BEFORE: Yes, it's true, I left my job at the animation studio after 31 years - or I was fired, depending on who you ask. It's complicated, maybe, but it comes down to personal problems between me and the boss, who believed for some reason that being the boss makes you right about everything, which I do not agree with. I like to run an animation studio a certain way, make sure the bills are paid on time, make sure that the Kickstarter backers get their rewards within a certain period of time, and also I like the ability to be right once in a while when I know the boss is NOT right about something. Turns out the boss did not see things the same way, and I maybe complained one too many times about how he tends to do a lot of things the wrong way. For this reason I was labeled as having a "bad attitude" and was again reminded that the boss is always correct, and when I disagreed with that point, I was offered the choice of quitting or being fired. Since I can't file for unemployment if I quit, I chose the latter, and I look forward in the coming days to him learning the hard way about all the things that I did for the studio that nobody else knows how to do, and those are things that will now not get done. Some of those things are little things, while others are the kind of things that could put him out of business, like not renewing the worker's compensation insurance or paying the payroll withholding on time. I won't say I practiced "revenge quitting", but in any action movie you might see the hero walking away from an exploding building or vehicle without looking back, and that's my mood right now. While the explosion hasn't happened yet, really, it's just a matter of time.
But who knows, I'm about to take a week's vacation and get on a cruise ship, so a week of people trying to run that studio without me, and not having the knowledge I have, or the passwords I have, could be a game-changer in how valuable I actually am to that business. It should be fun to find out - meanwhile after the cruise I'm going to be really busy at my other job, and honestly, this is the main reason that I HAVE the other job, so I would have something to fall back on if the primary job closed or my boss got sick or something - the back-up plan also comes in handy if I get fired. Really, I can find another job, what I could not do was make that studio run properly or 100% legally, and that's been frustrating me for the last few years. So this is a relief in many ways, and tonight's film is appropriate because it's all about the stress level of the main character, only he needs to keep his UP and I very much need to keep mine DOWN.
Jason Statham carries over from "Mechanic: Resurrection".
THE PLOT: Professional assassin Chev Chelios learns his rival has injected him with a poison that will kill him if his heart rate drops.
AFTER: Life can be a real roller-coaster ride, that's the point I was trying to make earlier. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down, sometimes you work a lot and make a lot of money, sometimes you have to take a few months off and re-assess your life. You get married, you get divorced, you stay single for a while and at some point you realize it's not only a roller-coaster ride with ups and downs, but at some point every ride is over, or at least you find yourself back where you started, and maybe you can go around on the big crazy ride one more time. There are circles within circles, everything is cyclical, but for now let's just focus on the ups and downs, highs and lows, gutters and strikes.
We don't know EXACTLY what Chelios did to get on somebody's bad side, but he's a hit-man, so he was contracted to do a hit and then somebody didn't like it, so they vowed to get revenge. It probably happens a lot in that business, we don't know for sure because we only really know the Hollywood version of hit-men and assassins, and I'm willing to bet there are more hit-men in movies than there are in real life. But again, I'm not an expert. Chelios works for Don Carlito Carlos, and apparently he was tasked with taking out Don Kim from Chinatown. And now Ricky Verona wants to kill him in retaliation, so Verona sneaks into his apartment at night and injects him with a poison, and then he leaves Chelios a video on a DVD to show him what he's done - because what's the fun of killing somebody if you don't also take the time to brag about it? There's maybe a NITPICK POINT here, because what if his poison kills Chelios, and police investigate the scene and find that DVD? Visual evidence of murder, right there on digital media - and this was done somehow BEFORE cel phones had cameras, so it must have taken some time to burn the footage to a DVD, maybe it's not that long, but still it represents some effort.
The poison inhibits the flow of adrenaline, which will eventually slow down Chelios' heart and kill him. (Why did they choose a slow poison, just to give him enough time to watch the DVD? Still seems odd.). Anyway Chelios calls the mob's doctor and gets the advice that he needs to keep his adrenaline flowing through any exciting action, like driving fast or fighting somebody or putting himself in danger. You know, anything that will also look really cool in this movie. So Chelios goes out and picks fights with a whole club's worth of black bikers, and also some reckless driving through a MALL, chased by a police car. Wooo, that's how you feel ALIVE, getting chased by the cops!
