Another elite assassin, another rampage—haven’t we seen Netflix’s Kate before?
Enough already with the John Wick duplicates, there’s only so much we can take
Film Reviews Netflix
This declaration probably could’ve been made a couple movies ago, but congratulations are in order for John Wick on having attained the Die Hard status of infinite remake-ability. Just as a generation of action releases sold the public variations on the same idea under the hook of “it’s Die Hard on a _____,” Hollywood has apparently given an open green light to projects tweaking the winning formula of “elite assassin with one thing to care about in this cruel world goes on rampage of vengeance.” This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, as the recent Bob Odenkirk vehicle Nobody proved, refreshing the concept by sticking a mild-mannered everyman in the killing-machine role. That film enjoyed some added credibility by having John Wick co-director David Leitch on as producer, as does Netflix’s Kate, the latest in this lineage of smoking barrels and ice-cold quips. Regrettably, the umpteenth neon-laced bullet ballet lands much closer to rip-off than riff.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead leads the way this time around as Kate, a hardened gun-for-hire raised from girlhood to stuff down her feelings so she can focus on marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat. (Same deal as Karen Gillan in this past July’s Gunpowder Milkshake.) She trusts no one but her handler and adoptive father figure, played by a present-at-best Woody Harrelson. (Same deal as Paul Giamatti in Gunpowder Milkshake, down to the eventual reveal of his intentions.) The wrinkle in this iteration of the increasingly worn narrative is that Kate’s been dosed with poison she’ll succumb to in 24 hours’ time, meaning the murder she’s avenging is… her own. (Same-ish deal as Gunpowder Milkshake, though in that one, Gillan’s character was only jabbed with a paralyzing serum. It wore off after about half an hour, much like this movie.)
The real distinguishing factor brought to the table by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan—a career VFX specialist who’s directed only one other feature, The Huntsman: Winter’s War—is the Japanese setting and his fraught engagement with it. Kate picks off a yakuza boss in a prologue and orphans his young daughter, Ani (Miku Patricia Martineau), who will of course become the gratingly plucky sidekick once she reappears during Kate’s next assignment in Tokyo years later. (This exact thing also happens in Gunpowder Milkshake, even the oblivious younger girl learning of their true connection at the very same point in the second act!) It’s then that the clock starts ticking on their lives, the women both targeted by gangsters looking to clean house. Their initial unease with one another soon gives way to a surrogate parent-child bond with a basic girl-power flavor, Ani admiring Kate for being a “badass” and “total killer babe.”
Audiences have fair cause to look askance at a racial dynamic that sees a white woman mowing down wave after wave of faceless Asian enemies, and the script makes a feeble attempt to get out in front of this with occasional cracks about the dumb gaijin. But Ani’s significant confession that she feels like a pariah due to her half-white parentage once again centers the perspective of Kate and people who can see themselves in her outsider identity. Speaking of which, the similarly yakuza-heavy Jared Leto netflick The Outsider mirrors a lot of the borderline-insulting genuflections to Japanese culture littering Kate. Whether it’s the pit stop at a J-pop concert, a quick kabuki interlude, a running gag about exotic soda flavors, phrases like “most regrettable,” or the chibi-style anime T-shirt Kate wears for most of her last day, Nicolas-Troyan’s fascination never delves deeper than the broad novelty sought out by a tourist.
It’s not a good sign that almost everything in the film seems to have come from somewhere else, most pronounced in a fight scene that recycles a refrigerator-door move from Leitch’s own Atomic Blonde. Even if the combat choreography that made this vein of cinema so popular is up to snuff, and Winstead does handle her steps ably even as her character breaks down, this film should aspire to be more than a delivery system for a few solid shootouts. The space between the set pieces meant to draw crowds can be filled with cleverness and heart as easily as nothing. The lessened oversight of fly-by-night genre productions has afforded driven filmmakers a chance to show their stuff and try some things out. Or it used to; in our new era of algorithmically dictated content, computers can make all those pesky creative decisions in record time. The downside appears to be that this method results in a shameless sameness, tepid gruel served again and again. And again. And again. And again.
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If anything, John Wick is even easier to rip off than Die Hard, since you don’t even have to think of a novel setting that doesn’t seem to pose a special challenge to the protagonist. (Something Die Hard itself gave up on after the second movie.)
You just need to take an actor with decent acting ability and then tell everyone that they’re actually an unbeatable super-assassin, which all of these actors are able to do just fine.
(Likewise, it’s easier than the years of Tarantino rip-offs, because even when his dialogue gets to be a bit much, it’s not as easy to duplicate at studios seemed to think.)
Fortunately, the John Wick movies continue to be great, unlike the Die Hard flicks. At some point, Hollywood will realize no one is biting (I think this and Gunpowder Milkshake may kill the trend off, since they’re both criminally wasting their casts) and move on to the next thing.
“Fortunately, the John Wick movies continue to be great”You were doing so well up to this point.
The more I look back, JW1 was the only good one. 2 and 3 took the worst parts of 1 and ran with them. There’s still a good John Wick 2 out there in an alternate universe that doesn’t include tatooed phone girls (who look like every neighborhood’s polyamorous plant moms).
I get it, it’s fun to be contrarian, but the second and third John Wick films are rated higher on RT than the first for both critic ratings and moviegoer ratings. I thought all three were fine and enjoyable as long as you don’t put much thought into what you’re watching.
I’m not being contrarian. The second film turned Wick from a force of nature into a moron, and the third filmed turned him into a patsy.I get going back to the well even if it’s dry, that’s Hollywood. Neutering your protaganist for plots that don’t matter is beyond my ability to give a shit though.
I agree with most of your points but, nerds on the internet don’t get to decide what’s popular, and clearly the general public enjoys the second and third film just as much as the first. They might not be great, but they’re still perfectly fine and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.
I feel like the goalposts have shifted a little.Also, we’re also building a mountain out of a molehill.So I’m out.
