THE ASSASSIN

(Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2015)

I love seeing the world through Hou Hsiao Hsien's eyes.
But that means slowing down, paying attention, giving oneself to the images.
His mastershot style is quiet and still and precise, and it magnifies nuance and gesture. Once you become attuned, it gives certain scenes incredible power. I suppose the flip-side to this is that if you do not become attuned, then his films must seem unbearably tedious.
The Assassin is a nuxia - an entry in the "female knight" sub-genre in the Kung Fu genre. It stars Hou muse Shu Qi as Yianning, banished from her home province as a girl to save herself after she reacts badly to some inter-family politics. In the interim she has been trained as a deadly assassin, but she lacks the ruthlessness required of the profession, although her skills are "matchless". Her Mistress dispatches her back to her home province and back to her family, where she is to kill the Ruler of the province (Chang Chen), to whom Yianning was once betrothed. This is both punishment and test, and embroils the assassin in the complex court politics of 7th Century China.
Aside from some text at the start, there is very little exposition explaining this, and what does come is mostly revealed in two quiet conversations, around a half-hour into the film. Hou is insisting that an audience pay attention to this film, that you must strain even to attain the most basic comprehension of the plot. His elliptical storytelling makes that difficult at times, especially where the internecine plotting is involved, but the broad strokes of the story and the characters are quite simple.
Shu Qi's character is still in love with Chang Chen's, and the only question really is how she will deal with the consequences of her actions (or inaction).
When other Chinese auteurs have taken on the wuxia genre, from Wong Kar Wai to Zhang Yimou, each of them bows to the stylistic conventions. Not Hou. Yes he features martial arts fights, but they are as elliptical as everything else here. The editing rhythms may change - quiet a jarring, if exhilarating, new development in his oeuvre - but these never feel like fights for their own sake. Yianning may be a matchless warrior, but she takes no pleasure in her skill, and her moves are efficient and precise, reminiscent more of samurai swiftness and finality than much I've seen in the wuxia genre. Hou shoots her in different ways in each fight; in an unusually tight mid-shot for one, her athleticism obscured (a decision he insists was due to Shu Qi's inadequacies as a martial artist), barely glimpsed in another, her opponents toppling like skittles from her limbs, in an elegant dance-like exchange in a battle with a golden-masked female assassin for yet another. And sometimes he doesn't shoot her at all; he cuts away from one fight to a long shot so that we can barely glimpse it among some distant trees, and stages another off-screen, lingering instead on another two characters. Her performance is quiet and contained but it gathers a great deal of power as the story develops. Chang Chen - always a charismatic presence - is allowed to show more obvious emotion, but his best scene is the one where he quietly confides in his concubine about who Yianning is, what she might mean to him evident in his voice and face.
This is a mesmerising, mysterious film, heavy with repressed emotion, its characters bounded by the social structures represented so beautifully by the period finery all around them, and also by Hou's lovely framing. Only Yianning is really free to choose her fate, and Shu Qi is accordingly the character we follow as she moves through and across the screen throughout the film, alone but at liberty.
All this and I have not mentioned what most reviewers focus on: this is a startlingly beautiful film. It is also an at-times-forbiddingly arty one. But worthwhile.

THE RAID 2

(Gareth Evans, 2014)

Given a bigger budget and a lot more confidence, Evans returns to the world of The Raid, taking his hero (Iko Uwais) and placing him in an undercover cop story which starts off as a prison movie, then transforms into a gang war story, never once losing sight of the fact that at heart, its really a martial arts fight movie.
It has the same flaws as the original. Evans writes, directs and edits, and two out of three ain't bad, but he's not much of a writer. The plot here is simple - a hoary old tale of jealousy, betrayal and turf disputes - and yet Evans manages to make it bafflingly opaque and difficult to follow. It doesn't help much that there are no real characters. Uwais' Rama is the good guy, and that's about all the personality he's given. The villains are defined by their props - the dangerous young half-Arab Bejo (Alex Abbad) wears shades, gloves and carries a cane - or, in a Tarantino-esque notion, by their weaponry. Except Evans doesn't write dialogue or personalities like Tarantino, so the fact that he features a deaf girl who fights with a pair of hammers and her partner who uses a baseball bat like its a samurai sword works only in the fight scenes.
But then that does seem to be all he cares about. And some of those fight scenes are extraordinary: unbelievably violent, hilariously extended, cartoonishly gory...and yet; beautifully choreographed and brilliantly shot and edited. People fight with fists, knives, machetes, guns, cars. They fight endlessly.
Everything is grotesquely bloated around those fights - Evans seems to believe that his film is somehow deeper than it actually is - but those fights make this film worthwhile. They go with many of the cliches of martial arts cinema, just as The Raid did, but they work despite those cliches, almost by overloading them. Evans goes further and more outrageous than most filmmakers would dare. He flips cameras upside down, follows people through shattered windows and into tumbling cars. He manages to use shaky, immediate handheld cameras in some scenes for visceral impact but rarely sacrifices coherence to do so.
It's everything else that lets the film down. Truly great action films feature great action scenes, of course. But they make you invest in those scenes. You care about who wins, who survives, what happens. Evans isn't quite capable of that just yet. You watch his action scenes dazzled by the technical virtuosity and the physical feats on display. But you don't really care about anything beyond that.

