“Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

- old Klingon proverb

Kill Bill is an odd movie (or pair of movies), even by Quentin Tarantino standards. Made after a six-year absence, which itself followed quite a hot streak, it’s arguably the beginning point of the auteur’s (still ongoing) decadent & self-indulgent phase. Though that’s quite fitting, considering the whole point of the thing was for Tarantino to dive head-first into the sort of throwback genre filmmaking he had only paid glancing tributes to in the past. It’s a B-movie plot & premise made with A-level talent, and the resulting mix vacillates between brilliance & irritation– your mileage may vary.

Adding to the movies’ schizophrenia is the late-in-the-game decision to split it the story in half, making two films out of what was intended to be one. The idea, “suggested” by the studio, was almost certainly financial, but QT tried to cover for it by claiming that one three-hour action movie is boring, whereas two 90-minute movies is more appropriate and “ambitious.” Of course, both movies well exceed their 90-minute run time, with 111 minutes for Volume 1 and 136 minutes for #2. The first feels abrupt and action-packed while the second is far more talky and laconic– a clear sign of its obviously longer production/post-production time, with many pointless scenes inserted apparently just so Tarantino could give minutes-long monologues to some of his favorite character actors.

(This also resulted in silly decisions like coyly keeping the titular Bill’s face off-camera for the whole of the first film. I mean, really– are we supposed to not know what David Carradine looks like?)

Still, when the film works, it really works, especially during those action scenes. Much praise is due to Tarantino who, despite his reputation for violence, had never really done any sort of “action” film before, but a lot is also thanks to star Uma Thurman as well. Not all of her performance works perfectly in the movie, but she most certainly puts her game face on when it comes fightin’ time. This girl can beat some ass.

[Administrative note: I'm treating this movie as one big movie, which theoretically it ought to be-- a shame Tarantino's "The Whole Bloody Affair" edit never got a wide American release, I'd buy that on Bluray in a heartbeat. Also the movie does take place out of chronological order, so if any of you wants to get cute by arguing which fight really does come "first," know that I am, as always, writing up the fights in the order the audience seems them happen in.]

[Second administrative note: After hearing rave reviews about the movie's epic script online, I purchased (for an amount of money I'm too ashamed to disclose) a copy of the script via eBay, about a year before Volume 1 came out. It is largely the same as the finished story, with a few significant changes and one entire (cool, but superfluous) chapter removed. I will comment on the differences when appropriate.]

1) The Bride vs Vernita Green

The Fighters:

• The Bride, aka (spoiler) Beatrix Kiddo aka Black Mamba. A veteran assassin and deadly warrior out for revenge against the former colleagues who betrayed her. Her real name is amusingly bleeped out (like a curse word on TV) every time it’s mentioned until very late in the second movie; this is done apparently so that she is mostly only thought of as the archetypical “Bride” figure (it’s even how she’s named in the script), as well as set up the punchline to a joke that every time Bill addressed her as “kiddo” in flashbacks, it wasn’t merely an affectionate nickname. Played by Uma Thurman, who originally developed the character with Tarantino.
  • Armed with: she brings a hunting knife with her, but doesn’t draw it until Vernita produces her own blade.
• Vernita Green aka Jeannie Bell aka Copperhead. A member of the Bride’s former team, who has since left the crime business for domestic bliss under the “Bell” alias. A husband (not seen) and young child have not made her any less lethal. Played by Vivica A. Fox.
  • Armed with: nothing to start but, as mentioned, later produces a knife, as well as some other handy implements.

The Setup: For an undisclosed number of years, the Bride and Vernita were, along with several other (mostly female) killers, members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS, get it? It’s a “real” version of the “Fox Force Five” TV show Thurman’s character from Pulp Fiction had starred in the pilot for), led by the titular Bill. The group’s snake theme led to each having the code name of a killer serpent, hence “Black Mamba” and “Copperhead.” (Vernita later grouses that SHE should have been Black Mamba, presumably because she was the only black member of the team, but maybe Bill thought that would be too on-the-nose.)

For reasons that are gradually revealed (long story short: Beatrix, Bill’s lover, discovered she was pregnant, and went into hiding to keep her child safe from Bill’s criminal life. Under a fake name she got engaged to a shlubby but nice & ordinary man… and Bill, upon tracking her down, assumed that she had betrayed him), Bill brought the entirety of the DiVAS to bear his wrath on the Bride’s wedding rehearsal day, killing her fiancee & new friends. Bill himself put a bullet in her head, leaving her for dead in her own wedding dress. She miraculously survived and awakens from a four-year coma to find her baby gone — she assumes dead, but the baby had actually been delivered safely and taken by Bill. After recovering and arming herself suitably, she embarks on a “rip-roaring rampage of revenge” to take down the folks who wronged her, one by one.

First we see her target Vernita Green, living in an idyllic suburb. At home alone, she answers the doorbell and, from her dialogue, she seems to think it’s a friend of hers come to visit. It isn’t.

The Fight: Vernita opens the door and after a quick glare in which we hear the Bride’s “revenge theme” playing on the soundtrack (the film’s audio cue signal that the Bride has set eyes on her latest target of revenge. It’s an obnoxious but weirdly funny musical bit with a blaring siren featured prominently. Taken from the TV show Ironside), followed by a punch to the face.

From there it just goes nuts. Vernita may be retired and she may not be driven by revenge like the Bride, but she does have a family to live for, so she fights back ferociously. She’s not shy about using her own home as a weapon, however, and the domestic tranquility transforms quite rapidly into a war zone.

The two throw each other through glass and into walls. The Bride kicks Vernita in the crotch (!) and drops her through her own coffee table. Vernita grabs one of those broken table legs and uses it to bash Kiddo in the calf. The Bride nearly chokes out Vernita, until the latter stops her by grabbing a fireplace poker and whacking her in the head with it.

Soon enough the fight goes into the kitchen, where Vernita ran to get a knife. The Bride barely dodges her initial lunges and deflects more by seizing a frying pan. After some creative use of the kitchen table, the Bride matches her by whipping out her own blade.

“This is even worse than the time I let those Mormons in”

With both combatants solidly armed, the two slowly move back to the living room in a tense stand-off, tentatively searching for an opening in the knowledge that one wrong move will bring death. The stalemate drags on as the audience sees, through the bay window the two ladies are on either side of, the approach of a school bus, which lets off a little girl who trots obliviously towards the house. As the reality of this sinks in, Vernita pleads silently not to continue this in front of her daughter. The Bride acquiesces, and both hide their blades just as “Jeannie’s” daughter Nikki comes through the front door.

The choreography has a definite martial arts feel to it, but not in any extravagant way. It’s quick, mean, even desperate. Tarantino makes a few aesthetic concessions, such as overt “whoosh” sound effects whenever either lady gets flipped through the air, but there’s an overall sense of this fight’s realness– it feels like it could really happen. Especially considering how the two combatants look after not too long: bruised, battered, bloody, sweaty and tired. It’s in this state that Nikki finds them.

Nope, nothing suspicious at all.

Vernita bluffs the girl’s initial hesitation away (“This is an old friend of mine I haven’t seen in a while,” she says with forced sweetness. It’s technically true), and makes her leave. Tension deflated, the two head for coffee in the kitchen.

After some discussion they agree to finish their duel elsewhere, later that night. In the original script there’s some discussion over how the Bride deliberately chose to make this a fight rather than a hit; she could have easily taken out Vernita at a distance with a sniper rifle or a bomb, but she had enough respect for her old comrade to give her a fighting chance. It’s not brought up here.

And in any case, Vernita shows no similar restraint in return. Hiding a gun inside a children’s cereal box (called “Kabooms,” of course), she takes a shot at the Bride that misses, which the heroine responds to by throwing her knife straight into Vernita’s heart. She slumps to the floor and dies within seconds.

The real kicker comes in the denouement: as Beatrix pulls the knife from her opponent’s chest, she turns to find  four-year-old Nikki standing behind her, looking right at her mother’s corpse and too shocked to speak. The Bride, cold as ice, tells Nikki that although she didn’t want Nikki to see this, her mother nonetheless “had it comin’” and if Nikki grows up and wants payback, she can look Beatrix up. Harsh.

(There’s also another, smaller kick after that: when the Bride goes back to her car, she crosses Vernita’s name off her kill list… and we see that it’s the second name getting crossed off. The plot, she thickens.)

As we’ve discussed here numerous times, the main job of the opening fight scene is to set the tone, or, as is the case here, the baseline. As mentioned earlier it’s an interesting mix of the fantastic and the grittily realistic, just as the movie itself largely is. But things will certainly get more ridiculous from here on out, and it was wise of Tarantino to start out with what’s arguably the most grounded encounter.

The fight pulls no punches. And neither, as we learn at the end, does the Bride: her cold-blooded behavior proves that her single-minded quest for revenge will have human consequences, and neither is she a very healthy person. This isn’t about right and wrong so much as it is about unfinished business.

As a side note, Tarantino has said repeatedly that he plans to make a third movie many years from now about Nikki’s own quest for revenge against the Bride. But then, Tarantino says a lot of things.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: An unfair fight.

Totally unfair. They don’t stand a chance.

I just got back from my local Alamo Drafthouse, and I have one VERY IMPORTANT message for the GFS community:

Go.

See.

Pacific.

Rim.

Not later. This weekend. Send Hollywood the right message.

Killin’ time.

Practically kill-thirty.

2) The Bride vs Gogo Yubari, Johnny Mo and the Crazy 88

The Fighters:

• The Bride aka Beatrix Kiddo aka Black Mamba. Sporting a yellow track suit deliberately reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s in Game of Death. She was a mean biatch back in the previous fight, but here’s where we see just how deadly she really is. Played by Uma Thurman, with special stunts carried out by the excellent Zoe Bell.
  • Armed with: a samurai sword specially made by Hattori Hanzo, the blacksmith whose blades are legendary even in the Bride’s circles.
• Gogo Yubari, a young Japanese woman whose cheery demeanor and schoolgirl outfit belie a murderous psychopathy. Played by Chiaki Kuriyama, who caught Tarantino’s eye in the cult film Battle Royale.
  • Armed with: a flail (ball & chain) with a retractable razor blade.

• The Crazy 88, O-Ren Ishii’s personal army. There’s actually maybe 40 or 50 of them, not 88– as Bill says in the second volume, they just like to call themselves that, probably because it “sounded cool.” A bunch of hotheaded but not terribly skilled young men & women, all wearing fancy black suits and Kato (the Green Hornet’s sidekick, most famously played by Bruce Lee) masks. Played by various stunt folks.
  • Armed with: mostly katana swords, probably pretty cheap ones. One has a sort of whip/strap and another has two tomahawks.

• Johnny Mo, field leader of the Crazy 88. He’s dressed similarly but is visibly older and completely bald. Played veteran Hong Kong martial arts star Gordon Liu. The character is a replacement for the script’s “Mr. Barrel,” an imposing fighter who takes the Bride up on her offer of standing down if she’ll pay him a favor later on.
  • Armed with: what appears at first to be a wooden staff but turns out to be dual short samurai swords with wooden cane handles.

The Setup: Though it comes late in the movie, this is actually the second part of the Bride’s mission of vengeance. Which makes a twisted sort of sense: as the Bride’s ultimate target, yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (more on her next time), is the most protected of her former colleagues, going after her first is a great way of getting through the hardest part immediately. But more importantly, it’s O-Ren who still retains the services of Sofie Fatale, the DiVAS’ old executive assistant. It’s Sofie who will help (voluntarily or otherwise) the Bride track down all her other targets.

This fight is also probably one of the greatest arguments for splitting the movie in two. In terms of duration, complexity and sheer spectacle, no fight in either movie comes close; it absolutely feels like a climax. It’s much better placed at the end of one volume rather than the middle of a single movie. Sitting through two more hours of dialogue & cameos after this monstrosity would set even the most patient of audiences to fidgeting. If you want to know how audiences will turn on you if you drag out a movie too long after what seems like it ought to be the climax, just ask Steven Spielberg. (Or maybe not, since he seemed unwilling to learn that lesson.)

The Bride follows Ishii’s procession to an upscale Tokyo restaurant known as the House of Blue Leaves (it sounds like a really cool name for a restaurant, but for all I know in Japan that’s about as inspired as “Applebee’s”), where she’s relaxing with Gogo and a handful of Crazy 88s. After seizing Sofie in the bathroom and holding her at swordpoint, Beatrix summons her foe out of a private upstairs booth by bellowing out her signature line: “O-REN ISHII! YOU AND I HAVE UNFINISHED BUSINESS!”

(She says it in Japanese and I’ll note that even as someone who barely speaks it, Uma Thurman’s pronunciation is terrible. Simply atrocious. She seemingly made little to no effort to study the rhythms of the language, and is just reciting funny words she learned from a piece of paper. I saw this in the theater with a friend of mine who speaks it fluently and his native Japanese girlfriend; they couldn’t stop laughing whenever Uma spoke.)

After a brief staredown between the two old comrades (punctuated by the obligatory “siren” moment in the Bride’s head), the heroine casually slashes off one of Sofie’s arms, leaving her to writhe and scream on the ground while arterial blood sprays from her new stump. Nasty, but it’s definitely one way to clear a restaurant. After the terrified crowd stampedes out, the Bride is alone with her enemies. Tough luck for them.

The Fight: It starts out simple enough. At Ishii’s direction, the six members of the Crazy 88 try to take on the Bride: first one at a time, then three, and finally the last remaining pair. She makes quick work of them all, her Hanzo blade humming as she does so.

This leaves only Gogo, and although the Bride tries to talk the youth out of dying today, the psycho adolescent just laughs at her, and readies her chain.

She’s not as into it as this guy.

Sword vs flail is an unusual mash-up, but the choreography (a joint effort between Yuen Wo-Ping and Sonny Chiba, the famed Japanese martial arts star who also appears in the film as Hattori Hanzo) does a decent job of giving a sense of real back & forth here. Well, mostly “forth” because it’s Gogo who dominates, with her unpredictable and long-ranging weapon. The Bride tries to keep her sword up for a while but is eventually disarmed by the chain, and even takes a couple brutal blows to the chest from the swinging ball.

Yubari is enthused yet methodical, displaying astonishing precision & control of the weapon. A time or two she even kicks the ball in mid-swing to suddenly change its direction. The Bride can do little but jump out of her way, with Yubari chasing her and smashing tables in pursuit. In an echo/foreshadowing of the fight with Vernita, Kiddo grabs a table leg as a desperate means of defense, and swings it like a baseball bat to return the metal orb back to sender. Gogo dodges the volley but gets nailed in the back of the head when it ricochets off the wall behind her.

She falls but the Bride can’t get there in time to finish her off before she recovers and activates the razor blade attachment on the flail. One swing slashes the heroine on the shoulder, and although another embeds the weapon in a wooden pillar, the chain wraps around the Bride’s neck. Gogo yanks it tight to keep her from escaping, and slowly pulls up the slack in order to choke her enemy to death. Fortunately, the Bride picks up her chunk of a table leg and slams it, exposed nails outward, in Yubari’s white sneaker. Her follow-up blow hits the deranged teen in the side of the head, taking her out for good.

Crybaby.

[In the script, Gogo had a sister named Yuki who was not present at this showdown. The biggest departure the final product has from it is the deletion of an entire chapter called "Yuki's Revenge" where Yuki nearly derails the Bride's mission in her own quest for vengeance. It could have been a setpiece to rival this sequence, too; as described in the screenplay, an armed-to-the-teeth Yuki tears up half a suburban block (the scene immediately follows Vernita's death) trying to kill her.]

Though it’s just the Bride and O-Ren Ishii now, it seems that a distress call she put out earlier has just paid off. Whole cars full of the remaining Crazy 88 rush in, led by Johnny Mo. The two adversaries share a moment of black humor, and an old joke that doesn’t become clear until you learn her name later on (“tricks are for kids,” get it?). Of course it wasn’t gonna be that easy, silly rabbit.

The small army quite literally has the Bride surrounded, swords drawn and ready for blood. There’s a tense stand-off in which the 88 are clearly wary of her, despite their superior numbers; the first time she moves even a little, the crowd lurches back as one. But the Bride isn’t going to let all the sword-bearing idiots in the world stop her revenge, so she gets to work.

There’s only one expression that aptly describes the Bride in the chaos that follows:

Homegirl goes nuts. There’s just no stopping a pissed off mama lion with a Hanzo sword. Imagine Neo during the Burly Brawl, but with a samurai sword, and no terrible computer graphics, and landing blows that actually look like they hurt… but even better than that. She’s constantly slicing, slashing and stabbing. She almost never stops moving, and with seemingly every other sword movement she takes down an opponent either fatally or by removing a limb. Between her dancing sword and her sick aerial moves (she flips about, clearly on wires), no one can touch her. Attempting to walk through the fight in sequence would be a fool’s errand, so let’s just call out some of the more memorable details:

- the middle of the floor is made of glass, allowing Tarantino to film from underneath

- there are at least three distinct music selections accompanying the battle: one cheesy, one dramatic & tense, and one silly fun (the song “Nobody But Me” by the Human Beinz)

- Johnny Mo constantly comes in & out of the fight, being separated from the Bride by multiple factors. The longest time he’s away is when the Bride snaps a bamboo pole at him which knocks him out for a few minutes

- this fight was deliberately done using old-fashioned techniques, without the aid of modern technology. There are veritable geysers of blood

- the theatrical release of the film switched to black & white for the majority of the fight. While this is stylistically interesting, it also had a practical purpose: Tarantino had learned a while back that the MPAA is, oddly enough, much less skittish about on-screen blood when the blood is not red. Unrated home releases later restored the scene to full color.

- The Bride’s acts of mayhem include:

• ripping one gangster’s eye out
• ripping another guy’s throat out
• chopping off numerous limbs & heads
• catching one thrown axe, dodging the other to let it hit someone behind her, and returning the first into the head of the thrower
• splitting one man in half down the middle
• slashing three necks with one swing
• jumping on one man’s shoulders to get the high ground briefly, and cutting the hands off the man she was perched on when he tries to stab her from below
• doing a form of “breakdance fighting” that would shame even Derek Zoolander when she spins around on her back and feet, slashing at her attackers’ legs the whole time

Eventually the orgy of violence winds down to just the Bride and less than ten remaining Crazy 88s (what were they thinking they could accomplish that the last forty or so couldn’t?), who she lets pursue her upstairs into a smaller room. For unstated reasons, one of the restaurant owners turns off the building’s lights, leaving the fight to take place in silhouette.

It’s cool, a nice little change. As the Bride dispatches the last handful in style, the owner turns the lights back on (again, inexplicably) just before the Bride takes out the last gangster standing: a frightened boy, probably not older than 17. She’d previously sliced his mask off and let him live out of mercy, but he came right back. So this time she breaks his sword into little pieces, then bends him over and literally spanks him with the flat side of the blade, sending him off to momma in tears.

Kiddo leaves the room to find a revived Johnny Mo, who goes after her ferociously. Their fight ends up on the second floor railing, with her frantically defending herself as he deftly balances on the thin surface while spinning his whole body so he can slash at her with alternating blades. But as soon as she finds an opening she leans and cuts off one of his legs, dropping him to a small indoor pond below (already filled with blood from another guy she’d killed and left in there).

Surveying the carnage she’s caused…

… the Bride makes a small speech:

“Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives, take them with you! But leave the limbs you have lost. They belong to me now.”

Which, uh, sure. Whatever you say, ma’am.

Whew. This is a real monster on every level. The execution is nearly flawless and the tempo changes just enough to keep things from being repetitive; all in all it’s a grand buffet of grisly fun. A shame Tarantino has largely shied away from straight-up action filmmaking ever since.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: Lucy, I’m home!

I’m too proud of myself for coming up with that joke to think of a caption.

“COME AT ME, SIS”

3) The Bride vs O-Ren Ishii

The Fighters:

• The Bride aka etc etc. Looking pretty tore up and bloody (much of it not hers) after finishing her symphony of death, but still ready for one last movement. Played by Uma Thurman.
  • Armed with: The Hattori Hanzo blade that just mowed down the entire Crazy 88.
• O-Ren Ishii aka Cottonmouth. The daughter of a Japanese mother and a Chinese-American soldier, O-Ren (whose origin we see extensively, in a gruesome anime flashback) was orphaned by yakuza violence at a young age, only to take revenge on her parents’ killer at age 11 (!), gradually becoming the deadliest assassin in the world and a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. During the Bride’s coma, O-Ren became the queen of the Japanese underworld, thanks in part to Bill’s backing.
  • Armed with: A hilt-less katana. Probably not a Hanzo sword– she expresses hostile jealousy and disbelief when the Bride claims that her own is– but still very impressive.

