roxanne “Roxy” Richter, a female ninja (or “half-ninja” as the comic elaborates) and Ramona’s fourth Evil Ex. (Their relationship occurred as a result of what Scott calls her “sexy phase” but what Ramona merely describes as “experimenting.”) Roxy is cranky, aggressive, and humorously insecure. She also has the ability of short-range teleportation, which she uses quite cannily. Played by Cera’s erstwhile television love interest, Mae Whitman. But I like to call her Annabelle because she’s shaped like a…….. she’s the belle of the ball!
  • Armed with: A very loose whip-sword she’s quite skilled with.

The Setup: At an after-party in a swanky night club, Scott’s relationship with Ramona is beginning to clearly deteriorate due to his insecurities regarding her past romantic history. They verbally jab at each other for a while, and Scott asks why Ramona keeps correcting his description of the League to the gender-neutral “exes” instead of “ex-boyfriends” as he’d repeatedly phrased it. But before she can answer, the explanation kicks him in the back of the head.

He gets up, assesses the situation, and puts it together.

This anatomical depiction of the male brain is the most realistic thing in this movie.

You know what that means.

The Fight: As Ramona starts to explain, Roxy gets miffed at being reduced to a “phase” and decides to take it out on Scott, winding up a big spin kick… which gets blocked, rather effortlessly, by Ramona.

Though Scott will later vocalize his reluctance to fight a woman (“they’re soft!” he whines), Ramona’s motivation here seems mainly to be about finally being proactive in defeating her past. Snarling in defiance, Roxy calls Ramona a “has-bian” which is hilarious, and takes out her chain sword. Ramona prepares her own attitude-adjuster.

The two have the most complex battle in the movie yet, with some really inventive staging to match Ramona’s slower, bludgeoning weapon against Egg’s Roxy’s longer, faster, cutting one. There are some neat acrobatic tricks & flips, though everything stays much more local than the high-flying escapades of the Patel duel. Neither one gains much of an edge against the other, though Ramona seems to be the more dominant fighter.

They break a lot of surroundings until Roxy is able to use her whip to seize Ramona’s hammer and send it out the window. But the villain gets too caught up in celebrating her accomplishment to defend against a brutal axe kick from her ex-lover, putting Bland to the ground.

After some taunting, Roxy insists that this is “a League game” meaning that Scott has to be the one to defeat her (it’s unclear what will happen if he isn’t. These rules are being unilaterally invented & imposed by one side of the conflict). So, getting by on a technicality, Ramona stands behind Scott and manipulates his limbs to use him as a fighting dummy.

It looks better than this in practice, I promise.

The impromptu solution actually works pretty well and Roxy gets beaten back, until she employs her teleporting powers again and BAMFs right in-between the couple, separating them. She then punches the vulnerable Pilgrim into the ceiling, and after he falls back down she tries to finish him off with a devastating axe kick of her own. As her heel comes down in slow-motion, Scott & Ramona improbably find the time for a conversation, where she advises him to strike at the “weak point” just behind Roxy’s knee. It’s clear even before Roxy’s moan-heavy reaction that “weak point” is a metaphor for something else.

That’s… hot? I think?

So, yeah. Amidst the ecstatic moaning, Roxy collapses to the ground and explodes in a shower of coins. K.O.

Another fun if not spectacular fight. Throwing Ramona in the mix allows for a much-needed change, as does the addition of some unusual weapons. It’s also quite amusing on the whole and very fast-moving. Though the talented Miss Whitman doesn’t reach the heights of Chris Evans’ Lucas Lee, she’s really quite funny in what could have been an unlikably shrill role if played poorly.

The climax conclusion of the fight is… unusual. Obviously we all get the nature of the joke, but it seems a bit of a stretch, a double-entendre that’s also literally true. It just makes no sense for that to be the thing that kills her– not just distracts her enough to be finished off but actually kills her– even for this movie’s value of “making sense.” I guess they don’t call it le petit mort for nothing.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: The conclusion of the movie-length boss rush(more).

War does funny things to men.

For once I’m at a loss to make a video game analogy that the movie itself hasn’t already beat me to.

+6 Blogger Pre-emption

4) Gideon Graves

The Fighters:

• Scott Pilgrim, obviously. Much more pissed off and determined than before. Played by Michael Cera.
  • Armed with: Eventually, he gets to use two swords, The Power of Love and The Power of Self-Respect. They’re both in the form of flaming katanas, the latter being more powerful.
• Ramona Flowers again takes part in the proceedings. Played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
  • Armed with: Nothing much, but she briefly makes use of a standing lamp to defend herself.
• Knives Chau, the teenage “Scottaholic” who’s been messed up since Scott ditched her for Ramona. She incorrectly blames Ramona for this. Played by Ellen Wong with manic enthusiasm.
  • Armed with: Befitting her name, a pair of short but wide knife-like blades.
• Gideon Gordon Graves, aka G-Man. The Seventh Evil Ex and leader/founder of the League. A wealthy businessman who has his own record label and several nightclubs, Gideon is manipulative, arrogant and cunning. The comic book incarnation is more overtly evil & villainous, but here he’s portrayed more passive-aggressive, a kind of transparently phony kindness that’s both creepy and amusing. Played by Jason Schwartzmann.
  • Armed with: Two swords, one of which is concealed in the cane he carries with him. The other he seems to conjure basically out of thin air, with a glowing blue blade that makes it resemble a lightsaber.
• Also there’s some henchmen, who are pretty nondescript.

The Setup: After a fight with Scott, Ramona ditches him and goes off to be with Gideon, who rubs it in by signing Sex Bob-omb to his label (Scott refuses to come along, and with no objection whatsoever from the rest of the band he’s instantly replaced). Our hero spends a while being lonely and rejected, but a follow-up call from Gideon– oozing obseqious insincerity– spurs Scott to go fight for the woman he’s in lesbians love with.

A series of improbably correct passwords gets him into Graves’ new nightclub (the Chaos Theater, a reference to the amazing game Earthbound), where he quickly finds his enemy, perched at the top of a stage, captive princess and all, like, well… a boss.

“YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME”

Sex Bob-omb is playing, feeling conflicted at Scott’s presence but still reluctantly obeying their new boss. Pilgrim tells off the villain and goes to charge the stage, but gets repeatedly stopped by Gideon, who pretends to act confused at Scott’s hostility. When Scott explains he’s in love with Ramona and fighting for her, he gains the Power of Love sword, which emerges from his chest and increases his level.

Of course it’s never that easy, as Graves demonstrates when he snaps his fingers and summons several henchmen. At G-Man’s request, Sex Bob-omb plays some accompanying music.

The Fight: Pilgrims and the henchmen waste little time throwing down, but he makes short work of them– really, Lucas Lee’s stunt men were more of a headache. Though that’s to be expected, because Scott is not only armed with an amazing weapon, but he’s also got some serious narrative momentum on his side.

The sequence, though light, is shot with Wright’s usual dazzling style, switching effortlessly between multiple camera angles (including one excellent, extended tracking shot) as Scott cuts them down one by one, leaving a man-shaped pile of coins each time.

With no one standing in the way, Scott & Gideon leap at each other to exchange mid-air sword blows a la Ninja Gaiden, but surprisingly (or not so surprisingly if you played Ninja Gaiden) it’s villain who gets the best of it, his cane sword smashing the Power of Love into pieces. Before the villain can finish Pilgrim off, he’s interrupted by Knives Chau’s arrival. Descending from the ceiling, Knives kicks the sword from Gideon’s hand, but immediately turns her rage against… Ramona.

“You broke the heart that broke mine!” she actually says, somehow without making you hate her

Knives starts dueling with Ramona, to Ramona’s confusion and Gideon’s amusement. Meanwhile, Graves gets back to the business of attacking Scott, this time more physically since both of them are unarmed. The villain is pretty good hand-to-hand but not great, the two of them seeming more or less even. The ladies’ brawl is a bit more frantic, with Ramona gruntingly denying Knives’ accusations in-between avoiding her attacks.

Filming simultaneous fights is always tricky but Wright handles it well, alternating between showing the battles unfolding both separately and concurrently.

On the lower level, Scott is eventually able to get the upper hand, or perhaps foot– he wraps his legs around Gideon’s neck and scissor-flips him down the stairs. Then he goes to sort out the cat fight up above, and in doing so has to face the painful truth that what he did to both these women was actually pretty crappy. Even as he retreats back into his old persona and tries to duck responsibility, Scott is suddenly stabbed from behind by Graves.

No visual symbolism there.

It looks like Game Over, with Scott seeming to drift into the afterlife as he says goodbye to Ramona (and also learns that Gideon was controlling her via computer chip in her neck) in a limbo-esque subspace desert.

But then we’re reminded: Scott has an extra life, having collected the strange icon after his battle with Exes 5&6. In the book, the 1UP was employed in a more arcade-traditional way: Scott simply got back up to fight some more. But here, Wright employs it more ingeniously, like starting the whole level from scratch or picking up from the last save point. In a rapid montage, we see Scott run off to the Chaos Theater, only this time he accesses the club more smoothly, makes amends with his band, and wastes less time on Gideon’s small talk.

Most importantly, rather than declaring he’s fighting “for love,” Scott answers that he’s fighting for himself– for his own dignity rather than any tangible reward. This is apparently worth way more experience points than before, because it gives him the Power of Self-Respect sword, and a Level-Up that’s even stronger than the first time through.

See? Check the stats.

Scott makes even shorter work of the henchmen this time, a veritable purple blur. He faces down Graves again and this time it’s Scott who wins the Ninja Gaiden-off, breaking through the villain’s sword and cutting him on the arm.

Graves collapses for a while, giving Scott time to call out Knives and try to dissuade her from attacking Ramona. She drops down in a frenzy anyway, but Scott cuts her rampage off early by coming clean and apologizing, to her and Ramona both. Through some unexplained means, this shuts down Ramona’s control-chip.

But Scott and the Evilest Ex still have unfinished business and, in true genre fashion, the previous incarnation wasn’t even his final form.

Silly Canucks don’t even know how to spell

In his upgrades form, Gideon fights with a kind of lazy but graceful power, often holding his sword in just one hand with the other poised oh-so-aristocratically behind his back. He is able to work a good number on Scott at first, but things look up when Knives decides to enter the fray (looks like a simple “I’m sorry” can do wonders for a girl). Their first assault against him is enough to make him swallow his gum, which he reacts to with disproportionate outrage.

The next stage of the fight is more overtly video-gamey than ever, with characters flashing red as they take “damage” and even flickering a bit.

The Pilgrim/Chau team does quite well at first but soon Graves is able to knock Knives off the platform, and soon after he hits Scott’s sword hard enough to break it, too. With the hero stunned, Ramona walks over to Gideon, who still thinks she’s under his sway. She surprises him with a knee to the groin (attack his weak point for massive damage!), which earns her a block that sends her down the stairs. Fortunately that’s just long enough for Knives to recover and disarm the villain.

The attack on Ramona gets Scott incensed as well, and Graves is looking at a tough combo.

It goes higher than two, trust me

Without his glowing sword Gideon is no match for the team, and they pepper him with a furious onslaught of blows in a brief, exciting and stylized montage. Knives delivers a devastating attack at the end that whittles his (visible) life bar down to the very last, leaving him to utter a final bitter monologue while he flickers on the edge of death.

Scott has little patience for it, and delivers the final blow himself.

Easily the best fight in the film. Not much in terms of laughs, relatively speaking, but it makes up for it with some sneakily-affecting character work. The gimmick of Scott’s extra life extends the fight in a way that feels both natural and not tiresomely repetitive. Though the staging is all combined to one very tight location, the fluctuating number of fighters and varying weapons still makes it quite dynamic indeed. Indeed, this is Scott Pilgrim’s finest hour.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: YOU ARE NEXT!

They have an Army, but we have a…

Um. Not quite.

2008′s The Incredible Hulk is underrated. It’s not great by any means, being underwhelming in certain aspects and lacking in others. But its heart is in the right place, and more importantly, it helped continue the groundwork its same-summer companion Iron Man had just recently begun. Again, this sort of thing is taken for granted in Marvel movies now, but all throughout the film you can feel a solid sense of respect & affection for the source material, an understanding that these people get the property, and want to have fun with it.

Certainly it can be credited with swerving the franchise sharply away from the dour, pretentious Ang Lee version. The director of the reboot, Louis Laterrier, is generally known as a genre schlockmeister, but in addition to all the competent action Laterrier actually pulls off some very striking shots and a few other nice tricks.

