RABID / PANIC IN THE STREETS

Dir. David Cronenberg CANADA 1977

Dir. Elia Kazan USA 1950


Thanks (as always) to Netflix, I stumbled on a pretty interesting pairing here. It ties in well with the mild David Cronenberg kick I've been on over the past few months and resulted in one really good and one pretty good viewing experience.

Rabid was shot and set in and around Montreal and begins with a motorcycle accident outside the city. A young girl named Rose is rushed to the nearest hospital, which just happens to be a cutting edge (for the late 70's) plastic surgery spa. Through a series of experimental (and highly improbable; the word morphogenetic gets thrown around a bunch) skin grafts, the doctors are able to save her life. She awakens from a coma a month later, only to find that she is unable to sustain herself on normal food. She quickly comes to realize that she requires human blood in order to survive. Cronenberg, never one to settle for the norm, devises a blood-drinking process that is unique, disgusting and disturbingly sexual. I won't spoil it here. After escaping from the hospital, Rose attempts to hitch-hike back to her boyfriend in Montreal, feeding along the way. She is unaware, however, that her "bites" transmit a lethal strain of rabies that transforms its victims into bloodthirsty animals mere hours after infection.

So yeah, this movie packs a lot into 90 minutes and feels very ambitious despite its schlocky subject matter and cast (more on that below). Cronenberg was still relatively unknown outside Canada when the film was made but he brings every cent of what must have been a small budget to bear, effectively depicting a city in chaos in the last act of the film, complete with military vs. zombie action and desolate, post-apocalyptic city streets.

In terms of the story, the film effectively tackles both vampire and zombie mythology, blending them well into a single narrative. The vampire aspect is particularly well done, combining a new take on the material (Rose possesses no vampiric 'powers' beyond the infection she spreads and her need for blood; also the manner in which she bites is, as I mentioned, unique) with a surprising lack of wangst generally found in vampire stories (Rose isn't exactly thrilled with her new situation, but ends up being fairly practical and ruthless rather than spending the whole movie crying about it).

The zombie half of the film, despite being similar to all that we've seen since then, probably seemed fairly ground-breaking at the time. Released a whole year before Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Rabid actually feels closer to Romero's lesser known 1973 film The Crazies, underlining similar themes of paranoia and militarism, while providing much more effective action and horror sequences (although I though the 2010 remake of The Crazies with Timothy Olyphant did a good job of updating Romero's vision). Also, Rabid may be the earliest example of fast zombies I've ever seen. Austin Trunick, my former roommate and all-around zombie movie expert could only cite the Italian film, City of the Walking Dead as a possibly earlier example, but according to Wikipedia, but that came out in 1980. You could also draw a pretty clear line from Rabid to the 28 Days Later films. In fact, Rabid was released abroad under the title Rage. Probably not a coincidence.

Lastly, I wanted to mention the star of the film, Marilyn Chambers. I was fairly surprised (OK, not that surprised, given that she never wears a bra during the film and spends a good amount of time topless) to learn after watching the movie that she was a fairly popular porn star during the early 70's and Rabid was her (less than successful) attempt at crossing over to a legitimate film career. The film left me wondering why she wasn't more successful, since she's actually very effective at playing a pretty wide range, from fearful to seductive to somewhat villainous. Her overall look is certainly more natural than the porn stars of today, none of whom seem like they'd have as good a shot at crossing over into regular film. Shame it didn't work out for her.



Panic In The Streets is an odd little movie. Although Elia Kazan was notable for directing several earlier films, it is the last one he made before launching himself into film history with a string of classics in the early to mid-50's (A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront, East Of Eden). Although my sister could speak more authoritatively on his work, I've seen enough to know that Kazan's tropes of realism and social awareness are in full force here.

