KWIF: 10 for 10

[KWIF=Kent's Week in Film
10 for 10... that's 10 movies, each written about in 10 minutes. It's an old format I'm dusting off because I have way too much in the backlog.]

This Week:

1. They Came Together (2014, d. David Wain - tubi)
2. Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary (2024, d. Garrett Price - hbo/crave)
3. Streets of Fire (1984, d. Walter Hill - blu-ray)
4. Gladiator II aka GladIIator (2024, d. Ridley Scott - in theatre)
5. Carry On (2024, d. Jaume Collet-Serra  - netflix)
6. Drive Away Dolls (2024, d. Ethan Coen - amazonprime)
7. Distant aka Long Distance (2024, d. Will Speck and Josh Gordon - amazonprime)
8. Polar (2019, d. Jonas Akerlund - netflix)
9. Outland (1981, d. Peter Hyams , hollywood suite)
10. The Thirteenth Floor (1999, d. Josef Rusnak - hollywood suite)

---

I saw the Paul Rudd/ex-Saturday Night Live star (in this case Tina Fey) romcom Admission a few years back and it was slight but enjoyable-ish in its straightforwardness. We Came Together has been popping up on Amazon, Netflix and Tubi over the years and I thought, given that it was Paul Rudd paired with an ex-SNL star (in this case Amy Poehler) that it would be much the same.

I hadn't realized it was from writer/director David Wain (of The State/Stella/Wet Hot American Summer), and it was aiming for a Zucker/Abrams/Zucker-style parody of romcoms. It's marginally successful.

If you've watched Wain's work before with the likes of Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, then you will have an idea of what to expect. Arch, very winking, fourth-wall breaking, and a lot of word play and juvenile humour and visual gags, often in the same beat.  The style is very rapid-fire and try-anything.  The problem with this style is it's not refined or honed, and it comes off as sloppy and unfocussed more often than it comes off as funny, even if there is much funny to be had.  

---

Yacht Rock is a musical genre coined by four comedy writers for a web series that was a satirical reenactment of a specific era and sound of music in the late 70's and early 80's. Yacht Rock, as a term, did not exist before this comedy web series that was both taking the piss out of the dominant personalities of the genre and a loving tribute to them and the music they were making. Sometimes something can be both respectful and disrespectful at the same time.

The men who coined "Yacht Rock" have also been acting as the gatekeepers of what is and isn't "yacht" via podcasts since the mid 2010s where they judge whether user-submitted songs are "yacht or nyacht", but the genre has, since its gestation, gotten out of their control. There are ironic parties playing yacht rock music where everyone wears captains hats and boat shoes, and there are dedicated satellite radio channels just for yacht rock music.

Director Garret Price decided to unpack this retroactively coined "genre" of music with the musicians whose music has been subsumed by the genre. People like Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, and Christopher Cross, and bands like the Doobie Brothers, Toto and Steely Dan.  As important, if not moreso, are the people behind the scenes like the session musicians like Steve Lukather, the Pokaro brothers and Jay Graydon.  

This is a fun, but hardly robust documentary. It covers all the ground it needs to in pretty expedient time, but there's not a lot of depth. As most of the artists interviewed state, they were just playing the music they liked to play, there was never any concept of a genre beneath it.  Some have argued, there is no actual genre there, just the whims of four comedy writers. 

---

I recall seeing Streets of Fire in the video store as far back as I can remember going to video stores. Streets of Fire always seemed like a "video store" movie. I never really knew what it was about, or even what type of movie it was. I guess I just assumed it was a crime drama, something that has never been of great interest.

Recently YouTube essayist Patrick Willems did an extensive video on his love for Streets of Fire, a film he acknowledges has its problems, but he feels has merits that outweigh its problems.  What stuck out most to me, having watched that essay, was Willems' insistence that the opening 20 minutes of Streets of Fire are, for lack of a better term, pure fire, and that the ending comes close to reaching the same heights. The middle is a bit mushier.