You’re right, it doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t trying to shift the goal post either. I personally think they’re all great films despite their flaws and agreeing with your assessment.
“Neutering”?
huh? Do you think they’re not?
I’m looking at metacritic, rottentomatoes, imdb and all three have nearly identical scores. Also I’ve watched them… and they are.
“Never mind the quality, feel the width!”
I’ve watched them too.They’re not.The action gets more intricate and the world broadens. To diminishing returns. What was special in the first has become commonplace by the third.There’s still plenty to enjoy in the 2nd and 3rd outings but the storytelling is getting extremely fuzzy. And John himself is too close to superheroic. I really appreciated how hard he got the shit kicked out of him in the first.
Die Hard… but in John Wick! (They shrink someone down and they have to escape an assassins while other assassins hunt him down.)
I love it. Greenlit.
Isn’t this the plot of Osmosis Jones (if we read antibodies and viruses as enemy assassins)?
I think you mean Die Hard but in Bill Murray. Fun fact: way back in “the day” there was a video game series called “Space Quest.” in the 6th one, they went through the trouble of naming one of the characters “Corpsman Santiago” because part of the plot was that: the hero was shrunk down in order to stop an evil woman from taking over the body of Santiago. The original title was “Where in Corpsman Santiago is Roger Wilco?” but that sounded too dirty. Don’t know if that’s true, but I CHOOSE to believe.
That premise sounds like a Rock And Morty/Solar Opposites episode.
“Rock And Morty”
GREENLIT!!!
It’s assassins being hunted by other assassins within assassins being hunted by other assassins all the way down!
I strongly endorse this statement. Maybe Jabba the Hut is at the very bottom? Also why has no one mentioned the Villainess?
Being John Malkovitch Wick
Plot twist: The big assassin has to run a marathon, and if they slow down they die! Hard!
Die Hard… but in John Wick! (They shrink someone down and they have to escape an assassins while other assassins hunt him down.)It could star Martin Short, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Quaid! And be mostly a comedy with only a short micro-assassin-vs-the-hero sequence that ends in an unexpectedly (for such a light film) gory bit of abject body-horror.
My favorite was Matterhorn. It’s like Die Hard at Disneyland.
“Die Hard but at a theme park (that somehow the cops can’t get into and intervene at)” would actually be pretty interesting.
Hollow World by Nick Pobursky is that, although it’s more Die Hard with a Vengeance. It’s about a Detroit cop whose family is kidnapped while visiting Disney World, and the series of challenges he has to perform to save them and prevent Space Mountain from being blown up.
Is there any world in which Liam Neeson hasn’t already optioned the rights to this?
Beverly Hills Cop III?
There is a book called Slayground that is exactly that, and it was written years before Die Hard. It is part of the excellent Parker series of books by Richard Stark(pen name of Donald Westlake).
“There is a book called Slayground that is exactly that”
Hve you read Slayground? It is absolutely NOTHING like “Die Hard in a theme park” except that it takes place in a theme park.
If anything the plot is closer to John Wick in a theme park.
Unfortunately, they tried to do that.
It turned out to be Beverly Hills Cop 3.
The thing is that “unbeatable super assassin on a quest of vengeance” wasn’t really invented by John Wick.It’s much more rooted in the asian action movie scene with movies like A Company Man. And further back even as a central trope in many wuxia novels.I don’t think it’s a fad, either. The issue with Die Hard is that it’s not really repeatable. There are only so many scenarios where an everyman can fight off bad guys while trapped and unable to ask for help. But the basic concept of a skilled professional being wronged and unleashing hell on those who wronged him is eternal. You will never run out of different combination of ways to tell that story.
The thing is that “unbeatable super assassin on a quest of vengeance” wasn’t really invented by John Wick.That’s what is inspiring all these rip-offs, though, down to the very baroque criminal underworlds they imagine. (Here’s a diner that criminals use and can’t carry guns into, except for the only two times we show the diner, when they carry guns in there and fights break out. Here’s a library full of guns … for some reason.)
“iT’s QuIrKy!”
Is it? I’ve always assumed the root of this genre was Taken.‘Kate’ is also a representative of another genre: kickass woman with super-skills, often with the film titled with just her name (because it’s so crazy and noteworthy that she’s capable, yet also a woman!!) – prominent examples are Hannah, Lucy (a cross-over with the ‘Limitless’ genre), and more recently Black Widow.Both these genres seem to me in modern film to come out of Leon. The Taken/Wick films follow a version of Leon – an older male killer who finally directs his skills to a worthwhile vendetta because of something that happened to a woman he cares for (Wick obviously further background the fridging) – while the Hannah films follow future versions of Portman’s character – a younger woman with no close friends or family who gained superhuman skills, usually by assassin training at a young age, taking revenge on the men who put her in her position.I’m guessing you could trace Leon back to Westerns. True Grit?
The root of the genre is probably pulp fiction novels or maybe dime Westerns before that.
The root of the current trend is John Wick, because of the world building they all attempt to do*. Wick inhabits a world just as unreal as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Gunpowder Milkshake and Kate do the same.
These aren’t just “person on a rampage” stories. The world building is a big part of it.
* You could argue that John Wick was inspired by Atomic Blonde, because of the shared creators and the world building, but it was a less successful film both commercially and artistically. Its version of Cold War Berlin, especially the weird black market sequence, looked more like sloppy writing than artistic choices, for instance, whereas no one is confused that the Continental in John Wick is supposed to be an alien presence in the movie.
I felt like Atomic Blonde also made the mistake of indulging to the point of disgust in male gaze. I don’t know if it was trying to satirize male gaze and just completely botched or it thought ironic indulgence IS satire (it’s not) or what, but I was deeply turned off the movie because of it.It also was poorly edited and the script is weak. But mostly the weird dumb bonerjamz cinematography did me in.
