Eat your heart out, Jason Voorhees.

It looks like he’s reeling just from being yelled at, which actually makes this even better.

2) Machete Chaos

The Fighters:

• Rama, once again. Played by Iko Uwais.
  • Armed with: Not a darn thing.
• The Machete Gang, as the credits oh-so-accurately call them. They’re a band of five (soon to be four) particularly tough thugs who have been roving the building together for stragglers. If this movie were a video game (and it is SO a video game), these guys would be the miniboss squad. Their leader (“Machete Gang #1″) is particularly aggressive and deranged; he may well be hopped up on some amphetamine or another, given his demeanor and resilience. Played by Alfridus Godfred, Rully Santoso, Melkias Ronald Torobi, Johanes Tuname, and Sofyan Alop.
  • Armed with: Hint’s in the name.

The Setup: After successfully unloading Bowo in the home of the one decent man in the entire building (and just barely hiding in the walls from the Machete Gang while he was at it), Rama has resumed his mission alone. But it’s not long before he encounters the gang again in a hallway. One of them is significantly closer than the others, so when Rama flees, he’s the first to catch up. Our hero of course beats the crap out of him, though it takes significantly longer this time, and finishes him off by tossing him down the building’s main stairwell, where he lands on a concrete ledge a few floors down, back first. Ouch.

Rama runs up one more floor and gets chased for a while, but when he finds himself at a dead end, he knows he has no choice but to do this the hard way.

The easy way does not exist in this film.

There’s a brief stare-down between the two factions, and then before you can say “ki ki ki, ma ma ma” everyone rushes in to get some killin’ done.

The Fight: Rama works harder here than ever before, being careful to stay inside the swing radius of his foes’ blades. It largely works, but he has a couple close calls that he barely dodges, including at one point when one of the gang (the one with impressive dreadlocks) almost stabs his face off after pinning him to the ground with a running leap onto his chest.

And for being the only unarmed guy, Rama does kick a decent amount of ass here, scoring lots of blows that temporarily incapacitate an opponent or two at a time, only to leave him to go right back to the remaining ones. He also briefly lays hands on a machete himself and proves fairly adept with it, but loses it in an up-close suffle after only getting to deliver a painful-looking but superficial wound. There’s even a mildly funny bit where he tries to pick it up off the ground but his hand gets machete-slapped away by the gang’s leader.

At one point Rama gets caught between two thugs on either side of the narrow hallway (Evans switches to a cool overhead shot for this) but is able to turn the situation around by beating them both soundly. He kicks one bad guy hard enough to smash him through the door of an apartment, then grabs the other one by the neck and leaps them both backwards so that the thug’s neck lands on the protruding shards of the broken door, killing him instantly.

This happens. This is a thing that happens.

There’s enough of a lull in the action that Rama takes time to pause, seemingly shocked at his own brutality. Possibly more so because the thug he just killed looks all of 17 years old.

But the fight picks up again soon enough. Rama is quickly able to kill another of the gang by taking his machete, using it to slice him through the gut and side of his neck, and then bury it in his chest. After that, he’s unarmed again as he squares off in hand-to-hand with the dreadlocked guy, who proves surprisingly adept at martial arts. He hits Rama with some pretty fancy moves, knocking him over a couch and following up with several mean-looking blows.

But the hero rallies, and when Dreads tries to jump up so he can deliver a devastating knee to Rama’s face, Rama tackles him in mid-air and swings him into the corner wall like a sack of wet garbage. It seems to put him down for the count.

This frees Rama up to tussle alone with the leader, who proves alarmingly resilient and capable. There’s a real vicious push & pull between the two as each struggles to take the other out. The villain very nearly executes a mean suplex on Rama, who actually changes his own momentum in mid-air so he only flips forward to land on his feet (and then falls on his face). Then Rama almost gets his neck-snapped before he can break free, head-butt him and attempt a choke of his own. They trade some more blows, screaming at each other wildly the whole time. If the first fight was a complex ballet the whole way through, the second one quickly devolves into a desperate struggle for survival.

The thug is able to pick up his machete again and misses with a few wild swings. Rama gets in close, softens him up with a few blows, get around behind him and put him down with a hard punch to the back of the head. Visibly shaken, Rama checks the AO, wary of any lingering or new threats. When the gang leader stumbles shakily to his feet, our hero panics and tackles him with a wild surge of energy, sending them both plummeting out the window.

This is what you’d call a “hail Mary play,” I believe.

They fall several stories, clip a ledge on the way down and stop on a metal balcony. Rama lands on top of his foe, so he’s relatively okay, but still pretty roughed up. Worse so when some of the bad guys stationed outside the building open fire on him. Most of the bullets bounce off the balcony’s bars, but at least one round makes its way into his flak jacket, and when he crawls inside he has to desperately remove the vest to get the heated bullet away, sacrificing yet another layer of protection. But at least he’s alive. Any fight you can walk away from….

Another piece of extended awesomeness here. As mentioned there’s a whole different vibe to this scene, as Rama is up against stronger odds right from the outset– not to mention that the first battle had to have taken a lot out of him. The bad guys here are not just more threatening but more distinctive visually, with their crazy-eyed leader having already established himself as being particularly ruthless and hateable.

One of the movie’s more subtle yet distinctive triumphs of choreography is also apparent here: reversals. In several clashes between hero & villain, one party will attempt a move that the other reverses, escapes or otherwise defeats. It’s not always something simple like a punch or kick, either, but a complicated throw or some such. And even though the move doesn’t work you can always tell what the first person is trying to do, which makes it even more impressive when you see the target cancel it out. Just one of the many little things that help make this movie so amazing.

And for all that The Raid is so wild & intense, there’s an interesting undercurrent of realism that grounds it, exemplified here. Rama’s physical condition degrades visibly as the fight goes on, and once it ends, between the exhaustion and the multi-story fall he’s quite out of it. His vision is blurred and he’s stumbling around like an Irishman at four a.m. the morning after St. Patrick’s Day. If not for the timely intervention of an unlikely ally he’d have been easy pickings.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: No time for sergeants.

This is even less friendly than it looks.

Constanze: “Is it not good?”

Salieri: “It is miraculous.”

Unfortunately not the kind of miracle Jaka’s going to need.

3) Jaka vs Mad Dog

The Fighters:

• Sergeant Jaka, the smart & capable leader of this SWAT team. While the corrupt Lieutenant Wahyu is ultimately in charge of this mission, Jaka is the team’s field commander. Played by Joe Taslim, a former Judo champion-turned-actor who you might recognize from being in Fast & Furious 6 earlier this year.
• Mad Dog, one of the crime lord’s two right-hand men. Smart, sadistic, relentless and enthralled with the glory of physical combat, Mad Dog is one dangerous puppy. Played by Yayan Ruhian, a renowned silat instructor (he used to train the Indonesian equivalent of the Secret Service) turned actor. While Iko Uwais is undoubtedly the star of The Raid and does the lion’s share of physical work, Ruhian is the movie’s secret weapon.

The Setup: While Rama has been fighting his way through legions of cannon fodder and mini-bosses, his companions Jaka, Wahyu and another cop named Dagu have been evading and hiding as well. Finally holing up in an abandoned apartment, this second group of survivors try to figure their way out of this mess. Jaka is able to deduce that Wahyu is hiding something and confronts him. After some drama (including the revelation that this mission is not officially sanctioned and no one else knows they’re here), the group decides to sneak out, but they pick the absolute worst time because as soon as Jaka opens the door he gets a kick in the face from Mad Dog, who’s been dispatched with a couple followers to track down the survivors.

There’s a scuffle between the two sides that ends Jaka ordering his men to escape, with Mad Dog’s posse in pursuit. Meanwhile, the two leaders get caught in a weapons stand-off that is decidedly uneven.

Sean Connery had a few choice words about this sort of thing in The Untouchables.

Once they’re alone, Mad Dog gestures for Jaka to put down the knife, which he does with some caution. Then they both rise and, at the villain’s further direction, enter the room. Mad Dog closes the door behind them and relaxes. As Jaka stands a few feet away, wary, Mad Dog unloads and discards his gun, then removes his sweater. All the while he talks about how killing someone with a gun is too easy (“like ordering takeout”) and he prefers the thrill of the fight, of getting his hands dirty.

The audience has already been informed, via Jaka’s intel, that Mad Dog is definitely crazy, but we didn’t know how crazy. The way Ruhian delivers his lines so calmly, even breezily, indicates the presence of a truly dangerous psycho. There’s something about his simple confidence in himself that’s kind of terrifying.

The villain stretches out, struts toward his target, and immediately unloads.

The Fight: Just non-stop, pure, brutal violence. They’re punching, kicking, blocking, dodging, tossing, reversing. They’re down, they’re back up, they’re all over the room, they’re slamming each other into things. It’s fast and it’s insane. No amount of description could do it justice. It’s a hurricane.

It certainly rocks you like one.

Hard, percussive muic kicks in just as soon as the fight starts, and only briefly lets up at one point when Jaka is able to get atop his adversary and furiously tries to choke him to death. Then it kicks right back in as soon as Mad Dog pops loose.

The two combatants are dazzling, managing that amazing feat of playing out meticulous choreography while somehow making it all look natural; it’s simultaneously a work of technical perfection but it’s also just two warriors trying desperately to kill each other.

He’s basically performing a sideways Shoryuken.

And for all Jaka’s superlative skill, it becomes increasingly clear that he’s out of his league here. Mad Dog is too fast, too resilient, too much. Jaka can’t stop him, heck watching this you’d almost believe a superhero couldn’t stop him. Though the villain absorbs many powerful blows and is left a sweaty, tired mess by the end, Mad Dog’s victory is guaranteed when he delivers a particularly strong knee to his foe’s face.

Jaka is still moving afterward, but is notably slower and dazed. Here the whole pace of the fight slows down, because the villain knows the end is near. He even revels in it, as we can see in a close-up shot when he tilts his face to the ceiling in a moment of perversely serene ecstasy.

From here on Evans plays a few tricks that solidify the sense of dread and inevitability. The drums die down and are replaced on the score by an odd mechanical whine that steadily rises, so loud that it drowns out the sounds from the few remaining blows (instead they’re accompanied by drum booms on the soundtrack). Because what happens from here is no longer excitement & entertainment but drama: a good man is about to be murdered.

Mad Dog softens Jaka up with another running blow. Then he grabs his neck, and, still savoring the moment, caresses his enemy’s head, almost affectionately. Jaka squirms to get loose but a vicious punch to the face stuns him further.

And with one brutal twist, boom! Neck snapped. Just like how Superman does it.

The word for this is perfection. It is utterly without flaw from a technical or dramatic standpoint. It avoids the sins that deflate so many otherwise great fight scenes (and, to be honest, even a few great ones). The two combatants don’t just “take turns winning”; they have a genuine, non-stop and complex push & pull where neither side gains advantage for more than a few seconds. Rarely is a fight this convincingly close, either– they’re both amazingly talented fighters but while one is clearly better, the other truly makes him work for it; it’s plausible that Jaka could have won. And the victor does not win on a technicality or a matter of luck. Mad Dog wins simply because he’s better… or perhaps just more crazy, savage and fearless.

While Taslim is outstanding, the real star of this fight is, of course, Yahyan Ruhian. He has a surprising range for a non-actor– he only ended up in front of the camera after joining Gareth Evans’ previous film, Merantau, as a choreographer, and ended up filling in an acting slot when the director had trouble filling a small but important antagonist role. In Merantau he was certainly a bad guy but more of a tragic one, his soulful eyes betraying a lot of regret. But here he’s a flat-out psychopath, the kind of guy you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw him walking down the sidewalk. On paper, the kind of bad guy who puts down his gun because he so openly relishes bare-hands killing is such a cliché, but Ruhian elevates it through the sheer intensity of his performance.

And one other thing? This whole battle, including the slower portion at the end as Mad Dog prepares to give the coup de grace, is well under two minutes. Yet it’s packed with so much incident it feels like much more. Is this how Olympic athletes feel during the 100-meter dash?

We are honored to witness this.

Grade: A+

Coming Attractions: Taking the rest of this week off for Christmas. But when we come back, our heroes say no to drugs.

With extreme prejudice.

Drug bust.

Face bust.

3) Drug Lab Assault

The Fighters:

• Rama, our hero, now patched up and rested a bit from his previous encounters. Played by Iko Uwais
• Wahyu, the police lieutenant in charge of the mission. Older and in worse shape than any of the other team members (and sporting hilarious bleach blonde hair), but plenty mean enough. It’s come out by now that Wahyu is deeply corrupt and has outlived his usefulness, which is why he’s ordered this raid as a sort of last-ditch shot for leverage. His companions know he’s dirty, but they keep him around because it’s important to stick together. Played by Pierre Gruno.
• Dagu, another SWAT member who we don’t know much about. Basically only around because he’s lucky enough to have survived. Played by Eka “Piranha” Rahmadia. No idea what the nickname is all about.
• Drug lab thugs, about 15 or so. They’re spread out all over the place given the huge nature of the lab, and probably a few are also coming in from other rooms so once again it makes sense that they’re attacking our heroes at irregular intervals. Most seem to be there to make drugs but several are probably guards, so their individual skill levels vary.
  • Armed with: Some have knives.

The Setup: After getting some help from the crime lord’s other lieutenant, Andi (who turns out to be Rama’s brother. Ze tweest!), Rama lays low for a while and eventually re-unites with the other two wandering survivors. They decide that since the exits are being watched by snipers, the only hope they have is to complete the mission as planned, so they head onward and upward. This will take them through the rather large drug lab (unspecified what kind of drugs, could be multiple types) not too far from Tama’s perch on the 15th floor.

While Wahyu and Dagu act as bait, Rama takes out the lone roving guard on the stairwell, tossing the gun-wielding thug over the edge. Here’s where the sountrack (or at least the US version, enhanced by Mike Shinoda and Joseph Trapanese) kicks into high gear with a rhythmic, jaunty, techno-esque tune. We see a long pan over the many workers in the lab going about their business, until they’re suddenly interrupted by Rama bursting through the door and tackling another guard. Time go all Nancy Reagan on this biatch.

The Fight: On many levels this is the most ambitious fight of the movie yet. It’s three allies with different fighting styles loosely cooperating against a numerically superior but disorganized opposition, in a very large space with lots of obstacles. Of course as you might have guessed by this point, Evans and crew pull it off masterfully.

There’s a wild, popping energy to this scene that sets it apart. The last fight was a vicious duel to the death and the one before that was a desperate struggle for survival, but this one’s just a smorgasboard of hyper-kinetic, high-speed violence. In this way it’s closer to the first fight than anything, only a lot more so because there’s more combatants, more space to play in and more energy at work. The fighters here run and jump and pull all sorts of crazy stunts. Evans goes back & forth between all three protagonists as they put down henchmen left & right, with varying degrees of difficulty.

