Silent Night (2023) Film Review

Sometimes in life you just have to feel sorry for Joel Kinneman. I mean the man has a knack for picking projects that sound good and safe on paper but just don’t work on the planet Earth. I mean this poor sod has been in the robocop remake (2014), both Suicide Squad films (2016 and 2021) as well as Chil 44 (2015) That one starred Tom Hardy and was based on a really good, really solid book.
Check it out if you need a detective thriller to read one holiday.
It’s set in Stalins Russia.
And today this poor unfortunate soul has agreed to be in Silent Night. Which whilst plot wise is basically your bog standard Punisher origin story movie that you’ve seen a million times before – dead kid, dad swears revenge, becomes badass, police are useless and or corrupt, big firefight at the end with evil drugs gang – Except it completely screws it up.
All right so the first interesting idea is that this film has virtually no spoken dialogue. Which I find interesting but there’s nothing really done with it beyond demonstrate that this type of film so is basic that it doesn’t NEED dialogue for everyone to understand what’s going on.
Or it’s that the characters or so thin that you could shine a light through them with a 2 watt lightbulb but that’s neither here nor there.
No, I have a spurious unresearched feeling that what attracted poor sweet Joel to this film was the director.
John Woo.
Now for any energy drink addicted, Tik-Tokking, vaping Fortnight playing 12 year olds currently scratching their heads in confusion, John Woo made films before the dark times, before Iron Man in 2008. Films like Face/off, Broken Arrow and Mission Impossible 2 amongst others.
Films with panache, style, doves!- Ask your dad if you don’t get that one.
And then there’s also the fact that our Punisher wannabe learns all of his bad assness not from being a former Ranger, Seal, Marine etc.
He gets it all from YouTube.
So… you see where my head was at, right?
A fairly solid actor with a decent grounding in action films with comedic leanings, a director who made erm… interesting action films back in the day, a basic, tried-and-true story structure full of one dimensional characters..
I mean the freaking John Wick films were partially based upon his work and here he comes back to show why he’s the master!!!!
Except at some point in the last few years he’s had a bash on the head and forgotten everything or been replaced by his evil twin or he was replaced by an alien clone or ….
Because this went down faster than my script editors lead balloon juggling “cancel me if you dare” stand up comedy routine on the titanic.
Let’s start with the basics – The pacing sucks. There’s only one major fight scene towards the end by then most people have checked out. It takes way too long to get going, there’s normally a fight scene at the mid-point to show everyone that now everything’s getting going but there isn’t, the fact that there’s no spoken dialogue means that by default you don’t really care about anyone, the villains are just cartoonishly evil, there’s only really one fight scene in the entire film, our lead learns to fight via YouTube videos and there’s only one major if very dull fight scene.
And speaking of our ‘badass via YouTube’ lead, he’s established early on to be an engineer of some description (no dialogue means no exposition. Or the terrible Marvel quips that are ruining cinema.) So I was wondering if he was ging to come up with some kind of budget gadgets- smoke bombs and the like but no. We get one tripwire and that’s your lot. Oh, sorry, you wanted something fun, exciting and interesting to happen in this film one fight scene? No. Just frowny faced people very seriously shooting each other in silence.
Oh, and this film is also very depressing to look at and somehow left a nasty taste in my mouth.
But my main issue with this film is simply that… It plays it all straight.
I mean all the ingredients are here for a really cool, dark satire of the standard Punisher origin story, no dialogue because we know it all by heart, our lead is a no-one who learns all his skills online- our villains are an evil drug gang who know the local train timetable by heart.
Now imagine what someone with a twinkle in their eye and their tongue in their cheek could do with that. Hell, imagine what the JOHN WOO of 15 years ago could have done with that! Instead it’s just this dark, miserable little film where it’s dialogue-free gimmick quickly becomes tiresome because the soundtrack isn’t very good, the fight scenes show no marital arts, swords (which I’m 100% certain a dingus who got all his training online would defiantly have done.) Gadgets, or anything but guns, which quickly becomes tiresome. Even the final battle was a snoozefest.
So yeah, Silent Night is an amazing idea for a dark satire which plays it completely straight whilst at the same time being dull, uninteresting, slow and mean spirited film being made by a director who seems to have regressed to being a straight-to-streaming hack for hire.
Just watch Violent Night instead (2022)
And please, if you see Joel Kinneman in a bar, buy him a pint. Poor sods earned it. And needs to fire his agent.

