LAST MAN STANDING

(Walter Hill, 1996)

Early in his career, Hill was great at balancing genre pictures on the line right between arty abstraction and pulp detail. When he tries the same thing here, he miscalculates somewhat, meaning that Last Man Standing is a one-note trudge through the story of "Red Harvest" (actually credited as a remake of Yojimbo). The arty abstraction doesn't feel arty or interesting, the way it did in his classics two decades prior (The Warriors or Southern Comfort, say).
Instead this just feels like purest pulp, with Hill struggling to infuse it with some sort of poetry. That works to some extent in his film-making. Lloyd Ahern's beautiful dust-and-sunlight coppery photography and Ry Cooder's score are distinctively toned and make the film always worth watching and listening to. The action sequences are thunderous and cartoonish, with awesomely loud fusillades of gunfire filling the soundtrack while bodies tumble in slow motion through the air.
But the script is less successful. Bruce Willis is minimalist and cool as John Smith, a gunman trying to work both sides against each other in a prohibition-era Texan border town, but his hard-boiled narration is leaden and dull, and the tough guy dialogue feels rote and second-hand, without any sparkle or wit, so that he feels a bit like a strong star performance without a strong film around him, or even a strong character to play. In the past, Hill has dealt - well - with archetypes, but here he is dealing with sketches, and the difference is telling.
Other good actors - like Christopher Walken and David Patrick Kelly - enliven things as twitchy gangsters, but for all it's action and incident, Last Man Standing never really takes off. It's minor Hill, and while that means it's still worth a watch, it's frustrating seeing such a master in such a low gear.

G.I. JOE: RETALIATION

(John M. Chu, 2013)

It can be tricky to define, the difference between stupidity and silliness. And while the G.I. Joe films both seem monumentally stupid, in reality they're merely silly. They don't aspire to intelligence, don't feature great, tight plotting, or acute characterisation or jaw-dropping cinematic invention. But then they don't have any pretences about themselves either. All they try to do is tell the sort of ripping yarn a 12 year old boy might like. The first G.I. Joe film, Stephen Sommers' G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, was an almost hallucinatory piece of pre-adolescent pulp delirium, based quite faithfully on the Marvel Comics inspired by the Hasbro toyline featuring a range of International soldiers who form a fighting force to oppose the vicious sci-fi terrorists of the Cobra organisation. Those comics mix science fiction technology, war story characterisation and plotting with a hint of soap and a fair portion of ninja action. Sommers copied all that, stuffing his movie with villainous masterminds, lots of groovy masked men, humungous explosions, tons of martial arts, a flashback to a characters origin every ten minutes or so, ultimatums delivered to world leaders, action scenes in exotic corners of the globe, crappy comedy, and hot bad girls in bondage gear who had good hearts underneath.
Chu isn't quite so gleeful in his range, telling a tighter, duller, more conventional story of the Joes double-crossed, mostly destroyed, then seeking revenge. He retains a few of the first films more successful elements, including the rival ninjas, raised and trained together, who formed the fan-favourite geekbait of the comics glory years (played by a charismatic Lee Byung-hun as Storm Shadow and Ray Park under a mask as the mute Snake Eyes). The best scene in the film - perhaps in both films - is the extended action sequence as Snake Eyes and new protege Jinx attempt to kidnap Storm Shadow from his Himalayan retreat, filled with thrillingly vertiginous shots of ninjas balletically battling on ropes hung from cliff-tops, all of it shot with a clear elegance and rhythm that serve as a reminder that Chu made his name as a director of musicals, of a sort.
The plot revolves around a good old-fashioned quest for global domination and is foiled through good old-fashioned firepower, with the biggest scenes in the film decorated with huge orange explosions and shouting, gurning figures in motion. Those characters have loose personalities but absolutely no depth or emotional weight - Dwayne Johnson's Roadblock seems to willingly abandon his family in his quest for revenge, Adrianne Palicki's Lady Jaye is saddled with ridiculously shallow daddy issues which are brought up through her spats with Bruce Willis' Colonel Joe Coulson, while the villains are just several shades of pure, insane evil. The story is formed by a series of escapes, attacks and scenes where people plan escapes and attacks, but it all looks slick and pretty when it needs to, and Chu keeps it rolling and making sense (for the most part).
If it lacks the sense of fun of the first film, its still somewhat refreshing to see a blockbuster so lacking in pomposity and so unafraid of seeming so utterly silly. This, after all, is a film unafraid of using RZA as the sensei of a ninja clan, depicting the destruction of London, having its heroes shoot remote control bullets, and giving Walton Goggins a scene-stealing cameo as the warden of a cryogenic prison deep underground in Germany. The G.I. Joe films are willing to try anything crazy in the hopes that something will work, and that's an endearing quality.

