Chris Knipp
02-02-2013, 01:22 AM
Taylor Hackford's PARKER and Kim Jee-woon's THE LAST STAND (2013)
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/640x480q90/674/P2MDtK.jpg
JAY-LO STRIPS FOR JASON IN PARKER
More than surviving
Two movies from Hollywood's January dump season this week feature action stars, one old, one younger, who wage mayhem in the cause of integrity. The message is mixed. The level of artistic endeavor is not high. But the entertainment value isn't lacking.
Jason Statham is featured as Parker, its eponymous protag used in several dozen novels by Donald E. Westlake, the high-production noir crime writer who also did the adapted screenplay (from Jim Thompson) for Stephen Frears' now classic The Grifters. Other screen morphings of Parker occurred in Point Blank, The Split, and Payback. This is a hard man to reckon with, a man of changing identities who looks good driving a luxury car but can't be beaten in a fight. He's in something like Elmore Leonard country here, Florida, a land full of glitz and poseurs. A group of crooks he stages a carnival robbery with do him wrong. They are also careless in their staging of the robbery, causing reckless endangerment of the crowd. Parker, who does not approve of any of this, spends the rest of the movie getting back at them. Parker is entertaining, attractive-looking trash, with the clear skies, shiny water and billionaire mansions of West Palm Beach, the gravel-voiced Nick Nolte as an aging cohort located elsewhere, and two attractive women who come and go as needed, Emma Booth as Parker's loyal girlfriend Clare and Jennifer Lopez as Leslie Rodgers, a failing real estate agent who collaborates with Parker in his revenge caper and would have liked more. Later she does a strip for him (and us) to show she's not wearing a wire. Bobby Cannavale comes and goes as a nice cop who wants to date her. The prefers trouble. There's a sad wistfulness about Jay-Lo. When Leslie says she's "pushing forty," she means it. It's pushing her now.
The studly Statham is noted for his violent actioners, and does not disappoint here. Parker refuses to kick in his take from the carnival heist to finance another bigger robbery (it's preposterously complicated; both heists involve setting fires and terrorizing a crowd) and gets into a violent fight in the getaway car with his cohorts after the first robbery that ends with him shot and rolled down into a ditch and left for dead. He survives to drop a knife-wielding bad guy off a high-rise balcony with a dagger through one hand and multiple broken ribs. Clare patches him up and Leslie's soap-addicted mother (Patti LuPone ) serves him healing sopa de pollo. These brutal fights are well done. You can see, more or less, what's happening. Likewise the bad guys of the two heists are well delineated, especially the ring leader Nolander (Michael Chiklis) and his lieutenant Hardwicke (Michah Hauptman), a shifty guy responsible for some of the worst moves in the robbery.
Parker has some nice scenes in it. A sequence where Leslie takes Parker (under an alias) around to look at Palm Beach mansions out of Architectural Digest has a nice irony. Both are playacting, far out of their depth, even though he's driving a Bentley convertible and she's visited these houses many times. What he's really doing, apart from warding off Leslie's passes, is looking for Nolander's hideout, and miraculously, he finds it. The hustle and bustle of those two fancy heists is fun to watch, though you can't help wishing Hitchcock or Soderbergh were staging them.
Parker is beyond good and evil, a blank slate so existential he provided the basis for Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA, but with his own ruthless code, from which he rarely deviates. "It's not about the money," he says as he tops an odious Mafia fence. This is is a true January movie because nobody takes this genre seriously without the dialogue of Elmore Leonard.
Maybe The Last Stand is in a different category, because it represents not only Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to feature film protagonist, but also because it represents the Hollywood debut of the Korean auteur Kim Jee-woon. Kim is remembered for The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, and for his exhausting recent study of a serial killer, I Saw the Devil. He is a virtuoso of violence. Walter Chaw, the passionate head online critic of Film Freak Central, calls Kim a "genius," his Tale of Two Sisters a "landmark." But Chaw admits he must compromise his values for this English-language effort, and ends only with the wish that Kim doesn't take as long to leave Hollywood and go back home to Seoul as John Woo did (about a decade) to return to Hong Kong.
This return of The Gubernator to full scale screen action shows him to be a less durable hard man than Clint Eastwood, whose political break, as the mayor of Carmel, California, was less strenuous than confronting the disastrous budget problems of the most populous state in the US. Clint, obviously also a director, also honed his Attitude longer and better. And he's grumpier. Arnold is downright cuddly at times. He stands fast, and he stands last, but he's not such a meanie. His hardest word is "schmuck!" -- a term that does bring a smile coming from the mouth of an Austrian body builder, though the humor is feeble. He gets to deliver a few of his laborious lines, like the exchange:
"How are you, Sheriff?"
"Old."