The Setup: After dispatching the army that stood in her way, the Bride follows O-Ren Ishii to an outdoor garden that bizarrely adjoins the House of Blue Leaves– on the second floor, no less. It’s unlikely, though not impossible, that an expensive restaurant in the middle of Tokyo would have such a beautifully picturesque slice of nature in its backyard, but it’s safe to assume that this battle site was chosen by Tarantino as a conscious flight of fancy. Again, despite the movie’s gritty realism, it’s also established that it sometimes operates by a sort of crazy dream logic, so characters can have their showdown in the Japanese equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting if they darn well please.

There’s some opening dialogue, but nothing as significant as the discussion between Beatrix and Vernita. O-Ren acts oddly detached and actively refuses to be impressed by the Bride’s superhuman accomplishments. Calmly telling the Bride “swords however, never get tired. I hope you saved your energy. If you haven’t, you may not last five minutes,” Ishii seems to espouse some sort of coldly utilitarian view of people; I imagine that helps, in her line of work. The Bride, like anyone else, is just a weapon, useful only until she breaks.

As the yakuza boss unsheathes her own sword, an extended & highly Latinized cover of “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” begins to play, the lengthy instrumental passage serving as an excellent build-up to the showdown.

The Fight: Much more measured, deliberate and classy than what we just came from.

Unlike all the faceless mooks the Bride just destroyed, Cottonmouth is every bit the Bride’s equal, and has been at this since she was a child. The two opponents take careful consideration before every clash of blades, and the result is close to what we saw in the climactic Rob Roy fight: a series of short but furious exchanges.

O-Ren starts out using sword & scabbard simultaneously, but after a few passes the Bride’s deadly Hanzo steel slices right through the latter, leading her to casually discard it. But before Kiddo can get too cocky, the next exchange ends with Ishii’s katana landing a painful strike on her upper back, dropping her to the ground as her blood leaks into the snow. The music stops, and from here on the only sounds to be heard are the occasional sword strikes, bits of a dialogue and, most prominently, the persistent thumping of a shishi odoshi.

O-Ren takes the opportunity to get in some possibly uncharacteristic and definitely uncalled-for catty barbs, telling the Bride that she’s a “silly Caucasian girl” who “likes to play with samurai swords.” Look, I know she’s trying to dishearten her opponent and she’s a cold-blooded killer besides, but O-Ren just watched the Bride pull off some next-level Jedi stuff; the trash talk rings hollow. And paradoxically, Ishii gives her a modicum of passive-aggressive respect with her follow-up: “You might not be able to fight like a samurai, but you can at least die like a samurai,” and waits as the Bride recovers.

And recover she does: slowly, but with unmistakeable grit. A slash like that would send pretty much anybody running to the nurse’s office even if they hadn’t just spent the last hour kicking all the ass in Japan, but the Bride is nothing if not determined. That determination is what drove her to survive what should have been a fatal head shot, what woke her out of her coma, what willed sensation back into her atrophied limbs one toe at a time, what allowed her to triumph against an army, and what will eventually allow her to make her final and most tragic decision. Heck, it’s probably what made Bill fall in love with her. Beatrix Kiddo is defined by her willpower, by her actions and by her choices. Unlike the supposed girl power saga of the The Hunger Games, whose agency-denied protagonist actually makes the story a misogynist fairy tale, the Bride is a doer. And what she does is get revenge, at any cost.

Resuming the fight, it’s the Bride’s turn to show up O-Ren, ducking a mid-level strike to land a decent slice at her old friend’s leg. We see the blood on her pretty white kimono (and the snow), and she’s limping. Realizing that this won’t be so easy as she thought, Ishii apologizes for her previous rudeness, which the Bride accepts before renewing the fight.

But it’s already over. At the end of the next lightning-fast exchange, one swing from the Hanzo sword lops off the top of O-Ren Ishii’s skull. The audience is treated to the holy-crap-am-I-really-seeing-this visual of the poor lady’s hair & scalp sailing quietly through the air, before the camera returns to her face and slowly pans up to show her exposed brain. O-Ren takes a moment to marvel at the feel of Hattori Hanzo steel, then slumps to the ground dead. Charlie’s angel has gone to hell.

The Bride limps over to a nearby bench and collapses as a melancholy Japanese song plays. She’s not just exhausted but visibly upset; it’s unknown if she’s sad because of lingering personal affection for O-Ren, or if she’s just overwhelmed with emotion over having just killed two soccer teams’ worth of people. Speaking of which: tired or no, she really ought to be booking it out of there, before somebody sees the mess inside and calls in the national guard.

At least they made up later.

Together, this fight and the previous one make up the chapter called “Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves,” and though I’ve split the thing into two portions’ for sanity’s sake, in a way this duel is the climax to the battle that began with Gogo and the Crazy 88. Or at the very least, O-Ren is the end-of-stage boss and they were the entire level.

So it is an interesting, and indeed admirable choice that Tarantino made to tone things down once the Bride enters the garden, rather than trying to top it. It’s as stately as the last fight was chaotic. Minus the amusingly gruesome bit at the end, of course; that might be a bit of a misstep depending on how tonally jarring you find it. Also there’s no duel as formal as this one in either volume, so it’s a nice change of pace. The Bride’s showdown ends with a climax that is more emotional than kinetic, a technique Tarantino would take to an even greater extreme for the Bride’s eventual meeting with Bill at the end of Volume 2.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: I call that bold talk, from a one-eyed blonde woman.

“Fill yer hand.”

Hellooooooo nurse.

Her nerves are twisted.

4) The Bride vs Elle Driver

The Fighters:

• The Bride, blah blah. She’s just been through some pretty nasty stuff, but, as always, is ready to throw down. Played by Uma Thurman, who possibly does her best work here. Well, second-best, after the reunion at the end.
  • Armed with: Nothing, actually. She doesn’t even have shoes. But she finds some handy implements soon enough.
• Elle Driver aka California Mountain Snake, a one-eyed former member of the DiVAS. She & Beatrix clearly never got along, partially because they were rivals for Bill’s affection. In the script there’s some business where they realize that they’re a lot alike and they never had to hate each other, so they find some peaceful respect before their duel (which is more traditional); in the film, although she talks a little about the professional “respect” she has for the Bride, her actions & attitude imply that talk is all it was. This Elle is 100% Bitch. Played by Daryl Hannah, who savors every last hammy line like it’s a bite of Christmas dinner.
  • Armed with: The Bride’s Hattori Hanzo sword, “purchased” from Budd. But she never really gets to use it.

[The pair's names also make for a fun bit of synchronicity: "Elle" and "Bea" (short for Beatrix) are homophones for the simple letters "L" and "B." Before the end of the fight the two address each other as such, indicating a clear familiarity. A nice touch.]

The Setup: After settling Vernita’s hash, the Bride set her sights on Budd, the only male member of the DiVAS and Bill’s brother. Despising himself for the murderous life he’d led, Budd was living a self-imposed punishment of poverty and alcoholism out in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. But he scraped together enough self-preservation to ambush the Bride, finally leaving her trapped in a coffin, buried alive.

Assuming she’d suffocate, Budd offered to sell her Hanzo sword to Elle for a million dollars. Elle took him up on it (after demanding that Budd make her “suffer to her last breath”) but, disgusted by how a great warrior like Beatrix was taken out by a scrub like Budd, she loaded the money bag with a real live Black Mamba snake, killing him painfully.

But unbeknownst to either of them, the Bride had, thanks to the cruel tutelage of her kung fu master Pai Mei, the ability to deliver effective punches three inches from her target. After an awesome flashback to said tutelage, the Bride smashed her way free of the coffin and out of the cold dirt, then headed straight back to her target. She arrives just as Elle opens the door, and greets her with a flying double kick.

Opening doors is very hazardous in the world of Kill Bill, kind of like Vince Vega going to the bathroom in Pulp Fiction.

The Fight: In a word: oof.

Yo ho.

If the fight with Vernita was mean, this one is brutal. Same principle– two powerful women face off fiercely in a domestic environment– but everything’s turned up to 11. Louder, crazier, nastier, harder. Never is it more apparent that these two hate, hate, HATE each other– maybe almost as much as Roger Ebert hated North, if such a thing were possible. Every blow and strike is sold with wincingly painful realism.

And despite being short it’s packed with variety. For most of the time, Elle is armed with the Bride’s katana, but due to either her opponent’s interference or the tight confines of the trailer, she’s never able to fully draw it and thus gain significant advantage. It happens enough times to be a running joke. Until the very end, the most it gets used is when it’s partially drawn and they take turns trying to push it into each other’s necks.

B uses a TV antenna as weapon and later hits L in the head with a lampshade. L stomps on B’s bare foot with high heel. B throws can of Budd’s tobacco spit (I believe) into L’s face, which makes her say “gross” in a way that makes her sound more like an annoyed teenager than a pissed off assassin. At one point they kick each other down at the same time and there is a split-screen camera showing them simultaneously recover.

The fight finally becomes fully hand-to-hand when the Bride disarms Elle with a foot stool. Driver runs up and tries a flying kick (she’s airborne for an absurdly long time) but the Bride sidesteps it, seizes her leg, and throws her through a wall into the bathroom. The bride then grabs her rival’s head and plunges it into Budd’s filthy toilet. Now THAT’S gross.

There’s gotta be a “Splash” joke in here somewhere….

Creatively, Elle hits the flusher in order to catch a few breathes, and escapes the Bride’s grip by elbowing her in the crotch. A few follow-up blows stun Beatrix long enough for Elle to run back to the living room and grab the dropped katana. Fortunately the Bride, glancing into a closet, sees Budd’s own Hanzo sword (an old gift from Bill that he’d lied about pawning). She grabs it and rises to meet Elle on the opposite end of the trailer’s hallway.

Although the soundtrack has been silent until now, as they stand off and talk an odd, tribal music kicks in. It’s got ominous drums, horn riffs and ritualistic chanting (it’s an old Ennio Morricone tune)– completely over the top, fittingly.

The Bride asks Elle (“just between us girls” she says with faux-sweetness) what it was she said to Pai Mei that caused him to rip her eye out. Elle says it was that she called him a “miserable old fool,” and we saw a brief flashback to the incident. But just as the audience processes the information that Elle trained under the same ancient kung fu master as the Bride (and was an inferior student), we’re hit with another whammy: Elle reveals that she murdered Pai Mei in retaliation, by poisoning his food. The Bride is visibly incensed– and so is the audience, because it wasn’t that long ago we saw the full-length flashback chapter showing Beatrix’s bond with the irascible old man. Then, they exchange what may well be the greatest dialogue in the history of motion pictures:

ELLE: “That’s right: I killed your master. And now I’m gonna kill you too… with your own sword, no less. Which, in the very immediate future, will become MY sword.”

BRIDE: “Bitch, you don’t have a future.”

Did I say in the history of motion pictures? Sorry, I meant in the history of THE SPOKEN WORD.

Levelling swords, they face off for what feels like an eternity (it’s a solid 30 seconds, I counted), as they music builds and builds and builds. You’d swear this isn’t a stand-off between two human women but between two tyrannosaurs. When the tension reaches a boiling point they charge in and lock blades, each pushing furiously at the other. After several alternating close-ups of both women’s faces, the Bride does something unexpected: she rips Elle’s other eye out.

Elle, now completely blind, goes bat guano crazy. She kicks and screams and cusses and falls to the ground, lashing out at everything in (her lack of) sight. The Bride watches, aloof & disgusted. She calmly drops Elle’s eyeball onto the carpet and, in a gruesome closeup, squishes it beneath her bare feet. No, THAT’S gross.

The Bride collects her sword and leaves Elle writhing in pain and fury. It’s an open question of whether or not she lives (a literal question mark, in the case of the end credits), but the camera is careful to show us the Black Mamba snake still lurking in the trailer. The miserable old fool sends his regards.

So much greatness here. While I miss the added dimension the script gave to Elle, there’s actually more than enough melancholy & regret in this story to go around, so it was a wise decision to make the character into a pure villain and have the audience straightforwardly cheering for her defeat. A few of the moves in the fight border on the silly (Elle’s extended jump kick springs to mind) but for the most part the choreography is very grounded and painful. The animosity at play here is truly palpable and the violence is uncompromising. Kill Bill volume 2 is notoriously scrimpy on action, but this scene is almost enough to make up for that bang/buck ratio.

[Note: I won't be including the final showdown with Bill, as it's simply far too short to properly grade, awesome or no. As stated earlier, the entire climactic sequence with Bill and B.B. works on an entirely different, and unexpected, level. Similarly you'll notice I didn't cover the training "fight" against Pai Mei from his flashback chapter; it's also fairly short, not to mention one-sided and deliberately cheesy. So long, Kill Bill.]

Grade: A

Recommended Links: I can’t stop watching it.

I kept referring to that script this whole series like it was some kind of hard-to-find relic. Turns out it’s all online. Read it and ponder what might have been.

Coming Attractions: Mine nostrils do perceive the good sir Johnson’s prepared cuisine.

Verily, a jabroni you be.

Welcome to The Rock.

Time to shine the spotlight on a little-seen gem, in this case 2003′s The Rundown. Released to little fanfare and poor box office despite relatively strong critical acclaim for a genre flick, The Rundown (an admittedly mediocre title) stars national treasure The Rock as a likable bounty hunter roped into some painful South American shenanigans. The film should have been the next step in the Rock’s burgeoning film career, but it seems that his much-predicted momentum took a stumble after The Scorpion King, his first starring role, was pretty underwhelming. And perhaps audiences in 2003 had similarly tired of the antics of Rundown co-star Seann William Scott, the once & future Stiffler; another shame, in my opinion, because Scott is truly hilarious. His sleeper hockey hit Goon from last year is under consideration as a future entry.

But the big shame here is that The Rundown performed so poorly at the box office and hasn’t even gone on to become a bona fide cult hit, because it’s just so much fun. Directed by the highly competent & unpredictable Peter Berg (check out that eclectic filmography), The Rundown has a solid sense of itself, managing to strike that ineffable balance between seriousness & silliness. It has stylized action & broad characters yet there’s a dark edge to it that puts some weight behind the proceedings. And there’s a real creativity in the action sequences, constantly signalling to the audience that this movie came to play.

[Note: Given that this movie was robbed of the popularity it deserves, finding images for the entries is going to be harder than usual. Bear with me.]

1) Beck vs A Whole Football Team

The Fighters:

• Beck, a bounty hunter aka “retrieval expert” trapped in indentured servitude with a wealthy boss of some nebulous criminality. Though Beck has an incredible talent for violence, he prefers not to resort to it; his true passion is cooking, and he hopes to open a restaurant one day. Played by Samoan Thor himself, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. (I’m going to try to refer to him as “Beck” in the entries, but I can’t guarantee I won’t slip up and occasionally call the character “The Rock.” Note that this is not out of disdain for Mr. Johnson’s talents as a performer; quite the opposite.)
  • Armed with: Nothing, though he does make use of some handy nearby implements. Beck, we will later learn, doesn’t carry a gun, not because he hates them but because he’s too good with them, and they take him to an emotional place where he might go too far. He’s a regular Atticus Finch, if Atticus Finch could kick Hulk Hogan’s ass.
• NFL Players, about five of them, from Beck’s favorite football team (he says it’s “the entire offensive line” which is probably an exaggeration but I don’t watch sports. Is the NFL the one where the hut-huts have to put the tackleball in the score zone?): the Defensive End, Fullback, Middle Linebacker, and Left & Right Tackle. A bunch of burly meatheads who look like they’re quite used to this sort of thing.
  • Armed with: one has a gun but he’s deprived of it before ever trying to use it.
• Beck’s eyebrows, played by The Rock’s eyebrows. They’re not an active participant in the fight but they’re always there, seeing over all. Even you. Right now.
  • Armed with: Hair, justice, Samoan magic.

The Setup: Beck has been dispatched to a kickin’ nightclub to confront Brian Knappmiller, the quarterback of the local football team who has unfortunately incurred quite a gambling debt with Beck’s employer. Specifically Beck needs to retrieve Knappmiller’s prized Super Bowl ring as collateral, but Knappmiller is loathe to part with it and tells Beck to shove off, throwing drinks in his face.

There’s an added element of humor to the scene in that Beck wants even more than usual for this job to not turn violent, because Knappmiller’s posse consists of many of the team’s other star players. There’s a neat sequence before the meeting where Beck, talking with an associate, points out each individual player, and as he does so Berg plays a montage of football clips (ostensibly of the player described, but really NFL and XFL footage), ending with a graphic showing the player’s name and main stats. If Beck has to hurt them, there’s a good chance the key members of his favorite team could be sidelined. Hard break for a sports fan. (Say what you will about anime nerds but this is a problem they never have.)

After wiping off his face in the bathroom Beck calls his employer to plead for more time, but is told to press on right now. He storms out to the dance floor much less meekly this time, and gives Knappmiller his standard ultimatum: “Option A, you give me the ring. Option B, I make you give me the ring.” Predictably, Knappmiller chooses the one that’s going to force him to smell what the would-be chef is cooking.

[When Beck first walks into the building, he passes by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who slyly remarks "Have fun!" to a confused Beck. The mysterious Austrian's role in the plot is never revealed because he's really there as a meta-reference for the audience, symbolically anointing his cinematic successor. The cameo was apparently unplanned and done on the spur of the moment.]

The Fight: The club’s strobing lights and the bouncing rhythm of Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” provide an excellent backdrop for an excellently-staged little opening number. After Brian chooses the dumber option, the beefcakes immediately set in on him, and the Rock takes them down one at a time with brutal efficiency.

The fighting here could never be described as “real” but it is covered with a nice patina of realism. There are no extended tradings of punches or elaborate stunts, just quick bursts of effective violence. Beck is clearly established here as a guy who has almost-surgical precision to match his raw strength, as we see him strike at vulnerable spots and use his opponents’ momentum against them. Notably, the third jabroni who rushes Beck gets taken out with a Rock Bottom, one of the Rock’s patented wrestling moves. As far as I can tell this is the only one of those maneuvers used in the movie, so it’s nice they got it out of the way fast; plus doing so in the opening fight sends a signal not to take the rest of the movie too seriously.

Berg and his crew do more than their part to help sell Beck’s prowess, juicing up all his blows with painful-sounding thuds on the soundtrack and accentuating the movements with well-timed (read: not excessive) stretches of slow-motion. This visual style will prove to be a running theme through the movie. It works like gangbusters as it highlights some of the more complicated staging, and it’s also just, well, cool.

After calmly watching him take out their teammates, eventually the enormous Left & Right Tackle rise to face Beck simultaneously, which he greets with a sort of irritated resignation. When they line up against him, the POV is from just behind the two giants’ shoulders, the perspective making Beck look tiny in comparison– an interesting choice on Berg’s part, because while these two athletes are taller than the Dwayne Johnson’s 6’4 height, they’re not that much taller… and of course part of the Rock’s whole appeal as a performer is his own hulking size (as opposed to action stars like Bruce Willis or Chuck Norris). The Rock seems here (and in many other performances) as the best of both worlds: not a lion amongst men or a men amongst lions, but a lion amongst other lions.

Anyway, the People’s Lion makes quick work of the two Tackles opposing him, taking each out with short strikes and pounding their faces into nearby pillars. The one setback Beck suffers comes shortly after, when the Defensive End recovers enough to seize Beck in a charging tackle and slam him into the DJ’s booth. He nearly cleans Beck’s clock with a follow-up haymaker, but Beck blocks it by seizing the record player and using it to block the blow (the music comes to an end with an abrupt record scratch– which is actually appropriate here, unlike its cliched use in a million movie trailers). He actually used a turntable to turn the tables! … I’m sorry.