The film begins at a card game in the run-down wharf area of New Orleans where a sickly Eastern European immigrant is murdered by a trio of gangsters following an argument over a card game. His body is dumped in the river and recovered the next day by the police. When the coroner discovers strange anomalies in the man's blood, the US Public Health Department dispatches Clint Reed to investigate. Reed discovers that the man (who was found without any kind of identification), was sick with pneumonic plague, an extremely lethal respiratory infection. Reed and the New Orleans police have 48 hours to locate the now infected murderers in order to stop a major outbreak of the disease from devastating the city.

Panic In The Streets was released in 1950, so you won't be finding any graphic depictions of sick people (dizziness and being really sweaty are pretty much the only symptoms shown) and, like many films of the post-war, pre-New Hollywood era (1945 to 1967, in case you're curious), the darkness of the film's subject matter is at odds with what they were and weren't allowed to show on screen. However, the film is briskly paced and well-shot, combining a basic police procedural with a socially conscious race against the clock. Kazan strives for realism wherever he can find it (much of the film seems to have been shot on location, if not actually in New Orleans), depicting the squalor of ghetto tenement buildings and rough-looking union halls with a clear eye for detail. His choice of casting for the gangsters (an extremely sinister, then unknown Jack Palance in his first film role and the hilariously named comedian Zero Mostel, who I've seen in other films of the time, always playing a blustery, easily cowed criminal) is pretty spot-on as well.

Oddly, Richard Widmark seems a bit miscast as Clint Reed (manly name non-withstanding). I've always enjoyed him in his usual roles as low-rent criminals and stone-cold killers, so the scenes of him living an idyllic 1950's suburban life with a pretty wife and scrappy little kid seemed a bit jarring. He does a fine job, but I found it much easier to see him in the Jack Palance role as I was watching the film.

In the end, the film spends a bit too much time on the procedural aspect of the case (pairing Widmark up with a police captain with a chip on his shoulder seemed both unnecessary and underdeveloped) and throws in too many scenes of bureaucrats and officials not listening to reason for me to say that it was a favorite, but it was interesting to see a film from 1950 deal with a viral outbreak, even if the threat of zombies was never imminent.

UP NEXT: Zombies! Diary Of The Dead is on deck for review and possibly TV reviews as the new fall season kicks off. Stay tuned.

WHIP IT

Dir. Drew Barrymore USA 2009

I feel like there was a bit of a backlash against Ellen Page and quirky indie movies in general following the splash that Juno made back in 2007. And although I liked Juno, I understand that the dialogue and 'look-how-quirky-we-are' characters can be a little grating. Whip It may have appeared similar based on its trailers (Quirky Sport! Ellen Page playing a chick with a weird name! The girl from Arrested Development!), but the film is a bit more grounded than its contemporaries and is a strong directorial debut for Drew Barrymore.

Ellen Page plays Bliss Cavander, a high school senior living in small town Texas. Fed up with her crappy job and the conservative trappings of her mother (Marcia Gay Harden), who forces her to compete in beauty pageants, she takes a trip to Austin with her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat). There she falls in love with the sport of roller derby, particularly a team of underdogs called The Hurl Scouts, which include such cleverly named players as Smashley Simpson (Drew Barrymore), Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), Bloody Holley (Zoe Bell) and Rosa Sparks (Eve). She finds herself having to juggle the pressures of her new secret hobby as well as a new boyfriend and the suspicions of her parents.

Full disclosure: I mostly wanted to see this movie because of all the hot, awesome women in it. Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig and Zoe Bell alone hit three very different points on my sexy spectrum. However, despite my deeply male reasoning, this film is pretty firmly entrenched in sensible, upbeat feminism. In addition to passing the Bechdel Test with flying colors, the film casts a wide net with its portrayal of women, from their goals to their motivations to their actions. Stand-outs include Kristen Wiig (in her most dramatic performance to date) as a down-to-earth single mother and Juliette Lewis as Iron Maven, Bliss' aging antagonist, who manages to show some interesting layers before the film ends. Bliss never comes off as whiny, even when all the conflicts at the end of the second act (where everything always goes wrong so it can get better in the third act) get dumped on her in an unrealistically quick fashion. If anything, the plot involving her hipster/rocker boyfriend feels like the relationship that could most easily be jettisoned from the movie. Guy looked like a tool anyway.

