As longtime Ultimate Action Movie Club member, writer, contributor, etc… Robb Antequera aka The Cinema Drunkie discovered a few days ago, his write up for our UAMC review of the new Donnie Yen martial arts comedy actioner Enter the Fat Dragon had a particularly ultimate and awesome quote featured on its cover!
And sure enough, if you go out and purchase the Blu-ray copy of Enter the Fat Dragon at your local neighborhood video store – jk, you’ll probably have to order it on Amazon – you’ll find a familiar 80s/90s action movie website’s name featured on the cover declaring, in Robb’s words, that Enter the Fat Dragon is “A Hilarious, Hyper-Paced, Rock-Em Sock-Em Blast” – because it is!
First Cover Feature Quote
The quote comes from Robby’s full write-up for our review on Enter the Fat Dragon which you can read in its entirety here. The line comes from the ‘Enter the Fat Dragon Review’ section and the entire paragraphs is actually even more so over-the-top about how awesome of a movie it is:
“Man. Oh. Man. What a ride this was! A hilarious, hyper-paced, rock-em sock- em blast of a movie! A throwback to the golden days of the 80s when we got kung fu comedy classics like Wheels on Meals and My Lucky Stars, I was grinning from ear to ear by the time the credits started playing! An absolute great time! Donnie Yen does the legends justice while continuing to show us he truly is one of the greatest to ever do it!”
As the rest of the review goes into Donnie Yen’s great performance and the well-crafted narrative that blends comedic elements with some truly badass action sets and sequences.
Ultimate Love for Action Movies
This is really cool for a couple of reasons. One, it’s our first cover quote ever (unless there are more floating out there that haven’t been sent to us). And two, well, because the Ultimate Action Movie Club (aka Ultimate Action Movies) is truly meant to be a page where fans of action movies can talk about how awesome action movies are.
Case in point, Enter the Fat Dragon is a great example of a fun actioner that would be great to watch with some friends over some pizza and beer this weekend – even if you have to do it remotely!
So, if you haven’t already, and the flick captures your fancy, check out Enter the Fat Dragon. Just be sure to get a copy with Ultimate Action Movies on the cover!
Meet a new player in the underground, indie martial arts scene of ultimate action!
In this day and age, it is widely known that if you want real action, you go to the low budget, independent world of action filmmaking. A world currently dominated by top action stars such as Scott Adkins and Michael Jai White. But there is one man, and one film, looking to take a place among them in the annals of action movie supremacy…
His name is Braden White. And that film is called Crossfire.
Introducing ‘Crossfire’ (2020)
From director Taron Spencer comes Crossfire, an exciting new action movie starring martial arts wunderkind Braden White, and also stars Ginifer Ree, Dale Neihaus, Ashlynn Ree, and William Row.
Written by White, Crossfire tells the story of two siblings who are also expertly trained assassins. When a hit goes bad, they discover a link that leads to the whereabouts of their father, a legendary assassin who disappeared 15 years ago.
According to White, who’s also producing, Crossfire “will change the face of low budget action movies.” And with a special behind the scenes look at some of the fight choreography, I’m inclined to believe him:
Skin Circuit and Past Projects
So you can bet, when this movie finally drops, we are in for a show!
Here’s a few other projects starring White to get your adrenaline pumping, and be on the lookout for Skin Circuit, also written & produced by, and starring White, coming soon!
Adam Copeland enters the ring in the grand tradition of wrestlers-turned-action stars with the very solid Money Plane (2020).
For years, wrestling and action movies have gone hand in hand. Just look at some of the wrestlers who’ve made the crossover into action movies: Dwayne Johnson, Steve Austin, Roddy Piper, John Cena, Jesse Ventura, Bill Goldberg, and Mike Mizanin, as well as many others. One of the many others was Adam Copeland, also known as the Rated R Superstar himself, Edge.
With starring roles in movies like the Jamie Kennedy co-starring Buddy Cop flick Bending the Rules, and the highly underrated thriller Interrogation, as well as co-starring roles on shows like Haven and Vikings, Copeland has conjured up a pretty decent resume for himself. Now, he returns to the action genre with Money Plane, a new high concept, high stakes action/heist thriller . So, how does it rank among other wrestler starring action flicks? Let’s find out!
A professional thief with $40 million in debt and his family’s life on the line must commit one final heist – rob a futuristic airborne casino filled with the world’s most dangerous criminals.
This… was pretty damn entertaining. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. A fast pace, some decent action, and a good sense of humor really make for a fun time with this one.
For starters, the best part about this is the cast. Aside from Copeland, we also have Kelsey Grammer, Thomas Jane, Denise Richards, Al Sapienza, all 3 Lawrence brothers (Joey, Matthew, & Andrew. More on that in a second), and relative newcomers like Katrina Norman and Patrick Lamont Jr.. And they all make this the entertaining endeavor it is.
Well, not so much Richards, whose two brief scenes in the film amount to about 90 seconds of screen time, but that’s neither here nor there. This is an awesome cast who give this their all when most actors of their caliber would probably slum it, especially Grammar and Jane, who are a ton of fun in roles they probably filmed in a day or two a piece.
But the true standouts of the cast are the Lawrence brothers. Andrew, who plays a member of Copeland’s team, and to my surprise also co-wrote and directed, makes this a family affair as he casts Joey in the role of the plane’s Concierge, and Matthew in the role of “The Cowboy”. All three are great, especially Matthew, who is pretty damn funny as The Cowboy, with a ridiculously thick Texas accent and a huge, fake Sam Elliott style mustache.
Now, onto the action. It’s all pretty well done. Andrew handles the action sequences fairly nicely, which is impressive when you consider this is only his second feature, and that he was working with an obvious low budget. We get a couple of shootouts and a slew of fist fights, most of which feature Norman, who gets this movie’s MVP for action performers, as she kicks the most ass. Jane also gets a nice shootout, where he shows he still remembers all his Punisher training.
