KWIF: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's week in film. Busy weekend plus work stress equals late reviews. 

This Week:
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026, d. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett - in theatre)
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (aka "Toki o Kakeru Shōjo" - 1983, d. Nobuhiko Ōbayashi - blu-ray)
Reach for the Sky (aka "La championne","Tales for all #12" - 1991, d. Elisabeta Bostan - Crave)

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[Caution, spoilers for the first Ready or Not]

When we last saw Grace (Samara Weaving), she had just exited the mansion of the family of the man she just married, her wedding dress soaked in his blood, and the house on fire behind her. She sits down and has a cigarette as the first responders rush the scene. This sequel to Ready or Not pick up from that moment, with Grace being rushed to the hospital and passing out. When she awakens, she is immediately interrogated by a police detective, given that there were a few bodies found in the house and she was covered in blood (and perhaps some suspicion of arson).  Also, her emergency contact is her estranged sister, Hope (Kathryn Newton, Quantumania) who arrives only to continue their bitter relationship.

Meanwhile, some shenanigans with the devil-worshipping rich is happening in the background. It turns out that the deaths of the family Grace married into means that the head seat of this world-controlling cabal is now open.  The calls are made, the players are introduced, and everyone, except Grace, understands that the game is on. She will understand soon enough.

Grace (along with Hope) is kidnapped and coerced into yet another game of hide and seek at a new estate, to be hunted by the rich fucks who she's not even married into this time (at least, not yet).

Ready or Not 2 (why it's not just called Ready or Not, Here I Come without the "2" in between I really just don't understand) is not that vastly different from the first movie in terms of the events in play. Grace has just come through a traumatic experience and now is thrust right into another one. She hasn't had time to process and Weaving is really good at showing that Grace is a shaky mess. She may have found some internal strength in the first go-around, but she's not a total badass this time around, especially when she's handcuffed to her younger sister and they argue more than cooperate.

Hunting them are five different families (it was six, but one of them, played by Kevin Durand, was too eager and coked-up and tried to start the game before it was officially started, and "Mr. LeBail" blew him up but good). By the rules only one member of the family can hunt at a time, but should that member parish in the process, the next family member can step in. If any one of the seekers kills another seeker, Mr. LeBail would be displeased and their whole family lineage would be eradicated. Each of the families has to hunt Grace with a weapon of the era in which their ancestor first made the pact with Mr. LeBail.  All of this leads to some enjoyable variations in hunting styles and quirks in the game to differentiate it from the previous film. The hunters include Sarah Michelle Gellar (Cruel Intentions), Shawn Hatosay (The Pitt), Nestor Carbonell (The Tick), Olivia Cheng (Entertainment Tonight Canada) and more Canadian supporting players (gotta get that tax credit!), plus Elijah Wood as the lawyer and a cameo from David Cronenberg.

Given the stakes at play, the hunters each have the same agenda, but their appetites for the hunt all vary, and so there's more than just "I'm going to kill you" attitudes on the field. 

Much like the first film, this falls into the "horror, not horror" category. It's not really scary or intense, although there's one scene in which a character is beaten so savagely by another character (who clearly is coded a sociopathic misogynist) that it's pretty uncomfortable where the rest of the film is pretty light on its feet. It is meant to introduce stakes, and that this character, if to obtain the high seat, would mean something pretty dire for the world, so there is a point to it...but it's not a fine point, and it's not used tactfully. That savage beating is tempered by being intercut with the most whimsical fight set to Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, so you take the good, you take the bad....

Grace and Hope's strained relationship creates an additional conflict dynamic in a film whose premise is all conflict anyway, so it adds another rung on the ladder for the hero to climb. Conceptually the estrangement between them is not a bad idea, however, when the characters get into the weeds of their conflict, it's...too familiar. In fact I'm pretty sure the issues between them, and even the words they say, were almost verbatim to those between Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega in Scream 6... directed by the same writer/directors of this film and co-written by Guy Busick, the same co-writer of this film. Like, really? Thought we wouldn't notice?

