Crank: High Voltage

Year 17, Day 81 - 3/22/25 - Movie #4,981

BEFORE: Yesterday and today, there were SO many actor birthdays in March, I was very close to having another birthday SHOUT-out, but it's a case of "close, but no cigar".  Both films have cameos from Chester Bennington, who was the lead singer of Linkin Park, and he died in 2017, but he was born on March 20, 1976. So I was one day off by watching "Crank" on March 21, therefore no shout-out. Other "Crank" franchise actors with March birthdays are Amy Smart (March 26), Jose Pablo Cantillo (March 30), Edi Gathegi (March 10), Ron Jeremy (March 12) and John de Lancie (also March 20). I hope they all have happy birthdays this year (OK, except for Ron Jeremy, he knows what he did...) but I can't just be giving out SHOUT-outs all over the place, their movies have to land on the right days...

Jason Statham carries over again from "Crank", and so do 13 other actors. 

THE PLOT: Chelios faces a Chinese mobster who has stolen his nearly indestrucible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker which requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working. 

AFTER: I'm going to take a guess and say that the most memorable bit from the first "Crank" movie involved Chelios shocking himself with those defibrillator (yes, I looked it up) paddles. Which weren't even used correctly, they're meant to be used only when someone's heart has stopped, and his was just slowing down. Sure, the shock charged him up on the adrenaline scale, but apparently it's more likely that his heart would have stopped completely after such a jolt. It's a movie, sure, so there's some poetic license, but still they should try to keep things within the realm of possibility, otherwise the whole exercise becomes some kind of impossibly fantasy film.  

Take the ending of "Crank", for example, when our hero falls from helicopter flight height all the way to the pavement, landing on a car and bouncing off it (!!!) then landing on the pavement and not being completely dead. How much adrenaline or epinephrine or Chinese toxin he had in his bloodstream at that moment wouldn't matter, as we saw in "Mechanic: Resurrection", if you fall from skyscraper height to the sidewalk, you'll be little more than a red stain after that impact. But Chelios is only mostly dead, which is also slightly alive, and a team of Chinese mobsters pulls up in a van and scrapes him off the street (they use a snow shovel, which is weird because who owns a SNOW SHOVEL in Los Angeles?)

He's taken to the finest Chinese heart surgeon working in the Chinatown underground (above the dim sum place, but below the lawyer's office) where they need his heart to keep a very old gangster named Poon Dong (again, !!!) alive, and they replace it with a baked potato wrapped in foil. Somehow Chelios is still alive, but he's relying on a battery pack to keep his artificial heart working, and the battery keeps running low on power, so he has to feed it electricity from the car he's jumpstarting, and so on. It's going to make things difficult (even more so than last time) if he's going to both figure out who's got his heart now, find it and somehow get it back in his body.  

That mob doctor is back again, via phone he lets Chelios know that if something happens to that battery pack, he'll only have about an hour to live, the device is simply not designed to keep people alive for very long.  Well, wouldn't you know it, the battery pack gets destroyed in a car crash, so he's got to hope against hope that receiving regular electric shocks to his skin will transfer energy to the heart's internal battery and keep it running - which leads to more and more absurd situations, like shocking himself with jumper cables from a helpful driver, or seeking out high voltage lines and grabbing hold wherever he can.  

All he knows is the name of the low-level Chinese gangster who was there during his operation, Johnny Vang, and the name of the club where he hangs out.  There at the club he catches the eye of a hooker named Ria, who sends him to a strip club, where he also sees his girlfriend, Eve, who naturally assumed he was dead since he hadn't called in three months and also fell out of a helicopter to his death. After a gunfight with Mexican mobsters, he learns the identity of the man trying to kill him this time - "El Huron", or "The Ferret". 

While the cops arrest people and start sorting through the bodies, Chelios escapes in a police car with Eve and another stripper, who happens to know that Johnny Vang also hangs out at the Hollywood Park racetrack - jeez, this is worse than "Marlowe", where the detective had to bounce back and forth between every social club/whorehouse in L.A.  On the way there, Chev meets Venus, the twin brother of his cross-dressing associate Kaylo from the previous film. (Venus is conveniently played by the same actor, who was available to come back for the sequel, however they'd killed his character off...). At the racetrack the heart starts losing energy again, so the mob doctor suggests that Chev rub up against strangers at the track to generate friction and static electricity.  So he rubs up against a horrified grandmother and also the guy from Linkin Park (also making his 2nd appearance in the franchise). 

But once Eve catches up with him again, an even better opportunity to create friction arises, and he and Eve have another very public sexual encounter in front of the track grandstand. And everybody digs it, nobody is offended, because back in 2009 it was a different time and public places weren't filled with Karens who called the police every time they saw something they didn't like, all right?  Two people are in love and boning right there on the horse track, you ENJOY it, you don't report it, umm, unless the lady is screaming for help, in which case that's probably a rape or sexual assault, yeah, go ahead and call that one in.  But not THIS one, except that it probably affected the outcome of the horse race.  

