Gone Baby Gone

Seen below: The rather excellent-looking trailer for the upcoming Boston crime drama "Gone Baby Gone":



Now, here's the question: Even if the movie is as good as it's trailer, and IMO it looks to be pretty damn good, will audiences give it a chance considering the problematic (and, you'll note, completely avoided by the trailer) issue of it being directed by Ben Affleck?

For my money, they ought to. Yes, Affleck has made some awful movies and can be held at least partially responsible for loosing the Plague of J-Lo upon us, and it has been a bit of guilty fun to have him as a go-to movie star turned punching bag lately... but he's a solid actor and potentially an interesting director, so he at least deserves and honest shot at retribution. That said, seeing it in a modestly-crowded Boston area theater tonight in front of "Death Sentence," (which you MUST go see now before it leaves) the audience was majorly "into it" until some of them caught the teeny-weeny Affleck credit right at the end of the names, and then the giggles started. Too bad.

REVIEW: Halloween (2007)

NOTE: Review may contain, by necessity, discussion-of or allusions-to differentiations between this film and the original which may constitute SPOILERS. You have been warned.

The reason I don't automatically get bent out of shape about movie remakes is that, when you get right down to it, almost everything is a remake of something else "officially" or not. It's pretty likely that we ran out of "new" stories on the fourth or fifth night of Cro-Magnon campfire tales. Joseph Campbell neatly sorted every story in every culture into one of only THREE seperate stories, Karl Jung apparently got it down to ONE. The plain fact is, almost any movie you'll see is either directly or indirectly "inspired" by other material, and from where I sit after a full century of existance it oughn't be forbidden for movies to add other movies to the list of "stuff to base movies on" next to books, plays, history, etc. This especially goes for the Horror genre: If- as many horror fans continue to insist- Freddy, Michael, Jason, etc. are the modern equivalents of Dracula, Frankenstein etc.; then it shouldn't be a de-facto sin to similarly re-imagine or revamp them in the same way that other monster-mainstays have been... or at least try to.

So, short-version, I don't begrudge anyone merely for ATTEMPTING to, 25 years later, put out a different spin on the Michael Meyers mythos. I especially don't begrudge Rob Zombie doing so, since if you ARE going to demand horror-genre bona-fides he's spent two genre films and an entire musical career establishing his. And while Zombie hasn't exactly made a perfect film he's made a fascinating and noteworthy one, which I'll take any day of the week over what we might've gotten had the producers gone the risk-free hire-a-hack route. Brett Ratner's "Halloween," anyone? Didn't think so.

The plain fact is that the original "Halloween" is just about the perfect example of it's own franchise and genre. No straight-up "slasher" film is better, and none will likely ever be better. Going in to Mr. Zombie's remake, my biggest hope was that it would compare to John Carpenter's original film in the way that the Hammer "Dracula" movies compared to the Bela Lugosi/Tod Browning original: Familiar story and characters but with a total visual and characterization overhaul. Instead, what we have here is a film that resembles no other horror remake so much as Coppola's "Brahm Stoker's Dracula." Both are reboots of an iconic character that place the antagonist in the forefront of the story, both make it a point to delve into a newly-minted "origin story" for said antagonist, both are intentionally prodding the audience's sense of cognitive dissonance by making the viewpoint and story-structure "sympathetic" with an unsympathetic character at the center and both are framed as self-aware tributes to the genre/franchise keenly aware that the audience will probably NOT be able to "forget" the original while watching.

The key difference, and easily the most controversial and "difficult" thing about the film, is that Zombie's take involves a revised "origin" for Michael Meyers that completely reverses the original film's approach to characterization. The 'point' of the original Michael was that he was an empty-vessel for pure evil, sprouted without rhyme or reason in the heart of genuinely good suburban familyland. The "new" Michael is the abused and unloved product of a home enviroment accurately described by one character as the "perfect mix" of forces to turn someone into, well... Michael Meyers. For literally one half of the film, we watch as lil' Michael starts off killing animals (like any good psycho in training) and then moves up to schoolyard bullies and eventually all but the youngest of his vile family members - an act which, as you already knew, lands him a lifetime stint in an asylum. It's not so much that Zombie wants us to "sympathize" with Michael so much as he's forcing us to place our audience-interest in him. To "understand" the why of what he does. The original film was "about" the babysitters stalked by the killer, this one is ABOUT the killer.

