Tag Archives: Vigilante

Darkland (2017)

08 Friday Dec 2017

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Original title: Underverden

D: Fenar Ahmad / 113m

Cast: Dar Salim, Stine Fischer Christensen, Ali Sivandi, Dulfi Al-Jabouri, Jakob Ulrik Lohmann, Roland Møller, B. Branco, Anis Alobaidi

Two brothers, two different paths in Life. One, Zaid (Salim), is a respected heart surgeon whose wife, Stine (Christensen), is expecting their first child. The other, Yasin (Alobaidi), is involved with a criminal gang. They appear to lead separate lives, but Fate brings Yasin to Zaid’s door one evening after a bank heist he’s been involved in has gone badly wrong. Yasin seeks his older brother’s help but is sent on his way unceremoniously. The next day, Yasin’s badly beaten body arrives at the hospital where Zaid works, and despite the staff’s best efforts, he dies. Zaid grieves for his brother, and with the aid of one of Yasin’s friends, Alex (Al-Jabouri), begins to understand just what kind of criminal gang Yasin was a part of, and why he was so brutally attacked and left for dead. An early encounter with one of the gang’s enforcers, Branco (Branco), leaves Zaid bruised and beaten himself, but at least he’s let off with a warning to leave things well alone. But Zaid isn’t so easily persuaded, and with the aid of close friend, Torben (Lohmann), he trains to become a better fighter, and to show the gang’s boss, Semion (Sivandi), that killing Yasin was a big mistake…

Away from Hollywood, vigilante thrillers tend to be gloomy, atmospheric movies that focus more on the characters than the mechanics of getting them from one action set-piece to the next. Scenes play out in longer fashion, the interplay between the characters is given room to imbed itself within the narrative, and the action set-pieces, when they come, have a more satisfying feel to them. In short, the viewer can make more of an investment in what’s happening, and in the complexities of how and why. (And they can do all this and still cheer when the anti-hero starts kicking ass.) In Fenar Ahmad’s second feature, the very gloomy, very atmospheric Darkland, the main protagonist embarks on a journey that sees him slowly but surely strip away his humanity, the very attribute that has made him so successful, in his pursuit of vengeance for his brother. It all comes at a very high cost indeed, with his marriage and his career put under increasing pressure, and his priorities skewed in one very dark direction indeed.

One of the movie’s strong points is that even though Zaid is the central protagonist and his motives are entirely understandable, he’s not the most sympathetic of characters. Thanks to Ahmad and co-screenwriter Adam August’s considered approach, Zaid’s decision to seek vengeance for the death of Yasin always seems a little self-serving, as if it’s more important for him to be the avenger out of some misguided sense of filial obligation; what would it say about him if he did nothing? Between them, the script and Salim’s pressure cooker performance point up this emotional disparity, and the usual assurances that the central character is looking to avenge someone’s death purely for the deceased’s sake are undermined from the start. This alters the standard vigilante movie dynamic just enough to make the movie more interesting, and more likely to subvert audience expectations.

Ahmad is also clever enough to make Zaid’s immersion into the world of the vigilante one that doesn’t occur overnight. Following his beating at the hands of Branco and his men, Zaid wisely seeks help and the movie spends time with him as he learns to protect himself through a combination of boxing moves, body armour, and mysterious injections that only make sense when the final showdown between Zaid and Semion arrives. As he becomes more confident and more focused, his commitment leads to a deadening of his emotions. His relationship with Stine suffers as he closes himself off from everyone around him, and even when she becomes embroiled in the cat and mouse game that develops between Zaid and Semion he remains remote from her and their unborn child. Where you would expect him to become angrier and perhaps more reckless in his efforts, here Zaid tamps down those feelings and focuses on the job at hand. By the time he faces off with Semion he’s an automaton.

