BLACK WIDOW (2021) ** ½

Black Widow is the least of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, mostly because it never really figures out what it wants to be.  I think there was a temptation on Marvel’s part to do a more stripped-down espionage-tinged earthbound adventure after so many bombastic intergalactic Avengers flicks, and the parts where Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) comes to terms with her past (and the makeshift family she left behind) works fairly well.  However, it feels like they just couldn’t resist putting a bunch of over-the-top sci-fi action set pieces in there, just to remind everybody it’s a Marvel movie after all.  It’s not that it’s bad.  It’s just that doesn’t quite jibe with the smaller, intimate moments.  It also doesn’t help that many of the fights, chases, narrow escapes, death-defying leaps, etc. feel like video game sequences or that Black Widow herself survives all of this with nary a scratch on her.  

The movie catches up to the ex-KGB-assassin-turned-Avenger after the events of Captain America:  Civil War.  On the run from just about everybody, she figures she has some unfinished business in Mother Russia and tries to take down the mastermind of The Red Room, the place that trained her to be an assassin.  Along the way, she gets help from her estranged family of spies, although whether they are trustworthy is another story.  

It doesn’t help that Black Widow is kind of a boring character.  There’s not much here that hasn’t already been explored in the other Marvel movies and done better, I might add.  Johansson was able to make the character work in the other films in just a few brief moments.  They didn’t give her much to work with this time around (which is why I’m sure she wants to get every penny she can from Disney with her lawsuit), which means the supporting characters are left to do much of the heavy lifting.  Like the main character itself, the film doesn’t have much personality until her family of eccentrics show up to breathe a little life into the proceedings.  Sure, the flick overall is mostly enjoyable, it’s just even more so whenever they are on screen.  

Another debit is the action.  Most of the fights are competent, but not all that memorable or exciting.  I guess it wouldn’t have been all that noticeable if the staging didn’t suffer from some less than stellar camerawork and choreography.  I can’t help but think this could’ve been a real winner had they hired a director who had a real knack for filming action.  Heck, the action sometimes pales next to the recent Marvel TV shows.

Overall, Black Widow isn’t bad.  It may have its share of flaws, but I can’t completely hate any movie that contains such an affectionate nod to Moonraker.  It might not have exactly been worth the extended pandemic-induced wait.  However, I guess it will keep most comic book nerds sated until whatever-the-Hell-the-next-one-of-these-things-is comes out.    

Marvel Cinematic Universe Scorecard: 

Avengers:  Age of Ultron:  ****

The Incredible Hulk:  ****

Iron Man:  ****

Avengers:  Endgame:  ****

Thor:  Ragnarok:  ****

Ant-Man and the Wasp:  ****

Spider-Man:  Homecoming:  ****

Iron Man 3:  ****

Captain America:  Civil War:  *** ½

Ant-Man:  *** ½

Guardians of the Galaxy:  *** ½

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:  *** ½ 

Avengers:  Infinity War:  *** ½

Black Panther:  *** ½ 

The Avengers:  ***

Captain America:  The First Avenger:  ***

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier:  ***

Captain Marvel:  ***

Spider-Man:  Far from Home:  ***

Thor:  ***

Thor:  The Dark World:  ***

Iron Man 2:  ***

Doctor Strange:  ** ½

Black Widow:  **  ½

HANZO THE RAZOR: WHO’S GOT THE GOLD? (1974) ***

Hanzo the Razor:  Who’s Got the Gold? was Shintaro Katsu’s third and final film as the sex-crazed samurai.  Things open with Hanzo’s two bumbling underlings doing a little night fishing at a remote pond when they are scared off by a sexy lady ghost.  When Hanzo hears about the sultry spirit, his immediate reaction is, “Imma fuck it”.  He finds the ghost, and soon learns through his patented fuck-and-interrogate method that she is only dressing like a ghost to scare people away, so they don’t go near a cache of hidden gold.  Just as Hanzo uncovers the elaborate conspiracy, a bunch of Ninjas attack his home, and he mops the floor with them using his assorted booby traps and hidden weapons… and this is all before the opening title screen!

