My Spy

Year 14, Day 29 - 1/29/22 - Movie #4,030

BEFORE: Here we go, the first real super-snowstorm "bomb cyclone" of this winter season, and of course it falls on a Saturday, so no snow day off from work. I get to spend the day watching my moron neighbors shovel very badly - I was raised outside Boston where I saw my share of blizzards and spent many hours training with my father to learn the proper techniques, and I'm convinced that New Yorkers just have no idea how to do it right. I allow myself one hour, max, of shoveling time, during which I focus on just my front steps, the right half of the front walk, and about 10 feet of sidewalk. That's it, that's all I'm legally required to do to keep things clear, to make access for deliveries in and for us to get out for groceries, if needed. And I don't need to scrape everything down to the concrete, I can leave a thin layer and just put ice melt on top of it, especially if there will be either warm weather or a bit of sunshine tomorrow, that will finish the job.

My neighbors, both next door and across the street, however, are absolute idiots who won't rest until every little flake is off their property, and I just don't understand this. There's rain and above-freezing temperatures coming in a couple days, so why spend HOURS outside in the cold, doing more work then they have to? Right now I'm watching from my upstairs window as three or four people try to dig out each house, but they're not working together, so I see them moving the SAME snow two or three times. (Again, I'm one person and I usually do the job by myself, in one hour. I work smarter, not harder.). I see one guy moving snow from right behind his car over to the curb, but STILL in the path of the car - so he's managing to dig out AND block himself in at the same time, he's got no plan. Other people across the road move the snow from their driveways out into the street, thinking that cars driving by will run it over and melt it - but this puts all drivers at risk of skidding accidents, and I believe this is illegal, or it should be. But me going across the street and yelling at neighbors won't be productive, I've tried that and it only leads to them not listening to me, and thinking that I'm nuts. Hey, I finished in one hour, and they're willing to spend all afternoon out in the cold, working inefficiently, so who's the one who's crazy?  I have learned over the years to try to let this be, let them be stupid and inefficient, because in a few days most of the snow will be gone, one way or the other, and it won't matter.

Dave Bautista carries over from "Escape Plan: The Extractors".

THE PLOT: A hardened CIA operative finds himself at the mercy of a precocious 9-year-old girl, having been sent undercover to surveil her family.  

AFTER: This film follows the Hollywood formula of pairing up a muscular or attractive top secret agent with a smaller or mousier, less attractive handler, aka "the person in the chair" who is often a tech expert who handles the mission parameters while the lead agent does the fighting and the shooting. We've seen this in "Spy" and "Central Intelligence" and many other similar comedies.  Does the real CIA work like this?  Honestly, I have no idea, and I'm betting that the screenwriters don't either, they just keep perpetuating the stereotypes from previous films - "Oh, this is just how it works..." as if the rules of intelligence work and buddy comedies are one and the same.  Well, if the movie turns out to be funny, then I guess who cares about accuracy?  And I think this particular film could have been a lot worse, there are many ways it could have run off the rails, to a greater extent than it did. Mr. Bautista has already proven he can do both action and light comedy at the same time, he did it in two "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies, and so when he's in a film like "Escape Plan 2" and just playing it straight, it feels like something is missing.

The other pairing here concerns placing him with a much younger actor, a pre-teen (is the age of 9 considered "pre-teen", or is that reserved for 11- and 12-year olds?  I have no idea.). This formula goes back at least as far as Schwarzenegger, with "Kindergarten Cop", "The Last Action Hero", "Jingle All the Way" and, umm, "The Terminator"? Stallone played on this, too, with "Over the Top", "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" and "Spy Kids 3-D". So they CAN make an action film that also appeals to kids and extends over into the comedy genre, it has become something of a formula. Even Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson made "Race to Witch Mountain", "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island" and "Tooth Fairy", so Bautista is really just following in the footsteps of giants. Literal giants, I mean Arnold and The Rock are really big dudes. Good for Bautista, I say - he's in five films that are bringing my January to a close, and really showing a lot of range - action, comedy, even sci-fi (oh, it's coming...)

In "My Spy" he plays JJ, a CIA agent who had a great record in Afghanistan or Iraq, he had no problem with weapons, explosives, all the impersonal stuff.  But he hasn't really made the transition to undercover work, the bad guys spot his fake Russian accent from a mile away, and so his cover's blown on a mission, he falls back on the weapons and explosives, and all the bad guys die, only that wasn't the objective of the mission, he was only supposed to be gathering information, working his way up the chain, and now all the leads are dead. As punishment he's assigned to a simple surveillance mission (grammatically, I'm opposed to using "surveil" as a verb, I've seen it a lot lately, not sure why, but I'll go out of my way to not use this. But I guess it's a word?)

JJ is paired with Bobbi, played by Kristen Schaal - again, this is the way, she's a tech and a handler, so she has to be mousy or unappealing in some way. I know this is her wheelhouse, and I can handle her voice on "Bob's Burgers", but in live-action I just can't take her, I don't know why.  I hope she's compensated well for all the times a movie has gone out of its way to make her seem grating and annoying, even turning it into a joke thing doesn't really help, because she's being asked to play "annoying" time and again. Or perhaps she's just really like that, but the end result is the same, I'm frequently annoyed by her.  Mission accomplished, I guess? 

Anyway, it's one of those "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" situations as the smart, aware,  cosmopolitan young girl realizes very quickly that there are hidden cameras in her Chicago apartment - kids these days, they're so tech savvy - and then hacks one of the cameras to trace the signal to the apartment down the hall where two CIA agents are pretending to co-habitate. The girl threatens to blow their cover unless somebody takes her ice-skating, buys her ice cream and teaches her a bunch of cool spy stuff. Which would be more embarrassing for a CIA agent in the long run, do you figure, having their cover blown or letting a little girl blackmail them?  Discuss.  Anyway, that's the premise.  