Unfortunately, while the movie fulfills its action quota, only two of its action beats could be reasonably qualified as “fights.” The first real Hulk-out, in a bottling plant after a tense chase through Brazilian favelas, is excellent but over too quickly and takes place mostly in the shadows; in one of the film’s smarter moves, it’s seen mostly from the perspectives of Hulk’s tormentors, and plays out more like a horror sequence.

But there’s still plenty of fun left to be had.

2) Hulk vs The Army

The Fighters:

• The Incredible Hulk, aka Bruce Banner. In case you haven’t heard, Banner is a mild-mannered scientist who, thanks to a lab accident involving gamma radiation, turns into a nigh-unstoppable rage beast whenever he becomes too angry or afraid. (This movie seems to tie the transformations directly to his heart rate reaching a certain threshold, a rather bland interpretation.) The Hulk is enormous, incredibly strong, durable, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. He’s also typically seen as “dumb” in contrast to the brilliant Banner, but this varies with each adaptation and even more so throughout the comic’s history; some Hulks are child-like idiots, some have a normal intellect, and some have just flat-out been Bruce Banner in a big green body. More recent work has even claimed that all incarnations of the Hulk retain Banner’s genius on some level, allowing the creature to intuitively calculate his seemingly random destruction so as not to harm innocent bystanders. Also important: not only does rage trigger the Hulk’s transformation, increased anger will amplify his power. “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets.” Played by Edward Norton, who acquits himself well as a brooding & thoughtful man of action, and also apparently did extensive but uncredited re-writes of the script.
• A small element of the United States Army, maybe a few dozen. They’re mostly equipped with small arms, but have several Humvees, a few of which are mounted with .50 caliber machine guns, and two more have some other interesting tech. Additionally, there’s a helicopter gunship nearby. (They’re also all wearing the woodland-camouflage Battle Dress Uniform, which the Army had fully phased out before 2008, the year this was released– let alone by 2011, the year this apparently takes place. Oops.) The troops are led by Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, a general deeply involved with the DoD’s gamma radiation/”special weapons” department, who has been obsessively hunting the Hulk for years and is also the father of Banner’s ex-girlfriend, Betty (awwwwwwkward). Played by William Hurt.
• Emil Blonsky, Ross’ point man in this endeavor. A British Royal Marine “on loan” to Ross for the Hulk chase, Blonsky is a cold-blooded special forces veteran. As the lone non-casualty of the bottling plant encounter, Blonsky has a bone to pick with Hulk, and Ross has worked to enable this rematch by pumping Blonsky full of an unthawed attempt at a re-creation of the super-soldier serum– the same one that made Captain America. Played by GFS hall-of-famer Tim Roth.

“Huge invincible super-monster? Pfft, we got this.”

The Setup: Ross, as usual, is chasing Bruce Banner. This time around he’s pinpointed the fugitive’s location to the sprawling university campus where Betty works, after he’d re-surfaced there seeking assistance. Uncle Sam wants Banner alive, so they can figure out from his body how to re-create the Hulk, so as before they’re going after the guy with non-lethal means. After the hero bolts, Betty tracks down her father and implores him to stop. She is less than successful, and gets detained on the sidelines.

Though Banner’s inside, Blonsky and the majority of the troops remain out front, knowing that’s where they’ll need to be if they can’t subdue him before a transformation. In a neat practical effect, Blonsky is shown very easily out-running the rest of the infantry behind him– a cool way to introduce the effects his “treatments” are having.

Banner leads them on a merry chase across the campus, stopping at one point to swallow a thumb drive containing important data. Gross, but a necessary move for a guy whose pockets are about to get jacked up. Eventually, Banner finds himself trapped in a nifty glass walkway separating two buildings. Soldiers lock the doors on either side, and on Ross’ orders they fire knockout gas into his confined space. He starts to succumb, but when he looks outside and sees Betty distressed, his eyes turn green….

And then this happens.

The Fight: At Ross’ order, all the soldiers start to unload on him, mostly with M16s. It’s little more than an annoyance to Hulk’s thick skin, and deters him not at all as he charges forward. A few Hummers with mounted .50 cals show up and begin firing, but even good old Ma Deuce can only cause Hulk moderate pain. Before they can even try to do worse, Hulk knocks over the nearest Humvee to him, then picks up another and smashes it repeatedly into a nearby sculpture, then the ground. Not one to let a nice piece of wreckage go to waste, the beast rips out part of the vehicle’s engine block and hurls at at a third Humvee, hard enough to knock that one into another Humvee. They both explode, which is always welcome.

This leaves Blonsky to take on the Hulk directly. Armed with a grenade launcher, he starts closing in on the Hulk, firing at intervals the whole way. The first couple rounds catch Hulk before he can react and do knock him back a bit, but soon he’s able to display some battlefield improvisation, and seizes two huge chunks of the metal lawn sculpture and uses them as shields.

Isn’t the guy with the super soldier serum supposed to be using a shield?

After he gets in close enough, Blonksy drops the weapon, though it’s not clear if it’s because he ran out of ammo or if he lost his grip when he has to leap forward to avoid Hulk’s first counter-swing. Either way, Emil is reduced to just using his sidearm from here, which obviously doesn’t faze the big green guy at all. But his acrobatic dodging is quite incredibly, leaping and flipping all around Hulk’s would-be swings.

Ross, impressed, orders Blonsky to draw the target into the next phase of the plan: the sonic cannons.

Sonic BOOM

These new weapons (apparently made by Stark Industries, of course) are non-lethal devices which fire visible waves of “sound” into the air and somehow incapacitate the target. It’s not clear if they do so merely by causing overwhelming pain to the target’s hearing/inner ear, or if they have their own concussive force, as is implied when Blonksy gets grazed by one just as he’s jumping out the way, which sends him tumbling too. But either way, you have to love these things: they’re SUCH a deliciously comic book-y contrivance, symbolic of how much fun this movie’s willing to have.

The cannons, once they’re both trained on Hulk, actually fix him pretty well at first, bringing him to the ground in pain. But once again, Hulk draws his strength at the sight of Betty’s visible distress over him, and forces himself back to his feet. Mitigating the sonic waves somewhat by first putting the metal shields in their path, and then he throws one right down the middle of the vehicle it’s mounted on, blowing it up. With the damage output reduced by half, Hulk is free enough to leap right onto the other cannon, destroying it personally.

Nearly out of options, Ross calls in the nearby gunship. Overly confident and disregarding orders to stand down, Blonsky takes a few more rifle shots at Hulk. When he’s out of ammo, he confronts Hulk face-to-face, daring him to continue their wildly disproportionate duel. “Is that all you got?” he taunts.

This seems… unwise.

Disgusted, Hulk casually but swiftly boots Blonsky right in the chest, propelling into a tree about a hundred feet ahead. It looks like it hurts.

Betty tries to get close to the Hulk to make him calm down, which her dad somehow fails to notice before the gunship closes in. He tells them to not fire but it’s too late, leaving Hulk to use his body to protect her from the hail of powerful ammunition. The entire patch of grass they’re standing on is reduced to a smoking pit by the strafing helicopter, but Hulk survived it. Cradling an unconscious Betty, he leaps away to safety. Mark this one as another loss in the government’s War on Hulk.

This is good, if not great, stuff for the superhero genre. It’s a tight and confined to one location, but still fairly epic in its small-scale way; the 2003 Hulk disaster had another, bigger confrontation with the military which eventually wore out its welcome. Hulk goes up against not just conventional Army might but also some wonky sci-fi weaponry and a deranged, British version of Captain America (not to be confused with the other British version of Captain America), which adds to the fun. And throughout there’s nice beats like the Hulk’s improvised shields, proving the creature’s tactical intelligence.

We even some nice character moments: right after the Hulk transforms, Ross mutters to himself, “now she’ll see,” thinking that Betty will lose her affection for Bruce now that she personally witnesses how much of a monster the Hulk is. But ultimately it’s the Hulk who bravely rescues Betty from Ross’ own monstrous bad decisions.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Something abominable.

Ladies.

“Finally! What the hell took you so long?”

I can tell the wait has distressed you.

Enter The Dragon! One of the most famous, beloved, iconic kung fu flicks of all time. Starring Bruce Lee, the man who, via a combination of superb skill, airy philosophizing, fiery charisma and a tragically early death, did more than any one man to bring chop-socky action to the wider world.

Is it a great movie? Good grief, no. It’s strange and choppy and at many times laughable. But is it a great action movie? Well… not entirely. It’s unevenly paced and there’s little suspense, given that the majority of the fights are so uneven. Indeed, this is the failing of most Lee movies: typically, his character’s arc goes from most fights where he is in no danger whatsoever, to the final fight(s), where he is in moderate danger. This is a type of action that’s meant to be enjoyed less for the suspense or excitement, and more as simply a showcase for the godlike physicality (and absolutely magnetic personality) of its lead. The Raid, this is not.

Again, this flick is just packed with fights, many of them small or inconsequential, so we’ll look at it as a retrospective and give each battle a light touch.

1) Lee vs Fat Guy

Still way less homoerotic than Top Gun.

Enter The Dragon certainly wastes no time getting down to business. Before the title appears and barely after the production company logos have faded, the audience is taken to an open-air duel between two men. Surrounded by Shaolin monks, the pair are for some reason dressed in nothing but speedos, shoes, knee-high socks and light boxing gloves.

The camera immediately and purposefully zooms in on Bruce Lee’s character (simply known as “Lee,” because why not), capturing his focused intensity. Of course even amongst perceived equals Bruce’s physique and persona would stand out, but here he’s faced off against a very unimpressive opponent. Visibly overweight, unimposing and never seeming particularly skilled, Lee’s unnamed foe is laughably doomed from the start. (Apparently this hapless opponent is a very young Sammo Hung, a contemporary/close friend of Jackie Chan and someone who would go on to become a Hong Kong legend both on and off the screen. All of which makes his non-entity appearance here more puzzling.)

As could be easily predicted, Lee wipes the floor with Sammo, taking him down multiple times with quick, powerful blows and skillfully evading all his counter-strikes. Hung performs a nice backflip evasion at one point (one of his career trademarks is how spry he is for such a large man), but he’s no match for the star. In the end, Lee defeats him by curling him up into a wrestling hold and making him tap out.

“Matte!”

Again, this is all too easy for Lee. It’s also fairly cheesy, full of the HK exaggerated sound effects that defined the genre at the time. Still, there’s a loose, unpredictable energy here that distinguishes the battle from the kind of action both sides of the ocean had been used to, and that’s all due to Lee and “Jeet Kune Do”– the actor’s self-created martial art/philosophy which mandated improvisation and adaptability, rather than other rigidly traditional Chinese disciplines and their limited move sets. (Many argue that Lee essentially created what is now modern mixed martial arts.) You can even see some of JKD’s more explicit influence, such as the wrestling-like move he finishes with, and a foot-punch he pulls off early in the match.

All in all, not a bad introduction.

2) and 3) Williams and Roper

Bunching these two together for brevity’s sake. They’re our secondary protagonists. Before they even got to the villain’s island, we already saw both of them in some quick defensive bits that are too simple to feature here, but very telling as to their characters: Roper beat up some loan sharks on a golf course because he’s a reckless gambler, while Williams knocked out a couple racist cops because he’s an awesome 70s black dude who doesn’t have time for Whitey’s bullshit.

As you can see, he doesn’t have time for this guy’s face, either.

Williams is played by the late Jim Kelly, a genuine karate champion who parlayed his role in this movie into a healthy stint as a blacksploitation star. Roper is played by John Saxon, apparently another black belt, who would later go on to be better known for his appearances in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

Both are apparently world-class martial artists, and have been invited to Han’s secluded island tournament. After a brief demo with spear-fighting, the first match is of Williams against an unnamed western fighter. Williams blocks all the man’s blows with ease, and puts him down twice, the second time for good. Afterwards, he gets some money from Roper, the two friends having an agreement to bet on each other with other viewers and then split the winnings.

The next match, in fact, is more dragged-out gambling joke than an actual fight. The “chump” these two pals are stringing along is a goofy-looking, middle-aged Asian man who inexplicably has a Hitler mustache. In addition to being a big gambler he’s also the most oblivious person alive because he fails to miss the painfully obvious collaboration Roper & Williams are doing right in front of his freaking face.

“Hey Williams, don’t forget to tell me when I can op-stay owing-thray the ight-fay.”

Basically, the plan is that Roper takes enough punishment to the point where their sucker agrees to tilt the odds/payout ratio heavily against Roper. I don’t really gamble so I don’t know, but this doesn’t strike me as standard betting procedure or even common sense– can you really change the odds in the middle of the contest, and if someone was offering to do that for you when it looks like they’ll lose, wouldn’t you suspect something? Anyway, Asian Hitler doesn’t, and after Roper gets battered enough, he finally goes along with Roper’s hoped-upon 8/3 odds. At a completely un-subtle hand gesture from Williams, Roper gets up and knocks his erstwhile tormentor out with one punch.