At one point a strong contender as Denmark’s official selection for the Best Foreign Language Film at next year’s Oscars (it lost out to You Disappear), Darkland has more to offer than a central character whose motives may not be as selfless as they should be. The contrast between Zaid’s comfortable, ordered lifestyle and his brother’s is perfectly illustrated by Yasin’s visit for help. With a dinner party in full swing, and already having ignored his brother’s calls, Zaid is in no mood to introduce Yasin to his guests. He keeps him outside in the hallway and gets him to leave as soon as possible. It’s when Zaid and Stine are enjoying an evening meal at a restaurant, and Semion and his entourage arrive as well, that the contrasts begin to blur, and in an icy encounter between the two men, Semion chastises Zaid for not being as charitable to the local community as he is. From that moment on, Zaid’s world is Semion’s world, and he has no intention of removing himself from it.

All this is aided by, and benefits from, sterling production design courtesy of Sabine Hviid, and excellent cinematography from Kasper Tuxen. Much of the movie takes place at night, and the semi-deserted streets of Copenhagen are used to very good effect, with the lighting providing an occasionally hallucinatory feel, as if Zaid is interacting with a different “reality”, one that has danger lurking around every corner. Tuxen is particularly good at framing the action so that each incident contains the necessary impact, and in the quieter scenes he uses lighting to create and support the various emotional moods on display. Ahmad directs with a firm understanding of how to avoid the clichés that can so easily make this kind of story seem derivative and underwhelming, and he draws out good performances from all concerned, with special mention going to Salim, and Al-Jabouri. There are times when the script feels like it’s going to cut corners in telling its tale, but thankfully it draws back from doing so, leaving the movie feeling and sounding more considered and thought out than expected.

Rating: 8/10 – with its secondary themes of personal honour and emotional neglect firmly established through its characters and their behaviours, Darkland has a lot more going on than its vigilante-out-for-revenge concept might imply; visually intense in places, and packing a visceral punch when needed, it’s a movie that also has a surprisingly melancholy vibe to it at times, something which adds further to the effectiveness of the piece as a whole.

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M.F.A. (2017)

09 Thursday Nov 2017

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D: Natalia Leite / 92m

Cast: Francesca Eastwood, Clifton Collins Jr, Leah McKendrick, Peter Vack, David Sullivan, David Huynh, Marlon Young, Jess Nurse, Mary Price Moore

A movie that invites the viewer to play an extended version of Spot the Influence, M.F.A. (that’s Master of Fine Arts in case you didn’t know) is a splatter cake of references and themes from other features, most of which are really obvious, and which have an unfortunate tendency to interrupt the narrative, and pull the viewer out of the strange effect that the movie creates in between these interruptions. So every now and then, the viewer is forced to exclaim, “Hey! That’s from [insert relevant movie title here]” before being able to reconnect with art student Noelle (Eastwood) and her attempts at university-based vigilantism. That’s the first, really obvious influence: Michael Winner’s seminal Death Wish (1974). But don’t worry, there are plenty of others to pick out. (There’s a game derived from Withnail & I (1987) where the viewer is required to have a drink every time one of the characters has a drink; you might want to train for it. You could play a similar sort of game with M.F.A. and have a drink every time a movie influence, or reference, appears on screen.)

At first, this is all kind of fun, but the movie soon runs the risk of adding all these references to the detriment of the script as a whole, with Eastwood’s revenge focused antagonist seemingly at the mercy of every pause and insert that writer, producer and co-star Leah McKendrick can come up with. It all begins well enough with under-achieving Noelle in danger of failing her class and not graduating due to a lack of emotion in her paintings. As if this wasn’t bad enough, she gets an invite to a party by a guy she likes, Luke (Vack), and while she’s there he takes her to his room and rapes her. Understandably shocked, she’s further shocked by the attitude of her best friend, Skye (McKendrick), who tells her to forget about it, and a school councellor, Mrs Sanders (Moore), who questions Noelle as if she were making it all up. When Luke invites her over to his place as if nothing has happened, he ends up dead and Noelle begins to walk a very dark path of revenge and cold-blooded murder.