Willems was right, the opening moments of Streets of Fire are absolutely lit up, with a massively energetic rock opera track in the vein of Meat Loaf or Bonnie Tyler (because the opening and closing songs were written by Jim Steinman, who wrote rock opera hits like "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" of which opening track "Nowhere Fast" and closing track "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young" are easy-fitting siblings of).

Streets of Fire is also a gorgeous-looking film, sweat-soaked streets - like it always just rained - reflect the vibrant neons that light up the backlot of an unnamed city where pillars holding up a skyrail interrupt every street. It's fantasy city, like Gotham, but much more condensed and even grottier. 

It's just too bad then that the film's exceptionally weird tone and style of 40's noir, 50's greasers and 80's rock just don't blend, especially when you add a Ry Cooter score that sounds like it belongs on The Dukes of Hazzard and not a semi-dystopian greaser-punk near-musical.

It's a weird one.

---

I own a copy of Ridley Scott's Gladiator on DVD. I'm sure most guys who were 20-something in the year 2000 do. It was like we were mandated to have one.  But I haven't watched the film in a very, very long time. I'm sure it's still a good watch, there's just little there to entice me.

So if I don't really have any love or affection for Gladiator, why would I bother with Gladiator II, you might ask? Because I heard there was a scene where they fill the Colosseum with water and shark and the gladiators have a big boat fight.  This level of audacious absurdity was really the only direction to go if you wanted to get butts in seats for a nearly-25-years-later sequel to a beloved Oscar-winning hit.

The film is pretty much pure spectacle while pretending to have some sort of anti-monarchy/pro-democracy stance. It has just enough substance to it to not be totally trashy, and Denzel Washington as a behind-the-scenes manipulator carries the movie, though Paul Mezcal's young, hot titular gladiator is appealing enough.  

I honestly don't have much to say about Gladiator II, except that if you like this sort of thing, then you will like this sort of thing.

[Toastypost - we agree]

---

We haven't had a competent mid-range action-thriller like Carry-On for a while. A young TSA agent is blackmailed by a high-tech mercenary black-ops team into letting a bag through security screening. The TSA agent clearly believes the threat on the other end of the earpiece he's been handed, but he also just can't let the bad guys get away with whatever it is they're trying to get away with.

What results is a tense, pulpy cat-and-mouse game where the cat is tracking every movement the mouse is making, but the mouse is just sly enough to get away with the occasional movement. 

Carry-On is a pretty taut action-thriller that of course feels Die Hard/Die Hard 2 inspired, but also Speed and a dozen other entries in the genre. It is not at any point exceptionally unique, but it does what it does very well. The minimal backstory on our protagonist, played by Taron Egerton (Robin Hood), is just enough that we get the sense of a man who has been coasting, underperforming, and unsure of how to step up in life. Here he finds his moment, and Egerton plays this everyman, and his struggle with confidence but also his determination quite well. The main bad guy is, surprisingly, Jason Bateman. Even more surprising is how effective Bateman is at shedding any sense of being the comedic straight man, and being a damned cold-hearted capitalistic bastard.

It's a really fun watch, one of Netflix's best originals this year.

[Toastypost - we agree-ish]

---

Drive-Away Dolls (aka Drive-Away Dykes) is the first solo directed narrative film from Ethan Coen (one half of the Coen Brothers pairing). Co-written with his wife, editor Tricia Cooke, it follows lesbian friends as they take a "drive-away" gig (wherein you are basically driving a car from one destination to another for compensation) in order to get out of town after Jamie (Margaret Qualley) has a bad break-up with her cop girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein).  Unfortunately there's a mix-up at the drive-away agency and they wind up getting the wrong car with the wrong items.  They are pursued by the mobsters who want the item recovered, but the women decide to take a series of lesbian-hotspot detours which are effective at throwing the mobsters off their trail.

It's hormone-fuelled (and sex-filled) journey as Jamie is flirty and dirty, while her traveling companion Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) is buttoned-up and reserved. Jamie wants to loosen Marian up, and Marian just wants to read her book.

The mobsters (Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson) are patented bumbling boobs in the Coen vein. Obviously they have some proficiency, or else they wouldn't be given any job to do other than clean toilets, but their proficiencies are definitely lacking refinement. Coleman Domingo, an always welcome presence, plays their boss, and Bill Camp's Curlie, the drive-away owner, needs a film (at least a short film) of his own.

The film is briskly paced at 84 minutes, and is maybe ever-so-slighly undercooked, in an over-before-it-begins kind of way, but I think I like it more for its lack of overstaying its welcome. The maguffin of the piece is so absurd that once it's revealed it's best it books it for the finale rather than lingering with it too long.

The artsy flourishes, particularly the weird 60's kaleidoscope/lava-lamp LSD-tripping interstitials are so out of place, and yet has its relevance. I recall disliking The Big Lebowski's weird flourishes on first watch too, so maybe they will grow on me. 

[Toastypost - we agree]

---

I don't tend to go into any film cold anymore. I've always seen a trailer, or read a review, or heard discussion on a podcast. There's always some prior awareness that draws me to a film (or repels me from).

Distant, aka Long Distance, just popped up on AmazonPrime with no fanfare and no promotion (at least, not to me). It featured an image of two people in space suits with an alien-looking-planetary backdrop, something which used to be an immediate interest pique, but these days elicits more of an eye roll as there's so many low-budget sci-fi stranded-in-space movies that pop up on streaming, especially Amazon and Tubi.

I clicked the "trailer" button and the brief clip it started showing (not a trailer) had good enough production values that I just pressed play on the movie. 

Starring Anthony Ramos (Transformers: Rise of the Beasts), the film opens with an asteroid colliding with a large bulky cruiser of a space ship. It's passengers are in long-range hibernation when the alarms go off, and they're all ejected in pod into space hurtling towards a nearby planet. Most burn up in the atmosphere. Ramos survives. He's on alien terrain in a space suit low on oxygen and there are hostile creatures stalking him. On his comm, he's talking to another survivor, pinned in her pod, and he must make the "long distance" trek to her while they connect as distant voices.

There is very little original about this film, but it manages to scratch a very satisfying itch. It does what it does inoffensively enough, and with a very healthy production that propels it well past other low budget features that try to do the same thing.  It's not an immediate favourite, but I was engaged throughout.

---

Despite what I said about Carry-On above, Netflix's reputation, generally, is that it makes terrible (or, if I'm being generous, not so great) movies. Polar is a prime example of this, a Netflix original, adapted from a comic book, by a director who is primarily experienced in working with musicians on concert videos, music videos or documentaries. The flash-over-substance of music videos really doesn't translate into feature-length storytelling, even if some of our best directors of the 90's and 2000s came out of music video production (like David Fincher or Spike Jonze).

Polar is an unchecked production, clearly having little oversight from the producers. It is a tonal mess of a movie that looks to capture the frenetic energy of a Crank-like action feature, riddle itself with excessive sex and nudity, and at the same time attempt to have a pensive reflections of later-in-life character looking to retire from his profession as a hitman.

It's an assaulting production (as well as an insulting production) that features an assassin character whose "finishing move" is to get her target into position of her sniper by giving him a blow job. The opening sequence of the film find a just-killed Johnny Knoxville's erect penis going flaccid (beneath his swim trunks I should clarify), which then cuts to a very sombre, sterile medical examination of star Mads Mikkelsen. That's the tonal whiplash of this film in a nutshell.

The thrust of the plot is that the organization Mads has worked for is pruning all their retired-or-retiring assassins to save on their pension. Hell, if this were a smarter, more contemplative movie, they could have really said something about the nature of big business and how they undermine the working class, but it's anything but a smart movie. 

I don't even know how, in the time I have left (I'm over time) to talk about the whole subplot featuring Vanessa Hudgens as a traumatized neighbour who Mads befriends.  It's like something out of a completely different movie. This was bad.