Which reminds me: I might have missed something but the rules of this tournament don’t seem really clear. You would think they have a “best of X falls” system, because when any fighter goes down, they both stop fighting and then line up against each other to start the next round. But so far the fights only end when one party is unconscious. Meanwhile, Roper hits the dirt a total of three times before he wins, so if there’s any TKO, it’s some time after three falls. Say what you will about Bloodsport, at least it established some firm rules.

Anyway, of these back-to-back sequences giving us a fuller introduction to our secondary heroes, Williams undoubtedly comes out better. Saxon is indeed enjoyable and his character has a certain lazy charm, but he pales (ahem) in comparison to Kelly’s size, power, and cool-guy attitude. Williams also gets the only thing resembling a real fight, whereas Roper’s is more of a comedy routine (which, arguably, pulls the “rake joke” trick of going so far past tiresome it actually comes back around to amusing).

4) Bolo vs Unlucky Guards

Uh oh. This guy look familiar?

He’s hard to forget.

Yep, our old pal Bolo Yeung had an early role in Enter The Dragon. Like Bruce, his character has one name but it’s actually not the same as his real name. Yeung was born Yang Sze and is credited that way in this movie; in a strange case of life imitating art, enough people started giving him the nickname “Bolo” because it’s the name of his character in this movie, and eventually it stuck.

Whatever his name is, young Bolo (see what I did there) is just as enormous and creepy as he would later be in Bloodsport, though so smooth-skinned and young-looking he seems almost boyish, like an embryonic Chong Li. But there’s nothing boyish about his hulking physique and the occasionally manic grimaces we’ve come to expect from before, though his rictus grins are more like a rough draft of what we’d eventually see in the Van Damme film.

Anyway, Bolo is introduced in this scene to dispense some very public punishment to four hapless guards who failed to stop an unidentified post-curfew prowler the previous evening (the culprit was Lee, skulking about doing recon, who knocked out or evaded all guards before they could identify him). Han shows he means business by having Bolo basically execute these chumps in front of the tournament crowd.

And an execution is definitely what it is. One at a time, Bolo calmly approaches and dismantles the terrified, smaller men. They try to fight back but their blows are either quickly blocked or calmly absorbed by the quiet killing machine. Bolo tosses one man casually over his head as if he were a rag doll (showing off that crazy strength) and then steps on his face, apparently fatally. After knocking the second opponent face-down to the ground, Bolo pulls back hard on his head from behind until his neck snaps from the pressure. Conspicuously, the third doesn’t seem to receive any killing blow, just a very painful-looking knee to the nuts.

But the final victim gets it worst of all: after being knocked around by the giant villain, he’s cradled in Bolo’s mighty arms almost like a child, and Bolo pushes him together until his spine breaks– he literally folds the man in half. Holy shit.

Is… is this even possible? Holy shit.

Not very exciting, of course; just a nice bit of focused cruelty. Even young, rookie Bolo Yeung is plenty entertaining, even if his move set isn’t much more complicated than what we saw in the rather simplistic Bloodsport fights. But this is all a lot less stiff.

5) Lee vs O’Hara

Finally, Lee shows up to work his mojo. (It only took, what? A little over an hour?) His designated opponent is one of Han’s top men, O’Hara, played by martial artist and veteran actor/stunt coordinator Robert Wall. The fight is a personal one for Lee, since it was O’Hara’s pursuit of Lee’s sister (who had been investigating Han) which ended with her killing herself to avoid capture. He got that ugly scar in the same encounter.

Lee simply gives one of his trademark smoldering glares, but his opponent opts for a more ostentatious approach, smashing a wooden board he’d brought along just for show. Lee is not impressed, uttering his famous “boards don’t fight back,” maxim. They line up, wrist to wrist, for the opening blow, and Lee scores it immediately, his fist striking out with blinding speed and intensity to hit O’Hara in the face and send him to his knees. Then he does the exact same thing again. The third time, his foe is able to block a bit, but Lee still gets him on the follow-up. (Again, any kind of “points” system in these matches and what indicates when they will take breaks from the fight to line up again is quite opaque.)

Eventually, O’Hara gets unhinged and desperate. He tries to grab Lee’s foot from the ground, which only earns him a backflipping kick in the face. When he tries to charge in with a powerful jumping kick, Lee simply ducks underneath him and puts his foot right where O’Hara’s nuts will land.

owowowowowowowowowow….

Rather improbably for a man whose genitals just had an unfortunate encounter with Bruce Lee and gravity, O’Hara can still continues to fight, though he only gets sloppier. Lee, however, only gets more worked up: at the beginning of the fight, he only moved to attack, but soon enough he’s bouncing around energetically, bobbing & weaving in the combat space.

Lee repeatedly puts O’Hara down with strong, single strikes, to the point where the audience even stops applauding since it’s not even a contest anymore. Lee puts O’Hara down harder with a strong kick to the chest he executes from very close, sending him into the audience.

Ooooooh that’s a lot of straightening for his leg to do.

It certainly seems like a finishing move– it’s even in slow motion and everything– but O’Hara can’t seem to get enough. Over Han’s objections, he breaks two random glass bottles nearby him and tries to take Lee out, barfight style. Lee doesn’t exactly say “wow, seriously?” but it’s implied. He easily disarms O’Hara and knocks him on his back. He ensures it’s the last time when he leaps onto the man’s (not shown on camera) body with a look of deranged intensity.

Some sort of doctor confirms it afterward: he’s dead, Jim.

This is an improvement from a lot of what we’ve seen before, but still not too great. For all his stature and build-up as the villain’s right-hand man, O’Hara is reduced to a stumbling ox for Lee’s swift, flawless strikes– basically a walking punching bag. Bruce is, as ever, fantastic and graceful in his almost-too-quick-to-see attacks, but this barely seems like a workout for him.

6) Williams vs Han

Having been shamed by O’Hara’s disgraceful behavior, Han cancels the rest of the day’s matches, and calls Williams in to his office for a private meeting. Han, played by longtime Hong Kong star Shih Kien (and whose voice was dubbed by Keye Luke), is a major criminal mastermind and drug trafficker. He holds these tournaments every three years as a covert way to find new talent and connections for his organization. He’s pretty much a straight-up supervillain, “right out of a comic book,” as Williams himself says in this scene. Dude even has a white pet cat he carries around sometimes.

He tries to get Williams to play ball by asking him who he saw snooping around last night, but Williams doesn’t have time for that jive crap. The confrontation turns ugly and Han calls in several guards, who the hero of course defeats easily.

Once Williams has awesomely dispatched those punks, Han springs into action personally. The American is immediately caught off-guard when his opening strike gets blocked by what turns out to be a heavy iron prosthetic replacing his left hand. Besides that, Han turns out to be a surprisingly agile and canny fighter in his own right, dodging most of Williams’ attacks and making excellent use of his handy (heh) advantage.

There’s some nice camera work here, such as alternating POV shots as the two trade blows, and a brief view of both characters’ silhouettes as they battle behind a paper screen. And a fun bit of background detail: after a stray blow from Han’s hand breaks open a bird cage, the occupants of which fly around the room and at one point into Williams’ face.

The fight spills through the wall into some kind of disco-themed opium den, where several slave girls baked out of their minds laugh uproariously at everything they see.

“Talk to the hand!”

An ignoble place to die, and too bad because the fight’s pretty much over for Williams at that point. Increasingly tired and beat up, he admirably continues to rise and gamely fight back, but Han is able to take him down for good with repeated iron blows to his back. Brutal.

This marks the unfortunately too early departure of Williams from the film, leaving us with the less interesting Roper as the sole secondary protagonist (and we all know why). But at least he goes down fighting, and in a scene which proves that the movie isn’t afraid to kill the guy you like halfway through. Not a bad fight, either, especially in the beginning. So long, Jim.

7) Lee vs Everybody

This is the big one, the centerpiece. The legendary sequence. It was even the centerpiece of this movie’s parody in Kentucky Fried Movie.

But here’s the thing: it’s… not very good. It’s not even the best fight in this movie.

“Dude, what are you talking about?” I inevitably hear when I say this. “It’s awesome! That’s the scene where Bruce Lee fights like 50 guys!” Well, that’s true in only the most technical sense. It’s more accurate to say it’s the scene where about 50 guys run right into Bruce Lee’s fists & legs one or two at a time, and stay down after they’re hit once. Less exciting, but more accurate.

Although one of those 50 guys is Jackie Chan. This one, I believe.

Not once does Lee ever seem like he’s in danger here, not just because the individual guards he attacks (setup: after he Metal Gear Solids his way into Han’s underground lair to find evidence and send a message to his MI6 handlers, someone sets off an alarm and Lee has to fight his way out) pose no threat to him whatsoever, but also because there’s barely any sense of scale to the conflict. Only once toward the very end is there an angle showing a large crowd of thugs at one time; otherwise, both because of poor camera-blocking and because Lee encounters the bad guys in waves, you really have no idea how many foes he’s facing at one time. On several occasions, the camera keeps so tightly on Lee you don’t know there’s anyone else in the room at all until one of the hero’s limbs lances out and strikes someone.

The poor execution mutes the concept of what it should be… and again, Bruce Lee is so perfectly invincible in the world of this movie it probably wouldn’t have been thrilling even if it had been shot better. Look at more recent scenes like the dojo encounter in Jet Li’s Kiss of the Dragon or the famous hammer hallway rumble in Oldboy if you want to see this sort of scenario done right.

As ever, the entertainment value is just in watching Lee’s dazzling speed and power. He strikes with sudden wild ferocity of a coiled snake (incidentally, Lee did use a poisonous cobra as an improvised stealth tool just prior to this scene), taking down each thug with ease. Eventually they start coming in with weapons, but he simply disarms them and uses them himself.

“Great, we just made him MORE dangerous!”

First a bo staff, then two smaller sticks, and finally Lee’s signature nunchaku. Curiously, he spends more time twirling those around to scare a bad guy than he does actually using them to take down opponents. Considering his remarks about O’Hara’s board-related antics, Bruce is oddly hypocritical when it comes to showing off.

The only other bit of interesting incident is when the fight wanders down to where Han’s prisoners/experimental subjects are being held behind bars. They provide Lee with some help by seizing guards who get too close to their cells, but it’s not like he needed it.

The fight ends when Lee is trapped between several slamming steel doors. Lee sits down resignedly to await his fate.

“I just took down like 50 guys and I get defeated by a DOOR?! fml”

You always have to wonder about what guys through the minds of henchmen in movies like this: “Hmm, I just saw this unbeatable superman mow through 30 of my colleagues, should I rush in at him too? Sure! One of us HAS to get lucky and it might as well be me!”

8) Roper vs Bolo

After Han captures Lee, he brings him to the tournament grounds, and demands that Roper– who he’d been courting as an employee– execute him. After some hesitation, the cocky American decides there are limits to his sleaziness, and he refuses. Incensed, Han has Bolo fight Roper, instead.

As the hulking fighter approaches, Lee moves as if to help, but Roper gestures him away, preferring to handle this himself. Pretty gutsy, if not suicidally so.

“You sure about this? I mean, you can see it’s Bolo Yeung, right?”

Their fight is the most entertaining one so far. They have a very solid back & forth, especially at the beginning. But soon Bolo’s strength advantage puts Roper on the ground, and Bolo pins him in an arm lock. Roper resists but he’s held quite tightly, and it looks like only a matter of time before his arm breaks. However, the plucky gambler takes the unusual step of biting Bolo’s leg, which lies conveniently near his mouth. Considering how much pain it puts Bolo in, and how he’s limping a bit after he finally lets go, Roper might actually have chewed some flesh right off.

but an hour later he was hungry again BECAUSE BOLO IS CHINESE GET IT HA HA

When they both get back up, Roper presses his advantage, but Bolo still comes back strong, at one point throwing him down with an overhead press. Eventually, Roper is able to wear him down with repeated, rapid strikes to the face, and finishes him with a deadly combo ending with a kick to the nuts. Down goes Bolo. Freddy Krueger will avenge him.

This one’s a lot more fun. It’s fairly quick but neither is it too drawn out, and is relatively varied in terms of content. Saxon acquits himself well and all kidding aside, between his performance and the choreography you can actually buy him being able to defeat this massive warrior. Indeed, for most of the fight it seems like either of them really could win at any second– a crucial ingredient in crafting a suspenseful battle.