This reversal indeed extends to the 2nd half of the film, an abbreviated retread of the original film but this time with greater emphasis on Michael's perspective. Now that it's the killer with all the depth and perspective, the film's victims are the empty, dehumanized ones. The film sees the "good guys" the same way Michael does: As lesser beings, targets, nothing more. They aren't important (well, one of them is, maybe) to Michael, they're in the way, and by extension they aren't important to the movie and aren't ever made important to the audience. We don't "want" them to die because they seem like nice-enough people (Zombie pretty much shoots his 'characters who deserve it' load on the Meyers family in Act I, so the latter half is refreshingly free of 'you stupid suburbanites' cheap-shots) but we're only "invested" in babysitter Laurie Strode for reasons that everyone and their grandma already knows and that the movie barely seems to recognize is supposed to be a twist.

So, yes. 40 solid minutes getting us "inside" the head/world of a savage murderer and a 2nd half that turns him loose on a cast's worth of one-dimensional canon-fodder, from the director of "The Devil's Rejects." And yet, what keeps the film from finally becoming the amoral "root for the killer" epic the prude-set has been warning us about since the original Michael stabbed his original sister comes down to a very deliberate and even MORE ballsy decision by Zombie: The killings aren't fun. There's no Freddy Krueger "funny" deaths, none of Jason Vorhees' improvisational genius, not even much of the original Meyers' "heh. Did I do that?" quizzical head-tilting. The butcherings of this new "Halloween" resemble the kind metted out by "Hotel Rwanda's" machete-wielding Hutus: Brutal, merciless and cold.

The new Michael, re-imagined as a towering 7-foot behemoth inhabitted by wrestler/actor Tyler Mane, is all business: He works fast, doesn't play games, and is so physically powerful he can take out some of his targets just by squeezing their neck really hard. And when the deaths do take longer than a few moments, Zombie purposefully dwells on the victims, not the hardware: Empty characters though they may be, the unlucky citizens of Haddonfield meet their ends with aplomb; screaming, crying, pleading for their lives. It's uncomfortable, it's hard to watch, it's horror-ific. There's not a single "Aw yeah, get 'im Mike!!!" moment once The Shape hits the 'burbs, and it seems to be the key to Zombie's vision: He's let the "slasher" audience deeper into the mind of the monster than they've ever been, but in exchange he's robbed them of the chance to "enjoy" the splatter.

So many of the choices Zombie makes here, and the fearlessness with which he carries it all out, are so fascinating that one wants to overlook or outright ignore some of the more basic and noteable flaws... but in the end that's not entirely possible. Setting up what is eventually a "two-act" structure is an interesting approach, but the fact that "part two" must so closely resemble the original film causes it to feel jarringly seperate: After spending 40+ minutes in the entirely new world of "growing up Michael," there's a genuine "oomph!" in realizing that the NOT entirely new world of the familiar "Halloween" story had just touched down.

More bothersome, the decision to retain (and directly involve) the true connection between Michael and Laurie despite the now much-less-supernatural-like Michael raises some basic logic questions the film just can't properly answer. And on the just-plain-silly side, while Zombie's penchant for stunt-casting genre icons thankfully doesn't get in the way of the movie (the who's-who of grindhouse vets appear in a series of minor roles, do their parts "straight" and move on) a somewhat gratuitous bit of striptease by Sheri Moon-Zombie does. Mr. Zombie, if you're listening: This officially became "showing off" about midway through "Rejects." Yes, you're wife is really, really hot. We're all very impressed. Good goin' on your part. But enough is enough.

I'll give him his biggest credit where it's most due, though (and this is where that SPOILER WARNING comes into play, kiddies): THANK YOU for finding an ending that is A.) as ballsy and brutal as the rest of the "big" scenes, B.) still doesn't let the audience "off the hook" or go for quick catharsis and C.) is an actual ENDING. I won't spell it out, folks, but if this new "Halloween" gets only ONE thing absolutely, spectacularly, perfect right; it's the decision to stand up in full knowledge of the ever-worsening sequels that followed the first film and boldly scream "fuck no!, NOT doing that!" at the very idea. Bravo, at least, to that.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

COMING ATTRACTIONS: DOUBLE FEATURE: EVIL BEHIND YOU & THE BURNING HELL

Well, we've now passed the six month mark here at The B-Movie Catechism and it's just in time for our 25th review. To celebrate, we're going to have our first double feature in which we GO TO HELL! First up is 2006's Evil Behind You, a direct to video horror/thriller produced by the folks at Given The Boot Ministries in hopes of bringing the Christian message into the secular environment. You can view the trailer here at the movie's official website. After that we take a look at 1974's The Burning Hell, evangelist Estus Pirkle's 16mm fire and brimstone epic which promises to deliver 20,000 degrees fahrenheit and not a drop of water! There's no trailer, but you can buy or rent a print from Mr. Pirkle himself at his website, or you can just watch the whole thing (in eight parts) on YouTube.