I felt like Atomic Blonde also made the mistake of indulging to the point of disgust in male gaze. To my (extremely male-gazey) eye, Atomic Blonde subverted the male gaze.It cast the preposterously beaufiful Charlize, and it invited us to look at her – and don’t get me wrong, I was very prepared to look at Charlize – and then put her thru some of the most grueling & gritty violence I’ve ever seen. There’s a bait & switch there. Like:
It takes shots that could be sexy in a male-gazey sort of way – let’s say Charlize easing her nude body into a bathtub – but it turns out she’s an exhausted and battered warrior. She can barely move; she’s covered in bruises & cuts; and she’s, I dunno, popping a dislocated joint back into place. There’s a sense of “Here, viewer, this is going to be sexy – SYKE!” You think you’re being invited to appropriate her body with your gaze: but no, it turns out her body is very goddam much her own. She’s going to rehab her injuries and stretch out and get ready to fight again, and the sexy view you were expecting to appropriate isn’t there. Tough shit.
Maybe I’m glossing over the lesbian scene too cavalierly; but overall I thought its “management”(?) of the male gaze and expectations around it were kind of brilliant.Also:
The stairwell fight scene in Atomic Blonde is the greatest fight scene in the history of movie-making.
“* You could argue that John Wick was inspired by Atomic Blonde, because of the shared creators and the world building, but it was a less successful film both commercially and artistically.”
No, you couldn’t. I mean, you could but you’d be very wrong because the source material for Atomic Blonde is more like John Le Carre spy stuff than John Wick, and it was massively overhauled when being adapted into Atomic Blonde. In fact, I’d argue that AB exists purely because of JW.
You could argue that John Wick was inspired by Atomic Blonde, because of the shared creators and the world buildingI would not try to argue that, because John Wick came out three years before Atomic Blonde. Also, Atomic Blonde’s director was a co-director of John Wick (1).
“Is it? I’ve always assumed the root of this genre was Taken.”
Christ, some of you people are going to go OUT of your MINDS when you discover Japanese and Hong Kong movies from the 80s and 90s.
Yeah, this is like when my fellow horror fiends got sniffy about all the Blair Witch knockoffs. “Akshually blah blah Cannibal Holocaust blah”.Okay, you’re not wrong about the origin of the subgenre but the *current trend* doesn’t give two fucks.
Cannibal Holocaust is on Netflix right now and I don’t know whether to watch it or not. Even if it’s terrible, I love watching terrible movies.
It’s worth a watch if only for the history. It’s not good but it is interesting.
Here’s an oddball underworld weapons dealer the protagonists visit to arm up, who euphemizes his guns as bottles of wine or cuts of meat or cigars or something.
And yet, for every crop of Gunpowder Milkshake (which I thought was “fine”, and I believe it’s ok for movies to be “fine”), you get the occasional Nobody, so maybe they’re on to something.
Hollywood put out more Westerns than I think it’s possible to imagine nowadays. But we got the Searchers, the Wild Bunch, Unforgiven, etc., out of it as a result.
So even if Sturgeon’s Law applies to these knock-offs (and it does), we’re likely to get some very good films along the way.
Wick III was not great. Would not even call it good.
(Something Die Hard itself gave up on after the second movie.)Woah, woah, woah! There is no reason whatsoever to disrespect the absolute genius of the third movie, Die Hard With A Vengeance!1: McTiernan returned for that one, his only participation in any of the sequels.2: They avoided repeating themselves by consciously doing the exact OPPOSITE of Die Hard (1): #1 takes place at Christmas. #3 takes place in a brutally hot summer.#1 takes place on the West Coast, in LA. #3 takes place on the East Coast, in the Big Apple.
#1 is a claustrophobic set piece, packed into the skyscraper at Nakatomi Plaza. #3 is a sprawling race all over NYC.#1 has John McClane working alone. #3 has him teamed-up with a righteously angry Samuel L.Stick to the formula by blowing it up in very specific ways. It’s really great. It also has the original version of the Captain-America-in-an-elevator scene, and that is fucking awesome.Love this movie.
Add Haywire, Ava, Anna, Hanna, Close, Red Sparrow, Peppermint, The Protege to the list, probably a lot more.
It’s actually pretty interesting to see Woody Harrelson, the son of a mob hitman, in a role like this.
That makes his role in No Country For Old Men have an extra kick as well.
Wasn’t there some interview where one of the victims of Woody’s dad claimed that she saw No Country and was certain that Woody had based Carson Welles on his dad?
a tough talker who goes out like a bitch when he encounters a real badass? that was Woody’s dad?
That was my first thought too.
and i’ll keep watching these movies
I might even enjoy them more than the Johns Wicks, if they star compelling actresses rather than a dull living statue of a man. At least, it’s been like that for Atomic Blonde, which I’d take over any John Wick.
I also liked Atomic Blonde and prefer it to John Wick, but I feel like you’re being kind of unfair to Keanu Reeves. Even if he’s not my favorite actor, and he isn’t, consigning him to “dull living statue” is drastically undervaluing his acting skills.
Never liked him, I’m sorry.I stand corrected, I liked him when he played the idiot (in a sort of endearingly bad way) in Bill & Ted.
a dull living statueThat’s a brutal way to describe Keanu…
“A dull living statue”I highly recommend that he avoid any trips to Sanford, Gloucestershire….
What if he’s a fan of crusty jugglers?
For the greater good, of course. Same goes for gangs of hoodies.
(Note: It’s spelled Sandford.)
Uh oh. I made a spelling mistake about Sandford. When does the broken bit of church take up the spot where my head and neck used to be?
Why?Atomic Blonde was such a mess. And grossly indulgent in male gaze shit.