Unlike Parker, which is consistent and linear, The Last Stand, understandably considering its multi-ethnic origins, is quite a hybrid. Not that that's anything new, given the long incestuous relationship between Westerns and samurai movies. Takishi Miiki (more prolific than Donald E. Westlake ever was) recently made a movie billed in English as Sukiyaki Western Django, by the way; Kim's The Good, the Bad, and the Weird is a humorous take on the Spaghetti Western too. But actually submitting to Hollywood rules on its own turf is a different matter. In Kim's Hollywood debut a traditional OK Corral Western is blended with a druglord caper film. The dashing South American drug lord Gabriel Cortez (Edoardo Noriega) has outwitted Forest Whitaker's FBI boss man agent guy, staging, and we mean staging, an elaborate escape during a transfer from one prison to another. There are at least a couple of dozen men simply dressed in orange jump suits to run around and confuse the cops about where Cortez has gone.
This has nothing to do with a Western. Neither does Cortez's wild ride in a super special car show quality Corvette ZR1 with a zillion horsepower, which he plans to drive across the Arizona-Mexico border at high speed with a pretty female FBI agent in tow. Somehow Kim and his crew of writers manage to combine this with an old fashioned cowboy defense of his small town. In defending it, the improbably named Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger) pretty much destroys it, reminding me of E.L. Doctorow's virtuoso novelette, Welcome to Hard Times (filmed with Henry Fonda in 1967). Like Parker, The Last Stand provides an arsenal of weaponry (here it's a stash held by Johnny Knoxville). Unlike Parker, this film seems obligated to use TommyGuns and blow up a lot of things. Arnold and Edoardo do have a Statham-style mano-a-mano battle on a deserted bridge, but the screenplay's, perhaps Arnold's own, insistence that he's somehow geriatric, leads to a somewhat befuddling combination of ultra-violence, actioner, and running joke. Why do the critics like The Last Stand better than Parker? Because more's going on, I guess. Forest Whitker always adds energy and class. Kim is out of his element and language group, but he provides humor, horror, and style, and knows how to take a helpful breather between spates of hyper-activity. Chaw says the movie references all the pictures Schwarzenegger's ever made ane even one he never got to do. You even get to see Harry Dean Stanton get killed. Parker provides simpler pleasures, but who remembers another Jason Statham flick?
The Last Stand, 107mins, opened in the US 18 Jan. 2013. Parker, 118mins, opened in the US 25 Jan.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/640x480q90/674/P2MDtK.jpg
JAY-LO STRIPS FOR JASON IN PARKER
More than surviving
Two movies from Hollywood's January dump season this week feature action stars, one old, one younger, who wage mayhem in the cause of integrity. The message is mixed. The level of artistic endeavor is not high. But the entertainment value isn't lacking.
Jason Statham is featured as Parker, its eponymous protag used in several dozen novels by Donald E. Westlake, the high-production noir crime writer who also did the adapted screenplay (from Jim Thompson) for Stephen Frears' now classic The Grifters. Other screen morphings of Parker occurred in Point Blank, The Split, and Payback. This is a hard man to reckon with, a man of changing identities who looks good driving a luxury car but can't be beaten in a fight. He's in something like Elmore Leonard country here, Florida, a land full of glitz and poseurs. A group of crooks he stages a carnival robbery with do him wrong. They are also careless in their staging of the robbery, causing reckless endangerment of the crowd. Parker, who does not approve of any of this, spends the rest of the movie getting back at them. Parker is entertaining, attractive-looking trash, with the clear skies, shiny water and billionaire mansions of West Palm Beach, the gravel-voiced Nick Nolte as an aging cohort located elsewhere, and two attractive women who come and go as needed, Emma Booth as Parker's loyal girlfriend Clare and Jennifer Lopez as Leslie Rodgers, a failing real estate agent who collaborates with Parker in his revenge caper and would have liked more. Later she does a strip for him (and us) to show she's not wearing a wire. Bobby Cannavale comes and goes as a nice cop who wants to date her. The prefers trouble. There's a sad wistfulness about Jay-Lo. When Leslie says she's "pushing forty," she means it. It's pushing her now.
The studly Statham is noted for his violent actioners, and does not disappoint here. Parker refuses to kick in his take from the carnival heist to finance another bigger robbery (it's preposterously complicated; both heists involve setting fires and terrorizing a crowd) and gets into a violent fight in the getaway car with his cohorts after the first robbery that ends with him shot and rolled down into a ditch and left for dead. He survives to drop a knife-wielding bad guy off a high-rise balcony with a dagger through one hand and multiple broken ribs. Clare patches him up and Leslie's soap-addicted mother (Patti LuPone ) serves him healing sopa de pollo. These brutal fights are well done. You can see, more or less, what's happening. Likewise the bad guys of the two heists are well delineated, especially the ring leader Nolander (Michael Chiklis) and his lieutenant Hardwicke (Michah Hauptman), a shifty guy responsible for some of the worst moves in the robbery.
