BEFORE: OK, I've got a long slog ahead of me to get to the end of January, so let me get started. Again, I'll match the movies watched in the first two weeks of this year up against any other two weeks of movie-watching ever, I'm already proud of my work in 2023. I physically went OUTSIDE and went to the real theater, in person! Had popcorn and a drink! I watched a Best Picture winner from last year and three films with release dates from 2021! Spent a few days in China and Japan, virtually! Now I'm not sure exactly what lies ahead, but something tells me it won't be as great as all that was. Dark winter days are coming, I feel.
Michelle Yeoh carries over from "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny".
THE PLOT: Three generations of women fight back against those who could take everything from them.
AFTER: Well, this one's not really that subtle at all - the basic premise is that men are evil and woman are good, or something to that effect. You'd think the issue at hand might be a little less cut and dry, black and white, but you'd be wrong. The men are all gangsters who run something called The Firm, which is basically organized crime, but from the way it's pitched here, you'd think those men control the world. Down with the patriarchy, sure, but if you succeed with that, what's going to take its place? Won't another criminal organization just rise up to fill the gap, and if that one happens to be more gender-neutral or have more opportunities for women, is that really going to be so much better? It would still be a criminal organization, after all, so I don't really see why "good" and "evil" here are so split along gender lines. And wait, I thought gender was just a construct, anyway, what about trans people, are they good or evil? Just saying.
Besides, the lead character here is a hitman, sorry hit-WOMAN. Are we really that willing to split hairs and say that a female assassin isn't just as evil as the male ones? Why, because she has love in her heart, and a male assassin just wouldn't? That seems rather a sexist viewpoint, in and of itself. So I'm not really buying that. Don't get me wrong, it's great to see female action stars, but even "Crouching Tiger" was less gender-biased, and that was set in feudal China, if anything the movie probably exaggerated how many opportunities there were for woman back then, as Liu Shen ran her own security firm, and there was at least the appearance that she had control over her heart, she could decide if she wanted to marry someone, even though she kept tending to choose against that.
So here men are either the suits in charge of the crime, or the thugs that perform it at street level, and women are supposedly the force that keeps them all in check, to make sure things don't get out of hand. Right. What a load of hooey - look, if you want to make a film with female action stars, just do that, we should be past the point where we have to stop and think about what that all MEANS. We just watched an old, old episode of "Iron Chef" and the judges were considering this feisty young chef named Morimoto, the rule-breaker, the cultural newcomer, the rebel, what does it all MEAN for him to cook this way, instead of just asking themselves, "Does his food TASTE good?" It really should be that simple.
There is one male in the film who's not totally evil, at least he's doing the wrong thing, but for the right reasons. He stole money from The Firm, but only because his daughter was kidnapped by thugs in movie-monster masks, and he's desperate to save her. Sam, the lead hit-woman in the film, accidentally shoots him, though, before finding all this out, so great, there goes the only decent honest man in this fictional universe. Then she's got to go out of her way to rescue the little girl, out of a sense of honor or guilt or both, and then the film becomes a little like a play on "Lone Wolf and Cub", only gender-flipped. Sam suddenly has a daughter figure in her life, and has to protect her while taking down the bad guys, who again, are all GUYS.
Eventually she does have some help, from her "Aunties", former associates of her mother, who run a "library" where all the books actually contain guns or other forms of weaponry, and I guess somehow the titles of the books are supposed to let you know what weapons are inside, only none of the titles are punny enough or information-based enough to really stand for the type of gun, or let you know that there's a grenade inside, I just didn't get it. Eventually even Sam's mother turns up again, she was a hit-woman too, who accidentally dragged Sam into the life, and who also crossed the wrong man when she was trying to make things "right", whatever that means in this profession. Like, where do you draw the line when you kill people for money, how do you then think of yourself as "right" and everybody else is "wrong", or is that just a defense mechanism that enables them to keep going? You KILL people. For MONEY. But I guess everybody sees themself as the hero of their story, and the villains need to do this, too.
What's worse is that everybody spends the movie talking about how complicated everything is, and protecting the child from learning what's really going on. It's really NOT complicated, though, there's a fight, somebody lives, somebody else dies. Bringing "right" and "wrong" into the picture is what's making things seem complicated - if you could just NOT do that, you'd see that history is written by the winners, aka the survivors. And in this film, that's going to be the women, mostly.
There is a connection to the "Crouching Tiger" films, beyond the fact that Michelle Yeoh carried over. The fight scenes here are nearly as ridiculous and impossible as the ones seen in wuxia films, OK nobody flies or changes direction mid-flight, but they do those stunts where they flip over or run up walls or shoot one bad guy with another bad guy's gun, it's all very exciting but I doubt that any of it is possible in the real world. I do award points for breaking new ground, and having Sam engage in a gunfight against three thugs after she's lost the use of her arms, well, that qualifies as new ground, I've never seen that before in a movie. But then she needs the young girl to steer a car while she pushes the pedals with her feet, while out maneuvering two other cars in a parking garage, and then it's just ridiculous again.
Compare this to, say, a "John Wick" movie, which also did feature a couple of female assassins the last time around, and also took itself WAY more seriously. It's OK to have a female hero and a female villain now and again, genderless casting is supposedly the wave of the future, but to only put women on one side of the equation and men on the other, well, that's really not a step forward for either gender, is it? We're right back to the old "battle of the sexes", just from the other side.
Also starring Karen Gillan (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Lena Headey (last seen in "Fighting with My Family"), Carla Gugino (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Chloe Coleman, Ralph Ineson (last seen in "The Witch"), Adam Nagaitis (last seen in "The Commuter"), Michael Smiley (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Angela Bassett (last seen in "Tina"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Samuel Anderson, Ivan Kaye (last seen in "The King"), Jack Bandeira (ditto), David Burnell IV, Freya Allan, Mai Duong Kieu, Joanna Bobin (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Joshua Grothe, Hannes Pastor, Billy Buff, Lee Huang.
RATING: 6 out of 10 bowling alley lanes
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