My Score- Skip It

The Punisher (1989 film) Film Review

You would think that if there’s one superhero that action films would make work, ESPECIALLY 80’s action films it would be Frank Castle aka The Punisher.

I mean this is a guy with no superpowers, no advanced tech, not even really much of a costume when you come to think of it. He’s got  backstory that can be very quickly explained and the film would basically come down to ‘guy with gun versus a man who has lots of people with guns under his command.’ Which seems like half of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s back catalog.

Now, it’s true that he hasn’t quite got the rogues category of other superheros because he’s not so much with the no-killing rule and as a result doesn’t have that many returning foils. But in that, there’s freedom to create your own villain, also, Castle’s a fairly limited character  even Punisher co-creator Gerry Conway has stated that “He’s a great Rorschach test. What’s given him some sustainability is, you can put into him whatever you want, as opposed to Spider-Man, who truly is who he is and shouldn’t be changed. The Punisher is a thin character on his own merits, but that allows for a lot of interpretations and different angles of approach.”

Which is kind of awesome. The Punisher is a relatively known character who offers a relative amount of creative freedom and the ability to really make the character your own. Also, given that Castle is known for being extremely violent, you don’t need to tone your ideas down for the kids or aim for that accursed 12a certificate.

Now imagine what you could do with that. No need for a high budget, relative freedom to do what you like with the central character, pretty much complete freedom with a villain and in 1989, they took all of this and did….

Well they didn’t do much.

I knew I was in trouble during the opening credits when firstly it seemed to be trying to hypnotize me then just showing loads of random repeated images when a better idea would be to perhaps set the scene? Give us the background on our lead since you apparently changed Castles backstory for reasons that really don’t stand up if you examine them in then any detail.

The story that’s being told has the potential for the whole actions=consequences/ you create your own monsters theme that comic books and films seem to love. We pick up 5 years after Castle has become The Punisher, where he has weakened the Mafia to such an extent that the Yakuza have decided to take over. It’s an interesting idea and could have been used to analyse the actions of The Punisher and examine if his actions are helping or hurting his city. (Which I don’t think is ever named in the film but i’m jsut going to assume is New York).

Except it doesn’t do that.

In fact, were the violence to be toned down slightly, this film would be a pretty solid kids film, the hero has a wacky sidekick (an alcoholic ex-actor who speaks in rhyme for absolutely no reason at all) The Mafia all seem to work in one of Blofelds old lairs and the film seems to end quite naturally with an image that was only a freeze frame and goofy sound effect from being a kids movie.

It would also have meant the film had naturally ended after about an hour but then the film just kept chugging along for a second climax that I neither wanted nor asked for.

And I wouldn’t have minded so much but the film was just so dull. You would think that a film about a one man army waging war against two massive criminal organisations would be interesting except it just isn’t.

The constant unending fight scenes are dull, stiff and repetitive. They tease you with the promise of ninjas but that comes to nothing, even the end fight scene was dull and asked us to have an emotional reaction that the film hadn’t earned. Also, i’m fairly sure that one decision made in the third act goes completely against The Punisher being this guy who only sees things in black and white.

To be honest, you could have removed the Yakuza idea or saved it for a sequel as the Mafias leader has an idea to unite all the families into a supermafia which is thwarted basically by accident in the first thirty minutes and then even worse was re-used as the plot for dire 2011 Green Hornet film that no-one seems to remember.

The dialogues shocking, interesting ideas go no-where, Castle only uses each weapon once for some reason which makes no sense at all and it’s just no fun to watch. I mean Dolph Lundgren is doing what he can but as a man who I think is meant to be tormented by what he’s doing and his inability to protect his family but that’s too big an ask for Lundgren which is a shame. He was perfect as Ivan Drago but as someone who’s meant to have some degree of depth he’s just wrong. He’s barely passable in the action scenes but their just so dull and unmemorable- despite being in interesting locations that are full of possibilities the film uses none of them. But what do you expect from the Director of Dead Heat, a 1988 American buddy cop action zombie comedy… which might just be the most amazing collection of genres I’ve ever seen in a single film.

Note to self, watch Dead Heat sometime…

Back on topic, The Punisher is a punishment to watch. It’s characters are flat, it’s ideas wasted, the action relentless boring and unimaginative, the dialogue shocking and it’s opening sequence gave me a headache. There’s a million films that have taken a similar idea and done it a million times better.