Throw in a potential romance between JJ and the girl's widowed mother, a bunch of comedy bits when JJ is brought to "My Favorite Person" day at school - I guess it's not called "Show and Tell" or "Career Day" any more? - and then a bunch of action scenes when the girl's uncle eventually shows up in Chicago to get the flash drive with the secret plans on it, and you've got yourself a movie, I guess.  More comedic events occur when Bobbi the tech person tries to do action stuff and fails, and the little girl learns a bunch of spy tactics from JJ and does really well.  NITPICK POINT: If you teach a young girl how to beat a lie-detector test, though, you might actually be creating a monster. 

It's SO easy to let a film devolve into slapstick, though.  See the big, muscular man dance very weirdly.  Watch the big, muscular man fall down while ice skating.  Watch the awkward tech handle a weapon, very awkwardly.  There's high comedy and low comedy, and those are two very different approaches, unfortunately the only stuff here that counts as high comedy relies very heavily on everything we know about action movies, like how the heroes in action movies tend to walk away from explosions without looking, all cool and nonchalant.  So if you've seen action comedies before, you're kind of all set up for this one here, and at 100 minutes, it won't waste too much of your time.  

As a bonus, the opening scenes of the film are set in Ukraine, so that couldn't be more timely. 

Also starring Chloe Coleman (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Kristen Schaal (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Parisa Fitz-Henley (last seen in "Fantasy Island"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "Boss Level"), Devere Rogers, Greg Bryk (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Nicola Correia-Damude, Noah Danby, Vieslav Krystyan (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Basel Daoud, Ali Hassan (last seen in "Goon"), Jean-Michel Nadeau, Laura Cilevitz (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Olivia Dépatie, Keller Viaene, Darrin Baker, Michelle McLeod.

RATING: 5 out of 10 intricate tattoos (which, it turns out, are against CIA policy)

Escape Plan: The Extractors

Year 14, Day 28 - 1/28/22 - Movie #4,029

BEFORE: Well, a lot of my links this month have been twofold: Oscar Grillo AND Bruce Willis were in two movies together, and I watched those back-to-back, then Bruce Willis AND Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson were in two movies together, so same.  Now I've got 50 Cent AND Dave Bautista in two movies together, and I think a number of other actors carry over too. But since I've got more Bautista coming up - he's going to get me to the end of January - I just need to focus on those two actors for the moment.

THE PLOT: After security expert Ray Breslin is hired to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Hong Kong tech mogul from a formidable Latvian prison, Breslin's girlfriend is also captured. 

AFTER: Well, "Escape Plan 2" was such a disaster that it forced the franchise to go back to the first film in search of some dangling plot thread that they could weave into a new tale. They landed on Breslin's former business partner, who turned against him - and I think they explained how Hush took care of him after that, but maybe we didn't SEE it until now.  Perhaps there was a scene that explained it but was cut from the first movie, so it appears here to remind us.  Hey, any chance to see Vincent D'Onofrio again, I'll take it, even if it's just archive footage.  (I've already tried to update the IMDB, since he's not listed as appearing here. It's not really a "spoiler", exactly, the scene is a flashback so there's no harm in adding his presence to the credits.)

So there's the jump-off point, after tonight's film reminds us that Breslin basically authorized Hush to kill his old partner rather brutally (Death by shipping container?  Is he just going to float around on a big cargo ship until he starves, after the ship gets stuck in some canal?) we eventually figure out that the big bad villain here is Lester Clark Jr., who went into his father's line of work of building escape-proof prisons, and he wants revenge against Breslin.  He also kidnaps the daughter of a Chinese tech CEO, to get either ransom money or access to the secret tech (this is an EFO Films venture, so it's probably cell-phone software that can take over the world, or an ultimate hacking device that will do the same).  But Lester Clark Jr. really can't do two things at once, like why did he kidnap Breslin's girlfriend, and not Breslin himself?  He's got to know that Breslin's going to break into the secret Latvian prison to save her, right?  That's kind of his thing, after all. 

It's not like I was expecting great drama here, of course not, that's isn't "Nomadland" or "The Farewell", but still I'm forced to conclude that standards within the action-movie genre have fallen off quite dramatically in the last few years.  It took six years to make a sequel to "Escape Plan", but only one more year to follow up "Escape Plan 2" with what is essentially "Escape Plan 3"?  I guess this makes sense when you realize that it only took about two days, max, to write this screenplay.  But for a film franchise that is supposedly based around high-tech prisons and how to break out of them, it feels like a real let-down to set the third film in an old-school Latvian prison (with no tech at all, really) and have the hero team break IN instead of OUT. 

Breslin makes the decision to retire at the end of the break-in and break-out, and I think that's a wise one. I wonder if Stallone would ever come to that same conclusion. According to his IMDB data, he was 73 when this film was released - it's probably time to stop making action movies. I'm reminded, however, that one of the franchises on my list of films I've never seen, and perhaps it's a glaring omission, is the "Rambo" films.  Never seen one of them, I suppose I should do something about that at some point. Even though I've tackled the "Twilight" series, the "Scream" films and even the "Scooby-Doo" films, certain franchises remain unwatched, like all the "Transformers" films, the Friday the 13th series, the "Halloween" films and the "Chucky" films - there may be others.  Oh yeah, all the "Fast & Furious" movies, too, haven't seen any. 