Dagu proves surprisingly capable for a guy who’s basically just lucky cannon fodder. He fights a lot like Rama but seems to be faster and more wiry, getting in several good beatdowns in this sequence.

But strangely in this fight it’s Wahyu who comes off as the most memorable. Despite being a paunchy middle-aged man amongst a crew of young, ripped martial artists, Wahyu is still quite the badass. That’s in spite of his dearth of martial arts prowess, rather than because of it: while Dagu and Rama pull off dazzling acrobatics and surgical beatdowns, the crusty lieutenant is just a big simple beast of a man. He throws wild haymakers and topples down huge objects around him as diversions. At one point he even channels his inner bad guy wrestler when he uses a chair to sweep the legs out from under a charging foe, then brings it crashing down on him brutally when he’s on the ground. He’s a bull in a china shop and it’s delightful to watch.

Rama, of course, is the fight’s MVP and rightfully gets most of the focus. Even though he’s still kicking ass in fine form, he absorbs a healthy amount of punishment from the tougher thugs, but he keeps coming back. At one point he’s able to seize a foe’s knife and starts his old slash & stab routine, but he loses it soon enough when he opts to throw it across the room to skewer a baddie who’d been choking Wahyu from behind.

The final showpiece of the sequence involves Rama and the last bad guy leaping onto opposite ends of a very long, thin table. Like, “I said, could you PASS the SALT?!”-long. They charge each other at full speed, and Rama gracefully leaps over what would have been a deadly slide kick.

“Why aren’t we fighting on the ground?” “Shut up, this is awesome!”

They have an extended battle and the last guy does pretty well for himself, until Rama is able to deliver a stunning kick-punch-sweep combo that drops the thug so that he lands with his back slamming against the table’s edge. Ouch.

The only thing “wrong” with this fight is that in comparison with the last two it’s relatively inconsequential: there are no recognizable faces amongst the sea of interchangeable bad guys here, and none of them rise above moderately threatening. Even the final table duel, while neat-looking, doesn’t end with quite the level of “oomph” the movie has subtly trained us to expect from this sort of thing.

On the other hand, that’s kind of the scene’s strength. This sequence comes during a particularly harsh stretch, storywise: Jaka has died, the remaining heroes know they’re cut off & alone, and Andi’s treachery has just been discovered by his criminal colleagues. The heroes, and the audience, need something light, fast-paced, and fun. They need a good clean win, and boy is this ever that. From the moment the high-paced music kicks in you begin to feel like it’s Comeback Time, and know that the movie’s starting to come into the home stretch.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: An unfair fight.

Definitely not fair, they should have at least three more guys.

BOSS FIGHT!!!

And he has SO many hit points.

5) Rama & Andi vs Mad Dog

The Fighters:

• Rama, our hero. Played by Iko Uwais.
• Andi, Rama’s brother and long-time black sheep of the family. Rama didn’t know he’d be there until he saw the pre-mission intel, and came determined to bring him out alive. Though physically formidable he’s more of an administrative/brains-type guy of the villain’s operation, and having something of a conscience he’s done what he can to minimize unnecessary brutality. Played by Donny Alamsyah.
• Mad Dog, the crime lord’s top enforcer and the real physical threat of the movie (the villain Tama will, spoiler, soon be unceremoniously shot by Wahyu). One of the few characters in this movie whose name is more than four letters. Played by Yayan Ruhian.

The Setup: Fresh off their victory in the drug lab, the protagonists ascend up to Tama’s lair on the 15th floor. But on the way, Rama sees something that makes him stop and let the others move on without him: his brother, tied up in the center of a dank room, getting pounded like a sack of meat by Mad Dog. What Rama didn’t know until now is that Andi’s employer had discovered his aid of Rama, and has sicced Mad Dog on him as punishment/interrogation.

He wordlessly enters and stares down the villain. Mad Dog stops his slow torture of Andi, releases him from the ceiling-suspended chain and allows the brothers a brief reunion as he cranks up the winch he’d been suspending his target with. Then he approaches the two and gestures for them to step aside, positioning himself so that he’s directly between them.

Because, you know, otherwise it would have been too easy.

Nobody needs to say anything, everyone knows what’s about to happen. Now, consider that Rama is still exhausted from his last three epic fights, and Andi has been stabbed through one hand and steadily beaten for a good while. Mad Dog, meanwhile, though he did have a nasty showdown with Jaka a while back, is fresher than either of them. On the other hand, there are two of them… but back on the first hand, this IS Mad Dog. So this is a lot less uneven than you’d think.

After a brief standoff, everybody gets down to business.

The Fight: Pure insanity. Emphasis on both words, because while the fight is certainly all kinds of crazy, it really is pure (well, nearly enough) in the sense that it is almost entirely unadorned by weapons, the environment, fancy tricks or outside interference. It’s just three warriors in a small room, trying very hard to kill each other.

It’s also of epic length: well over five minutes. That’s an eternity in fight scene time, especially in one that’s completely free of aforementioned adornment and has no changes of scenery. (There’s one brief cutaway early on to the Wahyu’s doings, but I’m not counting that towards this fight’s run time.) If the Jaka/Mad Dog duel was a breathless sprint, this one is a grueling marathon.

As with many battles of its ilk, recapping the exact goings-on would be a fool’s errand. Suffice it to say that despite it basically being five minutes of the same thing over & over, this fight never gets boring, and in fact only gets better as it goes on. Somehow it keeps staying fresh and diverse.

Rama & Andi make an effective team, sometimes getting the better of Mad Dog individually and sometimes overwhelming him by their superior number (or one hitting him while he’s engaged with the other). Given the lightning-fast nature of the battle there’s obviously not much time for the brothers to plan out any teamwork, but they do have a few good moments of improvised cooperation. My favorite is probably when Rama flings Mad Dog about by his leg and a downed Andi adds to the throw’s force with a kick to the chest.

When Mad Dog gets back up and has to defend himself against both brothers attacking him head-on while slowly backing towards the door, Evans films it in a really striking head-on shot of Mad Dog where all you can see of the two heroes is their limbs. It’s where the still from the top of the article came from.

But the villain gives more than as good as he gets, several times managing to overpower the brothers even when they do combine their efforts. And most of the fight he only has to engage with one of them at a time, since he keeps putting each one down with such ferocity that they’re slow to rise and help the other.

After a while the intense & exciting music steadily grows more, as we can see Mad Dog slowly wearing out his two opponents. Andi goes down hard when he’s slammed stomach first into a large metal box (air-conditioning unit or some such, probably) and shortly after that Rama takes a dive when the villain flips him all the way over in the air– before he lands, he goes so high his feet smash into one of the ceiling’s long fluorescent light tubes. (This will be important shortly.)

With both his foes reduced to writhing on the ground in pain, Mad Dog makes the same face we saw him make earlier, just before he killed Jaka. Uh oh.

You don’t ever want to be in the room when Mad Dog makes this face. Actually, you just don’t ever want to be in the room with Mad Dog.

He decides to start with Rama, the more dangerous of the two and the one he’d been unsuccessfully hunting for most of the movie. As he pulls the hero up and lays hands on his neck, a dazed Andi sees a broken shard of fluorescent tube on the ground nearby. He crawls slowly to it, seizes it, pulls back Mad Dog’s head from behind and stabs him right in the side of the neck with it. Owwwwww….

Improbably, this only seems to make Mad Dog MORE angry. He drops Rama and beats Andi mercilessly, and even starts slamming his head into the floor. Rama tries to interrupt but he gets a beating too, and almost nearly takes a probably-fatal elbow to the chest before Andi jumps back in and blocks it.

This last bit of teamwork seems to have worn down Mad Dog enough (he may be losing blood from the stab wound) that Rama is able to get around him and put his arm in a lock so that he can break it with a swift hand strike. Without missing a beat, the hero glides back around to the other side and breaks the other.

With the villain now far less able to defend himself, Rama whips around and delivers a series of rapid-fire punches to Mad Dog’s chest. Then he spins him around and delivers a really hard knee to the chest, possibly breaking some more bones. That’s two snaps, a crackle AND a pop, I believe.

Mad Dog doesn’t have much time to worry about seeking medical attention, though, because Rama immediately slams him to the ground and holds him down by the shoulders. Andi crawls over and pins down his legs for good measure. Rama grabs the still-embedded (!) light bulb shard, and slowly drags it all the way across the villain’s twitching throat. It’s SO gross, but with a guy like Mad Dog you have to pull out all the stops. Hell, if I were them I’d go on to decapitate him, then cut his body into fifths and bury the pieces in separate continents. You know, just to be sure.

I mean, at least try setting his body on fire. Are you SURE he’s not a vampire?

This is absolutely phenomenal. It may not be the best all-around fight in The Raid, but it’s exactly the kind of epic, adrenaline-soaked, balls-to-the-wall note this kind of movie needed to end with. If there is any true flaw it’s that the introduction of the bulb shard is a bit of a cheat, interrupting the purity of the fight. But it’s such a desperate struggle by then that it’s hard to begrudge the heroes for pulling out all the stops, and besides, Mad Dog still kicks their asses for a little while after the initial stabbing; they don’t actually kill him with it until he’s already pretty much lost anyway.

More than ever, you can really register the exhaustion and the desperation of the combatants. The quasi-realism the movie employs thus makes Mad Dog’s nearly superhuman ability to withstand punishment all the more impressive. A truly epic end to a truly epic movie. Gareth Evans, you are the chosen one.

Grade: A+

Recommended Links: Don’t forget to check out the trailer for Berandal, next year’s sequel to The Raid. Apparently Rama goes undercover so he can beat even MORE criminals to death. UPDATE: Trailer #2!

Coming Attractions: BWAAAAAAAAAAAAMP

Shadows of the Colossi

“Remakes, adaptations, and sequels, that’s all Hollywood does now,” complain the same crowds who declined to see last year’s Pacific Rim, a genuinely new intellectual property which Legendary Studios gambled a ton of money on. You can’t both whine about Hollywood only making safe bets on established franchises while simultaneously refusing to check out a new thing because you don’t know what it is.

I know what THIS is. It’s awesome.

Pacific Rim is an odd & frustrating movie, though. Its flaws are glaring: Despite the bold & unusual step (in an era where we’re bombarded by origin stories) of beginning the movie late in a pre-existing conflict, it nevertheless feels like the sequel to a movie that never existed. It has gaping plot holes and people making nonsensical decisions. It grounds its more interesting characters & designs in the background and then dispenses with them too early. Its whole middle section is almost entirely free of action. It clearly foreshadows thuddingly obvious plot points, then delivers them like they’re huge revelations. Pretty much all its fights take place at night and many in or under water that it’s often hard to see what’s going on. And its willful adoption of nearly every cliche in the book (it openly steals from many films, but none more egregiously so than Independence Day) alternates between amusing and disappointing. Despite what some of its more ardent supporters claim, it’s not the next Star Wars… but with a little tweaking, maybe it could have been.

But what works about it works SO well. The action scenes are astounding in their inventiveness & scale. The designs and special effects are similarly outstanding, born out of a clear yet professional love of their inspirations. The actors are well-cast and clearly having a grand time of it; between their efforts and a pretty sharp script, that aforementioned draggy middle never comes anywhere near the teeth-grinding tedium of Michael Bay’s non-action filler. (Another reason why this movie’s dismissal as “ugh, just another Transformers” by the masses is so irritating– it’s more like what Transformers SHOULD have been.)

Though even Perlman couldn’t have saved Transformers.

So, anyway, Pacific Rim. Giant robots vs giant monsters, Voltrons vs Godzillas. In concept it’s a child’s notebook doodles brought to life, yet it executes with a winning mixture of straight-faced solemnity and wicked playfulness. What does all that clanging & smashing come down to?

[A note on the final grades here, which will also explain why this film's fans are so willing to overlook its disappointments: I grade all fights based on how well they work as fights, and in Pacific Rim, like most movies, some fights are not as good as others. But a "pretty good" fight of giant robots against giant monsters isn't exactly the same as a "pretty good" fight of, say, Tony Jaa beating up a bunch of anonymous stunt men. Not sure if you'd call it a grading curve or what, just something to keep in mind.]

1) Gipsy Danger vs Knifehead

The Fighters:

• Gipsy Danger, our main “jaeger” (German for “hunter,” the film helpfully explains) as they call their giant robots here. Though one of the least visually distinctive machines in the movie, Gipsy still cuts a striking figure as a lean blue sentinel of justice. Despite being an earlier model, Gipsy is still plenty dangerous. Each of its hands can shift into enormous cannons capable of firing a handful (ahem) of deadly plasma bursts, though it takes a few moments to charge up. But Gipsy’s main offensive power is in direct physical combat, with blows administered by its skilled pilots. The unusual spelling of the somewhat un-PC term “gypsy” is apparently a reference to the de Havilland Gipsy engine.
  • Piloted by: Yancy and Raleigh Beckett, two American brothers cocky from their four confirmed kaiju (Japanese for “giant monster,” more or less) kills thus far. They’re talented but their rash attitudes & egos are about to get them in over their heads. Played by Diego Klattenhoff and Charlie Hunnam, respectively.
• Knifehead, which is not its real name, if it even has one; all kaiju titles are assigned by some unseen person at UN HQ or whatever, mostly for tracking purposes. The reason behind each name is not always obvious, but this one’s pretty on the nose– specifically, Knifehead’s nose, as the top of his head is one super-elongated snout that comes to a sharp point. He also has extra-long arms with large claws at the end, and is apparently the first to exhibit anything resembling advanced tactics. It’s also big, ugly, and mean, but that describes literally every kaiju. Another thing the beasts have in common, unfortunately: while each is neat-looking, none really have anywhere near the iconic design or “personality” of the classic Toho B-movies that inspired them. But to be fair, what does?

“Hey, I got personality falling out my ASS, blog-nerd!”

The Setup: At the sign of a new kaiju winding its way toward the 49th state, the Beckett brothers are roused to duty and sent to guard the coastline and keep it away from Anchorage. Their commander, Stacker Pentecost (a name so ridiculous it makes the actor’s, Idris Elba, look bland in comparison), orders the boys to hold back closer to land and wait for the beast to come near, rather than intervening to save a small fishing boat caught in its path (“Your orders are to save a city of two million people!” he intones, which means a LOT more folks must move there in the future because the entire state of Alaska currently boasts less than half that). They don’t go into why not, though presumably it’s because the kaiju has the edge in deeper waters. Apparently the novelization goes into more detail about the tactical advantage of the “miracle mile.”

