Review of TOP DOG

TOP DOG

Sergeant LOU SWANSON is investigating a hate-crime bombing. His police dog, RENO, a Briard, leads him to a moored boat where Lou finds explosives. Unfortunately, neo-Nazis find him, and shoot both him and the dog. Miraculously, Reno survives.

Switch to detective JAKE WILDER (Chuck Norris), who is grumpily awakened by his chief, KEN CALLAHAN and ordered to find Lou's killers. "I'm on suspension," Jake says, but to no avail; the suspension is canceled. To his further disgust, Jake, a loner, must work with a partner, someone as brilliant and efficient as Jake, but also as insubordinate.  In walks an attractive police officer, Lieutenant SAVANNAH BOYETTE, but she isn't his new associate. Rather, he's to work with the dog, Reno.

It turns out the bombing and murders are due to a nation-wide neo-Nazi conspiracy led by people with unsubtle names like OTTO DIETRICH. Their plan is to combine various hate groups, and bomb a ecumenical brotherhood meeting. They trap a Catholic Bishop, a rabbi, and some Indian looking guy with a pink yarmulke in a limousine with a bomb hidden underneath. Aha, but they haven't reckoned with Jake and Reno.

Reno is the real star of this movie.  The dog follows complicated orders, knows to bite through Jake's bonds without being told, and in general puts Lassie to shame. Why in the world do Lou and Jake feed him jelly donuts; don't the people in this movie know that's not healthy for dogs? And since when do police dogs wander the streets without a leash?

Otto et al need to learn the rules of successful villainy. For example--don't tell an underling to kill the hero and then you walk out of the room. Kill the hero yourself.

Jake, of course, had to disarm the bomb under the limousine. Which wire should he cut, the red or the green? I voted for the red. He doesn't get the girl in the end, but he does get the dog.

Apparently Chuck Norris is a creationist. I don't expect much from karate-expert actors, but a little intellect would be nice.

The movie has a nice though generic anti-bigotry message, but also implies that it's okay for a cop to ignore due process (by not waiting for a search warrant) if he's sure he's in the right.

This is a funny movie. It's easy to rip it apart because of all the foolishness, especially involving the dog, but the combination of action/violence and comedy make for a good workout movie. I give it ++++. It will get your pulse up to a run.

IRON MAN THREE

2014, superhero, fantasy, adventure,

At a New Year's Eve party in 1999, the future Iron Man TONY STARK (Robert Downey Jr), meets an entrepreneur, ALDRICH KILLIAN, who asks for Tony’s support. Tony agrees to meet him on the roof under the fireworks, but instead spends the night with MAYA HANSEN, the inventor of EXTREMIS, a treatment to regenerate lost limbs. However, Extremis has some, ah, strange side effects.

Fast forward several years, and a terrorist called MANDARIN who looks suspiciously like Osama Bin Ladin is setting off bombs in American cities. Officialdom has no clue as to who Mandarin is, how he is setting off the bombs, or even what kind of bombs he uses. Tony tells COLONEL JAMES RHODES he can help the government find Mandarin, but Rhodes rebuffs him.

Tony then issues a public challenge to the Mandarin. Maya Hansen visits Tony's Malibu mansion under the disapproving eyes of Tony's current girlfriend, PEPPER POTTS (hey-I didn’t name her). Maya tells Tony she thinks her boss, Aldrich Killian, is supporting the Mandarin. At that point helicopter gunships attack and destroy Tony’s house. Tony, Pepper, and Hansen manage to escape, but JARVIS, Tony's artificial intelligence robot, sends Tony via his latest Iron Man suit across the country to Tennessee, where the robot thinks the Mandarin is located. Tony's suit, damaged in a crash landing, no longer works and his only help is a ten-year-old boy, HARLEY.

Then matters get complicated.

Did I mention, Tony is also suffering panic attacks from when he fought off aliens in New York?