LOOPER

(Rian Johnson, 2012) With his third film, writer-director Johnson goes up a gear or two. Looper is a tremendously assured science fiction thriller; original, clever and brilliantly made, it surpasses most of this years crop of Hollywood genre cinema, and most of any years, to be honest. The first act is a zippy half hour, dense with incident and wittily slipping in tons of exposition without too much pain. In voiceover, Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) explains that, in this near future world, he is a "Looper", an assassin who kills people sent back from the future by the mob. He goes alone to a field, armed with a blunderbuss, at the appointed time, and he waits. A figure suddenly appears, hooded, and Joe shoots them dead, takes the silver bars strapped to their back as payment, and disposes of the body. Time travel has not been invented yet, but it is already influencing the course of his life. That worsens when he is confronted with an older version of himself (Bruce Willis) who has come back specifically to find the younger version of a future crimelord - the legendary Rainmaker - to kill him as a child. Future Joe's presence in the past/present sends both Joes on the run from Abe (Jeff Daniels) each trying to survive and guarantee their own future as they see it. That first half hour establishes this future world as a gritty, degraded version of our own. Vagrants fill the streets, cars run on battered solar panels stuck to their bonnets and roofs, and law and order seems largely negligible. This is all subtly portrayed with detail and texture, and the action kicks in with a jolt of pace. Johnson skilfully does all this without ever sacrificing his characters - there are few cyphers here, with even Paul Dano as Joe's doomed friend Seth and Piper Perabo as his favoured prostitute given telling little grace notes in their scenes. Jeff Daniels, meanwhile, reunited with Gordon Levitt after their excellent work together in the underrated The Lookout, is quietly scary but almost likeable as Abe, a mobster from the future who prefers words to violence. The film changes gear thereafter, settling in at an isolated farmhouse where a young woman (Emily Blunt, nicely combining strength with fragility) is determined to protect her young son and Joe awaits his final showdown with his older self. Their storyline provides a contrasting emotional strand to that of Willis, clinging to his memories of a dead wife while young Joe's actions mess with his mind. Johnson keeps the potentially complex time travel paradox plotting clear though never less than fascinating, and concentrates on his characters and the issues of choice and free will they face, without ever stinting on spectacle. His plotting is nifty and intelligent in its consistent ability to deliver surprises that seem, in retrospect, to be the only way things could have gone, and his direction is stylish but filled with strong, clean storytelling. There is also a quite appealing strain of nastiness working its way through this story. The sort of gee-whiz ideas common in time travel stories are given a bloodthirsty spin. A Looper returned from the future is captured through his younger self when mobsters begin to amputate body parts and he finds himself suddenly lacking fingers, a nose, legs. The fact that ten percent of the population has some low-level telekinesis means that when we encounter a character with a high-level version of the power, more or less the first thing Johnson has him do is explode somebody. The brutality with which everybodytreats vagrants feels convincingly frank and only adds to the coarse, damaged texture of this world. Perhaps most impressive is the use of Willis here. For the first time in years, a film has made interesting use of his onscreen persona - he was always one action hero with a little more to him - and specific appeal, and he responds with a fine performance. He and Gordon Levitt - who is equally good - have a single, brilliant scene where they talk things over in a diner, the tensions and strain between them bubbling over in some sharply scripted dialogue. Not quite the transcendent masterpiece some have claimed, then, but Looper is still great, utterly satisfying genre filmmaking which marks the newfound maturity of a young American auteur.

