The November Man: A Netflix find I watched In the Theater

I have a soft spot in my heart for action movies--I have watched and enjoyed (because of my ability to post-phone criticism) openly illogical and over-the-top shoot-em-ups like all three Expendables movies, because I grew up watching Rambo and Commando and all the Steven Seagal movies and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action movies, and so, so much more. I viewed them as a nice break from the teen slasher movies.  So I am forgiving of mindless action flicks. The November Man isn't technically an action film, but it isn't exactly the post-Cold War thriller it wants to be.

If I judged it on action movie terms, it is too slow-paced and has unnecessary character details. If I judged it as a spy thriller, well, it has some plot holes that are just awkward, and the movie has a real dilemma because it has at least one scene where an actual atrocity is committed by the Pierce Brosnan character (who we're supposed to sort of like, I guess) in order to shame his former protégé-turned-assailant about his inhumanity. He slices an innocent young lady's leg, after having held a gun on her.

Let that sink in: This movie has a female character who exists just so that the main character can brutalize her to prove a point in a very dumb way to another male character, because...

Uh, no movie. I will not play along with that. There is no "why" other than convenience.  We are never told what happens with her by the way--spoiler alert! Because technically, why should we care what happens to her so long as the lesson is learned!

I don't want to give away too much of the twists. Brosnan is good, he always is, here in a kind of "past-it and jaded, being a spy was never like "Bond" anyway", sort of way. Bill Smitrovich is impressive, and his character is not a good one. But he still owned it.

The acting is not any of the problem here. It's the story and the framing.

 Some of what happens makes no logical sense--and I have to be snotty--really? The movie has one of those awful "dude walking away from exploding car" cliché scenes--yawn. Car chases and the necessary accidents exist in a world where, apparently, cops and emergency vehicles don't.  Surveillance drones just fling about over major cities like no one would notice. Women seem to exist to be victims. Cats walk through walls. Being suspected of being semi-traitorous does not get you at least a suspension from a managerial position at a spy agency (well, I presume that shouldn't be true...). People just punch up intimate data about other people via a password over their phones or laptops (I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's bordering Snowden territory--way-too-easy.) The machina is all too deus-like for my taste.

This is a movie I'd have appreciated as a Netflix find for having some psychological drama and good acting, but on the whole, as a first-run viewing, it isn't great. Interesting and watchable--but not great.

A Good Day to Die Hard Is A Weird Movie to Watch

Okay--this trailer has nothing to do with movie I just saw except that the same people and some scenes are in it. But if you were to take this trailer and spread those scenes out in a movie that served as a justification for some family-based schmaltz and some badass oneliners and some actually mentally insulting chase scene about twenty minutes in that makes you feel a little ashamed for watching--

Oh lord, this is not a smart movie. That doesn't mean it isn't an enjoyable movie--you could like it, if gratuitous car-smashing and shit getting blowed up was your deal, but I'm just saying, if you like your action pictures to make any kind of sense, and have any kind of thin pretext to justify the millions of dollars of collateral damage to cars, trucks, all kinds of infrastructure, and whatnot--not.

This movie has adopted the meta-violence attitude as expressed in such movies as The Expendables franchise, of which Willis is a part. But this isn't even a knowing wink at the gratuitous badness of action movie pretexts--the way any old thing is a gratuitous pretext for porn--for example--so much as a nearly played-straight family movie( the what?) tied up in a genre movie with some real lapses in logical sense and an obvious twist and just some sick lack of attention to the laws of physics or the complete ignorance of the limits of the human body thrown in.

What I'm saying is--this movie is kind of enjoyable, but you really got to put your dumb-hat on to like it. Willis's McClain is a cartoon. His son is a non-entity. Their situation is transparently fucked in a way you can't help but notice all at once before they seem to. And if you can suspend your disbelief that a high-speed truck chase after a terrorist attack on a courthouse can occur without a billionty Moscow police turnout including helicopters and such (because if you don't know, Moscow is kind of the capital city of Russia?), okay. Enjoy away. I'm just saying these lapses killed my enjoyment.

It isn't the worst movie--it just isn't all that good. I can't recommend it unless you are bound and determined to see it, and if that's your thing, you are welcome to it. But it is a damn dumb movie.

Just saw "Red"--liked the heck out of it.