“Okay, but this is just one of my early roles. Surely I won’t continue to be known as the quiet villain who loses to inferior white guys, right?”

Bolo’s boss, obviously, is furious about the outcome, so this segues directly into….

9) Free For All

Han starts barking out orders and having several students attack Lee and Roper at once. This goes about as well as you’d expect, but Han just keep sending in new ones. Hilariously, he keeps picking out random students by name, when it would be quicker and more likely to succeed if he simply said, “Everyone, attack those two!”

Since the heroes are effortlessly mowing down these goons left & right, this is conceptually similar to the underwhelming sequence of Lee in the dungeons, but it actually works a lot better. The camera pulls back enough so that we get a real sense of the number of enemies the heroes are facing, the takedowns are a bit more complex than just one or two blows, and the whole thing is faster, looser, more fun.

Unfortunately Lee & Roper merely fight as discrete units rather than actively cooperating, though they get the job done just the same. The sheer amount of foes might have overwhelmed the pair eventually, but we’ll never know because early into the encounter, a British mole within Han’s organization springs all the prisoners and sends them to even the odds. Now it’s total chaos.

A MAAAAAAADHOUSE

The film takes a little bit of time, but not too much, to savor in this free-form carnage. We see Lee & Roper continue to stomp away, but director Robert Clouse also takes the time to highlight a few other moments of combat amongst faceless fighters of either side. It’s pretty darn cool.

Eventually, Han decides it’s time to join in on the action, and he gets his bear claw. Not the pastry, an actual bear claw. His iron hand is detachable and can be replaced with several other alternates, one of which is a bear claw with fur and everything. He and Lee eye each other amid the chaos.

Bruce Lee making this face at you is a more surefire guarantee of your death than seeing the Grim Reaper with a rocket launcher.

10) Lee vs Han

Wasting little time, the two have a great battle outside for a little while, with Han’s uncanny agility actually giving Lee some trouble at first. After the villain takes a fall and loses his bear claw when a missed swing embeds it in a wooden board, Han hightails it out of there while Lee is briefly distracted by a random goon.

He flees back up to his office, where Lee quickly catches up to him just as he’s attaching an even more deadly claw: an all-metal one with four knife blades. Lee is unfazed by the Wolverine-wannabe and coldly informs him “You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple.” SICK BURN. The melee continues outside unabated but no one else has followed them to this odd little office/trophy room. Now it’s just Lee against Han, solo.

Lee mostly sticks to long-range attacks here and doesn’t follow up most of his successful strikes, in order to stay away from the claw. Still, Han gets in a few slashes on his face and torso, though they’re mostly just on the surface and Lee is clearly the superior. He’s able to pull off this classy move where he doubles Han over, puts him in a headlock, and delivers a scorpion kick to his head. It’s almost as painful as it is insulting.

He also gives Han a close-up view of his butt. Rude.

Even crazier, Lee executes this wild double-trip thing where he slides his whole body in to attack one of Han’s legs, then, while Han is off-balance, Lee pivots his whole body and kicks Han’s other leg from the other side. It’s completely bonkers and I love it.

Knowing he’s losing, a dazed Han seizes a spear from a nearby statue, but it’s of little use and only ends up embedded in a nearby wall. Said wall turns out to be a revolving door– a hidden entrance to Lee’s private hall of mirrors where their showdown finally ends.

This is the other iconic part of the movie and it’s just so weird. Why does Han even have this place– did he have it built for just such an occasion? If so, that’s amazing. Also, I don’t think I’ve even been to a normal, non-supervillainous, funhouse hall of mirrors– are they as disorienting as the movie makes them seem?

Yeah, that’s definitely a stuntman as Han and not Shih Kien.

It certainly is plenty disorienting to Lee, almost cartoonishly so. He advances cautiously everywhere he goes, not knowing which Han he’s seeing is real and which is the reflection. The hero’s confusion defies believability at a few points, because he does manage to stumble into the villain a few times and nail him, but then somehow can’t find him again a mere second later. Is Han disappearing into the mirrors somehow, like by magic or something? It almost seems that way.

Also triggering your “come ON!” alarm is the point where Han is able to sneak right up behind Lee and rather than deliver a killing stroke– he really does have him dead to rights– instead opts for a light slash on the back of his shoulder. Maybe next time aim for an artery, dumbass.

As with the big underground brawl, this is a great concept but somewhat underwhelming in execution, not to mention repetitive and overlong. There are only so many times you can watch a dozen refracted images of Lee sidling forward an inch at a time while a dozen refracted Hans sneak up behind him.

The whole thing comes to an end when Lee remembers his master’s advice about an enemy using “illusions” to win battle (a piece of wisdom that seems suspiciously apt for the bizarre uniqueness of this encounter), and he smashes every mirror he can reach. This allows Lee to easily find the Freddy-wannabe and kick him hard enough to impale him on the spear he’d left sticking through the wall.

Schwarzenegger would have found a great way to make a “seven years’ bad luck” pun here.

Bye bye, Han.

In the end, though Enter The Dragon is highly flawed and disappointing, it’s hard to hold that against it. Since the film was such a breakthrough in so many ways (not the least of which was it being the first Hollywood production of an authentically Chinese martial arts film, a clash which accounts for much of its awkward sensibility), it pioneered a lot of what was to come. Earlier I compared the dungeon fight unfavorably to similar battles in more recent films, but without the success of Enter The Dragon and Bruce Lee’s legacy, it’s doubtful the scale of action would be where it is today. It’s the perfect example of a movie that needs to be seen primarily within the context of its time, and, in what’s recurring lesson here at this site, proof that movies are more than the sum of their parts.

There were no grades given for the ten fights in the movie; it seemed unnecessary. But the top three worth truly singling out are, in order: the final Lee/Han duel, Roper vs Bolo, and the wild brawl which happens between the two. Strangely those happen to be the last three fights to happen– a rare treat for such a succession of excellent bits to happen one after the other. Wataa!

Coming Attractions: It’s time to go back.

Redheads. Am I right, fellas?

Yes, unfortunately.

3) Black Widow Cuts Loose

The Fighters:

• Black Widow aka Natasha Romanoff. A former Russian spy & assassin who’s become one of SHIELD’s greatest assets. Supremely skilled at infiltration, interrogation and various forms of combat, Natasha is the ideal agent. The comics have all sorts of wild stuff about how she got her abilities but so far the movies have wisely avoided that. But one element is that she’s a former ballet dancer, which definitely shows up in her gracefulness here. The Widow has gone undercover in Tony’s organization as “Natalie Rushman” in order to… it’s not really clear. Monitor him for SHIELD and help out just in case any supervillains show up, I think? Anyway, it’s fortunate she’s around for this. Played with understated gusto by Scarlett Johansson.
  • Armed with: Like, half a James Bond movie’s worth of little toys and weapons, all secreted in her various belt and wrist pouches. A pity the Avengers movie eschewed most of these in favor of simple if effective guns.
• Security guards, about six or seven of them, working at the offices of Justin Hammer, Tony Stark’s corporate rival. Played by stunt men.
• Also present is Happy Hogan, Tony’s loyal bodyguard, but he’s sort of a humorous non-factor here. Played by director Jon Favreau, who’s so money, baby.

The Setup: Hammer has secretly been conspiring with Ivan Vanko, our friend from Fight #1, to utilize arc reactor technology to make his own set of weaponized Iron Man-style drones. When said drones, along with a manually overriden War Machine, run amok at the Stark Expo, Romanoff and Hogan drive off to the Hammer building to investigate. On the way over, Natasha changes in the backseat into her special ass-kicking outfit.

When they arrive, Happy insists on coming in to “help.” Tee hee.

The Fight: It is so cool, you guys.

The first guard accosts them and Hogan immediately engages him in a fistfight. Black Widow just keeps right on moving, and when a second guard approaches, she nonchalantly slides right past him and, still moving, turns around and tosses two little discs towards the guard which paralyze him with a slight electrical charge.

This pretty much sets the tone for the entire sequence. Johansson’s Romanoff is graceful, smoothly unpredictable, and frighteningly competent. She’s not always moving forward but she definitely never stops moving– she slides, jumps, runs, dodges, ducks, dips, dives, and all the rest with purposeful swagger. Every move and decision just flows seamlessly into the next. It’s glorious to watch.

The other little technological tricks Natasha employs are two small gas pellets she throws around the corner to stun another pair of guns so she can lay them out, and later she hooks one guard’s neck with an extendable cord (not a wire, those are for killing) to hold him in place while she takes down his buddy.

But occasion permitting she often goes the physical-0nly route, as well. She rides a push-cart and jumps off it to double-kick one guard in the chest. She slides (again!) in-between another foe’s legs and attacks them as she does so, then jumps off his double-over body to land on the shoulders of another.

The best is the penultimate takedown, when she tackles a guard and does this crazy thing where she spins all over his body while he’s still standing, raining blows on him the whole time. Then as she strides calmly away she uses his chemical spray to do a no-look neutralization of the last straggler just as he tries to sneak up on her.

This is all over in a minute or so, and the action keeps cutting back to the progress of Happy’s brawl with the very first guy. It takes some doing, but Hogan finally knocks him out with a strong uppercut, and jubilantly looks up with “I got him!” only to find this:

Between the red hair and this, are we sure she’s actually Russian and not Irish?

It’s a gag that works all the more effectively because the movie treats Happy’s artless tumble with just one guy with the same gravitas as it does a super ninja-spy methodically destroying half a platoon; whenever the camera cut back to Hogan, there weren’t any overtly comedic signifiers like a change in music or something. You get caught up in all of it equally and, like Happy, don’t realize how much she accomplished while he was toiling away. Very clever.

This scene does cheat a little. On close examination (ever the bane of the summer blockbuster), a good number of Widow’s attacks really should not have incapacitated her targets. There are times we merely see her punch someone’s leg, shoulder or what-have-you, and then boom, the guy’s down for the count. Doesn’t matter how hard she’s hitting, unless she’s packing knockout darts or doing some kind of crazy nerve strikes (neither of which is visually apparent or brought up in the dialogue at some point in the film), they simply shouldn’t be getting knocked out.

However, no amount of rewinding and freeze-framing can get around the fact that this is ridiculously fun. Again, it’s brief, but the scene just glides with the same effortless charm as the Widow herself does, possessed of a too-cool-for-school cockiness that’s just on the right side of the endearing/pandering balance. In a movie that’s about high-tech armored superheroes blasting and whipping each other, a quick sequence starring a 5’3 jumpsuited girl in a running around in a hallway comes perilously close to being the best fight of the bunch.

The scene’s not perfect but it’s breezily, joyfully confident, and just like all those sleazy pick-up artists book tell you: confidence goes a long way.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Take down Iron Man?? Ha, you and what Army?

… oh.

In which Iron Man teams up with his greatest ally.

Er, no.

4) Iron Man and War Machine vs Whiplash and Hammer drones

The Fighters:

• Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, our hero. Doing a lot better than before, since he’s not dying. Played by Robert Downey Jr.
  • Armed with: The Mark VI Iron Man armor. It’s powered by a new element Tony invented (building off his father’s unfinished work), and in addition to powering his suit better it also overcomes the issue of the old arc reactor slowly giving Tony palladium poisoning even as it kept shrapnel out of his heart. (Iron Man 3 would later skunk this entire plot development with the casual revelation in the epilogue that Tony could have just had surgery to remove the shrapnel in the first place. Which… huh?) Along with the triangular chest plate that Joss Whedon hated, the Mark VI boasts a few modifications, though it’s not clear which are new.
• War Machine, aka James “Rhodey” Rhodes. Stark’s reconciled pal and Air Force big shot. Played by Don “The Dragon” Cheadle.
  • Armed with: The same Mark II suit as before, but kitted out with tons of extra armaments courtesy of the DOD and Justin Hammer. Plus a new paint job, trading in the too-shiny silver for ominous grey.
• Hammer drones, a couple dozen of them. Built by Vanko for Justin Hammer. There’s some slight variation amongst them depending on what function (land, sea, air) they’re built for, but they’re largely the same: arc reactor-powered, remote-controlled robots based loosely off the Iron Man designs. Outfitted mostly with automatic and missile weapons, and able to fly. They also go down very easy, whether it’s to a repulsor blast, a strong punch from the Mark VI, or a barrage of regular bullets; it’s strange because these are supposed to basically be Iron Man replacements, so they ought to be more durable. Perhaps Vanko deliberately built them to be inferior, or maybe they’re just prototypes.
• Whiplash, aka Ivan Vanko. Stark’s new nemesis, who escaped prison and built up some new toys thanks to Hammer. Played by Mickey Rourke.
  • Armed with: A much more sophisticated version of his last getup. The improved Whiplash armor covers Vanko’s entire body much like the Iron Man suit. It’s also huge, though not quite the size of the Iron Monger. It contains a couple neat tricks like retractable plates in the feet which are good for locking down an opponent, but its main offensive capability is the two extra long energy whips housed in its forearms. There are cycling mechanisms visible in the back which make the whips extendable and constantly charged with electricity. It’s an intimidating design, but oddly lacking the iconic look of the previous incarnation, with all its fearless & bare-chested simplicity.