The standout action sequence goes to Copeland’s fight with the co-pilot, who gives him a knockdown, slam bang fight scene right in the cockpit of the plane. It makes me wish there was more of Copeland fighting like this in the movie.
Which leads to my issues with the movie. Why oh why would you cast one of the most exciting and talented wrestlers of all time in Edge and only give him one good fight? Seriously, he punches a guy or two and fires a couple of shots in the beginning, then it’s the big cockpit fight, and then that’s it. He’s flying the plane for the rest of the movie. He never fights again. Like damn, could we at least get him spearing somebody. I mean shit.
Also, why go through the trouble of casting Denise Richards in a role to only have her appear twice in scenes so brief that it makes Richard Grieco’s appearance in 22 Jump Street look huge by comparison? Like you could’ve used the money it took to cast her for the day she worked and distributed that money to other scenes that needed it and just hired a cheaper, no name actress to suffice. It really would’ve made no difference.
But other than that, I found this to be a fun little way to kill 82 mins. It’s well put together, funny, has some good action, and features Kelsey Grammer firing a machine gun while screaming at the top of his lungs. Sounds like a pretty cool time to me.
More actual martial arts tutorials from Scott Adkins, Ultimate Action Star!
In what is quick becoming one of the best series on Youtube, the up-and-coming action star Scott Adkins breaks down another one of his signature moves – the LEAD LEG ROUND KICK – in another great and informative tutorial.
Adkins, best known for thumping actioners Boyka: Undisputed, Accident Man and Avengement plus many, many others has quietly been putting together his own master class of sorts in martial arts kicks and techniques on his Youtube channel. Let’s check out the latest!
Based in Taekwondo which Adkins got his start in, the “lead leg round kick” is a fast and surprising move that can pack a punch, but will also leave an opponent at a loss as it’s hard to see coming. Adkins, who has spent years training as well as enjoyed quite a career in both stunt performance and choreography, is a great teacher in these videos showcasing both the movements and the theory for landing some ultimate hits.
And you can see just how devastating a well delivered lead leg round kick can be as Adkins unleashes on the unfortunate dummy in the video. It’s a really cool technique, and you can see Adkins perform the move – or something similar – in his roles as Boyka and other actioners like Triple Threat and Ninja II.
Ol’ Benny A takes his shot at the classic Heist Action genre!
I’ve been on a bit of a bank heist kick lately. Don’t ask me why. There’s just something oddly reassuring to me about these types of flicks. They’re predictable, even in their unpredictable twists and turns (with the good ones at least). But they’re also just super familiar – we’ve seen the bank heist again and again throughout action cinema.
From some of the early attempts by famous filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, to classic cinema staples Bonnie and Clyde, and into the post-modern stylings of Ocean’s 11, we always seemed enthralled with a well-planned, yet quickly wheels-off bank heist.
Looking at this genre from an Ultimate Action Movie Club perspective, the bank heist films have always been primed for great action sequences and intense standoffs. Some of my favorite classics like Heat and Point Break are great examples, but there are plenty more.
Which brings us to the 2010 bank heist actioner The Town starring and directed by Ben Affleck. While both a critical and commercial success, I didn’t actually have much of a memory of it watching it again ten years later, but was quite happy with its ability to provide some action, a bit of story, and a solid distraction through a familiar genre.
So, in case you didn’t know, Ben Affleck is from Boston, Massachusetts. And sure, you might say, he wasn’t born there but just moved there when he was a child… but it goes deeper than that. Ben Affleck *is* Boston. They’re the same person now thanks in part to Good Will Hunting and his constant reminders in his voice and the roles he takes on. So, it shouldn’t really be of much of a surprise that Affleck was the natural fit for this modern Boston fable about bank robbers living in the quickly gentrifying slums of Charlestown.
We get Affleck and his pal Jeremy Renner going full send on their harsh Boston accents and Fightin’ Irish tattoos as we the familiar bank heist set falls into place. We have the good guy: Affleck. The bad guy: Renner. The detective on their case: John Hamm. And surprisingly well crafted love interest in Rebecca Hall as the bank clerk they stick-up in the opening.
What follows is fairly predictable but fun as the heat inevitably builds up on our hero while he falls in love and the cop gets closer by the day. And throughout it all it does everything it can to remind you just what “town” we’re in with the colorful shop-keeps and the frivolous inclusion of Fenway Stadium as the spot for the final – one last time – heist to end it all.
And unless you’re a Yankees fan or – you know – just someone who might not love the city of Boston as much as Affleck might think everyone should, the setting to its credit works just fine for the story – but it’s the tense boiler-room genre action that keeps the film going strong.
Bank Heist movies can run the gamut of how serious they might be. They can be gritty like The Italian Job or fun-loving like the Ocean’s 11 movies, and The Town certainly shoots for the former. While it’s not Heat that you’re watching, The Town has plenty of intense action and does a great job of creating some memorable shots and sequences.
The most iconic moments come from the heist disguise costumes our robbers don as that might actually be the single most important element to any heist film’s aesthetic. For example, some of the most memorable masks that I can think of we get the U.S. Presidents from Point Break and the simple, yet sleek, white hockey goalie masks from Heat. For The Town we actually get two different sets: the first being some rather hellish skull-with-dreadlock looks for the opening heist sequence, then later we get some very cool – and oddly, even more, creepy – Halloween nun ensembles that certainly do the trick.
Again, the majority of the action in a classical heist movie like The Town is going to come from these bank robbery sequences – and then the subsequent chases and showdowns that follow. It’s also somewhat ceremonious of the genre to include a heist scene at the very beginning that’s ideally supposed to be just as big and just about as good as the finale.