REVIEW: Balls of Fury

GUY #1: "Hey, who was that lady I saw you with last night?"

GUY #2: "That's no lady, that was my wife!"

The key to "understanding" Vaudeville staple jokes like that is to realize that they were told over and over, night after night, by comic after comic and were still basically funny. Simple joke, doesn't even have to be especially well-told to work. Just has to be, because the audience already knows the joke, thinks it's funny and is endeared to the comic who tells it for agreeing with their sense of humor and expectations. "Balls of Fury" is kind of like that. It's premise gives away the entirety of the film almost immediately: It's a comedy about a secret underground ping-pong competition, staged in the framework and trappings of a B-grade "kung-fu tournament" movie. If you can conjure a basic picture of what that might look like, and it amuses you, so will the resulting movie even though it's obviously not the "best" telling of it's own joke possible.

The advertisements want you to think of it as something along the lines of a "Dodgeball" sports-spoof, but the actual film is aimed best at a smaller niche: Ironic-appreciators of bad 80s U.S. martial arts films. Genre mainstays like James Hong, Jason Scott-Lee and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa are onhand in mostly-straight versions of the kind of roles they can do in their sleep. If you A.) recognize Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa by sight, B.) know who he his by name and not "that one Asian guy and C.) are glad to see him, you will like this movie.

The plot concerns a secret, underground, high-stakes, life-or-death table-tennis tournament overseen by a Triad arms dealer Feng (Christopher Walken in full "It's Funny Because I'm Christopher Walken" mode.) A government agent (George Lopez in the first time I've EVER found him funny) recruits a onetime disgraced ping-pong prodigy (Dan Fogler) for training under a blind Chinatown ping-pong master (James Hong) and his niece (an unspeakably sexy Maggie Q, hotter than any woman that skinny has any right to be) to help inflitrate the contest, which holds dual significance for Fogler's hero: The champ-to-beat is a German rival (the great Thomas Lennon) from his past, and Feng (what else) killed his father.



Fogler is a natural comic lead, the premise easily sustains a movie's worth of jokes and all-in-all it's good for laugh. The Asian actors, Hong especially, seem to be having fun doing deadpan-parodies of the cheesy roles they so often wind up playing in the "serious" films this is spoofing. Granted, Hong has been "in" on subverting Asian stereotypes for laughs since way back in "Big Trouble in Little China," and Tagawa grimmaces with unmistakable "yeah, it's me" conviction. But it's fun to see Lee get to cut loose as a heavy, and Maggie Q demonstrably "gets" both the appeal and the absurdity of the "itty-bitty Asian girl as icy high-kicking fetish doll" routine. And Walken, well... Walken has honed this bit with such expertise that at certain points his "dialogue" consists of a series of improv-ish mumbles and/or strange, suggestive eye movements and somehow it's still funny. (Feng on a pet Panda: "Sleeping... I think. Could be dead... I dunno. Not really sure... what they, y'know, eat. Anyhoo...")

This one's pretty easy, folks. Go watch the trailer. If you laugh, you'll like the movie.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

EAT MY DUST

TYPICAL REVIEW

"Eat My Dust, which opened yesterday at neighborhood theaters, is an exuberantly idiotic movie... The cast, directed by Charles Griffith, who wrote the screenplay, acts as though Eat My Dust matters. It doesn't." - New York Times

THE PLOT

Hoover (played by the director of A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man) has a "going nowhere" job refilling hand towel and toilet paper dispensers. He still knows what he wants out of life though, and that's Darlene, the prettiest girl in all of Puckerbush County. But unfortunately for Hoover, Darlene has one condition before she'll go out with him; she wants a ride in a fast car. In particular she wants a ride in the 700hp Camaro that just won the race at the local track. So Hoover does what any sane man would; he walks into the pit and "borrows" the car in front of God and everybody, including his own father, the county sheriff. Joined by as many teens as can squeeze into the back of a Camaro (a surprisingly large number), Hoover and Darlene tear through the countryside causing thousands in property damage while mysteriously never harming a living thing. (This was years before the A-Team turned this into an art form.) The authorities give chase.

