One of Seagal's best in years is still weak

Urban Justice (aka "Renegade Justice") (2007)
Starring: Steven Seagal, Eddie Griffin, Carmen Serano, and Kirk B.R. Woller
Director: Don E. FauntLeroy
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

A violent man with a mysterious past, Simon Ballester (Seagal), moves into the worst area of Los Angeles' gang dominated neighborhoods so he can locate and kill the gangbangers who gunned down his police officer son. As he investigates (kicking copious ass as he goes), he discovers the truth about his son's death was far more than just another random gang shooting.


"Urban Justice" is one of the Steven Seagal's better movies in recent years. He's playing a character whose background and style is suitable to his age and bulk; he's working with a director, fight choreographer, and cinematographer who understand how to set up a scene so it looks like Seagal is actually doing some martial arts-so we avoid the embarrasingly obvious stunt doubles who have made him seem to laughable in recent years; and the script gives him some fairly decent lines to deliver... the way Simon Ballester so calmly and good-humoredly discusses death and violence is both funny and chilling.

However, Seagal's lines and the way fight scenes are filmed are just about the only decent thing about the flickhow to shoot a scene. Everything else is Standard Issue Direct-to-DVD Low-Budget Action Film Cliches, with the villains being of a kind we've so many times before they are uninteresting even after the scope of their evil ways has been revealed. The film also suffers from a problem all-too-common in one written by writers who are lazy or of limited talent--every character sounds like every other character, a grave sin in film-writing where characters are defined to a degree by what they say and how they say it. To make matters worse, the writers here also seemed to be shooting for some sort of record for how many times the word "fuck" was used in a single screenplay. I've no doubt that many people are so inarticulate that they say things like "I'm gonna fuck that fuckin' fuck the fuck up!", but to have an entire city full of them gets tiresome. And it dragged the movie down from a rating of 4 to a rating of 5.

If a little more effort had been put into developing the script's story and giving the actors better lines to say, this film could have risen to the level of the projects Seagal did in his glory days--the director and photgrapher certainly did great jobs, and Segal was better here than he's been in a while.

Maybe, just maybe, he's done embarrassing himself, and we can start enjoying his movies again

Connery is Bond one last time... and he rules!

Never Say Never Again (1983)
Starring: Sean Connery, Max von Sydow, Barbara Carerra, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Kim Bassinger, Bernie Casey and Alec McCowen
Director: Irvin Kershner
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

An aging James Bond (Connery) returns to field-agent work when SPECTRE's leader Blofeld (Von Sydow) resurfaces and steals two nuclear warheads.


"Never Say Never Again" is one of those rare times when the movie-going public actually came out ahead as a result of a legal battle between producers. This movie came about because of a settlement relating to the film rights to Ian Fleming's James Bond character, and, while it's a remake of "Thunderball" and not part of the official James Bond movie canon, it's actually a pretty good Bond film. At least if you enjoy classic Bond... if you're a fan of the Daniel Craig movies, you might not like it that much.

Connery's final performance as James Bond (a decade after he swore he'd never play the character again) isn't quite up to "Goldfinger" or "Diamonds Are Forever", but it's still quite good. The mix of humor and coldbloodness that marked Connery's Bond, however, is here in full force and it helps the film immensely.

What also helps the film is Max Von Sydow's Blofeld. It's too bad he didn't play the character in a "real" Bond movie, because he is the best Blofeld save Charles Gray.

And there's the gorgeous Barbara Carerra, who plays one of the very best and sexiest femme fatales to appear in any Bond movie. She was an actress I wanted to see more of in this film, in every sense of that phrase.

For a different take on James Bond, you're better off checking out "Never Say Never Again" than those Daniel Craig films, particularly if you're an old coot who enjoyed "Goldfinger", "From Russia With Love" and "Diamonds are Forever".






(The illo in this post was "borrowed" from the Illustrated 007 blog; it was the poster for the Thai release of "Never Say Never Again," and I LOVE those collage-style poster/cover images! Click here to check out more great James Bond-related artwork.;

'Hard Target' is one that's worth hitting

Hard Target (1993)
Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler, Kasi Lemmons, Chuck Pfarrer and Arnold Vosloo
Director: John Woo
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

When a young woman (Butler) hires a Cajun drifter (Van Damme) to help locate her father (Pfarrer) among the homeless of New Orleans, they become the latest targets of a group that organizes human hunts for twisted rich people.


Chance (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Nat (Yancy Butler) are on the run
from psychopaths who hunt humans on the streets of New Orleans in "Hard Target".

"Hard Target" is one of the very best action films of the 1990s and a high point in the careers of both Jean-Claude Van Damme and Lance Henriksen. The two men give excellent performances--with Van Damme showing great charisma and Henriksen giving his best performance as a bad guy save his role in the 1991 version of "The Pit and the Pendulum".

This is a film with a sharp script and even sharper action sequences. It's a film where the action set pieces--like a very exciting cemetary chase and a fantastic, extended battle in a warehouse--have been copied so many times that I suspect there are filmmakes out there borrowing from third and fourth generation sources with perhaps not having seen the original.

It's also one of the last truly good action films helmed by John Woo; after this point, he became so full of himself as a filmmaker and so wrapped up in "Woo-isms" that he reduced his stylistic signatures to jokes--like the unintentionally funny and completley inexplicable appearance of doves during a fight scene in "Mission Impossible II".

But, whatever ill winds blew across the careers of the principles involved with this picture later, "Hard Target" is an action movie classic.