Grinning mischievously, the brothers decide to be Big Damn Heroes and go save the boat anyway. The film cuts away from Gipsy’s slow march into the water and takes us to the ship, the SS Saltchuck, getting buffeted pretty hard by storm waters even before Knifehead rises menacingly from the ocean. But shortly after, Gipsy Danger, accompanied by the soundtrack’s trademark Inception BWAAAAMP, arises on the opposite side of the monster. Without so much as a “come with me if you want to live,” the robot plucks the endangered ship out of the water. If not for the courage of the fearless jaeger crew, the Saltchuck would be lost. The Saltchuck would be lost.

“Don’t worry, it’ll just be a three-hour tour.”

Even as our heroes cradle the (comparatively) tiny ship, it’s time for the fight to get down to business.

The Fight: From a far distance, Knifehead uses his long arm to take a swipe at Gipsy Danger, but only grazes the robot’s back as it leans down to put the Saltchuck out of the way. As soon as the ship is safe, Gipsy retaliates with a few punches, the second of which doubles the kaiju over. Gipsy then raises both hands up high and slams them down together on top of Knifehead’s, uh, knife-like head.

As Wayne Campbell would say: “So it’s not just a clever name.”

The monster is hurt but not badly, and tries to lunge in with a chomp to Gipsy’s face, which the robot blocks and instead gives Knifehead a mouth full of wrist. The heroes are able to wrench themselves free and hit the kaiju with two shots of plasma, the second of which sends it flying back into the water.

After Knifehead doesn’t emerge for like ten whole seconds, the brothers stupidly assume it’s dead and crow about their “victory” to Pentecost, who is irritated at them for disobeying orders. Sure enough, HQ starts picking up the monster’s signal again, moving too stealthily underwater for Gipsy to find. Before the boys can retreat, Knifehead suddenly jumps out from the waves and gets real close to the jaeger. Gipsy pushes it away and tries to charge up another plasma shot, but the kaiju pushes the blaster down with one long arm, then lunges in head-first at Gipsy’s shoulder. Knifehead’s ugly noggin cuts right through the robot’s left arm, leaving it useless and sending Raleigh (who controlled that hemisphere) into painful convulsions. Immediately after, the beast comes back in and yanks the arm all the way off, finishing the job.

With Gipsy’s capabilities degraded and its pilots scrambling to react, Knifehead presses its advantage, getting in even closer and putting its claw right through the machine’s visor.

Even the Three Stooges Defense couldn’t have stopped this.

Even as Yancy tries to form a plan, Knifehead tears all the way through and unceremoniously yanks him right out of his virtual seat. We never explicitly see the older Beckett’s final fate, but, well, you can guess.

Raleigh, meanwhile, is left not just with grief and panic, but has to handle Gipsy’s functions all alone– a task supposedly insurmountable for the “neural bandwidth” of a single mind. He screams as the kaiju goes Gipsy through the chest, then slams the seemingly helpless robot against an iceberg, tearing & biting into even more of its innards. (If you spoke kaiju you’d know that Knifehead’s roars here were a Tony Stark impression: “This looks important!”)

Fortunately, the kaiju’s gleeful destruction seem to distract it long enough for Raleigh to slowly activate the plasma cannon on the remaining arm and fire it at close range.

With that, the film cuts away and HQ announces that the plasma blast has cut off radio contact, leaving Gipsy/Raleigh’s fate in the dark. At least until a few minutes later (but the next morning in the movie), when we see Gipsy stumble and fall onto a barren Alaska beach. Though considering Raleigh’s been narrating for like the first ten minutes of the movie, you probably could have guessed he survived.

There is not a lot to this fight–there are few moves involved, the action stays in one small area, etc– but it sets the stage pretty solidly for what’s to come. Though it’s clearly inspired by previous monster movies, Power Ranger-type shows & animes, and superficially resembles the action in Transformers films, the combat in Pacific Rim is something new entirely. There’s a truly gratifying sense of heft, a kind of slow & lumbering grace befitting their size and strength. It’s Big Dumb done smart.

Also, even as we see the sheer power of the jaegers, we simultaneously learn just how precarious victory is in a fight like this. Just as in a real fight between humans, one small miscalculation can be the difference between life & death. Only here, the stakes are much higher. And bigger.

“Big” is the operative word here. This is not a great fight (it’s just setting the baseline), but it is a big one. Just about everything Pacific Rim does is done enormously if not perfectly: the size and the loudness are rarely so awesome as they are in this film. And while that sounds easy– just turn all dials to the max and you’re good to go!– it really isn’t. As countless blockbusters and would-be blockbusters have taught us, you can have all the money in the world to pour into special effects, but if you can’t put it together skillfully and can’t put some real weight behind it, everything eventually dissolves into just so much bland noise.

But not here. Here, the dials really do go to eleven.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: We hardly knew ye.

Only the cool ‘bots die young.

Another fight filled with tragedy.

And not just because Striker never got any beads for this.

If Pacific Rim has any major weakness it’s that it sags in the middle. Not terminally– what does transpire is watchable enough if a bit cliche-ridden and predictable, plus there are a couple of human physical sequences we’ll get to later– but if you came for giant robots fighting giant monsters (and of course you did), there’s a huge stretch of time where that is inexplicably not happening.

Fortunately the movie makes up for it when the action finally does rev back up, giving the audience three big fight sequences that are practically back-to-back-to-back, and a climax not too long after. This is where the movie starts to make its money.

2) Typhoon, Cherno and Striker vs Otachi and Leatherback

The Fighters:

• Crimson Typhoon, a robot made and by piloted by the Chinese (the jaeger program is an international effort). Unlike the other machines it has a third arm, made possible by its number of pilots. Rather than hands, each arm has a large spinning blade attached to the end of it, making this the jaeger’s primary offensive attack. Typhoon uses the blades in a technique called the “Thundercloud Formation,” the specifics of which are vague but is apparently designed to allow a continuous and seemingly unblockable offense. The robot’s head is also smaller than other models’ but more easily moved, increasing the pilots’ ability to see at the expense of heightened vulnerability, since the head is where the pilots are located. This will turn out to be a bad trade-off.
  • Piloted by: Cheung Wei Tang, Hu Wei Tang, and Jin Wei Tang, Chinese triplets and martial artists. Played by Charles Luu, Lance Luu, and Mark Luu, who are, you guessed it, real-life identical triplets. Good thing for them they’re Chinese and not North Korean. Supposedly Guillermo del Toro wanted quadruplets for the role but couldn’t find any so he had to settle for triplets… which is mystifying because the Wei Tangs are on-screen for so little time a fourth could have easily been simulated using movie tricks that have been around since at least The Parent Trap. Heck, they could have done it all with just one guy.
• Cherno Alpha, the Russian jaeger and one of the oldest around. Big and simple in a very stereotypically Russian way: ugly, but it gets the job done. Unlike the other jaegers (especially Typhoon), its head is a thick, heavily protected tin can connected directly to the torso, with no “neck” or other vulnerable spots– you know, like the guy who used to beat you up in high school. Doesn’t seem to have any offensive powers besides its extra-large fists.
  • Piloted by: Aleksis and Sasha Kaidonovsky, a Russian husband & wife team. Like the Wei Tangs, they’re not much of a presence in the movie, but they still make a strong impression with their imposing size, stoic attitudes and outrageous bleach blonde hair. Played by Robert Maillet and Heather Doerksen, the latter of whom probably had to endure a lot of taunting in primary school.
• Striker Eureka, an Australian jaeger with the highest kill count on record. A newer, sleek and speedy model. Like Gipsy, Striker largely gets things done physically (aided by some sharp-looking prongs at the top of its wrists), but it also houses six short-range missile launchers behind a retractable chest cavity. It’s unknown just how powerful the missiles are, but one barrage was enough to finish off a tough-looking kaiju earlier in the movie (in a battle so fleetingly glimpsed via news report earlier in the movie it’s not worth writing up), which makes you wonder why cities don’t just set up similar missile batteries near their coastlines.
  • Piloted by: Herc and Chuck Hansen, a father & son Aussie team. Herc, the dad, is a veteran jaeger & military pilot. The son, Chuck, is fairly young but a talented hotshot. He’s also another of the film’s irritations, because he’s a cartoonishly arrogant and needlessly vindictive prick. Apparently the screenwriters felt the film needed an element of drama it could only get from a designated jerk, so they made a bully straight out of a bad 80s high school movie to hiss nasty stuff at Raleigh every time they’re on-screen together. There’s a moment toward the end where Pentecost casually diagnoses Chuck as having “daddy issues,” which is bizarre because Herc is incredibly nice & respectful to everybody. Played by Max Martini (from The Unit!) and Robert Kazinsky, respectively
• Otachi, a more lizard-like kaiju who prefers to crawl about on all fours. In addition to the deadly claws & jaws that all these beasties seem to come equipped with, Otachi (Japanese for “big sword,” apparently) also has an extra-long & thick prehensile tail, with another large gripper claw on the end of it. It can also spit large amounts of corrosive blue acid which it stores in a sac underneath the chin. And this won’t come into play until later, but Otachi also has a set of strong wings hidden in its forearms.
• Leatherback, a fat kaiju with a gorilla-like body who walks dragging the knuckles attached to his enormous forearms. Big & strong, of course, and he has some sort of alien device on his back that can release an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

Whew, that was a long one.

The Setup: After their first attempt at forming a neural bridge went all kinds of wrong, Raleigh and his would-be partner, Mako, are grounded, so when two more kaiju are detected (the first time more than one has attacked at once), it’s up to Cherno & Typhoon to defend the city (Striker is held back in reserve, because it’s needed for an important mission later). Though actually as we shortly find out, the kaiju’s primary mission here is to hunt down a human scientist working for the jaeger program, because he’d gone rogue and neural-drifted with a piece of kaiju corpse, getting the hive mind’s attention. (The scientist, Dr. Geiszler, is made to feel bad for “provoking” the enemy, but since they were intent on showing up in cities and wrecking things anyway, I don’t see what the big difference is.)

So Striker hugs the coast while the two other active jaegers venture out to find the approaching kaiju. It doesn’t take them long.

Peekaboo.

The Fight: Otachi, not one to beat around the bush, pops out of the water directly in front of Crimson Typhoon. After a brief holler, it spins around and floors the jaeger with its massive tail. Sweep the leg!

NO MERCY!

Typhoon pauses and actually shakes its head a little bit before getting up, the way a human would after taking a hard knock. Presumably this is because the pilots are a bit dazed from the fall and the jaeger is only following their movements, but it’s still a funny touch because it looks like the robot is dizzy, which is hilarious.

Typhoon arises and attacks Otachi using Thundercloud, all three blades spinning madly. The brothers get in a good five or six swipes, ripping several tears across the kaiju’s ugly gut, before Otachi seizes two of the jaeger’s hands in its own claws, crunching the blades good. Rather than just going to town with the remaining third limb (this would kind of seem to be what it’s there for, no?), Typhoon responds by using the jets on its back to leap into the air above Otachi’s head, but remains vertical and still with its hands caught in the monster’s claws. It looks like the world’s biggest, slowest suplex, except it’s self-inflicted.

While Typhoon is briefly suspended above Otachi’s head, the pilots swivel the entire lower half of its body (that’s nifty) so that it lands with increased leverage, which it then uses to fling Otachi several hundred feet through the air.

The kaiju stumbles in the shallow water, where it finds Cherno Alpha ready for business. The beefy jaeger wastes no time charging in and delivering an elbow drop (more rasslin’ moves!) to Otachi’s long neck. Cherno segues right into a headlock and follows up with a few blows to the monster’s face. It can’t finish the job, though, because the creature’s tail swipes in to knock it down.

The Hansens see this and want to help, but are told to stand down by command. Meanwhile, Typhoon closes back in on Otachi, so the beast is surrounded and seemingly in trouble. But that damn tail is still too unpredictable for the pilots: it whips in and smacks Typhoon, and the claw at the end of it grabs onto Typhoon’s head/cockpit. This spurs the Hansens to finally disobey orders and start rushing over to help, but it’s too late to save Typhoon’s noggin: after a little bit of wrenching, the entire thing gets yanked clean off, and flung carelessly into the sea. Just like with Yancy we don’t see what happens to the triplets inside after that, but they almost certainly didn’t survive. As for Crimson Typhoon, well, now he’ll never be the head of a major corporation.

Too soon?

Really, as I said earlier, that was a serious design flaw. Surely they could have found a way to increase the jaeger’s visibility (cameras embedded in the sides, or something) without leaving its pilots so exposed. This is twice now in the movie a jaeger has been quickly compromised by a direct attack on its cockpit. That’s not the way to get ahead in life.

Anyway, Cherno Alpha’s pilots see this and are pissed. The jaeger clangs its fists together in anticipation, and rushes at Otachi. Unfortunately, Otachi does its Linda Blair impression and hits Cherno square in the face with deadly acid. The jaeger is damaged but not down, even though the acid quickly leaves the pilots directly exposed. Otachi bites into Cherno’s arm and the jaeger starts to fight back, but his fate is sealed when Leatherback decides to make his entrance.

Leatherback clings onto Cherno’s back and starts tearing it up from behind, even as Otachi keeps at it from the front. Soon enough the latter decides that Leatherback can finish things off on its own, and goes off to engage Striker Eureka. Indeed, Leatherback does make short work of things, seizing Cherno and shoving it into the ocean. There’s a strangely personal & chilling malice in the way the monster simply holds the robot down, waiting for the inevitable to happen. Water floods not just the pilots but also the reactor, shortly triggering a muted explosion that saves the pilots the indignity of a slow drowning death.

Meanwhile, an enraged Striker has been ruthlessly pounding on Otachi. The jaeger finishes up by hefting the kaiju above its head and giving it a mighty toss– maybe not the smartest move on the pilots’ part, since the landing in deep water doesn’t really hurt it, and Striker would have been better off pressing the advantage. Maybe they only did that so they’d have a safe distance from which to fire Striker’s missiles… but that doesn’t work either, because a freshly-unoccupied Leatherback sees the danger and activates its EMP.

To slightly paraphrase War Machine: Why didn’t they lead with that? Really, it could saved the kaiju a lot of hassle. Getting all their targets in range couldn’t have been an issue, because the pulse extends at least all the way to the shore.

As Striker stands inert, the two monsters have a brief exchange. Otachi charges off to find Dr. Geiszler while Leatherback stays behind to menace its motionless enemy. There are a couple cuts away to headquarters and the doctor’s misadventures in the city, but soon enough we come back to the two pilots in their useless robot. They leave their harness just as Leatherback gives Striker’s head a playful smack, which leads to Herc falling and hurting his arm.

