Fire From Below

No, not Fire Down Below. That one is lunkheaded action movie has-been-who-never-shoulda-been pompous religious nutjob Steven Seagal's brain-dead pseudo-environmentalist film. This one is lunkheaded action movie has-been-who-never-shoulda-been pompous religious nutjob Kevin Sorbo's brain-dead pseudo-environmentalist film. Put these two knuckleheads together and the gravity well of anti-acting will warp the very fabric of spacetime.

I recommend Fire From Below for anyone who needs to recalibrate her brain's logic circuits by watching something so preposterous it forces a master reset. This is a Siffy movie about sentient fire that's attracted to water and stalks and murders people like a flying snake monster. Yes, fire. Attracted to water.

Four words that are the harbingers of your doom: directed by Jim Wynorski. The man is such a titanic asshole that he slags people on the Internet who praise his films and is truly one of the world's lamest directors, because he always sucks in the same way and has none of the charming dedication to making artistic films despite an utter lack of artistic talent: your Ed Woods, your Bruno Matteis, your Neil Breens. Still, Sorbo's acting as executive producer makes the film even shittier. Is there nothing this man can't ruin? And since he's executive producer, how the hell did he allow himself to go on camera with his hair like that?

The credits hold moar terrors. Apparently two different people play "the sheriff", as displayed on screen. Either that, or the people who made this movie don't know how credits work. Then we get "Burton Gilliam as 'Bubba'". Yes, "Bubba" is in quotation marks. Now first, there's never been a good movie with a character named Bubba, nor shall there ever be. Second, who the fuck is Burton Gilliam? Or is the character and not the actor being spotlighted? The character with a stupid name, a dirty hat, and a face like a road accident, who exists solely to sexual harass a woman and then take a piss on camera before being blowed up real gud.

So the bad guy in the movie is a sleazy corporate executive type, who develops fire that zeros in on moisture because that somehow makes it specifically target people. Which are the only things you typically encounter that have any moisture in them. We're introduced to him walking up and down the same hallway since dressing a set costs money, along with the worst actor in the movie, and that's saying something. Your old pal Carl Eusebius was genuinely shocked to find that this woman--one Alex Meneses--had been acting for 15 years before this movie and had 47 credits on the IMdb. It must be some kind of achievement to do something professionally for that damn long and still be so fucking bad at it. She can barely recite Wynorski's ridiculous pseudoscientific gobbledygook in her remarkably robotic fashion. She only appears as a human being in scenes where she's being sexually harassed by Bubba or very obviously emoting that she still has a thing for old flame Sorbo, because if there are two attractive women in a Kevin Sorbo movie they both have to be his love interest, even if he never gives Meneses the time of day. I'm sure she pulls off the former because she doesn't have to act, per se; a woman who looks like Meneses undoubtedly has to fend off unwanted come-ons from cretinous lechers all the time. But my God, I hope that's not the same reason she pulls off the latter......

The fire kills a bunch of expendable meat in scenes we don't give a fuck about, including a hilarious attack on a boat in the middle of the lake that has the boat mostly, but in the end not quite, outrunning the fire. One woman in the boat, seeing the fire advancing menacingly on them, asks, "What's that?" What's that? It's fire, you silly bitch! I know the CGI in this movie is fucking awful, but Jesus, it's orange and crackling and hot. I'm glad they establish the fire is attracted to moisture, that way we get why it's going after the people. Who are currently on a lake. Then everyone in the town dies because of, uh, poison gas or something, so I'm glad we were introduced to a few of the townspeople in one scene. That way, the next scene in which they appear (you know, the one where they're all dead), we like care and stuff. Pathos, etc. Then the military shows up, and boy your old pal Carl Eusebius starts to get mad.

See, I really hate it when films and television get the military wrong. I don't know why that's one of my beefs, but it is. When they have military characters say and do things no one in the military would ever say or do, at least not without consequences. It takes me out of the film's world immediately. And it's usually laaaaaaazzzzzzzyyyyyyyy. It's not that hard to get this shit right, if you care. But if there's one thing Jim Wynorski doesn't care about, it's logic, coherence, pacing, tone, artistic integrity, consistency, drama, emotional resonance, avoidance of cliche, and attention to detail.

I have to go back to Battlestar Galactica again, because it fucking owns. That's getting the military right. One of my favorite scenes has Lee Adama, a member of Galactica's crew, being told by a member of the Pegasus crew that Galactica must follow one of Pegasus's policies. Lee responds that Galactica has its own commander and that that is who he takes his orders from. This is an excellent example of something called "chain of command", which the military takes very fucking seriously. It means that even though Pegasus's commander is an admiral, and thus outranks Galactica's commander, the Pegasus commander can't give orders directly to the crew of Galactica. What she could do is order Galactica's commander to tell his crew to do what she wants, but she can't issue those orders directly to them, despite her superior rank. Having a high rank doesn't automatically give you authority over everyone you encounter. The military has spent a very long time figuring out why chain of command is a good idea, which is why pretty much every large organization has adopted it.

