Worth Mentioning - Some of Them Dies About That

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Medieval action, Shudder-inducing horror, and Jack Reacher.

THE PRINCESS (2022)

In many cases, a movie with “Princess” in the title wouldn’t be a draw for me. For example, I still haven’t watched The Princess Diaries, more than twenty years after it was released. Maybe I’ll see it someday, maybe I won’t. I’m fine either way. But when I heard there was an action movie called The Princess and it was produced by Derek Kolstad, writer of Nobody, Die Hart, and the John Wick films (plus episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), this particular “Princess” movie became a release weekend must-see for me. And I’m glad I checked it out, because it turned out to be 94 minutes of violent entertainment. Just the sort of violent entertainment I would expect from something with Kolstad’s name on it.

Joey King plays the Princess of the title, who has backed out of an arranged marriage with an unpleasant fellow named Julius (Dominic Cooper). Julius has retaliated by taking the Princess’s father’s kingdom by force, aided by his whip-wielding right hand woman Moira (Olga Kurylenko) and an army of snarling dimwits. The story plays out like “Die Hard in a medieval castle” – and is quite reminiscent of The Raid and Dredd – as the Princess fights her way through Julius’s army, making her way down from a castle tower to the ground floor, seeking to thwart Julius and reverse the trouble she has caused. The back story about the arranged marriage is told in quick flashbacks between the many fight sequences, and flashbacks also show us why the Princess is so capable in a fight: she wanted to be a knight and received expert combat and martial arts training from Linh (Veronica Ngo) and Khai (Kristofer Kamiyasu).

Screenwriters Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton provided just enough story to explain and justify a whole lot of action, which was nicely brought to the screen by Le-Van Kiet. I wouldn’t call The Princess a great movie, but it’s plenty of fun while it lasts. And Joey King deserves kudos for not only doing something very different than anything she has done before – she’s best known for the Kissing Booth rom-coms these days, and was in The Conjuring as a child – but also for clearly putting a lot of effort into learning all the fight choreography that playing the Princess required. I never thought I’d see her play an ass-kicking fighter, and certainly never expected to see her kick as much ass as she does in The Princess, but she pulled it off.

NIGHT'S END (2022)

Night’s End marks the second collaboration between the Shudder streaming service and director Jennifer Reeder, as Reeder previously helmed the wrap-around story in the anthology film V/H/S/94 – which was a major hit for Shudder when they released it last year. Night’s End might have been better off if it had been cut down and included in an anthology itself, because as a feature film it ends up feeling quite underwhelming.

Night’s End is only 82 minutes as it is, but it feels substantially longer than that. The movie proceeds at a snail’s pace, and shows us the daily routine of shut-in Ken Barber (Geno Walker) way too many times. We know, he tends to his plants and drinks a mixture of coffee and Pepto Bismol (with a higher percentage of the stomach soother being added to the cup day by day), we didn’t really need to see this play out over and over. Ken is an interesting character at his core – he tells friends and family that he’s recovering from the nervous breakdown he had a couple years ago, while we can see that he’s just wallowing in his neuroses – but his story isn’t handled in a very interesting way here.

This is very much a movie for the Covid age; the action takes place entirely within Ken’s apartment, which he is afraid to leave. All of his interactions are done through Zoom – whether he’s talking to his buddy Terry (comedian Felonious Munk), his ex-wife Kelsey (Kate Arrington), or other characters who become involved along the way. Except for Kelsey, everyone Ken interacts with is alone, and the movie is primarily made up of scenes shot through webcams. Kelsey is occasionally joined on camera by her new husband Isaac, played by Michael Shannon… and it feels like the only reason Shannon is in this movie is because he happens to be married to Arrington in real life. So Night’s End gave the couple the chance to sit in front of a webcam together and goof off for a little bit.

Seeking a way to earn income without stepping out his door, Ken decides to try his hand at making YouTube videos. He’s not good at it and doesn’t get many views, but then he finds a hook: it seems his new apartment might be haunted. And it turns out that the building does have a tragic history he wasn’t aware of. Now here’s a subject he can make videos about that might get some views. The paranormal activity Ken deals with isn’t exactly on Poltergeist levels (or even Paranormal Activity level), but his amateur, housebound dealings with the entity sneaking around in his apartment do allow for more characters to enter the picture.