All of this is grafted onto a fairly by-the-numbers sports movie, made interesting by the fact that you don't seem many films about all-female (or frankly any kind of) roller derby. The movie does a fast, easy job of laying out the rules of the game so that someone (such as myself) who's never see it before can follow the action with ease. Drew Barrymore shows she's more than capable of keeping the plot flowing smoothly and displays a good sense of where to place the camera during the derby sequences. I also give her props for having no ego when it came to her own character. She probably only had about a dozen lines during the entire film, the same of which could be said for every other Hurl Scout who wasn't Kristen Wiig. Also her character was clearly stoned for the entire film, which is always good for a laugh.

Also, check out how old Daniel Stern got. He does a good job as Bliss' dad and I always liked him, but I'm wondering where the hell he's been since Home Alone 2. That shit was like 15 years ago. Or Bushwacked. Anyone else remember Bushwacked?

Anyway, I'm assuming most people missed this movie when it was in theaters last year (if its middling box office is any indication), but I'd definitely recommend checking it out now. It would actually make a great date movie. Fun, pro-feminist message for the ladies, hot girls on roller skates kick the crap out of each other for the gents. Enjoy.

DAYBREAKERS

The Spierig Brothers AUSTRAILIA 2010

"Living in a world where vampires are the dominant species is about as safe as bare backing a five dollar whore."

I've been putting off my Scott Pilgrim review since I plan on seeing it again tomorrow, so that will provide a nice refresher. I watched this movie last weekend and it kind of sucked, as the above quote may indicate (that it was the most memorable line in the movie should be very telling).

Daybreakers is set in the near future of 2019, ten years after a global pandemic has turned the vast majority of people into vampires. Ironically, this future is not particularly different; people still get up and go to work (except now they do it at night), getting their coffee spiked with blood as they wait for the train. Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a hematologist working for Bromley Marks, a major pharmaceutical company that's racing to create a synthetic blood substitute to replace the rapidly dwindling supply of normal humans that the vampires feed on (all humans who refused to turn either live like outlaws or are kept in stasis in giant blood bank facilities where their blood is harvested). This problem is compounded by the fact that vampires who go too long without blood mutate into grotesque bat-like creatures called Subsiders, which is basically if like homeless people turned into superstrong zombies after a few weeks. Dalton's sympathy toward normal humans eventually leads him to team up with a group of survivors led by Elvis (played by Willem Dafoe) and trying to find a cure for vampirism.

No one can accuse Daybreakers of being low-concept. There are enough background ideas and themes in this film to make it feel overstuffed at 97 minutes long. I honestly think the premise would have been better served by a TV show, where these ideas could have been expanded upon and fully explored. I will admit that, amid all the fucking Twilight/True Blood nonsense that's been in vogue for the past few years, unattractive, cold-hearted vampires are a bit welcome. And this film certainly has ideas and style to burn. The set and wardrobe design seems to be lifted from Mad Men; the men in the film wear fedoras and everyone lives in well-manicured suburbs, creating a dark version of the 1950's American dream. Cars are equipped with 360 degree cameras and blacked out windows that allow for daytime driving and little camera/videoscreen combos in place of rearview mirrors (the whole not showing up in mirrors thing doesn't get used much anymore; I dig the video screen mirrors, but vampires not having reflections doesn't make any sense even by the standards of the supernatural. It kind of clashes with the whole "scientific explanation for vampires" that the film goes for).

The movie also attempts to be socially conscious, to varying degrees of success. The whole "blood as oil" metaphor seems like it should be painfully obvious, but it actually plays out with a bit of subtlety. The plot more directly addresses the greed of big business and pharmaceutical companies via Dalton's boss, played by Sam Neill, who is more interested in a blood substitute because of the enormous profits it would generate, rather than any concern for pubic welfare. It even makes a statement about the issue of homelessness, as I mentioned eariler, via the Subsiders.