By this stage, the movie has begun its salute to Death Wish, and has done so via a shout out to The Hunting Ground (2015). We learn that Balboa University, the fictional campus where Noelle studies, has never acknowledged the rape of a student within its grounds in its entire history, and the script winds this into the narrative in an effort to make a point about contemporary gender politics, but while it’s a noble aim, it feels just as forced as the idea that a counsellor would dismiss a claim of rape entirely (especially these days), and just as forced as the idea that because they’re male and likely to be sports stars, rapists will always get away with it (even if there’s widely available video evidence to prove they did it). The script adopts then a very black and white attitude that seems intent on providing Noelle with a reason for going all Paul Kersey, but which also doesn’t forget to include moments of sexploitation when she does so (her first targeted victim has to be seduced before he dies). Despite this kind of direct approach, the combination of McKendrick’s screenplay and Leite’s direction doesn’t ensure this means an effective approach, and the two elements tend to work against each other.

Of course, Noelle isn’t satisfied with avenging her own assault, though it’s only when she becomes aware of another rape – that went unpunished – that she decides to do something more. As she works her way through a list of rapists, Noelle finds that her art work gains that missing emotion, or passion, that was holding her back. This idea, that murder can be an inspiration for artistic expression, has been seen several times before, including the likes of House of Wax (1953) and Color Me Blood Red (1965), but here it seems like an afterthought, so long does it take for Noelle to begin using her new feelings in order to improve her work (which of course is immediately recognised as being significantly better by her tutor and the rest of her class). And of course, once she begins killing her fellow students, Noelle has a detective on her trail called Kennedy (Collins Jr), who’s always one step behind her until the end (though like Rick Deckard in Blade Runner (1982) he doesn’t actually do any detecting, but is gifted her identity when an intended victim survives her attack on him). The tropes and long range subtleties of low budget horror thrillers are all present and correct, from the ease with which Noelle carries out her crimes, to the fetishisation of Eastwood herself, as she’s called upon to wear revealing outfit after revealing outfit before finally appearing nude.

With M.F.A. throwing together so many disparate elements, and sometimes in the same scene, it’s inevitable that the movie itself doesn’t always work as well as intended. Some of the dialogue is clunky and several moments of exposition sound like they’re being read from cue cards, but in a strange way the movie is quite hypnotic to watch. This is partly due to the various influences on display (which one will the viewer spot next?), and partly due to Eastwood’s committed performance, which anchors the movie and helps gloss over some of the longueurs that occur when the script tries to be didactic. Utilising a sympathetic approach to the character of Noelle that she manages to retain even when she’s wearing her vigilante hat, she gives an emotionally redolent, purposeful performance that could well prove to be her break-out role. In support, Collins Jr has very little to do except grow a beard very quickly, while McKendrick is erratic as the poorly written best friend whose involvement in Noelle’s life leads to an easily anticipated tragedy.

But again, even with all this going on, the movie is worth a watch, it’s strangled dynamic proving unexpectedly gripping in places, and with a dark thriller atmosphere that, for the most part, is well handled by Leite and which adds power to the material. There are brief moments of levity, a few nods to the kind of life Noelle could have had if she didn’t become a vigilante, and a couple of painful instances where Noelle’s self-awareness has the potential for self-destruction. The ending at least is dramatically satisfying, even though the build-up to it is wayward and not entirely confident in what it’s trying to say. A good try, then, and one that shows promise for all concerned.

Rating: 7/10 – thematically bizarre, and unabashedly dogmatic in places, M.F.A. is nevertheless a dour but entertaining, low budget rehash of the vigilante movies of the late Seventies; with a persuasive central performance by Eastwood, it’s a movie that wears its influences on its sleeves, and which isn’t afraid to mix things up – even if that mixing isn’t too successful – in order to tell its uncompromising tale.