Anyway, it's absurd, it's violent, and there's quite a bit of fun to be had, but the one thing RON2HIC lacks is the surprises that the first one had, so in that regards, there's some diminishing returns. I'm not sure that this franchise has further legs beyond this one (when the stakes are the fate of the world, there's almost nowhere else to go, unless it's ... I dunno... Ready or Not in Space or franchise crossover like Ready or Not vs Predator, or Ready or Not Go(es) to Hell...[ok, I think I just sold myself on three viable sequels.]) But, of course, I love "the most dangerous game" stories, so this still worked for me.

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In our ongoing (if now infrequent) feature "Toast and Kent Go Loopty-Loo", we covered the 2006 anime feature The Girl Who Leapt Through Time through the lens of it being a time-loop movie. I think we made a fairly good case that it fit the bill, even if does not follow suit with the usual time loop cliches.

While we worked on that Loopty-Loo I learned in my (very limited) research on the film that it was effectively a sequel to the original prose story (originally serialized in 1967), one that it's been adapted many, many times into film, television, manga and even a stage play.  House director Nobuhiko Ōbayashi 1983 adaptation is my first encounter with a more straight adaptation of this very popular story.

But it is clearly not a time loop, far less so than the anime.

Teen Kazuko Yoshiyama (pop idol Tomoyo Harada, in her debut role) daydreams of her ideal boyfriend, while her small-bladdered friend Goro Horikawa (seriously, he mentions needing to pee a lot) and her tall, quiet, flower-loving friend Fukamachi Kazuo unknowingly become part of a her love triangle.  Nobody, including Yoshiyama herself, seems to understand the complicated feelings she has for both these boys beyond the friendships that she's known since childhood. 

At the end of a school day (on a Saturday?) the trio are cleaning up the science lab (which apparently has had mysterious instances over the past few days) when Yoshiyama enters the chemicals storage room only to find a flask has shattered on the ground and the resulting spill is smoking. She thinks someone was in the locked room, but no one is there. She passes out as a result of the fumes.

When she awakes in the nurse's office she relays what had happened, only nobody saw any broken glass or sign of spill. She said she smelled lavendar.  She walks home with her two boys, Goro's house first along the way, and then Kazuo's house where he lives with his grandparents where she is invited for tea. She fixates on the greenhouse, where she smells lavender, and inside she becomes a bit woozy and decides to skip tea and go home.

And then strange things begin to happen. Her movements through life start happening in a confusing pattern. In math class she doesn't understand the work, as if she's missed a lesson (and Goro sleeps through class) and in the evening there's an earthquake, and the place next to Goro's house catches fire. The next day, there's an impossible time on her digital alarm clock, she's late to school. She rushes and catches up with a sluggish Goro only to see the clay tiles of a roof come sliding down about to crush him. She rushes to save him, only to awaken to what she thinks was a dream.

And then she relives those two days again, aware that she's experiencing something unique and also becoming more aware of her feelings for Kazuo (less aware of her feelings for Goro)...only to learn that Kazuo is a time traveler from the future with telepathic powers of mind control, implanting false thoughts, feelings and memories in the people around him. Nothing problematic there (at least his objective is to learn about the plants of the past for there are so few in his dystopian future, and not to romance Yoshiyama...and in fact seems pretty distant from actually loving her back).

I guess you could call those two-ish days a "loop", but in the context of the film it's really time travel, as she ultimately winds up traveling through her own lifespan, witnessing events from her life from outside (but she can't stay long as two versions of herself cannot occupy the same time).

The surface of this rendition of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a melancholy journey exploring youthful yearnings for love, and how truly little we understand when we're that age. The film ends with Yoshiyama, now an adult scientist, focused solely on career and not at all on love. When Kazuo left and erased her memories, he fundamentally broke something inside her. 