Because:a) it’s better acted;b) it actually has a story, an interesting setting, a sense of place and time instead of generic video game fare;c) the fight coreography is mostly visceral hand-to-hand combat, not gun-fu, which I find uninteresting;d) that fabulous long-take vertical fight inside the building;e) Charlize Theron is in it;f) Keanu Reeves is not in it;g) I’m kind of disturbed by all the double-tapping in the John Wicks. Multiple times Wick doubles back to make sure all the random, already incapacitated goons are unambiguously dead. The camera masturbates on that act. It glorifies violence in a way that Atomic Blonde doesn’t, because she’s just trying to survive, get out of there alive and protect one guy.
a) While I think she is often good, Theron is blah in this. Nobody else stood out.b) It certainly *wants* to have these. It tries. But fails. Largely because it wants to fuck around with nonlinear structure. And is obsessed with feeling cool instead of making sense.c) I’ll give you this one. I like both fight styles.d) Meh.e) She’s also in 100 Ways to Die in the West. What’s your point?f) Neither is Fatty Arbuckle. And?g) I get this argument but I think you’re either being hyperbolic or that particular act bothers you more than most.Fair enough on some of this but are you not going to address at all the cheesecake Penthouse Forum nonsense? I mean, you want to throw around “the camera masturbates”, look no further than Atomic Blonde.
Ways to Die in the West is a hysterical movie and Theron is both gorgeous and good
Sure. Have fun singing karaoke in L.A. with the talking dog.I like her generally. She adds nothing to 100 Ways to Snore in the Worst. Any remotely attractive woman could have filled that nothing role. Neeson is the highlight of the movie and even that’s only because the role was written to roast his image.(I’m being hyperbolic. In truth I think it’s *fine*. I got a few laughs out of it. But it really doesn’t do anything with Theron.)
:Sure. Have fun singing karaoke in L.A. with the talking dog.:I dont know what this means
Seth McFarlane is frequently spotted in L.A. singing karaoke. There’s a particular venue, can’t remember the name, where he shows up several times a month. I think it’s like The Golden Kitten or Cat or something. Has a feline in the name.
AB is not better acted. I’d say the same but like Reeves with Wick Theron took the Broughton character and made it her own. She deserved an Oscar nod for her performance.The story line was a little confusing and it dragged just enough that kept it from being great instead of really good. I did like the style.I love the fight scenes in both particularly the “one-take” stairwell fight scene in Blonde. Though the catacombs scene in Wick II is its equal. Theron and Reeves make any movie they are in better. Although The Old Guard is trash and Theron phoned in her performance. The double tapping is a result of the director’s style. Wick and Blonde are different types of movies. Wick is more fantasy whereas Blonde is more realistic.
d) that fabulous long-take vertical fight inside the buildingBest fight scene in the history of movies. Holy shit that scene is amazing.If I’m not mistaken, the “final boss” in that fight – they wind up one-on-one in a random apartment? He calls her “suka”, and as she drives a corkscrew or something thru his brain she yells “Am I your bitch now?!?” – was the same actor/stuntman who has two big fights with Keanu in the first John Wick: one at the nightclub, he throws Keanu off the balcony, and the second when he tries to suffocate Keanu with the plastic bag, and winds up strangled to death by Keanu’s handcuffs. He’s great. Excellent “opponent”.Anyway, where I was going was, I love how they’re both so exhausted by that point in this excruciating & long fight, that they can barely gather themselves for these last-ditch efforts to kill each other. Lunging, losing their balance, gasping for breath.
g) I’m kind of disturbed by all the double-tapping in the John Wicks. Multiple times Wick doubles back to make sure all the random, already incapacitated goons are unambiguously dead.This did not bother me, because I took it not as glorification/masturbation, but as a point of characterization. John Wick is not a casual. He is not sloppy. John Wick is a professional. And professionals verify.I was a HUGE fan of Garth Ennis’ run on Marvel Comics The Punisher, roughly 2004 to 2008. There’s a similar point of characterization there. He’s not doing this shit for fun. This is his job. And when you’re a pro you take pains; you do things right. You don’t half-ass it. There’s a running – not gag, not quite a motif either, but it happens a few times – where a military person goes over the scene of one of The Punisher’s actions, and he comments that the ratio of killed to wounded tells you everything you need to know. “He’s a worker.” There are few to none who are merely wounded.
I took John Wick’s head shots to be like that. The chilling touch of professionalism. Compare it to those slashers or thrillers where, say, the Final Girl momentarily gets the upper hand on the bad guy and knocks him out. But she doesn’t finish him! And the bad guy gets back up and regains the advantage for one last confrontation. See also: Zombieland, and its commentary on “double tap”.John Wick NEVER makes that mistake.
“At least, it’s been like that for Atomic Blonde, which I’d take over any John Wick.”
Of off the *whatever you want to call these movies* I would say the one with the least compelling star is Atomic Blonde. I love Charlize, but I found her achingly dull in AB.
The wrinkle in this iteration of the increasingly worn narrative is that
Kate’s been dosed with poison she’ll succumb to in 24 hours’ time,
meaning the murder she’s avenging is… her own. (Same-ish deal as Gunpowder Milkshake, though in that one, Gillan’s character was only jabbed with a paralyzing serum
That sounds more like Ethan Hawke in 24 Hours to Live:https://www.avclub.com/when-is-ethan-hawke-going-to-get-his-own-john-wick-1827732589
Or Crank.
Or 1950’s D.O.A. (and its 1988 remake with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan), which predates them all.
came to say this.
The Crank movies rule
With a bit of Escape from New York.
Nobody proved, refreshing the concept by sticking a mild-mannered everyman in the killing-machine role.
It’s almost as if they didn’t watch the movie.
Its gotta be better than Jolt… right??
It’s a shame that the fall of cable happened right as these kinds of movies started to rise. Literally perfect cable-on-the-weekend fare.
You know shits’ about to get real when they’re wearing a whimsical shirt and sunglasses, and are smoking a cigarette…indoors!
Whoa, what season of A Handmaid’s Tale is this? 17?
Mad Men, not Handmaid’s Tale.
FFS.