Code of Honor (2016)

07 Thursday Jul 2016

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Code of Honor

D: Michael Winnick / 107m

Cast: Steven Seagal, Craig Sheffer, Louis Mandylor, Helena Mattsson, Griff Furst, James Russo, Michael Flynn, Rafael Petardi, R.D. Call

You can say what you like about Steven Seagal – good or bad – but it doesn’t really matter. He’ll continue to make movies like Code of Honor, he’ll continue to wave his hands in the air in a vaguely threatening manner during fight scenes, and he’ll absolutely positively not change the way he mangles the few lines of dialogue he gets to spout from movie to movie. After forty-seven features (yes, forty-seven!), one short and one TV series, the slowest moving action hero in movie history has become the very embodiment of cinematic mediocrity. And yet… and yet… there’s something about him that keeps audiences coming back for more. Is it the possibility that he’ll surprise us all with a measured, affecting performance amidst all the gunplay and martial arts? Maybe. Or is it simply to see if he can put in an even worse performance than the last movie? Again, maybe.

There’s a third possibility: what if Seagal hasn’t found his “groove” yet? What if there’s a role out there that will allow the sixty-four old to impress us all, and erase the memories of the dozens of leaden performances he’s given since debuting in Above the Law (1988)? And what if that’s what draws in audiences time after time? An unrequited hope in the man himself? Well, if that is the case, then Code of Honor isn’t the movie to change anything. The guilty pleasures inherent in a Seagal movie are all here: those flapping hands, the poorly edited fight scenes that always fail to make him look good (and only halfway competent, despite his real-life prowess), the squinting, the drawn-out, laconic line delivery, and of course, the laidback hands clasped together  and looking bored approach to every character since Chef Casey Ryback.

COH - scene1

The plot is only slightly unusual this time. Seagal is a vigilante ex-US Army Colonel cutting a swathe through the criminal gangs in Salt Lake City after his wife and child are killed in a gang-related shooting. While the local cops, headed up by Mandylor’s frustrated homicide detective, mill about like extras getting in the way, rogue fed Sheffer goes after Seagal and does an equally good job of offing loads of bad guys along the way – and with katana knives at that; who knew they were standard issue FBI weapons these days? Add a pretty stripper (Mattsson) to the mix as a witness who hasn’t actually witnessed anything, and a bonkers twist that doesn’t make sense at all, and you have a movie that wants to be different but doesn’t have the wherewithal to make it happen.

Seagal is as bad as ever, but Sheffer matches him, giving the kind of dreadful performance that begs the label “career-killer”; A River Runs Through It (1992) seems like it was an eternity ago now. To make matters worse, the pair are coerced into a scene that rips off the confrontation between De Niro and Pacino in Heat (1995). (It’s a bold if unforgivable move, and Mann fans would be well within their rights for fast forwarding that particular moment.) Writer/director Winnick flirts with the idea of making a fast-paced, gritty thriller, but lets himself down by coming up with a script that flails about in search of credibility at every turn. With an abundance of, and over-reliance on, CGI blood splatter, and Robert A. Ferretti’s editing proving more distracting than fluid, Code of Honor wastes what few ideas it does have by surrendering to the inevitable: it’s a Steven Seagal movie, and if he’s not making any effort, why should anyone else?

Rating: 3/10 – good intentions aside, this is very much a generic Seagal movie, with little to say for itself, or the means in which to do so; plodding and cruelly exposed by the absurdities of Winnick’s script (and direction), Code of Honor can’t even be called another nail in the coffin of Seagal’s career – because by now there must be very little left of the actual coffin with all the other nails in it.

Miss Meadows (2014)

22 Saturday Nov 2014

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Miss Meadows

D: Karen Leigh Hopkins / 88m

Cast: Katie Holmes, James Badge Dale, Callan Mulvey, Ava Kolker, Mary Kay Place, Jean Smart, Stephen Bishop

Miss Meadows (Holmes) is a sweet-natured, well-mannered substitute school teacher who hides a dark secret: she’s a vigilante, dedicated to “removing” anyone whose moral compass isn’t attuned as finely as her own. On her way home one day, she’s threatened by a gun-wielding kerb crawler who points a gun at her and tells her to get in his car. Miss Meadows promptly shoots him dead with her own gun… and carries on walking as if nothing has happened.