Then Don Kim (also from the last film) arrives in a limo to clue Chelios in about where his heart is headed, it's going to keep Poon Dong alive, because it's such a spectacular heart - after all the previous owner fell out of a helicopter and somehow survived, also he managed to outlive the Chinese poison in his system (see previous film).  But Don Kim double-crosses Chelios and tries to kill him, which would have prevented him from trying to get his heart back, but Chelios kills Don Kim and his men first, because he's righteous and owns better guns.  

Chev next boards an ambulance to get a new battery pack for his heart, then finds Johnny Vang near some kind of electrical transformer set-up, and this leads to some kind of weird fantasy sequence where the two men battle, but are dressed in giant Godzilla or kaiju costumes. I'm not sure if this in meant to be a parody or some kind of representation for the madness going on inside the dying man's head.  Anyway, Vang still has the red Igloo cooler, only the heart's not in it any more, it's already been placed inside the very old man.  There's something else in the cooler, but, umm, the movie doesn't show us what it is - maybe that's for the best. 

Chev is taken to Catalina for the final showdown with the Mexican thugs, who are led by El Huron, who then reveals his connection to characters from the first film, which perfectly explains why he really really wants to kill Chelios. Well, he's welcome to try, but so far everyone who's tried to kill him has ended up dead themselves.  Venus arrives with back-up (and his case of Fullbody Tourette's Syndrome) and Ria arrives (with her weird shaking caused by getting hit by a car, I think) and wow, if this is the cavalry arriving to save Chelios, really, he's better off without them.  Chelios takes a moment to power up before the final boss battle by climbing up some power lines, and then he's literally on fire as he beats the bad guy to death.  So now he's still got the artificial heart, he's lost his mind AND he's covered in third degree burns.  Well, it looks like the end for our hero but you know, we've thought that before.  

OK, so it's been a while since this sequel came out in 2009, why haven't they made "Crank 3" yet?  Oh, right, because the singer from Linkin Park died, I guess. 

Well, we're off to catch a boat early tomorrow morning, leaving from NYC for Bermuda and maybe parts unknown. If I don't stay on holiday then I'll be back here with one more Jason Statham movie next weekend. 

Directed by Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor (directors of "Crank")

Also starring Amy Smart, Dwight Yoakam, Efren Ramirez, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Reno Wilson, Keone Young, Jai Stefan, Chester Bennington, Ted Garcia, Dan Callahan, Jay Xcala, Glenn Howerton, Carlos Ramirez (all carrying over from "Crank"), Julanne Chidi Hill, Art Hsu (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), J.J. Soria (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Bai Ling (last seen in "Nixon"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "Nightmare Alley"), David Carradine (last seen in "The Long Goodbye"), Corey Haim (last seen in "Murphy's Romance"), Geri Halliwell Horner (last seen in "Gran Turismo"), William Brent (last seen in "You Again"), Jamie Harris (last seen in "West Side Story"), John de Lancie (last seen in "Fearless"), Ho-Kwan Tse, Galen Yuen (last seen in "Rescue Dawn"), Shu Lan Tuan (last seen in "Because I Said So"), Eidan Hanzei (last seen in "Gamer"), Keith Jardine (ditto), Joseph D. Reitman (ditto), Kate Mulligan (ditto), Najja Meeks, Annie Girard, Yeva-Genevieve Lavlinski, David Rolas, Moses Romero, Dewey Kim, Portis Hershey (last seen in "Accepted"), Atticus Todd, Chad Damiani, Tom Roach, Maynard James Keenan, Danny Lohner (last seen in "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster"), Danna Hansen (last heard in "Garfield: The Movie"), Cherinda Kincherlow, Billy Gillespie (last seen in "Doc Hollywood"), Samuel Hubinette, Michael Weston (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Lexington Steele, Monique Alexander, Nick Manning, Jenna Haze, Ron Jeremy (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Ed Powers, Larry Eudene (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Reid Harper, David Scott Rubin (last seen in "Feast of Love"), Mandy Amano, Darryl Chan (also last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Tony Flores (last seen in "Domino"), Christine Q. Nguyen, Holly Weber (last seen in "The Ugly Truth")

With cameos from Lauren Holly (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Lloyd Kaufman (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), 

 

RATING: 5 out of 10 porn stars on strike (I think we all remember the big porn star strike of 2009, right? They were desperate times for all, indeed.)

Crank

Year 17, Day 80 - 3/21/25 - Movie #4,980

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

Mechanic: Resurrection

Year 17, Day 79 - 3/20/25 - Movie #4,979

BEFORE: OK, I'm going to pick up with Jason Statham right where I left off - I watched 9 Statham movies last year, and the last one in the chain was "The Mechanic".  I'm only going to watch four more this year, because that's how many I have now. But his films will get me to my vacation week, and then nearly to the end of the month, which is fast approaching.  Whether I'll still have my main job at the animation studio at the end of the month is another question entirely, the boss is after me to quit or get fired, and I'm not crazy about those choices. I'm hoping that a week without me there sort of highlights how much I do for the company, because when I'm not there to do those things, they don't get done. That may work to my advantage, but it's also possible that the damage is done - like why am I even fighting to keep this job if the boss doesn't want me there?  Wouldn't it be a relief to just give up the job that drives me crazy, and then I could work more shifts at the job that doesn't?  The job that drives me nuts pays better, unfortunately, and the job that doesn't drive me nuts doesn't have any staff positions available right now, so I'm kind of stuck. I need to keep making money, but not at the cost of my sanity.  Maybe a week away from both jobs, on a boat, might bring some clarity to all parties involved. 