The Town certainly delivers the goods on this account. We get a great opening action number. Affleck isn’t a badass kung fu master or anything (or really a marksmen since he’s got his Batman-code thing going on and not actually trying to kill anybody, you know). But Renner has some fire power and their explosive tactics bring enough firepower as well.
I’d say it’s a little bit of a disappointment that even though Affleck’s hero character is kinda pitted against his “brother” of sorts in Renner, we never really get a big showdown between the two of them. And instead of Affleck and Hamm going mano-y-mano at the end with guns blazing we just get Affleck skipping town and (fittingly for his character at least) just leaving a one sentence note saying “fuck you” to Hamm instead of any fiery death.
Yet, for a modern heist actioner, I can only think of a few examples that might be this gritty or action full like Den of Thieves, without of course falling into straight up action with a heist twist like some Scott Adkins or the like. So, if you’re looking for an oddly reassuring heist genre actioner to grind to one night, give The Town a first or follow up viewing for sure!
(from left) Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Dom (Vin Diesel) in "F9," directed by Justin Lin.
The Long and Winding Road: Chapter 10 – The Road Ahead.
The day before the 49ers and the Chiefs duked it out in the Superbowl Universal Studios set up a concert in Miami advertising their newest movie: F9. An hours-long concert lead-up to a two and a half minute trailer seems like overkill but Universal studios (more specifically Vin Diesel) was riding high. Justin Lin came back to the Fast Saga to direct the latest outing. Long missing cast members returned. Charlize Theron would reprise her role. The whole thing seem poised to break the global box office and start the summer movie season on a high note. Then the global pandemic happened.
On March 16 AMC, Cinemark, and Regal all announced full closures of all of their movie theaters for “six to twelve weeks” to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus and to comply with different state responses to the global pandemic. There could be no summer movie season because there were no theaters to play in. The entire country stared in awe as, one-by-one, studios pulled their movies out of rotation. F9 was the first to go, opting for an April slot in 2021 – one entire year later.
We don’t know what to expect from the movie since it’s delayed release plan. We can only go off of whatever media hype the cast and crew accomplished in relation to the trailer. Since the media machine was in full steam when the virus was just ramping up we can examine the treasure trove of content. I, however, keep going back to that trailer. What I have for you is a way over-analyzed breakdown of the trailer for F9 complete with predictions, skeptical thoughts, and some contextual analysis.
Read along on the rest of our Fast Saga coverage with these articles on the other Fast & Furious installments:
Open on a farm-looking place. Dominic Toretto put the square concrete home of LA behind him and now tunes tractors instead of muscle cars. Together with Letty, his wife, the two raise his son Brian safe from the world at large. Little does he know….
Across the globe, in a supermax prison, Jacob Toretto meets Cipher. With her chic looking bowl cut she persuades Jacob to join her cause: help her destroy Dominic Toretto and bring down world governments. She’ll hint that she has some very powerful friends (Eteon!) and that she has aligned herself with their agenda. Jacob agrees, he’s ready to step out from the shadows.
Dom’s just about to go put his son to bed when he gets a call from Mr. Nobody. He says Cipher has been released from a super prison in Paris. Dominic yells at him for not telling him Cipher was in prison in the first place. Nobody chuckles something about being on a “need-to-know” basis. He then smugly sips amber ale from a Stella Artois and wistfully mentions it’s five o’clock somewhere. Little Nobody takes the phone from him. He explains: Cipher’s set loose and they need Dom and his team to go get her. Oh! And Dom, Scott Eastwood says, Jacob’s there. Letty enters the room after overhearing the entire conversation.
The two go upstairs and poorly explain to an innocent child why they have to abandon him to save the world from a cyber terrorist. Poor little Brian gets his dad’s necklace as a consolation gift and goes to bed happy. His parents arrange Little Nobody to babysit but only after Deckard Shaw won’t take their calls. His voicemail says he’s busy hunting Eteon with the Samoan Hulk. You can hear Luke Hobbs’ voice in the background calling him a candy ass. Letty and Dom smile and shrug. Oh, those two. Boys will be boys. Or something like that.
In Paris the team reunites. Tej flips a big breaker revealing a monstrous hideout in the tunnels. He says he bought them off a former member of the League of Assassins who used to drill tunnels under cities and put bombs there. Everyone looks around uncomfortably. Letty answers her phone and walks away all coy.
Roman does his thing where he struts around and compliment/insults everyone saying how he missed them. When he gets to Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) he goes uncomfortably silent. He, Ramsey, and Tej all share a strange look. They mention a roadtrip in Mexico and a tequila fueled night. Thankfully Letty interrupts them all by introducing Han! They all cry and passionately reunite.
Han meets Ramsey. She blushes at his suave behavior but he cuts her off: he only has eyes for one woman. The sadness lingers. Dom cuts the tension by pointing them back to the problem at hand: Cipher is loose in London and they need to hunt her down. Cue the big reveal – Jacob is Dom’s little brother. Gasp! But Family!
Jacob steals some expensive piece of equipment with a flowery name. Let’s call it the Marigold Explosive. This Marigold can acidly break down anything, kind of like the blood of a Xenomorph. He executes the heist while Dom explains his brother is a world-renowned assassin, master thief, and performance driver. Dom’s narration comes to a close and John Cena smiles while he holds a bizarre looking vial.
But how are they gonna find him? Roman asks. Tej and Ramsey do their tech thing. They explain, once again, why God’s Eye won’t work, thus negating an entire movie. They learn Jacob’s going to deliver the vial to Cipher at a lavish party in the Palace of Versailles. They’ll never get in, bemoans Letty. Roman jokes about how he can talk himself into anything. Again Ramsey and Tej look uncomfortable. Nobody responds. Dom knows somebody.