EXPENDABLES 2

(Simon West, 2012) For something so terribly cynical, theres something heartfelt and almost naive about The Expendables films. The plot points and cliches of characterisation they use are so lame and old-fashioned that - in the age of Michael Bay and "chaos cinema" - they feel strangely authentic in their attempt to reconnect with the spirit of the action movie as it was imagined in the 1980s. This film is sleeker, slicker and far less baggy than the original, stuffing in more action scenes, more old school action stars (adding Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme and new DTV hero Scott Adkins to the original roster) but containing them within a mostly-coherent plot involving Barney (Sylvester Stallone) and his team losing a mission objective and a teammate to Van Damme's villain (actually, hilariously called Vilain) and resolving to "Track 'em, find 'em, kill 'em." somewhere in an Eastern Europe where the women wear shawls and scarves and the men model flat caps. Along the way, other mercenaries randomly pop up, having happened to be in the area (Norris' Booker gets Morricone's The Good the Bad and the Ugly as his theme) and trade groan-inducing, self-referencing one -liners (one exchange between Schwarzenegger and Willis involves both "I'll be back" and "Yippee-ki-yay") while blasting mercenary bad guys with semi-automatic weaponry, often without bothering to take cover. One cliche of '80s action cinema this film lovingly embraces is the hero standing in the open, spraying bullets at bad guys. Director West composes his shots nicely and his sequences are clear, efficient, and often exciting, if never quite inspired, and the story gives all of the heroes something to do; Jason Statham gets a church-set takedown of a team of bad guys, complete with awful one-liner and a somewhat disappointing climactic one-on-one with Adkins, while Stallone and Van Damme have their own final bout, and Lundgren, Couture and Crews mostly get the comedic material. Jet Li pops up briefly in the prologue but gets one nice action scene involving frying pans. None of them are particularly good, but then they have little to do beyond posing and cracking jokes. As such, Van Damme, Crews and Lundgren perhaps fare best, suggesting some life beyond what we see onscreen. That they are all playing action figures is largely taken for granted; this films attempts at drama are perfunctory and brief, always rushing off to the next bad gag or massive explosion. On that basis, it is sometimes fun, but also a little too generic emptily slick, and unmemorable.

MOONRISE KINGDOM

(Wes Anderson, 2012)

With his seventh film, Wes Anderson finds the perfect story and setting for his singular style and sensibility.
The result is a magical comic fairytale, shot through with his familiar deadpan melancholy and ably performed by a game, starry cast.
The two leads, however, are young unknowns. They are Sam Shakusky (Jared Gillman), a young orphan who falls in love with Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) while based with his Khaki Scout troop on the Island of New Penzance, off the coast of New England in Summer 1965. Names - the names of characters, places, even labels and brands - are crucial in the symphony Wes Anderson creates in each of his films, adding detail and a precise texture to his world which feels quite unlike any other.
Here that world is largely seen through the prism of typically intense Anderson children. Both principals are outsiders, both serious, both sad. They become penpals and resolve to run away from unhappy family lives together, and what follows is a lovely natural idyll, with shades of Badlands in it's scenes of a young couple creating their own little world in a natural setting.
The adult world our couple are fleeing is represented in the form of Suzy's attorney parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) whose marriage is falling apart, partly due to her affair with the Island Sheriff (Bruce Willis). Then there is Sam's Scout Master (Edward Norton), struggling to control his troupe. This side of the story is suffused in sadness, which comes in scenes where their complex adult problems are revealed in their faces and conversations. These are lonely people, their exchanges and small, everyday agonies contrasted with those of Sam and Suzy. They too will probably end up as sorrowful as their elders, Anderson seems to say, if they are denied the understanding and love they have found with one another.
That much might be enough - this may be the directors most moving, emotional film, the aching nostalgia and feeling for childhood's end adding to that - but there are also a few dozen great comic ideas here typical of Anderson. The scout troupe, run like an army, offers great dry comedy and a series of lovely visual gags. Bob Balaban pops up as a narrator offering context and portentousness, Tilda Swinton steps straight out of a Powell & Pressburger film as the blue-clad "Social Services", and Anderon's use of music (largely Hank Williams and Benjamin Britten here) is as superb as ever.
Best of all, much of the film is shot on location, meaning that it's somewhat looser than Anderson's usual approach allows; Mother Nature resists the control evident in his miss en scene. Instead there are lovely landscapes and shots which make the most of the possibilities of the forest and the ocean.
It all hangs together with impeccable style and no little emotional weight, suggesting, for all that his detractors insist that Anderson has to grow up, that he is at his finest and most natural when he is addressing childhood, as he does here.