Atanas Srebrev carries over from "Memory".  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Mechanic" (Movie #4,832)

THE PLOT: Bishop's most formidable foe kidnaps the love of his life in order to make him complete three impossible assassinations and make them look like accidents. 

AFTER: Ah, there's nothing quite like a sequel to a remake. Can we call that a requel?  The original 1972 film called "The Mechanic" never had a sequel, so if Statham's popular and somebody wants to turn that into a franchise, well, go ahead. Statham's also got a new film coming out now, called "A Working Man" but I don't think I'll be able to work that into my chain.  Again, I want to remind you that my blog takes NO MONEY from advertisers at all, so if I tell you that "A Working Man" is being released in theaters on March 28 and is from the same director as "The Beekeeper", it's only because I think you might want to know.  Damn, if I wanted to go see that the weekend we get back, I probably could, it would fit right into my chain. But I kind of JUST lined up what I want to be Big Movie 5,000 - so if I did that, I'd have to drop something else. Still, it's possible - I've got tent duty that weekend, though. The theater where I work is showing 3 big premieres, just not "A Working Man".

Arthur Bishop, aka "The Mechanic", went into hiding at the end of the first film, he blew up his old life (literally, along with his car and his safehouse) and we learn here he's been living in Rio de Janeiro under another name. But someone from his old life finds him (there are cameras everywhere these days, that's the explanation) and wants to hire him to kill three targets.  But Bishop pulls the old "use everything in this public place to disarm and defeat everyone, then escape" trick, and he takes off for Thailand. Using his computer skills, he scans the photo of the message courier and determines she works for Riah Crain, one of the world's biggest arms dealers. 

His friend Mei, who runs the beach resort, asks him to help out a woman with bruises, she's out on a boat and being beaten up by her boyfriend. Bishop rescues the girl, Gina, but also accidentally kills the boyfriend in the process.  But Gina reveals she's part of a set-up, she's been forced to try to get Bishop's attention and fall in love with him, Crain would then kidnap her and force Bishop to take the assassination jobs.  Gina just runs a children's shelter in Cambodia and wants to be left alone, but Crain threatened to kill all the kids unless she seduces Bishop. So Bishop decides to play along, but pretending to fall for Gina leads to him actually falling for Gina, so really, he's playing right into Crain's hands, and the mercs come to abduct her for real, and so I guess all this was inevitable, or we wouldn't have a movie. 

Now Bishop has to complete three jobs in 36 hours, and considering how far apart the hits are, I'm not sure that it's even possible to travel all that distance in such a short time.  First he has to get arrested in Malaysia so he'll be brought to the prison where his first target is, then he's got to get the lay of the land in that prison really fast, well I've always heard that you need to find the biggest baddest guy in that prison and challenge him to a fight, but that's probably not a good idea here. Instead he saves the life of Krill, the imprisoned warlord, and in doing that, he gains his trust. This enables him to have dinner with Krill, and kill him while his bodyguards are conveniently elsewhere.  Then it's just the matter of starting a prison riot and escaping through a quickly-blown up hole in the wall, and jumping off a high cliff into the ocean. Easy peasy. 

The second target is an Australian billionaire, former sex trafficker and current arms dealer (Ah, I get it, Crain's trying to eliminate his competition...).  This billionaire goes for a swim every morning in his skyscraper penthouse's very expensive and obnoxious pool, which hangs over the side of the building and has a glass bottom, so yeah, you can probably guess what's going to happen here, Bishop's going to break into the building and drill into that pool from the bottom, so it looks like an accident. It's very dramatic, cinematic and ironic, though, it's a bit like if you killed Elon Musk by running him over with a Tesla Cybertruck. No, even better, by blowing up a Tesla Cybertruck with him in it. All the people poorer than him (which is everybody, really) would then just go - "Yeah, that's an ironic enough death. No notes."

OK, so after traveling to Malaysia and Australia, those 36 hours are almost up - once you factor in all the time of getting to the airports, checking bags, going through customs, and sneaking all those weapons and explosives in somehow, Bishop's got like 5 minutes left on the countdown clock. Plenty (??) of time to get to Bulgaria and take out the third target, an American arms dealer named Max Adams, who's got an enormous collection of submarines for some reason.  Sure, he COULD just kill the guy and maybe save his girlfriend, and be done before lunch, but Bishop probably doesn't trust Crain, he could kill the third target and then Crain might kill Gina anyway. 