Knappmiller then tries to escape, but Beck hurls the record player in slow-mo at the QB’s back, dropping him like a sack of potatoes. As Beck angrily seizes the ring from Brian’s hand, he laments the idiot didn’t choose Option A. I would have. Then Beck’s own NFL-style title card flashes on the screen:

As we’ve said over & over here, one of the primary missions of the Opening Action Sequence is to set the tone for what’s to come, and this does exactly that. This scene does everything it needs to in terms of setting up what kind of movie is going to happen, and what kind of hero Beck is. Such sequences are also meant to grab the audience’s attention and provide them with a fun jolt to get ‘em in the right mood, and this scene does the hell out of that.

Oh, and I was a bit disappointed after checking up on the lyrics to the song that plays through most of the fight: it turns out the refrain is “go getcho freak on,” when I had always heard it as “Rock getcho freak on.” Arguably that would have been too on the nose but I liked the idea that the movie’s very environment is even cheering on the Rock. Ah well.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: The Rock meets The Walk(en).

“You have precisely the necessary amount of cowbell.”

In which the Rock enters a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

2) Beck vs Hatcher’s Goons

The Fighters:

• Beck, the retrieval specialist with apparently no other name, so it’s possible he’s related to Glenn. Once again he’s going to have to do things the hard way. Played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
  • Armed with: Again, nothing.
• Henchmen, four of them. Their field leader seems to be Hatcher’s brother Harvey, but the deadliest is the quieter man Swenson (not sure if he’s ever identified as such on-screen). Harvey is played by Jon Gries and Swenson is played by stunt man Stuart F. Wilson.
  • Armed with: Harvey has a knife and the two nameless others near him have handguns. Swenson carries two whips. Whips are kind of his thing.

The Setup: After returning pissed off from his last job, Beck demanded a mission with a payday big enough to wipe his slate clean. The mission is to “retrieve” his employer’s wayward son, Travis Walker (Seann William Scott), back home to daddy. The trouble is that Travis is putzing about in a remote mining town out in the Brazilian jungle.

The mine, and the town, are run with an iron fist by the eccentric villain Cornelius Hatcher (Christopher Walken, whose only performance notes from Peter Berg seem to have been “Chris, just do your thing,” because that’s exactly what he does). Hatcher and his small army of minions work the local populace basically as slaves, and although Hatcher initially allows (for a rather hefty sum) Beck the privilege of retrieving Travis, he later reneges when he learns that Travis has tracked down the location of a valuable jungle artifact, the Gato do Diablo.

Beck finds Travis easily enough in the local dive bar on a hot afternoon, where Travis had been conspiring with crafty bartender Mariana (Rosario Dawson, who hadn’t quite hit it big at this time). Beck gives Travis the old A&B choice, and although Travis predictably resists, Beck restrains him with minimal difficulty. That’s when Hatcher walks in with four goons (Swenson rather cannily enters through the back door, surrounding Beck) and announces that he had his “fingers crossed the whole time” on their recent deal, so Beck’s going to have to turn Travis over after all– no refunds. This will not go well.

The Fight: Beck is cool as ever, but given that two of Hatcher’s guys have guns drawn, he has to think creatively. First he trips Travis and sends him painfully to the ground, taking him out of the action. He throws a chair (wrestlers and their chairs, man) at Harvey and the two men near him– they’re foolishly clustered together– and escapes behind a pool table in the confusion. He takes cover as they fire off some rounds, then rushes with surprising speed when they get closer. Beck leaps and takes the first jabroni out with a nifty if gratuitously complicated flying corkscrew move with his legs, then immediately after landing he sweep kicks the other gun-wielding goon.

Swenson stands by passively in the background, wondering when the next Castlevania game will come out.

Having found time to disarm the two thugs during his amazing acrobatics, Beck then dismantles the knife-toting Harvey, and shoves one pilfered gun in the chump’s mouth while aiming the other at a rather impressed Hatcher.

Swenson should totally have this guy’s job.

Not wanting to cross the line into killing, Beck falls to the ground so he can double-kick Harvey into his two buddies and knock them down (again) like bowling pins. He sees Travis making a break for it and, with mathematical precision, releases the magazine from one pistol and slides it under Travis’ feet, tripping him. Dropping the other gun in an attempt to defuse the situation instead makes Beck vulnerable to Swenson’s whip, which the bad guy unfurls in a dramatically cool slow-mo shot.

But even whips are no match for the Rock, as he demonstrates when he catches Swenson’s initial strike, holding the end tight. By the time Swenson readies his other whip Beck has thrown a small wooden table his way, intercepting the blow so Beck can escape with Travis while the dust clears. To be continued, Mr. Hatcher.

Fun stuff here, even if some of the choreography is perhaps a little too silly for its own good. Though it’s a bit more creative in its staging, at heart this scene is really not much different than what the previous fight was: an abbreviated little scuffle to show what Beck is capable of. So at the end of the day it’s hard to be impressed with it much more. Of course, it’s hard to dislike it, too; more action movies should be this playful.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Remember this guy?

He grew up.

Let’s flip out.

This guy gets it.

3) Beck vs Manito and the Rebels

The Fighters:

• Beck, a bounty hunter who’s quite a bit out of his element. Played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
  • Armed with: Nothing. Poor guy.
• Brazilian rebels, a group of small but unpredictable freedom fighters opposed to Hatcher’s de facto despotism. To my amateur eye and also due to the fact that it’s Brazil, they seem to fight using a variant of capoeira, the martial art known for its fluid dance-like moves and ability to improve the lives of at-risk teens. About four or five of them take part in the impromptu “duel,” but for the first part it’s mainly the leader Manito, played Ernie Reyes Jr, the Fillippinio actor and martial arts champion most known for being the human co-star in the Ninja Turtles sequel.
  • Armed with: Knives and axes, but they also make deadly use of tree branches (including one that’ s on fire) and, more importantly, several handy vines for swinging.

The Setup: Their hasty retreat to the airstrip having taken a few jungle detours, The Rundown essentially becomes a buddy movie for a good stretch, with the Rock (who has serious comic chops of his own) mostly playing exasperated straight man to Seann William Scott’s antics. (The movie is clearly inspired by the classic action/comedy Midnight Run, so much so that’s practically a setting-switched remake.)

Eventually their trip through the wilderness gets them caught by the local resistance movement, who only speak Portuguese. Travis pretends to act as translator to just get the two released, but he secretly tells their leader that Beck is an assassin sent by Hatcher to kill them. Between that and Beck’s aggressive body language (courtesy of Travis’ misleading prompts), the little tribesmen decide they’re going to kick Beck’s ass. To death.

The Fight: Everyone backs off to create a large fighting space, and Manito is the first to square off against Beck, taunting him with a couple non-sequitur English phrases like “okay hip-hop” and “hey Kansas Cities” before screaming at him in Portuguese (not subtitled, but it’s “I’m gonna bash your face in!” according to an attempted translation by someone I watched it with). He opens up by swinging down on a vine from a tree he’d climbed up rather quickly, and punching Beck in the face on the way.

From there he takes on the enormous Samoan with surprising efficiency. Berg makes the most out of the size disparity between the two combatants, showcasing the short but ripped Reyes’ speed & skill as he batters Beck with blows. Manito flips, twists and turns about before Beck can lay a meaty hand on him, and landing multiple sets of rapid blows while he’s at it.

“Argh, this is worse than Surf Ninjas!”

From there the others join in and it becomes a real free-for-all, a sort of coordinated and gleeful chaos. Beck gets tossed around like a ragdoll, buffeted about by a constant series of moving targets. The group of compact little dudes almost seem to operate via some sort of hive mind, so synchronously do they move. One will stun him with a kick, another slides in to sweep his legs out so that a third will swing in on a vine and kick him in mid-fall. It’s not a complete shutout for Beck, though, as he gets in a couple painful-looking lumps of his own. But very few could handle this kind of sustained attack from multiple opponents working in concert. Plus, Beck knows this is all a misunderstanding and doesn’t want to fight, so he’s presumably holding back a bit.

They attempt to finish him off by having Manito and a pal swing in together on two vines (tied around their ankles so both hands are free) and each of them seizes one of Beck’s feet, then letting him go at the peak of their swing so the momentum launches him WAY high into the air, hitting half a dozen branches on the way down. Ouch.

Their celebration gets cut short when Beck opens his eyes and rises, looking rather pissed off. Perhaps worried about his durability, the rebels immediately get more serious and throw several axes at him (which he dodges) and the first guy comes at him with a knife. But Beck is in the zone now: angry, determined, more familiar with these little bastards’ tactics. The Beck from this point on is the guy we’ve seen as an incredibly effective neutralizer, not the muscleman blindly flailing about trying to score a couple punches.

The hero takes out the remaining handful with characteristic precision, even turning their own weapons against them when one seizes a flaming log from the campfire and brandishes it at him. After putting out the flame with a really painful-looking blow to the face, he side steps another incoming vine swing from two more foes and clotheslines them with the log. Taking out those chumps he’s alone with Manito, who draws his own knife after getting up from a nasty throw. He takes a few lunges but Beck is able to grab the rebel’s limbs and overpower him, taking the knife and declaring “I’m not your enemy!” but getting clocked in the face by yet another log-wielding rebel before he can prove it.

(Un)fortunately, that’s when the fight ends, courtesy of Mariana showing up and firing off a warning shot. Turns out she’s a mole for the rebels as well, and puts a stop to Hatcher’s mutual enemies fighting each other. Ah, fun while it lasted.

This is the kind of wild change-up the movie needed, after the far less ambitious skirmish at the bar. We’ve watched Beck go up against seemingly overwhelming odds (namely, half a football team and a handful of armed thugs), but these rebels are the first ones we’ve seen who operate at the level of physical competence that he does… and accordingly, this is the first time we really see our protagonist take a serious beating. Kudos to Dwayne Johnson for being quite willing to not just take a few blows but actually get knocked around comically– but of course, it’s fitting that a man who came from the world of professional wrestling wouldn’t be afraid of a little silliness tarnishing his machismo. If only more big action stars were as unselfconscious.

The staging really goes wild, too, with attackers coming from every angle and doing crazy circus acrobatics. At times the choreography is a little bit too cute for its own good, though, what with all rapid off-screen tree ascensions and too-perfectly-timed swings. Plus there are a few blows that are too ridiculous even for this movie’s stylized world, like when one rebel slide-kicks into Beck’s face and that somehow launches him ten feet through the air. Uh huh.

Speaking of stylization, Berg’s direction is more overtly playful than ever, constantly showing off the choreography and highlighting the painfulness of each blow. The fight’s soundtrack is ostensibly provided by the crowd of onlooking rebels, who play along with some primitive instruments, mainly drums. The whole thing pulls together quite well.

It just might be Ernie Reyes Jr who’s the scene’s MVP, though. A full footer shorter than the Rock and composed of lean muscle, Reyes is one compact badass, a coiled spring of aggression and hostility. As an actor he brings a kind of wild intensity to the performance as well, growling out his lines with bug-eyed craziness. Why isn’t this guy still famous?

All in all, though the fight’s ambition gets ahead of itself, it’s nonetheless chock full of kinetic goodness. Fits right in with the tone of the movie while still escalating the intensity.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: The big finish! Who’s gonna win?

The villains in the control room, maybe?

In which the Rock finally exercises his Second Amendment rights.

They still apply overseas, because AMERICA.

It was a bit hard to write about this one, given that even though there’s fighting it’s not really “a fight”– so much generalized chaos that it’s a bit hard to boil down, more of an all-purpose action scene. But there’s enough blows thrown and clever choreography that I couldn’t ignore it in good conscience.

4) Beck vs All the Bad Guys

The Fighters:

• Beck, the would-be chef whose bounty hunting got him caught in the middle of a South American uprising. Played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
  • Armed with: Beck is determined not to go in guns blazing, but he soon discovers the limits of that approach and makes Charlton Heston proud.
• Travis Walker, not one of the main players here but is featured just enough to warrant his inclusion. Spoiled and silly but also unpredictable, he does prove a bit useful here. Played by the always-welcome Seann William Scott.
  • Armed with: Travis packs a gun right from the beginning. Also his pals Mr. Thunder and Mr. Lightning.
• Hatcher’s men, pretty much all the remaining ones– around 15-20. They’re posted strategically throughout the ramshackle little village. Including Cornelius Bernard Hatcher himself, hapless brother Harvey, and the awesome Swenson; played by Christopher Walken, Jon Gries and Stuart F. Wilson, respectively.
  • Armed with: all sorts of guns, and of course Swenson brought whips, as did his two buddies.

The Setup: Beck, Travis and Mariana found the Gato earlier, but she, wanting to sell it so her people could be free of Hatcher, drugged the other two just to be safe and left them in the jungle. Unfortunately she ended up getting snatched by Hatcher’s men while they were separated, and Beck gets word that the bad guy’s holding her in the town square and will likely execute her soon. [Also, after the last fight, Beck made nice with the rebels but the proceedings were interrupted by a raid from Hatcher, who personally shot & killed Manito. Boo!]

Beck is free to take Travis and fly out of there, but the pair’s consciences can’t allow the distressed damsel to meet her fate. Off to settle Hatcher’s hash it is, then.

The Fight: Beck kicks things off on an odd note, by sending his Scottish pilot-for-hire Declan in, blowing on bagpipes, to trash talk at Hatcher using Biblical rhetoric. He presumably  serves not as an omen but as a distraction, so that no one would hear the incoming stampede of bulls until it was too late.

Yep, bulls. A clever use of Chekov’s Gun, the presence of a nearby bovine herd had been set up early in the film. They rampage through the small town square, scattering (and in a few cases trampling) Hatcher’s men and tearing up structures. As the villain himself wryly remarks, “that’s a lotta cows.”

They also provide excellent cover for Beck to storm right into the midst of Hatcher’s men. He tears up several using his strength and creativity before they can take a shot at him– possibly my favorite bit is when he stomps the end of a loose floorboard to throw one bad guy’s aim off. He takes out a handful, depriving them all of weapons and even using their guns as clubs. Meanwhile Travis gets isolated in a small shop and has an epic length confrontation with one (1) squirrelly thug, who he eventually takes down rather humorously.

But eventually Beck’s non-projectile strategy reaches its limits, and with all the bulls having come through the bad guys have a clear line of sight on their adversaries. Both Beck and Travis are pinned down by sustained fire in separate locations, and there’s a long, desperate while Beck realizes he’s going to have to go his Bad Emotional Place and use guns again.

But once he does, it is on. The hero rises to triumphant guitar strings, bearing a shotgun in each hand, and engages Beast Mode as he strides across the battlefield and blasts down every henchmen in sight. Here I’ll defer to my gun nut readers’ expertise but I’m pretty sure many of the distances Beck is shooting from would be very hard to manage with a shotgun– a weapon hardly known for its precision from afar. Still, he looks cool doing it. Especially when he causes a leaky tanker truck to blow up and walks away from the fireball in slow-mo, as all action heroes have been required to do ever since the days of Mosaic law.

Out of bullets, Beck finds himself pinned down again across from a group of henchmen in a sniper’s nest, but no problem: the Rock simply leaps the distance between structures and starts punching out all the support pillars, bringing the whole rickety perch tumbling down.

His arm still smarting, Beck is confronted by Swenson and his two fetishist pals. Time to get kinky.

The three quickly surround Beck, and here Berg tries something ambitious, because it’s difficult enough to stage an inventive fight sequence (with a real sense of back & forth) involving a whip, and this fight has three whip-users. Four whips total, actually, because Swenson is dual-wielding.

It must have been a pain to block this fight out, but the result is a real blast. Beck gets knocked about and snapped at but still gives back pretty good as well. He manages to neutralize Swenson’s two cohorts simultaneously, seizing the guns from their belts while on the ground and firing after kicking them down. Why they (or Swenson, who also was shown to have a gun) did not just shoot Beck despite having ample opportunity, is not mentioned. It’s especially odd in light of Swenson’s own “you should have kept the gun” admonition to Beck during the bar fight scene.

After tangling a bit more with Swenson, Beck is able to disarm the knockoff Belmont and go hand-to-hand with him for a few rounds. And while I think Swenson’s tops as a henchmen, there’s no way their little scruff would even last this long if not for Beck being so visibly worn down during it. Hero finally subdues henchman, and Beck is nearly taken out by a lingering sniper, before that shooter is fortuitously shot by Travis. Beck grabs the man’s fallen gun and immediately blasts the pistol out of the hand of Hatcher, who’d been quietly approaching and nearly taken out Beck from behind.

From there, it all winds down. Walken gets a few more hammy lines as the character refuses to contemplate how he’s lost everything, and is ultimately shot by an anonymous villager. Oh, and Travis subdued Harvey by crashing his escaping car into a water tower.

Do you know what this fight is? It’s a video game. It’s SO a video game. Especially after Beck arms himself– just put the camera into first-person view and his unstoppable rampage will be a lot more familiar. I say this with affection, obviously.

A few demerits, however. Aside from the aforementioned Gun Accuracy Fails and Swenson’s men choosing to get suicidally physical, the big one is Beck’s own decision go all NRA Poster Boy. It works quite well as a badass hero moment, but there’s literally no payoff to Beck’s earlier reticence to use guns. He doesn’t seem to be any more bloodthirsty than usual (certainly no more than the situation requires) and has no trouble dialing himself back down once the danger has passed. Nobody has to talk him off the ledge. He even gives Hatcher multiple chances to walk away alive! There’s no emotional consequence for the character, or even the illusion of same. Of course, this is a self-consciously silly movie, but it still oughtn’t introduce “serious” character beats it has no intention of following through on.

But the action is still fast, creative and continuous. It may not be as outright fun and inventive as the big jungle throwdown, but the scale and intensity is ratcheted up to appropriate levels for the climax. Just a good ol’ fashioned ass-whoopin’ writ large. This is the Rock’s destiny.

I demand sequels. Or at least Peter Berg signed on for a Castlevania adaptation.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: I have a good feeling about this.

This will be a post long remembered.

You’re hearing the music in your head right now. It’s okay, don’t fight it.

It’s time for another Retrospective, where we put away the microscope and instead take the bird’s eye macro view of a particular film or franchise. In this case, the great big granddaddy of them all: Star Wars. I’ll try to shy away from going into detail on each individual movie and/or my personal feelings on Star Wars (spoilers: I LOVE STAR WARS), because if there’s one thing the Internet needs less of it’s nerds explaining what Star Wars “means” to them. If there’s another thing the Internet needs less of it’s people griping about the prequels, so I will try to avoid that as well… but not entirely, because, well, that’s impossible.

A few notes first: Mostly because it’s what fits but also for purposes of my sanity, this series will only cover Jedi duels. Fittingly, the word “lightsaber” will come up a lot, and there are only so many ways around saying it over & over again, so I apologize in advance for the repetition. I’ll dispense with the setups here, because if you’re not familiar with Star Wars by now there’s little use in me explaining it to you. The entire series will be split up into separate posts, by trilogy. And despite the fact that George Lucas claims the films are meant to be watched in their own chronological order, I will be covering them in the order in which they were released, as God intended.

Now let’s hop in the Long Ago Machine….

1) Obi-Wan Kenobi vs Darth Vader

“The circle is now complete. When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master.”

(Episode IV: A New Hope)

The Fighters:

• Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness.
• Darth Vader, played by David Prowse (body) and James Earl Jones (voice).

The Fight: This was the clash of the titans. Coming into Star Wars for the first time in 1977, you’re introduced gradually to what the concept of a lightsaber is but it’s not until here that you really see them as dueling weapons. I wonder how that moment played out to original audiences, as the delightful old wizard squared off against the towering evil villain and they each ignited their blades?

That aside, the rest of what follows is actually not all that interesting. There’s nothing creative about the fight itself or the way it’s shot. Even the normally bombastic John Williams backs off for the most part. The choreography is never truly clumsy but neither does it impress. It’s just two actors swinging clubs at each other.

Though Hollywood sword master Bob Anderson would oversee the more impressive fights of the next two installments, here he’s only listed as a stunt man rather than a choreographer; Peter Diamond is listed as the film’s overall stunt coordinator, so it’s unknown who exactly plotted out this sword fight, if anyone did at all. Despite Vader’s “you can’t win!” boast, there’s never any real indication that he’s winning or that Kenobi is losing. Neither one dominates, hurts or gains an advantage over the other until the very end. Granted, the insta-kill nature of lightsabers as a weapon leaves very little margin for injury, but there are still ways around this.