There’s some macho arguing, but ultimately the two decide to “do something really stupid”: rather than sit there and wait for the inevitable doom, the Hansens climb outside to almost literally spit in Death’s eye. Armed with flare guns, they wait for a curious Leatherback to examine them up close, and fire a couple shots right at some of his six eyeballs. The monster is none too happy and raises his fists to take them out, when suddenly a spotlight hits him from behind….

SURPRISE MOTHERF—ER

Well. All kidding aside, this is some pretty harsh stuff to watch. Probably not as much as it would be if we’d actually gotten to know some of these now-dead characters (and their awesome jaegers) on anything but the most surface of levels. To be sure, some of the mystique surrounding the Russian & Chinese pilots is owed to them being more on the periphery, but it’s possible to flesh out a supporting character while still maintaining his or her mystique. As it is, these folks are barely cameos before this.

The way the fight unfolds also underscores the problem of the movie’s necessarily rushed storytelling. This is the first really extended monster combat we’ve seen so far, yet it’s filled with at least three “this has never happened before!” moments: two kaiju attacking simultaneously, a kaiju using projectile spit, and a kaiju with a sophisticated technological attack. We have minimal grounding here, jumping into this war just as it’s starting to get truly interesting and desperate.

All that being said, the fight is astounding. With five combatants constantly shifting back & forth and some unexpected attacks (not just the obvious ones like the EMP and acid spit either; Otachi’s crazy tail is another game-changer) this is a WAY more dynamic fight than the opening number. We get to see a few more tricks from the jaegers as well, and of course there’s that crazy sense of scale that Pacific Rim’s fights operate on. This battle puts a very effective cap on the tail end of the second-act doldrums, and excellently sets things up for the big turnaround.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Looks like Team Elbow Rocket’s blasting off again….

“Pacific Rim is the ultimate otaku film that all of us had always been waiting for. Who are you, if you are Japanese and won’t watch this?” – Hideo Kojima, master video game creator

If the movie impressed you before, here’s where it really shines.

Shiny, indeed.

3) Gipsy vs Leatherback

The Fighters:

• Gipsy Danger, our friend from the opening battle, repaired and given a couple modifications. The most notable of them is a chain sword hidden in each forearm.
  • Piloted by: Raleigh Beckett and Mako Mori, played by Charlie Hunnam and the strangely charismatic Rinko Kikuchi, respectively. After barely surviving the Knifehead incident, Raleigh spent about five years in anonymous construction work, recovering from the traumatic loss of his brother. As part of the now-cancelled* jaeger program’s last-ditch effort to proactively end the war, Stacker Pentecost tracks down Raleigh and pulls him back to active duty. His new co-pilot Mako turns out to be Pentecost’s own surrogate daughter, who he’d been caring for ever since her family’s death in an early kaiju attack years before. As you can guess, she has scores to settle.
• Leatherback, the ape-like latecomer in the previous fight. Having sustained minimal injuries in that five-colossus brawl, he’s pretty much good to go.

[*The film's "Pan Pacific Defense Corps" has discontinued the jaeger initiative due to high costs and increasingly unsatisfactory results in the face of ever-stronger kaiju attackers. They're funding Pentecost for only eight more months as they put their focus instead on an enormous coastal wall that doesn't even look like it will repel a sustained kaiju attack... and it doesn't, as we see earlier in the film, but the global bureaucracy charges ahead with the same plan anyway. The staggering political incompetence necessary for this premise is a lot more plausible in light of the real-life U.S. government's disastrous attempts to overhaul its health care system in late 2013.]

The Setup: As Beckett helpfully (and falsely, according to real-world science) explains, since Gipsy’s power source is a nuclear reactor, it’s “analog” rather than digital, and unaffected by the recent EMP blast. Regardless, it’s been maybe five minutes since that pulse went off– barely enough time for the pilots to get into their flight outfits, never mind the climb into the jaeger, get into their delicate “drift” state, do all the pre-flight checks, hook the machine up to a dozen helicopters, etc. But why let logic get in the way of such a great entrance?

Gipsy gets dropped off pretty close to the kaiju and assumes a ready stance. Raleigh quietly asks Mako if she’s ready for the real thing. She SO is.

For those who hadn’t given up on Pacific Rim entirely by this point, this is the part where it really wins them over. After not just that long dry spell but the devastating losses in the previous battle, the story is in desperate need of a little turnaround. You can really feel the excitement here, and even before the first punch is thrown the audience understands that although it won’t be easy, our heroes won’t let us down this time: Gipsy Danger’s about to kick some ass.

The Fight: The jaeger judo-dodges around Leatherback’s initial charge and is able to seize the monster from behind. Even though it’s unnecessary because Gipsy is immune to it, the robot still rips the bio-electrical EMP device right off from Leatherback’s, uh, back. From the top of the powered-down Striker Eureka, the pilots cheer on Gipsy, with even the erstwhile dickhead Chuck Hansen enthusiastically urging his rivals to take down the beast.

Leatherback is understandably pissed off at having chunks torn off him, so the kaiju breaks free and turns the tables. Using its advanced size smartly, the monster catches Gipsy in a bear hug.

He’s a Personal Space Invader

The kaiju then spins around to get momentum and throws Gipsy a good mile or two through the air to the Hong Kong coast, resulting in that long ponderous fall & slide that was spoiled in every single trailer. The jaeger finally comes up in a ready crouch at a dock area, and Leatherback sets foot on land, unleashing a great big giant monster scream apparently as the world’s biggest “come at me bro.”

Both monster and machine charge each other at full speed, with Gipsy’s pilots clearly relishing the thrill (it’s stated earlier in the movie that piloting a jaeger is basically the world’s greatest adrenaline rush). The music builds to a crescendo as they close the distance and Gipsy gets the better of it their simultaneous leap, launching higher up and coming down with a hammer punch on top of Leatherback’s scaly noggin.

“Hello! McFly!”

The jaeger hits its foe a few more times (including one with the awesomely impractical Elbow Rocket), but when Leatherback goes down he seizes a piece of control tower and clocks Gipsy with it a few times. Following the kaiju’s example (and maybe also Hulk’s), Gipsy grabs several shipping containers in hand and uses them to smack the enemy around, culminating in a simultaneous smashing to both sides of Leatherback’s face. It’s questionable at best, because surely those shipping containers aren’t made of harder metal than Gipsy’s own “skin,” but again: rule of cool. Del Toro films the blow smartly, slowing down time nearly to a standstill as we see a stunned Leatherback amidst a cloud of suspended debris.

Then everything revs back up and the fight continues. After some more tussling, the kaiju uses his size advantage again and just rushes into Gipsy, steadily pushing the jaeger back. Stuck in close quarters, the pilots decide it’s the best time to whip out the trusty old plasma cannon.

“Don’t plaz me, bro!”

Using the right arm cannon, Mako “empties the clip” per Raleigh’s instruction, tearing increasingly bigger holes in Leatherback’s hide until the monster’s arm falls clean off and it eventually topples, just before it would have pushed Gipsy into the water.

Gipsy starts to walk away, but Raleigh clearly remembers how he assumed Knifehead’s death too soon. Wanting to “check for a pulse” Gipsy revs up the other plasma cannon and blasts the monster several more times, ripping enormous cavities in its chest. Presumably a simpler and more ammunition-efficient way would be to just jump on the monster’s head or something, but this is way more fun.

In real war, double-tapping is technically illegal, so good thing the kaiju don’t know about the Geneva Convention.

Satisfied that Leatherback is not merely dead but really most sincerely dead, Gipsy looks to elsewhere in city at its next target: the deadly Otachi.

This is basically non-stop awesome. It fully delivers on the promise of inventive, epic excitement that you went to the movie for. More importantly, as discussed above it comes at just the right time in the narrative, giving the heroes a win they sorely need. And there’s that promise of more to come.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: The ship hits the fan.

Now, where were we?

Oh, right.

4) Gipsy vs Otachi

The Fighters:

• Gipsy Danger, our hero robot fresh off its last kill.
  • Piloted by: Raleigh Beckett and Mako Mori, just as it was ten minutes before. Played by Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi.
• Otachi, the big beast who took out Crimson Typhoon not long ago. We will find out later that Otachi is pregnant which, in addition to inviting some Jay Leno-esque “no wonder it’s so cranky herp derp derp” jokes, doesn’t really mesh with the movie positing that the kaiju are all clones off a bunch of weird genetic assembly lines. The moviemakers have also asserted off-screen that Otachi is female, which again may not make sense but it helps with the confusion I’ve been having with what pronouns to use for these damn things.

The Setup: After parting with Leatherback (rest in pieces), Otachi made a beeline straight for Dr. Geiszler, presumably tracking him by some sort of psychic means. She digs right into the public bunker he’d been hiding out in and gets up close with some sort of weird glowing tendrils.

Anal probe pain level: MAXIMUM

But before Otachi can grab Geiszler and make him wish he’d never left sunny Philadelphia, the kaiju turns at the sound of Gipsy Danger’s trademark blare. Come to think of it, I never was clear on if Gipsy’s Inception-like BWAAAAAMPS are heard by characters in the movie or if they’re just part of the soundtrack.

As the camera gradually reveals, the dangerous one is dragging a hefty oil tanker lengthwise in its left hand. The music here is a lazier, jazzier version of its main heroic theme, matching the cocky tone of the jaeger’s entrance. It’s fitting, because the heroes are hot off a much-deserved win. While Gipsy was confident in the last fight, here the robot– and the movie– is outright swaggering.

The Fight: As Gipsy closes in, the robot casually swings the ship up so that it’s being held in both hands like a club, and brings the improvised weapon crashing down on Otachi’s stupid lizard face. The villain receives several more blows before she uses her tail to pluck it out of Gipsy’s hands and fling it to a distant street. Where, in a nice touch, it bounces a few times and lands embedded horizontally between two buildings.

At least it will be easy to find later.

The tail also knocks Gipsy down with a strong blow to the chest, and Otachi uses that opportunity to scamper off around a corner. Gipsy gives chase but has a hard time finding the kaiju, which seems hard to believe. It’s like Where’s Waldo, if Waldo was a 3,000-ton space monster.

In another nice touch, as Gipsy clomps around Hong Kong, it passes a small car bridge, and the pilots actually go out of their way to step over it. Even while holding armageddon at bay, still showing at least some consideration to the surrounding environment. It’s not hard, Zack Snyder.

Unfortunately Otachi shortly more than makes up for Gipsy’s apparent respect for property values when she crashes right through a high-rise building and tackles the jaeger.

“I think I found her!”

There’s some more tussling here, the best part of which is when we see a ducked punch from Gipsy clear right through an empty office area, with the fist coming to a stop juuuuuuust in time to nudge a Newton’s Cradle into motion. It’s Del Toro’s playful streak showing– completely gratuitous but very funny.

Otachi grabs the jaeger and slams it back & forth between a few buildings, finally shoving Gipsy all the way through one of them. The kaiju tries to follow that up with an acid spit finisher, but Gipsy dodges just in time. Before the gross monster can spit again, Gipsy shoves a fist right in her mouth (wouldn’t there still be lots of acid left in there?) and grabs hold of something. Otachi brings her tail over and coils it all the way around Gipsy’s arm, effectively trapping the robot while trying to snap its head off.

“Caught between a mouth and a hard tail,” I believe is the expression.

Quick-thinking Raleigh counters this by venting the coolant on the machine’s left flank. The super-cold discharge ends up freezing Otachi’s tail so hard the jaeger can snap it right off. Now she’ll never be the tail of a major corporation. With its hand newly free, Gipsy is able to hold Otachi still and rip out the mouth sac that launches her acid spit. Yowch.

The enraged kaiju jumps onto Gipsy and digs the claws on her hind legs deep into Gipsy’s spine. With a solid grip, Otachi springs her surprise: the hidden leather wings on her forearms. As an even heavier version of the old-school monstruous kaiju tune plays up, Otachi pulls Gipsy high up into the sky, smacking the robot along a few buildings for good measure. It’s kind of poorly edited, with literally no transition between the pair just barely passing the rooftops and then suddenly being almost in orbit.

Out of plasma ammo and about to run out of atmosphere, Mako reveals (how is it possible for them to be surprising each other at this point? They’re literally sharing a brain) Gipsy’s own secret weapon:

“FORM BLAZING SWORD!”

Letting out a delightfully hammy declaration of revenge in Japanese, Mako makes Gipsy swing hard enough to cut clean through the bat-lizard.

Again, if you spoke kaiju you’d know Otachi was saying, “that really was a Hattori Hanzo sword.”

This is awesome, and if anything it only suffers from being not quite as awesome as what immediately preceded it. There’s a lot less direct physical fighting between the two combatants this time, but that’s replaced by a healthy amount of other incident: the brief chase in the crowded city, the acid spit, the tail freezing, and that unusual aerial ending. So while it’s less of a “fight,” than the Leatherback duel, that’s fine, because we didn’t need too much more of the same so soon.

And of course there’s that opening where Gipsy Danger strolls in Like A Boss and wields a tanker like a baseball bat. That forgives a lot.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: A disappointing finale.

“im un ur ocean, bitin off ur arms”

Feel free to make your filthy sexual jokes about “disappointing climaxes” here.

Gipsy and Striker will be hiding from them at the bottom of the ocean.

5) Operation Pitfall

The Fighters:

• Gipsy Danger, heroic leader of the Autobots our main jaeger, a little banged up from the last fight, but after a quick repair job is good to go.
  • Piloted by: Raleigh Beckett and Mako Mori, who are played by Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi.
• Striker Eureka, the sleek new jaeger model with the highest kill count so far. Apparently the EMP didn’t do it any lasting damage.
  • Piloted by: Chuck Hansen and Stacker Pentecost, played by Robert Kazinsky and Idris Elba. Chuck’s father, Herc, broke his arm during Fight #2 and is unable to continue, so veteran pilot Stacker has volunteered to take his place and left Herc back in command at Shatterdome. In a completely gratuitous subplot, Pentecost has cancer due to his prolonged exposure to radiation in the poorly-shielded early-model jaegers. The cancer is said to be largely subsided as long as Pentecost doesn’t enter a jaeger again, so presumably the point of this plot element is to show how noble he is for stepping up for duty… but since there are no other worthy pilots on hand, if Stacker hadn’t helped out the apocalypse would remain un-cancelled so he’d die in a kaiju attack eventually, and besides that he (spoiler) dies by other means during the fight anyway. Guillermo Del Toro already pulled the exact same “give a cancer diagnosis to the older mentor figure who’s going to be killed off later” in the first Hellboy, so maybe he’s got a thing for that strangely specific trope. Oh and apparently Hansen and Pentecost are drift-compatible, but the movie is so nebulous about how that works it hardly matters at this point.
• Raiju, an extremely fast kaiju with a crocodile-like head. Very little is seen of this little beastie, but its body seems almost optimized for swimming. Named after a Japanese mythological beast that has thunder & lightning powers.
• Scunner, a large kaiju with four arms and a bull-like head. Beyond that, doesn’t seem to do anything special– besides being a huge monster, obviously. It’s named after a Scottish slang word for having a strong dislike for something. It’s never really clear who’s naming these things, incidentally: as soon as they’re spotted on radar, the way the guys at HQ call them out it’s like the names are pre-existing, even though the jaeger program people are the only ones tracking these things. This is such a weird movie.
• Slattern, the most enormous kaiju yet– he’s immediately identified as a “Category 5″ kaiju, even though there’s never been anything bigger than a 4. Again, weird. In addition to its ridiculous size, Slattern has three long tails and a devilish appearance, though given that the two have similar facial protrusions it can be hard to tell it apart from Scunner. The monster’s name (which I don’t believe is ever mentioned on screen, only gained from ancillary material) is taken from an archaic insult for women.