Sherlock Sunday: The Deadly Necklace

Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962)
Starring: Christopher Lee, Thorley Walters and Hans Söhnker
Director: Terence Fisher
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

Sherlock Holmes (Lee) and his arch-nemisis Professor Moriarity (Söhnker) matching wits over an Egyptian necklace owned by Cleopatra, as it is stolen, recovered, and restolen.



This 1962 German film, with its two British stars and a British director, has surprisingly little to recommend it. The script is like a reject from the Universal Pictures series starring Basil Rathbone (with everything I don't like about the weaker efforts among those amplified ten-fold here, most notably Watson being portrayed as a bumbling, retarded simpleton), with an unbearably bad score.

It's amazing that a film with so much potential--Christopher Lee as Holmes and Terence Fisher directing... should be a sure winner!--could go so wrong. While Christopher Lee is absolutely right in his opinion that he and Thorley Walters more closely resemble the literary Holmes and Watson than any other on-screen pair, and there's no question that Lee gives a good performance as Holmes, there is very little else that works in this movie.

There are a couple of interesting moments between Holmes and Moriarity (who is played by the appropriately sinister German actor Hans Söhnker), but the downside is that they feel like they belong more in a hard-boiled, pulp fiction detective novel than a Holmes adventure.

'Firewall' is predictable and run-of-the-mill

Firewall (2005)
Starring: Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen, Mary Lynn Rajskup, and Robert Patrick
Director: Richard Loncraine
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Computer security expert Jack Stansfield (Ford) must help a group of brutal bank robbers help rob the bank he works for if he is to see his family alive again.


"Firewall" is a straight-forward thriller of the "Everyman is blackmailed and threatened by bad guys, until he finally fights back and wins the day"-variety. There's nothing here that hasn't really been done in other films, but it uses its various tropes and plot pieces effectively and it keeps the tension up and the story moving at a fast clip.

The best part about this movie is that it is so straight-forward; it's downright refreshing to watch a movie where the creators don't feel an urge to throw in badly executed and ill-conceived "surprise developments" and "shocking twists."

I recommend "Firewall" if you want to see a good, old-fashioned thriller with a solid cast and a decent (but not overly original) script.

Big city meets big cowboy hat

Coogan's Bluff (1968)
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Susan Clark, Lee J. Cobb, Tisha Sterling and Don Stroud
Director: Donald Siegel
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

When an impatient sheriff's deputy from Arizona, Coogan (Eastwood), loses a dangerous prisoner in New York City, he receives a crash course in how things are done Back East.


"Coogan's Bluff" is an amusing detective film crossed with a fish-out-of-water story about a cowboy cop applying tough-guy tactics to a manhunt in ultra-liberal New York. Running gags surrounding stereotypes held by New Yorkers about Westerners (such as everyone in a cowboy hat and boots is from Texas) and Coogan's amazement about how law is enforced in the Big City are all well-deployed and delivered with perfect straight faces and comedic timing by the cast.

The only sour note in this excellent film surrounds Coogan's pseudo love interest. Coogan's a womanizer, so he spends the film trying to bed a bleeding-heart parole officer (who is such a bleeding heart that she lets her clients fondle her breasts during meetings). He eventually gets somewhere with her but instead of "closing the deal", he sneaks a look at her files to get a lead on his escaped prisoner. She is naturally angered by this betrayal, yet at the end of the movie she gives him a loving send-off as he heads back to Arizona. I love macho-fantasies as much as the next guy--if only women would fall into our beds over nothing but our tough ways and country charm!--but in the context of the way these two characters interact throughout the movie, it's an eye-rollingly stupid development that leaves the viewer with a final bad impression of what has otherwise been a pretty decent film.

Fans for the laconic Eastwood from films like "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" will love him in "Coogan's Bluff". They're also likely to love the entire movie... so long as the DVD player is stopped after Cobb meets Eastwood in the park and repeats his explanation to Coogan about how things are done in NYC.

Leave this prisoner locked up

The Prisoner (aka "Island of Fire" and "Jackie Chan is The Prisoner") (1990)
Starring: Andy Lau, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, and Tony Leung
Director: Chu Yen Ping
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

Police detective Andy Lau (Lau) goes deep undercover in Hong Kong's harshest prison in order to root out corruption and discover why men are showing up dead in explosions years after they were supposedly executed by firing squad. Along the way, he disspears from the film in favor of numerous subplots that don't really have anything to do with the main storyline but give co-stars Hung and Chan something to do.


"The Prisoner" is one of those films that feel like several script girls were hurrying through the halls of Golden Harvest's offices one day, collided and dropped loose script pages. They tried to sort them out, but they didn't quite succeed... and director Ping went to work with a script that consisted of pieces of numerous movies. The acting is good, there's some great human drama in the film (the Hung character is particularly interesting, as is the tragedy surrounding Chan's character and his deadly feude with a Triad boss), and the action scenes are fabulous, but the plot is too disjointed and unfocused to engage the viewer. The climax of the film in particular seems ludicrous in the extreme, mostly because it isn't set up properly.

I think the most interesting part of the film is that we get to see Jackie Chan in a different kind of movie that what he is usually featured in. Chan's films are almost always fairly lighthearted, with cartoon-style violence. In "The Prisoner", the violence is grim and deadly, and the only lighthearted parts are dark humor. It's also kinda fun to see him doing the typical Hong Kong action movie routines (blazing two-gun flying leaps) intermingled with his own trademmark fighting style.

Oh, and a note to hardcore Jackie Chan fans... despite his name being above the title, Chan plays a fairly small role in the film. Andy Lau is the star *and* its hero. In fact, near as I can tell, the film is only titled "Jackie Chan's 'The Prisoner' as a marketing ploy, as Chan neither directed, wrote, produced, nor did anything other than act in the film (and even that was reportedly to repay a favor he owed the director).