After the great pre-title sequence, Who’s Got the Gold settles down into a rather routine adventure for Hanzo the Razor.  Katsu once again essays the role of Hanzo with badass swagger, and it’s fun seeing him acting like a total bastard in one more adventure.  That said, it’s easy to see why they only made three of these things instead of thirty (as they did with the Zatoichi series) as there’s probably one too many subplots that prevent the film from really cutting loose.  

Some of the subplots are solid (the best one involves Hanzo rescuing a condemned man with a terminal illness and using his skills to make a cannon), but really, the first ten minutes are far and away the best thing the movie has to offer.  Still, there’s enough jaw-dropping moments (like when Hanzo infiltrates a blind man’s orgy) here to make it worth a look, especially if you’re a fan of Katsu.  Despite the spotty plotting, Hanzo the Razor:  Who’s Got the Gold makes for a fitting close to an entertaining trilogy of kinky samurai flicks.  

AKA:  Fangs of the Detective:  Hanzo the Devil, the Soft Skin, and the Gold.  AKA:  Razor 3:  Who’s Got the Gold?  AKA:  Hanzo the Devil, the Flesh, and Gold Coins.  AKA:  Haunted Gold.

F9 (2021) ***

F9 is the F9th (but not F9inal) entry in the Fast and Furious series.  As you can see, they no longer refer to the films as “The Fast and the Furious” or “Fast and Furious” or “Fast” or “Furious”.  Just plain “F”.  They could’ve called it “FF” for “Franchise Fatigue”.  I’m not saying it’s bad or anything, but it definitely lacks the fun of the past couple of installments.  That said, it still has enough dumb shit in it to keep you entertained.  

The plot is pretty simple.  Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) needs Dom (Vin Diesel) to find a McGuffin.  Dom learns his estranged brother (John Cena) is after it too, which only brings the familial bad blood to a boil.  

The big stumbling block here is John Cena is the villain.  He isn’t bad, but he’s a big step down from Jason Statham or Charlize Theron or heck, even Luke Evans.  Since these movies are all about family, we know he probably won’t stay a bad guy for long.  That’s just how it goes in the Fast universe.  

However, the flashbacks of young Dom feel like scenes from Jim Henson’s The Fast and the Furious Babies.  I guess they were trying to do a stripped-down gritty approach with these scenes.  Either that, or they were trying to return the series back to its racing roots.  Either way, these sequences really run against the grain of the lunacy that occurs later in the picture.

I guess the filmmakers were trying to appease both sets of FF fans.  Some like all the racing shit.  Others like me want to see a bunch of crazy nonsense.  Because of that, a lot of this has the feeling of gratuitous fan servicing.  (Maybe the “F” stands for “fan service”.)  They also bring back a major character the fans have been clamoring for and finally make good on the promise that the franchise will go into space.  I mean, it’s cheesy and all, but it just feels tacked on to please the fans.  

Well, was I pleased?  Sure.  I mean it’s hard to get too picky when the movie features:  1.  A car swinging on a vine like Tarzan over a huge chasm.  2.  Helen Mirren driving at high speed while eluding dozens of cop cars, all the while delivering massive amounts of exposition.  3.  Vin Diesel getting a Hercules moment where he uses chains to bring down a giant pillar that clobbers a bunch of guards.  4. Said scene causing Vin to get a bump on the head, allowing him to go back in time and see things in his past her missed the first time around.  5.  Uh, cars in space.  

This was the first movie I saw in the theater in over sixteen months, a record.  I’m still not entirely comfortable with going to the movies on a regular basis, but I plan to venture out here and there.  That said, it felt good to be back.

AKA:  F9:  The Fast Saga.  AKA:  Fast and Furious 9.  AKA:  Wild Speed:  Jet Break.

VANGUARD (2020) *

Vanguard is an elite security agency owned by Jackie Chan.  Two of his best agents (Yang Yang and Lun Ai) are given the task to protect a VIP from kidnappers.  When they fail to capture him, they go after his daughter, which eventually springs Jackie into action.   