“shits’”
It’s “shit’s”, as in “shit is”.
Is it just me or is every movie that came out in the last18 months a D? I don’t mean literally a D in AVC reviews, just generally terrible.
Sounds like you didn’t see “Pig”.
well, yeah, we’ve been getting all the shit companies are burying because they can blame the pandemic for a failure that was going to happen anyway.
They’ve mostly hovered between a low B and C for me, but I have a high tolerance for bad movies.
Shang Chi got a B. It was good. There really haven’t been too many must see movies lately
Don’t take this the wrong way: maybe you don’t watch enough movies. Or just have bad taste. Okay, you probably could take that second part the wrong way.
C’mon, Suicide Squad was great entertainment. Black Widow was not bad, but I haven’t seen Shang-Chi yet.
Suicide Squad was okay, but the twist was obvious from the get-go. I enjoyed Black Widow a little more.
Was there a twist in The Suicide Squad? I guess for unfamiliar audiences the first team dying is a rug-pull but that’s the first 15 minutes of the movie, I didn’t think anything after that was supposed to be a twist.
I assumed John Cena going rogue was a twist.
Hmm, I guess. Although I thought that was pretty clearly telegraphed when we meet the character and establish he has basically the exact same skill set as Bloodsport, and when Bloodsport asks about this Waller says something like “he has his uses.” And then most everything Peacemaker does or says after that establishes his psychotic devotion to killing as many people as necessary for “peace,” so since he seemed to just be a human embodiment of U.S. foreign policy I was waiting for him to end up at odds with the rest of the team. The only question for me was whether he actually died and if the already announced Peacemaker TV show would be a prequel, but then it turned out he lived. Super excited for that show, I’m hoping it doesn’t try to redeem the character and instead is just Steve Agee and the lady handler trying to contain his craziness as they use him on missions.
Worth it alone for Idris’ ultra-weary “Awww, fuck me…”
This site gave Gunpowder Milkshake a B somehow, but I would definitely have given it a D for wasting its great cast and my time. Get it together Netflix, every year there are plenty of solid DTV action movies produced at a fraction of even a Netflix movie’s budget. It seems like they have a premise and a star and they call it a day’s work, the scripts feel like first drafts and they are all perfunctorily shot.
Yeah, I’m baffled that Gunpowder Milkshake managed a B. It was THE SAME movie as this.
Godzilla vs Kong gets a D for Delightful! Visually stunning, epic set pieces, didn’t take itself too seriously, it’s been one of my favourite movies in a long time!
Zola, The Green Knight, and Pig all stand out as exceptional releases. Suicide Squad was fun.
It isn’t you. Most of the new releases have been bad. Nobody was good. But the new films om Amazon, Netflix, and HBO Max have mostly been bad-mediocre.
So basically, what you are saying is that this director is no David Leitch?
Even David Leitch is kind of bad without Chad Stahelski.
Even David Leitch is kind of bad without Chad Stahelski.I have the opposite take, I thik Leitch is much better than Stahelski. I much prefer Leitch’s more grounded style for the fight scenes.
I like “Atomic Blonde” and Winstead and Harrelson a whole lot, so it is a shame “Kate” couldn’t find a way to bring all those things together into something enjoyable.
I know the genre generally gets referred to using John Wick, but I continue to think of it as Man On Fire.
Fun fact: a 10-year-old Dakota Fanning is on the commentary track for Man on Fire, and she fully cries at the end.
The whole “emotionally closed off badass assassin” shtick also feels like a waste of Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Karen Gillan, who are both really awesome and aren’t well served by intentionally draining away their energy for 80 percent of the movie. It works better for Keanu, who, recent critical re-evaluation notwithstanding, does just fine in that situation.
Yes! Why do these hack ripoff movies keep featuring beloved actresses I simply can’t resist even in bad roles . . . oh, right.
Winstead was great as an emotionally damaged assassin in the Birds of Prey and Harley Quinn movie. I just wish she had been in it more, had that movie been 70% Birds and 30% Harley instead of 70% Harley and 30% Birds it could have been really good instead of just decent.
You see some of this in the latter half of her Fargo season, too.
I really love that show and I thought your point was perfect. She really dips into that role and how she changed from being the brains and the planner to a person of action in the second half.
Part of what I enjoy about her in that role is how convinced I was for several episodes that the other shoe was gonna drop and reveal that she was just using Ray. And it never happens. Nikki is true blue for that sad sack. Which makes me like Ray more, too. As a bit of a saddo myself I think, “Well hell, if I was lucky enough to land her I’d probably get involved in crazy shit, too.”
Oh yeah, I liked Ewan McGregor too, he was very adept at playing both brothers, the sad sack and the successful one who got in over his head. But yeah, poor Ray. I mean, normally I’d be against their relationship since as her parole officer he’s got power over here, but Fargo makes it clear that even though they are partners, Nikki Swango (great name) is running the show and he never abused his power in their relationship. But I’m also glad, like you said, it wasn’t a ruse. That would have been cliche and lazy, she was legit broken up over his death.
You know what’s a great movie about an American badass traveling to Japan and dealing with fraught family dynamics and the yakuza? The Yakuza! Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura own and the engagement with Japanese culture is very interesting, Mitchum and his fellow Americans are veterans of WWII and the occupation, so they have a familiarity that is also understood to be at a certain distance. Anyway, it’s awesome, this as the review notes looks like Gunpowder Milkshake i.e. utter dogshit.
I thought you were going to name Snake Eyes…
Surely the best way to subvert this formula is to make the John Wick type an absolute piece of shit who goes on a rampage because they want to, not as some kind of revenge. And all the ‘goons’ are actually the morally ‘correct’ assassins, who don’t deserve to get their heads stabbed or whatever. I’m sure someone can tell me if this film does already exist.
It does. Unfortunately, it’s the news coverage of every mass shooting.
Well there is Rampage. But don’t see that.