So what was bad, if the film had all these deep social values at its core? Pretty much everything else. As I said, 97 minutes is not nearly enough time to delve into everything the filmmakers wanted to discuss. I'll never knock a film for being ambitious, even if it fails, but if you're going to create a world that's this interesting, you need a compelling plot and interesting characters to follow through it, both of which are sorely lacking here. The plot feels like a retread of various other films, Terminator, Equilibrium and Blade being the first three that spring to mind. The film is surprisingly light on action or horror, making the plot seem far more perfunctory and by-the-numbers than it needs to be. The finale is fairly anti-climactic and some of the twists that the plot takes in the back-half don't entirely make sense.

More disappointing than anything else are the characters and, by extension, the acting. I generally like Ethan Hawke in everything I see him in, but he seemed to be phoning it in pretty hard in this one. Granted his character is a pretty standard angsty protagonist, but everything from his delivery to his facial expressions just screamed boredom. Willem Dafoe, who's slightly unhinged, shotgun/crossbow toting Elvis character should have written itself, was also uncharacteristically unengaging, his humor (like the line at the top of the page) falling flat and his ass-kicking moments curiously absent. In fact, the only actor who came through in this movie was Sam Neill, who brought a nice touch of pathos to an otherwise extremely standard evil corporate villain.

I'm always ready to support genre films, even when they're less than perfect, but I don't know that I can recommend Daybreakers to anyone but the most die-hard of vampire fans. If you're looking for a vampire story where the main characters aren't all making goo-goo eyes at each other, it's worth a look, but other than that, I'd say try your luck elsewhere.

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

Dir. Edgar Wright USA 2010

"Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it."

Advertised as "An epic of epic epicness", Scott Pilgrim is in many ways the definative romance for the Twitter generation, a demographic raised on 8-bit videogames, grungy indie-rock and ironic slacking. It somewhat saddens me that few people born before the mid-seventies will find anything to appreciate in this film, but for anyone younger than that, who appreciates comics, videogames and hipster culture (although if you hate hipsters, the film mocks the culture almost as much as it glorifies it), I'd call it a must-see.

Based on a series of manga-style graphic novels by Brian Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World tells the story of its titular protagonist (Michael Cera), an affably selfish 22-year old slacker living in Toronto who passes his time playing in a garage band called Sex Bob-omb and hanging out with a variety of friends, enemies and acquaintences. His safe rebound relationship with a 17 year old fangirl named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) is interrupted when he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an impossibly cool punk-hipster goddess from America with a mysterious past and a knack for dating assholes. In order to win her heart (and the Toronto International Battle of the Bands), Scott must defeat the combined forces of Ramona's Seven Evil Exes.

With it's sprawlingly realistic cast and decidedly unrealistic aesthetic (which includes videogame style fights, surrealist dreams and musical sequences), the Scott Pilgrim series would appear to be a nightmare for anyone attempting to adapt it into a 100 minute movie. It's a testament to the skills of Edgar Wright (director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) that he is able to compress these elements and characters into something satisfying and unique with what appears to be minimal effort (although I'm sure it wasn't easy). The running time seems to fly by, but every single frame is packed with visual gags, background action and rapid-fire dialogue which (as a fan of the comic) left me feeling as though nothing had been left out. Much like Shaun of the Dead, with its repeated dialogue, numerous asides and machine gun editing, Scott Pilgrim overwhelms its viewers in such a way that leaves them wanting more.

My biggest concern going into this film was Michael Cera, who seems to be wearing out his welcome among audiences, who tend to complain that he can only play one character (no one seemed to care about this until recently; was Clint Eastwood's eighth movie playing an unstoppable badass any less enjoyable than the seventh?), and I will admit that to being worried that Cera's natural patheticness would clash with Scott's unwarrented, overblown confidence. While this did happen, Cera did manage to portray Scott's trademark cluelessness to a tee, and in the end, trading his bravado for self-doubt goes a long way to helping the audience sympathize with a character that is, quite simply, kind of a shithead.