Also starring Sylvester Stallone, Jaime King, Lydia Hull, Tyler Jon Olson, Shea Buckner (all carrying over from "Escape Plan 2"), Max Zhang, Harry Shum Jr. (last seen in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny"), Devon Sawa, Malese Jow, Russell Wong, Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Jeff Chase (last seen in "Freelancers"), Rob de Groot (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Holland Herzfeld, Boyang Yang, Sherri Robertson, Rich Miller, Sergio Rizzuto (The Pardoner! last seen in "Hard Kill"), Tony Demil, Heidi Lewandowski, Danni Wang, Stephen Oyoung, with a cameo from Jesse Pruett (last seen in tending bar in "Freelancers") and archive footage of Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Fire With Fire")

RATING: 3 out of 10 incendiary rounds

Escape Plan 2: Hades

Year 14, Day 27 - 1/27/22 - Movie #4,028

BEFORE: Another Thursday at home, no place to go except a short walk out to get bagels and a loaf of bread. The place was deserted because everybody in NYC is expecting snow tomorrow night, and the weather reports are telling us to expect somewhere between 0 and 20 inches of snow on Saturday.  I wouldn't mind zero, to be honest, but then why the heck is everybody staying home, two days before the storm?  I know, the Omicron pandemic wave is still a thing, but rates are dropping fast in this area, just 9% positivity instead of the 36% high from a couple of weeks ago.  So again, WHY am I still housebound?  Right, only one job is calling me in right now, just three days a week, the second job booked me for this coming Saturday, but then the screening got moved to the following weekend, because of the approaching storm, and the uncertainty that comes with it. (Attendance at the theater was low in late December, the last screening I worked had THREE people in the audience.). Bottom line, I'm going cuckoo bananas at home, and I applied for a THIRD part-time job, transcribing captions for movie files, which would be working from home, during my free time from the other two jobs, only I haven't heard back yet about my application.  Cuckoo bananas. 

Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson carries over again from "Freelancers". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Escape Plan" (Movie #2,230)

THE PLOT: Years after he fought his way out of an inescapable prison, Ray Breslin has organized a new top-notch security force. But when one of his team members goes missing, Breslin must return to the hell he once escaped from. 

AFTER: Tonight's film isn't on Netflix, or Hulu, or even Pluto TV - yeah, that's a bad sign.  It's on Amazon Prime, but not for free (another warning sign) but I chose to watch it on iTunes, for just $1.99 and even then, I think I paid too much.  Most GOOD films are on iTunes for a $3.99 rental, so that's probably strike three against this film, nobody rented it for $4 so they cut the price to $2.

It's old home week, with many actors in this film having been seen before in one film or another this month, and that's because EFO Films isn't just the home of cheap Bruce Willis action movies, it's the studio that made the first "Escape Plan" movie, released back in 2013.  That first film had both Stallone AND Schwarzenegger in it, but Ah-nold is nowhere to be seen in this sequel from 2018.  He went a while without making any movies, nothing released between 2005 and 2010, now I can't remember why, something about being a politician?  Governor of something?  Anyway, he got back into action movies with "The Expendables", "The Last Stand" and "Escape Plan", so that doesn't really explain why he's absent from this sequel, unless he wanted too much money, or was just too busy.  

Anyway, Stallone's character, Ray Breslin, managed to soldier on without the guy he met in prison (ah, yes, I'm re-reading the plot of the original "Escape Plan", and now I see why Arnold's character didn't return, makes perfect sense).  So Ray's got a new team of experts, ones that he personally trained, and this manages to take a lot of pressure off of Stallone for most of the picture.  The guy's not getting any younger, but then again, who is?  Only two other actors carry over from the first "Escape Plan" movie, 50 Cent and Lydia Hull - Amy Ryan and Vincent D'Onofrio are absent, again for one of them there's a valid plot-based reason, and the other stars from that film were the villains, easily replaced with new actors in the new prison.  

The first film also had a valid concept, a security expert gets himself thrown in prison and tries to escape in order to test the facility.  Makes sense, as long as you don't think about it too much, but yeah, I guess somebody has to be an expert on breaking out of prisons from a design standpoint, so that they can be built better in the future.  Ray's got a system, which involves figuring out the layout, the routine, and having help both on the inside and the outside.  But this new prison was sort of designed with him in mind - without giving too much away, Hades (which stands for High Asset DEtention Service) is located somewhere underground, and was apparently specifically designed to disorient the inmates, especially if they follow Ray's rules for escaping a prison.  

It's, well, it's not really realistic at all, I'm not saying it HAS to be, but once you throw a bunch of things into the prison design that are either impossible or not invented yet - like, say, medical robots, which is not a thing yet in real life - then your film has accidentally entered the realm of science-fiction, and that's something of a choice. It didn't HAVE to be this way, didn't have to be so ridiculous, because it ends up like some weird, random conglomeration that arose from some screenwriter throwing a bunch of, er, stuff onto a wall to see what sticks.  Hey, people like robots, right?  Let's add some robots.  People like martial arts, right?  Let's have a bunch of that.  

So I'm left to conclude that some screenwriter did exactly ZERO research into the current state of technology in today's prisons, and instead just threw in a bunch of random stuff that would look cool, connect the basic plot points, and give the audience just enough twists to mimic some form of lizard-brain satisfaction.  Why not do a little research?  Why not do the legwork and talk to a couple wardens, maybe tour a max-security prison and ask about real-world escape attempts?  Does that sound a bit too much like hard work?  Or was the studio not paying the writer enough for that? 