But, you know, this works too.

The Setup: Vanko has baited Tony into a trap at the Stark Expo in New York. After Iron Man arrives there and greets War Machine (who’d been demonstrating his new look on stage along with the drones), Vanko takes remote control of all the drones, as well as War Machine, and sends them all against Iron Man.

This launches an amazing chase sequence where Tony draws his pursuers away from the Expo and out into the streets & skies of Queens, evading fire and even managing to take out several of them. Eventually Iron Man is able to isolate himself and War Machine inside a large garden dome. Tony contains its attacks without hurting the helpless pilot inside until, in the aftermath of glorious Fight #3, Black Widow gets into Hammer’s computer systems and restores control of War Machine back to Rhodey.

The two’s reconciliation quickly devolves into macho one-upsmanship as they squabble over whose suit is the best; it’s highly amusing to watch such a silly argument play out with both characters wearing super high-tech armor. They spend so much time bitching that they don’t quite get into tactical position before the drones land and, one by one, surround the pair.

“We’re surrounded.”
“Good, that means we have them RIGHT where we want them!”

Without saying a word, the two close their face plates and go to work.

The Fight: At first, there’s actually no music– Favreau lets the endless cacophony of battle provide all the noise he needs. And what a cacophony it is: staccato bursts of automatic fire from the drones and War Machine, occasionally punctuated by repulsor blasts from Iron Man.

So much is happening at once you barely know where to look at any given time. The camera pans around smoothly to show the carnage as the two heroes unload at and dodge fire from the iron platoon surrounding them. Rhodey fires from both wrist gauntets and his shoulder cannon simultaneously, while Stark mixes in repulsor rays with punches for those that get too close.

After the initial shot just showcasing all-purpose chaos, Favreau goes on to highlight a couple moments of particular badassery. War Machine grabs a drone that had gotten close and delivers a point-blank spray of machine gun fire that cuts it in half down the middle. Iron Man reprises a hit move from the first movie when he leans back casually to dodge an incoming missile (in a subtle detail, we hear a beeping sound from his HUD to indicate the computer has detected a lock), then returns fire in the form of small missiles from a hidden compartment on his wrist, which take down three drones at once; it’s so neat Tony even happily calls it out, and his friend compliments it.

It’s about 45 seconds of perfectly exhilarating CGI chaos– intense, glorious, undiluted. And it doesn’t outstay its welcome, either: when Stark realizes that there’s just too many bad guys to deal with, he orders his friend to duck and then activates two extremely powerful laser beams, which cut down all remaining drones as he pivots in a circle.

Tony responds to Rhodey’s quite reasonable suggestion that he should lead with such an attack next time by pointing out that the beams are a one-time thing; they burn for a few seconds and then they’re done. Which is too bad, because what they initially think is just the last drone coming in is actually Vanko himself, big as life and twice as ugly.

After some talk, Rhodes launches what he assumes will be his secret weapon, the “Ex-Wife,” but it fails terribly, bouncing harmlessly off Whiplash’s armor and falling to the ground with a pathetic little fart noise. It doesn’t really make sense (would Vanko really know it wouldn’t work? Shouldn’t Rhodey have gotten farther away if HE thought it was going to work? etc) but it’s a fun excuse for just one more joke at Hammer’s expense.

Tony fires his own opening salvo– in another callback to the first film, it’s all those little smart dart-rockets he used against the terrorist hostage-takers in his Mark III debut) at Vanko’s exposed face, but his helmet comes back instantly and deflects them. Now it’s Ivan’s turn.

From then on, it’s really mostly Ivan’s fight. The new Whiplash armor provides a seemingly perfect mix of durability, speed, and offensive capability. War Machine’s more conventional weapons can’t put too much of a dent in Vanko before he’s able to evade or fight back, and Iron Man’s quick maneuvers are canceled out by the long reach of those unpredictable whips. In what turns out to be a fairly brief struggle, both heroes are repeatedly knocked around, seized by the whips and slammed to the ground. Poor Rhodey even gets his shoulder cannon cut right off.

Stark gives Vanko the best run for his money when he comes in hard with a flying punch as Vanko is distracted by beating up on Rhodes, but a few blows later Ivan comes back even harder with a headbutt. Soon, Whiplash lassos a hero in each whip, holding them on opposite sides of him. It seems pretty bad at first, but at Tony’s suggestion, the two re-visit the idea of “crossing the streams”– having their two repulsor blasts meet in mid-air and creating an enormous energy feedback, this time with Whiplash in the middle.

Whaddya know, it works.

The irony is, at that point the heroes didn’t necessarily have to resort to such a crazy tactic, because the very nature of Ivan’s double-hold meant that he left himself wide open to any attack. They were free to shoot at him in more direct ways as well.

After the smoke clears, a dying Vanko reprises his words from the race track, telling Stark “you lose.” Pulling a Metroid, Vanko starts the timer on bombs built into his suit as well as those of all the fallen drones, hoping for a Pyrrhic victory. Unfortunately for the villain, it would have been, in the words of comedian Doug Benson, more accurate for him to say “you lose… unless you happen to be wearing a suit of armor that flies really fast,” because the bombs have a long enough fuse for Stark & Rhodes to not just fly out of the blast zone but also for one of them to swing by and get Pepper to safety. Whoops.

For all Iron Man 2′s faults, where it really improves on the original is in its climax. The first film ended on a sort of limp note as it had the hero hobbled from the beginning and only barely limping to the finish line. The sequel, on the other hand, is a three-part roller coaster ride that starts with an extended chase scene, segues quickly into the chaotic destruction of the drones, and ends with not one but two fully-powered heroes up against a seemingly implacable boss.

The final fight is, unfortunately, a little too one-sided, but this is balanced out somewhat by just how one-sided (in the other direction) the showdown with the drones was. Also, while “believability” is a relative term when it comes to things like this, Whiplash’s dominance comes not from objective superiority but from a mix of quick-thinking tactics, technology, and surprise– exactly the kind of thing that would let you prevail in such an encounter. Just as in a real-life fight, you don’t win by gradually wearing down the other guy’s “hit points” or some such, it’s all a matter of acting decisively and applying just the right amount of pressure at the right place & time.

Well done.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Stop.

Hammer Time.

“Can fifteen years of imaginary training really be put to use?”

Honestly, the fact that the dude on the ground with a knife in his back manages to win this fight isn’t even the third most shocking thing to happen in this movie.

A lot of times people tell you that a movie is “so messed up” that it will “blow your mind” and it mostly turns out to be either mindless garbage (e.g., Riki-O) or tiring “provocative” pap (e.g., pretty much every Tarantino-wannabe in the wake of Pulp Fiction). Oldboy, the original 2003 cult film out of South Korea, is one of the few films that really lives up to that moniker.

A tale about the depths of revenge and obsession, Oldboy is a thriller but not a true action movie; nevertheless, one of its most talked-about (and believe you me, there is a LOT to talk about when it comes to Oldboy) scenes is an extended fist fight around the middle. Even without hearing the hype, when you first see the movie and come across this sequence, you know instinctively you’ve witnessed the birth of a new legend, and that director Park Chan-wook has made something indelible and unique. And he did it all in a single, continuous take.

Oldboy: The Hallway Fight

The Fighters:

• Oh Dae-su, our protagonist. A philandering, alcoholic businessman whose life took an abrupt turn when, without warning or explanation, he was kidnapped and imprisoned. For fifteen years Dae-su was locked in a hotel-like room with no contact with the outside world besides the TV, and eating the same food shoved under his door every day. Trapped for a decade and a half, Dae-su goes more than a little crazy, and hardens his body & mind into an instrument of vengeance against his tormentors. Then, with just as little warning, he’s set free. Played by Choi Min-sik.
  • Armed with: An iconic hammer. Not like a medieval war hammer or something, just a simple household tool.
• Thugs, about a dozen or so. Employed by the man who runs the place where Dae-su was locked up. They’re mean but unpolished, and in various degrees of fighting trim.
  • Armed with: Several have simple wooden boards or tubes as crude weapons.

The Setup: After a little while on the outside, Oh Dae-su has tracked down the place where he was locked up, but the man who runs the place is not the man who ordered the imprisonment, nor does he work directly for him. Apparently this kind of thing happens enough in Korea to warrant such a dedicated third party’s existence. After some decidedly physical interrogation of the business owner, Dae-su learns everything he can from him, and holds him at knife-point as he approaches a hallway full of thugs who block his way out.

He asks the goons which of them have the same blood type as their boss, and when he gets a volunteer, tells him to take the tortured man to the hospital so he’ll live. Then, without wasting a moment, our “hero” charges into battle. Notably, he drops the knife he’d been holding.

A questionable call, tactically speaking.

This is significant, because, along with his helping to save the life of the man he’d just brutalized, it shows that for all his pent-up aggression looking for an outlet, Oh Dae-su isn’t looking to kill, at least not yet. He’s looking to hurt.

It’s pretty messed up.

The Fight: Dae-su’s fighting is both canny and frantically unfocused, paradoxical as that might sound. He does what he can to keep moving and changing targets, not staying in one place long enough. Still, it’s not long before he finds himself surrounded by the goons rather than having them all to one side, and he tries to correct that by seizing one around the neck as a temporary hostage, keeping the others at bay.

He can’t keep that up for long, of course, and quickly loses control of the situation. He takes a few hits, loses his hammer, and goes down, getting repeatedly kicked & stomped by the mob. Surprising the group with his ferocity, Dae-su gets back on his feet and tackles the goon nearest to him, shoving him back into the crowd.

But numbers are numbers, and the underdog gets put down again, this time for even longer and with far more blows. When one thug stabs Dae-su square in the back with his own dropped knife, everyone seems to think it’s over, as they all back off while the intruder stays doubled over in pain for many long seconds.

Incredibly, Dae-su rises again and goes back on the offensive; this is the sort of thing that can happen when you spend fifteen years building up your Beast Mode. This time he manages to remain on the opposite side of the hallway and take his foes on in a more manageable way– largely because they seem, and not without good reason, afraid of this unpredictable wild man. The gang’s collective body language conveys a sort of “I don’t wanna be next, YOU be next!” feel, as they stay clustered at a safe distance and only close in haltingly.

Many are still armed with wooden boards, but few can really put them to good use as Dae-su is able to avoid them (one snaps against the wall in a wild swing) or break them with his elbow like a badass. Between the protagonist’s intimidating wildness and their own exhaustion & injuries, the gang gets even sloppier, missing easy blows and even just falling to the ground of their own accord. One of them picks up Dae-su’s hammer and tries to use it, but Dae-su is quicker and puts him down with a series of punches.

The last man takes several blows to go down, but when he does, no one gets back up again. Dae-su’s the last man standing in a corridor full of wounded, tired, terrified thugs. With, incidentally, a knife still stuck in his back.

Triumphant, Dae-su retrieves his hammer and heads for the elevator. He doesn’t even react when a cut in his head finally starts gushing blood. After a few seconds, he breaks out in a deranged smile, and since we can’t see what he sees, we assume it’s just pure self-satisfaction, pride in what he’s done.

This is not the smile of a well-adjusted man.

But the next cut reveals that it’s even creepier: the elevator has just opened to reveal another handful of glaring goons. Dae-su’s not happy because he survived a gruesome ordeal, he’s happy because it isn’t over yet.

Moments later we see the elevator open up on the ground level, and Dae-su exits amidst a cluster of slumped over enemies. Of course.

This is a rare cinematic feat where a sequence dives so hard into the mundane that it comes out the other side as Epic. This isn’t a titanic clash between a champion martial artist and a group of skilled opponents; it’s a simple brawl between hard men. The weapons are crude and ordinary. Given that it’s all in one take, there’s very little room for cinematic trickery to make the combat and the combatants seem more impressive than they are. Even the music is understated, a haunting mixture of sadness & excitement. There’s even neat little touches, like the slightly chubby, shirtless thug who takes a hammer to the thigh early on and spends the rest of the battle limping.

Oldboy’s signature fight seemingly breaks so many rules of cinematic fighting, and while rubbing your face in gritty realism it somehow makes you believe the impossible. Quite the achievement indeed.