Okay, this was one movie I had to see right away because of the cast: Bruce Willis? John Malkovich. Morgan freaking Freeman....and Dame Helen Mirren? Mary Louise Parker and Karl Urban, who I last saw totally "being" Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in Star Trek? In a spy movie based on a Warren Ellis graphic novel with the promise of things exploding and witty banter? It has Ernest Borgnine in it? Ernest Borgnine is still alive? (And he looks great! Yay, Ernest Borgnine!) And Richard Dreyfuss!

I was so very, very in. Looked quirky, action-y but fun.

And it was!

Willis plays Frank Moses, a retired CIA Black Ops superman who is so lonely he tears up his pension checks to have an excuse to call up Sarah Ross, a pensions bureau customer service cube-rat who is bored with her life, cynical about romance, and yet reads goofy awful romance/thriller novels. (I identified with this character just a little.) His life is depicted as being terribly normal, ensconced in a nice little not terribly fancy suburban home on a nice little suburban block, who pads downstairs one fateful night to have a wet works unit try to ammo the living hell out of him.

When he handles this in a "been there, done that" fashion, dispatching the first squad of "baddies" with smooth ruthlessness, and drawing in the assumed back-up team by "cooking off" some ammo on a skillet to simulate a firefight--all to kill their asses, whilst walking out with his reserve ID in a briefcase he had carefully set aside against the day?

It takes about ten minutes to recognize that whoever is after Frank Moses is about to catch hell. But then there's that matter of the girl he's been calling--

He totally doesn't want her to get caught up in his business. So he kidnaps her.


That bit was a little rough. But it laid out that this movie wasn't about survival, and it wasn't really about revenge, although those things fit in. I consider this kind of a romance. And it's also kind of about how do people navigate in a world that declares them outmoded? That might reject people of great skill for being "too old"? Where lovers make hard life and death decisions, where people really do embrace mayhem constructive, and where young snots seem to discount what the seasoned professional can do in his sleep? This movie is witty, pretty, has explosions and lots of gun play, but it also seems to say stuff.

There's a scene where Frank Moses wails on William Cooper (The Karl Urban character, whose mission is to kill Frank Moses). It seemed kind of like a fantasy-fulfillment: The old guy showing an upstart how it was really done. A lot of the movie is about how people can do surprising things. Helen Mirren is amazing as Victoria, a very feminine, petite, and cold-blooded highly trained assassin. Her character's romance/intrigue with Ivan Simanov (Brian Cox), a Russian, um, diplomat, unfolds in the background of the movie. And that is a story good enough to be a story on its own, too.

And then there's Morgan Freeman, as Joe Matheson, kind of the elder, the voice of wisdom--a seniors- home resident with late-stage cancer who is not interested in going gently into that good night. Being introduced to his last battle, he's ready to fight!

And then there's John Malkovich, as Marvin Boggs, a guy who was deep in "Men who Stare at Goats" or even MK-Ultra territory, who was dosed with LSD on a regular basis for 11 years and as such, is more than a little traumatised. His role is comic because of his oddness, but also tragic. You see a deadly competent professional who has paid with his mind.

I liked the heck out of this movie. The plot leads up to the question of just who is powerful enough to order hits against citizens--which might be a Macguffin for the plot of this movie, but isn't an unreasonable question altogether. Are Vice-Presidents or war-profiteers special people who get away with more? The movie just presents this idea of who the bad guy might be so innocently.

I hope it sinks in and spins around some brain-pans.

But long-story, short? Loved it. Fun. And I like Bruce Willis in things, unless they are Hudson Hawk, which I never could convince myself to like or even watch all the way through. Or Unbreakable, which is an M Night Shamalyan joint and I only watched one of them in theatre all the way through and didn't entirely like it even though by rights I should have thought it was teh awesomes. I think it's the bald head. I have a fetish. Him. Jason Statham. My hubboo, all sporting the Daddy Warbucks look. I dig the smooth. My fetish might go back to envisioning the full monty Sean Connery when I was a wee lass. A look he should have rocked straightaway. Like Patrick Stewart. Mmmmm. Patrick Stewart. But Willis is funny and physical and romantic in this ("gooey", even).

I thought it was a fun one. I recommend it.

"The Expendables"--oh my, my, oh hell yes!

I'd been looking forward to this one from the first moment I caught a glimpse of the movie poster--Stallone, Li, Statham, Willis, Lundgren....

