Tag: action

Dumb rich party girl Sophie Nelisse (of The Book Thief) with a new inheritance goes to Morocco with new bodyguard Noomi Rapace (from the good Dragon Tattoo movies), shit goes bad, and bodyguard has to keep her alive and try to figure out who's behind it. None of which is particularly new or interesting by itself, but the movie pulls out a few good moves.

The fights are good close-up struggles, a little jump-cut-heavy instead of the long tracking shots I prefer. The fortress kasbah is interesting, security system's not complete movie bullshit but visual enough to follow on screen.

I think they wanted to make another Man on Fire, but Creasy is a far more complex character than Sam, and there's more plot and bonding in that film; this isn't slow, but there's nowhere near enough plot, and it just kinda trails off at the ending.

★★★½☆ which is what Netflix originals seem to get for the most part.

Someone please inform Netflix that disco is not appropriate at any time. I could go the rest of my life without hearing Earth Wind and Fire's awful falsetto and Casio demo loop "music".

When Mads is brooding or doing a job, it's shot like a Scandinavian crime drama, grainy camera and maybe teal/orange crap. Everywhere else, the color palette is super-saturated like a Technicolor cartoon.

Anyway. Crew of young Tarantino-wannabe assassins are killing retired assassins, which seems like a job you wouldn't take if you're an assassin, because you'd want to retire someday. Millennials just got no long-term planning skills, I guess.

Mads Mikkelsen's Duncan "Black Kaiser" Vizla is an asshole old assassin with his shit together. Don't get attached to anyone or anything in this. Nothing nice is going to happen.

While he's out being calm and professional, the wannabes are dressing up (mostly Sindy, the Debbie Does Dallas cheerleader of the hit squad) and committing atrocities to try to find Vizla. There's some lovely hits and some really stupid gross-out ones.

The villain is like TV's Frank with an acid burn or wine stain on his face, I can't take him seriously. He's just too fat and petulant, and his entire scam is suicidally stupid.

Yet again women are used as hostages and bait because that's all hack screenwriters can think of doing.

This does, however, have the coolest gun since REASON. I'm disappointed there's no swordfight, though we're teased with one.

Then there's a tacky moral confrontation which tries to make up for all this overly fun violence.

★★★½☆ This is almost the definition of a 3.5: mediocre but engaging enough that you should watch it if you like trash movies.

Back in the Good Old Days of the Cold War, I read the hell out of the original 3 Jack Ryan books, and I love the Harrison Ford movies, considerably less the Baffleck "Sum of All Fears". The spinoff pulp books and shitty videogames, far less so. Amazon's now got "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" on Prime, let's see.

Slow start, but obviously a War That Never Ends in Middle-East thing.

Blank-faced drone John Krasinski as Ryan is generically skilled, has war flashbacks while he stares emotionlessly at a ceiling, writes "SQL queries" that pop up graphical displays. He's like someone's shitty PC in Millennium's End RPG, and I don't believe from his walking meatstick "acting" that this Ryan has a PhD in Economics, or even a GED, or really more than a brainstem.

Wendell Pierce (the Bunk!) is promising, but he's playing a last-chance-don't-fuck-this-up bureaucrat section chief, nothing exciting yet.

After a bit, Ryan is Proved Right as in all Jack Ryan stories, and dragged into the field from a party for a rich asshole & his generically pretty but vapid blonde daughter.

Interrogation and the vaguely placed prison are, uh, unpleasant, but nobody's being tortured. Yet. Bombs and guns always get into these, and it's fine but very console-shooter: Indistinct action around a squad shooting aimlessly (because without mouse you can't aim).

It all seems competently produced, poorly acted, and written by very unimaginative frat boys who've played too much Tom Clancy's Rainbow Seven. Long-dead Tom Clancy is the only real writer on the show, and this is "ripped from the headlines" by some necrophiliacs last employed on garbage like Lost.

I'll probably do another couple eps to see if the Bunk does anything good, but I hold little hope unless they replace almost the entire cast and writing room.

★★☆☆☆