“Apparently, it can.”

Grade: A+

Coming Attractions: FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

Ah, the things homeschoolers miss out on.

In which Spider-Man receives help from an unlikely ally!

Uh, no, she’s not who I’m talking about. But it’s about time she contributed

5) Spider-Man and New Goblin vs Sandman and Venom

The Fighters:

• Spider-Man, aka Peter Parker. Back in his red & blue outfit. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• The New Goblin, aka Harry Osborn. About half his pretty face got burned real ugly in the last confrontation, but considering the size of the explosion he was lucky that’s all he got. Playing the hero this time. Played by James Franco.
  • Armed with: His full bag of tricks.
• Sandman, aka Flint Marko. He’s using the excessive amount of dirt in the vicinity to make himself bigger and denser than ever. Played by Thomas Haden Church.
• Venom (he’s never called that in the movie), aka Eddie Brock, Peter’s sleazy rival. Brock’s role here is roughly the same as in the comic– disgraced journalist blames Peter Parker & Spider-Man for his troubles, even though they’re really his own fault– but the character has been subtly tweaked to be a “dark,” conscience-free version of Peter even before his transformation (the casting of Grace enhances this, considering the comic Brock has a physique much closer to, well, Thomas Haden Church’s). After Peter expelled the symbiote suit from his body, it bonded with the nearby Eddie*, creating a monster with every reason to hate Spider-Man. As Venom, Brock sports an altered version of the black Spidey costume, and boasts physical strength and black webbing that are superior to Spider-Man’s. Missing from the comic book is how the symbiote allows Venom to bypass Peter’s spider sense, and the unnerving way Venom, being two personalities in one body, refers to himself as “we.” Played by Topher Grace.

Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane is along as the bait yet AGAIN. She helps out a smidgen this time, but mostly her role in this consists of falling through the sky over & over. Oddly, the movie never addresses the fact that the big obstacle between her and Peter in the first two movies is how her being close to Spider-Man could make her a target, and yep, that’s exactly what happens here. Speaking of which, how come nobody else in New York ever asks why this lady keeps getting held hostage by supervillains looking to rumble with Spider-Man? The first and third kidnappings were quite public, and the police at least knew about her abduction at Doc Ock’s lair in part 2.

[*Eddie was nearby because, in an amazing coincidence, he just happened to be downstairs in the church while Peter was ridding himself of the symbiote. Everything creepy & weird about Brock is encapsulated in how he a) went to that church to pray for God to murder Peter Parker for him, and b) he addresses Jesus as "sir."]

The Setup: Fairly involved. Having worn the suit for too long, Peter eventually hit rock bottom and accidentally hit Mary Jane after an evening spent emotionally humiliating her. Knowing that the suit is enabling his behavior, he tries to take it off, but it resists, having bonded too closely. Only the ringing of a nearby church bell seems to stun it long enough to him to escape its grasp. (This is actually straight from the source material.) The suit desperately heads for the nearest replacement host, who happens to be Eddie Brock.

Soon enough, the suited Venom finds Sandman (… somehow) and offers an alliance, seeing as they have a mutual interest in stopping Spider-Man. One would think that Marko would have every reason to stay faaaaaaar away from Spider-Man, actually, but instead this noble victim of tragic circumstance immediately agrees to team up with psychopathic alien monster so they can murder a hero together. Makes perfect sense.

Rather than opting for something sensible like sneaking into his house at night and stabbing him, the two abduct Mary Jane and dangle her from an enormous web structure atop a construction site. Yes, a superhero fight at a construction site, sorry to blow your mind. When the news cameras show up, the villains ensure their invitation is suitably blunt.

Another weird thing about Eddie Brock was that he took the COMPLETE wrong lesson away from reading Charlotte’s Web

Between the two of them, no police are able to get close enough to effect a rescue, and apparently the city’s National Guard unit was on field maneuvers or something.

Meanwhile, Peter correctly figures this is too much for him to handle alone and goes to Harry to ask for help. Harry lays on the guilt trip again, but rather than apologizing or quite reasonably pleading self-defense, Peter offers a simple “she needs us.” Harry waves him off, but later on his elderly butler strolls in and offers his unsolicited medical opinion on how Norman’s wounds were clearly caused by his own glider, so maybe Harry should get over himself already.

Still, Spider-Man shows up alone, though the gathered crowds still cheer him and he takes a second to pause before Old Glory one last time. He makes his way to where MJ’s being held in a taxi suspended high up and tries to comfort her, but Venom ambushes him shortly after.

The Fight: With his advanced speed & strength, Venom shuts Spider-Man down pretty quick, and pins him to a bed of webbing dozens of feet below Mary Jane’s taxi. Revealing his face, Eddie taunts his rival for a bit, urging him to remember the humiliation he put Eddie through. Ever lacking in his comic counterpart’s verbal dexterity, Peter just sits there silently, rather than reminding Eddie that he only “humiliated” the guy in response to false & defamatory pictures Eddie made of him. Oh, and also while under the influence of the very same suit Eddie’s wearing now. But whatever. Not like he’s persuadable by logic at this point.

“Well, I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way. Good point.”

All this monologue-ing gives Mary Jane plenty of time to retrieve a loose brick and drop it on the back of Venom’s head just before he delivers the killing blow. While Venom shrieks, Spidey breaks free from the webbing and fights back, causing both to lose their footing. As they tumble through the air, they have a silly but fun mini-battle, slugging it out and launching web projectiles at each other in free-fall. Spider-Man tries valiantly but the villain largely gets the better of him here, finally restraining the hero once again. Peter eventually frees himself but doesn’t web away in time to entirely negate the impact of his fall… in a pile of sand. Ruh roh.

Soon enough the ground itself starts moving, and Sandman emerges, bigger than ever.

At least he didn’t try climbing with MJ to the top of the Empire State Building.

Our hero avoids Marko’s lumbering swings for a while, then heads back up to rescue Mary Jane, who’s started to fall through the webbing. This leads him wide open to getting blindsided by Venon again (priorities!), and the villain pins him on a girder, then hops down and holds him in place from behind via webbing around the neck.

Sandman repeatedly brings his huge fist down on Spider-Man, slowly pounding the life out of him as the crowd (and one particularly overwrought newscaster) watches in dismay. But just before Marko rears back for the final blow, a small projectile lodges in his neck from off-screen. As the background music fades to hear its rapid beeping and the camera zooms in, we see it’s one of those damned pumpkin bombs.

Hooray! Harry showed up after all. It’s the most predictable Marvel Team-Up ever, but Raimi juices it up with the expert timing of the grenade reveal. As Sandman reels in pain from his half-exploded head, the New Goblin flies by and knocks Venom down for good measure. Raimi continues his directoral swagger by having the inspirational hero music play up as Harry rises dramatically on his glider and offers his friend a hand.

Back to back, the two get to work immediately. Harry first uses the momentum from his board to spin Spidey into a perfectly timed kick at a leaping Venom, then he turns his jets directly onto Sandman, super-heating a good chunk of him into glass.

Sick burn

They fly up together and Peter gets dropped off to save their mutual ex-girlfriend, who had started falling down again. They have a bit of a tender/awkward moment as he drops her off higher in the same building (not down below with the police to keep her safe or anything, that would be crazy) and returns to help Osborn deal with Sandzilla, which only gets him punched and knocked down into a half-finished building.

Apparently tiring of this, the Goblin gets sufficient distance from Marko, and fires two missiles at him. Both hit their target with sufficient force to make him topple and break.

Meanwhile, Spider-Man is left alone in a half-finished building, searching for the elusive Venom. After creeping the hero out by making noise from unseen places, he soon reveals himself and smacks the hero down effortlessly, then webs him up once more.

Maybe James Cameron’s infamous “web bondage” script wasn’t so crazy after all

Eddie draws out Peter’s execution again, and Peter tries to talk him out of it, telling him he knows all too well the rush of evil power the suit can provide. In a line that perfectly straddles ridiculous and brilliant, Eddie calmly says “I like being bad. It makes me happy.”

Before he can skewer his nemesis with a length of jagged steel, he’s disarmed by two of Harry’s pumpkin blades. The Goblin himself flies in soon after, attempting to stab Venom with the blades in his own glider. Venom dodges and uses his webbing to seize the glider for himself. As Harry falls, he knocks over a few steel bars on the way down, the clattering of which has a brief but noticeable effect on the villain.

Venom leaps over to stab the still-trapped Peter with the glider, but Harry, taking one for the team one last time, leaps into Venom’s path and takes the blades instead, dying the same way his father dead but for the exact opposite reason. Bummer.

His friend’s sacrifice gives Peter enough strength to break free. He hits Venom pretty hard, and keeps him down by using the nearby metal poles to create a constant cacophony– boy genius Peter Parker has been able to deduce that the symbiote is weak against extremely loud noises. Spider-Man wastes little time exploiting this and, in one continuous CGI shot, shoves several poles into the ground around Venom and keeps clanging them together, effectively creating a “cage” of sound. It’s nifty.

Good thing it’s not a JOHN Cage of sound, as that would have accomplished very little

The symbiote roils in ever-escalating pain, and when it contorts itself loosely enough, Peter uses his webbing to pull Brock out of it. Meanwhile it becomes a big ugly mess, towering into an even more monstrous form. Spider-Man shrinks it back down with one more clang, and flings one of Harry’s spare pumpkin bombs into the writhing mass. Conveniently, Eddie tries to jump back in to save it, and dies in the same explosion that also destroys the suit.

Oh, and afterward, Harry dies in Mary Jane’s arms, and Marko shows up again in more human form but he and Peter just talk it out. Yawn.

This fight scene is basically Spider-Man 3 in miniature: it’s epic, overstuffed, convoluted, clever, and occasionally awesome. The setting is the very definition of generic, but it’s used well enough. You get the real sense of Spider-Man being overmatched by either of the villains separately, let alone together, thus making Harry’s arrival even more welcome– cheesy as it may be. The two friends make a good team, fighting not just alongside each other but cooperatively at a few key points.

But all the creative thinking on display contrasts pretty starkly with just how repetitive and uninspired the staging frequently is. For instance, it’s easy to lose track of how often Venom HAD his nemesis dead-to-rights only to delay giving the final blow juuuuuust long enough for some outside interference to give Spidey a break. After the third or fourth time that happens, the suspense dries out pretty quickly. Similarly, Mary Jane repeatedly finds herself nearly falling to her death– not to mention this whole setup of her as the hostage/bait to kick off the climax was done in each of the previous two films. And Harry’s sacrificial death is the least surprising thing this side of a Scooby Doo episode.

It’s flawed and ambitious, but big enough to make a fitting end to Raimi’s Spider trilogy.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: Let’s get mental.

City Trek Into Darkness

All right: for real now, we’ll ditch superheroes for a while.

It’s not even going to come flying back at him like Mjolnir.

The Last of the Mohicans, a throwback to old-style epic Hollywood filmmaking but with a new(-ish) gloss & polish. It’s a rare gem that’s both artfully elegant and genuinely exciting, thanks in large part to the lyrical direction of the Michael Mann– frustratingly unpredictable as ever.  It’s even got a star turn from the amazing Daniel Day-Lewis, from the period when he was just a very talented & handsome leading man and not a Mind-Blowing Super Actor with a yen for purloined milkshakes.

Let’s not get into the film’s historical inaccuracies. It’s a Hollywood action movie which is loosely based on an old book which itself was only loosed based on then-recent history; we’re quite a few layers away from “reality,” here. Also: I’m hardly the most politically correct guy in the world, but I’ll try to tread respectfully with regards to terms used to describe the story’s native characters.

1) Huron Ambush

The Fighters:

• Hawkeye, aka Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo, a British citizen who was raised by the vanishing Mohican tribe after being orphaned at a young age. Hawkeye (in Fenimore Cooper’s other stories he accumulates an impressive number of additional nicknames, including Long Rifle, Deerslayer, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, etc) is an excellent tracker, and is unparalleled in marksmanship. Played by Daniel Day-Lewis.
  • Armed with: A tomahawk/short axe and a Pennsylvania Flintlock Rifle. (Note this is not a musket as previously indicated; as a commenter points out, while most of the other soldiers and militias use various types of muskets, a marksman like Hawkeye favors the Pennsylvania Flintlock. More details here.)
• Chingachgook, Natty’s adoptive Mohican father. Noticeably older but still quite spry. Played by the late Lakota actor and activist Russell Means.
  • Armed with: In addition to his rifle, Chingachgook uses (I had to look this up) a gunstock war club, a length of thick wood that roughly resembles a long rifle but is actually a tricky weapon useful for both bludgeoning and stabbing.
• Uncas, Chingachgook’s biological son and Hawkeye’s adopted brother, renowned for his speed. Played by Eric Schweig.
  • Armed with: Musket and knife.
• Major Duncan Heyward, the British officer charged with transporting his commander’s daughters to their father’s command post. A competent soldier with an overly narrow sense of right and wrong. Played by Steven Waddington.
  • Armed with: Pistol and a stiff upper lip.
• Magua, the film’s villain. Out to kill the entire Munro family over grievances he has with the father, Magua is a ruthless, vicious yet somewhat sympathetic antagonist. Played by the great Wes Studi.
  • Armed with: Tomahawk, knife and whatever guns he can gets his hands on.

