KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, in other words (or the same words, just more of them) these are the films Kent watched this week.
This Week:
Alien: Romulus (2024, d. Fede Alvarez - in theatres)
Jackpot! (2024, d. Paul Feig - AmazonPrime)
The Five Deadly Venoms (197x, d. Chang Cheh - youtube)
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For some, the apex of the franchise is 1986's Aliens, but I don't think any entry in the series has been more potent, scarier or effective than Ridley Scott's 1979 original. Aliens, by turning the Xenomorph into an action-movie villain effectively demystified the creature, showed it off too much for it to remain scary. The creature is an effective and efficient killing machine, and it's definitely intimidating, but it ceased being scary.
In Alien3, the idea was to put the franchise's central figure into a situation where the dangers of an alien are almost secondary to the prisoners Ripley is stuck with. Alien:Resurrection was almost horror by way of the French whimsy in the Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro style. Prometheus was less an "Alien" movie and more of an "origin of the species" story, while Covenant was a hot mess of religious subtext. (The Aliens vs Predator movies are dumb fanfic movies and best left ignored).
Romulus then, by placing Fede Alvarez behind the camera, is intent on injecting the horror back into the series by ostensibly turning the latest Alien entry into a sort of conventional horror exercise of young hot people getting picked off by a murder monster.
If it sounds like I'm being dismissive, perhaps I am, so let's start out on the other side. What I primarily liked about this movie is what I like about most Alien movies: the world/universe- building around the Wayland-Utani Corporation. The quiet-but-present undercurrent of anti-capitalism has been steady throughout these films, and it's very much the trigger for not just character motivation but the reason behind the events in the entire film.
What never happens in an Alien(s) story is the Wayladn-Utani Corporation's comeuppance. It is never held responsible for the part they play in the deaths of many. Ripley and pretty much every other character in the franchise is just one of the workers whose backs the giant company rests easy (and profitably). Too big to fail. Too powerful to be held accountable.
Here, our lead is Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Civil War), a late-teen and an orphan living on a Wayland-Utani mining settlement planet, working off her conscripted number of hours. She had completed the original hours she was consigned and was looking to book her pass off the dreary, perpetually dark planet, but her hours were effectively doubled by the corporation without notice. The indentured servitude, she immediately realizes, is for life.
She meets up with friends around her own age who have a plan. As low-orbit space freighter scavengers, they picked up the signal of something big on their last mission which is sure to have the hypersleep pods they would need to traverse any distance from this miserable planet to another, sunnier, seemingly mystical utopia. They don't really need Rain so much as they need her "brother", Andy (David Jonsson, Rye Lane) -- a hacked, glitchy, second-gen Wayland-Utani Android who Rain's father had programmed to be her protector and best friend. His latent ability to access Company systems is integral.
So up to space they go, Rain seeing the sun for the first time, the promise of a brighter future ahead, and they discover their target is not a freighter, but a space station... that is slowly descending into the planet's orbital rings where it will be destroyed. They will have less than a day and an half to get in and out with what they need.
Of course what they don't realize until too late is it was a research station, and what it was researching is still on board. From there, if you've seen an Alien film, or a horror film, you know what is going to happen. But, the fun of these types of horror franchises is in how it happens and how differently it happens.
Alvarez has a couple set-pieces in this utilizing the facehuggers in a way none of the other movies have before. They skitter around the station like coconut crabs, flinging themselves at their victims faces, trying to wrap their tails around their necks and stick their intubating tube down their throats (it's never explicitly stated in any of the films, but they must be attracted to the carbon dioxide as we exhale, or the warmth of our breath... at one point Alvarez pays homage to his own film, Don't Breathe, as he has our protagonist navigate quietly through a room of these things). It's effectively creepy, made all the more so by the largely practical effects and sets.
In following the rhythms of a horror film where a band of teens or early 20-somethings are picked off one by one over the course of a night, it unfortunately destroys the known gestation period of the xenomorph from its incubation to chest-bursting to rapid growth into a full-fledged creature. What used to be a lengthy period of worrying about a comrade for hours on end instead finds a baby xeno bursting from someone's chest mere minutes after it was implanted and seemingly minutes later it's emerging fully formed from its secondary cocoon. That's my minor quibble.
The larger quibble is just how fatigued I was by the often two or three threats at once that Rain or her companions were facing. If they weren't layered then they were contiguous, one-after-another with no time for the character(s) or audience to really rest. I had such high hopes when the opening sequence of the film featured a slow pan around a space ship, devoid of any sound in the vaccum of space (where no one can hear you scream). I had wondered -- as the camera pushed in through a window, slowly, to a computer console awakening, the analog switches-and-knobs fetishized to the n'th degree -- was a slow, tense feature in store for us? Alas, no. Not at all. It's pretty frantic and at times exceeded my very flexible suspension of disbelief.
