ANGEL HAS FALLEN (2019)
Having saved the President of the United States in Olympus Has Fallen and then saved the President a second time in the sequel London Has Fallen, foul-mouthed Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is back to save the President again in Angel Has Fallen. But this one switches things up, as the President is no longer Aaron Eckhart as Benjamin Asher. Eckhart isn't in this movie. This time the President is Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman), a character fans of the Has Fallen series are already familiar with. Trumbull was the Speaker of the House (and became Acting President) during the events of Olympus and was then Vice President in London. (Asher needed a new VP in the second movie because his original one was killed in Olympus.)
Directed by Ric Roman Waugh from a screenplay he wrote with Robert Mark Kamen and Matt Cook (from a story by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, who had screenplay credits on both previous movies), Angel is also different from its predecessors due to the fact that it's a "wrongly accused man tries to clear his name while on the run" type of movie. That wrongly accused man is Banning.
As we quickly find out, Trumbull is vehemently against using private contractors to help the U.S. military in combat. He is tired of the country giving out money to people who are fighting in a quest for fortune and glory rather than out of a dedication to the nation. Trumbull's policies are having a financial impact on private contractors, and one of them decides to strike back. That's Wade Jennings (Danny Huston) of Salient Global, who uses his company's weaponry and employees who are apparently fine with murdering anyone as long as it pays to make an attempt on Trumbull's life. Banning's entire team of eighteen Secret Service agents are wiped out in a drone attack, but he survives and manages to save Trumbull in the process - although Trumbull is injured and goes into a coma.
Banning is framed for the attack on Trumbull, and Jada Pinkett Smith plays the FBI agent who becomes convinced that he's guilty after it's found out that the drones were programmed not to harm Banning and that he just received a payment of $10 million from a Russian account. With the FBI and Salient Global mercenaries on his trail, Banning has to go on the run and stay free long enough to bring Jennings to justice.
Adding complications into the story: Banning and Jennings are old friends, and while on the run Banning seeks the help of his reclusive father Clay (Nick Nolte), a Vietnam veteran who suffers from PTSD and walked out on his family when Banning was a kid. Angel Has Fallen also adds in a little more depth by showing that all this action hero business is catching up with Banning - he has migraines, dizziness, insomnia, and a spinal injury. He's considering accepting a promotion to Director of the Secret Service, a desk job. He still wants to be in the field, but it might not be physically possible anymore.
Of course, during the film Banning still proves to be quite capable of surviving insane situations while taking down dozens of enemies. Clay takes some down himself, especially in a really fun sequence where it's revealed that his mountainside home has security measures some might consider excessive.
The Has Fallen movies can be written off as mindless action flicks, but I'm glad there are still movies like this getting made. These are the kind of movies I grew up watching with my father. Although I wasn't as fond of London Has Fallen, Olympus Has Fallen was an entertaining Die Hard knock-off and Angel Has Fallen is a cool follow-up. It's nice to see these throwback style action movies coming out, dazzling viewers with shootouts, fist fights, and pyrotechnics, and being successful enough at the box office that they can come out every three years.
Angel Has Fallen did have to tinker with continuity a little, though. Radha Mitchell wasn't available to reprise the role of Banning's wife, so she was replaced by Piper Perabo. The character doesn't have much to do anyway, she just looks different in Angel than she did in Olympus and London.
GUARDIAN ANGEL (1994)
Director Richard W. Munchkin's contribution to the oeuvre of action heroine Cynthia Rothrock is known by two different titles, Guardian Angel and Beyond Justice, and while Guardian Angel seems to be the more popular of the two I spent a large portion of the film thinking that Beyond Justice, dopey though it may be, might be the more fitting one. That's because it takes the movie 40 minutes to get around to the point where the Guardian Angel title even makes sense for it. That's when the story written by Jacobsen Hart finds Rothrock's character taking a job as a bodyguard, thus making her the guardian angel of sorts. Then another explanation confirms Guardian Angel is the proper title for the film 69 minutes into its 95 minute running time. They sure held off on that.
Whatever the title is, those first 40 minutes are solid, following Rothrock, playing police officer Christine McKay, as she embarks on a relentless mission to bring down a counterfeiting ring. This mission involves her either participating in or causing physical altercations, shootouts, and chases. Unfortunately, she loses both her partner and her fiance along the way. Definitely not a guardian angel yet at this point.
The criminal who kills McKay's fiance is Nina Lindell, played by Lydie Denier, who gets caught and sentenced to prison. Nina is said to make her way through life going from millionaire to millionaire, no matter how those millions were made, and one of her rich exes is Lawton Hobbs (Daniel McVicar), who refuses to pay for her lawyer. Nina swears revenge - and it's Hobbs' bad luck that she ends up escaping from jail six months later.