That gorilla is actually a giant asshole at the zoo
I’ve rewatched Rampage recently, and while I consider it “good” for a Uwe Boll movie, it’s far, far harder to watch nowadays in the current sociopolitical context
The Parker book series is basically this. It’s been made into some movies: Point Blank with Lee Marvin, Payback with Mel Gibson, and Parker with Jason Statham.
And some excellent comics from Darwyn Cooke (RIP):
Man, I still love Payback. One of my all time favorite movies.NOT the directors cut though. The original cut.Haven’t seen Point Blank since I was a kid, I should remedy that. Parker looked generic as hell. Darwyn Cooke did a pretty good graphic novel adaptation some years ago.
The director’s cut of Payback is WEIRD. Point Blank is cool. Darwyn Cooke rules.
Man, I still love Payback. One of my all time favorite movies.That’s right.
Point Blank is easily the best of those.
The Parker books are basically nothing like this. Parker is a professional thief, and every book is built around a heist (or heists): the planning, the setup, the crime itself, and the fallout.
Yes, the character is ruthless and amoral, but they’re not cruel or vicious, and with the exception of one novel (Butcher’s Moon, the culmination of several novels’ worth of plot), there’s nothing approaching a ‘rampage.’ One repeated line in the series is that Parker’s crews don’t kill anyone unless they have to, because “cops look harder for murderers than thieves.”
The Parker book series is basically this. It’s been made into some
movies: Point Blank with Lee Marvin, Payback with Mel Gibson, and Parker
with Jason Statham.Payback is kind of great. And I love Brian Helgeland for giving us both it and A Knight’s Tale.
One of the oddly unremarked things about Nobody is that Bob Odenkirk does go off on a rampage because he more or less misses killing people and wants to get back into it. The “humiliated family man” angle is a head fake that pretty quickly gets dropped. That said, Odenkirk is still the “hero” and the bad guys are still faceless henchman working for a ultra-violent psychopath, so the movie otherwise ticks all the familiar boxes.
This depends on where you read your criticism. I read several positive but cautionary reviews that mentioned the borderline toxic masculine nihilism at the heart of Nobody.
The original three-issue comic “RED” does make the main character out to be a monster (and that is the word he repeatedly uses to describe himself) with lots of undeserving victims.
“with lots of undeserving victims.”
The people who tried to kill her were undeserving?
…K…
We already have Bad Lieutenant and I don’t think we’ll get a better movie than that, even with more killing.
From what little I saw of Revenge for Jolly! while channel-surfing, it was basically a John Wick-style dead dog revenge story, except the aggrieved owner was played as much more dead-eyed and sociopathic.In the original novel of First Blood (not the movie adaptation), the Sheriff and his deputies are basically well-intentioned, and Rambo is a sympathetic but unstable tinderbox who goes off the deep end, and gets increasingly violent and suicidal over the course of the book.
“Surely the best way to subvert this formula is to make the John Wick type an absolute piece of shit who goes on a rampage because they want to, not as some kind of revenge.”
Yeah, the best way to copy a movie is to make a completely different movie.
You give John Wick way too much credit. John Wick was a mediocre American version of a genre the Koreans have been making (much better than we do, most of the time) for at least twenty years. And, really, they just picked up the ball John Woo left on the field, twenty years before that, and ran with it.
No, he doesn’t. You know who’s going to want to watch Kate? My parents. Why? Because they love John Wick. You know what movie they WON’T see? Anything made by Koreans for at least twenty years.I’m not saying that’s right or good of them. It is, in fact, mildly racist! BUT! The point stands that YOU are not giving John Wick ENOUGH credit for bringing that particular style to the American viewing public.Be an international cinema hipster all you want, what influences American films, especially shit on Netflix, is whatever makes MONEY. Here, in America.I both support your film dedication and give you the finger. You’re not wrong, but fuck off.
How have Karen Gillan and Mary Elizabeth Winstead both been in the staring role of mediocre movies in the same year? Absolute waste of fantastic talents between both of them. Who keeps writing the same fucking action movie and who keeps greenlighting these?
Anyone else tired of the small child inserted into hardcore action thriller to soften the character’s initial resolve?
Hear you.But I like genre conventions, and wolf-and-cub is one of my favorites.
Atomic Blonde
Red SparrowHannahAvaAnnaKateLOL
… point?
They’re all really original movies.
Oooh I actually made a list about this the other day. Some are definitely part of a trend, and others are just movies that are in the same vein. Seems 2011 was a particularly prolific year. Here’s what I got:
Nikita (1990)Ms. 45 (1981)Salt (2010)Colombiana (2011)Haywire (2011)Hanna (2011)Lucy (2014)Atomic Blonde (2017)Red Sparrow (2018)Ava (2020)Proud Mary (2018)Destroyer (2018)Anna (2019)Peppermint (2018)Gunpowder Milkshake (2021) Kate (2021) The Villainess (2017)
Point of No Return (1993)
Which others am I missing?
I’ll bite: how many of those are made up?
None! I haven’t seen all of them, but I remember them all existing. The Villainess fucking rocks, btw, its South Korean action flick and belongs to a sub-sub-genre within these movies of “girls/women unwillingly forced or raised to be assassins” which includes Nikita (which heavily inspired The Villainess), Point of No Return (remake of Nikita), Red Sparrow, Hanna, and Gunpowder Milkshake. The motorcycle bit in John Wick 3 was directly inspired by a bonkers sequence in The Villainess.
I don’t think Destroyer fits. It is much more of a character study/drama. There’s very little action.
Good list of hitwomen/female assassins. I contribute some that you missed.Lady Snowblood (1973) – Meiko Kaji (it’s the film that inspired the character of Lucy Liu in Kill Bill).Love Song of Vengeance (1974) – the sequel of the film above.The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) – Geena Davis.Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) – Angelina Jolie.Wanted (2008) – Angelina Jolie again.I don’t think Lucy really tracks, though. She was a lowlife nobody that got transformed into a goddess.Destroyer: she was mostly a messed-up cop. And I don’t remember her doing very impressive action stuff, just running around looking beat.Ms. 45 is more of a rape & revenge thing. If that counts, then the entirety of the subgenre counts. Or at least Revenge (2017) with Matilda Lutz and A Vigilante (2018) with Olivia Wilde.