It’s also always been my pet peeve that Lucas or whoever signed on to the idea of pulling the hood up on Obi-Wan’s robe. The point is to make him look mystical or some such, presumably, but at the best moments it adds nothing and at the worst it looks comical, especially in the shots where you can see how the fabric has bunched up in a point behind his head. Unhooded, the flowing nature of the robe already works as a humble counterpoint to Vader’s intimidating cape, but the hood itself is a bridge on the river Kwai too far.

No shot in the actual fight looks this cool.

And we now know that Kenobi’s famous “I’ll become more powerful than you could possibly imagine” line was pure BS. Once he dies, he becomes a flickery ghost who dispenses advice– something he was plenty good at when he still had a physical body, thank you very much.

What makes the scene work (aside from the coolness of the lightsaber itself as a weapon) are the actors, and the affection we’ve come to have for the characters. Guinness is all dignity & grace (this performance made him the Magic Grandpa to a whole generation, a fact which irritated him to no end) while the Prowse/Jones combo is just pure menace & power. There is a real sense of grandiosity when they square off, and the way they sell their rather portentous yet snappy dialogue it indicates a clear, almost intimate, familiarity with each other.

Anyway, the whole thing ends with Kenobi deliberately taking a blow from Vader’s blade, presumably to encourage Luke & co to escape without waiting for him. You have to love Guinness’ wry little half-smile right before he does so– such a cocky “I know something you don’t” moment. A great beginning & ending to an otherwise underwhelming fight.

Grade: C+

2) Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader

“Impressive. Most impressive.”

(Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back)

The Fighters:

• Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill.
• Darth Vader, played David Prowse and James Earl Jones. With some significant in-the-suit work done by choreographer Bob Anderson.

The Fight: This is it. The big one. The silver tuna.

You’ll find it’s full of surprises.

Luke has rushed off to face his destiny prematurely, against the advice of not one but two Sagely Mentors, and soon enough finds himself in an eerily quiet chamber with the Dark Lord of the Sith himself. Director Irwin Kershner, who was wisely given the reins on this installment, does everything possible to sell the magnitude of this confrontation. Of course they barely had to at this point in the movie, because there is literally nothing more cool than Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back. As great as he was during his debut, throughout the course of the sequel he has proven to be singularly ruthless, cunning, intimidating and driven, yet utterly composed. This is Vader at his peak.

And this isn’t just the galaxy’s #2 Dictator here– to Luke, Vader is also the cold-blooded bastard who killed his father AND his kindly mentor/brief father-figure, not to mention ordering the deaths of his aunt & uncle. This is personal. So when Luke struts in with unearned cockiness and draws his own weapon, the audience feels all sorts of tension. Props are due to Hamill here, who portrays Luke’s eagerness to prove himself and emotion-driven decisions while still not coming off as an unrestrained spaz, as Hayden Christensen would do decades hence (more on that later).

More props due to Kershner and his cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who, mostly during the first half of the duel, play excellently with light & steam so that the two combatants are frequently in varying amounts of silhouette, giving their clash an iconic look. Also, I’m not sure if this was deliberate, but the wide shots seem to work smartly with the camera angles and actors’ body posture so that Vader still towers over Luke but not comically so, as a more natural contrast of Prowse (6’5) and Hamill (5’9) might appear.

The fight is basically broken into three parts. In the first, Vader’s main goal is to trap Luke in the carbon-freezing chamber and get him to the Emperor, but Luke’s secret training makes him more formidable than Vader had guessed. They fence a bit both before & after Luke escapes from the freezing pit, with a few neat tricks along the way, such as Luke stunning Vader with a ruptured steam hose or Vader swooping down dramatically after knocking Luke down a flight of stairs. “Dramatic” is definitely the name of Vader’s game here: since the entire confrontation was engineered by the villain from the start, he seems to be almost deliberately (even theatrically) playing up his superior power, often fighting with just one hand and coolly tempting Luke with the power of the dark side. The soundtrack here is mostly silent, with only sound effects and brief snatches of dialogue to highlight the proceedings. The choreography is nothing flashy– that stuff doesn’t really kick in until the prequels– but it’s stately, compelling and thrilling nonetheless. Also it’s not long before Luke is looking visibly sweaty (by the end he’s incredibly ragged and bruised, in fact), which further hammers home his underdog status here; this is a sort of happy accident of costume design, because considering the steamy environment and physical exertion Vader would surely be sweaty too (in fact underneath that bulky armor he’s gotta be stank ass filthy), but since he’s covered head to toe we never see it, thus preserving the character’s unflappable cool.

The second part begins after the pair are separated when Luke kicks his foe off a platform. Rather than merely hiding, Vader is actually just cannily controlling the battlefield, forcing Luke to chase about. Vader reveals himself near a window overlooking a vast chasm in the enormous Bespin mining structure, but rather than going back to fencing, the Sith Lord decides to show Junior what it’s like when the kid gloves come off. Without even the physical prompting that usually accompanies Force telekinesis, Vader quietly tears off huge pieces of the scenery and throws them at Luke, faster than he can keep up. Soon enough he’s battered to the point where he can’t resist the vacuum after one chunk of debris smashes a hole in the window, and he goes tumbling down. This is where John Williams’ famous music kicks in rather ominously, accentuating what’s already clear to the audience and probably to Luke: he’s not going to win this. He was never going to win this. He’s completely outclassed and has majorly screwed things up, just like Yoda and Obi-Wan warned him. He was a fool to come here.

The final part takes place as Luke tries to make his way back up after recovering from the fall onto an isolated platform (hey, what’s that platform there for, anyway?), but is ambushed by Vader and the fight resumes. The villain doesn’t try any of his cool Force mojo from this point on, but he doesn’t have to: he’s dominating the poor boy more than ever, pushing him back out onto the platform with no place to run. Luke does get in a painful-looking strike on Vader’s shoulder, but shortly after he gets his own hand chopped right off, his weapon along with it.

As Luke crawls out onto the (very narrow) end of the walkway, the dynamic in their struggle changes: because Vader wants & needs Luke alive and Luke is in a precarious position that Vader can’t forcibly extract him from, suddenly Luke has the upper hand, and Vader’s temptations turn almost pleading– he has to quite literally talk Luke off the ledge.

He tries threats, he tries bribing him with power, then he pulls out the big guns and hits him with the revelation that shocked the world. Watching the scene again now, after 30+ years of repetition, imitation and parody, it hasn’t lost one ounce of its thunder. Done wrong this could have come across as a cheesy soap opera-esque reveal, or the inescapable truth of it might not have been conveyed, but everything here comes together just right: Jones’ growling delivery, Hamill’s reaction starting out as quiet realization and quickly escalating into panicked desperation, and Williams’ music coming in at just the right moment. Perfection.

Vader tells Luke to come with him because “it is the only way,” but Luke proves that there’s always another way, even if it’s probable death. He lets go of his grip and plummets into oblivion. But despite his escape from corruption, there’s no mistake that Luke scored no victory here: this is a man who has been utterly defeated, inside & out.

What else can you say?

Grade: A+

3) Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader (rematch)

“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”

(Episode VI: Return of the Jedi)

The Fighters:

• Luke Skywalker, played by Mark Hamill.
• Darth Vader, played by David Prowse (though mostly Bob Anderson for this fight) and James Earl Jones.

Also Ian McDiarmid is there as Emperor Palpatine, overseeing the whole thing and stepping in at the end for a light show.

The Fight: This one is surprisingly abbreviated, and concerned with drama as much if not more than it is with action.

Goaded on by the Emperor, Luke tries to resist the anger bubbling up within but eventually lashes out, and engages with Vader. The action is noticeably more aggressive than what we’ve seen before and more complicated as well, with Luke pulling off a nifty backflip or two. Hamill does his best work yet in this duel, actually, clearly at war with his roiling emotions and trying to restrain himself yet coming off utterly psycho whenever his rage does take over.

Twice Luke tries to disengage and twice he’s pulled back in. The first time he’s pursued by Vader and forced to defend himself, so he then gets some distance and hides out as Vader hunts; this creates an interesting reversal of the duel in ESB, where Vader made Luke chase after him– except here Luke is trying to defuse the conflict whereas Vader was only turning it to his advantage. In fact there are several inverse parallels in the two showdowns: last time, Luke was warned not to go to Vader even though he wanted to, but now Yoda explicitly tells him he must defeat Vader even though he doesn’t want to, in order to become a full Jedi. This is the kind of thematic resonance snooty critics must be thinking of when they deride Star Wars as “shallow” and “simplistic.”

Anyway, Luke stays out of sight and tries to play it cool, but as Vader’s continued speaking and threats rattle him enough that he can sense the boy’s anxiety about Leia. Vader plays on that, which finally provokes Luke into a full-fledged Jedi tantrum. This is when Williams’ music, which has mostly stayed quiet throughout the proceedings, kicks in. But it’s not thrilling or scary but sad, because this is a family tragedy playing out before us, this is the wrong path for Luke to take.

Junior finally gets Dad on the ropes and pins him down with a series of furious blows, culminating in Vader’s own hand coming off. Luke finally stops his assault but he still looks truly rattled– he’s really on the precipice here. But that’s the moment Palpatine chooses to close in (he arguably overplays his hand), gleefully telling Luke to give in & take his father’s place. Luke looks wary at just being turned into the Emperor’s next disposable pet, then he looks at his father’s sparking stump and compares it to his own prosthetic fist. It is, oddly, the physical parallel between the two that finally snaps the hero out of it; he sees how alike he and his father already are, and chooses not to go any further.

Standing down for good, Luke throws his lightsaber over the edge of the pit (seriously, pits everywhere in this universe), and tells Palpatine that he’s failed forever. Luke knows full well that he may not leave the room alive, but he has faced his own inner demons and come out victorious. He won the battle his father lost long ago.

Fittingly, that also seems to have earned Anakin’s redemption: when the Emperor starts to torture Luke with Force lightning, his father steps in and tosses the despot to his death, at the cost of his own life.

Very good, but this is easily the most over-edited of the trilogy’s fights, cutting in and out to other parts of the movie’s triple climax several times; necessary from a storytelling standpoint, but arguably aggravating the scene’s own energy. As stated the choreography is more complex, even though it’s missing the same level of dramatic oomph as in the previous fight. Hamill acquits himself quite well indeed on all fronts, and McDiarmid’s unnerving presence as the ever-confident Emperor is creepy as anything. But the real missing X-factor here is Vader himself: throughout the fight and indeed throughout most of the film, Darth Vader seems like a shadow of his former self. His whole body language seems tired & resigned, nowhere near the menacing mystical shark of a man we saw in the previous two installments. He’s less of an implacable force of nature and more of an old man with regrets. It’s a shame.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: The complementary retrospective. I dread what awaits me.

Might as well get this meme out of the way now.

Let’s do this.

One character is conspicuously missing from this collage, but I wouldn’t say anyone’s actually *missing* him.

Ah, the Star Wars prequels. They get more hate than they deserve, but the hate they do deserve is more than enough. That animosity out of the way, let’s go ahead and take things as they come.

(Housekeeping note: I tried to do the whole prequel trilogy in one big post, but the verbiage kept spilling out from me. After hitting the three thousand work mark before I was halfway done and seeing that Revenge of the Sith has FIVE fight scenes all on its own, I decided to split this in two, with Episodes ! & II in this post and the next post dedicated to the third. Nobody wants to read a 10,000 word blog post, after all.)

1) Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi vs Darth Maul

“We’ll handle this.”

(Episode I: The Phantom Menace)

The Fighters:

• Qui-Gon Jinn, played by Liam Neeson.
• Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Ewan McGregor.
• Darth Maul, played by Ray Park. Voiced by Peter Serafinowicz, but he says nothing in this fight.

The Fight: Epic.

It’s hard not to view this fight in the context of its time. Prior to 1999, audiences hadn’t witnessed an on-screen lightsaber fight in about 16 years, and in the intervening time the standards of action film choreography had changed quite a bit– mainstream Western audiences were getting more exposed to hyper-complicated Hong Kong action ballets, for one thing. Plus, as we were reminded endlessly, the Jedi in the prequels would be from a mystical warrior culture in its prime, whereas in the original trilogy the only Force-users were a few over-the-hill remnants and one inexperienced newcomer. For this showdown, Lucas & co had to come out swinging, in more ways than one. (Not the sexy way. Mostly.)

So while it may not have ultimately been the best move to replace Bob Anderson with Nick Gillard as the sword master, it was certainly understandable. Gillard fused together multiple styles of fencing (and other types of swinging movements such as tree-chopping) to create a unique style of Jedi-fighting that was highly energetic and complex. His Jedi are more acrobatic ninjas than they are stately knights.

Speaking of complex, the nature of this fight adds several new wrinkles that hadn’t yet been seen in any main Star Wars media by this point: it involved more than two combatants, it traversed an enormous amount of real estate, and most obviously it introduced (to the screen, anyway) that long-drooled-after bit of fanboy lore, the double-bladed lightsaber. Wouldn’t it have been great if they’d not spoiled that in the trailers and been able to keep it secret until opening night? Ah, a fanboy can dream.

From a narrative standpoint it’s also distinctive for being the first Star Wars duel in which the protagonist(s) and antagonist have zero emotional/dramatic connection, at least not until near the end. This is not old friends or payback or familial redemption; Maul is a bad guy, they’re the good guys, and they’re in each other’s way. Maul doesn’t even talk– he’s a silent assassin, a blunt instrument.

Anyway, as to the fight itself, though time & repetition (I personally must have watched this close to a hundred times, including eight screenings in the theater. Yes, eight. You wanna make something of it?) have worn away some of its initial impact and revealed some of its flaws, it’s still a very entertaining & dynamic battle. And it’s still easy to see why it came off as enough concentrated awesome so as to mitigate the disappointment and head-scratchings of much of the preceding 100-some minutes.

The performers really do some excellent work executing Gillard’s hyper-detailed choreography. Liam Neeson (a GFS Hall of Famer for Rob Roy alone) is huge and powerful, while McGregor’s Kenobi is all wiry speed. But Ray Park’s Darth Maul is unquestionably the star here– the fact that he didn’t went on to be an actual movie star after this film and has rarely been put to good use since is something I’ll never forgive Hollywood for. Seriously, is it THAT hard to think up 90 minutes’ worth of scenarios for Ray Park to kick ass in? “Well, you know, he’s not a very good actor.” Oh, but Steven Seagal was?

Ahem. Point is, absent that aforementioned dramatic resonance, this fight had to succeed all the more on a purely kinetic level, and it’s Darth Maul who sells the scale of the threat here. Maul is fast, strong, and lithe like a snake. His overall design is a pointed contrast to everyone’s favorite Sith Lord, much more animalistic and primal (he’s got a painted face and freaking horns, for crying out loud) instead of Vader’s effortless, streamlined menace. And as portrayed by Park he is, while still tactically smart, a guy who wears his fury & aggression on his sleeve. The dude is a big scary bully and he fights angry.

Another key ingredient is the famous Duel of the Fates, John Williams’ specially composed orchestra/choir piece for the film– itself another unusual take for Star Wars. It was heavily promoted at the time and was run into the ground by Lucas afterwards, but like the rest of the much-revisited fight it still retains an elemental power that helps sell the scale of the conflict here, even cut up & re-arranged as it is.

The scene’s real problems come from its staging and plot contrivances. It begins in a hangar deck and Maul soon takes the initiative to move it (in a nice detail many don’t see the first time around, he Force-grabs a battle droid’s arm and uses it to activate a door switch) to more restricted quarters since presumably the open environment offers him little advantage against two opponents. All fine. But as soon as the combatants move through the door they’re in this enormous chamber, maybe 30 stories or more deep, with at least three levels of catwalks and some sort of giant towering reactors. Why are these enormous reactors sharing space with the fighter bay? Is it really safe to collocate your energy reactors with your military assets? (Fortunately for the people of Naboo, the Trade Federation had a similar design philosophy: their ships had their “shoot here to blow up the whole ship” power core about a hundred feet from the docking bay.) The climactic duel of Empire took place in a similarly cavernous installation, but that more or less made sense because Cloud City was established as a mining colony and its structures were designed to harvest the abundant gas below– the fight even took place in an industrial area because that’s where the freezing equipment Vader needed was. Here the audience has no sense of what this place is. It doesn’t flow organically out of the story, it’s merely there because it needs to be there.

Even more egregious is the bizarre contrivance in the latter portion of the fight, the hallway full of force fields that turn off & on at set intervals. These force fields serve no apparent practical function; as a young fanboy I tried to convince myself that they were for slowly venting gases out at staggered times, whereas Terry Brooks’ crappy novelization mentioned that they served a security purpose, which makes even less sense (wouldn’t they just stay on constantly in that case?). They exist purely as a plot device to get Qui-Gon killed– specifically, to get him killed in such a way that it happens while he’s separated from Obi-Wan and the apprentice must look on, able-bodied but helpless to stop it. It’s frankly like something a child would make up.

The way it finally resolves is pretty dumb, too. It’s a cool idea to try to have Kenobi win by using his brain rather than simply getting in a lucky blow in the middle of normal combat, but it’s inexcusable the way Maul stands there like a dumbass for as long as Obi-Wan takes many long seconds to lift himself out of the pit he’s trapped in, then land, and THEN slice him in half. *I* wouldn’t have that slow of a reaction time, and I’m not a mystical psychic space ninja monster.

Contrivances aside, the action itself is, despite all its frenetic complexity, seriously flawed when given close examination. How bothersome that is I’ll leave up to you; it’s not like the Star Wars movies were known for their accuracy in fencing technique before this. And this one is spliced up even worse than worse than ROTJ, because between the duel, the Gungan ground war, Padme infiltrating the palace, and the space battle, this movie has a four-front climax. Let it never be said that George Lucas is unambitious, but the Jedi fight is unquestionably far more interesting than anything else happening simultaneously, so cutting away from it is rarely helpful.

Also, there are three (3) separate occasions where Maul kicks Kenobi right in the face. He’s probably got the manufacturer’s logo tattooed in his brain by now.

Grade: B+

2) Obi-Wan and Anakin vs Count Dooku

“Surely you can do better!”

“Yes I can and don’t call me Shirley”

(Episode II: Attack of the Clones)

The Fighters:

• Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Ewan McGregor.
• Anakin Skywalker, played by Hayden Christensen.
• Count Dooku aka Darth Tyranus, played by acting legend Christopher Lee.

Come to think of it, no first name for Dooku is ever given, and you have to wonder exactly what kind of royalty he is considering that Force-sensitive babies are taken by the Jedi Order at birth. I really wish he went by his Sith moniker “Tyranus” more, because (and this is running theme) “Count Dooku” sounds like a name a child made up. Though not as much as “Dexter Jettster” does.

(You’ll notice I skipped all the chaos in the arena, because the monster stuff is a very weird type of “fight” and after all the reinforcements arrive it becomes more of a war sequence than anything. I also skipped the pretty good confrontation with Jango Fett on Kamino because come on, do you want to be here all day?)

Is it just me or does Hayden have freakily long arms? And shouldn’t he be WAY taller than Kenobi?

The Fight: It’s really less Obi-Wan and Anakin vs Dooku than it is Obi-Wan then Anakin vs Dooku, since little orphan Annie rushes in out the outset like a moron and gets zapped by a healthy dose of Force lightning, taking him out of commission for a few minutes. Kenobi is left alone to face Dooku, his master’s master, alone. Tyranus tries the same zap attack on Obi-Wan, but the latter casually blocks it just by holding his lightsaber in the way. This scene was only the second time we’d seen Force lightning on screen in the Star Wars universe, so it was something of a surprise to find it could be deflected so easily, and somewhat disappointing, too.

Obi-Wan’s time with Dooku is characterized by a series of short, intense clashes, and even though blow-for-blow Kenobi seems to doing well until the end, McGregor’s performance show that he’s struggling just to keep up. Dooku relishes it, too, leering at him evilly as he encourages the younger man to “do better.” And sure enough, it’s not long before he’s able to dart in and give Kenobi a couple incapacitating (but non-maiming, curiously; he just scoops out a chunk of flesh from two limbs) wounds.