At the elementary school, Miss Meadows is put in charge of a class whose teacher has just died of cancer. One little girl, Heather (Kolker), has been seriously upset by this and Miss Meadows does her best to console her, and eventually earns her trust. In the meantime, she also meets the town Sheriff (Dale); there’s an immediate attraction but neither of them pursue it immediately. It’s left to the Sheriff to do the pursuing, and he takes Miss Meadows for a drive. As their romance blossoms, a school trip to a local park eventually sees Miss Meadows entering a fast food restaurant in order to get the school children some hot dogs. There she finds a young man has killed all the staff and customers and wants to kill himself. When she tells him he should, he attempts to kill Miss Meadows instead, but she proves quicker on the draw than he does, and she kills him.

Faced with a vigilante in his town, the Sheriff is suspicious that it might be Miss Meadows but he doesn’t have any evidence, other than that she’s lived in previous towns where a vigilante has been on the loose. Meanwhile, Miss Meadows learns that she’s pregnant with the Sheriff’s baby; she doesn’t tell him straight away but when she does he asks her to marry him, and she says yes. Around this time a convicted child molester called Skylar (Mulvey) moves into the neighbourhood. Miss Meadows tries to warn him off but he ignores her and starts hanging around the school. And Heather reveals that she saw Miss Meadows shoot the man in the fast food restaurant.

An incident with a priest leads to Miss Meadows killing him as well but this time she leaves behind a clue, and one that the Sheriff recognises. He confronts her, and out of love for her, tells Miss Meadows her vigilante days are over. But then on their wedding day, Skylar abducts Heather…

Miss Meadows - scene

A quirky mix of drama, comedy, romance and the kind of vigilante thrillers Charles Bronson made in the Seventies and Eighties, Miss Meadows gives Katie Holmes her best role since Batman Begins (2005). As the unfeasibly sweet and wholesome Miss Meadows (we never learn her first name), Holmes embraces the role and gives a tremendous performance, doing full justice to the duality of the character and the changes in tone such a character demands. It’s an assured, confident performance – the kind Holmes hasn’t given in a very long time – but it’s so good that Miss Meadows the movie sadly doesn’t match the  quality of Miss Meadows the character.

While Holmes is mesmerising throughout, her understanding of the role so complete she doesn’t put a foot wrong at any point, the rest of the movie stumbles along around her, the various strands and shifts in tone not quite gelling to create a balanced, effective whole. Matching Miss Meadows with the equally good-natured Sheriff (we don’t learn either of his names) lessens the chance of any real tension between the two when his suspicions are confirmed. Because the script avoids the Sheriff experiencing any personal dilemma at all, the confrontation between the two has no depth to it at all, and it’s almost perfunctory in its execution. Similarly, the scene where Miss Meadows confronts Skylar over tea in his home feels forced because of its mixture of genteel manners and unequivocal threat.

There are other scenes and moments that don’t quite work. The cause of Miss Meadows antipathy towards wrongdoers is due to a childhood trauma that is teased out as the movie progresses, but there are clues to be had in the character’s talks with her mother (Smart). And as those clues are revealed before the full tragedy of the traumatic incident is shown, the viewer is effectively given the same information twice, leaving the incident to play out with little dramatic resonance or emotional impact. It’s poor choices like this that undermine the movie’s persuasiveness, and leave the cast adrift within scenes that often bear no relation to the ones that have gone before, or follow on. The scenes in the Sheriff’s office are the best examples of this, taking place almost in isolation of the rest of the plot, and again feeling more perfunctory than essential to the story.

