Blu-ray Review: Bad Ass 2 - Bad Asses (2014)

Now Available to Own   


  
Photo Slideshow   

There’s an old cliché that states that a gun shown in the first half of a movie will inevitably go off in the second and when you’re talking about Bad Ass 2: Bad Asses, gunplay in both halves is inevitable.

Yet (and far more creatively), when the perpetually fanny pack clad bad ass senior citizen played by Danny Trejo in the first film builds a child a secret door to heighten her hide and seek skills in the sequel, you just know that hiding place will come in particularly handy in the film’s final confrontation of hard-hitting criminals versus card-carrying members of the AARP.

Essentially the sequel stays true to the same formula established in the first movie about a rough and tough but down on his luck Vietnam veteran named Frank Vega (Trejo) who gains unexpected notoriety after cell phone video of him taking on a group of young skinheads terrorizing an old man on a bus goes viral.

If the premise sounds vaguely familiar, that’s probably because writer/director Craig Moss sought inspiration for his hero from the real-life elderly subject of a similar rapidly shared online video.

Of course, that’s where fact ended and Bad Ass fiction began.

Having been forced out of his forty year business operating a hot dog cart due to the sudden popularity of food trucks in the first movie, shortly after footage of his good deed on the bus went viral, the legally disabled Vega found himself venturing into vigilantism after his best friend and fellow veteran was murdered in cold blood.

With the police unable or unwilling to crack the case, Vega took it upon himself to investigate. Successfully unraveling a major political corruption scandal, Vega was named an honorary community police officer before the sequel checks back in with him three years after the events of the previous installment occurred.

Now running a recreational center, we find Vega teaching young men to box while trying to instill some strong morals in them at the same time.

When his favorite and most promising student is found dead in the midst of what appears to be a drug deal gone wrong, Vega once again finds he has no choice but to track down those responsible, regardless of how high up the chain of command the mystery goes.

Looking after Manny’s widowed mother and adorable kid sister, Vega also forms a new alliance with another fellow fighter (clad in sensible senior citizen apparel) in the form of Danny Glover’s ornery Bernie.

An agoraphobic shopkeeper whose store is connected to Vega’s gym, when Bernie falls victim to street violence and the two men team up the first time, it isn’t long before the previous bickering grumpy old geezers become fast friends.

New on disc, Bad Asses utilizes a lot of the same techniques from the first film from the frequent shots of Los Angeles maps that illustrate where the leads are going – following one scumbag’s tip to the next – as well as revisiting some of the same supporting castmates and employing a similar blend of laid back situational humor throughout.

Taking a lot of material from the duo's advancing age and the physical, health-related challenges that go along with it, Moss seasons the film’s obligatory bad ass fights with tongue-in-cheek jokes.

While it goes to the scatological well a few too many times (opting for the same exact flatulence gag in two separate scenes, for example), one positive aspect about the series is that its characters don’t talk like stereotypical movie heroes.

Intriguingly avoiding the tendency of a lot of thematically similar action movies to rely far too heavily on pop culture Tarantino-esque speeches or laughably repetitive f-bomb laced outbursts of profanity, Moss never forgets that he’s making a movie that can charm as well as simply entertain its target senior demographic.

Steering clear of cheap Viagra jokes or opportunities for exploitation that would’ve turned off older viewers, while it doesn’t deliver the same guns-blazing over-the-top spectacle of an Expendables movie, it strikes a nice balance of embellished yet nonetheless still human heroes rather than the near-action figures that populate Stallone’s testosterone fueled franchise.

Despite this, Bad Asses does run out of gas in a far more incredulous car chase laced finale than we witnessed in the first film by amping up the action to dubious heights that goes against Vega's street-fighting man Modus operandi.