The Setup: Having fended off the assault in Hong Kong, Team Jaeger is now executing their planned operation to directly attack the inter-dimensional breach the kaiju are coming from by dropping a nuclear bomb in it. In a modification of the original plan (thanks to the demise of Typhoon and Cherno), this time it’s Gipsy pulling security while Striker goes ahead with the payload.

As the pair approach the breach, they get word of two large signatures emerging from it, and are on lookout. As they’re deep in the ocean, their visibility is terrible and they have to “switch to instruments” though it’s never clear what that means, and in any case it doesn’t seem to affect their performance. Raiju and Scunner begin to circle the pair, moving too fast to be seen.

As the robots get to the hole where the breach is, both kaiju stop their advance, which clues Pentecost into the presence of a trap. Just then, Dr. Geiszler and his frenemy Dr. Gottlieb burst into command, fresh off their drift with a dead kaiju fetus. The pair tell everyone that the plan won’t work, because whatever weird science that runs the breach will be able to tell monster from machine, and won’t let them through unless they bring a kaiju corpse along for the ride.

As if that wasn’t complicated enough, this is also when Slattern decides to make its appearance.

Ahem.

So: we know that each kaiju is harder to defeat than the last. The previous two monsters managed to easily take out three veteran jaegers, and only fell to Gipsy after it took them on one at a time while using some spectacular moves. This time it’s the good guys who are outnumbered, including one super-duper-jumbo-sized opponent. And it all takes place entirely underwater, where the monsters’ increased maneuverability will give them even greater advantage. How will our heroes overcome these odds?

Luck, mostly. Luck and some cheating.

The Fight: Striker fully extends its wrist blades (where were those in the second fight?) and gets ready. Gipsy tries to catch up and help, but gets attacked from behind by Scunner, who had been hiding nearby.

“I fear you are underestimating the sneakiness.”

We see Striker get knocked down pretty hard by all three of Slattern’s tails. Meanwhile, Gipsy has to tangle with Scunner. It’s able to pin down the kaiju with one hand, but before Gipsy can deliver a killing strike with the sword attached to its free arm, the jaeger gets rammed from behind by Raiju at high speed. The swift little beast knocks the whole limb off, chomping it in half as it swims away.

While Gipsy recovers, Scunner takes the opportunity to bite the robot’s… leg? It has to be the leg, considering what happens later, but the editing is so poor you would swear it went for the intact arm (I rewound multiple times and it really seems like the arm). The leg is also an idiotic tactical decision, because it is indeed the leg right underneath Gipsy’s remaining arm. The jaeger whips out the other sword and shoves it right through the back of Scunner’s head, pinning it to the ground. Attempting to finish it off for good, Gipsy slowly drags the kaiju over to one of several volcanic pits, where the fiery discharge gives it a good burnin’.

Anyone else having flashbacks to Tim Curry in Legend?

Unfortunately, Scunner is able to wrench free before it gets the full Freddy Krueger, and swims off to lick its wounds. Right about this time, Raiju has finally gotten far enough away to start up another charge, and heads straight for Gipsy to finish the job.

With miraculous timing, the one-armed robot is able to duck and lift its sword just in time to catch Raiju right in its ugly snout. The beast has so much momentum that the body just keeps on going, so Gipsy doesn’t have to do anything but stand still in order to slice the kaiju completely in half, length-wise. It’s a really cool kill, but in addition to being an abrupt exit for a brand-new foe, it’s also a bit too easy.

“Well, that was a freebie.”

We go back to Striker, who’s been damaged enough by that one blow it can no longer release the payload. Striker’s more pressing problem, though, is a tackle from the enormous Slattern. After some struggling, Striker’s claws are able to tear up the Cat 5 pretty good, forcing it to draw back and unleash a visualized sonic shout that draws Scunner’s attention.

The (comparatively) smaller kaiju rushes to the aid of its superior, and as the two slowly circle Striker to get into optimal position, the pilots come up with a new plan: they’ll set off the bomb right now to take the heat off Gipsy, who can then detonate its own nuclear reactor to blow up the breach afterward.

After some emotional radio moments straight out of Armageddon, Strikers sets us up off the bomb just before it would have been crunched between the two charging kaiju. Gipsy, at an apparently safe distance away (ha!), keeps from getting flung to Kingdom Come by planting its chain sword in the ground. Meanwhile, the blast displaces all the nearby water, creating a nifty Moses effect. Too bad it’s not to last, and Gipsy’s battered again as the water comes rushing back in.

Surf’s up……. and right back down.

Gipsy grabs a big chunk of Raiju to get through the gateway, and limps toward the breach’s location. (In one of the many humanizing touches the CGI work provides, Gipsy’s limping here, which of course is a natural result of the damage sustained, makes the unfeeling machine look like a human being in pain.) But despite sustaining a point-blank nuclear detonation, Slattern is somehow still alive and seemingly not much worse for wear.

Our heroes improvise accordingly, dropping the Raiju half-corpse and using Gipsy’s jets to tackle Slattern just above the hole leading to the breach. They struggle against each other as they sink, with Gipsy skewering the kaiju through the chin with its sword, and finally finishing the job by burning off a ton of excess fuel through the nuclear turbine in its chest.

“HEAAAAART’S ONNNNNN FIIIIIIIIRE…..”

After that, it’s pretty much a matter of simply playing out the thread. Gipsy passes through the portal, arms the reactor, both emergency pods eject back up through the portal– how’d they get back through without a kaiju corpse? For that matter, how did they get radio reception back to HQ through another dimension??– bomb goes off and closes bridge. Raleigh ends up surviving process, he and Mako embrace (but don’t kiss), blah blah blah.

Eh, who cares.

Well, this is not bad, per se, but it certainly pales in comparison to the level of carnage we’ve seen before. And it feels like a rush, a cheat. After all those overwhelming odds, the solution ends up being pretty underwhelming: a few lucky hits and a big explosion. Raiju goes down almost as quick as he showed up, getting so little screen time he makes Typhoon and Cherno look like stars in comparison. Scunner isn’t bad, but doesn’t leave much of an impression either. And the actual “boss” is most disappointing of all– after that excellent entrance, Slattern pretty much gives one big blow, then doesn’t do a whole lot else and only showcases one special ability the whole time. And that special ability is basically a glorified distress signal, which means the only noteworthy thing the biggest, baddest monster in the movie does is call for help.

In this, Pacific Rim indulges more in its “war movie” side than it does in its sentai/kaiju side. Which is the filmmakers’ right, but it’s disappointing nonetheless from the perspective of fight scenes. And it’s not without merit: the entrance of Slattern, the bisecting of Raiju, the skewering/cooking of Scunner, and the emotionally-charged sacrifices are all good stuff. But on the whole, it’s the weakest fight of the movie, which is always a bummer to say about the climax.

Grade: B-

Coming Attractions: Wait… more Pacific Rim?

Where’d all the giant robots go?

As I’ve said umpteen times already, there’s a huge gap between Fight #1 and Fight #2 in Pacific Rim. But that’s not quite true. The much-anticipated giant robot vs giant monster throwdowns are indeed thin on the ground during this period, but amidst the various cliche-ridden shenanigans and melodrama, there’s a handful of honest-to-gosh real physical human fights which aren’t too shabby. It’s of course a few thousand tons shy of the action scale we came for… but it’s well-done enough that I feel bad completely ignoring it.

And yes I usually stick to my self-imposed rules for which movie’s fights I do and do not count, but you know what, it’s my blog, so whatever.

Mako is not terribly impressed with my reasoning.

So consider it a bonus round, a breezy way to burn through the rest of the week before we start on the next subject. “Breeze” being the key word: we’ll do all three at once here.

Handily they all involve our boy Raleigh Beckett, who is a lot more fit and combat-ready than you’d expect for a guy who’s been off feeling sorry for himself the last five years.

1) Nobody Candidates

Raleigh‘s Opponents: Three Chinese gentlemen, apparently selected by Mako as the best possible potential drift partners. Consistent with Pacific Rim’s treatment of non-main characters, we don’t know these people’s names or really anything else about them.

And not to be the awful white devil who can’t tell Asians apart , but the fact that they’re three young Chinese men with similar heights, builds, clothes and haircuts is a bit confusing considering that a few minutes ago we were briefly introduced to the Wei Tang triplets who pilot Crimson Typhoon; you’d be forgiven for briefly thinking they were sparring with Raleigh for some reason– like, Typhoon was going to give up one of its pilots. That wouldn’t make sense, but a lot of this movie doesn’t make sense. (The triplets are actually part of the small crowd watching the fight, but no one could blame you for not noticing that the first time, either.)

Why there weren’t more than three candidates, I don’t know. Also the tests are done using wooden sticks as kendo swords, which is odd because that’s largely not how jaeger combat works. Each duel works on a point-based system, with every blow or simulated blow counting as a point and the first man to four points the winner. Raleigh calls these a “dialogue” rather than a fight, but they sure look a lot like fights.

The Fight: It moves quickly enough that we immediately get the idea we’re not seeing all of each fight, just the final stroke or so each one. We even hear Mako grumpily calling out each final score, always with Raleigh way ahead. The Chinese guys are fit and skilled, but no match for Beckett– he consistently takes them down with little to no effort, and maintains enough control of each fight that he can do so without hurting them.

“Events occur in real time,” Kiefer Sutherland adds in a whisper.

It’s nothing too great, but there’s some fancy footwork here and it’s fun to watch. We get our first glimpse of Raleigh doing his thing outside a jaeger cockpit.

Grade: Not Bad

2) Mako’s Got Spunk

Raleigh‘s Opponent: Mako, duh.

After facing them all down, Raleigh calls out Mako on her attitude, and she replies that if he applied himself better he could have taken them out even faster. This leads, despite some resistance from Pentecost, to Mako entering the ring herself so she can bring our boy down a peg.

After some low-key trash talk/sexual tension, the two have at it.

My wife and I met the same way. No we didn’t.

The Fight: Surprisingly, Mako just stands there coolly when Raleigh darts in with the opening move, not flinching as he stops the stick less than an inch from her head. He interprets it as her being unready, but it’s implied she may have deliberately done it to screw with him. Just as he steps back to begin the next round, she herself darts in and catches him unawares, which is kind of dirty pool if you ask me. (And of course you asked me, that’s why you’re here.)

After another “easy” hit puts Raleigh back in the lead, the two have a longer exchange and she finally gets the better of him. After an even longer back & forth, Raleigh tries switching his fighting stance halfway through but still loses the point to Mako after some up-close tussling and getting flipped over. He does better in the next round, though, making the score all tied up.

The last exchange is the longest of all, with both players ratcheting up the intensity. Raleigh takes a fall but isn’t out, as he’s able to lock up her weapon so they’re in an apparent stalemate.

The match gets called off by Pentecost, but Raleigh has learned enough to want Mako as his partner. Which the movie will make happen, albeit by the painfully long route.

After a quick little scene establishing Raleigh’s skill, we get a longer bit that establishes Mako’s own prowess simply by having her show him up, if not too much. The scene doesn’t overly sell that they’re “drift-compatible,” as Raleigh gushes later (again, that whole process is vague), but there is a definite tension between them here in this solid fight with a nice ebb & flow.

Grade: Pretty Good

3) Aussie Smackdown

Raleigh‘s Opponent: Chuck Hansen, Raleigh’s unnecessarily aggressive rival/bully. This encounter happens just after Raleigh & Mako’s first drifting attempt nearly resulted in Gipsy blowing a hole in Shatterdome. Chuck is understandably upset, but goes way too far in needling the would-be pilots as they wait outside Pentecost’s office for their punishment. Raleigh is able to take the high road at first, but loses it when Chuck calls Mako a bad word.

Chuck’s taken by surprise at first but gets into the swing of things pretty well. The pair’s battle is an interesting mixture of unpolished street fighting and complex, MMA-style maneuvers– the latter of which largely come from Raleigh.

Indeed, Beckett is the one who is largely in control of the fight, though Hansen puts up a pretty good effort. They have a nice extended struggle and exchange of blows that culminates in Chuck getting slammed painfully against a wall. He hits hard enough to rupture some piping, which releases a bunch of steam around him as he glares hatefully at Raleigh– an effective if obvious visual metaphor.

Our hero does even better in round two, systematically shutting down Chuck’s assault and even slapping him at one point, apparently just to rub it in. Finally Beckett is able to wrap his legs around one of Chuck’s arms, bringing them both down in a strong hold.

Try not to let someone do this to you.

Thankfully the grown-ups arrive and break things up before Raleigh can break the arm of one of the few remaining jaeger pilots. Gipsy’s pilots are sent to the principal’s office, and Chuck’s left in the hallway with his old man, getting restrained so he doesn’t rush over and get beat up some more.

This image sums up the entirety of these two characters and their relationship with each other.

This is the best of the bunch, being the most technically complicated and emotionally charged. It’s also unusually layered for this movie, since on one level the audience is happy to see Chuck get smacked around, but on another we understand that Raleigh really did screw up big time, and his rival is right to be upset with him. Deep! Well not really. But still very well done.

Grade: A Lot of Fun

Coming Attractions: Take it easy there, Pilgrim.

“If your blog had a face, I would punch it.”

This movie has “vs” in the title so you KNOW it’s classy.

Like that tear-jerker action movie, Kramer vs Predator

Scott Pilgrim vs The World was practically designed to be a cult film rather than a big hit, but it still didn’t deserve to bomb like it did. There are certainly some strange decisions and missteps, and course a film like this lives or dies on how well its “tone” resonates… and this kind of tone is incredibly hard to get right. But if anyone could do it, it was the mad genius filmmaker Edgar Wright, flexing his impressive cinematic muscles to give audiences a one-of-a-kind experience: a real-life comic book/video game of a movie. Audiences were divided on how much they liked watching a bunch of aimless hipster kids walking around a cartoon-ish world, but everyone can agree there’s nothing quite like this movie’s particular brand of playfulness.