So, Bishop approaches Adams, and together they come up with a plan to take down Crain, who's really a thorn in both of their sides.  First they have to fake Adams' death, to make it look like Bishop came through and held up his end of the bargain.  Bishop lures half of Crain's men to the submarine pen and takes them all out, then makes a scuba beeline for Crain's mega-yacht, where he's holding Gina hostage, so he can take out the other half.  

Finally, after finding Gina and putting her in an escape pod submersible, it's down to just Bishop and Crain, two men on a yacht that's set to self-destruct. It's a perfect place for Bishop to both get his revenge AND pull another disappearing act, because everyone who knew he was still alive would think he just blew up with the mega-yacht.  But did he? 

It's a worthy sequel - I'll give it the same score I gave the first film. Now why is it, exactly, that Jason Statham's name never comes up when they talk about who should play James Bond next?

Directed by Dennis Gansel (co-director of "Berlin, I Love You")

Also starring Jason Statham (last seen in "The Mechanic"), Jessica Alba (last seen in "Barely Lethal"), Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "The Burial"), Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "A Haunting in Venice"), Sam Hazeldine (last seen in "The Last Duel"), John Cenatiempo (last seen in "Cellular"), Toby Eddington, Femi Elufowoju Jr., Anteo Quintavalle, Yayaying Rhatha Phongam, Bonnie Zellerbach (last seen in "No Escape"), Francis Tonkala Tamouya, Tais Rodrigues Dias, Lynette Emond, Allan Poppleton, Soji Ikai, Vithaya Pansringarm (last seen in "The Meg"), Rachel O'Meara, Geoffrey Giuliano (last seen in "Kate")

RATING: 7 out of 10 cigarettes brought into prison (one with something extra in it, but I didn't really understand what that was. fuel cell? tracking device?)

Memory

Year 17, Day 78 - 3/19/25 - Movie #4,978

BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over from "Marlowe", for the last time in this chain, but he's on top of the leader board for 2025 right now, with nine appearances. Well, everything has to end sometime, I think today just proves that little maxim, in more ways than one. 

THE PLOT: An assassin-for-hire finds that he's become a target after he refuses to complete a job for a dangerous criminal organization. 

AFTER: This is kind of a repeat theme, because I just watched Liam Neeson play a very similar character, a hit-man for hire, in the St. Patrick's Day film two days ago, "In the Land of Saints and Sinners".  Sure, that film was set in Ireland in 1974, and this one's set in Texas & Mexico during modern times, but come on, essentially the same film in many ways.  Beyond the job there's the fact that Neeson's character is very protective of children in both films, and also he's an expert in firearms and demolitions, that's pretty standard for an action hero with a shady past, which is apparently the type of character he likes to play.  But also he faces off with the FBI here, and that hearkens back to "Honest Thief" and "Blacklight" - so really, a lot of repeating themes this week, or perhaps each film is just a re-shuffling of the same game pieces.  

But the twist here is that Neeson's character, Alex Lewis, has Alzheimer's/dementia, he takes medication for it and tries to stop the onset of the disease, but it's still going to kick in at some point. Early in the film he visits his older brother who's already living in a nursing home for the same reason, and he can't carry on a conversation or even recognize Alex. So, really, it would be a great time for Alex Lewis to retire, only he's still taking contract killing jobs, and you get the feeling this isn't going to end well for him.  

Meanwhile, there's a parallel story with the FBI Child Exploitation Task Force, we see them undercover, taking down a man in Texas who's pimping out his young daughter. During the operation, Agent Serra's cover is blown, and he pushes the suspect out a window, which leads to a death rather than an arrest.  The teen girl, Beatriz, is taken to a detention center, but Agent Serra works to get her released to a group home, which is a better environment for her. But when hit-man Lewis is contracted to kill two people, one of whom is this same teen girl, then the parallel stories are bound to meet.  The FBI's efforts to control sex trafficking keep getting thwarted, and the best theory is that the mystery woman who's always seen being examined by the anti-aging doctor is also the woman hiring the hit-man, but what one thing has to do with the other is really very unclear. 

Alex turns out to have some kind of a conscience - he'll kill the first target, an adult man who's a builder of the processing facility that holds the immigrants and young sex workers, but he won't kill Beatriz because of her young age.  Alex even tracks down the contact who offered him the two jobs and roughs the guy up to drive home the point that he won't be completing the second part of the hit.  But later Alex has vivid dreams about shooting the girl, so is it possible that he DID do it, and doesn't remember doing it?  Nah, they probably just hired another hitman, but still, he had a dream about it.  So, yeah, that's also unclear. 

With Guy Pearce having a prominent role here, it's a clear sign they wanted this to be like "Memento" but it's just not. That film had a character who could not make new memories, but he had access to his long-term memories. We're dealing with the reverse here, Alex can carry out a hit (provided he brings a photo of the target) but he can't remember what happened yesterday, or where he hid an important piece of evidence.  But at one point he takes to writing important information down on his arms, and there's the reference to "Memento". 

