Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the fall season now fully underway, it seems the community has already settled on Frieren as the current must-watch production, earning such praise that I’m already feeling inclined to see what all the fuss is about. In the meantime, I’m currently catching up on Vinland Saga, and have already screened and thoroughly enjoyed the preposterous first episode of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You. Along with a great sense of genre-savvy humor, 100 Girlfriends understands the secret underlying the most powerful of harems: that it is the protagonist who must seem most lovable of all, not any of his/her prospective paramours. Anyway, I’ll have more on 100 Girlfriends when my post arrives, but for now, let’s chow down on a fresh selection of films!
With my curiosity piqued by the recent advertisements for the franchise’s fourth installment, I decided to check out the original The Expendables, and see what the general deal is with this star-bloated throwback of a franchise. The Expendables is clearly calling back towards the ‘80s heyday of a certain style of macho man action cinema, exemplified by films like Commando and Rambo 2. With Sylvester Stallone at the helm, it’s bristling with a collection of all-time movie heavies, ranging from Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke to Jet Li and Jason Statham. Stallone leads this crew of ne’er-do-wells on a vaguely defined mission in a vaguely defined Central American dictatorship, kicking and shooting and causing as much collateral damage as they can manage in the process.
Honestly, that plot description could also cover Commando or Rambo 2; what matters in these films is not the broad beats of the plot, but the ingenuity of the action choreography and the snappiness of the script. Unfortunately, The Expendables fails to shine on either of these fronts. In spite of its preposterously star-studded cast, the film’s action scenes feel consistently cheap and under-considered; there is little of the dynamic use of terrain and combat hardware that made this film’s clear influences so compelling, with copious CG and a preference for quick cuts over long, set-destroying takes robbing the film of any sense of place or consequence. Characters just walk in from the backlot to reel off their one-liners, and man, those one-liners are bad – our heroes “bond” through quips like “what happened to you?” “I got the shit kicked out of me,” or the ever-tooth-grinding tendency to respond to any expressions of male friendship with some version of “what are you, gay?”
With a script too weak to provide either energy or a convincing sense of camaraderie between our players, the fact that so many big names are cohabiting the screen feels like an entirely missed opportunity. Basically the only relationship that actually works is the central bond between Stallone and Jason Statham, and that falls entirely on Statham’s ability to evoke charisma even within the most emotionally barren of scripts. Rather than a fun adventure with the guys, The Expendables feels like a list of genre conventions checked off by a secondary action unit, a tired encore for a show that never happened. I’m a big fan of many of the names involved, but I have no idea why they made four of these.
We then watched The Stuff, an ‘80s horror-comedy about a snack that kills you. When miners discover a gurgling white paste bubbling up out of the ground, they do what any sensible person would do, and immediately chow down on the mysterious substance. Upon discovering that The Stuff tastes delicious, the paste is swiftly marketed across America, its true origins concealed beyond promises of “low-fat, diet-friendly” good times. Welp, surprise surprise, it turns out The Stuff is both intelligent and evil, if you eat it you become a zombie, and it’s up to our intrepid team of… a corporate saboteur, The Stuff’s marketing director, and a teenage boy to save us.
The Stuff is rambling, ridiculous, and at times barely a professional film, featuring some of the least convincing performances I’ve seen in a wide release (including, unfortunately, our teen lead). It is also a delightful sendup of both ‘80s commercialism and ‘50s monster movies, succeeding as both satire and a genuine horror movie (you really don’t want to know what this stuff does to your body). Perhaps my favorite element of the film was Michael Moriarty’s performance as our heroic saboteur; he treats the potential end of the world with the same bemused curiosity you might reserve for a dog walking on its hind legs, bridging the gap between the film’s horrifying concept and carefree tone. Not an essential film, but certainly an enjoyable one.
Next up was A Better Tomorrow, a seminal John Woo feature that basically set the tone for his balletic action movies, alongside establishing his enduring partnership with Chow Yun-fat. The film also stars Ti Lung and Leslie Cheung as brothers on opposite sides of the law, with all three aimed at a nefarious criminal organization.
After an early career largely focused on martial arts films, A Better Tomorrow was where John Woo established his enduring aesthetic trademarks – the trench coats, the shades, the slow-mo dual-handed gunfire, etcetera. But this early in his career, and without a significant budget to cushion him, his melodramatic flourishes are constrained within a tight crime drama shell, making for a film that feels more effectively gritty than his later American features. Combine that with the convincingly wounded, regret-laden performances of all three leads, and you arrive at a film that somehow grounds hundred-man gunfights in poignant emotional fundamentals, all while looking as cool and confident as anything in Woo’s filmography. An entirely propulsive and rewarding adventure.
With expectations muted by the ill-conceived Chronicles of Riddick, my viewing party then journeyed onward into the series’ third entry, the straightforwardly titled Riddick, and were delighted to discover our concerns immediately addressed. Having demonstrated space opera really doesn’t fit this franchise with its second entry, Riddick returns back to basics, seeing our titular antihero stranded on a hostile planet with two squads of bounty hunters at his heels. Riddick is low to the ground, propulsive, and loyal to the franchise’s key strengths while still finding room for slight innovations – in other words, it is essentially Pitch Black 2.
The film can’t quite evoke the same sense of threat and urgency as the original Pitch Black, largely for reasons outside of its control. Three movies into the series, Riddick is no longer an unknown entity, and there’s no room for misdirects like framing a different character as the film’s protagonist. Instead, Riddick wisely chooses to focus on elements of a Riddick hunt that the original couldn’t, letting us enjoy the security and satisfaction of sitting on Vin Diesel’s shoulder as hapless victims fall to his traps, rather than huddling among those victims ourselves. If the film feels perhaps too loyal to the narrative beats of its predecessor, I can easily forgive that a byproduct of this necessary course-correction. What’s more rewatchable than Pitch Black? Two Pitch Blacks.