There's an interesting conceptual idea here, that Kazuo interfered with the love that was supposed to bloom between Kazuko and Goro, and because of his interference it never happened. There's no "butterfly effect" to this in the film, but it's clearly what happened. And it doesn't need to have a sci-fi/fantasy trigger, it could be a normal situation where an outsider steps into a blossoming relationship and destroys the moment or moments where that relationship could have happened.

The time travel aspect of this film is fantasy nonsense, there's no true explanation for it, but it serves a purpose in exploring this moment in time in a play on the coming-of-age story. The fact that Kazuo has mental powers (most people from the future have some paranormal abilities, he explains) is pure real deus ex machina, but not far from usual for deus ex machinas to be employed in Japanese storytelling (at least from my limited exposure).

Director Ōbayashi had a fairly prolific career, but the only prior work of his I've seen is his most infamous work, House. It's a fever dream with an atomic bomb/generational trauma metaphor that I totally didn't jibe with, but perhaps need to revisit. Ōbayashi made his reputation on wild stylization and outre visual effect, which are on display here, though mostly reserved for the third act. Some of his techniques harken to the silent film era, others employing early blue screen technology. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time feels more akin to something Guy Madden would make, rather than Kurosawa (whom he would work with on documenting the making of Dreams). But it's a testament to the director's interests that the film truly focuses on the emotional journey of Kazuko Yoshiyama, placing less emphasis on the strange events affecting her life. 

While not monumentally mindblowing, this adaptation of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time still feels like a unique an important artifact both in the director's repertoire and of Japanese pop culture. (Also, the theme song is a banger, but it's not yacht rock despite that Doobie Bounce).

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A dozen films into the "Tales for all" series of Quebec-produced films for older kids/young adults, and the pattern, if there is one, is that each film plays in a different genre or story trope sandbox. In some respects it feels like the "Tales for all" films are meant to be someone's first, and perhaps only exposure to the filmic medium. 

In this case Reach for the Sky ("La championne", or "The Champion" in French) is the "Tales for all" version of a young adult sports competition movie... I'm specifically thinking the likes of The Karate Kid here. The only thing is the typical sports drama is full of tension, rivalries, and intense hormone-fuelled emotions of the youth.  But Reach for the Sky features a surprising dearth of drama.

A co-production with Romania and shot in Romania with a largely local cast (this film doesn't have the same problem so many other "Tales for all" do, which is cast members all from different regions speaking different languages and thus all voice performances, regardless of which language track you choose, are dubbed) it postulates itself in its opening moments as a peek inside the famous Deva training facility in Transylvania which produced many gymnastics champions, like Nadia Comăneci.

Young Corina (Izabela Moldovan), at 10 years old, has a deep desire to be a champion in gymnastics. She implores her local coach Mircea (Mircea Diaconu, who would go on to be a pretty big time politician) to take her to the next level, to do tryouts for Deva. Despite her father's objection, she goes. She's told she's too old, and not strong enough. She fails the audition. She's crushed. Mircea, though, seems to have a stubborn pride and commits to training her with ferocity, and when it comes time to reapply, she's not only accepted but Mircea is as well, as an assistant coach to former champion Lili Oprescu (Carmen Galin).  

Lili's approach to training is firm but full of tenderness, and the kids absolutely love her. When coach Lili accepts a new job to coach the Lichtenstein youth, Mircea takes over, and he is so the opposite:  harsh, brutal, uncompromising, full of toxic rage. He flicks the children in the head, calls them idiots, and pushes their young bodies to extremes. It is, put bluntly, abuse...but the film tries to reframe it as the champion's way, what's needed to push these kids to the next level, to international-level competitors. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, Mircea would be the villain, but he is not. He's clearly not a good guy when training these kids, but the film never specifically admonishes him for it. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, we would see Corina having a nemesis, someone she is either training with who is her rival, a mean kid who torments her...or on the international level some stuck up asshole American kid who denegrates her country and her people...something to really fan the flames...but Corina has no rival at all here, save for her own internal struggle with willpower in the face of severe abuse. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, Coach Lili leaving would be another rivalry, Coach vs. Coach, and when the third act comes to the big international competition, there is the framing that Lili is, for some reason, the bad guy, but otherwise the script never gives us a reason to dislike her (we have far more to dislike about Mircea).

In a traditional North American-styled film, it would ask if our young hero could conquer their base desires and become their respective sporting champion through training, self-control, and superhuman determination? And this film does indeed ask that, but with virtually no drama or stakes other than Corina's desire to be a winner.

Not to spoil it, but she does win, despite the film, at every turn, showing us she just doesn't have the chops. At one point she quits and runs away, tired of Mircea's abuse (go girl, get out). But like many an abuse victim, she returns to her abuser, too worried about what life would be like away from him.  So the fact that she comes up with the perfect routines when it really counts is nice an all, but even the framing of it, the editing and the shot structure, it doesn't capture the drama. At no point are we really given scores to track or any nail biting tension of "hey, this is her weakest event and she needs to do X to pull out the win, can she do it"?  

It's not entirely colourless, as the peek into the severity of Romanian gymnastics training present here is, if anything, truth (or, perhaps even less severe than reality, but far from sugar-coated), so there is a bit of flare there, but otherwise it's a pretty drab picture where the stakes (beyond the unintentional concern for the health and wellbeing of these younglings) are quite low. 

Of all the "Tales for all" I think this one is most ripe for a remake/reimagining, especially given how much has been revealed about Deva since.

KWIF: Hard Target (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, where each week (or so) I have a spotlight movie, of which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I have watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This Week: 
Hard Target (1993, d. John Woo - Tubi)
Timecop (1994, d. Peter Hyams  - Tubi)
Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris (2022, d. Anthony Fabian - Crave)
Cowboys and Aliens (2011, d. Jon Favreau - Tubi)

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It's been 30+ years since I saw, and was disappointed by Hard Target. There's been no urge to revisit it since, but it popped up as part of Tubi's recommendation algorithm during a particularly lazy Saturday afternoon, so... why not? I have become a real fan of the man-hunting-man-for-sport subgenre of action film [I should probably make a "most dangerous game" tag] in the past decade, so it made sense to revisit what was perhaps my first exposure to that type of story.

Being in my mid-teens when this debuted in theatres, I hadn't yet been exposed to John Woo, so his storytelling language was quite alien to me at the time, and I balked at its absurdity. I did know who Wilford Brimley was, though -- Cocoon, Ewoks: Battle for Endor and Quaker Oats commercials were all a big part of my childhood -- and the positioning of him as an action movie sidekick was downright ludicrous to me.

But with fresh eyes and much, much more cinematic experience under my belt, Woo's filmic language delights with modern, post-ironic reception. All his hallmarks are applied to this not-so-potent yet ultimately entertaining melding of "The Most Dangerous Game" and First Blood. Doves, slow-mo, fetishizing gun violence, both sides of a wall shots...that sort of thing.

There is interesting background elements to the story, both in its passing concern for veterans let down by the system, and a police department on strike leading to both a spike in criminal activity and the appropriate conditions for a manhunt-for-sport operation. it doesn't actually have much to say about either of these things...if there was commentary baked into the script, Woo's stylistic interests filtered it out of the final product.

Van Damme was still learning how to act, and his efforts at being cajun are nonexistent, but he had his screen presence locked down by this point. It's easy to forget how charming he was given how borex he seemed in his later 90's output offering diminishing returns on his schtick. Brimley seems to delight in the southern bayou accent and it's really enjoyable to see the perennial 70-year-old (regardless of how old he was, Brimley seemed to be 70 for decades) riding horseback and shooting arrows. 