It’s nighttime. Dom walks up to a red Lamborghini. Dame Helen Mirren answers. She grimaces in disdain but she lets him in anyways. The two chat for a second. She lectures him about the importance of family and how her children only recently reconnected and how it’s super important. Dom stares off, unsettled. She grabs his hand and makes him look her in the eyes. Family, she says, is all that matters. He looks down to see a flowery microchip wristband allowing him into the party. Bassnectar starts playing and we smash cut to:
Bodies. Writhing. In perfectly white togas. It’s that time again! You know what it is! Montage of half-naked models dancing on platforms while shiny sports cars drive in circles. Bass bumps. Dom sneaks a quick peek but Letty yells at him over the comms. She’s staring down the barrel of a sniper rifle watching him. Tej and Roman laugh. Dom moves in.
Dom walks past a few suspicious characters. He probably has an interaction at the bar where someone mentions a past adventure. Dom continues into the Hall of Mirrors where he confronts his baby brother. Both point guns at each other. Finally Cipher shows up. She monologues about the uber-wealthy and their tone deaf partying despite the world decaying. Dom doesn’t buy it. Jacob is totally her patsy. Dom puts his plan into action.
Turns out! This whole time Roman was distracting security so Ramsey could get inside. Once inside she connects to a computer and hacks the security system. This allows Tej to piggyback on it and turn the security system against Jacob and Cipher. Armed forces show up and a shootout ensues. Jacob and Dom battle. Dom gets the upper hand and snags the vial. He runs through the Palace of Versailles with a vial of evil acid. Ramsey escapes through the front, hopping in a Lamborghini that Tej drives, Roman’s in the back. Dom has to jump out a window. He lands on Letty’s character. They all drive off thinking they’ve won.
Back at the hideout they’re celebrating. Everything goes dark. They realize Jacob purposely lost the fight so that they could track Dom to his hideout and destroy his crew. They don’t have much time to escape so the crew bails. Before Dom can escape, however, he’s taken hostage by like twenty dudes. Jacob captures Dom. The gang still has the vial though.
The gang, beaten and distraught, doesn’t know what to do. They’re all rattled. That’s when Mia Toretto walks in. Don’t worry, she quickly says, Brian’s looking after the family. She steps up as team leader. Everyone follows her orders without question. They find out Dom is being transferred by a heavily armed convoy in London. They travel there.
A high-speed chase ensues over London where the gang saves Dom. In the process they manage to flip the transfer car train a la The Dark Knight nearly crushing everyone in the process. Dom escapes and Jacob and Dom do battle across London literally bashing walls and tearing apart entire rooms. They fight on double decker buses. They tackle each other and fall seven stories to the ground. Both survive, but bloody and exhausted.
Mia intervenes before the two can kill each other. She begs Jacob to give up his life of crime and surrender. He spits out how they turned their backs on him once they went straight. He yells at Dom for talking a big game about family and how he abandoned Jacob. Dom gets in the expensive car with Mia and they drive off. Jacob and Cipher have the vial.
Now the stakes have been upped. They have to stop Cipher and Jacob. They may have to kill the two. Dom nods, struggling to accept it. Tej and Ramsey and Roman share a meal together, eating gracefully without words as if they’ve done this before. Han watches them for a second. Someone asks how he’s still alive. He smirks. Turns out Deckard isn’t so evil after all. Mia wonders aloud, if Han could survive an exploding car do you think Gisele survived her plane crash? The question is left hanging. Han smirks.
Mr. Nobody teleconferences in. He explains Cipher’s plans to… I dunno… burn open a lock and steal Dom’s gym socks to laugh at him. I dunno. They usually make up some poor excuse and move past the motivation. Suffice to say it’s bad and the whole world would suffer. He tells them they have satellites that tracked Cipher and crew to Hawaii. They’re accessing weather satellites or something. Once again, this part doesn’t usually matter. The Gang’s needed in Hawaii.
There’s a lot more that happens in the movie but at this point you get my drift. They chase Jacob offroad in Hawaii. Cipher pilots a magnet plane. Helicopters shoot missiles at Dom and friends. Jacob wants to kill his little brother. Cipher’s using Jacob. At some point the crew test drives a rocket engine strapped to a car (pushing the limits of acceptable speed), implying the crew may have to drive cars in space someday. Han soaks up all of the atmosphere just by being his cool self.
It all sounds goofy and, at times, entirely plausible but that’s the niche of this self-mythologizing franchise. It never half-asses anything. It whole-asses everything. Whatever happened in movies before you can expect them to try and one-up. Army of zombie cars? Look for bigger. Let’s watch as Dominic whips car from island to island using only a metal clamp and wire rope. Or perhaps a Jeep driving across a collapsing wooden bridge in sheer defiance of gravity might suit you better.
The Fast & Furious franchise has stunned critics and audiences alike for its ability to outdo itself in almost every way while softly recalling it’s humble origins. We’ve come a long way from the Vibe magazine article that inspired this whole outfit. In fact, a long retrospective shows how every movie for the first five movies were a surprise success against plenty of odds. Only after huge international success would it turn into a franchise and even then it took four more films to inspire multiple spinoffs. While Vin Diesel has gone on to say that his franchise only has two more movies left in it (F9 being one of them) expect another Hobbs & Shaw, a female-led spinoff, and potentially more material to be mined for the near-future.
The story of the Fast Saga is really the story of summer blockbuster filmmaking writ large. What once started in the middle range budget with practical effects, quippy one-liners, and rap-heavy soundtracks turned from domestic appeal to international focus. While Marvel studios carved up the summer money Universal copied some of their success by injecting those ideas directly into the Fast franchise. By incorporating a moralist family-oriented group of misfits and rebels into a stunt-and-effects-driven action flick Universal hit upon universality. Now the movies are for international audiences and take place all over the world. It evolved past being LA-centric or even remotely real-world-influenced. It started as a crime drama and street racing movie and turned into a heist flick before settling into its role as a spy action thriller in the broadest possible terms.
