Worth Mentioning - All Pie Is Good Pie

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.

A Richard Linklater dark comedy and an old fashioned action flick.

HIT MAN (2023)

As mentioned when I wrote about the rom-com Anyone but You, there’s currently a big push to get movie-goers to see actor Glen Powell as the Next Big Thing. He has proven to be a good love story lead in that film and a smarmy douche with the potential to be redeemed in Top Gun: Maverick – but it’s director Richard Linklater’s dark comedy Hit Man that has shown me that Powell could probably take on any acting challenge that’s thrown his way.

Scripted by Linklater and Powell and inspired by a magazine article that dug into the true story of a college professor who worked for the Houston police in the late 1980s and 1990s as a fake hitman, Hit Man centers on Gary Johnson (Powell), a professor of psychology and philosophy who has a side job doing tech assistance on sting operations for the New Orleans police force. Austin Amelio plays Jasper, the cop who usually pretends to be a hitman for these sting operations that bust people who want to pay someone to kill somebody... but when Jasper runs into some police brutality issues, Gary is his last minute replacement. And he proves to have a great gift for pretending to be a killer. He researches the suspects and uses costumes and makeup to present himself as each one’s ideal vision of a hitman; and the scenes where we see Gary play these various versions of hired killers allows Powell to display an impressive range. Over-the-top rednecks, stone cold badasses, bizarre Europeans; Powell plays them all to perfection.

The two personalities we see the most of are Gary himself – a mild-mannered dork, known to be an over-thinker – and the cool, confident Ron. Ron is a character Gary creates when he goes in for a meeting with Madison Figueroa Masters (Adria Arjona), a scared, unhappy woman who feels trapped in her marriage to an overbearing husband and thinks murder might be her only way out. Ron convinces Madison not to go through with having her husband killed, but instead take the money she would have paid him and use it to start a new life. His decision to let Madison walk is an unusual outcome for this kind of sting operation, but it seems to be the right one. What’s questionable is when Gary-as-Ron agrees to meet up with the newly single Madison some time later... and enter a highly sexual romantic relationship with her. (Turns out he’s a better lover as Ron than he is as Gary, too.)

Obviously this is a bad idea, and we know things are going to go terribly wrong at some point, in some way. Especially after the scene where Gary-as-Ron pulls a gun on Madison’s abusive ex. We’re just waiting to see how it’s all going to fall apart... and when things do fall apart, I’m not entirely sure about the choices Linklater and Powell made. It sort of feels like the movie falls short of where the story seemed to be going, like they were pulling punches. But it still works well enough, and the overall movie is so well-made, interesting, and entertaining that I had no problem watching it twice on back-to-back days. Something that wouldn’t have been rare for me in the old days, but hasn’t happened often at all in recent years.

PLANE (2023)

Back in 2005, Jean-François Richet directed a remake of the John Carpenter classic Assault on Precinct 13, telling the story of a criminal who works with the cops and other prisoners to fend off an assault on a police precinct... and now, he has directed the action thriller Plane, which almost feels like it could have been a follow-up to / extension of that Assault on Precinct 13 remake, if it had Laurence Fishburne playing former crime boss Marion Bishop instead of Mike Colter as fugitive homicide suspect (turned French Foreign Legion soldier) Louis Gaspare... but, as it is, Plane has no connection to Assault on Precinct 13.

Being extradited to face murder charges in Canada, Gaspare is put on board a nearly empty commercial airline flight from Singapore to Honolulu. Gerard Butler plays pilot Brodie Torrance... and when a lightning strike knocks out the flight’s electronics system, Torrance and Richet guide us through an awesome crash landing sequence that drops the plane onto an unknown island in the Philippines.

As if being crashed on an island and unable to contact the authorities weren’t enough, Torrance, his crew, and the passengers quickly learn that this island is a lawless spot ruled by heavily armed rebels... and when the crew and passengers are taken hostage, Torrance feels it’s his responsibility to save them. Luckily for him, he has the trained soldier Gaspare on his side. And a film that starts with a great, unnerving plane crash sequence turns into, in the second half of its 107 minute running time, a cool action flick with some nice physical altercation and shootout sequences, all the while keeping things down-to-earth like the old school action classics.

I didn’t have high expectations for Plane, but I ended up being quite impressed and pleased with the fact that it was such an old fashioned actioner. This is exactly the kind of movie I grew up watching with my father, and the further I get away from those childhood viewings, the more I want to watch movies just like this.