Lance Henrickson just chews up the scenery having a palpable blast as the film's big nasty. He's as great a 90's b-movie villain as any, successfully going super huge, appropriately acting as if he is the king shit and utterly untouchable. Arnold Vosloo (using his actual South African accent perhaps?) is maybe not as commanding a presence as Henrickson, but he's suitably intimidating, and effectively cold-blooded as Herickson's right hand man and he does liven the film up.

What lets me down is the film's take on man-hunting-man, where Van Damme's Boudreaux never atually signs up for the manhunt and therefore doesn't actually "win" the game, which is the big thrill of the subgenre. He's more an amateur detective who stumbles upon the hunt and becomes a target as a result. It's disappointing and lacks real tension. 

There's also the matter of third-act escalation, of showing Boudreax's proficiency as a tactician and fighter. When he says to female lead, the likeable Yancy Butler, as he's leaving her in Brimley's care, "Without you, I'm hunting them", and the film implies that his familiarity with the terrain will give him some great advantage against the two dozen men now hunting him, nothing comes of it. He's still on the run, he's still somehow dodging hundreds of bullets, explosives and evading helicopter gunfire on horseback. It never successfully turns him into the hunter. Brimley feels more of the hunter and tactician.

Even still, it's never overreaching as it seems to know just what it is, and what it can be.

The Flash Scale: better than The Flash
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Double dosing on Van Damme that lazy Saturday, I actually watch Timecop first. I always had a favourable opinion of this movie but I haven't revisited it since the 90's. It was based off a Dark Horse comic book, in as much as the comic book of Timecop really was designed to serve as proof of concept to sell as a film (not the last time we'll see this).  Back in 1994, if it was tangentially related to comic books, I would watch it, and be kind of defensive about it. I had a real bias, back then (because I don't now, right? Right?). I've long been telling myself I needed to see it again, but I'm always wary about revisiting things I liked in my teenage years, both for the headslap moments of "I liked this???" and triggering those sense memories of being an utterly awkward person.

Well, no sense memories were triggered, and, I'll be damned if Timecop still isn't pretty damn fun. I mean, I'm still such a sucker for time travel shenanigans, and I liked how this story doesn't do branching timelines, it's just one linear timeline that gets all fucked up by time travellers, and there's a U.S. government agency chasing down time criminals from creating ripple effect into the future... and doing a pretty piss poor job at it.  Van Damme plays Max Walker, who stumbles upon a half-assed conspiracy by Ron Silver's presidential hopeful to steal the past in order to steal the presidency.  It's really dumb, but dumb in that delightfully formulaic 80's and 90's storytelling kind of way. 

The space-time physics and technology and whatnots are all ludicrous, but it doesn't stop the film from being a bale of fun. Van Damme is at his peak Van Damme-ness here, delivering his strongest acting performance in any film, and still in his giving-a-shit phase of his career where his ego hadn't completely taken over. Ron Silver was always the perfect go-to shitheel bad guy and he's just chomping down on every scene he's in. Mia Sara plays Van Damme's wife, and together they sell the relationship in a way that most action stars don't really wind up having sexual or romantic chemistry with their counterpart. It's astonishing to see a film like this with a steamy sex scene, mainly because we don't get those too often anymore, and one that doesn't seem male-gazey,  delivering equal time to each participant's body, and selling the idea of mutual pleasure. (It's a sex positive film. My favourite exchange in the film, after Walker and his tagalong from internal affairs Agent Sarah Fielding set back into the past: 
Walker: "Don't get sentimental and try to visit yourself."
Fielding: "Actually, I'd kind of like to call myself and tell me not to sleep with Bobby Morgan after my party. It's really disappointing."
Walker: "A smart woman would call Bobby and give him some advice.")

It's a pretty punchy script overall, and it closes its own causality loop very nicely, making for a thoroughly satisfying done-in-one film. There's no need for a franchise.