Most starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

My Score- Skip It 

 

Anna (2019) Review

I get that after your lifelong passion project (Valerian and the city of a thousand Planets) turns into one of the biggest bombs in cinematic history you might want to return to your cinematic roots and make something low budget to calm your nerves, check you’ve still got ‘it’ and stop your company from collapsing under a mountain of debt.

But there is returning to your cinematic roots and there is reheating old leftovers and Luc, buddy, this is some serious reheating.

But hey, I liked La Femme Nikita as well. Hell, I even stuck with the tv show for a couple of seasons but this… this is just copy paste. Just swap out the Centre for the KGB, and your pretty much good to go.

Now, for those of you who haven’t seen Nikita or even last year’s Red Sparrow (and on that one I can’t blame you) the plots simple. Set at some point during the cold war for no reason that I could work out, Anna is well, according to the blurb Beneath a woman’s striking beauty lies a secret that will unleash her indelible strength and skill to become one of the most feared assassins on the planet.

I’ll take that as a plot description because even though this film has a near 2 hour run-time (When a film this basic should be no more than 100 minutes at the longest) I genuinely have no idea what the plot is, why almost everyone did what they did or even who they were. I mean, how do you waste Dame Helen Mirren? I didn’t even think that was possible.

Now, as far as I could work out (and trust me, it wasn’t easy) the plot involves a beautiful Russian girl with no personality being forced into becoming one of the USSRs top assassins and then she enbarks on a cat and mouse game with CIA man (Cillian Murphy) whilst desperately trying to get out of the game without receiving a fatal dose of lead poisoning. Or Polonium. Or Cyanide. Or having a ‘boating accident’ since her cover is as one of the world’s top models. Because that makes sense.

In reality,it’s a mess. There’s only two real fight scenes (which weirdly enough featured pretty heavily in the trailer) , then everyone sits.around talking, some… people on set get shot but it never seems to cost our lead character anything. There’s one fairly major character, who, in the right hands could have acted as Anna’s conscience, a link back to her humanity but instead is just sort of… there. Remove them completely and the film wouldn’t suffer at all.

Also, I get that in spy films the odd flashback can be useful in helping us know how a trick was done, they are best used sparingly. Here? Their used so often that I was half wondering if the scriptwriter was on such a tight deadline that instead of rewriting some scenes, it was quicker and easier to just put in a flashback explaining how this was all part of some grand plan. It got do bad that you could make a drinking game out of them!

We never get a handle on our lead character and certainly not on any of the side characters. There’s two passable action scenes but scenes that should have been tense, weren’t. People that should have had depth, didn’t and its way, way too long.

I know a film of this type can work because it has in the past. But here? Even with the flashbacks it’s completely predictable and with a few rewrites it could have been so much better.

The best I can say is it’s made enough money to temporarily keep the creditors from Luc Beesons door.

My Score- Skip It.

Mile 22 Review

Mile 22 is such a simple premise for an action film that it’s almost impossible to screw up. All Mark Whalberg and his team of highly trained redshirts have to do is transport a corrupt cop from the American embassy to an airstrip through an entire city full of people trying to kill them so he can give them a file which will stop a bad thing from happening. Probably. The film doesn’t seem to care about it’s plot and neither do I.

How simple is that?

Hell, the corrupt cop is even the guy from The Raid?  You remember, it’s that awesome film that plays like Die Hard on steroids and utterly killed Dredd, which had a similar premise and went into production first but lost the release war because of VFX touch-ups which meant that it looked unoriginal and…..

Focus Miles.

Stop talking about things that actually interest you and instead talk about Mile 22. 

Ok, so Wahlberg runs a team called Overwatch who are sent in to do things that the government would rather not get caught doing and their watched over by John Malkovich who has the code-name ‘Mother’ which isn’t creepy at all. Or giving me flashbacks to last years god knows what starring Jennifer Laurence. Malkovich is accompanied everywhere by his collection of bobbing heads of Presidents past and present; their fake, plastic grins casting a knowing eye over clandestine killing. If I was being generous I might say that there’s some sort of satirical point being made about Americas habit of nodding things through without waiting for international backing, or support, or legality whilst maintaining  the cheerful idealism of America whilst the more unsavoury realities of its actions are made explicit.

But the films not smart enough to make that point and neither has director Peter Berg done anything along those lines so I’ll just move on.