[Toastypost - we agree]

---

It's quite amazing that a film like Outland exists. Made in the wake of Star Wars fever, Peter Hyams' stab at a "space" movie is so not interested trying to be Star Wars. Instead he seemed to take more inspiration from the grimy, industrialized future of Alien, minus any aliens.

Set at a mining colony on the moon of Jupiter Io, it's a suspense thriller about a newly assigned marshall (Sean Connory) who starts looking into the increasing rash of deaths happening in the colony, only to find drugs and conspiracy.

I had seen Outland a couple decades ago and it stuck with me how low-key the film was, in terms of its sci-fi elements. It could have been a thriller set in any remote mining town at any time, but the choice to set it in space and capitalize upon Star Wars mania was a brilliant stroke.  The sets are like a mix of industrial working environments, 1980's near-future technology, and prison-like living conditions. It's a sweaty, unpleasant looking atmosphere, where it seems everyone is just trying to get through their tour.

But Hyams makes sure to put his space environment to good use, adding it as the dangerous x-factor in the whole scenario. The deadly vaccuum of the inhospitable Io environment is made know pretty quick.

The mystery and dangers aren't complex or anything revolutionary, but this remains a hidden gem of 80's sci-fi.

---

I wrote about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV mini-series World on a Wire, about 15 months ago, and found it to be an incredibly surprising, engrossing, and far ahead of its time in terms of how it contemplated virtual realities and artificial life, as well as being really sharply made with some brilliant choices that used its budgetary limitations to its storytelling advantage.

The series was based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye from 1964, putting these ideas of simulated reality even further ahead of its time. I was surprised to learn that the 1999 flop The Thirteenth Floor was based off the same story, because The Thirteenth Floor left no impact on me whatsoever. 

My meagre recollection of the film was merely that I didn't particularly love it nor did it make any cultural dent.  It was released in the wake of The Matrix, which, as we all know, had its own take on simulated reality and had the benefit of revolutionizing filmmaking and being a complete visual spectacle, among other things.

The Thirteenth Floor really couldn't help but be seen as a poor man's also-ran.

The film opens with Armin Mueller-Stahl inhabiting a glossy 1930's reality where he's clearly living the high life, only to learn that he's actually from 2024 and was engaging in a very realistic VR.  He is killed at a nearby bar and his successor in the tech firm, played by Craig Bierko, investigates his death in two realities while also being suspect number one of police detective Dennis Haysbert.  And in walks Gretchen Mol, as the femme fatale of this very noir-styled techno-thriller, who claims to be Mueller-Stahl's daughter, and the rightful heir to the company and claims it was her father's wish to shut it all down.

It's honestly not a bad production. Its 1930's replication looks really amazing, and it's layered realities storytelling is competently handled. It's key problem is the worlds the film inhabits feel pretty claustrophobic.  There's really only about five meaningful characters in the whole production, which hems the film in as it tries to tease out a murder mystery.  I suppose since I was already familiar with the story's foundations there weren't many surprises to be had anyway.  This film is fine if you're, say, bored of the Matrix, or as an exercise after watching World on a Wire if you can track it down.

KWIF: The Fall Guy (+5)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (uh huh) Kent has a spotlight movie in which Kent writes a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else Kent watched that week (or maybe a month ago and forgot about) Kent does a quick little summary of my thoughts. Just not in third person.

This Week:
The Fall Guy (2024, d.  David Leitch - in theatre)
Millennium Actress (2001, d. Satoshi Kon - the shelf)
Witness (1985, d. Peter Wier - the binder)
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023, d. Guy Ritchie - AmazonPrime)
Clear and Present Danger (1994, d. Phillip Noyce - the binder)
Blackhat (2015, d. Michael Mann - the binder)

---

I don't know if I can really write a longer, thinker piece about The Fall Guy because it doesn't seem like much thought was put into the film itself. 

I'm being rude. 

The Fall Guy was a film I actually had a good time with, largely based on the explosive and almost effortless chemistry between Emily Blunt (Gnomeo and Juliet) and Ryan Gosling (Young Hercules) -- two extremely attractive people that look even more attractive together. Do Eva Mendes and John Krasinski need to be worried? Or at least extremely jealous?

This film is director, and former stuntman, David Leitch's love letter to stuntmen and stunt crews, wrapped in an action rom-com. Leitch over the years has proven his action-directing chops with Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, and Bullet Train. Each of those films may not have the greatest of stories, but the action tends to be really fun. 

And the action is fun here. There's a great "tripping balls" fight in a nightclub, and a swing arm garbage truck chase/fight sequence through the streets of Sydney that strive to stand out. I think the problem with post-John Wick action-heavy films is the action is too heavy and so nothing really stands out, and the same goes here.

What's more, I found the fact that we were watching a lot of stunts from the perspective of a film crew, seeing all the cameras and cables and tracks required, which was necessary as part of the film's narrative, but it ruins the illusion and lessens the impact of the stunts (most stunts, really, should inspire at least a bit of awe, but we've seen and know too much now, and they've become a little commonplace, undervalued).  I do appreciate that Leitch lets everyone in on the action, with the welcomed, if under-utilized Stephanie Hsu and Winston Duke each getting a sequence of their own, and Blunt reminding us she's more than capable of throwing fists when needed.

As a crime/mystery story, the more it reveals itself, the dumber it gets. It's a real nonsense plot which requires an acceptable amount of suspension of disbelief to start with (the star is missing, Colt is asked to discreetly track him down only to find a dead body and have things go even more wrong for him from there. But there's no real world logic to how wrong it gets, and the more you pick at it, the more it bleeds. There's only so much belief I could suspend and this stretched it to its breaking point.

What eventually made my suspension of disbeleif snap, though, was the film-within-a-film. A sci-fi epic called "Metalstorm" that looked, at best, like a sequel to Battlefield Earth. It looked like a mid-budget remake of the Barry Bostwick 80's b-movie Megaforce. This film would have you believe it was the next Dune or Star Wars, and it just looks like trash. The Fall Guy is a pretty good looking film. It really needed "Metalstorm" to look incredible, or play into it being B-movie action trash, not say it was an A-tier movie, but look like B-tier trash.

As a romcom, this is aces. I was in for every sleepy and/or doe-eyed stare that Colt and Judy give each other. Their dialogue was charming, funny and seemingly effortless in its delivery, and that split-screen sequence was terribly cute. Gosling and Blunt, all day, every day.

---

Watching Perfect Blue last week felt like a revelation, like there was a piece of cinematic language missing from my vocabulary all these years which I now understood. Millennium Actress couldn't compete with that type of lifting of the veil.

It also didn't help that I just wanted to sleep the entire time it was on. 

I didn't fall asleep, though, which is a testament to how engaged I was with it (I did fall asleep while writing this post).

Once again director Kon proves his mastery at the transition and edit. Where Perfect Blue was a Giallo-tinged suspense thriller, Millennium Actress is a romantic drama that, all at once, tells us a character's life story and steps us through seventy years of Japan's cinematic history through which we get a staggering sense of Japanese history.  Let me tell you that as a viewer having a very limited amount of knowledge of Japanese history -cinematic or otherwise- it does this film a disservice.

The story is of a studio executive and a young cameraman visiting a famous, but long-retired, reclusive actress to interview her after the demolition of the studio of which she was a big part of building. The exec, who you would expect to be forceful and entitled, is instead a gushing fanboy with nothing but the utmost respect and reverence for the actress.  He presents her with a key which the actress thought lost years ago, and the totem unlocks a lifetime of memories.

The actress recounts her birth, how she was discovered by a producer, her first film, but also her encounter as a teen in the 1930s with a young artistic rebel whom she helps escape by shielding from the law. She is instantly smitten by him, a soulful artist, and the key was a gift from him which she was made to promise to return to him, what became her life's mission.