Alex hides out in an abandoned bakery that once belonged to his family, and he finds that the flash drive that he took from the safe of the man he killed contains a phone call of the woman who ordered the hit, and also footage of her son, Randy, committing sexual assault. Before he goes on the run, Randy throws one last sex party on his yacht, but Alex got there first and was waiting for him in the closet off the bedroom.  Sorry, Randy.  Meanwhile the FBI are working hard to put all the pieces together, they've got bodies piling up and they all seem to be people connected to that immigration detention facility, what does that mean?  Who is going around El Paso killing the builder and owner of that detention center, and also one of its former inmates?  They take so long figuring it out that Alex actually has to call them and clue them in about who's ordering the hits. It's kind of sad when even the FBI needs help figuring stuff out.  

The whole last half-hour here is just clean-up, all rather unnecessary but the storyline needed to take some extreme steps to make sure that the bad people died and the good people lived.  OK, well, most of them anyway.  It's all very basic, though, it doesn't really feel like any new territory was covered here. 

Directed by Martin Campbell (director of "The Protégé")

Also starring Guy Pearce (last seen in "The Rover"), Monica Bellucci (last seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"), Harold Torres, Taj Atwal (last seen in "The Protégé"), Ray Fearon (last seen in "Barbie"), Daniel de Bourg, Josh Taylor, Ray Stevenson (last seen in "Allegiant"), Mia Sanchez, Lee Boardman (last seen in "Enola Holmes 2"), Scot Williams, Rebecca Calder (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Stella Stocker (also carrying over from "Marlowe"), Natalie Anderson, Atanas Srebrev (last seen in "Acts of Vengeance"), Antonio Jaramillo (last seen in "Savages"), Doug Rao (last seen in "Colombiana"), Josh Macrena, J.R. Esposito (last seen in "Barbarian"), Devina Vassileva (ditto), Vladimir Mihaylov (last seen in "The Expend4bles"), Sofia Soltess, Tudor Chirila (also last seen in "The Protégé"), Mariana Krumova, Lubomir Bachvarov, Sigal Diamant (last seen in "The Musketeer"), Danay Velinova, Louis Mandylor (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3"), Neda Spasova, Kalina Stancheva, Rosen Kovachev, with a cameo from Jake Tapper (last seen in "Glass Onion")

RATING: 5 out of 10 bruises seen in Alex's childhood photos

Marlowe

Year 17, Day 77 - 3/18/25 - Movie #4,977

BEFORE: Between everything going on, working both jobs and also trying to keep current on "Tournament of Champions" and "Spring Baking Championship", I've almost fallen behind on movies, which is not good with a vacation coming up. So the quick fix is to pull a double, watch a couple movies back-to-back, however I tried this and fell asleep halfway through the second film, which is just not going to help. Let me try again to knock this one out so I can get back on track. 

Liam Neeson carries over again from "In the Land of Saints and Sinners".  

THE PLOT: In late 1930's Bay City, a brooding, down on his luck detective is hired to find the ex-lover of a glamorous heiress.  

AFTER: Well, they really don't make movies like this any more, and you have to figure there's probably a pretty good reason for that. We've all moved on from the pulpy hard-boiled detective stories that were written in the 1930's, just as we've moved on from Victorian romances and movies about the Civil War - oh, sure, every decade or so somebody tries to bring them back, but there's some law about diminishing returns. Every time they come back, fewer people are interested. They'd rather watch a series about apocalyptic zombie fungi or what happened to a bunch of teen girls who got stranded in the woods, and those are TV series, I know, but they're open-ended, they can each go on forever, or until people stop watching. But who needs a classic detective story these days, after they aired CSI: Cyber and NCIS: Sydney?  This film even makes jokes about how outdated everything is, a cop loans the private eye a random gun and says, "If they ever start tracking the serial numbers on these things, we're in trouble."  Ha ha, we're getting away with something but also we're in the past and we're dead now. 

They tried to revive the classic Hollywood film about making Hollywood films with "Babylon", and that sure didn't work. "Babylon" was just "Singin' in the Rain" only three times longer and five times more gross. That's gross as in vomit and violence, not box office gross.  Some genres are perhaps better left alone, as we didn't NEED another film about Hollywood figuring out how to add sound to movies and put theater organ players out of work all across the country.  And so we probably didn't need a new movie about Raymond Chandler's famous private eye, Philip Marlowe.  Over the years, he's been played in films by Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery, James Garner, Elliott Gould and Robert Mitchum. Note that the character is of no fixed age or height, but that happened in the books too - Marlowe was as tall as he needed to be and looked like whatever you thought he looked like. (See also - James Bond.)

He obviously works in Los Angeles, being close to the film industry and all that in this film, but it's called "Bay City" here, which is a bit odd. Could the film company not afford the rights to the name of Los Angeles?  I figure that one's probably free, so why not use it?  San Francisco is more of a "Bay City" than L.A. is, so really, what gives?  Really, there are a lot of questionable choices here, like when a character looks at Marlowe's face and comments that he looks like he's been roughed up, however I didn't notice a bruise or a cut or any kind of damage at all, so again, WTF?  Was it the make-up person's day off, or did they figure they would add the cuts or bruises in post-production, and then just never got around to that? 

