Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

Posted on December 5, 2015 by badblokebob

The last time I watched the first entry in a once-popular ’80s comedy cop movie series, it didn’t end well. And that was directed by Richard Donner, of Superman and The Omen fame — Beverly Hills Cop, on the other hand, was helmed by the man who would go on to give us “worst film of all time” contender Gigli. Oh dear. Truth be told, my main reason for watching Beverly Hills Cop is so that I can one day watch Beverly Hills Cop II, directed by Tony Scott, and Beverly Hills Cop III, directed by John Landis. So, I didn’t expect to care for this all that much…

But I actually thought it was really fun. It’s not the funniest movie ever, nor does it have the most thrilling action, or the most engrossing or surprising plot, but it does all those things — well, the first two — well, maybe just the first one — well enough. It’s sort of incessantly likeable.

The term “star vehicle” could have been coined for this film — it’s all about Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley. It’s mad to think he was brought on late in the day, because you just can’t imagine it with anyone else. It’s his performance, his style, that makes the movie worth watching. Without him — with a straightforward lead like Sylvester Stallone, who was originally attached — it would be a painfully rote action/revenge thriller. The plot is no great shakes at all; what works is the fish-out-of-water element of putting Murphy’s black, working-class Detroit cop in white, posh Beverly Hills, plus his engaging performance and humour.

Murphy’s not the only good thing, though. Judge Reinhold and John Ashton make an excellent double act as the pair of cops assigned to keep an eye on Foley in Beverly Hills; Ronny Cox is their amenable boss; Steven Berkoff pretty much just has to turn up to be an excellent villain; Lisa Eilbacher is decent as the girl (presumably changed from being a love interest after they cast a black guy). Her part doesn’t exactly call for a great deal, but she’s fine enough in it; as good as anyone ever is in such a limited role.

There’s also the iconic theme music, Axel F, perhaps better known to The Youth of Today thanks to Crazy Frog (you’d forgotten that, hadn’t you? Sorry). It makes its debut ten minutes into the film during an exciting sequence where… Axel parks his car outside his home. I guess no one knew what they had on their hands… except perhaps composer Harold Faltermeyer, who seems to have written the theme, thought “my work here is done,” and laid it over most of the movie. (That’s unfair — there is other music. Sometimes.)

Beverly Hills Cop’s plot is colour-by-numbers, and sometimes advanced by magic (the way they track Axel and co at the climax just looks like GPS today, but no such system existed in 1984); the mystery is non-existent (even if it wasn’t obvious Berkoff would be the villain, the henchman who did the deed is shown to be in his employ the first time we meet him); Brest’s direction is unremarkably static… you could probably go on. But thanks to Eddie Murphy and the rest of the cast, Beverly Hills Cop winds up a highly watchable, very likeable spot of entertainment.

This review is part of the 100 Films Advent Calendar 2015. Read more here.

The Expendables 3: Extended Version (2014)

Posted on June 9, 2015 by badblokebob

Oscar-nominated screenwriter Sylvester Stallone continues his examination of masculinity and machismo amongst older men in this trilogy-forming instalment of his Expendables franchise.

You think I’m joking… because I am. But there is actually an element of that in this latest action-fest, as the leader of the titular band of mercenaries, Barney Ross (Stallone), chooses to retire his team of ageing soldiers (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, and new re-recruit Wesley Snipes) after one of their number is put in critical condition, and replace them with younger models (Kellan Lutz, Victor Ortiz, Glen Powell, and Ronda Rousey). It’s all in aid of capturing the team’s latest target, international arms dealer Conrad Stonebanks (Mel Gibson), who Ross thought he’d killed years ago…

That said, if you’re looking for any commentary on… well, anything… you’re going to have to read it in there yourself, because co-writers Stallone, Katrin Benedikt and Creighton Rothenberger, and director Patrick Hughes (now attached to The Raid remake, incidentally) are more focused on providing the simple ’80s-throwback action thrills and bad one-liners that genre fans expect from The Expendables. There’s certainly an abundance of both, to varying degrees of success: there are plenty of lines delivered in a knowing way that don’t seem to contain even a trace of humour, while the plot is naturally built to string together the combat scenes.