Incidentally, it's one thing that bugged the shit out of me on Star Trek. Despite the fact that the original show was made by veterans and portrayed an essentially military organization, it ignored military policies that would prevent some of the absurd situations the crew of the Enterprise found themselves in. An even better example is The Next Generation episode "Disaster", in which there are only 3 people on the bridge at the time the titular catastrophe shuts down all communication and nearly all movement on the ship. Those 3 people? The navigation officer, the psychotherapist, and a high ranking enlisted man. Much is made of the fact that, because of this emergency, the psychotherapist is now in command of the ship, despite her having absolutely no experience or training of any kind that is any way relevant, simply because her rank is higher than the navigation officer's. This is stupid, of course, because in any 20th century military, the navigator would be in charge, because she's what's known as a line officer (as in, in line to command) and so has (get this) training in how to command. It's almost as if the military considered, or has even experienced, such situations and formulated specific policies to prevent such a ludicrous situation as the goddamned shrink being in charge of the ship.

This movie? This movie has a general (that's a high rank, folks, meaning he's been in the Army a long time) walking around outside without his cover on. ("Cover" is military-speak for "hat".) It has a colonel meeting the general and not saluting him (no) or even greeting him at all (no no no) and immediately walking next to him to his right (no no no no no no no, inferiors walk on their superiors' left). It has an army major wearing a mustache (no, only the Air Force allows mustaches, and by tradition officers don't wear them anyway), and he looks like he's 70 years old, which puts him a good 20 years older than any major could still be in the Army. And he's supposed to be some kind of bigwig power player who gets calls from US senators. (Major is way too low a rank to be chatting up people in Congress.) At one point the general orders his man to "Call the Navy". Call the Navy! Yeah, just phone "the Navy" right up. The Navy, you know, that tiny office of the American government consisting of some 320,000 people. And the guy replies, "Done." Done? Who the fuck are you gonna call? This isn't the Ghostbusters office, son. The US Navy is just a tad bigger. You might want to narrow that down a bit.

God, I wished they'd filmed that scene: "Hello and thank you for calling the Navy. If you need the services of an aircraft carrier, please press 1. If your nuclear ballistic missile submarine is defective, press 2...."

Then the colonel introduces to world-renowned geologist Seagal Sorbo two majors...who are both wearing lieutenant colonel's insignia you dickheads, you horrible dickheads! And these lieutenant colonels majors keep calling Sorbo "Sir!" like they're just out of boot. Sorbo's all, "Just call me whatever the hell my name is in this movie" and they're all, "Yessir! I mean....whatever your name is." Haha, I get it, it's cute, army guys are dumb and can't stop calling people sir. Fuck you, Wynorski. Look, enlisted guys wouldn't do that anyway, because the people we trust to go to the desert and shoot brown people in the name of freedom normally have a few brain cells to rub together and so actually know who is to be addressed as "sir" and who isn't. But these guys are officers. That means they graduated from college. In fact they're lieutenant colonels majors, meaning most of the people they meet in their professional lives call them sir. And Sorbo isn't even in the military. Our fine Imperial stormtroopers are perfectly capable of applying military ways of doing things to military people and not applying those ways to people who aren't. Please stop portraying them as so dumb and single-minded that they can't tell the difference, Jim Wynorski, you fucking wanker.

So the colonel, Sorbo, Love Interest, Cranky White Dude, and Black Guy Who Will Die First find the source of the sentient fire. There's an explosion, killing Black Guy Who Dies First before he even gets any lines, while the palefaces run away. Blah blah stuff happens, then it's time to go back to the source of the fire and blow it up real gud. Yes, you defeat the fire by blowing it up with bombs, very scienmatifical. This is where the two lieutenant colonels majors show up, and so they and Sorbo head down into the caves to do what men do. Love Interest demands to accompany Sorbo to make sure he doesn't cock up the whole business, but he talks her down: "Honey, which one of us is the man, here? I do the hero stuff, you stand around looking concerned." Cranky White Dude dies entirely due to his own idiocy, but everyone else makes it out just in time, roll credits, I hate this movie.

Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Random Subtitle is the story of how superheroes are great to have around unless you make the fatal mistake of attempting to bring one of their friends to justice.

Now let me start by saying I'm not exactly a fan of Marvel, or of comic books in general. My teenage boy phase of comic collecting ended around age 15 and I haven't given two shits about comic books since then. After that, I watched the occasional comic book film, and they were kind of decent. I liked the first X-Men film alright (from waaay back in 2000), and I watched Iron Man on the airplane and found it to be a movie. But basically, once I saw Spider-Man II and The Dark Knight (the latter about 3 years after it came out), I was just kind of done with superhero films. So I haven't seen The Avengers or the other Captain America: Random Subtitle movies or any of those Hulk things or any of the X-Men or Wolverine movies that came after X-Men: The One Where Everybody Dies. I've seen both of the Fantastic Four movies that have the CGI character playing the Invisible Woman and both of the hysterically silly Ghost Rider movies, and the bottomlessly shitty Daredevil and its even more shitty spin-off? sequel? funeral march? Elecktra, but those I sought out because they're crap. The other Marvel movies, to judge by Iron Man: The Iron Man, seem to be a generic, bland paste that don't really stand out enough to be either good or bad. They're just there.

