Still, squint a little and pretend this is actually a Huntress movie in disguise, and - boom - suddenly it's kinda appreciable, particularly after Birds of Prey. derivative.įor 100 minutes though it's pretty, well-paced action entertainment on a visual, visceral level, even if at the end of it all you'll likely feel just like Kate does: haunted by the fact that she's looking for that all-elusive closure, the kind of satisfaction which everybody ultimately knows could only possibly come from being in another, better film. It's not even the fact that it feels like Leon, Man on Fire, Crank, and Mel Gibson's Edge of Darkness were all put in a blender with some luminescent gel and a female Japanese hard-rock band called Band-Maid, but it's the fact that they've already tried a couple of times to mix all those movies together before ( 24 Hours to Live, 3 Days to Kill), and yet another iteration, Japanese-bent notwithstanding, can't quite escape that increasingly feeling of being really quite. Still, despite the vivid neon-drenched stylisation - one sequence going full Dredd in terms of slo-mo action - and the unleashed violence and the performances, it is occasionally hard to ignore the frequent reminders that you've seen so much of this before, better. Sure, it would have been sublime to have Takeshi Kitano in the latter's role (we have to make do with a billboard, which is still a nice touch), but that's mostly because every film could do with more Kitano. Sticking her with a young sidekick for half the feature was a little thankless, and giving Woody Harrelson a 'generic mentor-with-a-twist' role was equally unkind, but the Japanese cast do well to make up for this, with Tadanobu Satō (utterly wasted in Mortal Kombat) and Jun Kunimura ( Black Rain, Kill Bill, and the indestructible tea-shop killer at the beginning of Hard Boiledl) great in their respective parts. Her blows - given and taken - are laced with LFE impact, her kicks well-placed to the knees, and when she uses a knife, she doesn't just stab once, it's three times to the neck, then pull the blade out lengthwise to make sure you get the job done. Of the recent spate of actresses who have embarked upon an action surge of this ilk - Kate Beckinsale's Jolt, Jessica Chastain's Ava, and some Besson-muse supermodel's Anna - Winstead is comfortably the most convincing in this kind of role, patently indestructible (notwithstanding being poisoned) but not necessarily super-powered, taking a hell of a lot of damage on her bloody, brutal journey. Then there's Mary Elizabeth Winstead, for whom this must have been a cathartic trip, letting loose on everything that her Birds of Prey character of Huntress really should have been, getting taken apart piece by piece as she endures one hell of a painful 24 hours just to get some vengeance-fuelled closure. it feels like Leon, Man on Fire, Crank, and Mel Gibson's Edge of Darkness were all put in a blender with some luminescent gel and a female Japanese hard-rock band called Band-Maid Slap a women's name on it as the title, and boom, we're good to go! What's the latest target then? The Luc Besson-scripted, Kevin Costner-starring, Liam Neeson-style actioner, 3 Days to Kill, itself a generic splice of a dozen better ideas from a clutch of far better movies (Besson's own Leon, Man on Fire, Crank.), and which has already been recycled again with Ethan Hawke's 24 Hours To Live. Like we ever needed more generic written-by-Besson- style action movies, with or without women stars. Rather than impressive efforts, like a solid riff on John Wick with Charlize Theron's Atomic Blonde, or backdooring Theron's Furiosa into stealing the show in Mad Max: Fury Road, instead now filmmakers appear intent on revisiting ideas from Jason Statham's, Liam Neeson's, or indeed Luc Besson's post-2000 back catalogue with a women in the lead. It's somewhat confusing that it is seen as a positive that women now get to star in bad action movies that men would have made in the past, equally badly. Not female-led actioners, but utterly generic and distinctly average-at-best female-led actioners. There's this whole sub-genre that's materialised. Mary Elizabeth Winstead commits to this bloody and brutal neon-lit manga-style romp through the Yakuza underworld, which tries its damnedest to feel different even if it's ultimately pretty familiar.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |