This is an
unusual series of films. Started out as a solid Walter Hill film starring Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames that
was dumped by its studio. Then it went the direct to DVD route. And the series
got better.
Undisputed 2
& 3 are two of the best low budget genre movies made for quite a while.
Sure there’s some cheese involved but who cares. These are melodramas about men
beating each other up (but none of them are gay, honest.) Both of these films
were directed by Issac Florentine and heavily featured Scott Adkins as Boyka, a
mad Russian with a shaved head and a goatee. A mean brutal character, Boyka s
one of the best pulp creations in recent years.
Okay the
basic plots. Part 1 has Ving Rhames as a boxer who gets thrown in jail as a
rapist. (Not a sympathetic character). He thinks he’s the greatest and has to
fight the prison champion, a lifer played by Wesley Snipes. He gets beaten. The
end. It’s a fun b-movie, one of Snipes best performances. Rhames character is
truly obnoxious. You are glad to see him fail. It’s wonderfully understated,
cynical but respects the Snipes character, who is trying to survive with
dignity in hell.
Part 2 has
the same boxer played by a different actor (now Michael Jai White) who gets
sent into prison again (for drug possession), this time in Russia. To get out
alive, he has to defeat Boyka. He manages to win, finally. He manages not to be
a dick this time. This one is much grimmer, with a cold Russian background and
a great villain in Boyka, who is a monster, the king of the prison, but who wants
to fight the dumb American fairly, prove he’s the best as a warrior. It’s a remake
of the first but is an improvement on a great base. It embraces its own
melodramatic excess in characterisation, makes the sport kick-boxing rather
than boxing, and just goes for it on every level. This is one of the best
sequels around, which can cost you about a pound on Amazon. So there’s no
excuse for not buying it (save the main character is still a bit of a dick).
Part 3 is the
perfect low-budget genre film, improves the second film by making Boyka the lead.
Now crippled from the fight at the end of part 2, ignored by all, Bokya
improves his mind and body, regaining his championship inside his own prison by
brutally destroying the best of who emerged after his injury. Next he gets
himself into an inter-prison kick-boxing championship run by gangsters from all
over the world. Basically each fight is one style against another. It has a
decent story, of a man building himself up, planning his escape when he is
being continually beaten on by his enemies, destroying some terrific combatants
in brutal fight after fight. It’s both a tough redemption of a total bastard through
survival story and an excessive fight movie. Like Part 1 with Snipes, have a
worthy protagonist really sells the film.
Undisputed is
one of the great low budget film series, with no weak chapters. It’s definitely
worth about five hours of your time, and some rewatches.
Another the
stupid season of summer films year has gone by, and what has come about?
Mediocrity on
the whole. Not the type of fun year full
of great entertainments like T2, Drag Me To Hell, Robocop or, obviously,
Raiders Of the Lost Ark. This was more like a slow descent into a shrug. Was
that it?
With The
Bourne Legacy we had a dull-witted thriller which hung around tiredly like the
dead, in The Campaign a comedy about politicians that forgot to make characters
and develop funny situations beyond blabbering around and being obnoxious to
women (like a David Cameron interview), in The Expendables 2 an over-the hill
action ensemble that started decently and then devolved in a direct to DVD plot,
wasting young current action men (Jason Statham and Scott Adkins) in favour of
geriatrics in an airport, and of course, The Amazing Spiderman. Apparently
there was a script for that. Of course
there were decent moments. Prometheus had the visuals but a bad story. The
Dictator, while being a bit simple in plot, was vicious and funny. The Dark
Knight Rises was ponderous but had ambition and terrific moments, and was a
disguised remake of Escape From New York. The Avengers was fun, the best of the
bunch but had serious plot problems. It was kinda of a remake of Rio Bravo,
which works for me.
So to break
down the good in more detail. And even bits of the weak.
For Prometheus,
what’s great about the film is that in the age of OTT stupid CGI idiocies
like Transformers, this film made use of atmosphere, horror and was really
pretentious. It may have been stunningly stupid for a few moments but that’s
fine. If you’re “homaging” 2001 and Quatermass, I’ll allow a few slip ups. It
was about the evolution of mankind, mysteries and scary monsters in a far off
land, cut off from civilisation. It was genuinely attempting to evoke the
wonder and fear of space-travel. It was terrific visual sci-fi and ok idea-wise.
A few months later, I’d say it was a worthy effort. But the alien at the end
was really stupid.
The Dictator
was my favourite type of comedy/satire, that of a monster who doesn’t really
change, but can be used to parody every movie convention about becoming a
better person. It had some very good jokes about dictators, PC left-wing
loonies, stupid people who think they’re not stupid, and was generally
under-rated when released. Worth seeing if only for the ironic speech about why
American should be a dictatorship at the ending.
The Dark
Knight Rises was the most comic-book, and the least pretentious, of the Nolan Batman
films. It even used the “some days you can’t get rid of a bomb” bit from Batman:
The Movie, but left out the marching bands and ducks. It had the best action
scene of the series where in a terrific sequence where Batman goes after bank
robbers while being chased by the entire police force (not as funny or knowingly
ridiculous as The Blues Brothers car chase of the same type). It had Tom Hardy’s
Bane, full of muscles and talking like Vincent Price (that’s a compliment by
the way). It had the great sequence where Batman had to climb out of a hellish
prison. It was a self-serious but well-meant, overblown and a bit mad, and
there’s not enough of those kind of films. The good news is this was the episode
where Bale finally nailed the Batman character. So Batman 8 was a good one. (I’m
counting Adam West)
Finally The Avengers, the House of Superheroes
for those of you who know your 1940’s Universal monster mash-ups. The good news
is that The Hulk was back, redesigned not to be the woeful Norton version, a
lot more like the Ang Lee version. The bad news was the terrible Captain
America costume redesign. The great news was that the villain Loki was really
bitchy and smug, so dialogue scenes were great fun. Unfortunately for him,
talking that way to The Hulk, gonna get you the recipient of the best
mainstream moment of the year. The film was pulp done right. It didn’t have the
crazy ambition of The Dark Knight Rises, or other more interesting films in its
genre like Hulk or Batman Returns, but it’s difficult to think of a way to do this
kind of film better.
For the
weaker films, there were pleasures. Bourne had Jeremy Renner, who kept the film
afloat with many good moments of subtle acting, as did Andrew Garfield in The
Amazing Spiderman, before the never-ending but samey fight with the lizard began
at the half-way point. Will Ferrell managed nice moments of obliviousness in
The Campaign (roll on Anchorman 2) and The Expendables 2 had Dolph Lunghren
telling jokes and the “we’re AMERICANS, No I’m British, I’m from Sweden, I’m
from China” gag.
So while
there were too many films needing script-work, none were Batman and Robin/Speed
2 –type atrocities. But some felt like they should have gone straight to DVD.