Wright also gets props for assembling a hell of a cast for Scott to (sometimes literally) bounce off of, starting with the beautiful Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who manages to make Ramona magnetic despite her constant aloofness and tendencies toward bitchiness. Major stand-outs include Kieran Culkin as Wallace, Scott's laid-back gay roommate who dispenses advice and snark without ever falling into camp gay stereotypes, and Ellen Wong as Knives, Scott's besmirched young ex-girlfriend, who perfectly walks the line between adorable, annoying and creepy. Also excellent are the slew of one-scene wonders that make up the League of Evil Exes, including Chris Evans as Lucas Lee, a uber-douche movie star, Brandon Routh as Todd Ingram, a dim-witted telekinetic vegan bass player and Mae Whitman as Roxy Richter a 'bi-furious', bad-pun-spouting ninja. My only complaint was the sidelining of Kim Pine, the deadpan drummer of Sex Bob-omb, who's tangled romantic history with Scott (one of my favorite aspects of the book) was cut from the film. Also major props for getting the characters to look exactly like their comic counterparts when O'Malley only ever draws that one anime face.

The other major draw of the film is its style, which cribs from comics, manga and old school video games. From the 8-bit version of the Universal theme, to Scott leveling up throughout the movie and enemies bursting into bunches of coins, the film contains a slew of gags and references for both casual and hardcore gamers. The film also gets an A for fight sequences, which are both creative and well-staged, with (as far as I can tell) the actors doing all their own fighting and stunts. Each of the seven fights is its own, driving the story forward and never feeling repetitive.

The soundtrack doesn't disappoint either, featuring several notable indie artists as the fictional bands within the film (Beck as Sex Bob-omb, Metric as The Clash at Demonhead and Broken Social Scene as Crash and the Boys). While Beck is a bit more talented than I would imagine Sex Bob-omb to be, all the songs are extremely catchy (especially the Metric song) and give the film another dimension of authenticity and enjoyment.

I feel pretty unapologetic for the fact that this review is completely one-sided. I would say that, along with Inception, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is one of the few movies worth your time during what has otherwise been a pretty lackluster summer. Even if you haven't read the books, I'd strongly recommend this to anyone who thinks they might be interested.

PANDORUM

Dir. Christian Alvart USA/GERMANY 2009

"Don't worry. I wouldn't have survived this long if I had a heart."

One of my favorite movies of all time is John Carpenter's 1982 classic, The Thing. It set the gold standard for all sci-fi horror that followed it (yes, I think it's better than Alien) and disappointingly few movies come anywhere close to that bar. Pitch Black came close back in 2000. And while Pandorum isn't better than either of those films, it manages to be an inventive, frightening and compelling sci-fi film with a great cast and some pretty interesting ideas.

The plot of the film hinges on several twists and an initial stance of audience ignorance, so I won't spoil anything that isn't made explicit within the first 20 minutes or so. By 2174, Earth has become a environmentally unsound shithole where its 24 billion inhabitants fight wars not for oil or land, but drinkable water. Out of this gloomy scenario comes the Elysium, a city-sized spaceship which embarks on a 123 year journey to Tanis, a recently discovered planet capable of supporting human life. Crewed by a small percentage of its 60,000 passengers (who rotate in two years shifts, spending the rest of the time in hypersleep), the Elysium represents the final hope for humanity's continued survival.

The film begins when Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) awakens from hypersleep on the Elysium. A member of the 5th two year shift, Bower finds no one from the 4th shift to bring him up to speed (which is very necessary given that hypersleep causes temporary selective amnesia). He awakens his commanding officer Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) and they discover that the previous crews are nowhere to be found and that something decidedly non-human has infested the ship.