He gets stopped at the last second by the intervention of a revived Anakin. Their short exchange is one of the few examples of genuinely successful, snappy dialogue in the entire film, if not the whole prequel trilogy:

DOOKU: “Brave of you, boy. But I would have thought you had learned your lesson.”

ANAKIN: “I am a slow learner.”

Nothing major, but a nice little smartass retort, and it works extra because it plays off the resentment the audience has built for Anakin’s impulsive, stubborn characterization over the course of the past 2 hours. Curiously, the shooting script simply has the slightly but significantly different line “I’m a slow learner”– with that contraction, any emphasis on the sentence would have to go to a different word, which I don’t think would work as well. It’s entirely possible that the ad lib was made by Christensen, who I think gets a bad rap; he’s a good actor in the right role, and the problems with Anakin’s characterization are due more to the script than to him. Ever see Shattered Glass? It’s pretty awesome for a movie with zero fight scenes.

Sorry, back to business. Kenobi throws his padawan (I trust I’m not the only one who never cared for that word) his own lightsaber, and for a few brief seconds Anakin is able to push Dooku back with the extra blade. But his green saber gets destroyed almost as soon as he gets it, so it’s back down to one. Not sure why two swords would always be better than one, anyway; it’s an entirely different fighting discipline altogether (“it’s an entirely different fighting discipline”) and even if two were always better than one, wouldn’t every Jedi carry two?

“I’ll shatter YOUR glass, old man!”
“… what?”

Anyway, Anakin seems to conduct himself even better than his master did, having several long and fluid exchanges with the Sith Lord. The filmmaking gets a bit fancy here, too, after Anakin cuts open a grounded power cable, sparks start flying intermittently out of the ground and lower the light level in the pair’s portion of the hangar. A good chunk of the two’s fight is then shot in an alternating close-ups of their faces, lit only by their swirling blades. It’s really cool-looking, and a very artistic way to work around Christopher Lee’s advanced age (79 at the time).

But even the Chosen One is no match for Gandalf’s boss, who he darts in with a swipe that cuts off Anakin’s hand, and Force-punches him into a heap on top of Kenobi. Lee’s performance after doing so is… interesting. He sags his shoulders and drops his face, looking not so much tired from effort as he does resigned and disappointed. Is he sad about being forced to kill two promising young folks, or bummed that the challenging combat he seems to relish is over so soon, or is he planning on letting them live and trying to look conflicted for the heroes’ benefit so as to better build on the doubts he planted in Kenobi’s mind earlier? If that’s the latter one, that makes no sense, because it’s pretty clear he’s down with the dark side rather than being a well-meaning political dissenter; I mean, even Jefferson Davis didn’t have a red lightsaber and throw out Force lightning.

An enigmatic decision on the actor’s part, or confused direction from Lucas? We may never know. Regardless, Dooku doesn’t have long alone with his thoughts, because a certain little green man ambles into the room shortly after.

This is all very likable, all those nagging issues aside. It’s a great contrast to TPM’s climactic fight– a battle that doesn’t betray the new type of Jedi aesthetic established for the new trilogy but still gives a different type of experience. This is no epic duel of the fates, just a quick & dirty domination by a classy villain. Even though he’s body-doubled a lot (most of the more demanding physical work is done in very wide shots to hide this), Christopher Lee is a welcome addition to the world of Star Wars: it’s a world that is patently ridiculous and is quite often stiffly-written, so “naturalistic” acting is rarely comfortable there. Old-school hams with a sense of the absurd and the theatrical, such as Lee &  his old Hammer compatriot Peter Cushing back in ’77, are a much better fit. He also makes a nice halfway point between Maul and Vader.

Grade: B+

3) Yoda vs Count Dooku

“Much to learn, you still have.”

(Episode II: Attack of the Clones)

The Fighters:

• Yoda, played by CGI and voiced by Frank Oz, may he live forever.
• Count Dooku aka Darth Tyranus, played by Christopher Lee.

“Cut a bitch, Yoda will have to.”

The Fight: Yoda hobbles in and Darth Tyranus wastes no time picking up pieces of the scenery– machinery off the walls and large chunks of ceiling– and throwing them at the funny old master. Yoda calmly deflects it all, not even attempting to counter. When Dooku upgrades to Force lightning, the great warrior (even though wars do not make one great) returns that to sender just as easily, and finishes off by apparently absorbing the rest of it. Neat trick, but it loses some of its oomph now that we’ve seen just how easy it is to defeat that lightning if you have a lightsaber.

“Showing off, I am.”

Still, Lucas manages to sell the gravity of this showdown, and the titanic power of the two foes. It had been more than 20 years since the diminutive sage had first burst on the scene and impressed audiences with only hints of his once-great power– so much so that we inevitably wondered just what the little green muppet had been capable of back in his heyday. And this is basically what many of us would have guessed it would look like: Yoda coolly standing his ground and unleashing a cosmic whoopass with simple humility.

Lee’s aforementioned ability to navigate his way through ridiculousness comes in handy when he says the line that switches the nature of the fight: “It is obvious that this contest cannot be settled by our knowledge of the Force… but by our skills with a lightsaber.” Egads, seriously? That may be one of the most clunky and awkward lines ever written. It reads like the Jedi-fied version of something you’d hear in a B-list high school comedy from the ’80s, spoken by a snooty English-lit teacher who uses twenty big words when five short words would suffice. Granted, Count Dooku isn’t as flippant as John McClane but surely there could have been a quicker & better way to say this– something like “It seems we’ll have to settle this the old-fashioned way.”

But again, it’s a testament to Lee’s skill that he doesn’t come off like a total goon saying it. And the subsequent slow-pan around Yoda as he draws his own lightsaber is SO awesome. As much flack as Lucas gets for not understanding what his fans want, there are times he definitely knows how to play to the crowd.

Because as droolworthy an idea as Yoda engaging in a massive Force-struggle is, Yoda whipping out a lightsaber and swinging away was always a mind-blower. We wondered how would that even work, given the character’s aloof persona, frailty, and tiny size. The solution chosen by Lucas and co was ballsy, reckless, or some combination of the two: Yoda’s fighting style turned out to be a completely unexpected method involving blinding speed and hyperactive acrobatics, much of it using his small size as an asset.

“A butterfly, I float like.”

The result certainly blew everyone away at first (the opening screenings I went to were filled with delighted gasps and shouts of joy), but as with the then-mind-blowing duel capping off TPM, time may not have been kind to it since. Some have unfavorably compared Yoda’s constant flipping to Sonic the Hedgehog’s arcing jumps, and it’s hard not to see that. Still, it was certainly a daring and unexpected choice. Though I would have liked to see more actual fencing and less flipping.

Just as the fight winds down and we get the revelation that Yoda was Dooku’s old master, the latter decides to cut and run by dropping a huge pillar on Obi-Wan & Anakin, which Yoda has to stay behind and push off. A disappointing end to a shocking and epic fight.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: We find out why Revenge of the Sith makes for a fitting acronym.

Shhhhhh, it’s okay, Natalie. Just make out with Mila and people will forget.

Sith Happens.

And how.

For all the credit fanboys give it for being “dark” (it got a PG-13! And KIDS get killed!… off-screen, kinda. Ooooooh so edgy!) Revenge of the Sith is, to me, where the prequels went from troubling & highly flawed to outright unwatchable. The storytelling gets even more muddled, characterization implodes, dialogue reaches a new low, the entire franchise’s biggest moments are fumbled, and the action is mostly half-hearted & disappointing.

It’s also where lightsaber fighting, once the coolest of the cool, kinda jumps the shark. It already received heavy exposure in the previous two installments but here it’s outright abused. Seeing a single Jedi calmly slice through overwhelming odds or two Force-powered foes go at it has officially gone from awe-inspiring to commonplace, even banal. It is my sincere hope that when JJ Abrams (or whoever) takes over the reins for the next trilogy, they severely dial back both the number of Jedi and the display of their powers. Jedi need to be special again. Anyway:

4) Anakin and Obi-Wan vs Count Dooku (rematch)

“I’ve been looking forward to this.”

The Fighters:

• Anakin Skywalker, played by Hayden Christensen.
• Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by a visibly-bored Ewan McGregor.
• Count Dooku aka Darth Tyranus, played by Christopher Lee.

The Fight: Meh.

There’s an air of… perfunctory-ness to the whole thing. Skywalker and Kenobi walk in and greet Palpatine, who simply responds with a flat “Dooku” indicating that he’s entered the room behind them (they’re Jedi, shouldn’t they have sensed him?). For his part, Dooku opts not to walk down the stairs near the entrance of the room but instead jumps & CGI-flips down off the railing. It’s very awkward to watch this 80+ year-old man “do” that, and doesn’t really fit with his more stately character– this guy isn’t Darth Maul, he shouldn’t act like it.

Whenever the scene’s not perfunctory, it’s painfully lame, such as when Obi-Wan tries to calm the Chancellor by telling him “Sith Lords are our specialty.” Dude, you’ve killed exactly ONE Sith Lord: it was 13 years ago, and you got lucky. Anakin hasn’t killed any. Last time you faced a Sith it was this guy and he beat your ass in 30 seconds, then got away because Yoda stopped to save you– don’t act so cocky. (To any nerd who tries to object by bring up the Clone Wars cartoons: shut up.)

The fight that follows is smooth & graceful, and it tries to make the most of its rather bland setting by having the combatants move around a lot through the two stories… but it’s missing anything to make it truly impressive. Some of the choreography doesn’t work either, like when Dooku delivers a kick that sends Anakin flying– Lee (or his stunt double) sells the blow terribly. It all adds to the sort airy weightlessness of the battle; it’s like watching cartoons fight.

Dooku Force-punches Obi-Wan twice, the second time being a full-fledged body seizure that takes him out of commission for the remainder of the fight. This movie also muddies the water much farther into how Jedi’s telekinetic punches work: you wonder if there’s no way to defend against it, why don’t they do it more often, etc.

The music kicks in when Anakin is left alone with the Sith Lord, and in a brief but furious fight he manages to literally disarm Dooku with one swift move, chopping off his hands and plucking his fallen lightsaber out of the air.

He holds Tyranus in a scissor-lock and agonizes over killing him. After some goading by Palpatine, he eventually does. Lee does some nice work here when he reacts to the Chancellor’s command: it’s ambiguous enough that Anakin could reasonably interpret it as “oh no, I’m panicking because I’m about to die,” when in reality it’s “my master is betraying me, WTF!” But that only raises the question of why he doesn’t speak up and at least try to drag Palpatine down with him by revealing his role in all this– there’s nearly 20 seconds between when Sidious first gives the order and when Anakin finally gives in, plenty of time for him to get over his shock and start squealing like a stool pigeon. Hell hath no fury like a Sith scorned, one would think.

At its best, the fight is gorgeous yet empty, and its worst it’s awkward. If this were merely the warm-up for better things to come, it wouldn’t be so bad, but unfortunately that’s not the case.

Grade: C

5) Obi-Wan vs General Grievous

[no good quotes]

The Fighters:

• Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Ewan McGregor.
• General Grievous, played by CGI and voiced by Matthew Wood.

The Fight: Oy.

Just a waste. General Grievous had been built up in supplementary material to be this super-awesome dueling master– a killer cyborg designed expressly to be the ultimate lightsaber fighting machine!– but in this fight the actual “dueling” part is over within less than a minute, and isn’t too interesting watch, besides. (“This food is terrible!” “I know. And such small portions!”) Not since the Matrix Reloaded’s Twins has such a great fight scene opportunity been bungled.

All Grievous’ amazing skill comes off more like just a cheap trick. Despite pulling some crazy four-armed lightsaber-wrangling (two used for fencing while two more spins like fans above), Kenobi defuses the threat very quickly, and not in a way that builds the hero up so much as it brings the villain down. Grievous looks more here (and in his previous scenes in the film) like a poser rather than a genuine threat– he’s cowardly, ineffective and just plain weird. He’s not a Vader, a Maul, or a Dooku. He’s just kind of a clown.

Kenobi himself doesn’t fare all that much better: Lucas fumblingly tries to give the character a Too Cool For School attitude as he non-chalantly drops into Grievous’ meeting with no apparent backup, and McGregor seems uninterested in trying to compensate for the poor writing. His big comeback (to being told he won’t leave alive) is a rather generic and half-hearted “Oh, I don’t think so!” Frankly even Fred Willard sounded more intimidating saying it. The “combat-ready” stance Kenobi assumes twice early in the confrontation (and several times throughout the film), where he holds his blade in one hand above his head, coils his body back, and points his other hand forward is really silly-looking.

Anyway, after the arrival of clone trooper reinforcements and a really lame-looking Force punch (even worse than Dooku’s kick) that sends Grievous into the ceiling, the villain opts to scamper away on this weird giant wheel of a vehicle, with Kenobi in pursuit on this cool giant lizard that can somehow keep up. There’s a chase in which Kenobi drops his lightsaber (odd, considering how much he chewed out Anakin for doing the same thing in Episode II… also during a vehicle chase, coincidentally. But it’s understandable– it’s not like he has some kind of telekinetic power with which he could have retrieved it), then a crash that leaves the two on the edge of a precipice and both lightsaber-less.

Kenobi does kind of well at first with a droid’s electric staff thing, but Grievous’ droid strength gets the better of him. Disarmed, the Jedi’s physical blows are no good (why doesn’t he Force-punch him again? Especially with that pit right there?), but he does pry open the villain’s chest plate, leaving it exposed for several blaster shots right to the heart. Grievous goes up in flames kind of awesomely.

“… and you’re to blame!”

Of course, since back in Episode IV Kenobi compared the lightsaber as being a more “civilized” weapon than a blaster, here he discards the blaster in disgust by saying “how uncivilized!” Which is just a notch or two beneath “why do I feel like you’re going to be the death of me” in the Herp Derp Remember That Scene In The Old Movies?! category.

I appreciate the scene’s ambition in trying for a new kind of battle here, especially considering it’s a lightsaber-heavy enough film as it is. The idea of Obi-Wan beating the bad guy with a blaster is a pretty ballsy and unexpected one, to be honest I’d appreciate it even more if I thought the movie had wit enough to be trying something “subversive” here, but of course it isn’t. It’s a short & lackluster lightsaber battle followed by an uninteresting chase and a quasi-interesting physical scuffle. And all against a weaksauce bad guy.

Grade: C

6) Darth Sidious vs Mace Windu

“It’s treason, then.”

The Fighters:

• Mace Windu, played by Samuel L (mothereffing, etc) Jackson.
• Chancellor Palpatine aka Darth Sidious, played by Ian McDiarmid.
• Three other Jedi Council members, whose contributions in the fight don’t even rise to “minimal”: Kit Fisto, Agen Kolar, and Saesee Tiin (I had to look up the names of the two who don’t have awesome green dreadlocks), played by Ben Cooke, Tux Akindoyeni, and Kenji Oates, respectively.

This is so much less cool than you’d think.

The Fight: Ugh.

If the previous fight scene was merely disappointing and underwhelming, this one is just plain bad and stupid. The choreography is weak and uninspired, the characters less resembling two cosmic-powered titans having an epic showdown than two, ahem, “men of a certain age” awkwardly swinging swords at each other– even more so than Episode IV’s Kenobi/Vader showdown, but that was simply uninteresting; this is outright embarrassing. And yet, while it manifestly fails to deliver on its epic status, it’s also paradoxically too long.

And did I mention stupid? The fight opens with Mace Windu and three other senior Jedi Masters approaching to apprehend Palpatine and, after some very mediocre dialogue, they engage in battle. Sidious opens up with this bizarrely unnecessary corkscrewing jump while he screech-howls like an animal. He then manages to kill Agen Kolar and Saesee Tiin, two of the most powerful and experienced Jedi Masters in the universe, with his opening strikes– in fact, the former falls prey to one of the most telegraphed lunges of all time. Lucas and co have a very hard time selling the awesomeness of one fighter without making his opponents look like total losers.

Kit Fisto takes one to the gut a few seconds later, so then it’s just Windu and Palpatine alone. They do not acquit themselves well.

Yeah, about like this.

Samuel L Jackson is a man of many talents, but sword-fighting on-screen is not one of them, and probably wasn’t even before he filmed this scene at the age of 53. And Ian McDiarmid… oof. He’s not a bad actor, as he’s spent a lifetime making quite a name for himself on stage, including in many Shakespeare productions. And his previous work as the unctuous & charming Senator Palpatine was actually very good, as was his work in Return of the Jedi. But his performance as Darth Sidious is absolutely, 100%, irredeemably awful. He’s a cartoon character in all the worst ways: he contorts his mouth like a buffoon, he cackles incessantly, and hisses like a snake when he’s angry. The overlord who spent decades methodically masterminding his gradual rise to absolute power has the same mannerisms as a schizophrenic hobo. McDiarmid’s performance (which I have to believe was molded by Lucas) is worse than five Jar Jars, because at least you were never supposed to take him seriously.

Anyway, Mace Windu and Captain Clownface twirl around awkwardly throughout Palpatine’s spacious high-rise apartment. One of the fight’s few and fleeting moments of gracefulness is when it moves close to the enormous bay window and an errant saber swing shatters the glass. That’s kinda nice.

Windu disarms Palpatine and he goes scampering about (again, like a cartoon), seemingly helpless. The duel ends with Windu’s blade in the villain’s face, which is of course just when Anakin The Dumbass enters. There’s some argument about whether Windu should execute Sidious on the spot, while Anakin wants him to live because he’s promised to help save Padme from dying. Palpatine can’t decide whether to play the helpless victim or whether to act overtly evil and, in what’s probably McDiarmid’s lowest point, he croons out “No, noooooo, noooooooooooooo!” and tries to zap Windu point-blank with Force lightning, which the Master just reflects back on him with his lightsaber. The lightning zaps throughout Palpatine’s body and either scars him permanently or reveals his true appearance, depending on what you believe (certainly Force lightning hasn’t marred the face of anyone else who’s ever been hit with it). Either way, he now looks more like he did back in Episode VI, though in a way that’s a lot more difficult to take seriously.

The real kick in the gut happens here, after the fighting’s done. Although it would take just a few more inches of effort for Windu to shove his blade through Palpatine’s face, he instead rears back his arm dramatically so that Anakin has plenty of time to draw his own weapon and cut off Mace’s saber hand. With Windu defenseless, Sidious surges back to life and releases another torrent of Force lightning, graphically electrocuting him and sending him flying out the window. Prior to Episode III, Jackson was fond of declaring that he was happy to be in the prequels as long as he didn’t “go out like a punk.” Looks like he didn’t get his wish.

[There are many who theorize that Sidious was never in any danger throughout the entire fight, and only prolonged it so that Anakin would walk in at the exact right second. This interpretation involves too many variables for the Sith Lord to rely on; considering he'd spent years & years playing out his meticulous plan it seems strange he'd gamble it all so boldly right now. Plus, Sidious should not be so much stronger than Windu that he's able to play possum so well against him; Windu is second only to Yoda, and Yoda comes within an inch of beating Sidious later.]

But the worst part is how this one action undoes all of the franchise’s thematic resonance and years of emotional build-up. Anakin Skywalker didn’t turn to the dark side out of pride and anger, nor did he do so as a completely selfish and calculated decision. He did it in a now-or-never moment of pressure, for a noble reason: saving his wife. He isn’t evil, just paranoid and misguided. Luke’s personal victory in ROTJ no longer has the same power; he didn’t win the battle his father lost, because his father turned “evil” under completely different circumstances. Anakin gave in to love, not aggression. Arguably there’s some poetic symmetry to the reveal that Anakin joined the dark side to save someone he loved and left it for the same reason, but it also makes his final decision a no-brainer: of course he’ll save Luke at the end, because saving family has always been his motivation.

So. This fight is completely un-exciting, frequently clumsy, and the ending undoes a huge part of what makes Star Wars tick. I’ll be generous.

Grade: D-

And let’s take a moment, if we may, to spotlight the absolutely horrible makeup job on Darth Sidious. The idea here is to make him look like the wrinkled, sagging freakshow audiences were introduced to in 1983 and indeed it follows the same general template, but too many things are just… off. Even without McDiarmid’s much more spastic performance and choreography that contorts him in very un-flattering ways, the overall effect of the new Palpatine is not comical but creepy.

From left to right: Yes; No; CHILD MOLESTER

This is the ultimate dictator of the galaxy and the evil mastermind behind six epic films. I shouldn’t wince every time he’s on screen.