THE POINT

"The heroine... likes fast young men and even faster cars... Fun stuff, concentrating on action, not social or psychological problems." That quote, from Britain's Channel 4 review of 1957's Dragstrip Girl, pretty much sums up the philosophy behind many of the hot rod movies aimed directly at the teenage drive-in crowd of the 1950s. And Eat My Dust starts out as the same kind of pure teenage fantasy as it's rockin-n-rollin chicken-racing predecessors. In the jejune universe of Eat My Dust every adult is an utter moron ("Hey, Roy, I'm looking for a kid in a blue jacket and Civil War cap, much like the one sitting four feet directly behind you in that conspicuous horse drawn wagon that I somehow mysteriously don't notice. Have you seen him?"), underage kids can get beer with no hassle (Hoover himself actually refuses to drink while driving, which is probably for the best considering the devastation he causes while stone sober.), and the destruction of private property doesn't matter as long as everyone walks away alive (Not necessarily uninjured, mind you, just alive.). If you need confirmation that this movie is told entirely from the kids' point of view, look no further than the brief segment preceeding the final chase where the Camaro runs out of gas. While Hoover drives a buckboard (apparently not uncommon in Puckerbush County) to the store in order to con some free fuel, Darlene breaks into a friend's house to shower, borrow some fresh clothes, and make a call to one of her girlfriends while polishing her nails. The background soundtrack to all of this is not music, but rather the frothing tirade of the sheriff (Hoover's dad, remember) which is being broadcast over the local airwaves demanding that the couple turn themselves in. Every single kid shown has their radio on, but not one of them ever hears a word that's being said. (Every parent reading this just bowed their heads in despondent solidarity.)

Had Eat My Dust been made in the 50s, that's probably all there would have been to it. Fifteen minutes of exposition, seventy-five minutes of car chases and hijinks, the end, date over, hope she at least kisses me before she goes inside. But Eat My Dust was released in 1976, just seven short years after Easy Rider had ushered in a very different kind of road movie, artful car-centered films like Vanishing Point, Two-Lane Blacktop, and the anti-Easy Rider masterpiece Electra Glide In Blue (get thee to a video store and rent that one right away). These films were anything but fun and games. Comparing some of those movies, author and critic Danny Peary wrote, "All these characters are not heroes to admire - they are miserable case studies. The sad aspect of [Two-Lane] Blacktop is that while these two young men take their endless trip to nowhere in their cubicle on wheels, they pass stationary cubicles - houses owned by people of all economic classes - where lights go on to signal that there are people inside who are just as withdrawn and isolated from the problems/horrors of the world." During the early seventies, filmmakers no longer saw the American highway as a simplistic playground for youthful rebellion, but rather a stage for existentialist explorations of alienation and aimlessness. While referenced subtly (okay, blatantly ignored sometimes for a cheap laugh), the influence of these weightier less-than-fun films can still be seen and felt in Eat My Dust.

The odd thing, however, is that the detached attitude from those earlier 70s films is expressed in Eat My Dust, not through the main character of Hoover, but rather through Darlene. She's the one who relentlessly chants faster, faster, faster even when the speedometer begins to creep up into dangerous territory. Faced with the inevitable point-of-no-return decision, Darlene's the one who just wants to keep driving, even after the duo has admitted to themselves that they really have no place to go. When the gas runs out, Darlene is the one who insists that the car somehow be refilled and made ready to hit the road again before she'll finally give Hoover his promised reward. And at the end of the movie, when the ride is over and the car has been returned (see, Hoover really did just borrow it after all), it's Darlene who rejects any notion of a real relationship between the two. "It was never about me, was it?" shouts Hoover, to which Darlene just shrugs and walks off into the night wistfully considering where the next day's escape from reality might come from.

If Eat My Dust had ended right there, it could easily be dismissed as an enjoyable, but mostly forgettable, teenage fantasy romp with a bittersweet ending. And really, as a stand-alone film, it still can. (This thing is a looong way from being a masterpiece.) But there's one final scene which, when considered in the context of the meta-narrative of American road movies, gives Eat My Dust a much more important status than one would think it actually deserves. It's a simple scene, really. After Darlene fades away into the dark, the owner of the car emerges from the stands and offers Hoover a job as his new driver in the races. Hoover accepts and the credits roll. That's it. Again, taken alone, it's no big deal. But if you know your early 70s car movies, then you recognize that something has changed. In the wake of Easy Rider, movie characters traveling the roadways had become so disillusioned and so detached from society, that they saw no options left other than to keep driving until they went mad or died or both. Hoover just gets a job.