Parker has some nice scenes in it. A sequence where Leslie takes Parker (under an alias) around to look at Palm Beach mansions out of Architectural Digest has a nice irony. Both are playacting, far out of their depth, even though he's driving a Bentley convertible and she's visited these houses many times. What he's really doing, apart from warding off Leslie's passes, is looking for Nolander's hideout, and miraculously, he finds it. The hustle and bustle of those two fancy heists is fun to watch, though you can't help wishing Hitchcock or Soderbergh were staging them.
Parker is beyond good and evil, a blank slate so existential he provided the basis for Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA, but with his own ruthless code, from which he rarely deviates. "It's not about the money," he says as he tops an odious Mafia fence. This is is a true January movie because nobody takes this genre seriously without the dialogue of Elmore Leonard.
Maybe The Last Stand is in a different category, because it represents not only Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to feature film protagonist, but also because it represents the Hollywood debut of the Korean auteur Kim Jee-woon. Kim is remembered for The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, and for his exhausting recent study of a serial killer, I Saw the Devil. He is a virtuoso of violence. Walter Chaw, the passionate head online critic of Film Freak Central, calls Kim a "genius," his Tale of Two Sisters a "landmark." But Chaw admits he must compromise his values for this English-language effort, and ends only with the wish that Kim doesn't take as long to leave Hollywood and go back home to Seoul as John Woo did (about a decade) to return to Hong Kong.
This return of The Gubernator to full scale screen action shows him to be a less durable hard man than Clint Eastwood, whose political break, as the mayor of Carmel, California, was less strenuous than confronting the disastrous budget problems of the most populous state in the US. Clint, obviously also a director, also honed his Attitude longer and better. And he's grumpier. Arnold is downright cuddly at times. He stands fast, and he stands last, but he's not such a meanie. His hardest word is "schmuck!" -- a term that does bring a smile coming from the mouth of an Austrian body builder, though the humor is feeble. He gets to deliver a few of his laborious lines, like the exchange:
"How are you, Sheriff?"
"Old."
Unlike Parker, which is consistent and linear, The Last Stand, understandably considering its multi-ethnic origins, is quite a hybrid. Not that that's anything new, given the long incestuous relationship between Westerns and samurai movies. Takishi Miiki (more prolific than Donald E. Westlake ever was) recently made a movie billed in English as Sukiyaki Western Django, by the way; Kim's The Good, the Bad, and the Weird is a humorous take on the Spaghetti Western too. But actually submitting to Hollywood rules on its own turf is a different matter. In Kim's Hollywood debut a traditional OK Corral Western is blended with a druglord caper film. The dashing South American drug lord Gabriel Cortez (Edoardo Noriega) has outwitted Forest Whitaker's FBI boss man agent guy, staging, and we mean staging, an elaborate escape during a transfer from one prison to another. There are at least a couple of dozen men simply dressed in orange jump suits to run around and confuse the cops about where Cortez has gone.
This has nothing to do with a Western. Neither does Cortez's wild ride in a super special car show quality Corvette ZR1 with a zillion horsepower, which he plans to drive across the Arizona-Mexico border at high speed with a pretty female FBI agent in tow. Somehow Kim and his crew of writers manage to combine this with an old fashioned cowboy defense of his small town. In defending it, the improbably named Ray Owens (Schwarzenegger) pretty much destroys it, reminding me of E.L. Doctorow's virtuoso novelette, Welcome to Hard Times (filmed with Henry Fonda in 1967). Like Parker, The Last Stand provides an arsenal of weaponry (here it's a stash held by Johnny Knoxville). Unlike Parker, this film seems obligated to use TommyGuns and blow up a lot of things. Arnold and Edoardo do have a Statham-style mano-a-mano battle on a deserted bridge, but the screenplay's, perhaps Arnold's own, insistence that he's somehow geriatric, leads to a somewhat befuddling combination of ultra-violence, actioner, and running joke. Why do the critics like The Last Stand better than Parker? Because more's going on, I guess. Forest Whitker always adds energy and class. Kim is out of his element and language group, but he provides humor, horror, and style, and knows how to take a helpful breather between spates of hyper-activity. Chaw says the movie references all the pictures Schwarzenegger's ever made ane even one he never got to do. You even get to see Harry Dean Stanton get killed. Parker provides simpler pleasures, but who remembers another Jason Statham flick?
The Last Stand, 107mins, opened in the US 18 Jan. 2013. Parker, 118mins, opened in the US 25 Jan.