The cast makeup represents multiple ethnicities, languages, and personalities in a truly global representation. That diversity helps align the movie to more audiences than just its initial straight, white, male audience. Across the globe people of different nationalities could see themselves represented as heroes onscreen. Going even further the franchise develops predominantly white characters as antagonists, only once it escapes it’s crime drama roots. Scott Eastwood tentatively fills the shoes of the white man fitting in comfortably with other people of color; a buoyant and optimistic perspective when it comes to action movie teams.
I grew up with these movies and learned to love them all in different ways. Seeing them and writing about them has brought me an impressive level of context to share with you all and helped me evaluate them both individually and as a collective. Fast & the Furious movies are, at their worst, escapist fantasy full of meaningless plot, poorly clothed women, and car-specific action scenes. Fast & the Furious has demonstrated time and time again it aims to be so much more. Whether it’s unification of the fan base after the death of a beloved star or changing their story after fan’s urges to right their own wrongs they’ve grown. Vin Diesel sits at the heart of it all and you can tell he’s listening.
No one expected this movie series to take off like it did but with each new iteration it gained an opportunity to prove to us why it’s so much more than basic cinematic drivel. With its heart on its sleeve this series offers a little bit of everything to everyone and while some argue that waters it down I will argue that: despite its broad appeal it clings to its main theme with an iron fist and that message is – family isn’t just something you’re born with it’s something you build and care for. As the man himself, Dominic Toretto, says “You don’t turn your back on family.” We are all looking for our families. Treat each other with respect and kindness and appreciate the bombastic parts of this world. They’re juvenile, sure, but explosions can still be profound (in a lowest common denominator way) as long as you’ve got loved ones to share it with.
Another modern Hong Kong action classic to add to your list!
When you become as old as I am, and you’ve been watching martial arts movies for just as long, you tend to become spoiled. Growing up on the likes of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao, just to name a few, it’s easy to get bored with a lot of these new martial arts movies.
Yes, they all look fine and dandy, but it’s hard to find one that matches the sheer ferocity of the ones from your youth. I mean, we’ve gotten SPL/Kill Zones, the Ip Mans, and The Raids, but that’s about it. Fortunately, I can say that there’s one recent movie that lives up to the intensity of those classics. And that movie is called… The Brink.
The Brink is a gritty cops & robbers kung fu flick starring Max Zhang as a relentless cop hunting down a ruthless smuggler played by Shawn Yu.
This one… this one is a doozy. Both brutal and breathless, the movie starts with a bang and just keeps on going, with amazing fight after amazing fight. Stunt Coordinator Chung Chi Li, a veteran member of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team who has provided phenomenal action sequences for movies such Fatal Contact, Invisible Target, Legendary Assassin, Extraordinary Mission, Kill Zone 2, just to name a few, gives us some very tense and exciting fight choreography throughout the proceedings. Great stuff here.
It’s not all furious action, however. The pace slows down a bit toward the end of the second half as it becomes focused more on the hunt and the characters than the action, but it’s still enthralling stuff, especially with great performances from both Zhang & Yu, to keep you glued to the screen.
But do not fret, action lovers… as your patience is undoubtedly rewarded by the gift that is the climax: an epic 2 vs 1 fight on a boat during the middle of a violent typhoon! This sequence is a thing of pure beauty. As an action fan, I was in complete amazement. There really are not enough words to describe how awesome this scene is, and if there was, I don’t think I can do it justice. It simply must be seen to be believed. It’s that amazing!
Any issues? Other than the slowing up of the pace, the character of the chief police inspector is more or less there for comedic purposes, and sometimes the comedy comes at inopportune times. I’m the kind of guy that’s like if your tone is grim throughout most of your movie, keep it like that for all of it. So seeing kinda sophomoric comedy bits in a gritty cops & robbers action drama leaves me a little “Ehh”. But it’s not a constant thing, though. So that’s good.
But other than that, this movie is definitely a slam banger. So if that sounds like your cup of tea, give it a whirl. I highly recommend it!
An Abandoned Station for Abandoned Agents. Just how ultimate is the special effect heavy legacy of Die Another Day?
My relationship with Die Another Day was a little bit complicated, and I say this as a James Bond fan who adores Pierce Brosnan portrayal and considers him the best 007 of all, with GoldenEye being my favourite movie of all time (not just Bond, I really mean all time).
I remember being very pleased with the film when I watched it on the big screen, but as the film landed on video I became a little bit disappointed: way too much CGI, slo-mo effects, an editing style that felt way too modern for my taste and Bond’s refined subtlety. That said, the film was never among my least liked and I had a lot of respect for it, and appreciation as it marked the beginning of my “Bond journalism”, so to speak: the first time I followed the development of production closely, from the cast announcement to its release worldwide.
Flash forward to 2020 and I see much criticism towards the film. While some critics make a fair point and I agree with them, I found that some others are way off target and simply dismiss some very important assets of the 2002 film, the 20th official James Bond entry and the one which marked the 40th anniversary of the launch of the EON-produced cinematic series.
This is what made me want to reassess the movie and the reason why I wrote my latest book, Beyond The Ice: The Case For And Against Die Another Day, trying to objectively point out what the film failed to achieve but, most importantly, what’s the biggest legacy and influence it lent to the upcoming 007 entries with Daniel Craig in the role of Ian Fleming’s secret agent, plus what makes this production unique between other Bond movies.
The first thing to ponder is the release date and generational impact of the film. That goes beyond personal preferences, in my opinion. Some may have not liked Bill Conti’s disco-influenced score for For Your Eyes Only, but the 80s were like that. Others may find scenes of Thunderball rather lethargic, but I’m sure back in the 60s having some whole eight minutes dedicated to the hijacking of an aircraft and its concealment under the waters of Nassau was something amazing to watch.