Stallone once called this "the most horribly produced film I have ever had the misfortune to be in."  OK, so, umm, why do it that way, then?  Didn't Stallone have any kind of script approval, or any say in the matter over what his character says and does?  Why make another sequel (yeah, I'll watch it tomorrow, I'm committed now) if this one was such a bad experience?  I guess that's a question I'll try to answer next.  

Also starring Sylvester Stallone (last heard in "The Suicide Squad"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Marauders"), Huang Xiaoming, Jesse Metcalfe (last seen in "Hard Kill"), Wes Chatham (last seen in "Tenet"), Chen Tang (last seen in "Mulan"), Tyron Woodley, Tyler Jon Olson (last seen in "Extraction"), Titus Welliver (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Shea Buckner (last seen in "First Kill"), Jaime King (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Lydia Hull (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Ashley Cusato, Baylee Curran, Vincent Young, Eric Newnham, Mark Hicks, Pete Wentz, MIng Xi, Gordon Michaels (last seen in "Scream 4"), Jamie Eddy, Joseph Blake Menzel, Joe Gelchion (also last seen in "Marauders") and the voice of Mike McColl. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 force fields (yeah, still not a thing IRL)

Freelancers

Year 14, Day 26 - 1/26/22 - Movie #4,027

BEFORE: Man, I'm really excited for my upcoming summer Doc Bloc / Rock Block. (working title, it's really just the usual Summer Music & Comedy Documentary Jam, and I could easily revert to calling it that.)  Why am I so excited?  Well, I've got a bunch of docs about musicians, comedians and other notable people who have all become documentary subjects in the last few years - I've listed some of them here already so there's no need to go through them again.  But that's not why I'm excited.

I put 28 or 29 of them in order, and then when the linking seemed a little tenuous, I sort of "pre-watched" a few of them that seemed like they might be missing credits on the IMDB, particularly where archive footage credits are concerned.  And I was right, a bunch of them were missing credits, I've made suggestions to the IMDB for additions, and the online credits have been updated properly, for the most part.  AND I've got a solid chain with a start point and an exit point, which could easily be reversed, so that means there are TWO films to aim for, that doubles my chances of getting there this summer.  But even all THAT isn't why I'm excited. 

I've been concerned about my last film, which is a documentary about the Velvet Underground.  It also doesn't have a lot of credits, which means I may have to WATCH it to figure out where to go next. There is, in fact, only one current film on my list that represents a solid next step.  HOWEVER, I accidentally determined that with the addition of just one more film to the line-up (and it's not a film I'm crazy about watching, but that scarcely matters at this point) the end of the chain links back to the beginning. I've seen this happen before, with some February romance or October horror films, because the same type of people tend to be in the same type of movies.  With documentaries, I can usually count on seeing newscasters, talk show hosts, U.S. Presidents and bands like the Beatles, again and again, I've come to rely on all that.  But the END of the chain now links back to the BEGINNING.

Which means that the whole thing is a giant circle!  I could get into this chain of 28 (OK, now it's 31) films at ANY valid link from ANY of my other films!  Then I can move in EITHER direction to complete the list, and I'm almost certain to end up with a final film with better linking outros than the Velvet Underground film.  Oh, yeah, THAT'S why I'm excited, my chances of getting into (and out of) this chain just increased about a hundred-fold, now I've got options over when this crazy chain starts, and maybe I can start it right after Father's Day and maybe the exact right PERFECT film can be scheduled for July 4. If it works out, that film will have a relevant title and subject matter for the holiday, of course, if I can swing it.  Oh man, does this give me something to look forward to!  

Of course, I have to get there first, I've got to finish this January chain of action movies, then there's the whole romance thing which will take up February and half of March, and then I think it's back to action movies in March, with Ryan Reynolds, Nicolas Cage and Dwayne Johnson.  But, big fun things are coming this summer, can't wait!  

Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson carries over from "The Frozen Ground", of course, and so do at least two other actors - that's kind of why I counted yesterday's film as a 50 Cent film and not a Nic Cage film. 

THE PLOT: The son of a slain NYPD officer joins the force, where he falls in with his father's former partner and a team of rogue cops. 

AFTER: OK, so far I've seen 50 Cent as a gang member in Long Beach, a pimp in Anchorage, and tonight he plays a rookie NYC cop. Well, as long as he doesn't get typecast, I guess. Or maybe he's OK with it, it's street cred no matter what.  But even as a cop here, he doesn't claim to be a "good guy", I'm not sure there are even any "good guys" in the film.  Again, street cred, but that makes it a little difficult to root for anybody here, if every cop is dirty.  

I guess his character is a bit questionable from the start, when we first meet Malo and his buddies, A.D. and Lucas, it's right after their NYPD swearing-in ceremony, which apparently is the only time that cops can drink in a bar while in uniform (yeah, I'm not sure that's accurate...) and they make references to getting in trouble when they were kids, and going straight from juvie prison to the police Academy (yeah, I'm not sure that's how that works, either...) thanks to the influence of the wife of a District Attorney that apparently two of the three friends were having sex with on the side (OK, that's DEFINITELY not how you get into the Police Academy). 

But that's all par for the course here, every cop depicted is either on the take, or has a drug habit, or is a very racist white cop.  Look, I'm not saying those things don't happen, but EVERY cop is one of those things?  Surely there must be some NYPD officers who are clean, sober and non-racist, right? RIGHT?  Yeah, yeah, this is a work of fiction, and no resemblance to real events is intended, but come on, what is some writer trying to say about our boys in blue, it feels like somebody wants to suggest that they're ALL bad, and I can't wrap my head around that, it would mean that the "thin blue line" that protects society is a whole lot thinner than we'd care to believe. If I said that "all rappers are thugs" then I'd be way out of line, I couldn't possibly support that, plus it sounds racist.  Sure, SOME of them may have criminal records, but I'm not in that world, so I can't speak as an authority.  SImilarly, unless you have first-hand knowledge that every single cop is a bad person, I'd keep an eye on making this kind of generalization. 