Fears about the PG-13 rating — lower than the R of the first two, in a misguided attempt to improve the box office — are largely misplaced. Well, unless you really like CGI blood spatters (there are none, not even added in for the ‘unrated’ longer cut) or other such special effects. The action choreography is fairly slick, though occasionally obscured by camerawork and editing that turns it into a cacophony of violence. The Blu-ray release helps expose this: the special features include an extended version of Statham’s main battle from the climax, and in that focused form you can see how it’s been carefully constructed and designed. In the film itself, it’s chopped up into ten-second chunks and intercut with everyone else’s duels. It becomes like an impressionistic painting of shooting, punching, kicking, stabbing, running, jumping… It’s a war, as the now-double-sized team of heroes takes on a literal army, and some will revel in the over-the-top-ness of it all. The sheer excess does have a certain charm.

The best bits come a little earlier on, though. A car/van/truck chase around the Port of Mogadishu is the action highlight, in my opinion; later, the young team attempt to infiltrate an artsy modern building in a sequence that seems to emulate a Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible film, which is at least a different style for this series. Elsewise, the supporting cast of cameos provide good value — in Harrison Ford’s case, literally, as he replaced Bruce Willis after the latter demanded $4 million for four days’ work. Ford just has to turn up on screen to be cool, though he has his moments beyond that. There’s also Kelsey Grammer as a merc talent scout who seems to have a habit of kicking off whole non sequitur conversations; a bigger role for Arnie, though still on the sidelines; and a pointless appearance by martial arts expert Jet Li, performing no martial arts whatsoever. The new kids are adequate but nothing to write home about.

The best addition, unquestionably, is Antonio Banderas. He’s a parkour-performing blabbermouth who keeps pestering Grammer for a job, but no one wants him because he won’t stop talking. And he’s hilarious. Of the 93 changes in the five-minutes-longer extended version (yes, ninety-three), most are split-second action beats, the vast majority during that big final battle, but a handful are more of Banderas just chatting away, and those are welcome. He takes a while to turn up, but when he does it lifts the whole film. His performance is the best thing to come out of the entire franchise. I mean, it’s not a reason to watch the films if you weren’t going to, but if you are anyway…

The Expendables 3 is, for my money, much for muchness with the previous two films. They all have different pros and cons, sliding different elements up and down on the series’ mixing board with various degrees of success, and this third entry is no different. It seems Stallone intends to keep producing Expendables flicks, with talk of who might appear in a fourth outing taking place even before the third was released (Pierce Brosnan, maybe? More recently, ex-wrestlers the Rock and Hulk Hogan), though the box office of this instalment throws that into question: off a $90 million budget, it only made $39 million in the US… but then it did take almost $167 million from everywhere else — surely enough to consider a sequel? Especially if next time they can stop it leaking on the internet several weeks early…

I kind of hope they do make more. The Expendables movies aren’t great films — heck, they aren’t even really great action films — and they’re a bit too cheesy and in-joke-y for the own good — and yet, somehow, I can’t resist them, and I’ll be happy to keep watching them for as long as Stallone and co can keep making them. After all, there are an awful lot of ageing action actors who’ve not appeared yet…

The Expendables 3 is available on Netflix UK as of yesterday.

Bullet to the Head (2012)

Posted on May 27, 2015 by badblokebob

2015 #70
Walter Hill | 88 mins | TV | 1.85:1 | USA / English | 15 / R

I had absolutely zero intention of ever watching this Sylvester Stallone vehicle (which is not to be confused with John Woo’s Bullet in the Head, of course), but then I saw a trailer on a Blu-ray and it looked like it might be funny and passable dumb-action fun. My respect to whoever edited that trailer, because neither of those elements are significant features of the full film.