Die Another Day was released in November 2002 and a lot had happened in the world since the last time we saw James Bond, happy that Christmas didn’t come once a year as he slept with the aptly-named Dr Christmas Jones on Christmas Eve 1999 in Istanbul at the end of The World Is Not Enough.
The new millennium had a though start with the fear of Y2K, referenced at the end of that movie, where your own Windows 98 laptop to computers in Wall Street could have irreversible fails as the operative systems could confuse the year 2000 with 1900. Nothing happened, in the end, but many were worried. Somewhere else, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears were singing everyone’s loved hits and we were distracted with random guys locked up inside the Big Brother house and other reality shows.
In the world of entertainment, the fantasy genre was becoming popular again just like animated movies, bragging about the new technologies they could use to create new worlds, like The Matrix or Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring. Action movies weren’t too dissimilar and the style first popularized by people like John Woo and Michael Bay in the 1990s which contained fast-cut editing, an exhilarating pace, lots of slow and fast cameras, exaggerated and unrealistic stunts with some disturbing violent moments, reached new heights.
When producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, along with screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, began working on Die Another Day by August 2000, one of the biggest box office hits of the year was Mission: Impossible II, the second part of the cinematic series based on the TV series starring Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt. Far from the cloak-and-dagger style of the small-screen production, both the first film of this saga released in 1996 and particularly its follow up from 2000 relied on heavy action scenes and stunts in the style of John Woo (who, in fact, directed this movie). And most of the scenes had Hunt as a one-man army instead of a team of people trying to play a diversion on a particular target before reaching their objective.
It was clear that the style of Bond 20 had to be like this to attract a younger audience, people between 18 and 30 used to spend more time playing video games than watching movies: the new Bond film had to mix exaggerated action, eye-popping visual effects, but also more drama, grittiness and violence. Something new should happen, something we never expected before in 19 Bond movies over four decades. Due to his highly acclaimed work in Once Were Warriors, a film showing the decadence of a Maori family in New Zealand, the producers chose Lee Tamahori to helm the production by July 2001.
Months later, real-life events affected the direction to take Bond into the new millennium: two commercial airlines impacted into the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. It looked like the plan a mastermind from a Bond film could devise but never did because 007 was there to stop him. Many experts went to the length of comparing Osama Bin Laden to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, SPECTRE leader and arch-nemesis. It was clear that the world has changed: what was safe wasn’t safe anymore, anything could happen anywhere and there was a new enemy to defeat.
The producers were, as many filmmakers in Hollywood, torn between not disclosing the 9/11 attacks to avoid hurting sensitivities and not pretending nothing had happened and the world was the same as before. The fictional enemy was found in North Korea, making Die Another Day by far the most political James Bond film of all. When Purvis and Wade started writing the script, Bill Clinton named the Demilitarized Zone dividing both Koreas as “the scariest place in the world”, by the time the script was in development and the 9/11 events had happened, George W. Bush accused North Korea of hiding mass destruction weapons and being part of an “axis of evil” along with Iraq and other countries wishing to destroy the “American Way of Life”.
Bond’s nemesis was Colonel Tan-Sun Moon, who explicitly dreams with the day where “all Korea is ruled by the North” and hopes to “squash Japan like a bug” and make the West “shake with fear”. He despises British colonialism, seeing 007 as a man sent to “police the world”. The man is on murky business: conflict diamonds dealing, selling illegal weapons hidden in the Demilitarized Zone, all behind the back of his father, a pacifist general who sent his son to Oxford and Harvard in order to “build a bridge” between both cultures.
The inclusion of North Korea in the film caused a lot of controversy in the Far East, particularly in South Korea where many citizens boycotted the movie and felt disgusted with the way their country was shown as if their troops were controlled by the Americans. Leaving this aside, Die Another Day proved to be extremely relevant in addressing the murkiness of a “rogue nation” we know little about and has been frequently observed for human rights violations over the years.
After a battle between Bond and Moon takes place in the film’s opening sequence, Moon is presumed dead and 007 is captured by North Korean troops. The secret agent is imprisoned, tortured, treated with no humanity and -14 months later- exchanged by Zao, Moon’s right-hand man captured by the Americans after storming on a summit between South Korea and China. Far from being received as a hero, Bond is labelled as a liability by the Americans, thinking he might have haemorrhaged information during his torment. MI6 dismisses him from the service, to save face with the NSA who is now leading the war on terror after 9/11. On an interesting note, many people will know that the National Security Agency is, in fact, an organization of analysts and bureaucrats. But the relevance they won after spying potential terrorists between foreign and nationals by the end of 2001 was very much addressed in Hollywood and not only Die Another Day conceived a fictional NSA with highly-trained enforcers but also the initial film of the xXx trilogy (released some months earlier) also did.
Bond’s exchange has an obvious connection to the real-life 1962 prisoner swap between Soviet agent Rudolf Abel and CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers over the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin as seen in the 2015 Steven Spielberg film Bridge of Spies. Years after Die Another Day, productions like Salt and Red Sparrow also featured spy exchanges, the former involving North Korea.
While many reviewers blasted Die Another Day for its over-the-top script, which included the villain Moon undergoing a DNA transplant session in a Cuban clinic to “reborn” as British businessman Gustav Graves or 007 kite-surfing a tidal wave, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Glieberman was the first to observe an interesting and ground-breaking fact about this movie: there was something at stake, and it’s not only the future of the world but the future of 007.
Far from being praised, for the first half of the movie we are meant to doubt at Bond’s capabilities. He was captured, tortured, stripped of his 00 licence and antagonized with the major services of the world. Much like in 1989’s Licence To Kill, he was on his own, but this time not flying away for private revenge but pushed away of the service: “You’re no use to anyone now”, a steely-cold Judi Dench as M says.