Of course there's a chain, and the chain leads up through two police detectives who knew Malo's father, when he was alive.  And they feel some kind of responsibility to look after Malo, but at the same time, this means inducting him into their criminal organization, making sure his buddies get assigned to their precinct, and then showing them the "ways of the world", namely that every cop takes a little piece of the action as confiscated money gets turned in, or more often, not turned in. With all of these police officers on the take, getting their pieces, and paying up to some crime boss who's pulling the strings, jeez, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  

Malo takes it upon himself to play each faction against the other - he tells the lead dirty cop that his closest lieutenant went rogue and betrayed him (when it was really Malo) then he tells the 

mob boss that the lead dirty cop is out to take him down, then he tells the lead dirty cop the reverse of that, so everybody is suddenly suspicious of everybody else, and the whole thing is like a powder-keg that's about to explode.  But this sort of is almost the same plot as "Setup", and remember, those two films came from the same studio, so we're really back playing action movie Mad Libs, just change a couple of nouns, assign new character names and recycle the old plot.  I think maybe somebody at EFO Films wrote ONE screenplay many years ago and it's served him well, he's used it again and again, just replacing a few key words each time.  Which is another reason I'm anxious to get off of these cookie-cutter action movies and on to another topic, really, I'll take anything else at this point. 

Basically, this movie is all over the place - I honestly can't tell if Maldonado was a "good guy" all along, like was he pretending to be a dirty cop trying to find out who in the brotherhood of dirty cops killed his father, or was he a "bad guy" all along, who joined the force just so he could get in on the action, since he felt it was his birthright?  Then the movie defiantly refuses to answer the one question that we would need answered in order to determine this.  In the end, does it even matter? 

The best news here is that 50 Cent has made THREE movies with Bruce Willis - two I watched last week, the other one is "The Prince", which I've seen before - and THREE movies with Robert De Niro, the other two are "Righteous Kill" and "Last Vegas", and with this one, I've now completed both sets, so that's how you win gin rummy, I think. 

Also starring Forest Whitaker (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Malcolm Goodwin (last seen in "Run All Night"), Ryan O'Nan (also carrying over from "The Frozen Ground"), Michael McGrady (ditto), Matt Gerald (ditto), Anabelle Acosta, Beau Garrett (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Robert Wisdom (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Pedro Armendariz Jr. (last seen in "Casa de mi Padre"), Dana Delany (last heard in "Superman: Brainiac Attacks"), Vinnie Jones (last seen in "Fire With Fire"), Douglas M. Griffin (ditto), Andre Royo (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Roger Edwards, Cassie Shea Watson, Javier Carrasquillo, Jeff Chase (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Danny Abeckaser (last seen in "Marauders"), Ambyr Childers (last seen in "Setup"), Jesse Pruett (last seen in "First Kill"), Shantel Jackson. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 tests of loyalty

The Frozen Ground

Year 14, Day 25 - 1/25/22 - Movie #4,026

BEFORE: OK, so I left ONE Nicolas Cage movie in January, and re-scheduled the rest for March.  Why this one?  Because it also has Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson in it, and I therefore had to decide whether to count this as a Nic Cage movie or as a 50 Cent movie.  Well, I had one slot left, so filling that slot will help me land the start of the romance chain square on February 1. Therefore, this counts as a 50 Cent movie, simple as that.  

Plus, an additional actor carries over from "Fire with Fire", and I think two more actors (in addition to 50 Cent) will carry over tomorrow, those are all signs that maybe this film belongs HERE and not THERE, but it probably would have worked out either way, thanks to so much overlap.  I've checked my possible outros to the Nicolas Cage chain, so in late March I should have plenty of options, since I can watch all the Nic Cage films in whatever order gives me the final link I want. So yeah, I'm kind of top of all of this. 

The only sacrifice is that "The Frozen Ground" had to be separated from the rest of the herd, but, hey, it's January so a film set in Anchorage, Alaska seems sort of seasonally appropriate.  

THE PLOT: An Alaska state trooper partners with a young woman who escaped the clutches of serial killer Robert Hansen to bring the murderer to justice.  Based on actual events. 

AFTER: Something a little different tonight, this is kind of like a true-crime procedural drama, a there really was a serial killer in Alaska named Robert Hansen.  Hansen was a baker, a loner, a veteran, a hunter, a bi-polar schizophrenic and a part-time thief and arsonist.  Oh, and he was responsible for the abduction, rape and murder of at least 17 women, the question of course is how he got away with this for so long - I mean, yeah, if he killed all the women he abducted, that would explain a lot, but nobody investigated the disappearances of so many women in the Anchorage area over this period of time?  He had two children with his second wife, but the family apparently took a lot of trips without him - that alone speaks volumes about him - and during those periods, he would abduct women and keep them in his basement dungeon. 

So, yeah, this isn't a very happy or positive film, except for near the end, when he finally gets caught and the Alaska State Troopers get to search his house, and are able to build a case against him, thanks to the testimony of one prostitute, Cindy, who managed to escape while Hansen was loading his sea plane to get ready to take her out to his murder cabin in the woods. She even left her sneakers in his car as evidence of her abduction, however nobody in the Anchorage Police Department would believe her story, simply because she was a hooker, and as far as they knew, Robert Hansen was a fine, upstanding member of the community. 