The Flash Scale: better than The Flash
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One of the latest subgenres in storytelling is kindness porn: stories about nice people who actively inspire niceness in others through their own kindness and positive spirit. In film the apex of this is the Paddington movies, in comic books it's Squirrel Girl, on TV it's Ted Lasso.  While there are people who have been completely receptive to the subgenre, the surprise successes and seeming longevity of "nice media", there are also those that bristle at it, demean it, rebuff its advances, often mistaking the pleasantness for treacle.  But kindness porn isn't treacly. It often is very aware of the darker forces in the world (and in self) but it doesn't so much reject the darkness as look for a crack for which it can pry open and let the light.  Kindness porn, I think, foremost, is about empathy and acceptance.

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris finds a widowed cleaning woman in post-war London taking admirable care of her client's homes, and, sometimes her clients themselves. She is a kind woman with the ability to persevere in the face of adversity.  She's giving but not selfless, she's gentle but not naive, she treats others how she would like to be treated, even those who don't treat her such in kind.

When she spies one of her richer client's Christian Dior gowns, she falls in love. Her mission in life becomes to have one of her own, even if it cost five hundred pounds...a small fortune for the working class. Working hard but also with a few strokes of luck, Mrs. Harris' mini-fortune comes to fruition and she's off to Paris to engage with the snobbish world of haute cuture. But also, Paris is the city where the laborer is king, and despite her initial rejection by the house of Dior manager, she is welcomed in by many.

From there it's not entirely sweetness and roses, but it does, ever so gently, get at the heart of the matter, exploring classism both from the angle of someone wanting to partake in something the elite see as theirs, and also taking jabs at the elite and the way they dehumanize and other the working class. 

Mrs. Harris doesn't quite have the same magical charm as Paddington bear, but then, she's not a talking bear with a marmalade sandwich under her hat. As well, there's something uneasily capitalist about the film that revolves around buying a dress. On the one hand it's smacking down the elite, but also raising their status symbols aloft in the other. 

The Flash Scale: better

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speaking of unispired

Although Timecop kind of did it in the early 90's, the 2000's became the heyday of putting out comics for the explicit purpose of selling a screenplay. Comic book properties were hot stuff, and it's easier to present a studio exec something visual than a wad of words on pages.  Entire publishers formed out of being a gateway for getting from script-to-page-to-screen.  As much as Marvel's success in building a shared universe pulled the studios focus away from buying just any comics property for their next major motion picture, but I think, at about the same time, Cowboys and Aliens decimated the studios faith in comics properties as a guaranteed through-line to success.

Muckraking comics reporter Rich Johnson originally exposed the publishing shenanigans that led to a glut of Cowboys and Aliens trade paperbacks being literally given away (or dumpstered) at many comics shops as a ploy to reaching the tops of the bestsellers charts. I remember my local shop stuffing one into my bag when I wasn't looking (after declining to take one myself). I never read it -- the taint on that thing was swift -- but it still lingers in a box with other trades somewhere.

Despite the ploy being reported in comic news, it didn't matter to studio execs who bought the script and greenlit the feature, with Jon Favreau, fresh off of Iron Man 2, directing and Lost's Damon Lindleof and Carlton Cuse doing a rewrite on the script. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford -- both known for their portrayals of icons of cinema -- were brought on as leads.  This was as sure a slam dunk as anything and yet audience reaction was unenthusiastic and critics were unimpressed. It bombed at the box office.

This was something a studio just threw money at, nobody's heart was in it, and that apathy is palpable. Everyone involved just did the work but brought nothing more to it.  The story isn't engaging or entertaining in any real way, it's a going-through-the-motions plot that doesn't provide anything particularly cool visually or conceptually to inspire the audience. Likewise, the characters are big nothings, there's so very little to invest in with them, and nobody has any sort of badass swagger.  Craig seems almost embarassed to be in the picture, and Ford is clearly cashing a paycheck. The tonal dichotomy between an alien invasion and western isn't something impossible to bridge (Nope, for example) but this story didn't crack it.  It's bad.

The Flash Scale: worse than The Flash