There’s also a small detachment of British soldiers, about two dozen, under Heyward’s command. Magua leads a similarly sized contingent of Huron raiders. The Munro girls are there too, but they mostly just stand off to the side looking scared. It’s not very empowering.

The Setup: Magua has been hired as a local guide for the Munro girls’ escort, but he’s secretly been plotting to betray them, and is leading the platoon into an ambush. Not long before things get in motion, Team Hawkeye finds the remains of the Huron war party’s camp fires, and decide to keep an eye out for them.

As the redcoats near the ambush point, Magua abruptly turns around and walks quickly to the rear of the marching column. He discreetly draws an axe from his cloak and, approaching a fresh-faced young lad in the back, buries the weapon in his face.

“For the last time: I will NOT sign your Street Fighter Movie poster!”

The Fight: Moving so quickly the Brits couldn’t react in time even if they weren’t shocked by the unexpected brutality, Magua immediately seizes the fallen soldier’s rifle and uses it to shoot down another. This acts as the signal for the other Huron raiders hidden in the wilderness to open fire. Most of the shots hit their targets, with several soldiers even tumbling down the steep hillside on the other side of the path. Magua chose the terrain well.

The stunned British quickly cluster together in orderly ranks, and send a volley of fire against the still mostly hidden Hurons. But the bad guys came prepared, and have already set up their cover. When the volley’s over, they charge down into the remainder of the platoon well before they can reload.

The redcoats are fairly well-trained, but in close quarters they’re no match for the natives. Mann treats the audience to an extended sequence of ugly carnage, consisting mostly of British soldiers being steadily felled in increasingly ugly ways.

This guy on the ground, for instance, is about to be sold some sporting tickets at an inflated price

It’s not pretty. Heyward is the only one who manages to hold his own. That’s mostly due to his being a little bit separated from the main action, but he does take down two bad guys by himself: one with a well-aimed pistol shot, another with some quick fisticuffs after Heyward’s horse is cut down and he’s faced with a lone straggler.

Soon enough the main group of Hurons finish up with the British platoon, and start to charge in on Heyward and the girls, when they’re interrupted by three shots fired from off-screen, each one of which takes down a Huron warrior.

Surprise! It’s the movie’s heroes, here to save the day. Which they actually do with cool efficiency, each of them shown joining the fight separately. Of course, it’s Hawkeye who comes out looking coolest, demonstrating some sweet moves as he cuts through two Hurons in a row just in time to stop Magua from firing on the Munro women.

A tomahawk will do in a pinch when you don’t have a bowling pin.

The two men have a brief gun face-off: Magua quickly swivels his musket to aim at Bumppo, but the hero dodges it, having instinctively begun ducking before Magua even pulled the trigger. Before Hawkeye can return fire, the villain escapes in the excessive smoke, disappearing into the woods like an evil Batman.

Chingachgook gets to finish out the encounter, cutting down the last fleeing Huron (along with Magua, most seem to have run out of fear and confusion) by hurling his war club in an overhead toss into the chump’s back. Nice little stinger of an ending and, in another nice touch, right before it Hawkeye prevents Major Heyward from accidentally shooting Chingachgook in confusion. The movie repeatedly makes Heyward out to be an overly fussy and foolish dweeb, which pays off at the end in a shockingly poignant way.

Mann and his choreographers employ a type of physical combat here that’s believably genuine and unpolished; stiff, but in a good way. Which makes sense, as these warriors are veterans in the art of killing rather than elegant combat. You couldn’t have a period piece about Indians who use a bunch of fancy & stylized ninja moves, that would be completely ridiculous.

This is not the grandest of fights, not even the best one in this movie, but in broad strokes it establishes everything we need to know about all the particulars: the heroes’ smooth competence, Magua’s villainy, the casual brutality of frontier life/combat, and how out of their depth the foreign Europeans are here in this wilderness.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: The movie lives up to its title.

Also, this happens.

Don’t mess with the old man.

Or he’ll Chingach-get ya.

2) Magua vs The Mohicans

The Fighters:

• Chingachgook, the Mohican elder. Played by Russell Means.
  • Armed with: Gunstock war club, same as before.
• Uncas, the young Mohican brave. Played by Eric Schweig.
  • Armed with: Knife and rifle. Later he grabs a tomahawk.
• Magua, the spiteful villain. Played by Wes Studi.
  • Armed with: Tomahawk and knife.

Magua is also leading a party of about a dozen Huron subordinates. Hawkeye is on hand but mostly just shoots down the cannon fodder.

The Setup: After having successfully killed Colonel Munro, Magua captures his daughters Cora & Alice (and Duncan too), then takes them back to a Huron village. Hawkeye arrives unexpectedly and tries to sway the local chief to have the girls set free. The sachem reaches a Solomonic compromise: have one daughter burned at the stake as repayment for Magua’s suffering, and have him take the other as his wife to heal his heart. This’d be an awkward arrangement for all involved, one would think.

Hawkeye tries to put himself in Cora’s stead (the sacrifice thing, not the wife thing), but Duncan, knowing that Bumppo stands a better chance than he at getting Cora to safety and rescuing Alice (and also finally accepting that Cora loves Hawkeye, not him), offers himself, which the chief accepts. Team Hawkeye leaves with Cora and, once they get far enough away, Natty use his rifle to perform a mercy killing on the burning Duncan to end his suffering.

This delay ends up staggering the party as they pursue Alice. Between his fleet-footedness and his own desire for Alice’s safety (the pair have been having their own quiet, parallel romance throughout the film), Uncas catches up to Magua at a scenic cliffside path far ahead of his father & brother. This will prove unwise.

See all those bad guys? It’s called “wait for backup,” genius.

 The Fight: Uncas moves so fast he actually gets ahead of Magua’s convoy, and ambushes the lead man by popping out from around a corner he was approaching. He cuts his way through several Huron warriors using a combination of guns and brute force. He finally gets to Magua, who greets the challenge with his own knife and tomahawk at the ready.

They clash, and Uncas makes crippling mistakes early on– he goes up against Magua too close, and isn’t ready for Magua’s craftiness. Whenever the villain blocks Uncas’ axe with his own, his other hand darts in and uses his knife to get several small but damaging slices on the kid’s torso. After this happens two or three times, Magua falls back to higher ground, and Uncas can immediately tell the seriousness of his wounds.

Whether through remaining recklessness or a Hail Mary attempt to finish things before he loses even more blood, Uncas refuses to let up. He clumsily shoves in closer to Magua, and the two end up tussling around on the surface of a flat rock. Magua again gets the upper hand and takes Uncas’ knife. This happens in wide shot and Mann doesn’t show us what happens immediately after– he cuts back to Hawkeye & Chingachgook in frantic pursuit, and Alice watching from nearby, crying & turning away as she can already see how this ends.

When the action comes back, Uncas is still on the ground, perhaps wounded more, and Magua is standing warily just a few feet away. Interestingly, the villain doesn’t take the opportunity to strike immediately, even though he easily could because Uncas takes a long time to rise unsteadily to his feet, leaving himself wide open. Magua’s giving him the chance to die honorably, on his feet.

Uncas tries to lunge in one last time, but Magua easily intercepts and stabs him in the side. He spins the Mohican around and plunges the knife in deeper, finishing the job.

Uncas cries out in pain, but there’s no real malice or gloating in Magua’s wordless execution– just cold, calculating efficiency. It’s rough stuff: Uncas was a likeable and noble co-protagonist, and it’s fairly horrifying to watch him die in helpless agony. Magua finally lets the boy go, and pushes him down the cliff.

Too late and too far away to help, Chingachgook is still close enough to see his son die. In a heartbreaking slow-motion shot, we see him scream in grief & protest, but his voice isn’t heard, drowned out instead by the unrelenting music. Russell Means’ haunted face does the job well enough on its own.

As the war party starts to pack back up again, Alice steps away from her captors, looking over the cliff side where her friend had just fallen. The villain confusedly beckons her to come back, and she quietly considers: a quick death alongside her love, or a life with Magua as her husband?

Good call.

Magua and his flunkies move on, but soon the good guys catch up with them, this time from the rear. Father & adopted son work quite well together to break through, with Chingachgook acting as the tip of the spear and Hawkeye supporting him from just behind with gunfire. Indeed, the old man is a single-minded engine of destruction, cutting through Hurons while barely slowing down.

Magua welcomes the new challenge, and the old warrior charges right at him. He ducks & rolls under Magua’s opening swing and, in one smooth movement, springs back up and bludgeons his foe in the back with his war club. Magua tries to counter-attack but the Mohican cuts it off prematurely by striking the swinging arm at the elbow. As Magua reels in pain, Chingachgook smashes his other arm, rendering both limbs useless.

Thankfully, Magua doesn’t try to continue using the “Monty Python Black Knight” offense

In just a few quick seconds, Magua has been completely shut down, left with nothing to do but stand there in awkward confusion. With victory assured, Chingachgook gives Magua an odd look: not vengeful or satisfied, just disgusted. With one mighty swing, the last of the Mohicans buries the sharp end of his club in Magua’s gut, and leaves him where he falls.

This is a great movie, but during its final stretch it enters another realm entirely. As soon as Duncan Heyward is tied up for his funeral pyre, a beautiful & haunting composition begins on the film’s soundtrack, and doesn’t let up until Magua dies. It often rises and falls in response to the on-screen activity… but it sometimes doesn’t, which in its way is even more affecting. It occasionally drowns out other sounds, most memorably resulting in Chingachgook’s silent scream, but the whole sequence is already virtually dialogue-free, featuring only one spoken word (Hawkeye calling out Uncas’ name after seeing him fall). It plays out almost like a silent movie.

The choreography is effective enough, but there’s relatively little complexity or traditional suspense in it. It’s all rather straightforward: Magua kills Uncas with little difficulty, then Chingachgook kills Magua with even less. But the way everything is handled– the music, the gorgeous backdrop, the various charged emotions that begin with Heyward’s awe-inspiring sacrifice, the ugliness of Uncas’ death and the bittersweet payback for it– combine to create an experience that’s far more than the sum of its parts, let alone the sum of just its punches, kicks and stabs. This is a straight battle that’s legitimately exciting but it’s also something lyrical, almost beautiful. Once again we’re reminded that it’s not just fights being graded here but fight scenes– the cinematic language is often just as important as the choreography. And this movie’s definitely speaking my language.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: Yo ho ho.

One Piece is the greatest thing ever.

Try not to look TOO smug about it.

Okay, not really. There are at least several things better than One Piece (the Bible, true love, Robocop) but when you’re watching it, it can often feel like it really is The Best. And I would legitimately argue its status as one of THE great pop epics of our time.

And I do mean epic. One Piece is HUGE: a multimedia franchise that began in 1997, One Piece started as a manga by Eiichiro Oda which now has about 750 chapters and soon spawned a televised anime adaptation with over 600 episodes. Neither shows any sign of stopping, being a singular cultural juggernaut in its native Japan and beginning to penetrate the wider world. Considering his story’s amazingly ambitious scope, Oda has been admirably unafraid to keep making his fictional world ever-larger, more complex and rich, often planting plot seeds which take hundreds of chapters to bear fruit.

One Piece is the story of Monkey D. Luffy– possibly the ur-example of the single-minded & virtuously simple protagonist– his journey to become the next Pirate King, and the friends & adventures he piles up along the way. The show runs through a lot of themes, but most prominently, One Piece is about dreams, and what ends a man will go to accomplish them. There might not be any modern story which is so thoroughly optimistic as One Piece yet it doesn’t shy away from the dark realities of human nature: the story’s world is filled with good people who have failed or made compromises, and villains who have committed unspeakably vile deeds. But one way or another, none of them are unchanged once they cross paths with the relentless engine of goodness that is Luffy.