I mean, for action sequences and super-powered beings punching each other, Spider-Man II seemed to be the best there ever was or will be. And The Dark Knight is the best comic book film in every respect but that of action sequences and super-powered beings punching each other. So I didn't see much point in watching any more such movies. What were they going to do that hadn't already been done better by those two films?

To judge by Captain America: Whatever, the answer is absolutely fucking nothing.

This movie was pretty bad, in ways I wasn't expecting. I thought it would just be another Iron Man: The Iron Man that I could put on to help me sleep on the plane while Iron Man punched Captain America and Captain America punched Iron Man and Scarlett Johansson struggled to speak in a remotely human fashion. Instead, I was confronted by a morally reprehensible mess, in which Captain America (and the movie is positively loath to address him as such) critically injures numerous police officers, betrays all his friends, and causes the deaths of dozens of people solely to keep his terrorist murderer friend from being arrested by the proper authorities. (To be completely fair, Cap and Iron Man do punch each other, and Scarlett Johansson remains as robotic and unnaturally stiff as ever.)

Now I never liked Captain America. I didn't dislike him, either. I just didn't care about him one way or the other, because he's basically Marvel's version of Superman. Not in the powers department (Supes is essentially Christ himself descended, while Cap is more the pushing of human physiology to its absolute limit), but in the morality/leadership department. If Superman is the Last Boy Scout of Krypton, Cap is George Washington with Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique. When I was in my comics phase, I was much more interested in the antihero asskickers who gave the bad guys what they deserved and did it with a whole lot of attitude, guys like Wolverine and the Ghost Rider. (Okay, Ghostie didn't really have attitude, but he had a flaming skull for a head. That's like 1000 cool points right there.) I didn't have any patience for namby-pamby do-gooders like Cap and Supes who tried to bring their enemies in alive instead of bringing the rain to wash the scum from the streets.

Now of course, I'm a bit older and so would probably be moar interested in the moral dilemmas of the goody-two-shoes types, if I wasn't also old enough to not give a shit about comic books any more. But what I don't understand is why people who are fans of Captain America aren't pitching a fit over this lousy movie. I don't know that much about Cap's character, but what little I do know is completely pissed on by the makers of Captain America: Does It Matter, Really?. And Jesus, how bad do you have to fuck up to be the worse half of a double-header in which the other film is Batman v. Superman? That's right, people I've never heard of who made Captain America, I watched your film back-to-back with a fucking Hack Snyder film, and you lost. When your story is less interesting than that of the man who gave us 300, you need to hang up your movie cameras and go home. I can't fucking believe I watched the two biggest superhero movies of this year and the only thing I enjoyed at all was Ben Affleck in a batsuit. If you spent a million jillion dollars on a movie and Ben "Gigli" Affleck was the best thing about it, stop making movies!

The plot, I guess. The Avengers are split in two over a proposal to actually subject them to oversight. That is, the United Nations wants to have power over the Avengers' going somewhere to deal with a problem, as opposed to their current M.O. of brazenly violating the sovereignty of any nation they please in order to handle whichever situations they see fit, without asking anybody's permission or having any kind of accountability. This is primarily because the Avengers have, according to this movie, a pretty bad track record of getting innocent bystanders killed when they perform their feats of heroic derring-do. Let me say again, the movie says the Avengers' actions have gotten an untold number of civilians killed. (Though as Cap explains to some girl who's so powerful she seems to eliminate the need to even have the rest of the team, she isn't responsible for all those people's deaths because, you know, the bad guys started it. Yes, it's the felony-murder doctrine, applied to people who can level entire cities with a thought.)

So the Avengers split, with Iron Man leading the "we gotta stop being vigilantes" side and Cap leading the "fuck the normies, we handle shit our own way" side. Wait, what? Yes, you read that right: Captain America, the conscious of the Marvel Universe, says screw the United Nations and people who don't have superpowers. We don't answer to them. We go where we want when we want, because the UN might, like, investigate a problem to see if it warrants sending in a super-powered Scarlett Johansson, and we'll have none of that, mister. I just want to make sure it's clear that Captain fucking America is taking the position that super-powered beings--or at least the ones on his team--should remain laws unto themselves, answerable and accountable to no one. That's right, Captain America, who in his last movie was in S.H.I.E.L.D., an organization of superheroes...answerable to the United Nations. This leads to an incredibly boring and silly fight as the Avengers fight each other in truly the saddest "Who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk?" that little boys have argued about since time immemorial. ("No way, Xenophane! Apollo would totally kick Hermes's ass if they wrestled!") It's embarrassing to the human race that the biggest movie of 2016 has all the dramatic tension of two 9 year olds arguing on the playground.

I remember being confused when I first heard about the titular "civil war". Surely, I thought, I'd misheard. Cap should be calling for an agreement to work with the governments of the world and not running around the world as uncontrollable vigilantes, and Tony Stark should be telling the world to kiss his ass, determined to do things his way. Am I the voice crying in the wilderness, here? But upon seeing the film, it's even worse than that, since Cap doesn't even stand against the agreement on principle. No, he opposes it mostly because those governments are trying to arrest his buddy Bucky, since they (and Cap) have very good reason to think the Buckster planted a bomb at a UN meeting that killed like 60 people.

I'd like to mention that again: Cap also has good reason to think Bucky committed this terrorist act, as he sees the evidence himself. In fact, at no point does Cap suggest Bucky is not guilty of this crime. (Of course he isn't guilty, because that might have been interesting, but for most of the film Cap doesn't know that.) He simply assaults dozens of police officers, causes a fight that paralyzes Don Cheadle from the waist down (the Black Guy Always Gets Crippled First), and breaks his fellow rebelling Avengers out of prison (where, need I even say, they absolutely belong as they have knowingly and willfully and repeatedly violated the law). And the movie ends, by God, the movie ends with Tony Stark admitting Cap is right and grovelling in front of him. Yes, the man who made the difficult yet absolutely morally correct decision is forced to kowtow to the very asshole who betrayed his comrades and willfully became a criminal so he could protect Timothy fucking McVeigh. And we're expected to cheer this moment! God, I want to punch this movie.

In the last 4 minutes, I just sketched out in my head the outline for what might have been a decent Captain America film with the same general plot. Of course this time, Cap will be on the right side, that of law and order and oversight and not being a fucking answers-to-nobody mete-out-God's-own-justice vigilante. Being presented with evidence of Bucky's guilt, Cap reluctantly does the right thing and agrees to work with law enforcement to bring him in, while Tony Stark castigates him for selling out his friend to the normies and vowing that the Avengers will handle the situation in-house, apprehending Bucky themselves and handing him over to the authorities only if they determine him guilty. The film would have Cap slowly realizing that some of the people's he's working with are less than committed to bringing Bucky in alive and actually giving him a fair trial and are more interested in Osama bin Laden-ing him in revenge for the terrorist attack. At the same time, Stark is dropping hints that Bucky is being framed, testing Cap's resolve for sticking with doing things the right way. The writers could take it from there. We'd still get our fanservice "Avengers fight each other" scene, but at least this time it might have some weight since it has Cap doing the right thing for the right reasons (putting aside personal feelings to follow the rule of law) and Stark doing the wrong thing but still for the right reasons (trying to save a possibly innocent man from a system that isn't giving him a fair shake). We might even get some *gaspshockhorror* tension. Can Cap bring Bucky in alive while still working with the corrupt law enforcement that's trying to take him out?

Not only would this scenario be more in keeping with each character's established, er, character (and let me stress again that I've never cared one whit about either Iron Man or Captain America, but I hate it when characters act completely out of character), but it would be a Captain America film that centers on, oh I don't know, fucking Captain America instead of being a half-assed Avengers 3.

Captain America: Avengers 2 1/2 is a morally repugnant character assassination of a character I never gave a shit about anyway. The people who made this movie need to get their fuckin' heads checked after getting their asses handed to them by Ben Affleck and Hack Snyder in the storytelling and character departments, something I didn't think was possible under the physical laws governing this universe.

Oh well. At least the, what, 3rd incarnation of Spider-Man in the last 9 years was pretty nifty. I'm glad somebody was behaving in character around here.

Behind Enemy Lines 2: Axis of Evil

The original Behind Enemy Lines is a pimple on the world's collective ass. It stars Owen Wilson as the Great American White Boy and Gene Hackman as a guy standing in a room speaking passionately into a radio transmitter. Inspired by the story of an Imperial pilot shot down over Bosnia during the NATO intervention, the film couldn't be bothered to know anything about the conflict in which it was set. It existed only to impart one single truth: Foreigners are evil.

The Bosnian Serbs? Evil. The Croats? Evil, too. NATO? Craven. And also evil. Only Hackman's 100% red-blooded American Admiral Reigart wants to get Wilson's whiteness back to the Empire where it belongs. Everyone else is trying to kill Wilson or allowing other people to kill Wilson, including the NATO commander, Admiral Piquet. Being French, he's unable to man up and Go Get Our Boy, as Reigart passionately demands. And wouldn't you know it, when Piquet finally authorises a rescue mission, he staffs it with French troops, who of course flee when they come under fire and leave Wilson's whiteness stranded in a foreign land full of swarthy foreign people who are foreign. It's left to Reigart himself, in defiance of orders, to round up some good old Imperial stormtroopers and personally(!) lead the rescue to save the only lives worth saving: American lives.

The real Imperial pilot whose experience was the source for this dreck survived for six days using his SERE training. For those of you don't know what that means--which is to say, everyone reading this blog--SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. It's what to do if you're ever, say, shot down and stranded in enemy territory: how to contact friendlies without giving away your position, how to find food and water, how to not parade around on hilltops so you'll be instantly spotted and captured. Now, I watched this film with an actual SERE instructor, and I delighted in his constant rage and yelling at the screen every time the Wilson character did something guaranteed to get him killed. Of course, you don't need military survival training to know that if you're wearing a mask to blend in with other masked enemy soldiers until you can duck out of sight and escape, you don't take off the mask and turn back to look at the enemy soldiers to see if they saw you move 30 feet away from them. It's no wonder the real pilot sued the studio that produced this film for making him look this dumb. (He lost.)

So Behind Enemy Lines sucked, and no-one liked it, but it broke even at the box office, which in today's Hollywood is enough to warrant a sequel, albeit a completely unrelated direct-to-DVD no-budget in-name-only sequel released five years later.

Behind Enemy Lines 2: Now Owen Wilson-Free! is the story of how stupid and incompetent the Imperial military is. I wouldn't complain about this if the movie dealt with something in which the military actually isn't competent, such as governing areas of which it has no cultural knowledge that are pocketed by guerrilla fighters and child suicide-bombers. But this film portrays our brave sturmtruppen as incompetent at doing what they do best: killing people with lots of skin pigmentation and blowing things up. Hogwash, I say! I submit to you there is no organisation more skilled at killing brown people and blowing things up than our own Imperial military. Now that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Milosevic are gone, we're number one, baby!

The member of the titular Axis of Evil in this case is North Korea. Those crazy Commies have themselves a nuclear weapon that can reach the Empire itself, and it even appears to function! Now if there's one thing we in the Empire don't countenance, it's other countries' being able to retaliate against our homeland if we decide to blow them up real good, so the Emperor orders a team of Navy SEALs (led by Lt. James (Nicholas Gonzalez)) to go in there and destroy the missile silo with the nuclear stuff in it, without even bothering to inform South Korea, the only target the North can reasonably strike back against. What, consult with our allies? Please. The ROKs might get an explanation after the whole thing is over, if we feel like it! The Navy and Air Force argue the merits of their respective proposals--a precision air strike vs. a commando operation--and the Emperor decides on the SEAL option, declaring 'I'm done talking about this!' and ordering the Navy honcho to send in the troops.

Stock footage of Seoul attempts to convince us we're in South Korea before we cut to our SEAL team in a bar somewhere in Bulgaria. Oh, wait, there's some Korean writing on one wall and some Asian people wandered into shot, so I guess the team is in Seoul. A dozen or so names and ranks of the SEALs are flashed on the screen for us, even though most of them aren't even in the bulk of the movie. I didn't care to remember any of them, and I guarantee you won't, either. The film establishes that one of the team members has just had a daughter born back home and refers to himself as immortal, so I immediately pegged him for the grave. To the filmmakers' credit, they appear to have set it up this way on purpose, as this guy pointedly makes it to the end of the movie. They more than make up for it, though, in their slavish obedience to the other post-Saving Private Ryan war movie cliches throughout the picture.

The Imperial decree comes down, and the SEAL team boards a fake "civilian" flight to disguise their parachute drop into North Korea, never-mind that commercial flights from the South don't fly anywhere near Northern airspace lest they be shot down faster than Jesse Jackson at a KKK rally. The Emperor isn't very decisive, though, as he decides to cancel the SEAL team's mission in the middle of their drop. That cocks up the whole enterprise, as three guys have already jumped when the order comes down. Immortal Guy disobeys orders and jumps as well, so now four SEALs are on the ground while the rest just stay on the plane and fly off. Man, if only the military had some kind of, I don't know, 'point of no return' beyond which the mission can't be recalled so that sort of thing doesn't happen....

The four men are told to lay low and await rescue. These highly-trained elite special ops SEALs respond by immediately giving away their position to a Korean child of indeterminate gender. The Navy must be pretty lax in its physical training for SEALs these days, since these guys chase a kid who can't be more than twelve years old over hill and dale yet don't manage to catch him/her before she/he reaches her/his village. Instead of running the other way to at least put some distance between themselves and their original hiding place (presumably where the North Koreans would start searching once they got word from the village), they decide to bust into the kid's house and scream at her/his mother in English. (I'd say it's tough luck that one of the four isn't the Korean interpreter they brought along for this mission, except it's eminently clear they didn't bring an interpreter!) This proves to be an even dumber move than I thought, since a unit of North Korean soldiers just happens to be in this podunk village at this particular time and quick comes a-runnin' to see what all the ruckus is about. In the ensuing Saving Private Ryan-wannabe firefight (desaturated colours, slow-mo, shaky-cam, bloody bullet wounds, the whole business), the filmmakers almost do something right when one of the three soldiers who isn't black is fatally shot. The cliche monster will not be denied, though, so this fellow clings to life until the black guy is kacked. The Movie Gods thus satisfied that The Black Character Has Died First, the white guy is now free to expire. The movie goes into slow motion and plays overbearing sad music so that we'll care about this character we don't know and can't distinguish from any of his buddies. (We don't.)

Immortal Guy and Lt. James are captured and brought before one Cmdr. Hwang (Joseph Stephen Yang). I'm probably one of the only people who saw this movie and got endless amusement out of the range of Korean accents displayed onscreen. Actually, I'm probably one of the only people who saw this movie, period. Yang is an actual Korean, but he doesn't even bother to try to effect a North Korean accent as he interrogates James, who has flashbacks to Master Chief Boytano (Keith David) to keep himself from breaking under torture. This works, of course, because like Jesus Christ, the invocation of Keith David repels evil. Col. Koh Lip (Dennis J. Lee) arrives and takes over the interrogation even though his haircut is way out of regs. He chews out Hwang for his brutality and talks nicely to James in English because he's Korean-American and his Korean is on par with Borat's English. He even flubs his Korean lines a couple of times, but it's not like the director noticed or would've cared if he had!

Now that the SEALs have been captured, the South Korean ambassador storms into the Imperial Palace and reams the Emperor for violating North Korea's sovereignty without consulting or even informing the South. This guy must have balls the size of Alpha Centauri since he repeatedly cuts off the Emperor of the Known World. Man, the Emperor can't get no respect, as earlier the CIA director was also cutting him off. This film really has no conception of the aura of majesty that surrounds the Emperor. It may not mean anything to newspaper cartoonists or redneck southerners, but military officers, diplomats, and government officials don't treat the Imperial Personage like the slow kid from 3rd period English. Oh, and no South Korean ambassador would refer to the East Sea as the "Sea of Japan". And North Koreans wouldn't paint "North Korea" (in Korean) on the sides of their jeeps. That's the South Korean name for the North, the use of which to any Northerner will get you anything from an icy stare to a death sentence, depending on Kim Jong-un's mood that day. I'm just sayin'.

Shockingly, the Empire continues to not negotiate with the North, not even to get the two surviving SEALs back. No, since the SEALs have failed, the Emperor orders the Air Force to proceed with the air strike, which is somehow supposed to lead to war even though the North seems pretty okay with the whole commando strike team attacking its sovereign territory thing, so I don't know why this air strike is so much worse. In a genuine surprise, the South Korean ambassador pushes the Emperor to follow up the air strike with a full-scale invasion of the North to re-unify the peninsula. That the South would advocate preemptive evasion was ridiculous when this movie was made, but I didn't see it until 2009, with Lee Myung-bak in power, and suddenly it doesn't seem quite so ridiculous. So I guess the filmmakers got me there, though really I think the South Koreans only push for war so the Emperor can get all self-righteous and preach peace even as he's calling down air strikes and launching commando raids. So...like the current Emperor, so I guess they got me again....

Where the Empire fails, though, South Korea succeeds, as South Korean special forces (wearing masks so the same two stuntmen can play a dozen of them dying) rescue the two SEALs moments before Immortal Guy was to be executed on Col. Koh's orders. . I was ready to be impressed with the movie for actually allowing non-Americans to do something right, and to rescue Americans at that, but as the scene plays out, most of these elite Korean troopers die in the 'rescue' since they have no plan beyond 'leap out of the forest and start shooting wildly', and Lt. James ends up having to save everybody. James draws a bead on Koh but doesn't fire, because earlier Koh declared they were ch'inggu (friends) and James somehow has it in his head that Koh is sympathetic to his mission. Boy, won't James's face be red when South Korean special forces commander Col. Chung (Hyun-Joo Shin) tells him that the rescue began when Koh started shouting for Immortal Guy to be killed!

The Emperor, having heard that Lt. James is alive, has the exact same conversation with the Air Force and Navy brass about the merits of the air strike vs. the commando team, including some of the same lines verbatim from the earlier scene. I guess that 'I'm done talking about this!' line was so good the director couldn't help but give it to us again. The scene is so similar, in fact, that I think it's actually a different take of that very scene. Did they run out of money to shoot new footage? Or did they just think we wouldn't notice the characters having the exact same conversation they just had half an hour ago? Beggering belief, the Emperor orders James to carry out the strike on the silo.

Now wait just a damn minute. Earlier the Emperor called off the mission when it would've been an entire SEAL team, and when he heard that four SEALs made it onto the ground, he ordered them to hide and await rescue. But now that his entire effective force on the ground consists of one guy, he orders him to carry out the mission? Look, we're not talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, here. Unless you're a cigar-smoking wisecracking Austrian beefcake, you can't single-handedly defeat an entire country!