Nonetheless, it’s still fun to see Glover and Trejo play off each other as men so set in their ways that they won’t let anyone (including themselves or each other) tell them that they’re "too old for any of this shit," as Glover’s Lethal Weapon alter ego was so fond of saying.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Night Train (2009)

On DVD & Blu-ray 7/7
Pre-Order Now

Photo Slideshow

Bookmark this on Delicious

Print Page





Unfortunately, while I just couldn't get on board with National Entertainment Media's recent release Baby on Board-- the second direct-to-disc offering Night Train (already available for rental at Blockbuster before hitting other chains for sale and rent in July) is a vastly superior work. Additionally, it's also one that you're able to board quite easily as a film fan and then uneasily as you try to figure it all out.

Not quite a horror film due to some clever cuts to shield us from obvious gore nor purely a morality play as mythological ideas and suspense fueled double crosses are woven throughout, at its core, Night Train is essentially a chamber piece.

Furthermore it's one that aside from the scope of the train setting could've actually been played out on the stage as it centers on a main trio of strangers who meet out of random chance around Christmas when they find themselves aboard the Nightingale.



Easily gravitating towards Danny Glover as our main protagonist since he is the conductor (and Danny Glover) and must ensure that all things are running smoothly-- the movie immediately gets us on his side when he lets a strange, troubled, pill-popping foreigner on board without money or a ticket because it's Christmas after all and the weather outside is frightful.



He takes a seat in the same car as a drunk, unhappy, and unsuccessful salesman Peter Dobbs (Steve Zahn) and a bookish pre-med student Chloe (Leelee Sobieski) who pours over gruesome anatomy texts. Yet just moments after he pops more pills courtesy of one of Peter's mini bottles of vodka, the stranger goes out for the count-- a nameless corpse in a train car on Christmas.



While the two passengers and Glover's Miles try to ascertain what happened and get ready to alert the authorities, a box tumbles out of the dead man's belongings revealing an overwhelmingly valuable treasure that-- after some moral hemming and hawing-- the three decide to split three ways.

Realizing that since the man never had a ticket, they could just imagine he was never there in the first place-- soon the trio scheme to get rid of the body to claim the treasure as their own as their interest in the box increases in equal measure to their anxieties and suspicions about one another.

For although this initial and literal stranger on the train is the Nightingale's first corpse, he's far from its last as others show up looking for the box, passengers grow more concerned and the three reveal aspects about themselves one would never have guessed.

Admittedly it's a familiar premise that feels at once like we're moving right into A Simple Plan or Shallow Grave territory but suddenly, the filmmaker mixes things up considerably by giving us a new meaning to the term "pandora's box" as Night Train barrels on to a devastating conclusion.

And in writer/director Brian King's feature filmmaking debut, everything feels eerie from the start of a work with a time and setting you're never quite sure about as the overly CGI looking train footage (ghoulish and supernatural like the unintentional but creepy tinged look of Robert Zemeckis' Polar Express) pops right along with the snow in 1080 pixels.

At once, Night Train is a throwback to vintage film noir and classic Hitchcock like The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train and North By Northwest or as King cites in an extra feature, John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon. In the same turn it is also one that knows its cinematic history well with nods to countless works like Murder on the Orient Express utilized throughout a script that was created out of King's affection for the use of trains in old cinema.

Of course, trains themselves can be a metaphor for life (as Glover noted) since they're forever moving and changing as people make choices to get on or off but nonetheless they can be confining and claustrophobic all at the same.



In the standard definition extras-- over fifty minutes in all that's more than half of the film's 91 minute running time-- actress Leelee Sobieski makes an intriguing leap between the three actors (including herself) whom she explains are both "weird collectively... and individually." She cites this decision to cast the very different talents alongside each other as something that heightened the idea of the movie's treasured box being like a toy the three are fighting over in a sandbox.

She's quite right in that it's the characters that drive the piece and Zahn himself chimes in during his solo interview with a similar preference that instead of the treasure or a more clearly defined setting, we're mainly fixated on the three rather strange individuals who together craft the film into a simple, old fashioned American fable or myth.

I couldn't help but realize that in doing so and avoiding specific genre trappings, the need to wrap things up concretely or explain everything too much, King shows that he respects our intelligence enough for viewers to try and get to know the individuals as though we're strangers on the train as well watching the horrific events unfold in near real time.



While admittedly, after a few abysmally bad B-movie thrillers, I wasn't expecting much from the film that skipped the theatre and premiered straight on disc. However, honestly given the dark and uncertain nature of the piece as it slowly moves into Philip K. Dick meets Franz Kafka territory-- although it seems like it would've been a natural for perhaps Lionsgate or Summit Entertainment, I completely understand the lack of a major distributor to put a huge marketing campaign behind a film they can't quite sell as horror or any specified genre.

Although it's definitely not of the caliber of last year's brilliant train thriller Transsiberian-- it's quite a gripping ride that draws you in and doesn't let you step onto the platform easily. For you know that ultimately you're going to have to jumped off-- still dazed and confused by all that's come before it especially since and truer to real life perhaps than films where strangers suddenly tell each other everything in two minutes flat-- we're still not certain who Conductor Miles, Chloe, or Peter were by the time the movie ends.

An unexpected summer sleeper also produced by A-Mark Entertainment, FilmTiger, Rifkin Eberts and Cutting Edge-- the Blu-ray release from National Entertainment Media is exquisitely sharp with heightened artistic external shots that aside from feeling overly digitized add to the ambiance overall. Also featuring Spanish and English subtitles for the deaf and/or hearing imparied as well as impressive-- if not explosive-- DTS HD 5.1 Master Audio and 5.1 Dolby Digital with its widescreen 1.78: 1 aspect ratio-- although the extras are only in standard 480i definition, they're well worth exploring despite a repetition in the interviews and the making-of-featurette footage.



However, you'll want to be sure to view the film before looking for more treasures since spoilers come tumbling out in the extras within an instant. While I may have been an ideal audience member for the movie since much like King, I have a soft-spot for Hitchcock, noir and a genuine fondness for trains on film since the mystery, romance, danger, and metaphors aren't nearly as irresistible in a car, plane, bus, or subway-- it's a ride that I'd recommend taking. And it's definitely all the more enjoyable if you're an experienced ticket holder who's climbed aboard its many cinematic inspirations to be had in journeys of movies past.

Blindness (2008)

“This story does not have one truth, and all the different interpretations make sense…This is a story that must create a lot of questions, but give no answers… It raises issues about man’s evolution, makes us reflect critically, but points in no specific direction…”

– Director Fernando Meirelles as quoted
in the Miramax Films Press Release for Blindness

I begin with this quote in particular, not just because it sort of underscores the pretentious nature of the film, but more importantly because, I’m all for films that challenge the viewer in putting the pieces together, testing our intellect by making us come up with meaning whether it’s discovering a political allegorical subtext in No Country for Old Men or trying to figure out just what the hell is going on in Memento.

And while admittedly despite my high tolerance for art house fare that doesn’t offer an easy way out for the viewer, when we’re presented with something like the cinematic adaptation of Nobel prize-winning author Jose Saramango’s 1998 novel Blindness and adapted by Tony award-winner Don McKellar, we at least want the reassurance that the filmmaking team knows precisely the film they want to make. For--if it had been handled with far more clarity—no doubt the film would’ve resonated better with the audience. We get the sense that there’s a larger purpose to the epic scope of the storytelling, which surrounds a nightmarish outbreak that suddenly inflicts mankind when ordinary citizens begin losing their ability to see (view the trailer).

Beginning with an Asian motorist, soon the bizarre loss of sight (which at first we assume is some sort of nerve induced hysterical blindness) becomes something far more horrifying altogether. And soon-- with the pacing of an action film—more people are infected as they come in contact with the initial man until eventually Sandra Oh’s World Health Initiative quarantines them all into a militaristic compound where they’re left to fend for themselves in a situation that evolves into something resembling at first a prison and then eventually a concentration camp.