THE GRANDMASTER

(Wong Kar-Wai, 2012) 

I get the feeling that Wong Kar-Wai could take any story and turn it into a film about Tony Leung mooning around in period Hong Kong, remembering the various women in his life.

That’s not a bad thing; somehow director and star often seem capable of alchemy when they work together. But it doesn’t always make for an entirely satisfying experience.

Take The Grandmaster, for instance. It is Wong Kar-Wai’s first attempt at a martial arts film since Ashes of Time almost 20 years ago. That film is a bizarre, barely coherent clash between a directors sensibility and the demands of a genre. The result is delirious, beautiful and never entirely successful.

The Grandmasters is more accessible. It tells a story, following a handful of “grandmasters” – expert practitioners of different schools of Kung Fu – across a few decades in the early 20^th Century. They include Yip Man (Leung), Gong Er (Zhang Zhiyi) and"the Razor"(Chang Chen). While other biopics have made much of how Ip Man resisted the Japanese, here his life as a warrior and his importance as a symbol and cultural figure is barely explored. The prologue features an extended and stunning battle between him and dozens of men at night in the rain. While this fight scene – visceral, beautiful and brilliantly choreographed – seems inspired by and then surpasses the climax of The Matrix Revolutions, it is entirely lacking in context of dramatic weight. It is unsurprising that this scene was used as a teaser for the film, since it works just as well as a standalone scene. Indeed it is never really explained who, when or why Ip was fighting those men.

Instead in the first act we alternate between learning about the contentment of his domestic life and the political strife in the Kung Fu community, where ageing masters try to settle upon dynamic new leadership while spreading understanding of the different styles across their immense country.

The narrative follows this pattern, elliptically cutting between different lives, times and places. Ultimately it focuses (but only to an extent) upon the relationship between Yip and Gong Er, whose early fight functions as a sort of consummation of a love that is never really acknowledged until it is too late.

There are problems with this approach. In his other work, Wong invests the characters with such intensity and emotional truth that when the romantic longing kicks in – as it always must – it feels earned and powerful. Here it feels a little tacked on, as if he was attempting to give a typical martial arts film some of his own personality with mixed results. You can almost feel him straining hard to find some resonance in this material, and the resulting thematic hollowness is the result. The way the narrative flips – that fight between Yip and Gong functions almost as a passing of the baton – makes it feel like two films stitched uncomfortably together.

But at least they’re two ravishingly beautiful films: the whole thing looks unbelievably good. Phillipe Le Sourd's cinematography is fabulous; and Wong chooses to shoot many of the fights indoors, ensuring that a rich, chocolatey palette predominates, an unusual look for a wuxia.

His cast are superb; Leung as deep and charismatic as ever, Zhiyi carrying much of the emotional weight and doing it easily. Both excel in the terrific martial art sequences, which do achieve some poetry amidst the flurries of lyrical physical action. Indeed, many directors more generally associated with the genre could learn a great deal from how these fight scenes are handled – always visually impressive, they never sacrifice physical coherence of visceral impact.