The story concerns Mrs. Cavendish, an heiress, the daughter of an aging film star, who hires Marlowe to find her boyfriend, Nico Peterson. A little digging and he finds out Nico Peterson's been run over by a car and is dead, so that should explain why he hasn't been showing up at his married lover's house. But when he checks in with Mrs. Cavendish, she says, "Oh, I know he's been reported dead. But I saw him in Mexico, so I think somebody faked his death."  So now Marlowe's got to go BACK to the Corbata Club again and start asking a whole new round of questions.  There's a LOT of going back and forth here, between the film's four or five locations, it really would be a lot more efficient if people were more forthcoming when they spoke with the detective, it would save a lot of gas and time. 

For that matter, the film keeps going over the same plot points, again and again, so it's a long time before any real progress is made in this investigation.  Every question Marlowe asks basically gets asked three times, in three different locations, again, lots of commuting between them, and then any major plot point is hammered home at least FIVE times. Yes, we get it, that guy deals drugs, he's said that several times, and it's been explained to everyone he meets.  Nico goes to Mexico, yes, we get it, please stop mansplaining drug dealing to me.  Hollywood stars like heroin, sure, we get it, but someday it will be cocaine and these conversations will all happen a lot faster, hopefully. 

Marlowe finally tracks down Nico's sister, who hangs out at one club, but she can't talk freely there, so she wants Marlowe to meet her at ANOTHER club, where she works on Tuesdays. Great, more commuting, more mileage on the car, more time wasted before anybody can answer a question being asked for the third time.  So he goes to the Cabana Club on Tuesday, but is met with a couple of toughs that try to beat him up, because the owner of the Corbata Club saw him talking with Nico's sister, so really, you won't see her again. 

Then Mrs. Cavendish's mother, the aging starlet, wants to hire Marlowe to find the SAME guy he's already looking for, but for entirely different reasons.  So she has to go over every single plot point AGAIN, but from her P.O.V. and explain why SHE needs to find this guy, who people think is dead but really he might not be dead. OH MY GOD and she has to explain exactly how she wants her tea made IN DETAIL to the waiter, who probably doesn't even speak English. Can't anybody just SHUT UP in this movie and stop explaining everything from tea brewing to drug dealing to how guns aren't being tracked yet? 

Finally something happens when Marlowe gets too close to getting some questions answered, they slip some drugs into his drink and drag him through the THIRD illicit club and lock him in a room while they torture the drug dealer and force him to explain yet again how famous people love drugs and how they need to be smuggled into the country. Yeah, dude, we know this already, because it's literally all you ever talk about. Ah, but Marlowe was only pretending to be drugged, so now he can break free, and also he knows who the real villain mastermind is, and it's exactly the person you thought it would be, the guy who plays the villain in really every film he's been in over the last decade. You really don't hire that actor for any other reason, like I think he would never get hired to play a normal guy with a wife and kids who worked at a shoe store or something, because nobody would ever believe him in that role.  Typecasting is great, because you can just skip to the end of the movie now and save yourself some time, because, duh, it was that guy.

After all that, the guy Marlowe's been looking for turns up at his own house, which sure could have saved us all some time if he'd just done that sooner. He tries to explain why he faked his own death, but by now it doesn't really matter, anyway it also falls back on the same points that the film has made over and over - famous people are rich, they like to take drugs, and somebody had to bring the drugs to them, because that's how drug dealing works. Sure, mansplain it again. But then he maybe learned the hard way that keeping extensive notes about all that was probably not such a great idea. 

Ugh, this was so tedious but at least when it's over you'll be glad for that. I don't know, maybe you'll feel nostalgic for a time when drugs were illegal and also you could smoke in a restaurant and also Nazis were about to try to take over the world. Or maybe not.

Directed by Neil Jordan (director of "Mona Lisa" and "The Crying Game")

Also starring Diane Kruger (last seen in "The 355"), Jessica Lange (last seen in "In Secret"), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (last seen in "Faster"), Colm Meaney (also carrying over from "IN the Land of Saints and Sinners"), Daniella Melchior (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Alan Cumming (last seen in "Loser"), Danny Huston (last seen in "Birth"), Seana Kerslake, Francois Arnaud, Ian Hart (last seen in "Tristram Shandy"), Patrick Muldoon, Mitchell Mullen (last seen in "Filth"), Brenda Rawn, Alan Moloney, Stella Stocker (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Darrell D'Silva (last seen in "Dirty Pretty Things"), Kim DeLonghi, Tony Corvillo, Roberto Peralta, J.M. Macia, Michael Garvey, David Lifschitz (last seen in "The Promise"), Anton Antoniadis, Minnie Marx, Luke Manning, Mark Schardan (last seen in "The Gunman"), Billy Jeffries, Gary Anthony Stennette (last seen in "Paradise Hills"), Julius Cotter (ditto), Michael Strelow, Lauren O'Leary, Keith Gallagher