While I’m unfamiliar with Saramango’s source material, I understand that it did keep one major storytelling device in serving up a cast of nameless characters known only by a mere description whether it’s Alice Braga’s The Woman with the Dark Glasses or Danny Glover’s The Man With the Black Eye Patch.

The film’s protagonists consist of talented actors Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore as The Doctor and His Wife, respectively. While Ruffalo’s eye doctor loses his sight after trying to treat the first sufferer of what has been since dubbed the “White Sickness,” his devoted wife fakes the same condition in order to journey to the compound and take care of her husband.

Although initially Moore seems to be just playing the supportive and loving sidekick to Ruffalo’s heroic character who becomes the unceremonious "Ward Representative" of their first ward, intriguingly it’s Moore who becomes the true hero of the film. As the leader with sight, she fearlessly takes on Gael Garcia Bernal’s monstrous King of Ward Three—although much too late in this critic’s opinion—as the increasingly dangerous King begins holding the compound’s governmental resources for ransom in the form of money, jewelry, and eventually women.

It’s at about this time that the film seems to truly begin relishing in the utter degradation, depravity, and filth of the situation. Of course, heightened circumstances can bring out the best and worst in people when they are tested but the point could’ve been made in much less than 125 grueling minutes as we begin feeling utterly sickened by seemingly endless frames consisting of naked, dirty starving individuals, urine and fecal matter, a horrific group rape scene that outdoes Kubrick’s infamously brutal “Singin’ in the Rain” routine from A Clockwork Orange and more.

And that is not to say that illustrating a dystopia on film doesn’t have value as Alfonso Cuaron’s brilliant Children of Men did this much better and even the less-than-stellar gore fests of 28 Days Later, I Am Legend and Stephen King’s The Mist raised far more questions about the dangers of scientific experimentation, group think, and discovering our true nature at the worst of times. Yet, structurally, something is awfully amiss in Blindness. And honestly, it’s an extremely disappointingly exploitative, utterly ugly film that instantly made me want to watch Meirelles’ first groundbreaking effort, City of God (one of the greatest films of the 00’s) and its Oscar winning follow-up The Constant Gardener just to remember the talent he possesses, not to mention do more research on the original book.

For, as we the press exited into the lobby from the darkness of the film which just sort of stops after a surprisingly important yet far too briefly explored plot point, we’re left wondering just what it all means and if Meirelles actually knew in the first place the type of film he wanted to make. My theory is that he was so fascinated by the idea and the topics therein that he neglected to fine-tune it into a workable thesis statement, thereby closing audience’s minds instead of opening them for discussion.

Although one critic joked that if he was forced to watch it again, he would kill himself and another said it was one of the worst films he’d ever seen, I wouldn’t go that far, yet it’s one of the biggest letdowns of 2008. In fact, trouble was predicted following its premiere as the Opening Night Selection at the Cannes Film Festival which left critics divided and Blindness was sent back for reworking (Entertainment Weekly, pg. 55; 8/22/08).

Yet despite the changes, we’re left not just thoroughly confused but realize at last that we really don’t care. And while I was charged with the argument that if it remains in your head hours later, it was a good film, I disagree. For it remained there precisely because it wasn’t a good film as my head was filled with the grotesque imagery of fecal matter and sexual assaults, and wondering why the celluloid was wasted in the first place.

Although my guess is that it will most likely be viewed as a religious parable, an indictment on governmental ineffectiveness in the wake of a tragedy, a commentary on the darkness of human nature, an allegory that illustrates the terror of Nazi like group think, or a warning about where we are headed. Yet, ultimately asking us to sit through something as endlessly bleak, overwhelmingly brutal as Blindness where in the end the questions it raised and the filmmaker’s intention are greater than the sum of its horrible parts, makes Meirelles’ opening quoted goal seem pointless, shallow, and a bit sadistic in the end.