But this feels like Wong Kar-Wai compromised, trying to be something hes not. It is still lovely and full of good things, but it never feels quite right.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING

(John Hyams, 2012)

He may not get the respect or acclaim he deserves, but make no mistake; with Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, John Hyams fully announces himself as one of the most interesting directors currently working in American genre cinema.
His action chops have long been evident; he shoots fight scenes with a fluid mix of shots and approaches - slo-mo, fast-cutting, classically clear compositions, handheld fluency - but those scenes are always visceral and cohesive. The fight scenes here are remarkably brutal, even gory - axes take fingers and toes, the hero John (Scott Adkins) knocks the top of a mans head clean off with a baseball bat - yet Hyams ensures that the gore is always clear in its origin and thats the dimensions of the violence are generally physically defined. One move flows into the next and from the one before, and the editing choices are dictated by the dynamics of movement, of action and reaction. This is most relevant during the last twenty minutes of the film, a quite brilliant rolling action scene depicting John infiltrating the lair of villain Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and battling his way, one at a time, through his army, much of it done in a single, extraordinary take. There is also a fantastically destructive fight between Adkins and Andrei Arlovsky in a sporting goods store which would be good enough to climax the majority of martial arts films.
But Hyams' sensibility is increasingly fascinating too. This film is a bizarre genre hybrid - if it surrenders to its basest action instincts in the last reel, in the first two it establishes a singular mood and worldview unlike just about anything else, ever. It has a mood of sustained dread which makes it feel nightmarish - tellingly, the first shot is from the point of view of John as he is woken from sleep - and much of the action occurs in a depopulated netherworld of hookers, strippers, mercenaries and grotesques through which John stumbles, as confused and ignorant as the audience.
It follows John as he wakes from a coma after witnessing his family murdered by Devereaux in the gruelling opening scene. As he tries to discover more about who he is and what has happened to him, a parallel story details Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren) and his attempts to recruit an army of the genetically-created "UniSols" from the other films in this franchise, to serve under the command of Devereaux, here depicted as an enigmatic Col. Kurtz figure. Meanwhile John is discovering that he may not be quite "normal", as his past acts are revealed and strangers try to murder him.
In a film like this, the acting barely matters, but Adkins has a vulnerability to him that suits his character until he remembers what he is capable of and starts to rack up a ridiculous body count. Van Damme and Lundgren have little to do but Hyams makes good use of the icon each represents.
The many ambiguities contained in the story work beautifully - the more John learns, the more complex his situation becomes - and feed into the brilliantly bitter ending, which allows for the catharsis of a final confrontation and then upends it with a vicious little coda.
It may be a little cheap and clumsily written in parts, but this film is as challenging and cynical as action cinema gets. I can't wait to see what Hyams does next.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION

(John Hyams, 2009) John Hyams can really shoot action. Universal Soldier: Regeneration is filled with scenes highlighting this talent, indeed it seems at times designed as a showcase for Hyams' ability to make a familiar fight scene a visceral, almost elegantly flowing sequence. As such, it's a superior example of the truest brand of modern B-movie, the direct to DVD (DTV) action flick. It stars two DTV giants in Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, reprising their parts from Roland Emmerich's more mainstream 1999 action sci-fi blockbuster. Van Damme is Luc Devereaux and Lundgren Andrew Scott, both reanimated, augmented and near-superhuman "Universal Soldiers" who are reactivated when an Eastern European terrorist group kidnap their Presidents children and threaten to blow up what remains of Chernobyl's old reactors. The terrorist group are in cahoots with Dr Colin (Kerry Shale) who has created a new, even more powerful brand of super-soldier embodied here by MMA fighter Andrei Arlovski as a brutal, relentless, Terminator-esque presence capable of ceaseless, spectacular violence. The story exists mainly to move these characters (and the American soldier played by another MMA fighter, Mike Pyle) into position for a series of one-on-one confrontations and face-offs, but it commendably does this with virtually no flab, few poorly-written dialogue scenes, and some terrific use of the amazing Bulgarian location (an enormous, unused iron factory, convincingly standing in for Chernobyl). It also makes good use of it's principle actors; Van Damme has always had a sad-eyed melancholy to his presence, and here he spends the first hour of the film in a fog of sorrowful confusion before busting out the ultra-violence in the last act. Lundgren, on the other hand, is a more intimidating, if mischievous presence, and his character here is given an eccentric twist in his brief appearance which suits the performer. What suits him (and Van Damme) more is action, and they share an extended fight scene like somethingfrom a Godzilla film, destroying rooms and walls as they go. Arlovski has even more action, and he is a convincingly destructive physical performer, all of his hammering blows and crunching smashes captured precisely by Hyams' camera. Hyams films much of the action - including a couple of the fight exchanges and a commando attack upon the terrorists - in long, sinuously mobile camera moves, but is not above a more fashionable adherence to rapidly-cut chaos. He retains the ability to keep his material coherent, however, a prized gift in an action director. His fight scenes are often a mix of impact cuts and mid-shot one-take captures, highlighting both the athleticism of his actors and his understanding of what works best in this sort of film. His understanding of space and movement, allied to the lovely timing of his editing - there are few jarring cuts in the whole film - is what makes these scenes feel so fluid and watchable. His father - solid, occasionally inspired genre craftsman Peter Hyams - acts as his cinematographer here, and the film has a consistent, defined aesthetic throughout which is rare in the DTV field. Hyams career is definitely worth watching - on the right script, with a bigger budget, he could potentially make a great action film.