It pains me to say this, but it looks like Jackie’s entering the Steven Seagal phase of his career.  He spends large chunks of the movie sitting behind a desk while receiving plot updates from his assistant.  Yang and Ai do most of the stunt-heavy Kung Fu, although the choreography leaves something to be desired.  When Chan finally does do something, it’s pretty lame.  (Like when he gets chased by crummy looking CGI lions and hyenas.)  In fact, Vanguard is so bad that it makes some of Seagal’s recent efforts look like Drunken Master 2 in comparison. 

Vanguard starts off bad and only gets worse (and duller) as it goes along.  That’s mostly because Chan gets less and less to do.  Making it especially pathetic, is the fact it was directed by Stanley Tong, who helmed some of Jackie’s best stuff in the ‘90s.    

Seriously, this has to be the worst Chan flick I have ever seen.  (Worse than Iron Mask, if you can believe it.)  It took me NINE days to get through it, a new record for an under two-hour film.  It’s almost enough to make you want to swear off Kung Fu action/comedies entirely.   

The plot goes in circles.  The bad guys keep kidnapping good guys and then more good guys have to come and rescue them, resulting in a different good guy getting kidnapped.  All of this is monotonous.  Even the goofy shit, like the one guy who flies around on a skateboard like James Franco in Spider-Man 3 is undone by the shitty CGI.  In the end, the villain dips sportscars in gold and uses them to make his escape.  This sounds stupid, until you realize it was only done so that the CGI animators had an excuse to make the computerized stunt cars look cheap.  You know it’s bad when during the big car chase, Jackie doesn’t even drive, he rides shotgun.  

As with all of Chan’s films, make sure you watch the end credits sequence.  As per usual, it shows us all the bloopers that occurred while filming.  It also reveals that Jackie was almost killed during a jet ski mishap.  Because of that, I guess I can forgive him for spending so much of the movie behind a desk.  

HITMAN: AGENT 47 (2015) **

Hey, remember when they made that movie from that video game Hitman?  I had to try really hard to remember too.  I think all I remember was that I spent the whole movie wishing they had got Jason Statham to play Hitman instead of the miscast Timothy Olyphant, and that pains me to say, seeing how much I like Timothy Olyphant.  It really said something about the film that it could take a great actor like Timothy Olyphant and make him feel like he wasn’t right for the role.   

So, here’s this reboot they made a few years ago.  They couldn’t get Statham this time either, so I’m not sure why they even bothered.  I mean, the role of the Hitman is nothing more than a bald badass who shoots people.  It’s a tailor-made vehicle for Statham, and yet Hollywood refuses to cast him in the role.  What gives? 

Anyway, this time around, they got Rupert Friend, an actor I am not familiar with to play Hitman.  He doesn’t have much in the way of screen presence and he doesn’t look all that intimidating either.  (He sort of resembles a bald Orlando Bloom trying to do long division.)  We also got Spock Lite from the J.J. Trek movies as the nice guy who’s obviously a not-so nice guy.   

The influence here seems to be the Bourne movies.  While there are some touches of the shaky-cam aesthetic that hamstrung that series, the action was a lot crisper than I was anticipating/dreading.  That’s not to say it was great, but it got the job done more or less.   

Friend isn’t bad while essaying the loneliness and solitude that comes with the territory of being a Hitman.  The one scene that really stood out to me was when he sat in the dark and stared unblinkingly at his laptop as it looked for his next target.  Not only did it brilliantly show the isolation and single-mindedness of the character, it helped make him sympathetic in the audience’s eyes.  As someone who depends on his laptop to write his reviews and seeing how it has been constantly on the fritz for the last few months, I certainly identified with the idea of a character who cannot perform the only task he is good at because he is at the mercy of technology.  This scene alone made Agent 47 better than the original in my eyes.   

The plot, such as it is, follows Hitman as he is in pursuit of a woman with psychic abilities (Hannah Ware) who can predict what’s going to happen in the movie before it happens.  It’s fitting that she is the audience substitute because we can predict just about everything in the movie before it happens too.  Sure, the story is predictable, but the action is slightly better than average.  While it’s nothing that will knock your socks off, it’s certainly watchable.  What’s more, it contains a gun-punching sequence, and if you know me by now, you know I love it when a guy punches another guy with a gun while simultaneously shooting him.  So, it has that going for it. 