I know it sounds crazy, but I think what we have here in this little Roger Corman produced no-budget quickie from 1976 is nothing more than the first signs of a paradigm shift in the American conscious. (Okay, once you've picked your jaw up off the floor where it dropped in disbelief, we'll continue.) If critics like the aforementioned Mr. Peary are correct, and the road movies of the early 70s reflected an undercurrent of feelings of alienation and helplessness over Vietnam and Watergate, then Eat My Dust reflects an emerging attitude of getting through it and getting back to work. If you think I'm overreaching here then consider the fact that Smokey and The Bandit was released just one year later. In that movie, Burt Reynolds accepts a cross-continental delivery job, makes a bet he can do it in record time, and along the way becomes a folk hero. Folks, that's the EXACT same plot as Vanishing Point. But whereas the earlier film ends in fiery death, Smokey ends with Burt winning the bet and... accepting another job. Hah! Ridicule me all you want, but I believe that in the sub-genre of car movies, Eat My Dust represents the first shot fired against the spiritual malaise of the early 70s. (And the New York Times said it didn't matter.)

Of course, I'm saying this with 30 years of hindsight and a stack of film magazines next to me. It's highly unlikely that the makers of Eat My Dust had any such thing in mind while they were in production. (Ron Howard himself once dismissed the movie as nothing more than the one where Opie gets laid.) But knowingly or not, the battle against the prevailing mindset of the early 70s was going on in the arts. When Walker Percy, author of The Moviegoer (my kind of book title) and Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, was asked what worried him most about America's future, he answered, "Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom... gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the communist movement... but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems." St. Gregory The Great had a term for this kind of life-robbing dreariness. He called it "acedia". These days we recognize it by its more familiar name of Sloth. That's right, Sloth, the red-headed step child of the seven deadly sins. (There goes my Irish readership.) Sloth gets little respect these days because whenever most people hear the word they usually think of simple laziness. (Or that guy tied to the bed in the movie Seven, but we're not going there.) But you have to think there's more to Sloth than just the basic lack of desire to work, otherwise why would the Catechism list it as one of the capital sins of man?

Capital sins, as the Catechism explains, are called such because they engender other sins, other vices. How does this work with Sloth? Father Paul A. Duffner, O.P. puts it this way. "Friendship with God has its obligations, and those obligations can in time come to be seen as burdens, as joy-killers rather than sources of joy; and can give rise to a sadness that stands in the way of fulfilling those obligations. This peculiar sadness, comments Fr. F. Cunningham, O.P., which leads to a neglect of the spiritual duties that flow from sharing in God’s friendship is called sloth... a kind of spiritual paralysis that leads to the neglect of our duties." Father Duffner goes on to add, "The sin of sloth causes one to shun many things because of the sorrow or unpleasantness involved, and to seek many unlawful things as a means of escape from his depressing state; and because of this it begets many other sins." This is exactly the state of mind the protagonists of the early 70s car movies find themselves in. Overwhelmed by the state of the world and the effort required to do something about it, they instead withdraw into the isolation of their car interiors, fall into reckless unlawfulness, and eventually lose their souls. Even Hoover, goaded by Darlene, seems to be on this route throughout most of Eat My Dust. But at the end of the day, when confronted with the harshness of reality, rather than follow Darlene into hopeless escapism, Hoover just gets a job.

And that's what we as Christians have to do sometimes when spiritual apathy begins to creep in. Father Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. advises that "to recover the spirit of faith, enthusiasm and generosity in the love of God, we must daily courageously impose little sacrifices on ourself in those matters in which we are weakest... The first steps are costly, but after a bit the task becomes easier... even when sensible joy is lacking." This is the exact point which dozens of better written, more intelligent blogs have made when addressing the recent Time Magazine article regarding Mother Teresa and her decades long struggle with feelings of spiritual loneliness. She didn't withdraw into herself and succumb to Sloth, she did the job, and tens of thousands of Indians are glad she did. Whether being fueled by joy or something even deeper, the Christian spirit can be pretty hard to stop once it gains momentum. Like Hoover said, it would take running into a wall or something. We just have to keep in mind that in Christianity the wall we most often run into is ourselves.

