CREED

(Ryan Coogler, 2015)

The confidence and assurance Coogler demonstrates in the leap from his debut, Fruitvale Station, a small-scale independent film, to Creed, a big studio boxing drama and a reboot-sequel to the Rocky series, is truly startling. And not only is he confident; he is successful - this is a superb piece of studio film-making, made with wit and style, engrossing, exciting and affecting throughout.
The story follows Adonis "Donny" Thompson (Michael B Jordan, showing the movie star chops needed to carry a whole film on his shoulders), illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, as he gives up his white collar world in Los Angeles and travels to Philadelphia, where he convinces his father's old friend Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to help train him. Donny must battle his old demons - of course, this is a boxing movie - while Rocky deals with his. Along the way, too, there are a couple of epic boxing matches.
The only real issue Creed has is pacing; at just over two hours it is a little overlong, and it feels as if the whole movie restarts after Donny's first real fight, when Rocky confronts his own problems. Aside from that, it is a beautifully crafted example of the boxing genre. Donny is an interesting character, fighting because he feels he needs to, and his relationship with Rocky is touching - mutual surrogacy which is finally acknowledged, and needed by both men. He also has a sweet romance with Biancha (Tessa Thompson), a singer whose progressive hearing loss gives her character a never-overplayed thematic resonance for Donny, with his issues with making his mark while he has time, and Rocky's obsession with the past and future.
While cramming in two lead storylines - one for Donny and one for Rocky - creates some of those pacing issues, it also allows Stallone to shade this portrayal of his oldest character with some lovely notes of melancholy and regret. This is probably his best acting work, and he retains that old movie star presence, now deepened by age and sadness, which gives this film a nice depth of flavour.
But it stands and falls as a boxing movie, and what is so exceptional is the way it embraces each and every boxing movie cliche (most of them pumped up by Stallone in the Rocky series) and yet transcends them. There are training montages, of course. Donny screws up and comes perilously close to losing everyone he loves. There is a run through the streets of Philadelphia.
But Coogler is an exciting talent, and he knows the power of a moving camera and comes up with some interesting angles on familiar material. He shoots Donny's first big fight in one extended shot, lending it the elegance and power of a great dance sequence in a musical. Whenever a possible opponent for Donny appears on-screen, his career stats appear beside him, like something from a computer game. That Philadelphia run is mainly in slo-mo, with motorbikes racing around Donny as he sprints. Donny and Biancha first connect in an upside-down shot, lying on her floor, listening to her music. The way the dialogue drops away as the referee addresses Rocky and Donny in the dressing room, and all we can hear is the crowd above.
Donny's sudden and panicked need to go use the toilet before his first fight is typical of this film - slight twists on familiar material, freshening it up. The climactic bout is shot in a more modern style, lot of movement and impact cuts, but it is done about as well as it can be done, and it follows the emotional arc familiar from this series to exhilarating effect.
All of this and the clear-eyed way it regards issues of ageing and legacy make this an unusually intelligent studio franchise film, and one that is almost entirely successful.

HOMEFRONT

(Gary Fleder, 2013)

Very much like an action thriller from another era - theres a lot of the 1980s here, and possibly even more of the 1970s - Homefront is never quite brave enough to go all-out to satisfy the sort of pulp cravings those movies effortlessly catered to.
Despite the presence of Jason Statham in the lead as retired undercover cop Phil Broker, director Fleder makes it all a little too slick and a little too mainstream to work. The screenplay - by Sylvester Stallone, a reliably canny creator in terms of base action thrills - is brutal and simplistic and classical in construction. Broker and his 9 year old daughter are living in a small Louisiana town after his (pre-credits) involvement in a massive operation to bring down a Biker gang ended in much bloodshed. A schoolyard altercation between his daughter and a bully escalates until the local drug kingpin, Gator Bodine (James Franco, surprisingly bland) becomes involved, discovers who Broker is, and calls in the Biker gang for help in disposing of this quiet man with devastating combat acumen.
The smalltown Louisiana setting works well, and the cast is unexpectedly starry for this sort of material, with the likes of Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder both good in small parts as desperate women of different stripes, and Frank Grillo reliably nasty as a Biker assassin.
Fleder can do action competently, too, and Statham has a few impressive fight scenes. But competence is about as good as it gets. Its never delirious enough or offensively violent enough or bleak enough or funny enough. It sets up its familiar story, you know exactly what will happen, then that happens.
Which is perhaps what many Statham fans want of a Statham film. But he's capable of more. Films like this - with a sprinkling of cinematic pedigree - are small steps towards something more.
And its frustrating when they don't get there.

BULLET TO THE HEAD

(Walter Hill, 2012)

Bullet To The Head may well be Walter Hill's worst film*. That means it's still better than much modern mainstream American cinema, for Hill is an old master, and even when given a clumsy, derivative script like this, he can still make the material sing...to a certain extent.
That extent is almost entirely visual. His lovely compositional sense is still as strong as ever, his ease with storytelling remains, and he still directs action sequences with a bracing directness and stylish economy. The fights and shootouts in this film are tough, brutal and always coherent, the artful touches subtle yet fitting. But these are flourishes, and there aren't quite enough of them to elevate the film.
Hill, a fine screenwriter, didn't write Bullet To the Head, unfortunately. Because if he had it would be a lot more interesting than it is. The story is generic to the point of parody. Hitman Jimmy Bobo (Sylvester Stallone) is double-crossed and loses his partner after a routine job. He teams up with a Cop from out of town (Sung Kang) to find out who was responsible, and goes up against a mix of gangsters and mercenaries, best represented by the lethal Keegan (Jason Momoa), whose skills seem to rival Bobo's own.
If that sounds utterly straight-to-dvd, well that's because it is. Each story beat and plot turn could have come from a "How To Make a B-Action Movie" manual. Christian Slater - these days confined to the DTV ghetto for past crimes against cinema - even shows up as a scumbag lawyer, and it's set in a series of straight-to-dvd (i.e. cheap) locations like a multi-storey carpark and a disused ironworks. Otherwise, Hill puts the New Orleans locations to decent, mildly atmospheric use, cranking the very-'80s mix of rootsy rock and blaring harmonica on the soundtrack up really high in the hope that the sensory distractions provided by his images and sounds might cause us to miss how thin the characters are here, how clumsy the exposition, how basic the plotting.
This story limps along in awkward little spurts, Cop and Hitman squabbling dully inbetween punishing action sequences. Those squabbles frequently allow Stallone's character to engage in some ethnic stereotyping - again, a very '80s element - as their conversations clunkily move the plot along. Stallone plays Bobo as a bit of a dick; he has no arc whatsoever, which is almost refreshing, and his lack of emotional range suits the actors immobile face and gut-sucked-in acting style. Kang is a list of cop cliches rather than an actual character, and he could be entirely removed from the film with little noticeable effect upon the story. Momoa makes the best impression; fearsome and nasty in the action sequences, he snarls his way through the few scenes in which he has to emote or speak, and the way he relishes his own mayhem makes as big an impression as any other non-Hill element here. But given that this is probably one of Hill's last films, we should enjoy him while he's here; and while this lacks the mythic boldness and stark simplicity of his greatest work, there is enough of his great talent still here for a receptive audience to relish.


*Ok, his worst film is still probably either Brewsters Millions or Supernova, but you get my meaning.

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.