Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with some more ActionFest reviews. I’ve only got a few more movies to cover, so let’s not waste any time, shall we?
Transit is a frustrating movie. It’s got a great B-movie set up (bad guys rob an armored car, get caught inside a dragnet and hide the money amongst a family’s camping gear in order to slip through the roadblock), it has a great good guy (Jim Caviezel) and a good bad guy (James Frain) and it has no problem putting a suburban family in danger. All those things should add up to a really fun, gritty exploitation flick, but due to some of the most incompetent directing I’ve seen in quite a while and a script that falls a little short of its premise we’re left with a forgettable bit of escapism.
Not that I was expecting The Searchers or anything… I just wanted a memorable bit of escapism is all.
Caviezel acts his heart out and Frain is a great, ruthless sweaty bastard of a villain, so when the movie never really rises above mediocrity despite having these impressive tools at its disposal it’s more frustrating than if it was just an okay DTV action flick.
Taking a good amount of the blame on this is director Antonio Negret who either didn’t shoot the action scenes correctly or over-edited it so that the crazy cuts and seemingly random use of speed-ramping distracts from the real metal on metal stuntwork going on.
For example, there’s a scene immediately following our bad guys making it through the roadblock where they’re trying to catch up with the unsuspecting family and realize the family has exited and they have to do a tire-screeching jump into oncoming traffic to turn around on the freeway. Firstly, what’s the point in being so sneaky in getting through the roadblock when a mile away you draw so much attention to yourself and secondly, I swear to God they cut it in such a way that it looks like the bad guys turn around TWICE, which would make a complete circle.
It’s like Negret saw how Edgar Wright uses quick cuts and just copied it, not really understanding that there’s a storytelling reason behind such filmmaking.
Negret isn’t the only one guilty of falling short, though. Michael Gilvary’s script is a great set-up, as I mentioned above, and at different points there are some surprising revelations that indicated a shift in tone. It’s a slight spoiler, but we find out Caviezel has a criminal history… but it turns out to be a white collar thing. Maybe it would have been too much in the TAKEN style, but how great would it have been if this suburban family dad was the one guy you didn’t want to fuck with. Maybe not a Navy SEAL or anything, but someone that has no qualms about fucking you up, especially if you threaten his family. To me that’d make more sense than just using his embezzling as a plot device to show a strain on the family and why the wife would just leave him on the side of the road once the money is found.
But the movie’s not horrible despite all that. The acting is pretty good throughout (although Diora Baird delivers one particular line in the last act that is Sheri Moon Zombie bad), the photography is lower-budget digital, but solid and the violence does reach minimum exploitation requirements… although they set up that some fool is going to get eaten by a gator and never deliver on that promise!
Overall it’s a disappointment, but nothing that’s aggressively bad. With what they had, though, they should have delivered something much better. If you want a good, underseen chase flick seek out Black Cat Run, from a story by Frank Darabont and directed by a young DJ Caruso.
Now we’re going to look at another low-budget thriller, this one called THE AGGRESSION SCALE.
I actually saw this one at SXSW and didn’t get around to writing it up, so since it played ActionFest it’s as good a reason to catch up as any.
The Aggression Scale is what would happen if Kevin McCallister was a violent survivalist autistic kid and Hans Gruber’s team showed up and murdered the shit out of his parents.
Twin Peaks’ Ray Wise is a bad guy. Owen (Ryan Hartwig) and Lauren (Fabianne Therese)’s parents stole money from him and buy a house. Wise sends a team of killers to get the money back and wipe out the whole family.
Maybe I have a soft spot for kids kicking ass, but this movie really worked for me. It’s super cheap, some of the performances aren’t that hot (sorry, Fabianne), but the movie has a lot of personality thanks in large part to the team of killers, which features Dana Ashbrook (Twin Peaks), Jacob Reynolds (the kid from Gummo all grown up!) and Derek Mears (Jason!). Mears in particular is a welcome addition to the cast. He’s a big, threatening guy with a great sense of darkly comic timing. Some day an Apatow alum will recognize how funny he is and really put him to good use onscreen.
When these guys show up and start killing it’s up to Owen to save his sister and get some payback for his parents. There are sharpened metal jacks, rigged chemical bombs and all sorts of Solid Snake-like sneaking around by this kid. He even pulls off a Predator-like trap out in the woods!
The film is an earnest exploitation entry that isn’t afraid to get down and dirty with the violence and is just fun enough to rise above the typical DTV trash cinema stigma. It’s not high art, it’s not the greatest thing in the world, but it achieves what it sets out to do and I gotta give it credit for sticking to its guns and not copping out on the premise.
Here’s the trailer to give you a feel for the tone of the movie:
Finally, we’re going to look at Dragon Eyes, a take-back-the-neighborhood martial arts flick starring Cung Le, Peter Weller and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Cung Le is a badass, no doubt about that. He’s of that new breed of action stars culled from the MMA ring, that don’t just look good on screen, but know what they’re doing. This is Le’s first starring role and his first time as fight choreographer.
His choreography is the real star of this film, which is a bit overly complex and convoluted, but it delivers where it counts. JCVD fans might be disappointed that, despite top billing, Van Damme isn’t more than an extended cameo, with maybe only 7 or 8 minutes of screentime. He’s a mentor character only shown in flashback as he trains up Cung Le in prison.
John Hyams of Universal Soldier: Regeneration fame directs and it’s clear that he has a better grasp on shot composition and framing than most directors in his field. Makes me curious to see what he’d do with a studio film. He has the technical aspects of filmmaking down, but seems to be stuck in DTV land.
Still, he makes the most out of what he’s given… and he was smart enough to not only cast Peter Weller as the corrupt cop/crime boss and let Weller ham it up big time. Big, big, big time. Like almost Nic Cage big.
The only real trouble with the film is there’s an overall feeling of dour seriousness that really kneecaps it from being as fun as it wants to be. There’s a raid on a drug den about halfway through (you can see it in the trailer below) that has crackheads freaking out over the “ninja!” that breaks in that is hysterical. If that was the tone of the whole movie I’d be running at the mouth nonstop about how awesome this movie is, but instead the movie’s more about political maneuvering as Le plays each gang faction against each other as he plans his big revenge.
That’s fine, but like I said above it made for an overly convoluted movie. The martial arts sequences are inventive and brutal and have a good sense of drama to them. Each fight tells a mini-story and isn’t just a bunch of fists flying and glass breaking.
However I couldn’t really invest in any of the main characters, so I felt like a passive observer through most of the movie. I don’t need to be engaged on every level, but you gotta give me something or I’ll feel left out in the cold like I did here.
So, to wrap it up… On a technical level, Dragon Eyes gets high marks for Hyams’ eye and Le’s choreography, but an inconsistent tone and way-too-complicated plot keep it from being great.
There you go. I’m on track to wrap up my ActionFest coverage by tomorrow morning. Just a few more reviews to go, including the great French thriller Sleepless Night!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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