7) Yoda vs Darth Sidious

“Not if anything to say about it, I have.”

The Fighters:

• Yoda, by Frank Oz and CGI he is played.
• Emperor Palpatine aka Darth Sidious, played by Ian McDiarmid.

The Fight: Derp.

Is it possible to create a really good sword fight featuring a 60-year-old robe-wearing & makeup-slathered actor against a diminutive CGI muppet? Maybe, but ROTS doesn’t provide a lot of evidence in favor.

This time around there’s actually some gravitas at play, thanks largely to audience anticipation, Frank Oz’s performance, and John Williams’ music. Yoda’s entrance into Palpatine’s chambers is pretty cool– he casually flicks a hand and it drops the two door guards to the ground. He is, however, weirdly unprepared for the jolt of Force lightning that knocks him into the wall, even though (again!) Sidious telegraphed the fact that he was about to do it pretty heavily. It looks like Qui-Gon Jinn’s “he can see things before they happen, that is why he appears to have such quick reflexes. It’s a Jedi trait,” in TPM is just below Kenobi’s “only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise” in terms of Statements Not Supported By Reality.

Yoda dusts himself off and retaliates with a strong Force punch* that sends Palpatine across the room. Switching emotional polarities really quickly as usual, Sidious panics and tries to escape with a cartoony flip that really doesn’t match his look (and his naked cowardice doesn’t inspire much admiration for him as a villain), but he’s cut off by Yoda, who utters a smug, “If so powerful you are, why leave?” Sidious’ retort is weird: “You will not stop me. Darth Vader will become more powerful than either of us!” The way McDiarmid delivers it, it sounds like the second sentence is being offered as a justification for the first, even though that makes no sense. At this point, viewers had certainly become accustomed to George Lucas writing dialogue exchanges where each character’s lines didn’t seem to have anything to do with the other’s, but it’s rare that a single character can’t even follow his OWN lines.

[*Once again: what's the deal with Force punching? If it's as effective and practical as a regular punch, why don't they do it more often? More importantly, as we see here, it's the good Jedi's long-range equivalent of Force lightning, so if they achieve roughly the same purpose in combat, why is one good/neutral and one "bad"?]

Anyway, after some really awkward posing by Sidious and a cut away to the Anakin/Obi-Wan fight, the two find themselves dueling on the platform that rises into the middle of the empty Senate chambers. It’s here that the combat is actually the most interesting. Yoda is flipping about still, but with much more actual sword work than in his clash with Count Dooku. The new music trailing in from the other fight & some smart camera work really convey the epic scale of the conflict, and of course the symbolism of this deciding battle occurring in the very heart of the Republic’s political system is powerful if obvious.

The fight gets a lot less compelling after the next cut, when we find the two have somehow separated: Sidious is several stories above Yoda in the enormous chamber, ripping out empty Senate seats (again: symbolism!) with the Force and throwing them at his tiny foe (“Duel of the Fates” plays from this point on, but it doesn’t gain much in being repeated from Episode I). The acrobatic muppet has little trouble dodging them as they come, and he finally gets Sidious on the defensive by seizing one & returning it to sender. As he does with every other emotion, McDiarmid WAY oversells his panic at having to dodge a single projectile.

As soon as he re-orients himself Palpatine is face-to-face against Yoda, but he knocks the saber out of the green alien’s hand with a quick burst of Force lightning. It now becomes pure strength against strength, as Sidious pours on the juice and Yoda tries to push it back. Yoda seems to get the upper hand and when he repels the attack it creates an explosive pulse that sends them both flying. Sidious is able to get hold of a guard rail but Yoda is not so lucky, so he falls a loooong way down and takes a couple hard thumps on the way down.

Yoda then scurries off and… that’s it. The contest of the two most cosmically powerful figures imaginable comes down to an accident of footing, the fate of the galaxy is lost on a technicality. It’s hard to understate just how monumentally disappointing this is. And besides that, it’s stupid: it’s understandable that Yoda wouldn’t want to continue the fight after suffering such a nasty fall (when 900 years of age you reach, as resilient your back will not be), but it’s frankly astonishing to think he’d tuck his tail between his legs for 20 years to avoid a rematch to a fight he probably would have won, especially with billions of lives on the line. Lucas once again chickened out as a storyteller; he wanted to find a way to have the good guy lose without making him “really” lose, and the resulting compromise is baffling rather than comforting. (And don’t even try to come at me with the silly rationalizations from the crappy novelization.)

More baffling is the pervasive laughter on the part of Darth Sidious throughout the fight. Not just laughter but straight-up cackling, with all the professionalism of a tenth-grade drama student playing a witch in Macbeth. He cackles after he’s zapped Yoda with lightning at the beginning, he cackles several times when they’re locking swords, he cackles as he’s heaving Senate pods at Yoda, he cackles while Yoda is seizing the Senate pod and spinning it in place in preparation to send it back, he cackles while Yoda is falling. He cackles without any regard to whether it’s an appropriate time to do so or whether it will impress the audience. Yes, way back in ROTJ the Emperor’s creepy laughter was a continuous presence in his climactic scene, but there it made sense: Palpatine had Luke right where he wanted him, he was steadily working to unnerve & aggravate the man, and he had every reason to believe his ultimate victory was achieved. Here he just cackles compulsively and ceaselessly. Like most everything about McDiarmid as the Sith Lord, it’s meant to be grand & scary but it comes off as petty & comical. When it comes to over the top acting, there’s a fine line between hammy and vampy. This is so far on the wrong side of that line it makes the 60s Batman villains look like Mark Ruffalo.

There’s more to like here than in most of ROTS’ other fights, but it’s weighed down by too many clumsy missteps and unforgivable errors. Wasted potential.

Grade: C-

8) Anakin vs Obi-Wan

“You were the Chosen One!”

The Fighters:

• Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Ewan McGregor
• Darth Vader formerly Anakin Skywalker, played by Hayden Christensen.

The Fight: Improvement.

After some truly terrible opening dialogue (“only a Sith deals in absolutes!” Hmm, ONLY a Sith, huh? Sounds like an absolute statement there, buddy), the duel kicks off more spirited than anything since the Episode I.

For those first few minutes, everything comes together perfectly. The actors, via either their own skill or just through sheer repetition, move at an incredible pace through an exquisite dance of death, never missing a single beat. Christensen in particular– with his tall & lean physique, striking black outfit and don’t-give-a-crap long hair– cuts the most imposing profile in the trilogy since Liam Neeson took a dive. Lucas shoots the whole thing like a pro, alternating skillfully between close-ups, mediums, wide shots, overhead angles, and even one striking behind-the-back view as the pair duel through a narrow hallway. Remarkably, even though the opponents are using the same color lightsaber (a first in Star Wars history!) and seemingly move in fast-forward, you can actually keep track of the action and see what’s going on. And John Williams’ specially composed piece “Battle of the Heroes” plays up immediately and keeps going for quite a while– it’s exciting, memorable, and hauntingly tragic.

This is the only fight in the whole movie that’s firing on all cylinders. There are some interesting beats in the control room, including some more intimate physical work like a disarmed Vader choking Anakin with his robot hand and doing the “why are you hitting yourself?” thing as he tries to turn Kenobi’s own saber against him.

In another cool beat, the two conclude a dazzling series of point-blank blows by trying to simultaneously Force-punch each other, which turns into an impromptu telekinetic wrestle that results in both flying back– odd, because while it’s believable that in a straight duel Obi-Wan’s experience and intimate knowledge of Anakin’s technique might put him on even footing, in a contest of raw strength the Chosen One would surely have the advantage.

Anyway, unfortunately, it’s not long after that an errant strike from Vader manages to hit the “press here to destroy whole chunks of the installation” button on a control panel. And naturally the two Jedi, with their finely-honed instincts and powers of precognition, think that’s the perfect time to venture out from the relative safety of the control room out onto more precarious and crumbling parts of the facility, where they’ll be exposed to the continuous splashing of liquid hot magma. Right.

What follows after could not possibly be more boring. The combatants still take occasional swings at each other but they’re mainly preoccupied with jumping around as pieces of the facility fall down and dodging lava. It’s meant to be spectacular but it’s all just so much green screen sound & fury, signifying nothing. It completely interrupts the flow of the fight and makes this all-important confrontation wind down rather than build up.

“Don’t touch the floor, the floor’s lava!”

Once the erstwhile master & apprentice find a some real estate in the lava river (a floating droid and a chunk of metal with its force field still working, that is. Even still, shouldn’t the proximity to that much heat be enough to kill even a Jedi?) the two have a few more up-close clashes, but nothing near the furious beauty of the fight’s opening. They also talk a little more, and Ewan McGregor gets in the only affecting bit of performance in the entire sequence: as he tells Anakin that he’s sorry how he failed him, he has the look & sound of a man who’s lost so much he can only laugh grimly at his awful situation. He’s actually smiling as he says it, in a crazy sort of way.

Unfortunately it is soon overshadowed by what’s the worst line that George Lucas ever wrote, indeed one of the worst lines in the history of cinema: when Kenobi declares that Palpatine is evil (hey Obi-Wan, is he ABSOLUTELY evil?), Vader replies, “from my point of view, the Jedi are evil!” Which… gah. That’s not something anyone would say in that situation, in fact it’s not even actual dialogue– it’s an actor reading his script notes out loud (“ANAKIN: 22 years old. Tall. Headstrong. Driven by love to paranoia. From his point of view, the Jedi are evil. Hates sand”). And the movie still can’t decide if Anakin has only joined the dark side on a selfless mission to help Padme, or if he’s genuinely swallowed Palpatine’s silly story about the Sith being misunderstood good guys out to bring order to the galaxy. Neither, of course, matches the Darth Vader we were introduced to in 1977, but of course that’s been off the menu for a while now.

Shortly after this, Obi-Wan spots some safe terrain atop a nearby small hill, and flips to safety. He announces that the fight is over because he has “the high ground” and warns Anakin not to come at him bro.

Vader disregards and tries to flip all the way over Kenobi’s head and directly behind him, but Obi-Wan lunges in and with one quick strike he chops off the other three of Vader’s remaining original limbs, leaving him to tumble down towards the lava and eventually catch fire.

There are so many ways in which this makes no sense. Search throughout the entire previous six movies for a Jedi duel where “the high ground” was a deciding factor in anyone’s victory. Your search will be in vain. In point of fact, Obi-Wan Kenobi himself flipped directly over the head of a ruthless Sith Lord not once but twice back in Episode I, at the beginning of the fight and (even more so) at the end– yes, that’s right, the arrogantly foolish move reduces Anakin to a torso is the same move that Kenobi used to WIN a fight. In fact Anakin himself got away with flipping over Kenobi’s own head (to land on his platform) about a minute before this! Besides that, even if it was a stupid idea, there was plenty of room on that mound for Vader to land on that wouldn’t have put him within his opponent’s striking distance. With all the various listings of Lucas’ faults that populate the Internet, “he doesn’t know how to end a fight” gets a surprisingly small amount of play.

So Obi-Wan chews out his old student one last time, takes his lightsaber and leaves him to die. Others have complained that it was foolish for Kenobi to just assume Vader died rather than finish him off, but given McGregor’s performance the more obvious (and compelling) interpretation is that he’s just too sad and disgusted to even look at Anakin anymore.

And that, of course, is that. The emotional and aesthetic linchpin of the entire Star Wars series ends not with a bang but with an idiotic whimper.

At least there’s this.

As with the Matrix Reloaded’s signature brawl, this duel is a mixed bag. What works REALLY works, but there are so many bad decisions which simply cannot be ignored. This is a 6+ minute fight in which only two minutes contain actual fighting, and the rest are largely filled with scrambling around on CGI backdrops. There’s no excuse for that. It averages out to:

Grade: B

Well, that’s it for Star Wars, unless this blog hangs around until 2015 or so. I wish I could have gotten the more painful-to-review prequel fights out of the way first and followed up by commenting on the glory of the originals, but I suppose that’s sort of fitting.

Coming Attractions: After all this star warring, we’ll unwind with some really, really, ridiculously silly. I won’t give away what it is, though I kind of already did.

Do you want to see the real world of male modeling, the one they don’t show you in magazines or the E! Channel?

“Of COURSE you do.”

1) Zoolander vs Hansel

The Fighters:

• Derek Zoolander, the man whose really really ridiculously good-lookingness took him from the anonymity of southern Jersey’s coal mining country all the way to international fame & fortune as the world’s #1 Male Model. One man, five syllables. Played by Ben Stiller.
  • Armed with: Though he mostly relies on his more physical skills in this battle, Derek is never far from his signature and diverse Looks, which include Ferrari, Le Tigre, Blue Steel and the enigmatic Magnum.
• Hansel, so hot right now. An up & comer whose free-range attitude puts him in stark contrast with Zoolander’s sleek style. Though new & inexperienced, he’s got some tricks up his sleeve.
  • Armed with: Hansel carries his trademark scooter but it doesn’t get any play here.

There’s also the notable presence of:

The Setup: Zoolander and Hansel have been drifting toward this inevitable confrontation for a while now. Early in the film, a perfectly reasonable misunderstanding led to an awkward confrontation at the annual modeling awards show, which in turn set off a chain of events that caused a humiliated Derek to retire from the world of male modeling.

But returning to his roots proved useless, as Zoolander’s true talent lies in being really, really, ridiculously good-looking. Goaded by a promise from the villainous Mugatu to help Derek build a center that will help kids learn to read good (and learn how to do other stuff good too), Zoolander agrees to return to modeling as part of Mugatu’s exclusive and incredibly classy “Derelicte” campaign.

At an industry party, a cocky Zoolander brushes by Hansel, and can’t resist lobbing a couple verbal sneers at him. Though Hansel at first tries to walk away, Derek eggs him on, and soon their confrontation escalates. They play some devious mind games as they try to psych each other out.

Finally the title character has had enough, and he challenges the brash upstart to the ultimate of all contests: a walk-off. Stunned, Hansel (so hot right now) eventually agrees. They will meet at their version of the OK Corral: the old Members’ Only Warehouse, in ten minutes. This is about to be settled on the runway.

Pretty crazy stuff. Derek should have listened to his friend Billy Zane.

He’s a cool dude.

It’s a walk-off. It’s a walk-off.

The Fight: Once Bowie introduces himself and establishes the rules (first model does a distinctive walk, second model duplicates it and elaborates. But come on, you already know how walk-offs work), the opening strands of what is surely the most exciting fight scene music of all kick in: Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

Director Stiller wisely shows us the complete walk-off and Hansel’s duplication, to give the audience some grounding. From there though the whole sequence is infused with bravura filmmaking. The conflict turns into an extended yet zippy montage, gliding back & forth between each devastating move and its expert counter. Often we’re even shown the action in split-screen– all the better to instantly compare the two’s amazing feats of mimicry.

And such amazing feats they are. The rivals shimmy, leap, flip off the wall, perform hand-stands and even do the Robot. In addition to the camerawork and editing, the performances and choreography here are completely top-notch.

The action frequently cuts back to the two contestants as they wait their own turn, with their backstage demeanor quickly transitioning from smug & cocky to outright weary. Hansel in particular seems very worn-down, at one point ordering his runway-side assistant to cut the fringe near his eye in a graphic sequence. Material this powerful, it’s little wonder that Sylvester Stallone was so obviously inspired by it.

It’s that same weariness, though, that makes Hansel desperate enough to “go monk.” Drawing on some exotic disciplines he’s dabbled in (we’ll learn more about the character’s mystically-inpired lifestyle later) and praying to the “Great Spirit,” Hansel takes the stage again with renewed purpose. The beats of “Beat It” subtly fade away and are replaced with some exotic foreign music as Hansel shoves his hand down his own pants. After several spastic movements around his groin, Hansel’s hand suddenly emerges in a dramatic slow-mo shot with the prize he’d been searching for: his own underwear. The golden-haired adonis had somehow learned a technique to remove his tighty-whiteys without pulling them down past his feet. Truly, nothing is impossible for the determined male model.

Even Bowie is impressed. And when David Bowie is impressed at things you can accomplish within your pants, you know you’ve got something special.

Zoolander takes the runway uncertainly and is visibly nervous as he prepares to attempt to replicate the achievement. The music dies down to an ominous hum, signaling the stakes if Derek loses. He even thinks to himself how glad he to have worn underwear that day (come to think of it: if anything, wouldn’t a lack of underwear excuse him from having to duplicate this stunt?). He darts into his pants with one, and eventually two hands, furiously working about and visibly pained. The music builds to a fever pitch, and Zoolander’s hands shoot up with a fistful of his leopard-print briefs… which are still secured around his crotch. He hasn’t just lost, he’s given himself the ultimate wedgie. Ouch.

Bowie’s disapproving voice confirms the hero’s defeat. But we don’t stay for long to witness Hansel’s revelry, because Mugatu’s henchwoman Katinka Ingabogovinanana shows up with thugs in tow, prompting Derek’s reporter friend and would-be paramour to usher him out immediately. And unfortunately not straight to an ice pack.

Good work here. The nature of the conflict is spelled out in simple but superb detail, and the director pulls all sorts of tricks to keep the confrontation constantly dynamic & interesting. We get a clear sense of the fighters’ abilities: Zoolander is experienced and confident, but Hansel (so hot right now) is limber and unpredictable.

The fight also works well in the context of the story, further establishing what kind of weirdness to expect from Hansel, cutting down on Derek’s recovering ego a bit, and most importantly, bringing the pair’s conflict to a head in order to pave the way for their reconciliation later.

If anything it suffers from perhaps being a bit too short; it’s not long at all (not even the full length of “Beat It”) before we wind down to Hansel’s deciding move. But it’s a minor complaint.

Grade: A

Recommend Links: This film is only Bowie’s second-best cameo. This is the best.

Okay, I hope that was fun for you, because it was fun for me. After drowning in over 10,000 words of Star Wars I needed to blow off some steam and act a little silly. Sillier than usual, anyway. I think after this I’m going to slow down to a two-posts-per-week schedule permanently. Three was a bit much.

Coming Attractions: More serious. But still silly.

Just in a different way.

Ooh, does this ever bring me back.

Ninja Scroll (aka Jubei Ninpocho) holds a certain place in the, ahem, hearts of many a male nerd of a certain age. Although Western culture is fairly saturated with Japanese animation today, for several years after Akira the release of such products to the US was something more like a slow trickle, and that relative rarity gave these shiny foreign objects a certain cultural cachet: for many of us, they were the stuff of whispers in the cafeteria, late-night screenings at sleepovers, and scratchy VHS copies. For a time few titles held the reverence of the early import Ninja Scroll: with its dynamite combination of bizarre fantasy, outrageous violence, overt misogyny and gratuitous sexuality all served up on a slickly stylized platter, it was like the ur-text of what we’d come to expect from anime as a whole– it was the definitive “cartoon your parents don’t want you to see.”

In short, it’s everything an adolescent thinks is “mature.” Re-watching it decades later I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it to anybody– it’s crude, gross, and completely ridiculous. But it’s also kind of awesome. Ten minutes never go by without something violent, insane, or both happening.

Once again I will be breaking format here. Many of the fights are so short that grading them one at a time would be futile; therefore I’ll be breaking the entries down into villains. Or, rather, into devils, as the movie’s baddies are the wonderfully-titled Eight Devils of Kimon (“devil” having a different meaning in Japan than in the Christian context)– this movie is SO video-gamey. Some of the eight devils only have one big fight, while others have multiple fleeting skirmishes the run time of which adds up. Three of them– Benisato, Yurimaru, and Zakuro– don’t even make the grade at all, as the heroes’ encounters with them are so esoteric or or brief as to not qualify as a “fight”… and two of those three actually get murdered by their own compatriots, due to the emotional fallout of the weird omnisexual love parallelogram they have going on. Today we start with:

1) Tessai

(voiced by Ryūzaburō Ōtomo)

An enormous (easily 7-8 feet tall) beast of a man. He has advanced strength and a sweet weapon, but his real trick is his ability to transform almost all of his body into nigh-impenetrable stone, at will.

Armed with: an enormous double-bladed metal spear that he can throw like a boomerang.

Damn, you’re ugly.