Compounding the hard sell of this unusual approach was the unfortunate timing: Scott Pilgrim vs The World debuted just after the public had turned against its star, Michael Cera, in a big way. Seemingly overnight (it looks like the disastrous Year One was the turning point) America went from loving Cera’s trademark “smart but hapless wimp” routine to absolutely despising it, thus once again proving the wisdom of The Simpsons. (Many haters ding Cera ostensibly for only having one “persona,” but come on, not every actor is in the Daniel Day-Lewis mold. Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars also basically did the same thing every movie. How many times did Clark Gable play a nerd?)

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a KROW”

Anyway, I personally really dig it, and find it gets better with re-watching. It’s also an inevitable subject for the blog, but we’ll be grading with a different sort of scale in mind. The fighting, while often surprisingly complex, is also lighter and of less consequence than the average in-depth movie fight… which is to be expected, since it’s more of a comedy. So we’ll keep in mind not just how well done the combat is but the overall effect of the scene itself. And though each entry will be about a specific Evil Ex, we’ll naturally be skipping the three whose battles involve little to no genuine fighting. Sorry, Todd and the twins.

1) Matthew Patel

The Fighters:

• Scott Pilgrim, the film’s titular hero, a hapless 20-something slacker/hipster with no job and a wonderfully naive teenage girlfriend. In pointed contrast to his personal aimlessness and generally wussy demeanor, he’s inexplicably amazing at fighting (in the movie it’s not remarked upon, but in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s original comic book it’s casually mentioned that Scott is “the best fighter in the province”). Played by Michael Cera, who unfortunately is the film’s weak link. Though he tries mightily and even stretches a bit, there is just something off about Cera’s take on Pilgrim, who in the books was more of a manic livewire in addition to being dumb & unambitious– he had a kind of Jack Black-like intensity rather than Cera’s typical low-key, lovable beta male. So perhaps the trouble with the character comes from the awkward dissonance of fitting the square peg into a round hole. And to be fair to Cera, when you get right down to it there’s not much to actually like about Scott Pilgrim for much of the story: he’s an objectively bad person.
• Matthew Patel, Ramona’s first Evil Ex-Boyfriend; they dated for about a week and a half in seventh grade. A young man of Indian descent with advanced fighting skills, supernatural powers, and an odd fashion sense, Patel is arguably the most overtly cartoonish of all the film’s villains. Played by Satya Bhabha, who does a great job with what could have been a very annoying part in the wrong hands.

Seriously. You try doing this in a movie and not making people walk out.

The Setup: Scott Pilgrim is a strikingly unambitious youth in the mystical land of Canada, 23-year-old Scott is now finding his precious little life a lot more interesting as he pursues the mysterious newcomer Ramona Flowers. Through unexplained means, word of his interest in Ramona has spread to the League of Evil Exes, seven of Ramona’s former romantic partners who seek to control her future love life by making any new lover go through them. (It’s a metaphor, see.) Scott would have clued into this earlier but, foolishly, he only skimmed the email warning him of the consequences of his attraction.

For his first quasi-date with Ramona, Scott takes her to a club where he and his friends are competing in a battle of the bands. Scott’s actual girlfriend, Knives Chau, conveniently passes out from pure excitement early into the band’s first number. Also on hand at the event are Scott’s gay roommate Wallace, his little sister (rated T for Teen) Stacy, and Stacy’s date, who is unbeknownst to her being quietly seduced by Wallace. And that date must be really gay, because let’s face it gents: there’s regular gay, and there’s “walk away from Anna Kendrick” gay.

Yeah, I was surprised too.

Sex Bob-omb (that’s the name of Scott’s band, because of course it is) is doing pretty well, when suddenly they’re interrupted by the crashing arrival of Matthew Patel.

The Fight: Crashing, specifically, through the ceiling, free-falling down and calling out Scott’s name as he does so.

There’s a great slow-motion sequence of Scott reacting with genuine puzzlement, finally only being spurred into action by Wallace’s gleeful urging to fight. Pilgrim unplugs his guitar, blocks the diving attack, and counters with a sweet punch that sends Patel flying back.

He lands okay, but after some more sardonic assistance from Wallace (“Watch out! It’s that one guy”), Scott counters Matthew’s next charge with a face-kick that shoots him into the air. Scott leaps up high in pursuit and gives a follow-up uppercut and a 64-hit punch combo.

They went ahead and did the counting for me.

They both come down and land in that “versus” image from way up top, and here’s where they start jawing. The weirdo introduces himself and explains he’s the first Evil Ex. In a movie full of over-the-top characters, Matthew Patel is particularly over-the-top… and in a very un-ironic and cartoonish way, what with all his jerky head movements, exaggerated body poses, speech contortions and guyliner. So again, all props to Bhabha for pulling off so well. (He’s barely recognizable from his other major claim to fame, his lengthy run in season two of New Girl.)

The two engage in some more down-to-Earth sparring. It’s surprisingly complex and reasonably “realistic” though of course very stylized. Mostly a lot of blocks and near-misses. Both Cera and Bhabha, neither of them experienced martial artists, acquit themselves well. Wright’s camera work, as expecting, is dynamic and exciting, as if he’d been directing fight scenes for years. One nice touch is the use of a special kind of dust applied to the actors’ clothes that shakes off and briefly lingers in the air with every impact– one of the many tricks Hong Kong action stars use to accentuate each blow.

While most of the crowd is excited, Ramona appears visibly embarrassed at being the cause of this, and there are repeated cutaways to Stacy making expressions of disbelief– essentially as a way to tell the more skeptical audience members Hey, it’s okay, this is silly, you can laugh at it. Which might seem like unnecessary hand-holding, but you’d be surprised how slow some audiences are.

Speaking of puzzlement, Scott is still confused at what’s going on here, and he stops long enough to ask Patel what his deal is, which is when the villain is irked to learn that Scott blew off his explanatory email. Also between rounds of heightened fighting (and as Matthew starts to get in some solid hits), people in the crowd inquire about his outfit and ask if he’s a “pirate,” which is odd because aside from the Jack Sparrow-esque guyliner he doesn’t really look like a pirate. And Ramona is finally goaded into explaining her brief history with Matthew, in a strange half-poem accompanied by illustrations straight out of the comic (or possibly new drawings by O’Malley just for the movie).

When Scott reacts incredulously to Ramona’s mention of Matthew’s “mystical powers,” the evil ex decides that’s his cue to exercise them, floating in the air, conjuring fire in his hands and summoning a pack of “demon hipster chicks.” He does all this while singing and dancing a Bollywood-esque number. It’s… well, for me it was a little much, even for this movie’s wacky concept of reality. I suppose everyone has to draw the line somewhere.

This. This is the place where I draw the line.

So that weirdness happens and Patel starts flinging fireballs mid-song, all of which Scott dodges and one of which vaporizes a pair of roadies. Angrily noting that Matthew’s last two lines didn’t even rhyme, Pilgrim grabs a cymbal from Kim Pine’s drum set and hurls it Patel, hitting him hard enough to dispel the demon hipster chicks and leave him spinning vulnerably in the air. Scott takes the opportunity to leap in with a devastating punch that finishes off the evil ex for good, turning him into a handful of coins a la River City Ransom.

If there’s any real problem (aside from the Bollywood stuff) with this, it’s that it seems to lack a sense of… scale? Weight? Consistency? Other than the fact that it’s the end of a fight, there’s no extra oomph to Scott’s last punch that indicates it should even be a finishing move– Patel didn’t seem tired at all before that, and he endured several blows that seemed just as powerful earlier on and came down smiling. The fight only ends because it seems like it was time to end. Which, come to think of it, might play into the story’s themes: Scott feels like he’s the main character in his own movie, and that everything should eventually go his way just because he’s, well, himself, regardless of whether he’s earned it or not.

In any case, it feels odd to criticize such an achievement as this. The movie actually took plenty of time to get to its first fight– enough time for Wright to lay the groundwork for the movie’s strange, hyper-stylized world. If this had come much earlier it would have been quite jarring even for the more patient fan. And what a payoff it is: finally we’re treated to the sight of real human beings flipping about like characters from a video game or anime but without it seeming painfully fake or dumb. There’s visual onomatopoeia incorporated in a much less intrusive way than in the old 60s Batman cartoon. Explosions and flashes of color change the entire screen filter for brief seconds before switching back (something you appreciate a lot more when looking for just the right screenshot, mind you). There’s a great mixture of the immediate and the spectacular, the thrilling and the ridiculous. Edgar Wright can basically do anything, and here he did something very, very fun.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: Our Canadian slacker hero fights an American superhero. Kinda.

“I understood that reference!”

In which Captain America whips it good.

Scott doesn’t “fondue” either.

2) Lucas Lee

The Fighters:

• Scott Pilgrim, obviously. Played by Michael Cera.
• Lucas Lee, the second Evil Ex. A professional skater turned movie star, with plenty of ego to match. Apparently the comic incarnation is based on Jason Lee, who followed a similar career arc, but the movie version seems to be more of a riff on Keanu Reeves, what with his gruffly clueless/intense monotone and friendly relationships with his stunt team. Played with breathless gusto by Chris Evans.

The Setup: Pretty simple. While Scott & Ramona are on another date, they visit the set of a Hollywood movie being filmed nearby (a sly dig at how many movies are filmed in Canada for cost reasons), Scott having been informed of the event by Wallace, who has a crush on the star (and is also on set). As a scene is ready to start, Lucas Lee emerges from his trailer, accompanied by Universal Studios’ famous opening fanfare.

Lee skates over to his marker, and begins filming a tense hostage scene. Unfortunately, and also just as Ramona recognizes the actor as one of her past loves, it’s gradually revealed that the tense threats Lee is shouting are not his script lines, but are directed directly against Scott. Uh oh.

This actually comes later, but whatever

The Fight: It takes way longer than it should for Scott to realize the gravity of the situation; he asks for Lee’s autograph multiple times even as the actor repeatedly punches him, sending him to the pavement. (He’s so star-struck he doesn’t realize he’s getting struck by a star, hyuk hyuk.)

As Pilgrim lies dazed on the ground, Lucas turns briefly to Ramona and delivers what’s probably my favorite line in the movie. With all the forced politeness of a real-life encounter with an ex, and coupled with the hilarious intensity of Evans’ line reading, he asks “Sup? How’s life? He seems nice.” Without waiting for an answer, he picks up Scott’s body and hurls it into the nearby castle being used as the film’s backdrop.

Scott rises unsteadily and gets walloped again. The next time he gets up, he sees who he thinks is Lucas walking away, and pursues only to find that it’s the actor’s stunt double, dressed & coiffed similarly. He gets knocked down again by the stunt man, who’s soon joined by six other similarly dressed stand-ins. Meanwhile, the real Lee chills on the sidelines.

Where’s Stephen Tobolowsky when you need him?

Before he can finish the suggested taunt from Wallace (ever the rabble-rouser) about getting Lucas’ “sloppy seconds,” the stunt crew start in on Scott. Our hero gets in an extended fight with them which is, again, surprisingly complex and well-done, considering the silliness of the situation. Cera cuts quite the incongruously heroic profile, perfectly ducking & blocking as he takes on a wave of fighters coming at him from all angles. He even breaks several weaponized skateboards as he puts down attacker after attacker. It’s completely unrealistic, obviously, and even more so than the ground-based segments of the Patel fight, but it fits in perfectly with the heightened reality of ridiculous action movies Wright is trying to emulate.

Pilgrim’s good performance comes to an end when he’s brained from behind by a skateboard, and when he goes down all the stunt men gang up for a good old fashion kicking bonanza. In real life such group-stompings can result in broken bones, internal bleeding and death, but Wright opts for a take more akin to a Warner Brothers cartoon dog-pile: the camera follows Lucas as he walks off for coffee when he sees our hero is down, but when he comes back, Scott is back up and seemingly unscathed, standing over a pile of defeated foes. Well played.

Responding to Scott’s “you’re needed on the set” taunt, Lee has a face-off with his new rival. There’s a purposely melodramatic, overextended moment as they charge each other, first in split-screen and then in super slow-motion. They leap into the air to attack, but of course Scott loses that contest.

The big kick sends Pilgrim all the way through the fake New York skyline, leading to another funny moment when Lee has to pause his follow-up boasting as he rips through the rest of it in pursuit. They talk briefly, and Lee gets in a sucker-punch after pretending to befriend Scott. His acting is better than ever!

Displaying atypical cunning, Scott is able to goad the cocky Lee into hopping onto his skateboard and doing a thingy grind on the rickety, snow-covered railing along the impossibly long stairs they’re standing by. The ending is edited well, cutting back & forth between Lucas’ speed rapidly reaching absurd levels and Scott’s multiple, sedate “wow”s in reaction. Sure enough, the speed is too much to handle, and Lucas explodes after reaching the bottom. Two down!

He totally bailed.

More fun is had here, but it’s disappointing from a fight-scene angle, more so than the last one. Scott can’t even lay a finger on Lee, making for an absurd power imbalance when he’s only two bosses in. He even uses a “cheat,” if a clever one, to make the final kill. This is mitigated somewhat by the long-ish fight with the stunt doubles, which itself was both a pleasant surprise and a gag that arose organically from the scenario.

Another mitigation: the scene is very funny, with Chris Evans doing some absolutely hilarious work in a rare-for-him comedy performance. With his rapid-fire & raspy delivery he actually finds a way to breathe some life into the overplayed caricature of the Egomaniac Movie Star. Evans may be another case of an actor with genuine comedic chops who rarely gets to exercise them thanks to his ridiculously good looks– please, don’t everybody pity him at once. (One of his earliest roles was in Not Another Teen Movie, but even if you did think that was funny, he mostly plays the straight man there.)

So while a nice and highly amusing change-up, it’s not particularly impressive aside from Evans’ performance. But fortunately there’s more to come.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Her?

It’s as Roxy as the nose on plain’s face.

Girls, girls, girls….

Always fighting over a boy. Sorta.

3) Roxy Richter

The Fighters:

• Scott Pilgrim, as always. Played by Michael Cera.
• Ramona Flowers, Scott’s new girlfriend, joins in on this one. Turns out she’s a pretty capable and aggressive fighter in her own right. Played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
  • Armed with: A giant sledgehammer, which in true video game fashion she can produce at will from her deceptively small hand bag due to her skill at accessing sub-space (or perhaps more accurately, hammer space). She can wield the heavy weapon with surprising speed.
• Roxanne “Roxy” Richter, a female ninja (or “half-ninja” as the comic elaborates) and Ramona’s fourth Evil Ex. (Their relationship occurred as a result of what Scott calls her “sexy phase” but what Ramona merely describes as “experimenting.”) Roxy is cranky, aggressive, and humorously insecure. She also has the ability of short-range teleportation, which she uses quite cannily. Played by Cera’s erstwhile television love interest, Mae Whitman. But I like to call her Annabelle because she’s shaped like a…….. she’s the belle of the ball!
  • Armed with: A very loose whip-sword she’s quite skilled with.