David Jonsson's Andy is the best part of the feature. I loved him in Rye Lane and he's doing so much of the dramatic heavy lifting here. He's asked to shift his personality a couple of times in this and the transitions are so well done. You need a damn good actor to manage those types of switches that change the audience's perceptions from sympathetic to fearful and back again, which Jonsson does masterfully. It helps that Andy is the most developed character in the film. Seriously, I didn't feel like I really got to know the rest of the cast outside of Rain, and I didn't really care for any of them. They were all consummate horror movie fodder. When we look at the team building of almost any prior film, they all way exceed Romulus' cadre of blank fresh meat.
Romulus, like so many legasequels, retreads familiar ground, at times feeling like it's cribbing from every Alien film that's come before, sometimes tonally, sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in references, and sometimes just lifting enire sequences and concepts from the past. Some of it works well in tying Romulus to the series overall (there are some surprising nods to Prometheus even), but some of it just feels too *winky winky* fanservice.
It's a pretty glossy movie. It looks good overall. I wish it had taken its time more, slower, more lingering shots. I wish it felt more like a 1970's movie than a 2020's movie, but it seems purposefully designed to draw in the teenage crowd looking for air conditioning and a few cheap scares with some nostalgia triggers for the olds in the audience, and I think it succeeds, despite my not liking it as much.
My rankings below. To note, of all the Alien(s) films, the only one I think is outright bad is Covenant.
Ranking Alien(s):
1) Alien
2) Prometheus
3) Alien3
4 - Tie) Aliens | Alien Resurrection
6) Alien: Romulus
7) Alien: Covenant
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In the world of Jackpot!, if you win the state lottery (with massive payouts akin to the Powerball Lottery) then legally anyone can kill you within the first 24 hours and claim your prize, the only rules are you're not allowed to kill anyone else in the process, and no guns.
It's a stupid, unrealistic premise. If you're not going to go the route of satire (which it teases in its intro then abandons almost completely), then only way to make a premise like this work is to go big...very, very big.
Unfortunately, director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call) didn't go big enough to sell the ridiculousness of the premise. There is a decently produced sequence when Awkwafina's Katy (wasn't she also Katy in Shang-Chi?) is announced as the winner of the 3.2 billion dollar lottery while on a casting call, and the other actresses immediately start gunning for her. The fight spills into a martial arts class which then busts its way through the wall into a yoga studio, when John Cena's Noel arrives on the scene soliciting himself as an independent contractor who will serve and protect the winner for a percentage of the earnings.
The scene has some energy to it, feeling like a brawl but with wacky makeshift weapons. It immediately brought to mind Jackie Chan, and for the rest of the movie I couldn't shake the idea that the only way this works is if it's a Jackie Chan stunt show. It is unfortunately not.
It's standard for a genre film to have a lead character who is new to the conceit, it gives the other characters the opportunity to exposition dump for the them and the audience. But here it's absolutely far fetched that after four years of chaos and murder that Katy has never heard of the lottery, and it hurts the story, stretching further one's already fraying suspension of disbelief.
The remainder of the movie feels direly cheap. Like TV movie-budget cheap. The other action setpieces have little charm and show their limitations circling around the same locations for five minutes. The final sequence where a mob of people descend upon Katy...it's almost all the same cast we've seen throughout the film, as if to say L.A. is made up of a few dozen people, and not a sprawling metropolis.
I enjoy both John Cena and Awkwafina, they are generally likeable, funny and charming, and they are quite affable together, and when Simu Liu emerges, there's residual "Shang Chi buddies" chemistry between him and Awkwafina, but it all doesn't add up to much. The comedy of the film lacks punch, the action of the film is weak, the premise is absurd, the satire is nonexistant, and it just looks terrible.
This is not a winning ticket.
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A master, nearing the end of his life, wonders the fate of five of his students, each of whom he taught a specific discipline of kung-fu: centipede, snake, scorpion, lizard, and toad. They have all long departed from him and changed their identities, but he worries given the potency of their power that they may have turned to evil. Hi final student, Yang Tieh who has learned each of the disciplines but is by no means a master, is tasked with discovering the identities of these former pupils and, if necessary, stopping thier criminal behaviour at all costs.
Yang, venturing into the city, becomes embroiled in a conspiracy of crime and corruption among the law enforcement and judiciary. At the heart of it is the Five Venoms, but learning who is who, and who is involved proves twisty and complicated.
It's not masterful intrigue by any stretch, but it is a fun bit of puzzle solving and mystery that brings the audience along for the ride. And when the action starts, it's all about how each of the Venom styles is portrayed in combat. The overblown sound-effects only enhance the delightful camp of it all.
The fights are well-structured but not the most tightly choreographed, but it doesn't matter. The unique styles and "venom strikes" each are very evocative of their respective creature make for entertaining viewing, and the revelations, as they emerge lead to some pretty surprising plot turns.
I think with any kung-fu feature, if it can engage an audience beyond just the martial arts display then it's a good one. This is a good one.
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