It’s not all bad, though. Holmes’ mannered, skilful performance anchors the movie, and is so rich it bolsters the movie during those short stretches when she’s not on screen. Dale and Mulvey are more than competent foils for Holmes’ ultra-proper, Fifties influenced femme fatale – the scene where Miss Meadows and the Sheriff make love for the first time is worth seeing all by itself just for her delighted reaction; it’s not just their first time – and the photography by Barry Markowitz is almost painterly in its depiction of small-town life. There’s also an amusing, wistful score courtesy of Jeff Cardoni that is appropriately idiosyncratic, and matches Miss Meadows’ prim nature perfectly. And even though her script doesn’t always meet the challenges it sets itself, Hopkins is on firmer ground in her choice of shots and the way in which she places the camera to achieve the desired comic or dramatic effect (this is a very good-looking, carefully composed movie).

Rating: 5/10 – without Holmes’ assured, ironic performance, Miss Meadows would swiftly become a chore to sit through, even though the premise is a shrewd one; uneven and unsure of which impression to make, the movie aims for a John Waters-style vibe but is ultimately too lightweight to succeed completely.

Assault on Wall Street (2013)

09 Saturday Nov 2013

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Assault on Wall Street

D: Uwe Boll / 99m

Cast: Dominic Purcell, Erin Karpluk, John Heard, Edward Furlong, Keith David, Michael Paré, Lochlyn Munro, Eric Roberts

Security guard Jim Baxford (Purcell) and his wife Rosie (Karpluk) are faced with mounting debts when Rosie’s post-cancer treatment proves to be too expensive. Soon their medical insurance is capped, the savings they had invested are wiped out by fraudulent banking practices engineered by Jeremy Stancroft (Heard), they max out their credit card, the bank refuses to extend them any further credit then informs them they’ll be foreclosing on their property, and to top it all off, Jim loses his job. Can things get any worse? Well, yes they can, but then it’s up to Jim to fight back and redress the balance.

Set against the backdrop of the recent financial meltdown in America, Assault on Wall Street takes a simple tale of financial woes pushing a good man into doing (very) bad things, and turns it into something turgid and forgettable. Baxford’s response is to become judge, jury and executioner of every bigwig investment banker he can train his ‘scope on. There’s a long, slow build-up to all that, though – around seventy minutes – and as setback after setback is piled on poor Jim’s back, you’re supposed to feel so sorry for him and his plight that the extreme course of action he embarks upon seems entirely reasonable; forgivable even.

Assault on Wall Street - scene

But when all’s said and done, this is an old-style vigilante movie. Purcell makes for a cut-rate Charles Bronson, but at least has a better range of facial expressions (though check how he looks at a funeral: his eyes are so red and wet he looks like he’s been Maced). The main difference here is that Bronson’s Paul Kelso famously “took out the trash” while Purcell’s Jim Baxford merely goes on a killing spree. Like most vigilante movies there’s an unsurprising lack of moral depth on display, and what little there is is trampled underfoot by the banalities of Boll’s own script. At the film’s end, a voice over proclaims, “I promise I will keep killing” – nothing having been settled at all, other than the movie’s own requirement for some good old fashioned biblical-style bloodletting.

This being an Uwe Boll movie you can expect the usual disjointed montage sequences, a simplistic script peppered by implausible dialogue, the camera being in the wrong place at the wrong time so that even the simplest of scenes are visually confusing, performances that range from underwhelming to apparently improvised, and well-known character actors such as David and Paré (who should know better by now – Assault on Wall Street is his 11th movie under Boll’s direction) turning up to pay the mortgage without looking too embarrassed. In short, Assault on Wall Street is a very bad movie, and while Boll has made worse movies in his time (check out Bloodrayne: The Third Reich if you don’t believe me), this is a very slightly better movie than he usually makes. But don’t let anyone else tell you it’s a great deal better because it’s not: it’s leaden, unconvincing and slipshod.

That said there are some positives: Mathias Neumann’s photography is crisp and well-lit, and Jim’s firearm rampage is effectively choreographed, while Karpluk does a good job with her woefully underwritten role. Otherwise, this is one movie to avoid.

Rating: 3/10 – the sluggish pace and haphazard direction stifle any chance Assault on Wall Street had of being even remotely interesting. To all producers out there, a word of warning: if Uwe Boll wants you to finance his next picture, make sure he hasn’t written it as well.