Obviously the film had to change some of the names of the people involved, but there was an Alaskan State Trooper, perhaps similar to the one played by Nicolas Cage here, who had been involved with the investigation around dead bodies found around Anchorage, Seward and the surrounding valleys. Forensics teams noticed similarities in the ways that the victims were killed and buried, so it's great when different agencies contact each other and solve crimes based on patterns, but then of course tying these crimes to specific individuals, doing profiling work, plus the research involved in finding similar cases and possible connections, that's what takes a long time, most likely.  

In this case, the FBI profile of the killer indicated someone with hunting experience, low self-esteem and a history of being rejected by women, somebody with a stutter and a compulsion to keep souvenirs from his victims.  Oh, and probably somebody with their own plane.  Maybe that's not a lot to work with, but eventually this did lead investigators to Robert Hansen, and a warrant to search his house, car and plane. After stumbling on a marked map of his "hunting" locations, it then just became a matter of confronting him with the evidence during interrogation. 

The filmmakers here (same studio as most of the Bruce Willis films from last week, EFO Films) did their best to make this exciting, but all things considered, most police investigative work probably isn't as exciting as many movies would have you believe.  Stakeouts, profiling suspects, gaining the trust of witnesses, and even conducting interrogations aren't as visually interesting as shootouts and explosions, and this little problem is probably tough for any "action" film to overcome and still be true to the real story.  Still, I know that procedural podcasts are a big thing now, I'm not sure why they're so popular compared to, say, movies on the same topic, but that's where we find ourselves.  Last year I watched that 6-episode mini-series "I'll Be Gone in the Dark", which was about Patton Oswalt's late wife, Michelle McNamara, doing a lot of the profiling research for a true-crime novel that led to the identification of the Golden State Killer, I enjoyed that series quite a bit, so I sort of get it.  

And while seasonally appropriate, the subject matter of this film is still very much a bummer, so it didn't really help alleviate my Seasonal Affective Disorder, although it could make you feel happy to just be alive, in some sense, I suppose. 

Also starring Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Trapped in Paradise"), John Cusack (last seen in "The Grifters"), Vanessa Hudgens (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Radha Mitchell (last seen in "The Shack"), Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, Dean Norris (last seen in "The Hustle"), Katherine LaNasa (last seen in "Alfie" (2004)), Matt Gerald (last seen in "Faster"), Robert Forgit, Ryan O'Nan (last seen in "Marauders"), Kurt Fuller (last seen in "The New Guy"), Kevin Dunn (also carrying over from "Fire With Fire"), Gia Mantegna (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Michael McGrady, Brad William Henke (last seen in "North Country"), Bostin Christopher (last seen in "Harriet"), Olga Valentina (last seen in "Extraction" (2015)), Jason Collins, Taylor Ann Tracy, Ron Holmstrom, Leo Grinberg, Katie Wallack (last seen in "Like Crazy"), Brett Baker, Mark Robokoff, Jill Bess, with cameos from Lydia Hull (also last seen in "Extraction" (2015)), Mark Rhino Smith (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen")

RATING: 5 out of 10 animal-head hunting trophies

Fire With Fire

Year 14, Day 24 - 1/24/22 - Movie #4,025

BEFORE: Both Bruce Willis AND Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson carry over from "Setup".  As I mentioned, this is the LAST film in the Bruce Willis chain, I made it through NINE of his movies.  These were just the ones that were available to me right now, they're all over Netflix - though I got a message saying tonight's film is leaving that platform on January 29, so if you're playing along at home, you've only got five days left!  I don't know where it will go from there - maybe Tubi, maybe cable, maybe Peacock or Pluto, but I'm just glad that I seem to be somewhat in sync with the Netflix schedule.  It's always better for me to get to a film BEFORE it scrolls off the service, God knows there have been plenty of films I didn't get to in time.  

Bruce Willis has been very busy lately, sure, and now I know he only works one day on each action movie, two days max - so I didn't get to recent releases "American Siege", "Fortress", "Deadlock", "Apex", "Survive the Game", "Out of Death", "Breach", "Survive the Night", "Trauma Center" or "Midnight in the Switchgrass" (and I swear, I didn't make these titles up).  Most of these aren't yet available to me, or if they are, they're on AmazonPrime or On Demand for like $3.99 to $5.99 each.  Sorry, Bruce, money's a little tight right now.  

Still, I watched NINE Bruce Willis movies in a row - has anybody else even done that?  Has anybody in Bruce Willis' immediate family ever done that?  Maybe Bruce has done that, you know, to check the quality of his own films - but I'm probably the only other person.  Right?  Anyway, he's back to playing a tough, seen-too-much detective again, after a short stint as a mob boss in "Setup". 

THE PLOT: A fireman takes an unexpected course of action when a man who he's scheduled to testify against, after a hold-up at a local convenience store, threatens him. 

AFTER: OK, if I'm going out, I'm going out on top - there's some good stuff in here that I can work with.  The original plan had me ending the Bruce Willis chain with "Acts of Violence", because that had Cole Hauser in it, and Cole Hauser is also in another film with Nicolas Cage. BUT, then I found January was too crowded, so I re-scheduled almost all the Nic Cage films for March, when I'll have more time.  The schedule after the romance chain ends was WIDE open, so why try to cram 35 or 36 films into January, or why keep the romance chain from starting on February 1, like it's supposed to?  Moving the Nic Cage chain makes so much sense, and I have an easy way to get there from the end of the romance chain.  See, THIS is why I "bundle" my films, if I put 5 or 7 or 9 films together with the same actor, it gives me multiple outs, and more options - now there's a whole list of actors who could be in the LAST Nic Cage film in that mini-chain, and that's just going to help to connect to an appropriate film for Easter or Mother's Day, when the time comes. 