Plenty of good action sequences and unexpected plot twists, but one of the best aspects of the flick is Tony’s continued one liners. Whether people are about to beat the shit out of him or he’s arguing with Pepper, he always has a snide rejoinder which is so inappropriate as to be funny. Yes, the science is bogus, and yes, there is no character development except at the end where he suddenly conquers his anxieties, but so what. The dialogue is snappy and the pace is good. The only part I really didn’t like was the callous way he treats the boy, Harley.

All in all, this is a fun movie, definitely better than the first of the series.  I give it ++++.  It should get your pulse up to a run. Downey is vacillating on to still another sequel, but if he agrees, I’ll watch that also.

Review of DELTA FORCE

DELTA FORCE

Action, Lee Marvin, Chuck Norris, Teheran, hostage crisis, terrorism, hijacking, 1986

 

The film starts with the unsuccessful 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages seized by Teheran. A helicopter has crashed, and the soldiers are retreating to their plane.  Acting against orders, Captain SCOTT MCCOY (Chuck Norris - who else?), rescues a fellow officer PETE PETERSON and afterwards resigns from the army because he's so disgusted with all the screw-ups.

Five years later, two men with suits that scream, 'I want to be conspicuous,' board and hijack a plane from Greece to Rome (and then New York). When the men, ABDUL RAFAI and MUSTAFA (played by David Menachem, a nice irony), find a ring with Hebrew lettering, they tell the stewardess, INGRID HARDING, to identify all the Jewish names on the passports. She cries and says as a German, she won't cooperate with such a selection process, but after getting slapped around, she agrees to read the passport names, and  people with names like Kaplan or Goldman are called up to the front of the plane. To add to the pathos, one of the Jews has little numbers tattooed on his arm.

The pilot, Captain ROGER CAMPBELL, manages to flick an emergency switch that the terrorist standing right next to him is too stupid to recognize. Thus, the famed, elite DELTA FORCE, led by NICK ALEXANDER (Lee Marvin) and assisted by McCoy (persuaded to come out of retirement and now a colonel) is activated.

The plane flies to BEIRUT, LEBANON where the Jewish hostages are taken off the plane and transferred to a terrorist hideout, then to ALGIERS, where the women and children are released. There, they first confront the Delta Force, and, after a disastrous gunfight (due to lousy intelligence), return to Beirut. Delta force follows, and the confrontations begin in earnest.

I don't know if this counts as a spoiler, but with both Lee Marvin and Chuck Norris as leaders, how can Delta Force lose?

There is a lot of silliness in this movie. The terrorists go to Beirut, refuse to release the women and children, and then fly to Algiers where they willingly release the women and children. Then they return to Beirut without difficulty, even though their fuel tanks were leaking from bullet holes.  And, of course you have the standard insanity of people having the shit beat out of them and still jumping back up and fighting some more.

There was one point of suspense which persisted almost to the end: would the Jews be rescued or would the terrorists murder them first?

This is an exciting moving and most of it engages your attention.  I give it ++++.  It will often get your working-out pulse up to a run.

Review of PATRIOT GAMES

PATRIOT GAMES

Action, counterterrorism, Harrison Ford.  Released 1992

The film starts with JACK RYAN (Harrison Ford) drinking champagne with his wife in a pleasant, family-friendly scene in their hotel bedroom.  Wink, wink. Ryan, a retired CIA agent and professor at the Naval Academy, is on vacation in London with his family. This vacation is rudely interrupted when a car bomb explodes. An ultra-violent IRA splinter group is trying to assassinate LORD WILLIAM HOLMS, a British official and apparently a member of the royal family. Ryan leaps into the fray and ends up killing PATRICK MILLER, one of the terrorists. Patrick's brother, SEAN MILLER, sees Ryan kill Patrick and, being a good psychotic, determines to kill Ryan and his wife and daughter for good measure. Yes, Sean is arrested and sent to prison. Yes, Ryan goes back to the USA, thousands of miles away. But those details can't stop Sean, or there wouldn't be any movie.

Like HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, Patriot Games is based on a Tom Clancy book. In  my limited experience, movies made from his books are much better than the books themselves.