Bond’s symbolism as a saviour of Great Britain dates back to the 1957 Ian Fleming novel From Russia With Love, where the infamous Soviet General G wants to hit the British’s pride hard and discovers 007’s subsequent triumphs over the SMERSH operations, plotting to lure him into a sex scandal with a fake and beautiful Russian girl defector killing both of them afterwards, making the British Intelligence lose face to the eyes of the world. In the case of Die Another Day, it only takes a young and beautiful British agent in complicity with Moon to blow Bond’s cover – a woman right under the nose of 007 and the whole Western Intelligence! Miranda Frost, played by Rosamund Pike long before her Gone Girl fame, is the first proper case of a mole in the cinematic franchise. This also goes in sync with the fear of “infiltrations” into the West, either in the society or the intelligence services. Note that Moon was educated in the West, just as Mohammed Atta who crashed one of the planes that impacted into the Twin Towers, and that Frost was feeding him information right from the inside, starting with Bond’s operation to terminate the Korean as seen in the pre-credits sequence.
Some paragraphs before, when I noted some of Die Another Day’s exaggerated plot devices or scenes like the DNA transplant or the tidal-wave surf, you’ll see that I omitted the invisible (and infamous) Aston Martin V12 Vanquish. This is simply because it’s not something as fantastic as you may think. The late Nick Finlayson, workshop supervisor of this and many other Bond movies, noted that in early 2002 armed forces of the world were already working on a cloaking device that could make a vehicle almost invisible to the human eye with the use of tiny cameras. In 2008, José Azaña, a Spanish scientist working with a group of researchers in Montreal, affirmed that they found a way to make an object invisible in almost every angle. Like many other things in the James Bond universe, the invisible Aston Martin was only some years into the future and therefore does not qualify, in my opinion, as something really “out of this world”. We just don’t have the money or means to do it, but some people might. After all, who would think we would be able to receive messages in a wristwatch in 1977, yet Bond did that year in The Spy Who Loved Me decades before the smartwatches existed! (In telex form, that is.)
What is my real criticism to Die Another Day? The execution. Things feel a little bit incomplete. I think Miranda Frost is a much more interesting character than Jinx, the “female version of James Bond” played by Halle Berry. She had won the Best Actress Academy Award in 2002 for Monster’s Ball and teens were gasping at her bare breasts in 2001’s Swordfish, so they needed to hyphen her appearance as much as they could. Nothing against Berry, she’s a wonderful actress and an incredibly sexy woman. It’s just that I don’t buy her as the “female version of Bond”. Xenia Onatopp from GoldenEye is, forgetting she was on the evil side: there you have a girl who drinks Martinis in a special manner (“Straight up, with a twist” rivaling Bond’s iconic “Shaken, not stirred), dresses in the finest clothes, handles weapons like a professional killer and uses her body to achieve her objectives. To a certain extent, also Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies, although she lacks the needed glamour and prefers to kick her way out. In the case of Jinx, she’s too street. “He did you? I didn’t know he was that desperate”, she tells Miranda after confessing Bond spent a night with her. Also, she tells Zao that his disappointed “mamma” sent her after him. She is sexy, pleasing, beautiful, charming, skilled… but she needs more to catch up with Bond’s finesse as Xenia did.
I also think Gustav Graves, Moon’s alter ego played by Toby Stephens, is too flamboyant. Too much super-villain thing exaggerated speeches, so much angry faces. Again, nothing against Stephens, but I feel Tamahori should have opted for a subtler, less grandiloquent approach for this villain.
The editing is not always of my taste, but I understand that they followed popular trends and aimed at the aesthetic zeitgeist from the early 2000s. I do think, however, the virtual reality training scene is beautifully choreographed and shot. That scene alone provides more thrills than any Bond film of the 80s counting both Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton.
A little bit of touristic exoticism would have been good, too. If it wasn’t for Cádiz in Spain, doubling for Havana in Cuba, all of the scenes of the film except the popular London would have taken place in an undistinguishable place. We see nothing of the Icelandic culture even though the film was partially shot in Iceland, but the action takes place “somewhere” in the country, on a snowy terrain that could be anywhere. Out of Cádiz and London, we didn’t have the chance to see the world here as in many other Bond adventures.
Other than that, however, Die Another Day is nowhere near a bad James Bond movie. It has flaws. Many flaws. But ignoring its relevance is pointless. For the first time, Bond is immersed in the “real” spy world with sleeper agents and moles. For the first time, Bond’s fortitude and capacity are questioned by everyone, even the audience. Casino Royale had 007 tortured and betrayed by a woman. Quantum of Solace had the US Intelligence pressuring M to Bring Bond in. Both Skyfall and SPECTRE had a villain thought to be dead or missing and resurfaced to haunt Bond or M, not to mention that the latter has another mole of the main villain who is none other than a Whitehall bureaucrat breathing over M’s neck. So all the insecurities of a “not-so-safe world” were somehow first condensed in Die Another Day.
There is another thing that should be noted in the movie: the huge influence of technology. I’ve detailed it in the book and it’s really interesting to explore as it deals with the perennial “man vs. machine” battle that somehow started during the Industrial Revolution in 1760. I think it’s something you can easily find out yourself but if the subject interests you, I cordially invite you to get my book.
In a scene of the movie, seconds before Bond is finally reinstated to MI6, he is given an old key which opens a door accessing to the subterranean London. There, in a disused station as the ones used as Winston Churchill’s bunker during the Luftwaffe blitz in WWII, Bond reunites with M. “I never thought I found myself here. An abandoned station for abandoned agents”, he says. While the comparison evokes his personal situation, it somehow evokes the legacy of Die Another Day: an abandoned film by the 007 fans and the action moviegoers, whose greatest things always seem to be overshadowed by the profusion of special effects.