ANON (2018) **

Anon finds writer/director Andrew Niccol back on his bullshit again.  As in The Truman Show, it deals with the concept of people being constantly filmed and/or spied on.  It is also a none-too-subtle cautionary sci-fi tale like Gattaca.  And as with In Time, it features Amanda Seyfried looking hot.  

Set in the near future, Anon paints the picture of a world where everyone has cameras implanted in their eyes.  Since it’s hard to commit crimes when you have a security camera in your retina full time, being a cop is something of a cake walk.  Somehow, someone is getting away with murder by hacking into the peoples’ peepers and erasing and/or manipulating their first-person surveillance footage.  It’s then up to cop Clive Owen to go undercover and draw out the mysterious hacker “Anon” (Seyfried) whose clients keep turning up dead.  

Sad to say, Seyfried is sorely miscast as the titular hacker.  The blame is really a two-way street as Niccol didn’t give her much of a character to work with.  I guess it kinda goes along with the anonymous nature of her character, but you can never quite get a handle on her.  It doesn’t help that her character is more of a machination of the screenplay than a three-dimensional human being.  She’s a wide-eyed innocent waif when it suits the script, and other times, she’s a seductive femme fatale.  She’s never quite able to pull off the many facets of the character, which is a big stumbling block when her identity and motives are crucial to the plot. 

Owen is good though.  He sometimes resembles a world-weary detective straight out of a ‘40s movie that somehow got stuck in a futuristic Philip K. Dick story.  His performance prevents it from completely falling apart, but it’s hardly enough to salvage this slow-moving tale.  It was also nice to see Storm of the Century’s Colm Feore popping up as Owen’s superior.  

It’s a shame too, because Niccol had a kernel of a good idea here.  Ultimately, that’s about what it is.  An idea.  It’s an intriguing premise, but there’s no real substance to hang anything on.  What’s more, the heads-up display on the constant POV shots gets annoying after a while, and the first-person shooter-style scenes are often phony looking.   

THE CURSE OF VHS DELIRIUM (2021) ***

Here’s another feature-length trailer compilation from the good folks at Umbrella Entertainment.  It can be found as a bonus feature on Drive-In Delirium:  The Final Conflict.  Like the previous VHS Delirium installments, it is an assemblage of home video previews culled from VHS releases (most of which are from Columbia Pictures and Thorn EMI).

This entry is a breezy, enjoyable romp.  Like The Final Conflict, there are quite a few “respectable” titles here, but not enough to get in the way of the fun.  It’s mostly a hodgepodge of genres, although there are a few themed stretches devoted to horror, comedy, Cannon Films, and Mondo movies.  Overall, there’s a fun mix of trailers in this collection, even if it doesn’t quite match the heights of entertainment the previous compilations in the series attained.  

The complete line-up includes:  The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The Incredible Melting Man, The Humanoid, Bronx Warriors 2, Starman, The Blob (1988), My Stepmother is an Alien, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, The Confessional Murders, Grizzly, Piranha 2:  Flying Killers, Creepshow, Mortuary, Phantom of the Opera (1989), Dark Tower, Watch Out We’re Mad, Odd and Evens, Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure, Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams, Things are Tough All Over, No Sex Please-We’re British, The Van, Stir Crazy, Stripes, The Toy, Hanky Panky, Spring Break, Screwballs, One Night Stand, Big Trouble, Erik the Viking, Enter the Ninja, Ninja 3:  The Domination, Missing in Action 2:  The Beginning, Rappin’, Doctors’ Wives, The Burglars, Gloria, Escape from El Diablo, Thunder, The Siege of Firebase Gloria, Spymaker, The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, Hells Angels Forever, Holocaust 2000, Suspiria, Brutes and Savages, The Jupiter Menace, Amin:  The Rise and Fall, The Bushido Blade, Ator:  The Fighting Eagle, Death Vengeance (AKA:  Fighting Back), Rottweiler 3-D, Superman 3, Carry on Up the Jungle, Carry on Abroad, Carry on Girls, Percy, Bullshot, and My Tutor.