Fights with:

• The Koga Ninja, servants to the Mochizuki Clan. Most notably including Kagero (voiced by Emi Shinohara), a female ninja and poison tester who insisted on coming along. About ten or so altogether.
  • Armed with: All manner of swords, knives and a huge arsenal of ninja stars.
• Jubei Kibagami, a former Yamashiro clan ninja turned wandering mercenary after he was betrayed. He’s the quintessential cowboy hero (samurai flicks and Westerns always did have that weird, mutually symbiotic relationship): stoic, upright and unstoppably badass. Based loosely on the Japanese folk hero Jubei Yagyu. Voiced by Kōichi Yamadera.
  • Armed with: mostly his killer samurai sword, which is hooked to a string in his coat so he’s never far from it. Also, notably, a small knife/dart.

The Fights: This is not just the first real fight (there’s a cute little pre-title teaser where Jubei quickly schools some bandit chumps) but the first action sequence of the movie, and the introduction to the Eight Devils as well. So it had to come out swinging, and boy does it.

Off to investigate some shady dealings in a nearby village, the Kaga ninjas glide gracefully through the treetops at night, when they’re suddenly assailed out of the darkness by Tessai’s spinning blades. Many try to fight back by unleashing a torrent of shuriken, and although they strike with impressive percussive force, they all either miss the devil as he leaps among the shadows or bounce harmlessly off his stone skin.

It’s barely even a fight, really– it’s an execution. Not only are all the ninjas woefully overpowered but they also have no idea what they’re dealing with, and besides that they’ve walked into a trap. Heads and body parts rain to the ground. Tessai, having all the advantage, leers & chuckles as he rips them to shreds. (Interestingly, Tessai gets *one* assist here, unnecessary as it may be, when Yurimaru electrocutes a single ninja.)

Although Kagero is ordered to retreat by her captain, Hanza, she hesitates. Being quite the sicko, Tessai graphically rips off Hanza’s arms right before Kagero’s eyes, and then stares her down as he drinks the blood flowing out of the severed limb.

WARNING: Don’t look at the above picture if you don’t want to be grossed out

Kagero flees to warn the clan, but doesn’t get far– Tessai knocks her out cold. She comes to later, after the devil has spirited her away to a tiny hut in a quiet little town. He’s… well, let’s just say that calling it getting fresh would be an epic understatement, and leave it at that. It’s uncomfortable to watch as he paws all over her like an animal, so fortunately he’s interrupted when he looks up to find Jubei– a stranger to both parties at this point– quietly looking on in the little house. (It’s unclear if Jubei was already in the building or if he snuck in quietly; he could certainly do the latter, because NINJA!). He barks at the hero to leave, but Jubei quietly refuses. Angered, Tessai transforms his skin back into rock, and although Jubei’s a bit surprised, he calmly retort that surely not ALL of the freak’s body can be stone, and puts one eye out with a dagger.

Hero & heroine escape and part ways, with Tessai not giving chase per orders from a superior. Later on, though, the beast does track down Jubei to a quiet little street, reaching through a stone wall to seize him and then beating him near senseless. The hero takes it like a champ, and comes back swinging with a strike that pushes Tessai back but doesn’t cut him. They seem to be at an impasse, but Jubei notices that the monster’s skin is starting to crumble (we’ll find out later that his intimate contact with Kagero exposed him to the abundance of toxins always coursing through her body). Seeing an opportunity, the hero waits until Tessai throws his weapon again, then he dodges it and leaps in to cut off the villain’s hand with one mighty slice. Being both shocked and literally disarmed, Tessai can’t catch his boomeranging staff as it comes back to him, and it lodges right in the middle of his rocky bald head. Ouuuuuuuuch.

[insert headache joke]

Tessai is how Ninja Scroll announced that it meant business, and, more specifically, just what kind of business it meant. This brute arrives on the scene as a one-man wrecking crew and displays shocking personal depravity, so it communicates what kind of threat level is involved when we learn that Tessai only represents one-eighth of the bad guys who’ll be dealt with. Though oddly Tessai is in some ways un-representative of the other seven devils; they’re all varying degrees of crafty and cunning, whereas he’s just a blunt instrument. On a more meta level, the movie’s aesthetic– gruesome, bombastic, exploitative– has been established right away. You can’t say you weren’t warned.

But whereas the one-side nature of Tessai’s takedown of the Kaga works quite well, his later confrontation with Jubei feels unfortunately short. It would have been nice to see some more back & forth as Jubei nimbly dodged Tessai’s attacks while struggling to find a way to truly hurt him. This I fear will be a running theme throughout the series.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Who’s this handsome devil?

None of your beeswax.

There’s a lot of buzz about this devil.

2) Mushizo

(voiced by Rezo Nomoto)

A hunched, hideous man with a schtick that’s unusual even amongst the Devils of Kimon. We don’t see much of Mushizo, but he’s notably cunning, treacherous, and agile.

Armed with: he wields a long, two-pronged spear that unfortunately gets little use. But his real weapon is the hive of killer wasps he carries on his back, the residents of which he has some degree of control over.

“I call this look ‘Blue Steel.’”

Fights with:

• Jubei Kibagami, our katana-wielding protagonist.
• Kagero, the lady ninja who plays the static yet pivotal role here of distracting the majority of the villain’s swarm.

The wily monk Dakuan is also there with the heroes, but he contributes little. Similarly, Mushizo’s compatriots Mujuro Utsutsu and Zakuro stand by and watch, warned away from participating by Mushizo himself.

The Fight: The unlikely trio of protagonists have gathered in the tiny village where the villains have faked a plague. They barely have time to pay their respects to the innocent civilians when a few, and then a LOT, of wasps start swarming in. Like, thousands. As they start flooding in over the hill, the scene’s music (frequently re-used in trailers and ads for the film) kicks in: a steady, pulsing drumbeat with occasional dramatic blaring horns. It’s really cool.

They all try to run from this plague of murder bugs, but Kagero stands firm, and casts a spell to counter the swarm. The details are a little murky but it involves expelling an unknown number of cherry blossoms from her sleeve, which somehow poison and/or distract the wasps– some are shown dropping, but not at nearly the rate needed to hold off a group that size. Also, is this the only spell she knows? That’s kinda lame. Still, the image is kind of weirdly striking.

Kagero holding the line means it’s up to Jubei to take down the source. He spots Mushizo and chases him to the village’s water mill. The two banter for a bit until Mushizo surprises Jubei by launching  a few darts that only narrowly miss his face, then following up with a surprisingly deft lunge of his spear.

Jubei dodges and counters by slicing Mushizo across his hunched back, but the villain laughs and says that all he’s done is damage the hive, thus enraging its residents.

Jubei flees again and finds refuge in the nearby river, though he can’t stay there indefinitely; Mushizo and the wasps both wait patiently for him to emerge. Jubei quietly maneuvers himself underneath the branch where his foe perches waiting, and with awesome ninja skill he rockets out of the water, cutting off Mushizo’s foot along with the branch he was standing on.

The villain doesn’t miss a beat, lunging at him on the way down. Jubei catches the strike on his sword, and when Mushizo fires a poisoned dart from his mouth (!), the hero just barely stops it with his sword handle. Above the river the two other devils muse on if Mushizo was able to finish off Jubei on his own, but Mujuro’s assessment proves correct: the trip underwater is drowning the wasps so, in a panic, they’re trying to sting their way to safety. Mushizo’s own pets rip him apart from the inside.

As you can see there’s very little to this fight– to the point where I considered not even including it. But after already disqualifying three-eighths of the film’s villains, this segment’s nasty little Quasimodo deserved a bone. Besides, it’s creative and weird even by Ninja Scroll’s standards, and it shows our two co-protagonists cooperating in an unexpected way; the fight also briefly cuts back to Kagero halfway through, wincing under the pain of maintaining the spell, so we see her contributing more and also put a ticking clock on Jubei’s efforts to take down the Wasp Whisperer.  But still a shame that we didn’t get more of Mushizo, especially after his delightful speed and unpredictability with physical weapons.

Grade: C+

Coming Attractions: Jubei gets blindsided.

Dance of death.

3) Mujuro Utsutsu

(voiced by anime legend Norio Wakamoto)

A change of pace from his companions, Utsutsu is a devil with a genuine sense of honor & fair play, and though he speaks with an air of superiority it’s less bluster and more of a well-earned confidence. A supremely talented swordsman, Utsutsu’s real advantage is related to his blindness: his hearing is greatly magnified to compensate, allowing him to rapidly react by echo-location and listening to his opponents’ muscle movements. Basically he’s like the superhero Daredevil… and many, many other genre characters. Honestly, this gag is a little played-out, and probably was even in 1993. Do real life blind people find this trope offensive?

Armed with: A simple katana, which he can also use to “blind” opponents by shining light on their faces. The implication is that he’s merely reflecting sunlight off of it (difficult in a setting where the trees create a lot of shade) but the visual and its effect are so oversold it seems more like it’s glowing of its own accord.

Fights with:

• Jubei, mostly.
• Kagero, who again plays a small but vital role.

The Fight: Kagero, having been overcome with emotion, foolishly charged into a trap (you don’t have to be Mister Sensitive Feminist to deduce that this movie thinks VERY little of women), which caught her and reluctant partner Jubei in an explosion that sent them off the side of a cliff. Using Jubei’s cord-attached sword as an impromptu grappling hook, the two find themselves literally hanging on by a thread. They ascend one at a time, and find that not only was Mujuro Utsutsu waiting for them at the top, it was he who held Jubei’s sword after it dislodged from the rocks, acting as their anchor. Very sporting of him– shades of Princess Bride.

Utsutsu challenges the pair, which Jubei takes personally. In fact, all throughout the fight he behaves with uncharacteristic pride, repeatedly insisting to Kagero that he fight Utsutsu alone. This can’t be personal to him since he doesn’t seem to know the devil from earlier, so it’s possible that he sees a more direct challenge to his personal skill in Utsutsu’s straightforward swordsmanship, or perhaps he’s still upset with Kagero for her dumb play earlier– after the fight, he does dress her down about not taking her own life seriously.

Anyway, the two men charge off into the nearby bamboo forest, running alongside each other for a long time before Jubei ever makes his first move. What follows is the closest thing to an actual sword duel in the entirety of Ninja Scroll. And it’s mostly Mujuro’s game: he reacts with ease to all of Jubei’s strikes, and when he goes on the offensive it’s all the hero can do to keep up.

Jubei still attempts to think strategically, though. He brought the fight to the forest to, as Utsutsu immediately guesses, try to dampen the devil’s advantage– the preponderance of static obstacles would ostensibly challenge his ability to navigate. However, Mujuro’s skill is more powerful than that, and he dodges every tree with calm ease. He’s even unruffled when Jubei covertly slashes a few of the bamboo stalks in the hopes that the resulting noise would mask the hero’s own movements, but he is again unsuccessful; Utsutsu can hear him even amongst a veritable cacophony.

Mujuro then puts Jubei on the defensive and pursues him with a series of strikes that the hero only barely counters. One of the advantages of animation is employed here as we see Jubei being pushed what must be a dozen feet or more over the course of his multiple parries– a bit of choreography that would be impractical and/or silly-looking if attempted in live-action.

Waving off Kagero’s attempts to help, Jubei squares off against Utsutsu once more, even as the devil employs his trick of trying to weaken Jubei’s sight with the glare off his blade, turning the hero’s own eyes against him. Jubei gets knocked to the ground as they clash in mid-air, but Mujuro’s killing stroke is stopped short by a dagger Kagero had left planted in a bamboo trunk and escaped his “radar” vision. Jubei wastes no time killing the surprised villain with one lunge through the heart.

Again, even though there’s some slight supernatural enhancement, this is the straightest fight in the whole film; it is, ironically, unusual in its ordinariness. And certainly never boring. Short, as most every Ninja Scroll fight is, but more in the “whew, that was intense” sense rather than the “aw, that’s it?” one. Mujuro Utsutsu is very efficiently introduced, deployed and dispatched, during the course of which we get a thrilling little scene that allows for some very head-scratching relationship development of our two leads. Not truly great, but not bad at all.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Ninja, vanish!

Creeper ninja is creepy.

“Who, me?”

4) Shijima

(voiced by Akimasa Omori)

Shijima is arguably the most ninja-like of all the film’s many ninjas: he employs stealth, deception and diversion over outright combat. Also, whereas most of the other devils only have one real “big” power or gimmick (Zakuro stuffs corpses with explosives, Tessai can turn to rock, etc) Shijima has four: he can create illusory copies of himself, he can control people’s minds, he has a sweet chain-claw, and he can fade into & transport himself via darkened areas– allowing him to quite literally strike from the shadows. Though he pops up more than many of the movie’s other villains, he has a such diverse skill set and is interesting enough he could have stood to play a much bigger part.

Armed with: The Claw!

No, not this one.

Not quite….

There you go.

It’s a huge, sharp claw on one hand that he can fire off on a chain at will. And, as I suppose is standard issue for ninjas, a supply of small darts.

The Fights: Shijima has one very brief encounter early in the film, where he attempts to kill Dakuan as the monk is separated from Jubei on a trek through foggy darkness. Through a clever trick, Dakuan just barely managed to avoid the villain’s claw bursting out of the shadows. Not much to it, but a nice way to establish the character early on and tease at his potential.

The second time our protagonists encounter Shijima, they’re all standing in a clearing as they suss out the villains’ overall plot and figure out what to do. Shijima makes his presence known with several furtive movements at their peripheral vision, then goes all-out by surrounding the trio with dozens of his illusion copies.

He throws a few darts at Kagero (which she dodges) to attempt to keep her from sending off her carrier pigeon message for help, and that move turns out to be what Jubei needed to determine which Shijima is the real one. The hero lunges in and cuts the devil’s leg right off. Taking it like a champ, Shijima hops away wordlessly with Jubei in pursuit.

While Jubei hunts down what turns out to be a fake trail, Shijima uses the shadows to double back and kidnap Kagero– it’s implied he got the drop on her because she was stunned after Dakuan dropped some particularly shocking news on her. When the two men return, they find that Shijima has carved a note into a nearby tree telling them to come and get her, if they dare. Dakuan figures it for a trap (duh) but Jubei heads in regardless.

Shijima had, it turns out, taken the unconscious Kagero to an abandoned temple nearby. Between the dilapidated condition of the building and the setting sun, the place makes both a cool backdrop for a fight as well as a tactically advantageous (i.e., shadow-filled) ground for Shijima. Before Jubei arrives, the creepy little devil does something quite lascivious to Kagero, which is implied to be what allows him to mind-control her. So when our hero shows up and finds Kagero, she awakes with a glassy-eyed stare and immediately attacks him.

Kagero was never a match for Jubei, really, but his efforts at defending himself are hindered by the escalating effects of the poison he’s infected with (long story) as well as Shijima hassling him from the sidelines. But mostly Shijima’s contribution here is to use his claw to grab Jubei’s sword, attempting to drag it with him into the shadows. Jubei has to wrestle for control over it, which causes him to get stabbed in the hand by Kagero.

Jubei decides to let him have it, releasing the sword so that it stabs Shijima as it comes in. The creeper slowly tumbles out of the darkness, dead. Jubei passes out and Kagero comes to her senses.

Shijima’s a lot of fun, so it’s a shame that after two really promising build-ups he had so little participation in his own final battle; pitting the two heroes against each other is an interesting twist, but it’s too brief and Shijima’s own presence in that fight is minimal. However, as a whole he’s a welcome and dynamic addition to this movie’s crazy little world. Thanks, Shijima.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Boss fight!

GEMMA SMASH

Say whatever else you will about Genma, dude has chin for DAYS.

He registers a 3.5 on the Bruce Campbell scale, or 0.4 Z’Dars.

[A quick note: His name is definitely "Genma" not "Gemma" no matter what the subtitles on your copy say or what you think you hear. That's the way it's written in all the movie's material, and the nature of the Japanese standalone "N" precludes the two sounds being interchangeable or an understandable Japanese attempt at mimicking a Western word, such as "Bejiita" for "Vegeta." Don't feel bad for how Manga Entertainment lied to you for decades, I just found it out myself.

Even though "Gemma" is still widely accepted amongst fans, I'll stick with "Genma" here, as much for nerdy accuracy as for how I don't need this site turning up in image search results for horny boys looking up a certain pair of buoyant British actresses who are also named "Gemma." Although I spoiled that by said "Gemma" a bunch of times anyway. DAMMIT]

5) Genma Himuro

(voiced by Daisuke Gori)

The leader of the Eight Devils of Kimon. Although not quite the size of Tessai, still a monstrously huge & muscled man, with speed and quick-thinking to back it up. A cunning, ruthless and patient strategist. Most importantly, though, is his mastery of the resurrection spell: Genma has such control over his whole body that he can recover from any injury, even death.

Though the machinations of the plot would have required a showdown between the two anyway, for both Jubei and Genma this fight is personal. They knew each other back in the day, when Genma was a high-ranking vassal of the clan Jubei served as a ninja for. Jubei hates Genma for how the villain manipulated Jubei’s friends into killing each other over the stash of gold that would later serve as this movie’s Maguffin; Genma, meanwhile, is still ticked about the time Jubei cut his head off.

He got better.

Armed with: Almost nothing. A good portion of his left arm is covered in metal plating, but for the most part Genma chooses to rely on his advanced personal strength and immortality to do the job.

Fights with:

• Jubei, who is SO freaking pissed off.

No, man, it’s spelled… ugh, never mind

The Fight: As the film approaches its climax the vendettas between hero & villain grow more personal. While Dakuan restrains him in concealment, Jubei watches as Genma fatally wounds Kagero, having impersonated her liege lord the whole story. This makes Jubei go completely apeshit; he breaks free from the monk’s grip and charges out sword-blazin’. He eliminates a small army of disposable, faceless ninja goons, one swipe at a time, while Genma gets away. Unfortunately that action mostly happens off-screen or in quick cuts & flashes, but it’s still one helluva cinematic beast mode.

After tearful goodbyes with Kagero, Jubei sneaks aboard Genma’s departing ship. With the help of Dakuan and (unwillingly) Zakuro’s gunpowder-filled body, Jubei creates a large explosion in the ship’s main hold, destroying or sinking all the gold Genma was going to use to finance his conquest of Japan.

The scene where Genma hears the explosion and calmly waits is pretty amazing. He sits stock still, only his eyes moving, as he takes it all in, and calmly tells an underling to order an evacuation. He barely moves but the artwork and voice acting convey someone absolutely enraged, knowing that his years of careful planning have all been undone. He descends into the fiery cargo hold to find Jubei waiting patiently.

The hero cuts quite the striking pose there, particularly as some blaring horns kick in along with the steady drumbeat. The two talk for a bit and then charge at each other. Jubei’s blade, unfortunately, proves a poor match for the villain’s speed and power, with every blow either being dodged or stopped cold by Genma’s plated arm.

Genma returns every strike of Jubei’s with a devastating counter, but, never missing a beat, Jubei just continuously picks himself back up and charges Genma again. He’s so relentless it’s almost funny. Jubei will not be denied– he gonna GET that ass.

When Genma seems tired of this game he traps Jubei’s sword arm in his own massive paws, and gives him the mother of all Indian burns– apparently up until it breaks. Then he pins the hero up against a support beam and hits him with a devastating series of blows. Undeterred, Jubei distracts his foe with some trash talking as he reels his sword back in and, with his uninjured hand, lops Genma’s own right arm off.

Aside from the initial shock, Genma reacts with admirable stoicism, and goes right back to beating the stuffing out of Jubei. He re-attaches his own arm and leans menacingly over the hero, who surprises him again with the rather direct route: he seizes Genma’s collar and head-butts him to death. Like, over & over. Just rams his forehead into Genma’s face until it looks like a pile of smashed ass. As with his undeterred behavior earlier in the fight, it’s at once impressive and morbidly funny. Skill and power disparities be damned at this point– Jubei is just a single-minded engine of vengeful rage. As he says to Genma, he’ll kill him as many times as it takes.

He ends up getting held to that word, because he has to kill Genma a few more times immediately: first with a sword to the gut and some wooden shrapnel to the chest….

… then when that doesn’t stick, ripping his sword out from Genma vertically.