Those characters are a YouTuber known as Dark Corners (Daniel Kyri), associate Lyden Knight (Theo Germaine), and an author who has written a book about “ghosts and their personas”, Colin Albertson (Lawrence Grimm). Albertson is sure to be a divisive character, because everything around him in this movie is very low-key, but Grimm chews the scenery with his over-the-top performance. Then takes the film in some unexpected directions. Some viewers will find Albertson to be completely out of place, but I was glad to have him around to liven up a movie that was feeling really dull by the time he arrived.

I enjoyed watching Grimm camp it up, and everyone else did well with their more grounded performances. This was my first time seeing Geno Walker in anything, and I was impressed by him as a lead actor. The script by Brett Neveu just gave him underwhelming material to work with.

It all builds up to an ending that didn’t feel worth the long, slow journey it took to get there. It would have been much more satisfying as the ending to a segment in an anthology movie, and Night’s End would have been much more effective if it was cut down to about half its length.

The Night's End review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

REACHER: SEASON ONE (2022)

I really enjoyed the movie Jack Reacher and, to a lesser degree, its sequel Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. These films were based on novels by Lee Child, who has written more than twenty books about the Jack Reacher character, basically pumping out one new Reacher book every year since 1997. When they had the chance to bring Reacher to the screen, the filmmakers chose to adapt the ninth and eighteenth novels about the character. That always seemed kind of odd and random to me. The Reacher character was played by Tom Cruise in those movies, and while he turned in a badass performance both times, some readers of Child’s work weren’t happy with the casting. Cruise isn’t exactly the hulking, muscular, 6’5” blonde that Child described.

So now Reacher has moved to the small screen with an Amazon Prime TV series, and this time the idea was to cast someone who looks like the person readers have been imagining for a couple decades. I would envision Chris Hemsworth when I read the books, but that’s a casting choice for more big screen Reacher adaptations. For TV, we get Alan Ritchson, who certainly fits the description. But I can’t say I was blown away by the performance he gave in the eight episode first season of the Reacher TV show, which is an adaptation of the first novel in the series, The Killing Floor. It’s not the first chronologically, as Child went back and wrote some prequels, but The Killing Floor was the first time Child wrote about Reacher, so it makes sense that it would serve as the basis of the first season.

I think fans of the Reacher novels will be rather pleased with this season of the show, because it is a reasonably faithful adaptation of The Killing Floor. It does broaden the core mystery a bit, allowing for an appearance by private investigator Frances Neagley, a character from the book series who wasn’t included in The Killing Floor (and is played here by Maria Sten), and also widens the scope through the fact that it’s able to follow multiple characters. The Killing Floor was written in first person, so we were with Reacher every step of the way. On the show, we can cut away from him occasionally to see what his associates police chief Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) and officer Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald) are up to.

The Reacher character is fresh out of the military, where he worked as an MP and investigated homicides, and has now chosen to spend his life drifting around the United States. He meets Finlay and Roscoe when he decides to exit a bus in the small town of Margrave, Georgia – a decision he makes because he’s a blues fan and his brother once told him that a blues musician called Blind Blake died in Margrave. Unfortunately, someone has just been murdered in Margrave, and the perpetrators have decided that this giant outsider who just wandered into town will be the perfect scapegoat. Over the course of the eight episodes, Reacher proves that he was actually the worst person they could have possibly picked to try to frame for their crime. With the help of Finlay, Neagley, and Roscoe, Reacher discovers that a major criminal organization is operating out of Margrave. And they proceed to bring the criminals to justice. Several people lose their lives – some innocent, some not so much. Along the way, Reacher finds out that he has an unexpected personal connection to the crimes in Margrave, and also finds a spare moment here and there to develop a romance with Roscoe.

I found Reacher to be one of the most easily binge-able shows I’ve ever come across. I made my way through the eight episodes in a short span of time, thoroughly enjoying it the entire time. The show plays like an extended version of an old school action movie, in both how it handles the action scenes and the fact that we have moments where Reacher and Finlay go out of their way to help a neglected dog. A lot of old school action heroes had a soft spot for dogs, from Martin Riggs in the Lethal Weapon movies to Steven Seagal in Out for Justice. His kindness he shows toward the dog almost made up for the points Reacher lost for me by dissing classic rock.

The only area where I felt there could have been some improvement was Reacher himself. Ritchson. Cruise may not have looked like the character, but he always came off like he knew what he was talking about. Ritchson lacks a worldliness that the character should have. I never bought that he was as capable and knowledgeable as Reacher should be. It just felt like he was reading the lines, not making the character believable. But even though I never fully bought into the title character, I liked Reacher a lot and hope the show will get several more seasons.