Long Kiss Goodnight kind of sucks. My only takeaway from it is “What? Chefs do that.”.I really, really enjoyed Mr & Mrs Smith. It’s a little disturbing for minute, when Brad Pitt is beating the shit out of Angelina at their house. But I adore enjoy the banter during the car chase.
“I told you your mom looked like that actress!”
“Yeah yeah.”and“I’ve never cooked anything in my life.”
“Web. Of. Lies!”
I think Jolt pretty much qualifies. Watched it on a whim last night never having heard of it. It was fine for what it was, but damn, the cast: Kate Beckinsale, Stanley Tucci, Bobby Canavale, Laverne Cox, Susan Sarandon, Jai Courtney, David Bradleyu
Have you ever seen Chloe Sevigny in Hit & Miss? 2012 TV series. She plays a transgender (MTF) hitman in Ireland. Trying to make her numbers while raising two biracial kids and easing a boyfriend into her new life. Giallo-level killings + tense Brit drama beats. How it works I don’t know.Also: Zoe Bell, Angel of Death. TV series 2009. Same vibe.
The Rhythm Section (2020)
The Protege seems like it’s close enough to the specifics and even came/comes out this year yet somehow it doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar. Was I the only person who got banner ads for that?Considering it’s from the director of Casino Royale and stars Maggie Q, frequent supporting player and star of a TV reboot in this same realm it’s weirdly a non-entity. Is this since Gong Li dropped out of it? The trailer also made it seem like the lead’s ethnicity was going to be a component of the film.
Nikita is just brilliant.
“Which others am I missing?”
Yes, if you’re attempting to make ANY type of point.
Finally! The Villainess rules! Get with program people. (I know it’s subjective, don’t lash out. Thank you.)
Salt is pretty damn good.Haywire has its moments.
I’m just waiting for Karen, whose tipping point will be not being allowed to speak to your manager.
Did The AV Club review Gunpowder Milkshake? It was meh, had cartoonish violence, and wasted most of its stellar cast.How about The Protégé? It was okay, had great action scenes but is forgettable.
They reviewed Gunpowder Milkshake, and some how that piece of shit got a B, so this one getting a D+ makes it sound incredibly dire. I got so excited for Gunpowder Milkshake based on the premise, trailer, and cast. Once I found out it was a Netflix movie I tried to lower my expectations, but it still limboed right under them with its half-assed script and weak action, completely wasting a bunch of actresses I love. My wife and I didn’t even finish the last 30 minutes (and man, it was way too long yet somehow managed to feel like it skipped all character and plot development).https://www.avclub.com/gunpowder-milkshake-is-a-better-jackie-chan-homage-than-1847270791
Def one of the most disappointing releases in recent memory. I also was hyped on everything about it beforehand but wooof.Also, and I know I am an extreme minority here: The Old Guard was garbage.Anyway I’ve been here enough… years? decades? to know not to trust the grades or reviews. Especially when it comes to movies, so I’ll probably end up giving this a shot.
I actually enjoyed the premise, cast, and character stuff in Old Guard but I thought the action was functional at best and it occasionally betrayed its big-but-not-quite blockbuster budget. And even though I would give the movie a B and the action a C, that’s probably the BEST Netflix original flick I have seen outside of the Oscar-bait projects. At least it wasn’t so boring and lazy that I had time to start re-writing it in my head while I was watching it like I did with Gunpowder Milkshake.
It’s crazy how much money Netflix spends on these originals while clearly never consulting a script reader.
Yeah it’s a recurring problem that Netflix originals just seem to get the first draft of a script and call it a day. They’ll drop endless funds on creators, actors and production but never the writing.I kinda think it’s because they’re thinking worldwide and all their stuff is going to be dubbed or subtitled anyway so dialog might as well be as basic and straightforward as possible.
If it was just dialogue I could more easily shrug it off. But it’s shallowness of character, weakness of plot, ham-fisted and unearned sentimentality… Just really bad writing. I personally find the sentimentality particularly gross. It’s such nakedly crass attempts at emotional manipulation.
It suffered from what a lot of Netflix movies seem to, in that the way it’s shot (camera or lens or filter, I do not know) looks cheap. The world also felt very small, only a few set pieces with very fake looking backgrounds. Forgettable action. Forgettable characters, aside maybe from the non hetero couple. Annoying cookie cutter villain who’s whole plan is dumb as rocks.I will say, I have some hope for the planned followup. I wanna see how the woman at the bottom of ocean turns out. THAT could get into some interesting territory.But yeah, I guess I was just baffled it seems to get so much praise. Honestly I would not doubt if that contributed to my disliking of it, so that’s on me. It’s got some good ideas, great cast, but it mostly just ended up annoying me the more I thought about it.
The Old Guard. the dialogue is bad, the characters are bad, the fight choreography is terrible, the story is bland, the acting is bad. It is not even worth a rewatch. Unlike Extraction, which is also bad but the action scenes are done well enough that I can rewatch it from time to time
I don’t get all the love The Old Guard keeps getting. For a group of warriors, they don’t seem to get strategy and other basic military stuff, and keep getting beaten by amateurs.
To be fair, the AV Club assigned different reviewers to the two movies.
I’m confused you seem to think John Wick was some original concept.
The concept isn’t original. But that it’s clearly the current ur-text for these sorts of films shouldn’t require a footnote about the history of vigilante/assassin films back to Yojimbo.
i haven’t seen it yet, but if you can’t take away anything else good from it, at least there’s Band Maid! they’re so great <3
“This declaration probably could’ve been made a couple movies ago, but…”But, yeah, let’s lose our shit because a woman stepped in.