The Setup: At an after-party in a swanky night club, Scott’s relationship with Ramona is beginning to clearly deteriorate due to his insecurities regarding her past romantic history. They verbally jab at each other for a while, and Scott asks why Ramona keeps correcting his description of the League to the gender-neutral “exes” instead of “ex-boyfriends” as he’d repeatedly phrased it. But before she can answer, the explanation kicks him in the back of the head.

He gets up, assesses the situation, and puts it together.

This anatomical depiction of the male brain is the most realistic thing in this movie.

You know what that means.

The Fight: As Ramona starts to explain, Roxy gets miffed at being reduced to a “phase” and decides to take it out on Scott, winding up a big spin kick… which gets blocked, rather effortlessly, by Ramona.

Though Scott will later vocalize his reluctance to fight a woman (“they’re soft!” he whines), Ramona’s motivation here seems mainly to be about finally being proactive in defeating her past. Snarling in defiance, Roxy calls Ramona a “has-bian” which is hilarious, and takes out her chain sword. Ramona prepares her own attitude-adjuster.

The two have the most complex battle in the movie yet, with some really inventive staging to match Ramona’s slower, bludgeoning weapon against Egg’s Roxy’s longer, faster, cutting one. There are some neat acrobatic tricks & flips, though everything stays much more local than the high-flying escapades of the Patel duel. Neither one gains much of an edge against the other, though Ramona seems to be the more dominant fighter.

They break a lot of surroundings until Roxy is able to use her whip to seize Ramona’s hammer and send it out the window. But the villain gets too caught up in celebrating her accomplishment to defend against a brutal axe kick from her ex-lover, putting Bland to the ground.

After some taunting, Roxy insists that this is “a League game” meaning that Scott has to be the one to defeat her (it’s unclear what will happen if he isn’t. These rules are being unilaterally invented & imposed by one side of the conflict). So, getting by on a technicality, Ramona stands behind Scott and manipulates his limbs to use him as a fighting dummy.

It looks better than this in practice, I promise.

The impromptu solution actually works pretty well and Roxy gets beaten back, until she employs her teleporting powers again and BAMFs right in-between the couple, separating them. She then punches the vulnerable Pilgrim into the ceiling, and after he falls back down she tries to finish him off with a devastating axe kick of her own. As her heel comes down in slow-motion, Scott & Ramona improbably find the time for a conversation, where she advises him to strike at the “weak point” just behind Roxy’s knee. It’s clear even before Roxy’s moan-heavy reaction that “weak point” is a metaphor for something else.

That’s… hot? I think?

So, yeah. Amidst the ecstatic moaning, Roxy collapses to the ground and explodes in a shower of coins. K.O.

Another fun if not spectacular fight. Throwing Ramona in the mix allows for a much-needed change, as does the addition of some unusual weapons. It’s also quite amusing on the whole and very fast-moving. Though the talented Miss Whitman doesn’t reach the heights of Chris Evans’ Lucas Lee, she’s really quite funny in what could have been an unlikably shrill role if played poorly.

The climax conclusion of the fight is… unusual. Obviously we all get the nature of the joke, but it seems a bit of a stretch, a double-entendre that’s also literally true. It just makes no sense for that to be the thing that kills her– not just distracts her enough to be finished off but actually kills her– even for this movie’s value of “making sense.” I guess they don’t call it le petit mort for nothing.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: The conclusion of the movie-length boss rush(more).

War does funny things to men.

For once I’m at a loss to make a video game analogy that the movie itself hasn’t already beat me to.

+6 Blogger Pre-emption

4) Gideon Graves

The Fighters:

• Scott Pilgrim, obviously. Much more pissed off and determined than before. Played by Michael Cera.
  • Armed with: Eventually, he gets to use two swords, The Power of Love and The Power of Self-Respect. They’re both in the form of flaming katanas, the latter being more powerful.
• Ramona Flowers again takes part in the proceedings. Played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
  • Armed with: Nothing much, but she briefly makes use of a standing lamp to defend herself.
• Knives Chau, the teenage “Scottaholic” who’s been messed up since Scott ditched her for Ramona. She incorrectly blames Ramona for this. Played by Ellen Wong with manic enthusiasm.
  • Armed with: Befitting her name, a pair of short but wide knife-like blades.
• Gideon Gordon Graves, aka G-Man. The Seventh Evil Ex and leader/founder of the League. A wealthy businessman who has his own record label and several nightclubs, Gideon is manipulative, arrogant and cunning. The comic book incarnation is more overtly evil & villainous, but here he’s portrayed more passive-aggressive, a kind of transparently phony kindness that’s both creepy and amusing. Played by Jason Schwartzmann.
  • Armed with: Two swords, one of which is concealed in the cane he carries with him. The other he seems to conjure basically out of thin air, with a glowing blue blade that makes it resemble a lightsaber.
• Also there’s some henchmen, who are pretty nondescript.

The Setup: After a fight with Scott, Ramona ditches him and goes off to be with Gideon, who rubs it in by signing Sex Bob-omb to his label (Scott refuses to come along, and with no objection whatsoever from the rest of the band he’s instantly replaced). Our hero spends a while being lonely and rejected, but a follow-up call from Gideon– oozing obseqious insincerity– spurs Scott to go fight for the woman he’s in lesbians love with.

A series of improbably correct passwords gets him into Graves’ new nightclub (the Chaos Theater, a reference to the amazing game Earthbound), where he quickly finds his enemy, perched at the top of a stage, captive princess and all, like, well… a boss.

“YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME”

Sex Bob-omb is playing, feeling conflicted at Scott’s presence but still reluctantly obeying their new boss. Pilgrim tells off the villain and goes to charge the stage, but gets repeatedly stopped by Gideon, who pretends to act confused at Scott’s hostility. When Scott explains he’s in love with Ramona and fighting for her, he gains the Power of Love sword, which emerges from his chest and increases his level.

Of course it’s never that easy, as Graves demonstrates when he snaps his fingers and summons several henchmen. At G-Man’s request, Sex Bob-omb plays some accompanying music.

The Fight: Pilgrims and the henchmen waste little time throwing down, but he makes short work of them– really, Lucas Lee’s stunt men were more of a headache. Though that’s to be expected, because Scott is not only armed with an amazing weapon, but he’s also got some serious narrative momentum on his side.

The sequence, though light, is shot with Wright’s usual dazzling style, switching effortlessly between multiple camera angles (including one excellent, extended tracking shot) as Scott cuts them down one by one, leaving a man-shaped pile of coins each time.

With no one standing in the way, Scott & Gideon leap at each other to exchange mid-air sword blows a la Ninja Gaiden, but surprisingly (or not so surprisingly if you played Ninja Gaiden) it’s villain who gets the best of it, his cane sword smashing the Power of Love into pieces. Before the villain can finish Pilgrim off, he’s interrupted by Knives Chau’s arrival. Descending from the ceiling, Knives kicks the sword from Gideon’s hand, but immediately turns her rage against… Ramona.

“You broke the heart that broke mine!” she actually says, somehow without making you hate her

Knives starts dueling with Ramona, to Ramona’s confusion and Gideon’s amusement. Meanwhile, Graves gets back to the business of attacking Scott, this time more physically since both of them are unarmed. The villain is pretty good hand-to-hand but not great, the two of them seeming more or less even. The ladies’ brawl is a bit more frantic, with Ramona gruntingly denying Knives’ accusations in-between avoiding her attacks.

Filming simultaneous fights is always tricky but Wright handles it well, alternating between showing the battles unfolding both separately and concurrently.

On the lower level, Scott is eventually able to get the upper hand, or perhaps foot– he wraps his legs around Gideon’s neck and scissor-flips him down the stairs. Then he goes to sort out the cat fight up above, and in doing so has to face the painful truth that what he did to both these women was actually pretty crappy. Even as he retreats back into his old persona and tries to duck responsibility, Scott is suddenly stabbed from behind by Graves.

No visual symbolism there.

It looks like Game Over, with Scott seeming to drift into the afterlife as he says goodbye to Ramona (and also learns that Gideon was controlling her via computer chip in her neck) in a limbo-esque subspace desert.

But then we’re reminded: Scott has an extra life, having collected the strange icon after his battle with Exes 5&6. In the book, the 1UP was employed in a more arcade-traditional way: Scott simply got back up to fight some more. But here, Wright employs it more ingeniously, like starting the whole level from scratch or picking up from the last save point. In a rapid montage, we see Scott run off to the Chaos Theater, only this time he accesses the club more smoothly, makes amends with his band, and wastes less time on Gideon’s small talk.

Most importantly, rather than declaring he’s fighting “for love,” Scott answers that he’s fighting for himself– for his own dignity rather than any tangible reward. This is apparently worth way more experience points than before, because it gives him the Power of Self-Respect sword, and a Level-Up that’s even stronger than the first time through.

See? Check the stats.

Scott makes even shorter work of the henchmen this time, a veritable purple blur. He faces down Graves again and this time it’s Scott who wins the Ninja Gaiden-off, breaking through the villain’s sword and cutting him on the arm.

Graves collapses for a while, giving Scott time to call out Knives and try to dissuade her from attacking Ramona. She drops down in a frenzy anyway, but Scott cuts her rampage off early by coming clean and apologizing, to her and Ramona both. Through some unexplained means, this shuts down Ramona’s control-chip.

But Scott and the Evilest Ex still have unfinished business and, in true genre fashion, the previous incarnation wasn’t even his final form.

Silly Canucks don’t even know how to spell

In his upgrades form, Gideon fights with a kind of lazy but graceful power, often holding his sword in just one hand with the other poised oh-so-aristocratically behind his back. He is able to work a good number on Scott at first, but things look up when Knives decides to enter the fray (looks like a simple “I’m sorry” can do wonders for a girl). Their first assault against him is enough to make him swallow his gum, which he reacts to with disproportionate outrage.

The next stage of the fight is more overtly video-gamey than ever, with characters flashing red as they take “damage” and even flickering a bit.

The Pilgrim/Chau team does quite well at first but soon Graves is able to knock Knives off the platform, and soon after he hits Scott’s sword hard enough to break it, too. With the hero stunned, Ramona walks over to Gideon, who still thinks she’s under his sway. She surprises him with a knee to the groin (attack his weak point for massive damage!), which earns her a block that sends her down the stairs. Fortunately that’s just long enough for Knives to recover and disarm the villain.

The attack on Ramona gets Scott incensed as well, and Graves is looking at a tough combo.

It goes higher than two, trust me

Without his glowing sword Gideon is no match for the team, and they pepper him with a furious onslaught of blows in a brief, exciting and stylized montage. Knives delivers a devastating attack at the end that whittles his (visible) life bar down to the very last, leaving him to utter a final bitter monologue while he flickers on the edge of death.

Scott has little patience for it, and delivers the final blow himself.

Easily the best fight in the film. Not much in terms of laughs, relatively speaking, but it makes up for it with some sneakily-affecting character work. The gimmick of Scott’s extra life extends the fight in a way that feels both natural and not tiresomely repetitive. Though the staging is all combined to one very tight location, the fluctuating number of fighters and varying weapons still makes it quite dynamic indeed. Indeed, this is Scott Pilgrim’s finest hour.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: YOU ARE NEXT!

Now I show you some trick or two.

Ugh, darn ambiguous titles never tell me what to expect.

Bloodsport, a movie SO painfully & gloriously awash in the 80s. It was a different time: when American pop cultural masculinity turned more aspirational than representational and was thus typified mostly by impossibly glistening strongmen with indecipherable speech patterns (often foreign). Possibly because what they said mattered so much less than what they did, and what they did was… well, just about anything. Action stars in the 1980s were not just heroes but gods: invincible, noble supermen whose physical prowess defied all logic, and who could only be threatened by treachery rather than being outright defeated.

Only in such an environment could one such as Jean-Claude Van Damme thrive. Although a bad actor (to be fair, he has slowly gotten better), like his contemporary Arnold Schwarzenegger he has a strange charisma & innate watchability, even apart from his athletic abilities. And despite all the instances of choreography which favors vanity over believability (why do opponents just stand there stupidly while he does a 360-degree jumping spin kick?), Van Damme’s skills are legitimately amazing: he was a national karate and kickboxing champion before he ever set foot in Hollywood. And even to this day, he can still rock those splits like nobody’s business. God bless you, JCVD.

“You’re welcome.”

Bloodsport, from 1988, was hardly Van Damme’s first movie but it was definitely his big break and first starring role. The movie is a special kind of ridiculous because it’s the Hollywood-embellished version of a story that was almost certainly made up in the first place. That story being the wild exploits of Frank Dux, who announced to the world many years back that before he was 30 he’d already been a super soldier and super spy when he wasn’t busy being a no-shit American Ninja Warrior who won the hell out of secret tournaments that no one else has been able to verify the existence of. Don’t you feel under-accomplished now?

Anyway, Bloodsport the movie is the story of (again) Frank Dux, who goes to compete in the “Kumite,” a secret full-contact tournament featuring the best martial artists around the world. Dux competes to honor his master, a Japanese immigrant who had taken Frank under his wing many years ago. In-between competition days he also has to dodge two Army CID goons (one of whom is Forrest Whittaker) who have been sent to keep Dux from getting hurt because he’s too valuable to Uncle Sam. Yes, really.

This entry is about halfway between a usual series and a retrospective (I first attempted to make it the latter). Every fight scene takes place under nearly identical circumstances, but some are much shorter than others or are not even shown in full. With the tournament unfolding over three days, the movie divides all its action into three large chunks, and that’s how we’ll tackle them all.

But still, we’ll be covering things pretty quickly. This is a relief because not only are there a lot of fights in Bloodsport but they can also get quite bland & repetitive; there’s not much to say about a lot of them. The film was definitely made during a strange time in American martial arts history, and gets by now on a combination of nostalgia and its own corny energy. Not to mention Jean-Claude’s hypnotically swaying legs.

[Note: I'll list the names of the fighters and actors when I can, but sometimes they're simply not provided.]

1) Sen Ling vs Suan Paredes

The Fighters:

• Sen Ling, apparently some sort of karate user. Actor not listed in the credits.
• Suan Paredes, who seems to be a kickboxer. Played by Michel Qissi, Van Damme’s longtime friend in real life who would later play the villainous Tong Po in the movie Kickboxer.