Never-the-less, that's just what happens. James and the few surviving South Korean special forces attempt to destroy the missile silo. The South Koreans are just there to get killed (except for the one English-speaking Korean they hired to play Col. Chung) while James rips off Predator's 'hero sabotages key heavy machinery in plain sight which causes an explosion that starts the battle' scene. James and Chung are captured again, when Col. Koh appears out of nowhere and orders them released so they can continue their mission. So he is helping the good guys after all? Well why the hell did he order his men to kill Immortal Guy? Why didn't he let South Korea know he'd be willing to turn James over to them so he didn't almost get himself killed in the earlier rescue? It's a good thing for him James took that ch'inggu stuff seriously instead of splitting his head like the 38th parallel. (Get it?)

I don't have the space or the patience to get into how badly this film gets the military wrong (please don't use the term 'chain of command' if you don't know what it means), or the shots of palm trees allegedly establishing South Korea, or the one SEAL who declares that 'Korea believes in the shaman' and so he's relieved that he won't have to die in a godless land. When this fellow dies, he gets a Korean shaman vision, complete with spectral tiger! White pandering: It's not just for American Indian spirituality anymore.

Col. Chung doesn't seem concerned that his entire unit, between the 'rescue' and the destruction of the missile silo, has been wiped out. Well, the only lives that matter are American, so as long as the two SEALs survive and make it home, it's a happy ending. James returns to the Empire to meet up with Master Chief Boytano, allowing Keith David to show us a little of the fine acting that falls from him like manna from Heaven. The film's last line of dialogue is, fittingly, completely wrong in that it has an officer calling an enlisted man 'sir'.

I'll leave you with the words an enlisted man once said to me when I did that very same thing: 'Don't call me sir, son. I work for a living.'

EJO Review: Wolfen

Next up on our Edward James Olmos series is a real disappointment. There aren't many good werewolf films outside of Universal's Wolfman series, and Wolfen (1981) was supposed to be one of good ones. Sadly, not only does it not rank with An American Werewolf in London or The Howling, or even Wolf (werewolf Jack Nicholson!), but it's actually rather terrible. And it's not even a werewolf movie!

The film opens with a monster attack sequence that the makers of Predator clearly saw. The wolfen-point-of-view shots were undoubtedly the inspiration for the Predator's infrared vision. Since I plan to rip this movie pretty hard, it's nice to start off with something good, and the film deserves credit for its pioneering monster POV. Thank you, Wolfen; Predator would've been slightly less awesome without you, so you weren't a complete waste of celluloid. The shots of run-down New York City are also effective, atmospheric, and creepy. I miss the New York that gave us films like this and Escape from New York. Where can we find a rotting cesspool of crime and decay to film now? Thank God there's still Detroit.

Anywho, after taking way too long stalking people (and getting so close to them that you can't believe it wouldn't be seen, or heard, or smelled, a recurring problem with the stalking sequences), the wolfen kills a rich, important muckety-muck and his wife, though not before killing their chauffeur, because the black guy always has to die first. Solving this murder is so important to the city of New York that they bring in a fat, lazy drunk specially to handle the case. Said fat, lazy drunk is played by Emmy-award winner Albert Finney, who does an excellent job playing a fat, lazy drunk, and not just because he's English. In fact, despite occasionally missing with his American accent, Finney gives the film's best performance (apart from God's own, natch), and I'm thankful he was chosen for this role rather than America's home-grown go-to guy for the role of fat, lazy drunk in the late '70s and early '80s, Joe Don Baker. The other performances range from adequate (Gregory Hines(!) as Finney's coroner pal, Tom Noonan as a zoologist whose obsession with wolves even I find unhealthy) to jaw-droppingly awful (Diane Venora as a psychologist assigned to assist Finney, though her assistance consists entirely of sleeping with him for no reason other than they're the two leads in the film). This is also the film debut of Reginald VelJohnson, notable because it's possibly his only appearance in front of a camera not playing a cop.

Edward James Olmos is cast in this film according to the Hollywood Ethnic Actor Rule as an American Indian(!), despite the fact that he doesn't look Indian at all. You'll remember from last week that this rule allows actors in the "not WASP or black" category to freely play any ethnicity in that category, since American audiences won't know any better. He plays Eddie Holt,* a militant Indian put away by Finney's Dewey Wilson (yes, really) for killing an apple. No, I don't mean he went to prison for wanton slaughter of innocent fruit. "Apple" is apparently the American Indian version of Uncle Tom (or, to the primary audience of this blog, "banana"), that is, a ethnic minority who's sold out to the Man. Holt is so obviously set up as the werewolf that you instantly know he's not the werewolf, though it takes Olmos running naked on the beach for Dewey to figure this out. Frankly, I would've preferred that Dewey make this determination without my having to see the little Eddie. The scene has Dewey, thinking Holt is going to turn into a werewolf (it's complicated), following him to the beach where he strips naked, licks up water from a puddle in the sand (wolves drink seawater?), and runs around making growling and howling noises. While all this is going on, to absolutely no one's surprise, someone is killed by the wolfen in another part of the city, sending Dewey back to the drawing board for suspects. I admired Olmos's dedication to his art in this scene, as it must have taken serious cajones to go on camera and do the scene rather than just punching the director in the face or smiting him with a thunderbolt, and it reminds me just how prudish our society has become over the lifetime of yours truly. Still, a grown man running around pretending to be a wolf just looks silly, no matter how much gravitas the actor has or how scary the music is. It's a goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously, like something out of The Exorcist. Actually, "goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously" describes the whole of The Exorcist.