Besides, you didn’t come to see Mile 22 (which is how far their convoy has to go before the end credits can start) to hear about satire on geopolitics or how the characters are flatter than a policeman trying to get a runaway steamroller to stop at a red light. You want to know how exciting the scenes where the bang bangs go into the bad man and make him fall over are.

And, their fine. There’s a nice scene where the Dredd killer gets to show off his moves in an almost Jackie Chanesque sequence and enough gunfights, car chases and running to keep you vaguely focused but there’s nothing spectacular or unique or even that memorable. The action sequences are predictable and there’s just this vein of gritty nihilism running through the whole thing. Which normally I wouldn’t complain about, but this is a film where a bit more gloss and some slightly more outlandish stunts would have helped. Also, the editing on these scenes sucks. Seriously, how hard is it to watch Heat a few times until you understand how this time of action should be shot? I mean, allegedly they use those gunfights whilst training US Marines!

Sorry, distracted again.

I recommend not trying to follow the plot beyond the time limited escort mission that the trailers have made you think it as it’s a convoluted mess that exists purely for sequel bait and could have been removed completely without impacting the film in the slightest.

But it’s also the blindingly obvious type of confusing mess.

How their going to turn this into a ‘ multi-media series’ baffles me. This is the kind of ‘world-building’ that makes the DCEU/ Dark Universe look competent.

As an action film it’s a dull, grey, mess full of one dimensional characters laboring under a plot that’s too twisty for it’s own good full of action scenes that have been done better. As a starting point for the Mileverse? I’ll pass.

But what did I expect? The whole franchise has been going downhill since 8 Mile

My Score- Skip It. 

 

 

The Hitmans Bodyguard Review

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably have to say it again.

The United Kingdom has severe anti-gun laws. Whilst it is not impossible to acquire a firearm in London it would take you a long time to build up the trust required to be given access to a single pistol. Getting hold of enough rifles to launch a small coup? Not going to happen. There’s a reason that London’s gangs use knives and acid instead of guns.

Also, if your trying to get from the UK to Amsterdam in a very short time frame, maybe taking an 9 hour ferry ride isn’t the best idea? Even if you are getting a lift with a bunch of singing nuns.

But, if I started applying logic to this film then it’s going to fall apart completely. Because this film is a blast from start to finish, it’s a live action cartoon not meant to be taken seriously in any way shape or form. Could I sit here and pick hole after hole after hole in it?

Yes, yes I could. But why would I want to?

After months of CGI filled ‘blockbusters’ it’s so refreshing to see a film with actual stunts, actual explosions and a complete knowledge of the fact that it is what it is.

The plots very, very simple.   Ryan Reynolds has to get Samuel L. Jackson to the Hague so he can put Gary Oldman in prison for appearing in Robocop. But Oldman has unlimited access to people who flunked out of Stormtrooper academy for failing their marksmanship tests.

Well, either that or our two main characters are so indestructible that the bullets are hitting them and their just patching up faster than the human eye can see. Because after about 20 minutes I figured out that there was absolutely no danger in any of the fight scenes and from then on whilst I enjoyed the film it did get a slight downgrade.

Call me old fashioned but I like my heroes to have a chance of being killed when their being shot at by a million bullets. Because after a while it an start to get a little bit tedious. And the run-time could do with 15 minutes being chopped off as towards the end I was starting to feel slightly bludgeoned.

But Reynolds and Jackson have amazing chemistry and some of the best scenes are just them, sitting in a car throwing barbs at each other. And I wished that they were longer as they represented a chance for the headache I was starting to develop to start going away.

I would also like to recommend for a knighthood whichever genius decided to hire Salma Hayek for her role which is little more than a glorified cameo where she either sits in a cell hurling some very creative and funny abuse at anyone unlucky enough to wander into her eye-line or wrecking stuff up in a low-rent bar.

And  Élodie Yung is there as well. She gets a nice participation trophy as well as another thank you from me for giving me a break from the relentless action.

Look, this film is not some deep think piece on the human condition, it’s Shoot ‘Em Up blended with The Nice Guys and The Blues Brothers. The films plot twists  which it thinks are so amazing and unforeseen could all be predicted in the first ten minutes. But I mustn’t fall into the trap of over-intellectualising. This is just instantly disposable, artistically worthless, expertly crafted trash, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Just don’t take your mum, this film has Tarantino levels of swearing.

My Score- See It