Her real life blurs into her acting roles as she describes them. Like Perfect Blue the transitions between real life and her acting are seamless and, at times, difficult to discern.  Her roles, or at least the ones that matter to her in retelling her life, are the ones of a young romantic longing for an unseen man who she desperately wants to find. The roles step through the eras and genres of film, from samurai to geisha to Kaiju to sci-fi.  All the while as she recounts her blurred story of life and work, the producer and cameraman are present in the story, the producer injecting himself into roles in the films he clearly knows so well. It turns out, he was a young production assistant during her later films at the studio and was, once or twice, a part of her story.

It's a surprising film in how down to earth it is. It is a film that deceptively seems like it should have been live action, but to have the actress span the ages she does is almost impossible for a single performer, and to have the scale of adventurous productions in her repertoire would make for an expensive film.  Plus, I don't know that any live action director alive has a handle on seamless transitions like Kon.

---

For four years I had an art teacher in high school who loved Peter Weir films, and would play them in class while we were toiling away on our sketches. I've seen Dead Poets Society, Green Card, and Fearless numerous times. Of the three, only the latter did I actually like.  If you look at the release dates of those films, you can tell which years I went to high school (accounting for the delay between theatrical and home video release). I don't know why, if he was such a fan, we never saw The Cars that Ate Paris, Gallipoli, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Mosquito Coast, or Witness.

I have just assumed all this time that I'm not a Peter Weir fan. And I'm not. But I've spent some time thinking I'm opposed to Peter Weir, and, after watching Witness for the first time, it turns out I'm not. 

Witness is a surprisingly patient movie from an era of filmmaking where its action movies were increasingly bombastic and its thrillers were full of sex, violence and cliches. This lacks almost any bombastic action, and there's no sex, an anti-violence message, and its cliches are tossed out the side of the horse-drawn buggy. 

It's got plenty of Amish. And I thought this story of a police man protecting a young Amish boy (Lucas Haas, Mars Attacks) who witnessed a murder would be full of crude, reductive stereotyping of the community instead places Harrison Ford (Working Girl) as Captain John Book within the community where he is largely respectful of its traditions, keen to help out, and even finds a bit of peace while he's there. 

He also starts falling for Rachael (Kelly McGillis, Stake Land) the boy's mother, but also keeps his hands to himself, respectfully remembering they are people of two very different worlds.  There is an intense attraction between the two of them that just builds until, following the climactic conflict between Book and the bad guys, deflates like a balloon. The scene of Rachael looking out her window to see Book chatting up his police pals by their cop cars, smoking a cigarette, it is just an incredible moment that reinforces the gulf that separates the two of them. The thread of attraction that seemed to grow inot a bridge made out of stone turns out to just be a wispy thin thread.

Along with the film's climax -- where Weir, instead of delivering that oh-so-American release of catharsis and shooting up the bad guy instead ends with an appeal to his humanity -- proves the director isn't interested in the most satisfying ending for the audience, but the one that feels most real.

This is a pretty great movie, held down by a drone of a score that might as well not have been there at all, and one of the most awkward impassioned kissing scenes I've seen.

---

One of the dumbest titles in recent cinematic history, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre finds Guy Ritchie delivering a script with plenty of charming flourishes, and leading a cast where everyone seems game (even Jason Statham (The Beekeeper), well, at least for the first 20 minutes where he flirts with the idea of adopting a character before he falls back into default Statham mode). 

Josh Hartnett (Halloween H20) does that "proof I can be funny" supporting role mid-life crisis thing that modern actors have done since Tom Cruise appeared in Tropic Thunder. He's good, and handsome, and, yes, funny playing a pompous, pampered superstar actor (if we're comparing, he does a better job than Aaron Taylor Johnson in the same role in The Fall Guy).  Aubrey Plaza (Ingrid Goes West) sometimes feels like she's in the wrong movie, but I would watch that movie. Cary Elwes (Robin Hood: Men In Tights) gets some good cracks, and Hugh Grant (Wonka) genuinely seems to be enjoying himself. 