There’s been a bunch with women already, it’s not 2013 anymore.
“But, yeah, let’s lose our shit because a woman stepped in.”|
Yeah, because the FIRST ONE didn’t star a woman, you fucking idiot.
My impression of this from the trailers was Crank but not insane. And that’s not good, needs more madness.
So when are we going to get an adaptation of Vertigo’s 100 Bullets?
Netflix is ass in general when it comes to action. They apparently fail at hiring anyone who knows how to shoot it, the scripts are rote, the only thing pulling in actors are the nice paydays. Even the stuff that’s got potential like The Old Guard, the action is just incredibly average.
How do we square this headline with 1) Star Wars movies and 2) superhero movies?
I’m surprised we haven’t gotten an Scary Movie type parody of John Wick style movies yet.
This seems like as good a place as any to say I think Netflix has really dropped off in quality programming over the past few years. The last original Netflix film I recall being legitimately wowed by was THE OLD GUARD, and I dug the series BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR. But unless they catch a Lee/Scorsese/Baumbach/Sorrentino-level director’s work, it’s pretty sketchy over there.
So they pulled out an unused Black Widow screenplay?
Wait…now white people can’t kill Asian villains in movies without being “problematic”?
Nice, another movie that reminds us that smoking is cool!Does she do blow too?
“Enough already with the John Wick duplicates”
Yeah, you’ve loved every single one, but now that there’s a single sub-par you’re going to pretend you’re fed up with them!!!!
“sameless tepid gruel” Welcome to the dietary habits of bachelorhood Charles
watched The Yakuza last night, was pretty dope.
Felt surprisingly gorey and it did feel a bit white-saviory at times (also the plot was very predictable to put it mildly), but I dug the visuals, the lead was cool, some of the action was REALLY good and I’m currently listening to BAND-MAID on loop as a result.Not a super inspired narrative but I’d give it a solid C in the “you’ve clicked this to enjoy some action for 90 minutes” genre.Definitely better than that time-loop one on Amazon with Mel Biggotson.
So finally saw it this weekend and I just realised what’s wrong with this review and the movie. A large part of the appeal and what makes JW so great and work as a template is basically the action choreography and a sly sense of humour. It’s like diehard where McClaine is unkillable and not an underdog in a confined space. Kate has action scenes that are serviceable and little time for humor. Gunpowder milkshake beats this on both of those parameters which is why it was better. Neither of those come close to JW or Nobody which is why both of them falter. You want a female protagonist JW remake the Villainess but less melodrama and inject some levity – and for the love of god keep that wow choreography.
I’m just here to talk about how great that car chase scene was. Rest of the movie was meh.
(Same-ish deal as Gunpowder Milkshake, though in that one, Gillan’s character was only jabbed with a paralyzing serum. It wore off after about half an hour, much like this movie.)This is just a baffling sentence. I can’t tell whether you mean that Kate’s poison wears off in 30 minutes, which is absurdly false, or that you were bored of Kate in 30 minutes, and you’re making a desperately thin connection between two movies solely in the service of a weak and badly worded jab.The paralytic in Gunpowder Milkshake is an inconvenience to the main character in order to create two mildly clever set pieces–the gun fight and the car chase. It was disposed of after that, because it wasn’t the plot of the movie. Kate’s poison, while the degree to which she’s impeded does change depending on the needs of the scene, hovers over the entire film. It’s explicitly stated early on that this is not a movie where she’ll find a cure and get a happy ending. She is going to die, very soon, and she’s going to use that time to get revenge.
Kate started out okay. The fight scenes were pretty badass, and the cinematography really captured the colorful, vibrant Tokyo, but about halfway through, I lost interest. Winstead was fine, but let’s be real, and as the review author states, we’ve seen this way too many times before. I guess the female badass assassin is the new badass assassin. Nothing really changed though. There’s no real chemistry between Kate and her ward, like we’ve seen before. And the DOA vibe didn’t really resonate. It all seems too over the top and not enough boots on the ground.
“Enough already with the John Wick duplicates”
So, John Wick was the first action movie with a hitman in it?
Or maybe this movie was clearly much more influenced by Japanese and HK cinema than it was by Derek Kolstad’s brand-new, first-ever idea of having a hitman kill a bunch of other underworld people.
Okay, so we just watched this movie tonight.It’s not a good sign that almost everything in the film seems to have come from somewhere else…I’m not sure that’s a correct assessment.First off, I think you’re underplaying it. It’s not almost everything in the film that seems to have come from somewhere else. It’s goddam everything that seems to have come from somewhere else!
Second, as the movie goes on, the star that emerges is the truly demented list of OBVIOUS and OVERT influences. A non-exhaustive list:Black RainTokyo Mater (yes!)Atomic Blonde & John Wick (2 or 3)Kill Bill 1 (scene with Crazy 88s)D.O.A. (1988) – w Dennis Quaid; itself a remake of a 1950 noirDie Hard (Shoot. The glass!)The Challenge (1982) – Toshiro Mifune & Scott GlenLa Femme Nikita & Leon The Professional
The Mechanic (1972) & The American (2010)
maybe a hint of You Only Live Twice (final seige)
It’s kind of glorious, how many movies the filmmakers managed to steal pieces from to stuff into this one. Note, I’m definitely not trynna say that I’m too good for this material. I love all that shit above.The movie feels very much like how Quentin Tarantino & Edgar Wright swallowed a whole bunch of 60s & 70s movies in their youth and have been vomiting them back up in riotous and fun reconfigurations. Same – what, feel? concept? method? mix of homage and plagiarism? – but different & whackier set of influences.This is a movie that seemed to me kind of dumb & formulaic (and way too dark) in the first half. But it opened up in the second half, becoming so over-the-top with its references that it became really fun.
And Crank! Can’t believe I forgot to list Crank as one of the influences.