RATING: 4 out of 10 studio lot parking spaces

In the Land of Saints and Sinners

Year 17, Day 76 - 3/17/25 - Movie #4,976

BEFORE: Happy St. Patrick's Day!  I've had corned beef four times in the last week, so I won't say I'm sick of it, but I've had it a lot. Last Monday there was a staff lunch at a restaurant and I was late, so I had to order fast, so a corned beef sandwich was quick - late Thursday I had a can of hash for dinner, and then Saturday we went to the diner and they had the corned beef & cabbage special.  And then today my lunch place in Manhattan had it in the mix, of course. I always ask for a little container of vinegar on the side, even if they just have balsamic, that works. When I was a kid my mother cooked this meal, and in true Irish fashion, she boiled everything in one pot - the cabbage, the carrots, the potatoes and the cut of beef - but rather than mixing the flavors together, I found that tended to drain all the flavor OUT of the vegetables because they were boiled for so long. So with the vinegar I at least was able to add some flavor back into it, and that still holds true today, because this is still a traditionally all-boiled meal. Great Irish cuisine, it just needs some more flavor when you cook it that way. 

Liam Neeson carries over again from "Blacklight".  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Belfast" (Movie #4,377)

THE PLOT: A disillusioned hitman comes out of retirement for one last job when an IRA bomber on the run from the law arrives in his sleepy Irish village. 

AFTER: All this time and I still don't really understand "The Troubles", though I seemed to explain it OK in my review of "Belfast", that kind of thing just doesn't stick in my brain.  Catholics are more prominent in regular Ireland, and Protestants have Northern Ireland. I' sure it's Britain's fault, somehow, which means it's Henry VIII's fault. But once you get into terms like "Unionist" or "Nationalist", you lose me. Unionists are pro-UK and Nationalists want to be separate?  Not sure. Catholics in Northern Ireland were the minority, so they encountered discrimination and then they protested against that, so that led to car bombs and riots in the streets. Am I even close?  

Anyway, it doesn't matter - all we need to know is that this group of four who blew up a car bomb in Northern Ireland came down south to hide out, in the little town of Glencolmcille in Donegal county. Finbar Murphy is a WWII veteran who lives there, he came back from the war to find that his wife had died, and after drinking a lot he found work for the local crime boss as a contract killer. We see him take someone out to a very quiet forest, he makes that person dig a hole, and then there's a new grave and he plants a tree on top.  Well, at least he's thinking about forest preservation, right?  A very ecological hit-man. But I guess what we're seeing is Finbar's last job, he wants out of this life, which forces the crime boss to hire a new guy, Kevin, as his new killer. 

Finbar's cover is running a book store, and he's friends with the local police officer, they go out in the woods and shoot tin cans together, and somehow Finbar always wins - no, that's not suspicious at all, at least not to the police officer.  Finbar also is starting a relationship with his neighbor, Rita - but this life is disrupted when those IRA car bombers come to town, one of them, Curtis, is staying with his ex-sister-in-law Sinead, who is the local bartender, in a trailer while the other three hide out in a remote shack. But Finbar sees Sinead's daughter fishing one day and notices bruises, so that tips him off that she might be being abused.  So he befriends the guy, and takes him out to the forest to show him his guns, and, well, he's not coming back from that one.  

But Curtis's sister is the leader of the group of bombers, and when he disappears, she's just not going to give up until she figures out what happened to him.  So that leads her to the local mob boss, who gives up Finbar's name, since he's no longer employed by him.  This leads to the three bombers going around town, shaking people down until they find this Finbar guy, and they set up a meeting in the local pub, where Finbar says he'll give up the killer, even though it's him. The bombers bring a bomb to a gun fight, thinking they'll blow up the pub if things get dicey.  Sure, there's a lot going on but it's really just one climactic gun and bomb and knife and grenade fight, with a long slow build leading up to it.  

Still, it's definitely the most Irish film that I had on my list, after dealing with "The Secret of Kells" and those other animated films last year, along with everything that had Brendan Gleeson in it, like "The Banshees of Inisherin".  

Directed by Robert Lorenz (director of "The Marksman")

Also starring Kerry Condon (last seen in "The Banshees of Inisherin"), Jack Gleeson, Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "The Weight of Water"), Sarah Greene (last seen in "Burnt"), Colm Meaney (last seen in "Free Birds"), Desmond Eastwood, Niamh Cusack (last seen in "Hereafter"), Conor MacNeill (last seen in "Belfast"), Seamus O'Hara (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), Mark O'Regan (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Valentine Olukoga, Michelle Gleeson, Bernadette Carty, Conor Hamill, Anne Brogan, Laura Hughes, Joe Gallagher (last seen in "The Boxer"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 shotgun shells

Blacklight

Year 17, Day 75 - 3/16/25 - Movie #4,975

BEFORE: I'm posting late today, this is my Sunday film and I watched it LATE on Sunday night, not early on Sunday morning, because I had to be at the theater at 8:30 this morning to open up, for the last day of the NY International Children's Film Festival. Then I was home by 6:00 pm but really needed a two-hour nap, because then came watching "Tournament of Champions" with my wife, this is a MUST-SEE TV event in our household.  Really just four more work days this week, then we're off on a vacation next week.  Can't wait. 