The movie has some cute lines. A terrorist is in bed with a woman he just picked up. She says, "Wait a minute. I have to get something." He says, "But darlin', you're not goin' to make me wear one of those rubbers. That's a sin." (SPOILER ALERT--he doesn't have to wear the rubber. In fact, he never wears a rubber again.)

It takes eight minutes from the opening until you first see a gun, so lovers of violence whose attention span is less than that shouldn't watch the movie. But once the violence starts, it goes full steam. Sean and his colleague, KEVIN O'DONNELL, kill so many people (including other terrorists) and for so little reason, it gets tiring. Yes, psychopaths are a staple of action movies, but enough is enough. Harrison Ford is entertaining, but half of his performance is a minimally sedated Han Solo, and the other half is a constipated academic. James Earl Jones is (as always) wonderful, but he has only a minor role.

A scene near the end shows the terrorists trying to kill Ryan in his own house. This should be exciting, but you know they will fail. The final scene, Ryan chasing a terrorist in a boat, is just plain stupid.

In spite of these criticisms, most of the movie is exciting. Harrison Ford is always fun to watch, there are some interesting twists, and the plot moves well. Most of the film got my pulse up to a run.  I give it ++++.

Let me know what you think of this blog. You can write me at fiddlerzvi@comcast.net.

Review of OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

The film begins with the President of the United States, BENJAMIN ASHER (Aaron Eckhart) in the ring with his sparring partner, a secret service agent named MIKE BANNING. These two have such a good relationship that Mike can and does beat the crap out of the president.  Switch to preparations for a fund raiser where we meet Asher's unrealistically lovely and loving wife, MARGARET.  On the way to the party, tragedy strikes, an accident on an icy bridge. Mike gets the president out of the car before it topples off the bridge, and is almost, but not quite, able to rescue Margaret before she plunges to her frozen doom below. This puts a strain on his friendship with the president.

Fast forward eighteen months.  Asher, still president, confers with the South Korean prime-minister LEE TAE-WOO about the best response to North Korea. Switch to a four engine prop plane with Korean pilots entering restricted air space over Washington DC. American fighter jets threaten to shoot it down, but it destroys those jets with machine guns. Koreans converge on the White House planting bombs, shooting bystanders and in general creating chaos.  The president and prime minister retreat to the fortified bunker, but Korean and American traitors kill the prime minister and take the president hostage. Under the leadership of terrorist KANG YEONSAK, they issue demands such as withdrawing all American forces from the Korean peninsula, and prove their seriousness by shooting various officials trapped in the bunker with the president.

With the president hostage and the vice-president unavailable, the secretary of state, ALLAN TRUMBULL (Morgan Freeman), must assume the awesome responsibilities of the presidency in this time of crisis. Fortunately, secret-service agent Mike is able to sneak into the White House. This is his chance to redeem himself...

I'm not an expert, I suspect fighter jets have too much shielding to be shot down by machine gun bullets.  And a prop plane? Come on.  What kind of bargain-basement terrorists are these?  In the beginning, terrorists kill a lot of people, but when Mike swings into action, they seem to develop the "Where Eagles Dare" syndrome and lose their ability to aim. The scene where Trumbull realizes this mess is on his shoulders is pivotal, but Freeman, usually a superb actor, is here as convincing as a college drama student.

In general, the characters are flat.  Terrorist Kang is a focused sociopath, President Asher is perpetually frustrated and weak, Trumbull is befuddled, and Mike is murderously determined.  But you can't blame the actors. The plot is monochromatic, a continual struggle against horror with minimal breaks. The actors don't have a chance to portray three-dimensional human beings.

Why do Eckart and Freeman take such crappy roles? For that matter, why did so many Koreans participate in a movie that portrays Korean people the way so many movies portray Arabs or Muslims.

As a cinematic production, this movie stinks.  But as a workout movie, it's great. It hooks you in from the beginning and, as one thing after another goes wrong, keeps you hooked. The unvarying plot won't let you look away.  I give this +++++ - it will get your pulse up to a sprint.