Check out this cool perspective trailer for a never-to-be Cannon Films classic!
For many fans of Chuck Norris, his days collaborating with the late / great film group Cannon Films were the pinnacle of the Chuck’s action movie excellence. From awesome titles like Invasion USA, The Hero and the Terror and Firewalker, to ultimate franchises like The Delta Force and the Missing in Action films, Chuck’s time with Cannon can be called nothing short of prolific – and, well – very ultimate.
However, as was also very much the Cannon way, movies were constantly being conceived, pitched and even financed on the fly (resulting in many going into production with barely a title, much less a script on paper) and the duo of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were always shopping around new features. One of these concepts apparently even produced a short teaser trailer featuring Chuck Norris in the lead role of a new actioner called “Top Kick” – check it out below!
At only 19 seconds this is clearly just a spec trailer (and no word yet on its actual authenticity, but it certainly looks like it could have been produced from the era). It also sounds like this would have been somewhere in the very late 80s which again, would have been peak era for the Cannon Films and Chuck Norris partnership.
It also appears that Top Kick would have been a collaboration with Chuck’s son Mike Norris and was also shopped around under the spec titles “Tough Kick” and “Cold to Touch”. Many Chuck Norris fans will also be quick to point out that Chuck would go on to eventually star in an action/comedy called Sidekicks in 1992 (which was another collaboration with Chuck’s brother Aaron Norris) as well.
Regardless of how it came about or what eventually happened to this shelved project, it certainly looks like it could have quickly become another instant Chuck Norris classic which I’d personally love to discover as a VHS one day and pop in the old VCR.
It’s also cool to see the different Chuck Norris clips from his previous Cannon Films work spliced together to give the sense that the man could have kept this up for decades if he so chose, and if his partnership with Cannon had lasted just a bit longer.
Or, maybe you’ve seen it. I don’t know you. But it’s awesome and here’s why!
Starting off with a bank heist so daringly stupid, so poorly performed and so disasterly undertaken (editor’s note: is it undertooken? No, I guess that’s right) you’d think this movie might be a mess. Except, of course, it’s not.
The opening heist sequence is one of the best pieces of cinematic storytelling that I’ve ever seen. Seriously, it rivals some of the best set pieces of Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break with Bodhi and gang and those of Micheal Mann’s Heat (which themselves were heisted by Christopher Nolan in The Dark Knight). It also sets things up for what Set it Off is about – four best friends, struggling to get by, but always sticking together while they watch the dumb world around them constantly make a damn mess of itself.
Directed by F. Gary Gray (great name, great resume with Friday, The Italian Job, Law Abiding Citizen, The Fate of the Furious), written by Kate Lanier and Takashi Bufford and starring an ensemble main cast of Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise, we have one of the greatest heist movies ever made… and if you haven’t seen it, here are all the reasons you need to right now!
We’ll get to the action and the heist scenes in a bit, but off the bat this was a great vehicle for featuring a new and diverse cast taking on the tried and true tropes of the standard back robbing escapades of American cinema. Every badass action scene that you’d expect from the initial injustice that serves as the impetus, the planning and the emotional high experienced after that first heist, and the inevitable fall due to pushing to go too big ends with a great showdown that hits every point along the way – all led by some phenomenal performances.
They all have different reasons for going in on their heists. Vivica A. Fox’s “Frankie” is spurred by the initial botched heist pulled on her while she’s working as a bank teller, her bosses find out she knew the assimilate from the neighborhood she grew up in and immediately fire her on the spot for any perspective involvement, Jada Pinkett’s “Stony” watches her brother gunned down by police mistaking him for a gang member, Kiberly Elise’s “T.T.” has her son taken away from her due to her low wages from the cleaning job they all work, and Queen Latifah’s “Cleo” joins up because she’s awesome and the majority of the comic relief for the whole film.
So, I’m sure plenty of people have seen this one actually. It didn’t get released in a vacuum. It came out in 1996 to solid reviews and did quite well at the box office grossing over $40 million against a budget under $10 mil. But this was a year that saw some big draws for action titles like Independence Day, Mission: Impossible and The Rock, but those were all summer blockbusters, the only real challenger for action in the late fall release of Set it Off was Mel Gibson’s Ransom – another solid actioner – that perhaps over-performed with $300 million.
However, while Set it Off might not have had the same familiar male action star fire power, it’s core cast included three women bursting onto the scene along with one who was actually making her feature film debut (being Kimberly Elise). And what we get feels almost like a real life portrayal of these four women bonding together, sharing their lives and ultimately plotting to turn into back robbers. Which is awesome.
Alright, so now for the goods – the action! Set it Off is HUGE in its action pieces. Like, I haven’t felt this much spine-tingling in an action scene since Terminator 2. I don’t know how this movie was pulled off for under $10 million with some of the chases and shootouts which are indiscernible from Cameron or Bay stunts. The ladies pull off some very well-crafted heists that are full of all the style and suspense you’d expect from a French New Wave film, then blast out of the banks by ramming trucks through windows and executing high octane shootouts in the lobby.
And while there’s certainly a solid love story thrown in with Pinkett’s Stony and Blair Underwood’s “Keith Weston” (who, fittingly, is a bank executive at the large bank the group plans to rob for their final score), we’re going to let you enjoy those moments while we head straight onto the ultimate action.
Plus we get one of the best counters to these four leading women with the shrill, whiny agitated voice of John C. McGinley (also fitting in pretty much the same role he played in Point Break five years earlier) as their foil detective on the case. And for extra comeuppance sauce for the ending, McGinley’s “Detective Strode” is both Frankie’s firing and the mistaken shooting of Stony’s brother. So, by the end when he gets his final word – and does actually attempt to recognize who they are and why they’re obviously justified in their actions – it makes for quite a satisfying and high stakes ending.