Just as Genma starts to re-form and it seems like Jubei just can’t catch a break, the consequence of all those tons of gold being exposed to heat from the fire comes due, and a small flood of molten gold comes rushing in. Jubei high-tails it up a ladder, whereas Genma gets a thick coating of the liquid metal. He flails about a bit and grabs at Jubei’s leg, but the hero ultimately escapes while Genma sinks to the bottom of the sea, trapped forever in a frozen gold prison. If only he’d listened to his father’s lessons.

This one’s pretty close to flawless. Unlike every other fight in the film, it doesn’t suffer from being too short. The build-up to it is excellent, it has some great change-ups, a killer setting, awesome music, cool moves by the hero and an amazing villain. They really did save the best for last.

Grade: A

Well, that’s it for Ninja Scroll. It somehow did mostly manage to survive the ravages of time and maturity. Thanks to Yoshiaki Kawajiri and all others involved for the memories.

Coming Attractions: How sweet, fresh meat.

Welcome to MY blue Photoshop filter!

A truly horrifying match-up.

Almost

1) Freddy vs Jason

The Fighters:

• Frederick Charles “Freddy” Krueger, aka the Springwood Slasher, aka Son of a Hundred Maniacs. A creepy serial killer of children, who came back more dangerous than ever after being killed by a vigilante mob (his hideous face are from the burns he suffered in death). Freddy’s status as master of the dream world makes him almost infinitely powerful when he enters his sleeping targets’ minds. Whenever he’s pulled to the real world, however (as he is here), he’s deprived of his reality-warping powers and while more durable than a normal human, he’s not nigh-unkillable like he is in dreams. Possessed of a cunning mind and a truly sick sense of humor. Played by the endlessly charming Robert Englund.
  • Armed with: His iconic “claw,” a specially made glove on his right hand with knives attached to all four fingers.
• Jason Voorhees, the killer of Crystal Lake. A handicapped boy who survived a negligence-caused drowning and went on to become a hulking murder-zombie, Jason is practically a force of nature. Ever since the resurrection that kicked off his sixth installment, Jason’s physical strength and durability have been downright supernatural. He brushes off most blows with ease and can only even be stunned by heavy weapons fire or explosions. He can overpower any human and can punch right through flesh & bone with little effort. Mute and simple but possessed of an odd tactical intelligence (he’s excellent at covertly stalking his prey and hiding their corpses, for example), Jason is one hell of a blunt instrument, albeit blunt instrument who prefers sharp instruments. Played by stunt man Ken Kirzinger, who mostly acquits himself well in his one & only turn in the role (after replacing fan favorite Kane Hodder).
  • Armed with: Jason loves all sorts of weapons but here he comes equipped with his trademark machete.

The Setup: Freddy vs Jason was never going to be a great movie, or even a good one. Neither character’s home franchise ever was, after all; the best they achieved was cheesy entertainment (with, occasionally, fleeting moments of greatness). Since it was always going to be crappy, the question was if it was going to be the right kind of crappy. A proper camp tone is hard to strike just right even when you know what you’re doing. It’s even harder to squeeze it in alongside occasional moments of genuine menace even bad horror movies need to have if they’re going to be memorable, and harder still to try to mix the apples & oranges approach of the titular monsters’ respective cinematic legacies.

Above ingredients do not mix well

It is, perhaps, about as good as any Freddy vs Jason film could ever get. Director Ronny Yu often strikes the right balance of cheesy enjoyability, but a lot of it is also just so much polished dullness, with many of the jokes falling flat. And, occasionally, it is really cool.

The plot is a hasty hash of “sure, why not” thinking. In an actually quite well done prologue, we learn that due to his prior defeats and many of his survivors being drugged into dreamless complacency, the youth of Springwood (home of Freddy’s beloved Elm Street) have forgotten him, and without fear he has no strength. (This is not how Freddy’s powers have ever worked before, but like I said, “sure, why not.”) So, he enters the dreams of the slumbering Jason Voorhees, manipulating him into turning his wrath at the teens of Elm Street, reasoning that a renewed bloodbath on Freddy’s home turf will get people talking about him again. Improbably, this actually works.

But Jason keeps killing even after Freddy gets his mojo back, which ticks off the old sweater man. Thanks to both Krueger’s machinations and those of some kids caught in the crossfire, Jason gets hit up with enough tranquilizer to pull him into the dream world. He ends up getting schooled pretty hard by Krueger, as he’s the master of that domain, but the kids concoct yet another plan to lug Jason’s slumbering body off to Camp Crystal Lake, and send one of their own into the dream world to pull Freddy out just in time to square off against an awakened Jason. Again, this somehow works.

Annoying teen Lori (Monica Keena) yanks both herself and Freddy into humdrum reality (specifically into a Crystal Lake cabin, which is on fire for some reason) just as he’s about to kill her. Freddy’s delayed reaction to realizing he’s been plucked out of a realm where he has godlike status is precious, even more so as he turns to discover a very pissed off-looking Jason staring him down (Kirzinger’s posture and the sudden heavy metal tune actually manage to convey the emotions of a masked mute pretty well). They approach each other with the flames adding an appropriate-if-unsubtle touch to the epic nature of their confrontation.

(Wisely, they decided to cut the part where Keena hammily declares “Place your bets!”, though it did appear in the trailer.)

The Fight: After Freddy finishes his cartoonish gulping, he mans up and does what he can to stand against the unstoppable force.

They set a pace early on that keeps up for most of the fight: Freddy is fast & wily, landing lots of small blows, while Jason is a big slow ox who hits Freddy with great force but only very rarely.

It’s hard to see any other way this could have been blocked out (and lasted more than five seconds), but it’s still objectionable. Jason is often lazily thought of as “slow”– the stereotype is of him lumbering along through the woods after a sprinting co-ed– but his actions can be more properly described not as slow but as deliberate. He’s not stupid, either, at least not when it comes to killing; he’s certainly gotten the drop on smaller prey than Krueger before.

Freddy, for his part, does the lion’s share of work, not just physically but verbally. He grunts and howls with every blow he takes, and laughs triumphantly with nearly every bit of abuse he dishes out. Some of the moves around look like something out of pro-wrestling and cross the line into unacceptably silly, even for a character as hammy as Freddy. And while I’m prepared to believe that Jason’s resistance could be whittled down with lots of small cuts from Freddy’s glove, he wouldn’t be fazed for a second by anybody short of Captain America dropping elbows on him. Englund does what he can with the material and Kirzinger, who is good for most of the movie, is stuck playing the slow dummy.

They’re in the cabin only briefly, with the most notable part being where Freddy tries to kick his foe in the nuts and only ends up hurting himself. Jason then grabs the burned killer and drags him bodily through the wall the long way, and launches him into the open air.

There’s some boring business where the surviving kids try to escape and are confronted by Freddy, who really ought to be worrying about bigger things. That bigger thing presents itself by slicing up the teen who’d remained to stay and distract Freddy, and the fight begins anew.

Their dance continues as before, until one good blow sends Freddy near a bunch of oxygen tanks, which are there because, um… the now-abandoned Camp Crystal Lake had a huge scuba diving program? Sure, why not. Freddy figures out quickly that by using his claw to slice the caps off, the compressed oxygen will launch them through the air at high-speeds (repeat after me: sure, why not). Krueger than embarks on the weirdest game of impromptu Missile Command ever as Jason slowly stalks toward him. A couple lucky hits send Jason dozens of feet backward into the middle of a small construction site, because of course there’d be a partially-finished building right in the middle of an abandoned summer camp, right next to where they keep all the oxygen tanks for scuba diving. SWN.

Freddy quickly climbs to the top of the scaffolding and drops a whole crapload of long steel rebars on Jason, a couple of which skewer right through him and pin him to the ground. While Jason tries to tackle this problem in slow-motion, Freddy kicks off a dangling… cement mixer, I think?… and sets it ricocheting an absurd number of times, hoping it’ll hit Jason. He also tries to set off a mine cart (?) full of dirt to roll down a ramp at Jason, but it get stuck, and meanwhile Freddy himself gets caught up by the swinging movements of the crane he knocked loose, which brings him right into Jason’s waiting fists. They both get creamed by the freed cart and go flying to the dock. Lot of flying through the air in this fight.

Both are clearly more tired at this point, especially Freddy. Ronny Yu helps to signal that it’s the final round by making heavy use of slow motion and some more melodramatic music. Jason starts laying into Krueger pretty good at first, slashing him across the chest several times, until the Springwood Slasher slices Jason’s fingers off just as he’s goes in for the kill. Freddy seizes Jason’s machete with his ungloved hand and delivers some serious payback, with a bunch of hacking blows that send him to the ground. Again, this isn’t something that should do more than just piss Jason off. In a really gross move, he gouges out Jason’s eyes right through the hockey mask’s eye sockets. Ouch.

Should have used the Three Stooges defense

This is when those meddling kids interfere by spraying the dock with gasoline (there’s a gasoline hose nearby. You know how to react) and lighting it afire– ain’t nobody got time fer dat. Jason uses the distraction to punch one stub-fingered arm right into Freddy’s guts and ripping his arm off, and Freddy retaliates by machete-ing Jason right in the chest. Both get blown right into the lake when the flames reach a nearby gasoline tank and make a fireball out of the whole thing.

The kids think they’re safe, but they should know the first kill NEVER takes with these guys, because a machete-wielding figure slowly stalks up to them. Yu shoots it cleverly to not give away which of the two villains it is, before pulling up to reveal that it’s Freddy, still wielding his opponent’s weapon. But just as he raises it to make some teen-kababs, he gets stabbed in the back and right on through his chest by his own claw… still attached to his own arm. An exhausted Jason drops the limb and falls back into the lake. Lori takes this moment to say a really lame one-liner and decapitates Freddy.

But that’s still not the end, because after they leave, we return to the lake in the morning, and in dramatic slow-mo, Jason Voorhees rises triumphantly from the water, machete in one hand… and Freddy’s severed head in the other. Last man standing, bitches!

Until we zoom in on Krueger’s head, and… oh no….

I can’t really convey how hilarious it is. Perfectly timed.

A mighty mixed bag. There are a few really awesome parts, especially the beginning and ending, with many tedious or annoying parts. Jason & Freddy are two very different kinds of monster, and unfortunately the way the filmmakers tried to square that circle was to turn Jason into the chump. Similarly, the whole oxygen missiles/construction yard derby part is really convoluted in execution, even if it was inventive in concept.

The fight does cover a lot of ground with a couple daring change-ups. And it certainly doesn’t cheap on time: even subtracting the cut-aways to annoying humans, this fight still lasts in the neighborhood of around ten whole minutes. That’s impressive all on its own. And the ending, with Jason walking away in (mostly) one piece and Freddy’s wink, actually finds a way for the movie to have its cake and eat it too: giving one character a real “victory” rather than a “they both lose” cop-out but still not completely ruling Freddy out.

Grade: B-. Or an A if you’re seeing it at midnight with a bunch of drunken pals.

Recommended Links: Kumail Nanjiani’s take on the expectation of Freddy Krueger’s racial sensitivity.

Coming Attractions: “Daniel LaRusso’s gonna fight?? Daniel LaRusso’s gonna fight!!”

He’s a real macchio man.

Strike hard, strike first, no mercy. But enough about my dating rules.

Speaking of dating: check out that dreamboat on the far left, ladies.

Time for another 80s staple. Being that you have found your way here to this fine site I trust you are reasonably familiar with such classics and will not need *too* much background, at least at first. And you also probably know that much of the “action” in this franchise is not terribly, well, action-esque. Due to a mix of both realism and cinematic clumsiness much of the non-climactic fight scenes in the Karate Kid films are short and underwhelming. So, much as we did with director John G Avildsen’s other signature series (or at least the series he started), Rocky, we’ll be covering only each film’s ending fight sequence. Though unlike with Rocky this won’t be a retrospective; as dear as the Karate Kid franchise is to many of our hearts, it’s not weighty or cohesive enough to merit an enormous blog tome, and is better broken up into individual pieces. You have a problem with that?

“… no, sensei.”

That’s what I thought.

1) The Karate Kid: Daniel vs Johnny

The Fighters:

• Daniel LaRusso, a Jersey kid recently transplanted to California along with his single mother. Awkward & moody but basically decent, a crash course in karate from his martial arts master of a superintendent has (barely) prepared him for the grueling gauntlet that is the All Valley Under 18 Karate Tournament, where he is to face down his tormentors. Played by Ralph Macchio with endearing awkwardness.
  • Trained by: Kesuke Miyagi, an Okinawan immigrant, karate master, and U.S. Army war hero currently living out his days as a quiet handyman. Because, rather than despite, of his great proficiency for violence, Miyagi is very peaceful, and teaches Daniel-san the essence of his family’s awesome karate style only because he sees no other way to end the boy’s torment. And also because he needed someone to do his chores. It’s win-win, really. Played by the late great Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, who was actually a stand-up comedian and American native with no karate skill whatsoever. Acting!
• Johnny Lawrence, a handsome and hotheaded rich kid who’s tore up at LaRusso over a girl. The alpha male of his peer group and prize student of his dojo, Lawrence is an old-school bully who has plenty of skill to back up his bluster. Played by William Zabka, who was like the William Atherton of school movies for a little while.
  • Trained by: John Kreese, a sadistic & ruthless karate instructor who was a Green Beret in Vietnam. He runs the Cobra Kai dojo where Johnny and his pals learned their skills. Though almost cartoonishly evil– he’s openly racist, encourages dishonorable & petty conduct, and is a generally Might Makes Right sort of guy– he’s no less intimidating or effective for his two-dimensionality. As Miyagi says, “no such thing as bad student, only bad teacher” and it’s clear that Kreese is the reason Johnny is turning out so bad. Played by Martin Kove, who should have been in more stuff.

[Note: most former Special Forces vets would likely object to Kreese's characterization, not just for his immoral behavior but for how his highly rigid and regimented lifestyle is unlike the easy professionalism that is the trademark of the real SF community. Also, it's oddly never brought up how each kid's mentor is a veteran and they never try to appeal to each other that way; if Miyagi had rolled into the Cobra Kai dojo wearing his Medal of Honor, Kreese likely would have backed right the heck off, racist or no.]

“You killed HOW many Germans?! Well, you’re all right, Charlie.”

The Setup: Shortly after relocating to sunny California, Daniel LaRusso’s young heart got him into some trouble, when he started a romance with Ali (Elisabeth Shue), the former girlfriend of Johnny. Since then, Johnny and his pals had given Daniel a very cruel summer, from which he could find no shelter until he was taken under Mr. Miyagi’s wing. Miyagi bought Daniel a few bully-free months by having Kreese agree to wait until Daniel’s entry in the local karate tournament, during which time he gave Daniel some unorthodox training in his family’s style of superior martial artistry. The contest is Daniel’s moment of truth to find out if he’s the best… around.

After arriving in the tournament and finding his groove, Daniel did quite well against the Cobra Kai underlings and some other competitors. But on Kreese’s orders, Johnny’s friend (and relatively nicer bully) Bobby reluctantly takes Daniel out with an illegal, crippling shot to his knee. Discount Mark Hamill Bobby is disqualified but Daniel seems out of commission, Kreese having cruelly denied him his shot at dignity.

Daniel, though, rallies and convinces Miyagi to use some sort of nebulously defined massage technique (Asian people are magic, don’t ya know) to suppress his pain just enough to limp back out to the mat. Daniel LaRusso’s gonna fight!

He’s dressed more appropriately this time around.

The Fight: A classic. Everything comes together almost perfectly. Just real enough to be believable while not losing an ounce of excitement– and of course a good bit of that excitement comes not so much from the choreography but from the characterization. This is such an identifiable struggle that we really care about the outcome.

Macchio as Daniel comes off as every bit the underdog he is, being dwarfed by the bigger & buffer Johnny, who Zabka imbues with just the right amount of aggressive energy. Johnny, after all, is the true karate master here; Daniel has only learned just enough to defend himself in a short amount of time, and that really does come through in Macchio’s performance and the staging. It’s made more believable by the particular rules of the tournament, with every match being less of a “fight” (like a boxing match is) and more a series of short skill contests: the first one to successfully strike his opponent in the correct area scores a point, which ends the round, and the first one to three points the match. If this were a real fight with no rules, Daniel’s chances would have been a lot different, even with two working knees.

LaRusso does indeed come out strong here, winning the first two rounds against Johnny with some simple and quick moves. But when the Aryan bully gets called over to see his sensei (ostensibly to check on the bloody nose Daniel just gave him), Kreese delivers that famous, cold-blooded line:

Pure excellence. Kove comes off like a total snake, and even in the heat of the moment, Johnny can see that all is not right. Zabka’s reaction (see the second image in the post) encompasses so much: realization, crushing disappointment, and perhaps most importantly, panic– Lawrence feels instinctively that he’s on the wrong team but doesn’t know how to do anything else but stay the course. The outcome of the match is now doubly important because it’s not just about helping Daniel but about saving Johnny. Kreese, and everything he stands for, cannot be allowed to win.

Unfortunately, Johnny starts to do just that, winning the next two points after opening up with that unethical sweep to Daniel’s injured leg. In addition to his next two points (which are largely drawn out, with the already-hurt Daniel getting increasingly tired before each loss), he also scores a couple non-points, like when he elbows him in the injured leg.

Daniel is looking pretty ragged as they close into the endgame. But before they can GET HIM A BODY BAG!, he pulls out his secret weapon, the legendary “Crane Kick” technique he’d been practicing ever since he saw his teacher do it.

Now, let’s be serious here: the Crane Kick is, by any practical measure, stupid. It’s basically just a jumping front kick with some unnecessary theatrics that might provide a tiny bit of misdirection to a particularly dumb opponent. Miyagi famously says “if do correct no can defense” but that’s nonsense, there’s no such thing as a move you can’t defend against one way or another; as Miyagi himself says in the sequel (where the Crane Kick is defended against), the best block is to not be there.

But that doesn’t matter. The Crane Kick is just ridiculous and weird enough to work for a movie like this. More important than the concept, though, is how it works spectacularly in execution. Macchio’s excellent delivery and the slow build-up of dramatic music culminating in a loud cymbal clash as it connects (followed by a swell of triumphant music, of course) all do their part, but the most crucial ingredient in making any fake attack memorable is how well the recipient sells it. It’s why you’d never remember George McFly’s one-punch knockout if Tom Wilson hadn’t spun around like a pro, and why even Leonard Nimoy credits William Shatner for ensuring the Vulcan Nerve Pinch worked on-screen (because William Shatner does NOTHING by half-measures). Even the best pro wrestler in the world can look like a doof if he’s in the ring with a guy who can’t sell his moves.

So all glory be to William Zabka here. He charges in attempting to punch, he gets a face full of foot, he gets turned around and thumps to the ground on his chest. Then he crawls around on his knees while still gripping his face in pain. That’s some physical acting, folks.

“You just got waxed off, biatch.”

The epilogue is brilliant in its brevity: a few moments of rapturous celebration, including a humbled Johnny willingly handing the trophy to Daniel as he gets hoisted by the crowd, then a freeze frame on Miyagi’s face as the cheers continue before the screen goes black and the credits roll. The movie should end with him, because for all that the movie was about Daniel’s struggle, it’s Miyagi whose philosophy has been vindicated, and he’s the grieving father who regained a son. There was, as many know, another ending filmed where Miyagi confronts a deranged Kreese in the parking lot and teaches him a lesson, but that was wisely cut (and even more wisely, saved and used as the sequel’s prologue), as it would have been both gratuitous and anti-climactic. Yo Miyagi, we did it.

The Karate Kid’s climactic showdown is just the right mixture of corny and serious. It’s everything we love about cheesy 80s movies with none of the stuff we hate. It has its share of change-ups, surprises, nice character beats, and a rousing finish. Banzai!

Grade: A

Recommended Links: William Zabka’s highly entertaining interview with the AV Club, where he shares his insights on the role and some behind-the-scenes stuff about the movie. And a cool Rodney Dangerfield story.

The 442nd Regiment the fictional Miyagi served in is a real thing. Every American should be taught about their truly remarkable gallantry. Those guys went for broke.

Blogger Trivia: A couple friends and I once played a drinking game in the barracks with this movie, using rules like “drink whenever there’s a fight” and “drink whenever the Cobra Kai show up.” It was not the best decision I ever made.

Coming Attractions: Daniel versus the Chozen One.

This, basically.