BEFORE: Tom Hardy carries over from "Venom: The Last Dance", and I won't say that I met Tom Hardy, not exactly, but he did come to the theater a couple months ago for the premiere of "Mobland", which is a crime series on Hulu, and we screened the first two episodes, I think. I was on outdoor detail, which involves keeping an eye on the crowd and making sure nobody trips on the ramps that help people get from the sidewalk to the street because there's this giant press tent blocking the sidewalk. Both Hardy and Pierce Brosnan came out to meet fans that were being kept in a holding pen of sorts, and so Tom Hardy was a few feet in front of me while he was signing autographs. OK, so it's not a thrilling story but it happened, I took a couple of pics and for once you could really tell that it was the celebrity I saw. For me that's a big deal, usually my pics are blurry or you can just see the back of a celebrity's head.
I know I used Tom Hardy as a link already this year, but I needed to watch "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" to get to "Dune: Part Two", and at the time "Venom: The Last Dance" wasn't available yet, so I've had to circle back - just like I can't follow the Luis Guzman link out of this film, and it looks like I'll get back to him and use him as a link in June.
I think I've got the Doc Block finalized now, HBO just aired the new doc about Pee-Wee Herman last night, I was able to scan quickly through Part 1 just to get a quick cast list and therefore figure out where it can fit into the line-up without me having to move a lot of other things around. That's a definite must-watch, along with the one about Yacht Rock, the one about the South Park creators renovating that Mexican restaurant, and the one about the Star Wars holiday special. Oh, it's SO going to be a fun block this time around, I've made sure of that. Coming June 25 (or so) through August 7 (or whenever) to a blog near you...also starring Faye Dunaway, Martha Stewart, Christopher Reeve and a bunch of other stars.
THE PLOT: After a drug deal goes wrong, a bruised detective must fight his way through the underworld to rescue a politician's estranged son, unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.
AFTER: Well, it's a bit of the old ultra-violence today, this is another one of those movies where everybody seems to know martial arts, everybody's got a gun but seems to prefer some kind of hand-to-hand combat with cleavers or knives, and everyone seems to have 100 bullets in their gun and (almost) never needs to reload. That last part seems to be bothering the most people, because as a result there are like a million bullets fired in this film overall, and at some point you'll probably be thinking it's a bit excessive. Basically everything's over the top here, but are the plot points believable? Well, probably not, there have to be SOME cops in the city who aren't corrupt, the main character is probably meant to be the hero here, but he's clearly been in trouble with his superiors before due to favors he's done for a politician, who is probably also corrupt, and we know this because he claims to not be. It's the Trump era, after all.
I'm not sure where this story is set, I GUESS it's supposed to be NYC, what with the corrupt politician (We see you, Mayor Adams...) and so many dirty cops, but I couldn't pin down any of the locations. Plus there's a lake cabin setting near the end of the film, and I don't know one lake that close to New York City. Maybe upstate, but it just wouldn't be that close. It turns out this film was shot in Wales - the one in the U.K., but they NEVER mention what city they're in, so is it supposed to be Anytown, USA? They sure went out of their way to TRY to make this look like New York - but it just doesn't, the buildings aren't high enough and the train yards and car repair lots just look a little TOO shitty. Also, we don't have THAT many elevated trains in NYC, and they don't travel between buildings like that. So, maybe Chicago? Not sure.
The son of that dirty politician gets involved with the Chinese gangs, he's part of a crew that's assigned to steal a truckload of washing machines, only the washers are filled with drugs. Well, that's one way to do it, I guess. To stop the police car that's speeding after them (in a wild opening chase scene that looks partly CGI, for safety reasons) the crew drops a washer out the back, stopping the police car but critically injuring a cop. Coincidentally, that cop turns out to be a friend of Patrick Walker, the lead character and slightly less corrupt cop. The other police on the scene are the much more corrupt cops, so you have to wonder whether they were trying to stop the truck so they could get the drugs themselves.
The Chinese gangster who hired the crew turns up very dead, and the crew goes missing, so the hero cop and the more corrupt cops all race around the city to find the politician's son. Walker has the inside track because he's paying off an informant, a secret doctor for the Chinese mob, and one person missing from the scene had been shot several times. So Walker gets to the politician's son (and his girlfriend) first, but only by minutes. Both the corrupt cops and the Chinese gangsters show up a few minutes later, and there's a giant shootout at the club. Again, some people prefer knives and cleavers and good old-fashioned martial arts, you'd think that once the guns came out that would be the weapon of choice, but you would be very wrong, guns just aren't all that cinematic, I guess.
The mother of the dead Chinese gangster shows up and gets her little brother, another Triad boss, into the mix. The best theory at this point is that the crew that stole the washers killed the gangster, but when Walker asks them about it, they say it was the gang of corrupt cops. Well, when the Chinese mob is hunting you, they may not be willing to listen to reason, so you know what, why not just leave town while you can? The little brother Triad boss turns up at the hospital, for example, to kill the cop who's in a coma and that seems like overkill at that point. He's almost stopped by Ellie, a rookie cop who got assigned to work with Walker, only then she got re-assigned to work with the more corrupt cops. But she starts to see the corrupt cops for what they really are, and she kind of goes back over to Walker's side, which seems to be the lesser of two evils.
Ellie goes to see Walker's ex-wife and of course he's not there - that seems to have been the problem during his marriage, that he was never there - but she learns about that lake cabin, and figures that's probably where Walker is hiding the crew members that simply EVERYONE is looking for. Before long, everyone turns up at that lake cabin, and it's giant shoot-out number two, only not everyone's going to be walking away from this one. Vincent, the leader of the corrupt cops but tries to escape by train. (NITPICK POINT: Who the hell puts a train yard so close to a lake cabin? Seems unlikely...). Walker catches up with him, and that's the end of that. As reinforcements arrive, Walker strongly suggests that Ellie arrest him, but she doesn't, and we never find out if he just goes back to work at the precinct, or if he's in trouble for helping wanted fugitives escape, or killing gang members, or just owning the world's most unlikely located lake cabin. Well, maybe whoever sold it to him said it was lakefront property, and Walker fell for it.
I'm giving myself the day off tomorrow - because I want the next film to line up with Memorial Day, it's fine, I need to have a break day every now and then, I've got to get some comic books to my storage unit and also catch up on logging some comics in, I've got them piled up all over the place and a three-day weekend is the best time to deal with that. Back with my Monday film on Tuesday, probably, then I've got to go work another premiere event. There is another film on my list with the same title as this one, and I'll be getting to that one, too, in just a couple of days.
Directed by Gareth Evans
Also starring Jessie Mei Li (last seen in "Last Night in Soho"), Timothy Olyphant (last seen in "When Trumpets Fade"), Forest Whitaker (last seen in "How It Ends"), Justin Cornwell, Quelin Sepulveda, Luis Guzman (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Michelle Waterson, Sunny Pang, Jim Caesar, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Yeo Yann Yann, Serhat Metin (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Richard Pepper, Megan Lockhurst, Richard Harrington, Gordon Alexander (last seen in "Lift"), John Cummins, Narges Rashidi (last seen in "Speed Racer"), Astrid Fox-Sahan, Jeremy Ang Jones, Aaron Ly, Lockhart Ogilvie, Albert Tang, Tom Wu (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Jill Winternitz (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Jack Morris, Alan Leong, Jennifer Armour, Clarence Smith, Stacy Sobieski, Jon-Scott Clark, Kage Jakubiec, Bailey Cameron, Christopher Maleki (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Joe David Walters
RATING: 5 out of 10 terrible Christmas presents
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