As with the previous projects, I can see why Olmos took this role. Wolfen is firmly in the vein of 1970s Western-civilization-in-decline films that portray victims of European colonization and oppression as morally superior to their conquerors. The film sets up a dichotomy between the Noble Savages (guess who they are) and the White Man Dependent on, Like, Capitalism, Man, and comes down clearly on the side of the white liberal guilt. I mean, Indians. And this is the single biggest problem with the film. It is, in fact, the reason it's a truly bad film rather than a serviceable low-key, low-FX monster flick. There is essentially only one Indian character (Holt), and more than once he gets to wax morally superior to Dewey by ponderously speechifying about how corrupt White Society is. To give you an idea of how well the Indians emerge as characters, the only other Indian has any screentime at all is credited as "Old Indian". No name, just Old Indian. We don't even find out what tribe these Indians are a part of, or even if they're from the same tribe! They're just Indians, and Indians love nature and marijuana and hate capitalism and Whitey. And the ones who don't aren't real Indians ("apples") and deserve to be murdered. The filmmakers would undoubtedly be appalled to hear that this is the subtext of their film, as I'm sure they didn't intend to treat their Indian characters as shabbily as 1960s Westerns that portrayed them as a faceless horde of identical backward savages to be mowed down by heroic white cowboys. But to quote Ken Begg, "well, you can’t not see it. I’m absolutely sure that it’s unintentional, but still, it’s kind of there anyway."

The worst example of the one-dimensional nature of the Indian characters in this film is the excruciating exposition scene near the end, in which Dewey, rather than discovering the secret of the wolfen through the White Man's Science of his detective work, has the wolfen explained to him by the Indians (again, mostly by Olmos looking righteously angry). Dewey goes to a bar full of Indians, imaginatively named the Wigwam Bar (really?), and there the Indians painstakingly explain to him what the wolfen are, why they've done what they've done, and why the White Man deserves to have it done to him. (That the wolfen have killed a number of black characters at this point goes unaddressed. I guess they're collateral damage from the wolfen's carpet bombs of justice.) Why yes, the Indians are smoking peace pipes while generic Indian chanting plays on the soundtrack.** I'm so glad you asked!

Wolfen's pacing is slow, its acting is hit (Finney, Olmos)-or-miss (Venora, the non-Finney cops and investigators), its story is a little scattershot, its kills are telegraphed (maybe they were slightly more surprising in 1981, but I doubt it), and its central monster not being a werewolf is a cheat. But all of these things could be forgiven if not for the ham-handed "message" of the film and its treatment of Indian characters as positive stereotypes every bit as offensive as the negative stereotypes it's reacting against. And then there's the ending. And I said, you find out what the wolfen are and why they're doing what they're doing, and the film clearly agrees that they have some justification. But the ending torpedoes any final hope the film had. Not because it has the wolfen offscreen teleporting from ground level to the penthouse balcony of a skyscraper, but because Dewey realises that the wise Indians are wise and that the wolfen are morally correct, and he decides they should be left to continue to murder people as they see fit. I'm serious, that's really the implication of the ending. Dewey agrees that the wolfen are right to eat the people they've chosen to eat. I can't explain to you how little sense this makes in the context of the film. It's bad enough that the makers of the film thought this, given the situation they've set up, but why does Dewey accept it? There's nothing about the character, either before or after his experiences with the wolfen, that in any way suggests he'd be okay with this. The wolfen even eat one of his friends in the movie! Dewey must've smoked some of whatever they put in those peace pipes to just accept that the wolfen have killed (including, again, a good friend of his) and will continue to kill. That, or the filmmakers allowed their own belief that the wolfen are right to impose itself on their character, regardless of whether or not the character and his experiences support that view. I'm betting on the latter.

I haven't mentioned the subplot of another entire group of investigators trying to link the murder of the rich muckety-muck to a vague, ill-defined "terrorist" group, using some kind of truth-machine that looks like whatever Egon was imaging Dana's face with in the original Ghostbusters. But that's okay, because this storyline has impact on exactly nothing, and I can't for the life of me figure out why it was included. But as I've noted, it's the film's moral failings that truly made me angry and frustrated with it. Like The Constant Gardener, the film makes its creators appears to be of the "if your cause is just, anything you do in furtherance of that cause is just" school of evil. Ends alone do not justify any and all means.

Unless the goal is to make sure there are no more Adam Sandler movies. In that case, use any means necessary.


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* How they resisted naming the character Eddie Two-Bears or something equally "Indian" I'll never know, but kudos to the filmmakers for at least avoiding this stereotype.
** Actually, the Indians give two completely different explanations for why the wolfen are killing people, but nobody ever seems to notice this.