THE RAID

(Gareth Evans, 2011)

Gunfire is a tricky thing to get right. Not many movies do.
The more weaponry and gunshots in a movie, the less likely any of it is to have an impact. That applies in Gareth Evans' The Raid just as much as it does in any John Woo or Hollywood action movie, where gunfights often devolve into a loud aural and visual backdrop to the primary action. But a gun - and the lethal threat it implies - should be a big, terrifying presence in any action movie, much as it would be in real life. The difference between action and violence is something fudged by many action movies. The Raid is very much an action movie, but it dabbles in actual violence - let's define that as a violent act which is shown to have realistic consequences as opposed to action, which is a violent act with more cartoonish or heightened consequences.
The now-legendary gun battle in Michael Mann's Heat is terrifying from the first shots because Mann is intent on the exact damage all that lead does when it fills the air. Car doors jump and shudder under the impact of rounds, windows explode, human flesh is pulped. People die, obviously. The noise rends the air.
The early - and massive - gun battle in The Raid is deafening, and claims perhaps a dozen lives. But it has none of that weight. It has more in common with the 1980s tv show The A-Team, where violence never had any consequences besides bruises.
This seems problematic in a movie which is, to some extent, about violence. Evans later shows an almost schizophrenic attitude to onscreen violence; his action scenes are typical martial arts sequences in many respects, with combatants taking massive batterings with little damage. But then occasionally he includes a moment of shocking (and almost giddily hilarious) gore: a man's neck impaled on the broken surface of a door, a man falling onto a metal stair-rail.
There are other problems. The lack of a plot or characters, for starters. The premise is streamlined and simple: a team of armed Indonesian police invade a tower-block owned by a Gang Boss. Their aim is to clean it out and arrest him. But once the alarm is raised they find themselves trapped halfway up, without hope of reinforcements and with dwindling numbers, surrounded by criminal residents charged with eliminating them.
At that point the film begins to resemble a video game as our hero (Iko Uwais) has to fight innumerable opponents in the corridors. Evans stages and choreographs the martial arts scenes brilliantly and Uwais is nimbly magnetic as a physical performer, fighting with knives, nightsticks, machetes and fists and feet. Unlike many modern films, these scenes are spacially coherent, clear and classically shot. They are also generally witty and viscerally thrilling, and climax in a relentless, exhausting fight with the villain's henchman Mad Dog, which is a satisfying conclusion to so much mayhem.
Perhaps more successful than the carnage, however, are the few scenes of suspense as the remaining cops hide and the gangsters hunt them. These scenes are familiar and devastatingly effective: men concealed within a partition wall while a hunter stabs it with a machete, for instance. The action, when it comes, serves as a nice release after so much tension.
But the scenes of exposition and character development are filled with cliches and bad dialogue - our hero has a pregnant wife at home, Mad Dog lives for the thrill of killing with his hands, a corrupt cop is a craven coward etc - which are only barely balanced out by the quality of the inventive action scenes.
Evans directs it all slickly with a good eye on pacing, but its generally an ugly little b-movie, elevated in places by a clear-eyed, exciting approach to action with little else to recommend it.

DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME

(Tsui Hark, 2010)

Give ridiculously-prolific director Tsui Hark a starry cast and a big budget and you just know the result will be something interesting. Here the result is a marvellously inventive and energetic potboiler, full of the pleasures of mainstream Chinese cinema.
The story follows Detective Dee (played with wit and humour by Andy Lau) who has been imprisoned for opposing the Reign of an Empress. When her coronation is threatened by the deaths - due to apparent spontaneous combustion - of a couple of her pet Politicians, Dee is released to use his unparalleled detective skills to solve the case.
Of course that means many lengthy Kung Fu sequences, choreographed, imaginatively for the most part, by Sammo Hung. It also means a talking stag, some slapstick, a little muted romance, and throughout, an impressively mounted grand spectacle.
Utilising sporadically shoddy cgi, Hark conjures a vivid period world to life here; a thriving, bustling Chinese city which makes for a fine backdrop to the huge action set pieces he orchestrates. It is a tad overripe, but that is balanced by how consistently ravishing and unabashedly entertaining the whole thing is.