This blog could always do with a bit of branching out, so tackling a small slice of One Piece is both an opportunity to examine our first TV show (an animated Japanese show, at that) and hopefully nudge some Western readers towards a property that’s relatively unknown in their part of the world. (On that front: I hate to be such a cliched nerd, but avoid the dubbed American versions of this at all costs, especially the early stuff by 4Kids; seek out the subtitled material instead. Dubbing competence aside, the story & characters simply lose something in translation.) Also, it couldn’t hurt to pull in some traffic from otakus on Google.

And this will be a small slice, examining the five distinctive battles which occur at the conclusion of the show’s famous Alabasta arc, from relatively early in its run. The Alabasta storyline was not the first one to impress or win over new fans, but it was the first time the show engaged in some seriously long form storytelling and arrived at a thrilling conclusion that managed to pay off years of investment.

A word for the uninitiated: Many of One Piece’s characters have fantastical powers for one reason or another (the most common explanation is having eaten one of the rare “Devil’s Fruits” which grant the consumer a certain set of superhuman traits), but even many of the ostensibly “normal” characters are capable of feats far beyond actual human ability: impossible leaps, exaggerated strength, incredible endurance, etc. It’s just another one of the stylized conventions inherent to shounen anime programs, kind of like calling out the name of your special attack before you do it.

1) Usopp and Chopper vs Mr. 4 and Miss Merry Christmas

(Did I mention the show and its characters are very, ahem, colorful? Get used to that.)

The Fighters:

• Usopp, one of the more inexperienced and least powerful of Luffy’s crew. An incurable liar (complete with comically long nose) and often a shameless coward, Usopp is a good soul who can be counted on when it matters most. Voiced by Kappei Yamaguchi.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: Usopp has no special powers to speak of, and is not even physically impressive by normal human standards. His main asset is his advanced cleverness, both as an inventor of useful devices and quick-thinking battle tactics. His most common weapon is a slingshot, but he has all sorts of little gadgets with him.
• Tony Tony Chopper, the doctor of Luffy’s crew and its newest member. Although brilliant and talented, Chopper is very naive, having not seen much of the world; he’s very childlike in both attitude and appearance. He’s also a reindeer. Voiced by Ikue Otani.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: Yep, a reindeer. Specifically, he’s a reindeer who ate a Devil’s Fruit that gives the consumer human-like attributes: speech, intelligence, etc. Chopper can transform at will between a very human-like appearance, a powerful reindeer form, and a sort of hybrid form that’s about three feet tall and totally adorable– which is what he spends most of his time in. He has the considerable strength of a wild reindeer, and has also devised a special drug called the “Rumble Ball” which augments his abilities for a short while after consumption.
• Mr. 4, one of the high-ranking members of Baroque Works (see below). A huge, slow-talking, and slow-moving simpleton. Voiced by Masaya Takatsuka.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: Mr. 4′s powers are not supernatural, which is rare in his organization. He’s merely an incredibly strong human with a knack for baseball– his main weapon is a four-ton (!) baseball bat, which he uses either as a direct weapon or to smack exploding baseball bombs at his foes. The bombs are launched by his “dog,” Lassoo, which functions as a sort of pitching machine but with explosive cannon balls. It’s very weird.
• Miss Merry Christmas, Mr. 4′s partner. An obnoxious older lady who’s as agile and loquacious as her partner is slow and quiet. She’s the brains of the pair, and their abilities complement each other nicely. Voiced by Mami Kingetsu.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: She ate a Devil’s Fruit that gave her the abilities and appearance of a mole, allowing her to tunnel rapidly underground.

The Setup: At the risk of making this too long:

Monkey D. Luffy’s crew, called the “Straw Hat Pirates” due to their captain’s signature headgear, are a motley band of do-gooders in search of excitement and treasure. Soon after entering the Grand Line– the chaotic center of the fictional world’s vast ocean– the heroes run afoul of a criminal organization known as Baroque Works. BW is a vast, secretive enterprise which has currently set its sights on taking over the desert kingdom of Alabasta, and has been subtly fomenting instability there for years. This is discovered by Alabasta’s young princess, Vivi, who was able to infiltrate Baroque Works’ ranks and attain a fairly high position. Once the criminals discover Vivi’s true identity, she hires the Straw Hats’ help.

After a VERY convoluted series of events, the separated Straw Hat pirates end up in and around Alabasta’s capital city Alubarna, facing off against the highest-ranking officers of Baroque Works as a civil war begins to erupt around them. There’s a lot of overlap between their various battles, but first (and weirdest) is Usopp and Chopper’s showdown outside the Southeast City Gate.

[Baroque Works' higher ranking members work in male-female pairs, usually around a theme. The male half is assigned an alias corresponding to his rank, and the female's name is calendar-based (days of the week and holidays). It's delightfully bizarre.]

The Fight: Chopper is actually there first, and has to contend with the pair alone. He’s taken by surprise at their tactics and is seen getting hurt in some unspecified manner before the camera pulls away to elsewhere. When we return, a dazed Chopper is being roused by Usopp, who was sent over by Sanji after getting thrashed a bit by Mr. 2.

Usopp thinks they’ve run off, but they’re still underground, tunneling around ominously. Turns out, these two work as a pretty efficient, if bizarre, team: Merry Christmas (hmm, typing that name is going to get old REALLY fast) creates a local tunnel network with plenty of holes. Their dog, Lassoo, fires the baseball-shaped bombs, which are explosives on timers. The bombs either reach their targets or are lined up to be batted the right way by Mr. 4– who can get around those tunnels pretty quickly for such a slow guy.

Meanwhile, the much-faster female half is free to run interference, such as when she seizes Chopper’s foot to keep him from attacking her partner directly early in the fight; the young doctor only avoids taking a direct volley from Mr. 4 by reverting back to his tiny form at the last second, letting them sail harmlessly overhead.

The crafty Usopp takes this opportunity to disappear into the tunnels himself, and unnerves the villains a bit by calling them out from the unseen depths. He emerges and bashes Mr. 4 on the head with an enormous mallet before he can react, knocking the criminal unconscious.

Where had he been hiding that? Hammerspace, of course.

Usopp wields it with casual ease, despite the “5 ton” label on it, shocking all the others present. He talks trash– his usual brand of self-aggrandizing lies coming in handy for once– and pursues Miss Merry Christmas, though she keeps dodging him easily. The bit’s resemblance to a certain classic, non-digital arcade activity is unmistakeable:

Skee ball. It’s clearly skee ball.

It goes on for quite a while, and there’s even a hilarious, blink & you’ll miss it gag where Usopp drops the hammer for a second and flicks her with a rubber band– even calling out the “attack” name for it (simply “rubber band”) in sotto voce– just to annoy her. He never does whack that mole, but they both get visibly tired.

Unfortunately, Mr. 4 wakes up, not as injured as assumed, because as an attack from Lassoo soon reveals, Usopp’s hammer is a bluff– it’s just two frying pans he jerry-rigged together, then covered with fake vinyl and a “5-ton” label. Cute, but it infuriates Miss Merry Christmas, so she enters her combat mode where she can dig through the ground freely– no longer relying on the tunnels– and goes after Usopp.

She chases him to some nearby ruins, where he lures her into colliding with the underground wall, which she hits hard enough to bring the whole thing collapsing down on Usopp. Afterwards, she grabs hold of him from underneath, and drags him along with her, Jaws-style, as she “swims” through the ground, pulling him through several ancient walls and leaving Usopp-shaped holes like Bug Bunny.

This is starting to get downright cartoonish.

Meanwhile, Chopper contends with Mr. 4, who uses a technique where his dog fills the air with baseball bombs and explodes dozens of them at once. Chopper survives (… somehow) and uses his rumble ball to enter an enhanced intellect mode, analyzing Mr. 4′s tactics. He finds it, and scrambles over to Lassoo, splashing sand in the clueless dog’s face. Chopper then shoves the dog’s head down a nearby hole when it sneezes repeatedly in reaction, each sneeze launching a bomb from its mouth. Chopper links up with the wounded Usopp and both run from the tunnel network area just as it erupts in a massive explosion, engulfing both villains.

You’d think THIS would be enough, right?

It’s pretty big, but after a short breather, the bad guys reveal they still have plenty of hit points left. Usopp tries to run away one last time (it’s kind of his thing), but he’s seized from beneath by Miss Merry Christmas, who ends the episode on a cliffhanger by mocking the pair and telling them that Luffy’s dead– which, as far as she knows, is true.

Strangely, this drives Usopp to find his courage. He tells Chopper not to believe the news, and believe in Luffy instead. But the liar nevertheless gets dragged upright through the sand by Merry Christmas again, this time right smack into Mr. 4′s deadly bat. The poor kid breaks more than a few bones, and the impact sends him flying through the air.

What a Foul move.

Miraculously, Usopp survives, defiant as ever. The mole woman (who, incidentally, Usopp has repeatedly described as a “penguin,” much to her annoyance) grabs him and tries to pull another Batter Up, but this time the good guys are ready. Using the last remaining power from the rumble ball, Tony Tony Chopper enters his “Horn Point” mode: a hulking, four-legged appearance with enlarged antlers. He follows behind Merry Christmas as she drags his friend, and when they get close, Usopp uses a slingshot to fire a smoke pellet in the air, obscuring everyone’s sight.

He breaks free by slipping out of his shoes, and imitates the mole lady’s voice to give Mr. 4 the go ahead. Chopper uses his horns to scoop up Miss Merry Christmas and runs her right into her own partner’s waiting bat. Thud.

MMC goes flying, and without the brains of his operation, Mr. 4 can only stand in shock as Usopp uses Chopper’s antlers to create a massive slingshot, and puts a small (but real this time) hammer in it as the pellet. The launched mallet hits the batter dead-on.

“… and THAT’S how we settle things back home in Asgard.”

The blow knocks Mr. 4 into Lassoo and they both land next to Miss Merry Christmas. Just to put a nice bow on the whole thing, the dog accidentally barfs up one last grenade, which goes off right on top of them all. Good boy.

Usopp collapses and melodramatically prepares for his own death, and Chopper frantically calls out for a doctor, before being reminded that he is one. Then, the action freezes and this is slowly typed on the screen:

It’s definitely out of nowhere, too: the show is of course very stylized, but never in the preceding 100+ episodes has the action stopped to read out fight outcomes like it was a sporting event. It doesn’t just make for an unexpected capper to the fight but also provides a welcome bit of triumphant silliness to relieve the tension regarding the high stakes at play– remember, Vivi’s beloved kingdom is erupting into civil war thanks to Baroque Works’ machinations, and the heroes have recently suffered a set of severe setbacks (including Luffy’s near death). It’s nice to have an almost literal scoreboard pop up and essentially say “GOOD GUYS: 1, BAD GUYS: 0″

This is probably the oddest and easily the most convoluted of all the climactic clashes that are beginning to happen. Chopper and especially Usopp are ill-suited for direct physical combat, so this showdown necessarily has to happen in a wildly complex scenario, where the heroes get in their licks via mostly unorthodox means.

There are a few demerits, the most prominent being the over-reliance on explosions, and how little those explosions seem to do. Over & over again, the villains and especially the heroes are caught within bomb blasts– not ten or twenty feet away but just a few feet or even inches away, and not only do the characters miraculously survive but they’re barely hurt, lacking the decency to even get all scarred up like Harry Osborn. Of course, it’s a cartoon and a willfully silly one at that, but even this kind of ridiculousness has its limits. Similarly, the abuse the heroes (particularly Usopp) withstand makes it hard to accept the idea that the villains go down for the count after taking a lot less.

But it is a good deal of fun, silly or otherwise. Usopp & Chopper engage in varied combat both separately and cooperatively. The staging follows a strong pattern: the good guys seem outmatched, they find a smart way to bounce back, the villains come back even harder, and finally the good guys are able to rally and win the day for good– it’s a template the other battles will follow, to an extent.

The battle is also paced fairly well, taking neither too long or too short: it begins at the tail end of one episode, takes up the bulk of the next (with a cutaway or two to Vivi’s efforts to reach the palace), continues on into the episode after that and ends before the commercial break. It’s a cliche to say that most of any given “fight” in Dragon Ball Z is really like 90% charging up and yelling at each other with 10% actual punching & kicking and dragged out over half a season… but it’s a cliche because it’s true. So it’s refreshing to break away from this obnoxious anime tradition, and have some battles that are over in about an episode and a half, with very little time wasted. One Piece is legitimately as cool as you thought Dragon Ball was when you were in high school.

Grade: B

Recommended Links: Chris Sims at Comic Alliance gives the series his own unqualified recommendation after reaching an earlier, but still great, point in the manga. Worth reading if you’re curious to learn more/other opinions about One Piece.

Coming Attractions: Remember when I said this fight was “probably” the oddest?

There’s a reason for that.