Liam Neeson carries over from "Honest Thief", and this makes 6 Neeson movies in a row, which means he's tied with Allison Janney for the lead this year. I think you know where this is going...

THE PLOT: Travis Block is a government operation coming to terms with his shadowy past. When he discovers a plot targeting U.S. citizens, Block finds himself in the crosshairs of the FBI director he once helped protect. 

AFTER: Neeson plays a man here with another special set of skills, namely he goes out in the field to rescue FBI agents who are deep undercover, and either their cover's been blown and their lives are endangered, or they're so deep that they've sort of forgotten who they really are and therefore see the world in a different way, so they need to be retrieved and re-programmed, so to speak. We have know way if this is a common problem in real life, or if the FBI employs one special person to go retrieve these people. But that's the main problem here, none of us in the audience know what really goes down at the FBI, however for a screenwriter there's an opportunity to write just about anything, and we can't really say that doesn't happen. It's all a little too convenient, isn't it?  For that matter, I don't know if there's really a type of car bomb that goes under someone's seat and prevents them from leaving the car without causing an explosion, so I've got no choice, I've got to roll with that plot point. Twice. 

The director of the FBI uses Travis Block for this purpose, and of course he's got weapons experience and demolitions experience, because every Liam Neeson character does, even the ones he played in "Ordinary Love" and "Made in Italy". JK.  Block and the FBI director served together in the military, so they go way back - which eventually becomes a problem when Block learns his buddy has a secret project called "Operation Unity". Here the screenwriters get another pass, because they never really have to get around to telling us what Operation Unity does, we only need to know that it's bad, and several people have been killed already because they got too close to it.  Or the whole project is about killing U.S. civilians if they know too much about something else, honestly it's all not very clear. 

The other special skill that Block has is that read-the-room power, haven't seen it in a while, but every spy and assassin movie was using it back around 2015-2018, they even gave the Ben Affleck Batman that power.  It's the ability to quick assess a dangerous situation, and then use whatever is handy to take down the 10 men who are attacking, including making them shoot each other with their own guns, climbing walls parkour style and fashioning a makeshift bomb out of two propane tanks and a flare. It's sort of MacGyver-ish but it also pertains to hand-to-hand combat, not just quickly building improvised devices. Anyway, Block has that so no how many FBI agents they send after him, you know he's going to come out on top because he can electrify the wet floor or use a handy grenade launcher to blow up a car. 

Block also has some form of OCD, I'm not sure if that logically goes hand-in-hand with the reading the room skill, but it's very useful that he always checks how many exits he has whenever he's in a new location, however he also has to do some actions three times repetitively in order to stop the phrases that are going around and around in his mind.  Hey, whatever works, you can't argue with results, and we understand he's doing a bunch of high-stress tasks in his high-stress job that is totally off the books so nobody will ever know about it. 

After he loses track of Dusty Crane, one of the undercover operatives he was sent to get, and Dusty escapes from him twice and causes a lot of damage trying to get away in a funny-looking garbage truck (this was filmed in Australia, with Melbourne standing in for Washington, DC, in case you were wondering) he starts wondering what the connection is between Crane and Operation Unity.  Crane manages to contact an investigative reporter and tells her that the political candidate's death was not an accident, however Crane is then shot by other agents, and Block has to put all the pieces together after the fact, with the help of the reporter. 

It doesn't help that Block's daughter and grand-daughter are put into witness protection, they disappear from their work and school with no forwarding address, and Block can't locate them.  Which is a little weird because they know nothing, they're not witnesses in any case, the FBI just wanted to use them as bargaining chips (hostages) to convince Block to stop looking into things.  But you know he's come too far just to come that far, right?  He can't quit the agency, either, because he was never officially hired there.  Ooh, curse that technicality, but that is also some very funky logic.  Really, he could just drop things, go try and find his family that was "Taken" from him, and forget about exposing the shenanigans going on at the FBI. Nah, he was probably right the first time.  

So instead he kills so many dirty FBI agents that they basically run out of agents to send at him, which enables him to hold his boss at gunpoint to find the dirt on the secret operations. Yeah, that should work, then he can clear his name and quit the job and there will probably not be any repercussions from that in the future at all.  Sure, you can wait for a big twist here, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one is coming. 

Directed by Mark Williams (also carrying over from "Honest Thief")

Also starring Aidan Quinn (last seen in "The Handmaid's Tale"), Taylor John Smith (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Emmy Raver-Lampman (last seen in "The Beekeeper"),  Claire van der Boom, Yael Stone (last seen in "The Wilde Wedding"), Andrew Shaw, Zac Lemons, Gabriella Sengos, Tim Draxl, Georgia Flood, Caroline Brazier, Mel Jarnson, Joe Petruzzi, Todd Levi, Andriana Williams (last seen in "Honest Thief"), Yesse Spence, Anita Torrance, Irene Chen, Luka Sero, Clara Helms, Dailin Gabrielle, Rodney Miller.  

RATING: 5 out of 10 bottles of wine shot up by FBI agents