I thought I died and went to action-movie heaven. The promise of a movie that also squeezes in Schwartzenegger, Roarke, Eric Roberts as a bad, bad man, and Randy Couture, Steve Austin, and Terry Crews, and oh by the way, also has kickboxing's awesome Gary Daniels (not a big enough part) and Charisma Carpenter who I adored on Angel (I have unresolved feelings about how her character got handled, is all....)

It's like Christmas! (Um, that's actually the Jason Statham character's name. Although Stallone's "Barney Ross" is a normal enough name, we have Randy Couture as "Toll Road", Mickey Roarke as "Tool", Jet Li, somewhat awfully as "Ying Yang", and Terry Crews as "Hale Caesar"....yeah. These aren't names, they're wrestling handles. Although Randy Couture wins by having such a great name in real life. It's what I would totally name a lingerie store, if I were gonna start one.) There is no way in the universe that such a movie could ever suck with so many awesome people in it, I found myself thinking. In fact, even if it was brainless action nonsense, I would love that it was the quintessence of the genre of brainless action nonsense. More, bigger, faster, things exploding, muscles pumping, dialogue getting chewed up and spit out like a used, whatever those gun cartridge-thingies are called.

And then I saw it, and it was actually good.

Now, by "good", you could be thinking all kinds of things; it was a good action movie. It was a meta-action-movie, also. We begin with a vision of how the "expendable" team works as they bloodily handle a hostage situation involving pirates. It's there that we learn, by way of terse dialogue and loads of action, who the team is and what the character's specialities are. Ross is the leader. Christmas the cocky one with the blades, and Lundgren's Gunnar is a bit of a head-case. But it isn't until the most meta scene in a church where Bruce Willis (or, "Mr. Church") offers a mission in a South American fictional place to Ross's team, or to his rival Trench (fun cameo by Arnold) that the movie is really "set". The Schwartzenegger character immediately thinks the job smells like bad news and exits, and this leaves Ross ready to take up an ugly job with his band of mercenaries.

I'm going to elide over all the plot-bits. You can go watch the movie if you want to know about them. The things I want to point out are that there are some pretty good scenes by Roberts and especially Mickey Roarke. There's this one scene where the camera just focuses on that beat-up face as he goes on about how a life of violence makes you lose your soul--that was deep. Also, a scene I found provocative was where the courageous and dissident daughter of the General of the country where the Expendables are charged with wreaking their havoc is water boarded by the bad guys. To me, this was almost like a statement that this is the kind of thing bad guys do. I don't know if because of my biases I read more into it than was there.

Things blow up, massive quantities of ammo gets used, males bond over smoking, drinking, and getting inked, women are rescued from bad men and there are some pretty righteous fight scenes. Dolph Lundgren and Jet Li get into it in a scene that demonstrates why size isn't always an advantage, and thankfully, there are two good fight scenes with Steve Austin--one with Stallone, which was pretty good, and the one I was waiting for, with Randy Couture, that had some awesomeness but unfortunately, probably because of the tight timing of the movie, couldn't have been longer. That was the match-up I'd have wanted to see more of, just as a long-time wrestling fan.

Anyway, although the violence is ridiculous, the plot could be seen as contrived, and the characters for the most part remain sketchy--I think for your summer action movie dollar, you're really getting bang for your buck. There's some good jokes and if you like machismo or just watching muscle-y guys shoot and/or blow up stuff, which is apparently a fetish I have, you'll enjoy the hell out of this. I sure did.


Although I will say, I sat through a half-hour of adverts before the movie, which almost put me in the wrong mood. Hey--cinema-people! I am not interested in buying a phone or having a Coke. By all means show me previews of similar movies to insure I come back for another motion picture, but don't subject me to such a downer of adverts that I am almost too irked to like the movie once it starts--

Grr! I brought in outside drinks, fools. I wish I brought candy, too! Think about that next time you want to rob me of my experience; I will not eat your nachos, no! Those overpriced nachos are being paid for with what? Cell-phone ads? Adverts for HBO shows that aren't even the demographic of the movie I came to see?

What? I'm sharing my outside candy, too. I'm going to pass out M&M's. And you won't stop me.

No, I kid. I don't share candy. That was just me with my testosterone up from this kick-ass action movie....