Another option is to track down some epinephrine from a pharmacy or a hospital, and when the pharmacist balks, one helpful person at the drug store points out that there's epinephrine in the nasal spray, so why not give that a whirl? He also makes it to the hospital and tries to get some from a rolling crash cart, but this only alerts some cops at the hospital, so he has to settle for shocking himself with the defribb - the defirbrill - you know, the heart-starting paddles. Well, that should put some hair on his chest. Finally he gets a syringe of epinephrine and injects himself, then runs off to pick a fight with a motorcycle cop, and we learn what a proper English action star wears under his hospital gown. Hint: it's nothing.
Another check-in with the mob doctor (who's delayed flying back from Vegas) reveals that Chelios probably just took TOO MUCH epinephrine, because he really didn't ask how much is enough, he just took some in the syringe and some more in the nasal sprays, so now his body is dealing with that overdose, and he's sweating but he's cold and he also has a big erection. OK, good to know. Time for some very public sex with his girlfriend, who's been asleep most of the day, that's why she wasn't answering her phone, and she doesn't QUITE understand that rival mobsters are coming to her house to kill her, but sure, she'll go with her boyfriend to Chinatown to have sex in full view of a bus of tourists. Really, they never seem to find the time to have sex any more, so this is a welcome change for her. Wait, WTF?
Chelios gets a tip from an informant who's both a cross-dressing party boy AND the link to the "Napoleon Dynamite" universe, and he's spotted Ricky Verona's brother, Alex - so Chelios heads over there to ask Alex where to find Ricky, or kill him, whichever comes first. But at least Chelios gets a line on Ricky and heads over to the Triad warehouse to (because this is still a Jason Statham movie) work his way through an astounding number of guys with weapons and martial arts training, using some killer acrobatics and occasionally shooting one gang member with another gang member's gun. So those negotiations don't go well either, but at least Chelios knows that Verona and his own boss, Carlito, are working together to kill him.
Finally the mob doctor is back in town and manages to squeeze Chelios in for an appointment. He finds that he can slow the poison down, but he can't cure it. So Chelios arranges a meeting with the people trying to kill him, because it seems like he's got nothing left to lose. But surprise, the triads arrive and Chelios didn't kill Don Kim in the first place, he just wanted him to disappear for two days so he could, umm, wait, what was the reason for faking the guy's death again? Whatever it was, it lead to Chelios getting poisoned so maybe it really wasn't the best plan after all. Anyway Verona tries to escape by helicopter, but Chelios jumps on board and as they fly over the city, he pulls Verona out of the helicopter and kills him as they're falling to the ground. Seems like overkill, really, he doesn't need to kill him, the ground will do that for him, but what do I know?
All in all, it's another film in the same vein as "Speed", it's just that instead of a bus that will blow up if it goes below a certain number of miles per hour, it's a man whose heart will stop if he stops doing dangerous and exciting things. But you can see the resemblance, right?
Directed by Mark Neveldine (director of "Gamer") and Brian Taylor (ditto)
Also starring Amy Smart (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Jose Pablo Cantillo (last seen in "Ambulance"), Efren Ramirez (last seen in "When in Rome"), Dwight Yoakam (last seen in 'When Trumpets Fade"), Carlos Sanz (last seen in "Stronger"), Reno Wilson (last seen in "The Great White Hype"), Edi Gathegi (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Glenn Howerton (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Jay Xcala, Keone Young (last heard in "Wish"), Valarie Rae Miller (last seen in "La La Land"), Yousuf Azami (last seen in "12 Strong"), Laurent Schwaar (last seen in "The Divorce"), David Brown (last seen in "The Drop"), Dorian Kingi (last seen in "Antlers"), David T. Green, Eve Loseth, Allen Bloomfield, Stephanie Mace (last seen in "Gamer"), Dan Callahan (ditto), Sam Witwer (ditto), Chester Bennington, Michael McLafferty, Earl Carroll (last seen in "Alex & Emma"), Sean Graham, Noel Gugliemi (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Daniel Venegas (last seen in "School for Scoundrels"), Francis Capra, Peter Choi, Toshi Toda (last seen in "Just Married"), Jai Stefan, Jacki R. Chan, Rich Shuster (last seen in "Eraser"), Ted Garcia (last seen in "Zodiac"), Carlos Ramirez (last seen in "Stillwater"), Robin Wilson (last seen in "Lucky You").
RATING: 6 out of 10 Google Earth satellite images
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