There is that odd take in the elevator with Hartnett where Grant breaks after barely delivering his line... which speaks to one of the larger problems of this film: it feels unrefined. There's a lack of care, and certainly a lack of flair to the overall production. It doesn't look great, it looks barely a cut above, say, Burn Notice or some other action TV series. This obviously wasn't a cheap movie, so why then does Ritchie's work on Netflix's The Gentlemen TV series look so much better? The editing here proves serviceable but we've been so locked into the idea that Ritchie movies are highly stylized, that this largely doesn't feel like a Ritchie movie. 

Ritchie already did his take on Bond with Man from U.N.C.L.E., while this feels like his riff on Mission Impossible if it were done by Asylum. It's certainly inessential to his repertoire.  I think the director just likes to work, he's found a mid-range groove and he's maybe going to coast there for the rest of his career.

---

The third entry in the Jack Ryan "series" (and the second with Harrison Ford [Cowboys & Aliens] in the role) finds Ryan becoming embroiled in the "War on Drugs". The PotUS's friend is found murdered alongside his whole family, the culprits being the Cali Cartel. The President wants swift retribution, under the guise of the War on Drugs, and discreetly has his national security advisor run an off-the-books operation to take out the head of the cartel.

When Ryan's friend and mentor Admiral Greer (James Earle Jones, Conan The Barbarian) falls ill, Ryan takes his place as Deputy Director of Operations in the CIA. He is dispensed to Columbia to try and find other means to cutting off the supply chains to the US.  He petitions Congress for more funds, and Congress agrees so long as no military engagement is enacted. Little does he know he is set up to be the fall guy for it.  

The film is a pretty taut political thriller that falls apart only with a jingoistic third act that finds Ryan single handedly going to Columbia to bring back the soldiers left behind by the NSA.  It turns into a ridiculously out-of-place rescue-the-POWs action sequence that neuters the political intrigue that had been the film's raison d'etre up til that point. 

The finale of the film finds Ford's Ryan dressing down the President ("How dare you, sir!") by holding the most powerful position in the land to a standards of decency and responsibility that have absolutely been abandoned in the past decade. It's perhaps the most upsetting (and unintentional) note of the film.

---

In the past dozen years of massive disastrous box office performances, Blackhat still stands out as one of the biggest bombs, recouping under 20 million of its 70 million dollar budget.  

It's not just that the film tanked at the box office, but it was both critically and socially derided at the time. That beautiful brick wall of a man, Chris Hemsworth, Thor himself, playing a nerdy master computer hacker. It was laughable in its very conception.

But a funny thing happened in the years since, the Michael Mann fans have managed to drown out the knee-jerk reactionaries and get the film into a "reclaimed" status. Certainly the podcasts and socials I feed into have been saying as such for a couple years now.

Having seen the film (then forgetting to log it) I have to say, bluntly, not bad. In fact, good. Not great, certainly flawed, but good.

My biggest gripe with the film is how Mann shot it.  It's a film that puts Mann in Steven Soderbergh mode, using a lot of different types of digital cameras and lenses and I found jumping between them quite distracting.

The film begins with a nuclear power station melting down. It was hacked and the cyberwarfare arm of the People's Liberation Army want to find the culprit. Captain Chen (Leehom Wang) of the division aligns with the FBI in the US, needing genius-level hacker (and his college roommate) Nick Hathaway freed from prison in order to sniff out whomever was capable of such an attack.  A subsequent attack on the stock market only exacerbates the need to find the culprit.  

It's a pretty taut globetrotting cyber-thriller all told. It takes some tense and scary turns as it leans into just how reliant we are upon technology, and just how vulnerable that technology is to malicious interference.

I can ignore the sketchy accent, and I can even buy into Hemsworth as a hacker, but how did Hathaway get so adept at knife fighting and shooting guns? There was a lot of nonsense in the film, questions raised and never answer, but I still just rolled with it and enjoyed the ride.

I had just watched Decision to Leave the night before watching this, so I was pumped for more Tang Wei and this did not disappoint in that regard. Loved the cast which also features Holt McCallany and Viola Davis.