Watching Guardian Angel / Beyond Justice is a good time, because it's exactly what it needed to be: a fun and action-packed movie with plenty of moments in which Rothrock beats up enemies with her fists and feet. Then it ends with a great little exchange between McKay and Hobbs that would make James Bond proud.
AQUAMAN (2018)
Aquaman is a DC Comics character I know next to nothing about, beyond the fact that he has the ability to communicate with the creatures of the sea and has been mocked mercilessly over the decades for having such a "lame" power. I saw him in episodes of Super Friends when I was a kid, have read a few comic book issues he was in, and saw him in the Justice League team-up movie a couple years back... a movie that I barely remember at this point. So by the time I decided to check out director James Wan's Aquaman movie, I didn't have many pre-conceived notions about what an Aquaman movie should show me.
The movie begins in 1985, when Atlanna (Nicole Kidman), Queen of the sunken land of Atlantis, washes up outside of a lighthouse in Maine where a guy named Tom (Cliff Curtis) is working as the lighthouse keeper. Atlanna was injured while fleeing an arranged marriage, so Tom takes her in and nurses her back to health, the sea dweller and the regular human fall in love, and a child is conceived. That child will grow up to be known as Aquaman, but at first he's just Arthur Curry. Atlanna and Tom's domestic bliss is suddenly interrupted by the arrival of some Atlantean stormtroopers one day, so Atlanna is forced to return to Atlantis to keep her family safe.
Jump ahead to modern day and Arthur (played by Jason Momoa) has taken on the Aquaman hero gig, policing the seas and taking on bad guys like Jesse and David Kane (Michael Beach and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) a father/son pirate team he battles in his first action sequence of the film, when he interrupts them as they're hijacking a submarine. I have to say, Aquaman didn't get off to a good start for me, since this sequence ends with Jesse being trapped in the flooding submarine while David pleads for Aquaman to help him save his father. Aquaman leaves the man to drown right in front of his son... a bit too harsh as far as I'm concerned. The Kanes did kill innocent people, as Aquaman says in response to their cries for help, but how about letting the authorities deal with them? Seems Aquaman is trying hard to seem like a badass after being picked on for so many years.
Jesse does drown, but since Aquaman didn't make sure David was apprehended he will be back to cause more trouble for him later in the movie. David even takes on a supervillain name, calling himself Black Manta. About twenty minutes after Aquaman leaves Jesse to drown, his own dad Tom gets caught in a tsunami and would have died if helpful Atlantean Mera (Amber Heard) didn't show up on the scene and use some Atlantean magic to resuscitate him. The moment when Arthur sees that Tom has drowned is some earned karma. And yet he doesn't regret letting Jesse die until Black Manta puts Mera in danger.
The tsunami is just one of many unusual sea events that start happening all around the world. Areas begin to flood, decades of pollution are removed from the sea and thrown back onto the land, warships are tossed out of the water. These things are being done by an Atlantean named Orm (Patrick Wilson) who seeks to become the Ocean Master and lead the underwater nations in a war against the surface dwellers. As it turns out, Orm is Arthur's half-brother; Atlanna was forced into that arranged marriage after all, and Orm was conceived. So not only does this movie ask you to believe that Jason Momoa, who was born in 1979, was actually born in 1986 or so, it also wants you to believe that Patrick Wilson, born in 1973, is a few years younger than him, and playing more than fifteen years younger than his real age in this movie. It's tough to suspend disbelief that much, even in a movie that goes all-in on the comic book fantasy element of Atlantis.
Aquaman is not the kind of comic book adaptation that felt it needed to be grounded in reality to appeal to audiences. Wan and writers Geoff Johns, Will Beall, and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick were perfectly content with setting a large amount of film in colorful undersea kingdoms, where actors like Wilson, Heard, Willem Dafoe, and Dolph Lundgren look really silly while having conversations underwater. The oceans nations are populated with all sorts of strange aquatic creatures, including monstrous things called the Trench that Wan is developing a horror movie spin-off around and even a drum-playing octopus. The underwater stuff in this movie really reminded me of the sort of worlds seen in Star Wars movies - the Atlanteans even get around in weapon-equipped vehicles very reminiscent of Star Wars vehicles.
Arthur has little interest in being involved with Atlantis, the land that stole his mother away from him, but he challenges Orm for the throne in an effort to thwart his half-brother's war plans. The fact that his love interest Mera is being forced into an arranged marriage with Orm gives Arthur even more reason to want to defeat his brother. To do so, he's going to have to get his hands on a legendary trident. A globetrotting adventure to locations like the Sahara Desert and Sicily, Italy is required to locate that object.