Adapted from a French graphic novel (no, really — it’s called Du plomb dans la tête), the story casts Stallone as a hitman whose partner is killed by order of their employer, which is what brings him into contact with cop Kwon (the Fast & Furiouses’s Sung Kang), whose former partner was also killed by the same chap. (Actually, he was killed by Stallone; and they weren’t partners any more because the guy went corrupt, or something. My point is, the partners parallel is an angle that gets pithily highlighted in marketing and reviews, but is barely touched in the film itself.) Reluctantly teaming up, they set out to find out who’s behind it all.

At times, you get the impression that director Walter Hill (who also performed uncredited re-writes) wants this to be a noir tale: there’s a hardboiled voiceover, a story mired in corrupt officials, twists about who to trust, and so on. But these elements are only fleeting (including that voiceover), never building a consistency where you could plausibly claim it as any kind of neo-noir. Instead, it’s more of a buddy movie in the ’80s mould. There are multiple scenes of Stallone and his new chum just driving around chatting, often in a gently racist way, all of which is clearly striving for that amusing, loveable, buddy movie vibe. It doesn’t reach it — it’s not funny, or likeable, and it just feels like a shoehorned aside from the plot.

Said plot all comes down to a final fight, Stallone vs Jason Momoa (of Game of Thrones and the Conan reboot), who’s technically the henchman but serves as the primary antagonist. In the film’s closest move to originality, they duel with fire axes. It’s a fairly worthwhile dose of combat, if you enjoy that kind of thing, but even then isn’t worth watching the whole film for.

It comes to something when your production logos gimmick is the most interesting thing about your movie, but Hill has even bluntly stated in an interview that “we’re not breaking new ground. We’re trying to be entertaining within a format that’s familiar.” Talk about setting your sights low! And, indeed, low is all they achieved.

Bullet to the Head is on Film4 tomorrow at 9pm.

The Expendables 2 (2012)

Posted on August 14, 2014 by badblokebob

Sylvester Stallone’s ragtag collection of former action stars (and some current ones) reassemble for another throwback fight-fest, this time upping the daftness factor, to mixed results.

The story sees Stallone’s team of mercenaries coerced into another mission by Bruce Willis, which goes askew when a gang of villains led by Jean-Claude Van Damme intervene, killing one of Stallone’s team in the process — you’ll guess who well before it happens, because the characters are so constructed from cliché that the doomed one virtually has “Will Die Later” flashing on screen during some early backstory scenes. Anyway, the guys set out for revenge, of course, and in the process seem to wind up liberating an ex-Soviet country from the rule of this evil gang. Bonus.

Whereas the first film was played straight and fairly serious, the sequel has more of the self-awareness that fans expected — and, indeed, wanted — from the franchise: the action sequences are bigger, faster and dafter; the cameos are longer and more knowing. The opening quarter-hour and climactic half-hour are what we’ve come for, a ludicrously OTT explosion of action and too-knowing fourth-wall-shattering dialogue, where the guys get to show off the skills that put them here. In between, there’s a vague kinda story that mainly links the fighting together, alongside cameos airlifted in with little regard to meaning or sense.

So is it better? Sometimes. The whole thing is inherently silly — these are (mostly) grandfather-aged chaps kicking ass with the best of ’em — and it plays up to that with sly winks to the audience and implausibly-grand combat choreography. But at times the nudge-nudge factor goes a little far, and the disregard for building a wholly plausible story, especially towards the end, is a shame.

Plus, technically speaking, it’s a mess. Apparently it cost $92 million, which must’ve all gone on salaries because it looks closer to $9.2 million. There’s the worst CGI you’ll see this side of an Asylum movie; the worst cinematography you’ll see this side of a YouTube clip. Seriously: either someone f’ed up the Blu-ray transfer or someone fluffed the technical side further back in the process, and based on comments from those who saw it in cinemas, it’s the latter. Plenty of the film actually looks fine, great even, but there are shots and scenes where the the resolution all but disappears, everything goes kinda smeary-blurry, like someone applied a paint effect… or, more likely, decided they could digitally zoom in during the edit and didn’t think how awful it would look. It’s distractingly ugly.