I mentioned to my roommate after the first twenty minutes of this film that it was probably the best videogame movie I've ever seen. Pandorum is not actually based on a videogame (although its atmosphere and setting is very similar to Dead Space), but the beginning plays very much like one. Bower is sent to explore the ship with just a flashlight and no weapons, while Payton remains behind in a control room, guiding him via an intercom. You could trace the videogame analogy through the entire film, but I feel like that would give the wrong impression.

I think what ultimately impressed me most about the film was the plot, which was high concept enough to support two different movies (this makes sense, since apparently the film was adapted from two similar, pre-existing scripts). The larger premise of the ship acting as a second Noah's Ark to a new planet is obviously interesting, but the film also creates a second thread with the introduction of Pandorum, a little-understood form of madness that has been known to strike people who spend too much time in space. The characters fear of this seeps into the viewer and influences the film in some surprising ways. In fact, by the time thet third act gets underway, the plot takes a surprising number of satisfying, unexpected twists. Just as I'd figured out one, I was blindsided with another.

The film's atmosphere isn't particularly original (somewhere between Dead Space and an Jeunet movie), but Alvart takes his time at the beginning, orienting the audience within the ship and giving an clear impression of its immense size. Lots of little touches (a shaving razor that utilizes a laser, bar code tattoes used as access keys, a pretty nifty stun gun gauntlet) are used to create the believable futuristic world and the film doesn't rely to heavily on jump scares for horror.

I was also pretty impressed with the cast; always a key component in a good sci-fi/horror film. Ben Foster (as you may remember from my review of The Messenger) is rapidly becoming one of my favorite character actors. You can drop him in pretty much any role, leading or supporting, and count on him to turn in a solid performance. Here, he brings Bower's fear and confusion to the forefront, managing to be both a clueless everyman and quite a bit of a badass. I don't really know what happened to Dennis Quaid in the past few years. It seems like he's slumming it in everything from shitty big budget genre flicks (The Day After Tomorrow) to shitty low budget genre flicks (Legion). At least he can mark this one in the win column. He turns in a solid, nuanced performance here. Special mention also goes to Norman Reedus (one of the Boondock Saints) in a cameo and the extremely sexy Antje Traue, a German actress in her first English-speaking role.

I went into this film hoping for the best but expecting little, and I'm pleased to say that it delivered in almost every way I wanted it to. Definitely reccommended if you've got Instant Watch.

Up Next: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (so fucking good) and this past January's vampire offering Daybreakers (not so good).

FULLTIME KILLER / DISTRICT 13: ULTIMATUM

Dir. Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai HONG KONG 2001

Dir. Patrick Alessandrin FRANCE 2009

"You obviously don't watch enough movies. If you did, you'd know that when the organization betrays a killer, he'll pay back twice to the ones who've wronged him. Even if he dies trying."

Woo, foreign movies! I paired these two together by virtue of their being a) foreign b) action movies and c) really silly. However, I enjoyed Fulltime Killer quite a bit more, so I'll probably have more to say on that than District 13, which is basically a textbook example of a disappointing sequel. Onward!

Fulltime Killer is the first Johnnie To movie I've ever seen, something I will quickly and further rectify since a lot of his stuff is now on Instant Watch. I've been a fan of the Heroic Bloodshed genre ever since late high school, and I'm pretty well versed in the John Woo/Chow Yun-Fat classics that define the genre (Hard-Boiled, The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, etc). Highly inventive shoot-outs, extremely badass characters and uber-dramatic male bonding are the main tropes of the genre, as well as a lot of unintentional, but appreciated humor that comes from the action and the drama being cranked up to 11. With Fulltime Killer, Johnnie To and his co-director offer an interesting subversion on the genre and a witty commentary on the tropes of action films in general.