(I just linked Mother Teresa to Eat My Dust. This is either one of my proudest moments or deepest shames.)

THE STINGER

Hey, if you think I over-analyzed a simple carsploitation movie, then you might want to avoid the DOCUMENT OF THE PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR THE PASTORAL CARE OF MIGRANTS AND ITINERANT PEOPLE: GUIDELINES FOR THE PASTORAL CARE OF THE ROAD issued by the Vatican on June 19, 2007. (Note to The Holy See: Please consider reassigning whatever bishop is in charge of coming up with document titles.) The study included sections on "The Pastoral Ministry for the Liberation of Street Women", "The Pastoral Care of Street Children", and "The Pastoral Care of the Homeless (Tramps)". But the only section that really got any press at all (other than a few indignant yelps over the use of the word Tramps) was "The Pastoral Care of Road Users" due to a small sub-section which stated, "We have drawn up a special “decalogue” for road users, in analogy with the Lord’s Ten Commandments." Yep, the Vatican issued a Ten Commandments for Road Users. (Fortunately, most of the jokes which followed were fairly good-natured.) Here they are.

1. You shall not kill.
2. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.
3. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.
4. Be charitable and help your neighbour in need, especially victims of accidents.
5. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.
6. Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.
7. Support the families of accident victims.
8. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.
9. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.
10. Feel responsible towards others.

These "commandments" seem so obvious (like the recent award-winning warning label found on a laundromat washing machine which read, “Do not put any person in this washer”) that you would think even a journalist would understand them. However, during a press conference on the document, one reporter asked the President of the Council just when could a car become an occasion of sin. Cardinal Renato Martino replied curtly, "When a car is used as a place for sin." Somebody please send that guy a copy of Eat My Dust so he'll know what the Cardinal was talking about.

Michael Bay's "Super Mario Bros."

UPDATED: Now using a video-player with quality that doesn't suck!

What if the director of "Transformers" applied his, er.. "skills?" to movie remakes of OTHER beloved characters? Imagine no more...



Personal Challenge set with this project: Create something that looked and sounded awful from premise to execution but ALSO looked like an interpretation that might concievably actually get made. I think it came out decently, overall.

REVIEW: War (2007)

The best thing I can say about "War" is that it deserves to be better than it is. While I won't spoil it here, what is probably one of the niftier "Gotcha... and gotcha AGAIN!!" plot twists I can recall for the genre caps off what is otherwise an entirely generic, disposable John Woo knockoff action thriller; and has the effect of making the characters, motivations and story points involved so much more interesting and imbued with such greater potential you wish that the actual product was worthy of it.

The film is a two-way "versus" star-vehicle for Hong Kong action legend Jet-Li and up-and-coming British action star Jason Statham. The two "met" previously in "The One," but as it was made before Statham revealed himself to be a kung-fu virtuoso in his own right the film lacked a proper "Hero versus The Transporter" showdown. Unfortunately, despite implications of the trailers, "War" doesn't quite provide this either- the two share only a single brief-but-brutal exchange of fists (and anything else that isn't nailed down) at the climax -but instead sets them up as opposing forces in a large (and largely incomprehensible) Yakuza vs. Triad crime saga that finds each actor playing to darker, angrier places in their skill-sets. Fans can at least rest-assured that, whatever else is going on in "War" the standard "We must fight! Wait, we're actually on the same side! Let's team up to fight the REAL enemy!" hero/hero fight structure is NOT in play.

Statham is an FBI agent who's partner/best-friend was killed, along with his entire family, by "The Rogue," a martial-arts master Yakuza hitman who no one can catch and who surgically overhauls his face all the time to avoid recognition. Three years later, Statham has morphed into the standard-issue divorced/slovenly/bitter cop dedicated to hunting down Rogue... who has just now resurfaced, his face re-cut into that of Jet Li, in the midst of a stateside Triad/Yakuza war over priceless artifacts. What none of the cops realize is that Rogue, for reasons unknown, seems to be pulling a "Red Harvest" on both gangs. Devon Aoki (middle of my blog banner, the one with the snake) is on hand as a Yakuza princess to give us something to look at when people aren't fighting and/or shooting.

It's all rather basic and unremarkable, building to a pair of twist-reveals that succeed in redrawing the map of what you thought the movie was about but don't quite make the first two acts "better." At best, it's enough to make it an interesting action movie footnote.