But you didn’t come for that. You came for classic action stars fighting each other. In that regard, it’s pretty much the definition of brain-off brawny fun. If you don’t care for ridiculous action and cheesy dialogue, both of which are laughable in a way that’s hard to tell if it was intended or not, then this is not a film for you. If that sounds up your street, however, then The Expendables 2 is no classic, but it is a fun time.

The first Expendables is on 5* tonight at 9pm. The series’ latest instalment, The Expendables 3, is in UK cinemas from today, and US theaters from tomorrow.

Daylight (1996)

Posted on October 8, 2010 by badblokebob

2010 #87
Rob Cohen | 110 mins | TV (HD) | 12 / PG-13

Daylight is a disaster movie; the kind they apparently made lots of in the ’70s, and has seen a revival (to some degree) thanks to Roland Emmerich and his brand of apocalypse-bringing. This was made in the ’90s though and, lacking any self-aware qualities, might be seen as a throwback. Whether that matters is probably an issue for more well-versed disaster movie fans than I.

The plot concerns the collapse of an underwater car tunnel, trapping people inside (naturally). It’s a tunnel that connects Manhattan to another bit of New York. Or possibly New Jersey. To be honest, I can’t remember now. Suffice to say, it doesn’t matter, besides the points that, a) who doesn’t like a movie set in New York?, and b) it allows for a moderately diverse array of victims-in-waiting. How diverse? Not very. But a bit.

Following the collapse, a fireball rips through the tunnel. It seems to destroy most cars and kill most people, except for about a dozen survivors. How are they not killed by the fireball? Well, it seems to be by the good fortune of Because We Need Some Characters. Should you ever get stuck in an exploding tunnel, pray you find yourself in a disaster movie and had been doing something mundane yet passably interesting earlier on, and you might get to survive. Naturally some of these will die later, because a disaster movie works in more-or-less the same way as a slasher movie, only with less jumps. After a few “well, they sort of deserved it” characters are dispatched with, screenwriter Leslie Bohem seems to have drawn up a list of Which Characters Would It Be Most Tragic To Lose and started to work his way through them until he reached the end of the screenplay. I suppose it’s flat-out good advice for a disaster movie, but, try not to get too attached.

The film continues to stretch credibility to the max at every turn. Are there really a series of giant fans that Stallone could conceivably lower himself through to get into the tunnel? Maybe there are — it’s got to be ventilated somehow — but it doesn’t stop the sequence in which he does it from feeling like a science-fiction movie. On the bright side, the lack of concern for plausibility makes for a couple of moderately impressive effects sequences. Despite the notion that CGI has somehow made everything look more realistic, sometimes the limits of ’90s technology help. OK, most of Daylight’s effects still look like effects, but they’re at least as believable as the plasticky sheen that still pervades most CGI.

A closing pan up to the twin towers of the World Trade Center provides, thanks to hindsight, a crushing reminder of reality when it comes to disasters. It’s a shame that an arbitrary shot of a New York landmark almost inadvertently overshadows the whole film. I suppose any shot of the Center calls up those memories now, but it’s unfortunate that this one comes at the end of a disaster movie.

All things considered, Daylight’s pretty ridiculous; in fact, it’s so daft you might begin to wonder if someone actually researched the facts of what might happen in such a disaster and it’s all a case of Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction. Or perhaps it really is just The Movies. If you don’t care for disaster movies then it’s certainly not going to change your mind, but for anyone who is prone to liking them, Daylight is, for all its faults, an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.

Daylight is on ITV tonight, Friday 21st November 2014, at 11:15pm.

100Films.co.uk

100% movies. Except when it's about TV.

Tag Archives: Sylvester Stallone