PLOT: 'O' (played by Takashi Sorimachi) is a Japanese assassin operating out of Hong Kong. Disciplined and highly prepared, he has a reputation as the most reliable and successful hit-man in all of Asia, although he lives a stereotypical life of solitude, while admiring Chin, the young woman who cleans his apartment, from afar. His life is turned upside-down by Tok (played by Andy Lau), a brash, reckless new assassin who cribs his flashy style from the action movies he admires so much. In his attempt to supplant 'O' as the number one hit-man in Asia, Tok slowly begins to ingratiate himself into every aspect of 'O's life, and starts by dating Chin.

Fulltime Killer does an excellent job of having its cake and eating it too via it's two protagonists. 'O', with his cold efficiency and somewhat overblown angst, plays straight many of the tropes found in classic Heroic Bloodshed movies. Andy Lau, on the other hand, plays Tok like a leather clad, gun toting Bugs Bunny, while engaging others (and the audience) in spirited meta-conversation regarding action movies and film in general (he has a excellent point about bad movies being able to have great trailers, which I always find myself thinking). The film takes some weird diversions, especially toward the end, but spends most of its running time skillfully walking the line between a genuine action flick and a silly parody of itself.

The strongest aspect of the film is the character of Tok (obviously) and more specifically, the way Andy Lau dives into the character headfirst. Andy Lau is probably best known to American audiences for playing the Matt Damon character in the Infernal Affairs films (the first of which was remade as The Departed). His work in those films proves that he's got serious dramatic chops and great screen presence, which is why its so much fun to see him completely unhinged in Fulltime Killer. At the same time, his character is down-to-earth and charming enough for the audience and Chin to relate to. Contrasted with the super-serious and emotionally numb 'O' (the quote at the top of the page is his, which sums up the tone of his character pretty well), Tok pretty much flies off the screen and insists you enjoy the film.

The action in this movie is less prevalent than in a John Woo film, but it does so for the sake of building the characters and making them seem like interesting (sort of realistic) people. And although To's camera work isn't as flashy or dynamic as Woo's (way less slo-mo, no Jesusy, dove-filled frame compositions) the action is still well paced and enjoyable. The sequence about two-thirds of the way through in which 'O' and Chin fend off a squad of riot police while descending the outside of an apartment complex was my personal favorite. Recommended if you think you'd like it.

So I'm guessing most people saw Casino Royale when it came out a few years ago. One of the best parts of that movie (for my money, at least) is the first big action sequence in which Bond chases a terrorist through a construction site and later an embassy building in Madagascar. That scene employs parkour, a French physical discipline that revolves around getting from point A to point B as fast as you can, utilizing your own physical skills and the environment around you. Combined with a knowledge of martial arts, it is some serious shit. The first District 13 film (2004) starred David Belle (widely credited as the founder of parkour) and Cyril Raffaelli (a parkour stuntman who also specializes in shotokan karate and wushu kung-fu) as a badass cop and a noble criminal forced to team up and stop the titular ghetto of B13 from being destroyed by a government/criminal conspiracy. They did this by beating the shit out of tons of dudes. Witness the glory of the opening scene.

The first film benefited from badass fights, no wire work or computer effects, and the clean, capable direction of Pierre Morel, who garnered enough attention with the film to end up making Taken, that Liam Neeson-murders-every-gangster-in-Europe-to-get-his-daughter-back movie that was a surprise hit last year. Best of all, the film struck just the right balance of action and character development that you want from something like this. Draw the characters in broad strokes, let some interesting performers flesh out the details, then start the ass-beating and don't let up.

Unfortunately, the sequel smacks of cheap cash-in across the board. The two protagonists are reunited, but you've got a different director, a plot that's essentially a re-hash of the first film and a bizarrely lopsided ratio of action to talking. People are constantly explaining the plot to other people (which isn't that complicated and certainly doesn't need to be done for the audiences sake) and the fight scenes that are there all pale in comparison to the ones from the first film. If actions sequels are supposed to be bigger and better, no one told these guys.

I don't want to get into all the other details of why it sucked (although some of the poorly translated subtitles are good for a laugh; one character describes another as a 'slender, natural-born killer', which was just...really creepy), but I do recommend you check out the first movie.