Anyway, back to "Fire With Fire", whose title comes from that famous saying about "Fighting fire with fire", which doesn't really make much sense because given the choice, you should fight fire with WATER, not more fire.  Um, unless it's an electrical fire, in which case, don't use water.  I know that in some rare cases, firemen battling a forest fire will burn down a section of forest themselves, in order to stop the bigger fire.  But I still think in most cases, you should choose water, if it's available. But I'm rambling again - the phrase really means to fight back in a similar fashion against those oppressing you, not to actually try to fight a fire with more fire. 

The main character here is, you guessed it, a firefighter in Long Beach, CA - and he happens to visit a convenience store at the same time as an Aryan Brotherhood crime boss who's NOT robbing the store (as the synopsis suggests) but trying to buy the store, to make it part of his criminal enterprise.  The store owner, however, won't sell, and pays protection to the Eastside Crips, so it's a no-go.  But the Aryan crime boss then kills the store owner's son AND he can't help but say his own name very loudly during the "negotiation" process, which really puts anybody shopping there at the time, say, a firefighter buying snacks for his fellow firemen, in a very tight spot.  Said firefighter is now a witness to the crime, and he agrees to testify against Aryan crime boss David Hagan, though this puts him at risk. 

Everything's going to be fine, though, the firefighter just has to enter the Witness Protection Program, change his name, and stay down in New Orleans until the trial.  Look, it's not like this crime boss has a network of underlings across the country who will hack the system and help him track down where witness are being kept safe.  Wait, that is exactly what happens, only they can't prove it was Hagan who sent a sniper to that motel to shoot at both our firefighter hero and the attractive U.S. Marshal who seems to have fallen for him.  Yeah, OK, it's great that Jeremy finally found somebody who he cares for and who cares for him, but man, what bad timing.  The budding couple let their guard down, and Talia the U.S. Marshal is in jeopardy.  Once the smoke clears, the couple is separated, Talia recovers, but Jeremy doesn't feel safe any more and sort of removes himself from the Witness Protection Program.  

He heads back to Long Beach, which seems like a really BAD idea, because that's where Hagan is, and where Jeremy's likely to be recognized, but once there, he teams up with the Crips to get a gun, because he wants to take Hagan out.  And so begins a process that I've seen several times in the films of the last week (remember, most of them come from the SAME film studio, EFO Films) as Jeremy works his way up a chain of bad and badder dudes to get the information he needs to take the big dog down.  What's interesting here, to me anyway, is that he's accidentally landed on a good technique, he can kill a few criminals and if he should happen to leave fingerprints at the scene, there won't be a hit in the database, because his identity was changed.  Whether or not this would work in real life, I have no idea, but it's a neat little twist that I haven't seen in a movie before.  And as you know, I've seen a LOT of movies. 

The detective on the case, though, realizes that the fingerprints which can't be traced to anybody probably mean that Jeremy's back in town.  Jeremy gets some information from Hagan's lawyer about where he's going to be, and then puts those old firefighter skills to good use - TWICE.  Once to burn down the building, and again to rescue his girlfriend Talia, when he realizes that Hagan also kidnapped her.  This conveniently teams up a number of loose ends at the same time, plus it brings the whole firefighter thing back into play - a bit contrived, perhaps, but at least the whole thing is somewhat symmetrical.  And logical, I'll have to concede that.  

It's great to see Vincent D'Onofrio as the big bad, just as it was great to see him as Kingpin in "Daredevil" and "Hawkeye". I'm not exactly sure when he switched over to villain roles, like in "Jurassic World" and "The Cell", but it does suit him.  And it seems like he has more fun when he plays the villain, but I still miss him as Robert Goren on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent".  They brought back Christopher Meloni as Det. Stabler, and they're bringing back/rebooting the original "Law & Order" soon also, I wish fans could get an update on Goren, too at some point. 

OK, with that, I'm moving on - NO Bruce Willis in tomorrow's film. 

Also starring Josh Duhamel (last seen in "CHIPS"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "After Class"), Julian McMahon (last seen in "Paranoia"), Vinnie Jones (last seen in "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball"), Arie Verveen, Eric Winter (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Bonnie Somerville (ditto), Yohance Myles (last seen in "The Host"), James Lesure, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson (last seen in "Boss Level"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "Thunder Force"), Nnamdi Asomugha (last seen in "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Danny Epper, Scott A. Martin (last seen in "The Watcher"), Thom Barry, Christopher Berry (last seen in "The Whole Truth"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 tin cans used for target practice (Yes, I realize I used this one last week for "First Kill".  But if EFO Films can repeat it, so can I.)

Setup

Year 14, Day 23 - 1/23/22 - Movie #4,024

BEFORE: Bruce Willis carries over from "Acts of Violence", this is film #8 in a row for him, just one more to go after this, then I'm all caught up.  Nah, not really, he's just made too many films in the last few years for me to ever get all caught up. 

THE PLOT: A group of friends become involved in a potentially deadly diamond heist. 

AFTER: First off, I need clarification on the title of this film - Wikipedia and the IMDB list is as "Setup", but the cable company apparently didn't get the memo, and displays it as "Set Up". There's a fair amount of difference there, one's a noun and the other is a phrase used as an adjective - now me, I would have put a hyphen in-between the words, but that's just because I love hyphens so much. 