KUNG FU PANDA 2

(Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)

An obvious and largely winning attempt to replicate the success of the original film by slavishly recreating every element that made it so popular, Kung Fu Panda 2 settles for efficiency rather than inspiration. That isn't a criticism; it works marvellously at extending snd deepening the world and characters of the first film whilst recreating the mix of faithful homage to Chinese Wuxia cinema and knockabout Jack Black comedy. Black is key to the tone here, always undercutting the intense drama or the sentimentality but allowing enough of it to remain that the film always has some emotional interest. The animation is fine, the action scenes thrilling, often beautiful, and well-conceived and choreographed in such a way that no live action film could possibly match, nicely mingling slapstick and action.
Gary Oldman is the villain, a role he could play in his sleep, and the whole thing races along from one set piece to another before an appropriately massive finale and the inevitable set-up for another sequel.

BLOOD AND BONE

(Ben Ramsey, 2009)

A fight movie reminiscent of the low budget, often straight-to-video b-movies starring the likes of Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme from the late 1980s and early 90s, Blood and Bone, while stuffed with cliches, succeeds splendidly on its own narrow terms.
Those cliches are wholeheartedly executed; with Michael Jai White's hero "Bone" a stoic, invincible superwarrior akin to a Western hero who fights his way through the LA Underground fighting scene on a specific mission of vengeance, taking on several quirkily individual fighters as he goes, all while becoming emotionally attached to the warm home of a foster mother and her children in a gang-infested area. His ultimate opponent is James, a sociopathic, upwardly mobile, Genghis Khan-quoting, samurai sword-wielding gangster played with effective intensity by Eamonn Walker. The drama is strictly second-rate, competently written and acted, and the few stabs at comedy barely register.
In a movie like this, action is everything, and Blood and Bone gets the action just right. Director Ramsey shoots many of the fights in single takes so that the action flows and the skills of the combatants are best displayed. The cuts he does choose are never gratuitous, and generally enhance the visceral impact of the events they frame. Many of the fighters are experienced MMA veterans, and while, as an actor, Michael Jai White seems capable of just one facial expression, he possesses undeniable charisma as a physical performer, while lacking the grace of a Jet Li or the comedic chutzpah of Jackie Chan, his explosive speed and power are beautifully captured here in some fantastically satisfying fight scenes. Even better, for fans of this sort of material, the ending promises a sequel, as Bone literally walks off into the sunset.

THE GREEN HORNET

(Michel Gondry, 2010)

Seeking to marry the wry irony and braying adolescent wit of some modern comedy with the Superhero genre is a brave - or foolhardy - venture. It also seems quite pointless. Superhero films skirt comedy in their every contrived and restricted aspect: plotting, characterisation, design, visuals, music are all tied to the conventions of the Comics medium, and mainstream comics, at that, often making for deformed cinematic texts. To try to gently tease that easily parodied side of the genre while also playing a deadpan buddy comedy overloads The Green Hornet. That it also has to fulfil the base requirements of the genre by including fight scenes and car chases and confrontations means that it's basically a strange mess, tonally confused, narratively awkward and emotionally hollow.
Gondry - obviously an original and distinctive talent - is marooned by the screenplay and he shoots the majority of the spectacle like a competent tv director. Three scenes bear his obvious imprint: a contract spread by word of mouth reproduced as a split screen symphony, a fight scene making virtue of Kato as a 3D effect in his own right, and a sped up sequence of Seth Rogen and a girl snogging their way through a garage full of classic cars.
But this odd concoction ultimately pleases nobody, since it partly fails in each of it's aims: it's neither a fine Superhero blockbuster, nor a hilarious comedy. Rogen, always good for an off-kilter one-liner, is never a likeable or convincing lead and Christoph Waltz lacks any of the menace or charisma evident in his villain in Inglourious Basterds. He is not helped by a a character with a single quirk (an obsession with how scary he is) instead of a personality. Cameron Diaz scarcely registers at all, leaving Jay Chou to steal the show as Kato, getting most of the best action scenes to himself.