Even after watching Aquaman, I'm still not sure that I'm familiar with the character of Aquaman, because I get the feeling that Momoa's hard-drinking dimwitted surfer dude portrayal of the character isn't quite accurate to how he has been portrayed in the source material since his 1941 debut. Still, I got some enjoyment out of watching the ridiculous, over-the-top, candy-coated movie that Wan made here. Although the 143 minute running time could have been trimmed down, the film moved along quickly and was goofy as hell, so it was fun to sit through.
THE STREET FIGHTER (1974)
In 1993, screenwriter Quentin Tarantino and director Tony Scott had the lead characters in their collaboration True Romance meet at a triple feature of martial arts movies: The Street Fighter, Return of the Street Fighter, and Sister Street Fighter. Clips from The Street Fighter were even shown in the film. And from the moment I first saw True Romance, I was determined to watch these Street Fighter movies someday. It took some time, since I was a kid who didn't have internet access in those early '90s days, but eventually I did get a chance to see those three movies (plus The Street Fighter's Last Revenge). And it was thanks to Tarantino, who helped bring that Street Fighter quadrilogy to VHS in 1997. I scored a copy of that VHS set as soon as it was available, and after watching The Street Fighter I could understand why it got the honor of being featured in True Romance.
Directed by Shigehiro Ozawa, The Street Fighter is an awesome martial arts action flick that was apparently the first movie to ever be rated X simply for violence. That was an overreaction on the MPAA's part, but it does deliver some fantastic moments of violence for the viewer's pleasure, as the titular street fighter makes a bloody mess of his enemies. Blood splatters, eyes are gouged out, a man gets punched in the mouth and spits out multiple teeth, an attempted rapist gets his package ripped off in our hero's bare hand. There's even a moment where the film switches into x-ray vision as we watch a person get punched in the top of the head. There's absolutely no reason for the x-ray vision because nothing actually happens to the person's skull, it doesn't crack open or anything, it's just a cool stylistic touch. The payoff comes when the movie goes back into regular vision and the fellow who got punched in the head spews a huge gush of blood from his mouth.
Sonny Chiba plays the street fighter himself, Takuma "Terry" Tsurugi, a man who makes his money pulling off criminal needs. He's actually a total bastard. He is introduced impersonating a priest so he can bust a man named Tateki "Junjo" Shikenbaru (Masashi Ishibashi) out of prison before he can be executed. By using an "ancient technique" that involves punching the guy in the right spot, Terry puts Junjo into a temporary coma from lack of oxygen. Junjo collapses when he's standing on the gallows, about to get a rope put around his neck. Even though the authorities were about to kill him anyway, they're obligated to rush him to the hospital to deal with this medical emergency. Terry and his pal Rakuda, a.k.a. Ratnose (Gerald Yamada) hijack the ambulance on the way, and Junjo is free.
Terry was hired to bust Junjo out of jail by the guy's brother and sister, but once the job is done he finds out they could only afford the advance they paid him, they don't have the rest of the money. When Terry finds out they can't pay up, a find breaks out, during which Junjo's brother tries to hit Terry with a flying kick and instead accidentally goes smashing through Terry's apartment window, falling to his death. Then we learn how much of a bastard Terry really is; he gets the money he's owed by selling Junjo's sister (Sue Shiomi) to a criminal organization. He collects some cash and she's taken off to be drugged and raped. This is our protagonist. But you don't have to like him or condone his actions to enjoy watching him kick ass and destroy his enemies.
The criminal kingpin Terry sells the sister to is in league with the Yakuza and the mob, and they try to bring Terry in on their scheme to abduct a young woman named Sarai (Doris Nakajima), who has just inherited an oil company after the sudden death of her father... whose death was assisted by a mobster. The plan is to hold her hostage and force her to sign the oil company over to that mobster. When Terry declines the offer to be involved, the conspirators decide he knows too much to be allowed to live.
Now that he's as much of a target as Sarai is, Terry volunteers to be her protector. Since Sarai's uncle was friends with Terry's late father, who molded Terry into an invincible fighter by teaching him a combination of Chinese boxing and Japanese karate, he gets the job even though Sarai is disgusted by him and his animalistic, violent behavior.
The Street Fighter is packed with brutal action scenes, as Terry never goes very long without finding someone to fight with. He fights Junjo's brother, he fights through an entire martial arts school to prove himself capable of protecting Sarai, he fights the seemingly endless number of henchmen and assassins working for the Yakuza and mob. And of course he ends up fighting Junjo himself, after the escaped convict finds his sister in a brothel and aims to earn her freedom by killing Terry. Chiba brings an incredible energy to the fight scenes; it's clear that Terry has a powerful rage coursing through his body as his faces his opponents, and he takes this anger out on their bodies.
The violence that earned The Street Fighter an X makes the movie a whole lot of fun to watch, and it's all set to a cool, unforgettable score composed by Toshiaki Tsushima.
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