Well, I started the Bruce Willis chain with cosmic interstellar genocide, but then spent two days on bank heists, two days on mercenaries defending world-takeover tech, and two days on kidnapping.  Actually there was some overlap, the mercenary films had a little kidnapping in them, so did one of the bank heist films.  And through it all, Bruce Willis has played a general with the Space Force, an ex-cop, a dirty sheriff, a tech company CEO, a secret agent, a secret secret agent, and an honest current cop.  So versatile!  Tonight he's a mob boss, if you can believe that one. Is there any role that he can't play, besides the ones that require spending more than one day on a film shoot?  

The real star here is Curtis Jackson, or "50 Cent" or "Fifty" or "Fiddy" or maybe he's just calling himself "Dy" these days, I can't keep up.  I think that the IMDB, however, should have started limiting the number of name changes that any one person gets, right after Sean "Puffy" Combs changed his name to Puff Daddy, then to P. Diddy, then Diddy, and Kanye is now "Ye" on the IMDB, which is just ridiculous.  We all KNOW his name is Kanye West, so shouldn't his name on the IMDB reflect the name that everybody knows?  Look at the poster above, it clearly says "Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson", so that's the name I"m going to use.  I've been through this with Kid Cudi and Kid 'N Play and the ladies from TLC, and I've got to draw that line somewhere. This isn't like the Asian actors who get their given and family names put backwards by the Hollywood system, this is just about rappers getting swollen egos and being indulged and allowed to change their names to whatever they want.  Well, fine, if Kanye gets to change his name to "Ye" then I still have the right to call him Kanye West, which I will continue to do, at least until I receive an injunction by post.  

(Really, it cuts both ways, you can't get a producing credit as "Curtis Jackson" and an acting credit as "50 Cent" in the SAME film.  You've got to pick one.). Anyway, once the Bruce Willis chain ends, Mr. Jackson's going to be sticking around here for a few days. 

50 Cent plays Sonny, the titular guy who's "set up" by his friends in a "set-up" and has to set things up, er, straight again somehow.  He and two childhood friends pull off a diamond heist, and then one friend shoots the other two.  But somehow this guy didn't get the memo that you can't kill 50 Cent with a bullet, I think he's been shot before in real life and he MAY have mentioned this fact before in interviews.  Silly backstabbing, er, chest-shooting friend.  Sonny gets up and walks it off (eventually) and figures out a way to get back at his friend, Vincent. To do this, he robs a poker game and works his way up the chain to get a sit-down with the biggest mob boss in Detroit, Biggs.  

The mob boss agrees to help him get his share from the heist, provided he does a few favors first.  I think there was an episode of "M*A*S*H" like this, where Hawkeye and BJ had to do a favor chain for everybody in camp, just to get a three-day pass to Tokyo or something.  (EDIT: This long-running show actually did TWO episodes with favor chains, one in season 2 where Hawkeye was trying to get a new pair of boots, and another in season 4 where the goal was to get another can of tomato juice for Col. Potter. If you're too young to remember "M*A*S*H", I'm sure it's streaming somewhere... It was syndicated at least twice a day in my parents' house).  In order to get his share of the diamond heist, Sonny has to boost $2 million that a rival gang is digging up, and deliver it back to Biggs.  Which he looked like he might do, except then the film has one of those "Whoops, I just shot Marvin in the face!" moments, a la "Pulp Fiction". 

Sonny also tracks down the guy who fenced the diamonds, and tries getting his cut that way.  Yeah, that's a no-go, too, because the fence already paid Vincent and says Sonny's got to work things out with him.  Considering that Vincent already SHOT him once, that's probably a bad idea, and it only gets the fence killed, too.  Meanwhile, there's another hitman, representing the party that SHOULD have received the diamonds, and he's willing to kill Sonny, Vincent, or anybody else that gets in his way.  Also meanwhile, Vincent's father is in prison, and we learn that the warden is offering Vincent's father protection, and extorting money from Vincent, which is why he had to pull the double-cross set-up in the first place.  So yeah, it's a little hard to find somebody to root for here, everybody's dishonest, and then even the honest one learns to be dishonest, just to survive all this.  

Sonny puts the $2 million in a locker and tells Biggs that Vincent took it and killed Bigg's man, who was acting as Sonny's partner.  Usually this would be a VERY BAD idea, to steal a mobster's money and put the blame on somebody else.  But it does seem to be a way here to accomplish a few things at once, like, why kill two birds with one stone when you can kill three?  Still, I'm not sure this sends out a very constructive message to the audience, and this plan has so many moving parts that if even ONE thing doesn't go the right way, it could be fatal.  Which it is, for some people, the audience is just clearly being conditioned to accept that if the worse bad people die, that's fine and if the slightly better bad people don't, that's the best we can hope for, I guess.  Hey, life is complicated in Detroit, especially when there are so many overlapping crimes going on at once. 

So much was still unresolved at the end of the film that it almost feels like somebody was planning a sequel - thankfully this hasn't happened, so far. 

Also starring Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Ryan Phillippe (last seen in "I Know What You Did Last Summer"), Jenna Dewan, Randy Couture (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), James Remar (last seen in "Horns"), Brett Granstaff (last seen in "Vice" (2015)), Will Yun Lee (last heard in "Superman: Unbound"), Shaun Toub (last seen in "War Dogs"), Susie Abromeit (last seen in "Battle Los Angeles"), Rory Markham (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Jay Karnes, Ron Turner, Ralph Lister (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Alex Safi, Ambyr Childers (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Omar Dorsey (last seen in "Harriet"), Rich Komenich (last seen in "The Watcher"), D.J. Howard, Richard Franklin, Richard Goteri, Jordan Trovillion. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 prison shanks