The Fight: The very first match in the Kumite, actually, so it basically serves as our intro to the proceedings. It’s…. not bad, but not really great either. Beforehand, Ling and Paredes size each other up all macho-like, and as a final “reminder” (in reality for the audience’s benefit, as the characters would already know this), Frank & his pal’s escort explains the way the tournament is played: single-elimination, no body parts off-limits, and matches only end via submission, knockout or ring-out.

The two fighters are a bit tentative at first. Suan is pretty agile and skilled with some high kicks and knees.

A good series of blows puts Ling down, including with a slow-mo shot (the film is never shy about its slow motion) showing blood fly from his mouth, prompting Frank’s buddy to utter the kumite’s “bloodsport” nickname that gives the movie its title.

Ling rallies a bit and puts a minor hurt on Suan, but the kickboxer comes back with a strong combo that puts the Asian fellow down for good– out cold AND out of the arena.

Bloodsport’s combat scenes tend to be either fantastically ridiculous or stiffly “realistic.” This definitely falls into the latter camp. It’s technically uninspired but oddly notable for its mean, brief ugliness.

2) Ray Jackson vs [Unknown]

The Fighters:

• Ray Jackson, Frank’s new pal and the only other American competitor. Despite having polar opposite personalities they built and unlikely friendship, which began with bonding over a few rounds of the justly-forgotten game Arcade Champ after arriving in Hong Kong. A hulking (with an unquantifiable mixture of fat & muscle) biker with no discernible fighting style, Jackson is a cocky brawler rather than a disciplined warrior. Played by Donald Gibb, who most know as Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds.
• An unidentified fighter, leanly muscled but nowhere near Ray’s size. Like Jackson, he wears an uncomfortably tight pair of sweat pants.

The Fight: Short but sweet. Just as the fight starts, the freshly shirtless Ray calls his opponent an “asshole” for no apparent reason. When the match begins, Mr. Random unloads a good set of blows against Ray, who just stands there and takes it. It culminates in a strong high kick to the big man’s face, making his nose bleed profusely.

Apparently a student of the “nobody makes me bleed my own blood!” school, Ray gets mildly pissed at this, and with one sudden move he seizes his foe by the hair and delivers a devastating overhead haymaker that puts the kid down instantly.

So… it’s that simple, then?

Disproportionately jubilant over an easy victory, Ray pumps his arms up to make the crowd cheer louder, and takes the opportunity to publicly taunt Chong Li, the current champion, who seems amused at the prospect. After he resumes his seat, Frank teasingly asks what took him so long.

3) Chong Li vs Budinam Prang

The Fighters:

• Chong Li, the film’s villain and the reigning kumite champion. Obviously a celebrity within the martial arts world, Li is a consummate showman. He projects an aura of casual supremacy, and works the crowd after and even during some of his matches. But deep down he’s utterly vicious, cruel and amoral– he already killed one competitor in the last tournament, and that won’t be the last. A man of few words but amazing power, as is immediately evident in his ridonkulous physique. Played by Bolo Yeung, a veteran Hong Kong actor, contemporary of Bruce Lee’s, and former bodybuilding champion (hence the absurd pectorals).
• Budinam Prang, a wiry & determined fighter. Given his name I’d guess he’s from Thailand. Played by Samson Li.

The Fight: In contrast to the high-strung energy he will channel later in the movie, Chong Li’s debut fight has him acting bored, almost irritated to bother with such a weakling. His cockiness is well-earned, though, because while Prang tries gamely with some spirited blows, Li simply shrugs them off and counters quickly. His second responding move leads to him putting the poor little guy into a simple hold, completely at the villain’s mercy.

Some kind of distinctive snapping noise is heard, but all Li did was squeeze and Prang’s body doesn’t move in time with the sound effect, so it seems like a needless flourish.

Even without a snapped neck, Prang is helpless. Li milks the moment briefly with the crowd, and knocks Prang out with one brutal chop to the face. All done. The scoreboard say it’s a new record, about 14 seconds or so, but it felt longer.

It’s an odd way to build up your villain. Li certainly does shut down his opponent with little effort so we get the idea that he’s incredibly strong, but it’s done in a very limp way– there’s nothing terribly impressive about the attacks Li overcomes, or the pain he dishes out. Remember in Ong Bak when Ting took out that first chump with a single, incredibly cool knee to the chest? It’s nothing like that. Fortunately Yeung’s considerable charisma & physical presence go a long way.

4) Frank Dux vs Sadiq Hossein

The Fighters:

• Frank Dux, our protagonist. Odd that it’s taken so long to finally see him fight, even if we did see him endure a lengthy training montage flashback earlier. Dux is the ideal hero: quietly noble, supremely capable, effortlessly handsome; navel-gazing viewers who prefer the profoundly flawed protagonists of the 70s and the modern era will have a hard time watching Bloodsport. Frank uses a style of “ninjutsu” (i.e., very flashy karate) taught to him by his mentor, Senzo Tanaka, after Tanaka’s own son & martial arts heir died young. Played by, of course, Jean-Claude Van Damme.
• Sadiq Hossein, a Syrian fighter of unknown discipline. He already had a hostile confrontation with Dux the night before when the hero intervened to save a plucky female reporter from Hossein’s lecherous advances. Between his misogyny, cowardice and dishonorable fighting tactics, the character doesn’t exactly push back against Arab stereotypes. Played by Bernard Mariano.

The Fight: It’s even sillier than Chong Li’s. Hossein taunts a bit but can’t walk the walk. The Syrian tries a simple punch, which Frank seizes and then smacks Hossein a few times with his free hand.

He tries a kick and Dux does the exact same thing. Hossein goes down, and Frank holds a fist over him menacingly. Sadiq takes the hint and feigns unconsciousness as a tacit surrender in the fight. The referee declares Dux the winner, but Hossein suddenly decides he doesn’t like being chumped out, and tries to attack Frank from behind. Effortlessly, our hero blocks him, then takes him down with a couple elbow strikes. Now he’s really done. To top it all off, Dux has just barely beaten Li’s still-fresh speed record.

Just as with Chong Li, it’s an odd way to establish how good one of your leads is– in this case, putting him up against a complete chump.

5) Montage I

Ah, the beloved 80s montage. Bloodsport wisely elides over many of the intermediate matches so we can spend more time with the leads, but still lingers on enough colorfully distinctive tertiary fighters so that we remember them as they recur and eventually face off against some of the bigger names. Ironically, some of the best and most complex fighting in the film happens in these fleeting matches full of characters we never get to know. This first montage is set to the film’s signature tune, the ever-catchy “Fight To Survive” by Stan Bush, who has both the touch and the power.

There’s a sort of Blah matchup between a white guy in shiny blue pants and a nondescript kung fu dude. The most notable thing about it is how the white guy falls down to his left after being kicked on the left side of his face. Sometimes I think this movie’s choreographers missed the part of choreography school where they taught choreography.

There’s a hilarious, recurring “monkey fighter” named Ricardo Morra who we see in a training montage that opened the movie (his “training” consisted of climbing up a tree and smashing coconuts) up against a generic white karate man. He’s known by the vaguely offensive “monkey fighter” name due to his frankly ape-like fighting style: he constantly squats low to the ground and moves around very quickly in a bouncing manner. While it’s unpredictable and fun to watch, it’s not any real or practical martial art that I’m aware of; it certainly must be murder on the quads. Anyway, Morra pretty thoroughly kicks the white guy’s ass by repeatedly going for his legs, then jumping on his back while he’s down and going to work on his head.

Two Asian kung fu guys present the best traditional Hong Kong martial arts moves in the whole movie, going at each other with a fast & complex exchange. Sadly they have little personality and are given marginal screen time.

A distinctively Muay Thai fighter (a Westerner who the boards will later identify as “Paco”) fights an acrobatic man in a karate gi. His opponent is fast but ends up getting beaten badly by the kickboxer’s deadly feet and knees.

A sumo-looking man named Pumola also makes an impressive if brief debut. Even more so than Jackson, Pumola is a thick wall of muscle and fat, and although skilled lets his size do much of the work. Here all we see him do is pull a Bane and crack some poor fool’s back over his knee. Hardcore.

We also get quick glimpses of Dux, Chong Li and Jackson cleaning up more competition. Ray’s brief inclusion is the funniest: he simply flings one poor kid right out of the arena like a television bouncer. No ticket!

Not everything’s great, but it moves so quickly it’s a lot more fun than the stand-alone fights have been so far.

And with that, Day One is over. Again, it’s silly but not lacking in its own awkward charm. The stakes will increase both physically & emotionally soon enough, but the first day of fighting is a solid introduction to our principal characters and what kind of combat we’re in for.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Day Two!

In which we learn the deadly Wheelchair Technique

Kumite, kumite, kumite, kumite…..

“I fight to surVIIIIIIIIIIIIVE”

Here we are on Day Two, which is I suppose the semi-finals. It is, as they say, where Shit Gets Real.

6) Montage 2

This second tournament montage stretches the definition a bit. The clips are much more uneven: some fights are shown seemingly from beginning to end, while others are only glanced fleetingly, but we do see the conclusion of almost all of them. With all the chumps having been eliminated in the first round, only serious fighters remain, allowing for some better competition.

First up is our pal from before, Paco, now wearing much more stylish black shorts and up against an Asian man named (as best as I can tell from squinting at his name on the board in a wide shot) Toon Wing Sum, played by John Cheung. Well, whatever his name is, he gets in just one solid hit against Paco, whereas the Muay Thai fighter is able to destroy him with a series of strong elbows & knees. He finishes off rather cruelly, holding a clearly helpless Toon still while raining down more gratuitous blows. The crowd boos.

Frank goes up against an anonymous karate man. With almost dance-like precision, they do alternating round kicks which barely miss, then try simultaneous jump kicks against each other. Frank wins due to, apparently, going higher. He later scores another flawless victory against another nobody.

A couple more random Asian men fight, and again it’s quite complex but glimpsed only briefly. The one in black pants wins.

One of the more notable matchups is the sumo-esque man, Pumola, going head to head with Ricardo Morra, the wiry little fighter who bounces around like a monkey. Morra’s technique serves him well at first: he gets in some good harassing blows on Pumola, including one to the crotch area that looks like it should hurt worse than Pumola makes it seem. But ultimately the larger man is able to use his size to repel Morra’s attacks, and even worse, he catches the little dude in a bear hug. After that, it’s all over: a distinct snapping sound is heard and Morra stops moving.

Later on, Dux goes up against a tall, muscular and intimidating black guy– he sort of looks like a male Grace Jones. (Please restrain yourself from making the obvious joke.) Frank’s opponent halts the referee just before he calls for the match to start, so that he can do a comically prolonged threatening gesture (sloooooowly dragging his finger across his throat) and signal that he’s going to put the hero down. But it’s a big buildup for no reason, because Dux is unfazed: he immediately opens with a quick kick to the face, and knocks not-Grace out of the ring shortly after.

Chong Li also gets to work his magic in three separate fights. The latter two are pretty easy fights against nondescript chumps who he takes down while pumping the crowd up. But his first one is against Suan Paredes, the kickboxer we saw in the very first battle, and Suan seemingly does fairly well at first. He lands several good blows to Li’s face, leaving the champion slightly dazed and oddly amused. He comes back strong and systematically breaks his opponent down. Suan briefly rallies with a punch to the stomach but the villain is unfazed, putting him down hard. Li finishes by hoisting his senseless foe back up, and kicking Suan’s leg so hard his bone pops out. Ouch. Afterwards he works the crowd harder than ever, reveling in his own sadism.

The big finishing number is Frank vs Pumola. Dux takes a hit early on, which prompts him to remove his shirt (so you know this is Serious Business). The big guy is clearly pained as Frank delivers some strong blows, but also strangely enthusiastic.

“If I were anyone besides Jean-Claude Van Damme this would REALLY hurt!”

Much as he did with Morra, Pumola is soon able to take advantage of his size and negate the impact of several of Frank’s kicks. He then catches the hero in that same bear hug, but Dux escapes from that with some headbutts.

Here our hero makes the transition from serene ninja to deranged berzerker. He delivers a fierce palm strike to Pumola’s abs– probably liquefying the dude’s internal organs, if he’s using the same skill as the “Dim Mack” from earlier– and lingers on the blow with a wild, slow-motion shriek.

Pumola’s expression looks like he took a break from the intense pain to wonder “wow, seriously?”

Dux follows that up by doing the splits (because why simply duck when you can do the freakin’ splits) and uppercutting Pumola right in the crotch. You’d think he was hitting him in the balls, but according to the real Frank Dux (who, as we know, never lies), it was actually the bladder. Either way, Pumola’s groin has seen a disproportionate share of action today, and the big guy is so stunned with pain that a simple nudge from Frank just tips him right over.

7) Ray Jackson vs Chong Li

Don’t congratulate yourself if you can guess what happens.

The Fighters:

• Ray Jackson, our hero’s loutish buddy. Played by Donald Gibb.
• Chong Li, the unstoppable villain. Played by Bolo Yeung.

The Fight: Just before he heads to the ring, Jackson receives some advice from Dux, who has been watching Li carefully: stay away from his right leg, and go for his abdomen. “Chong Li is weak in the gut, that’s how Paredes surprised him,” Frank cautions, even though that’s not an accurate depiction of what happened in the Li/Paredes fight. Correct or not, Jackson is cocky as ever and waves off Frank for being over-anxious.

The two have a pretty even exchange of blows at first, and soon Ray is actually able to hit Li hard enough to send him to the mat– much to the latter’s surprise.

He probably could have broken Li’s leg here, but they probably don’t teach you that at the Drunken Brawling Idiot dojo.

Ray wastes no time (but a lot of energy) celebrating his “victory” prematurely, running around the ring and boasting about how awesome he is, despite Frank’s sideline urgings to finish the job. However, Chong Li is nowhere near finished. He arises and engages with Jackson again, this time neutralizing his opponent with the same brutal efficiency as he did all the rest. When Ray hits the mat, Chong Li doesn’t let up, repeatedly kicking the clearly defeated American.

As Van Damme screams in hilarious protest from nearby, Li finishes Ray off with a monstrous stomp to the face. Then he gives Frank the mother of all Mean Muggings:

Women all over Asia dread seeing Chong Li’s “O” face

Adding further insult to injury, Li removes Jackson’s signature Harley Davidson headband as a trophy. He even dangles it above Frank’s grasping hands, like a schoolyard bully. It’s so awesome.

Incidentally, at no point do you ever buy that Jackson is a serious threat against Li– or that he should have even gotten this far, really. He’s probably a handy guy in your average bar brawl, but not anywhere near the level of this gathering of the best martial artists in the world.

Still, Gibb’s performance does its job. Ray is likable & amusing, so his defeat (and subsequent hospitalization) puts a real human face to Chong Li’s cruel villainy, and higher stakes for Frank than just the honor of victory.

Day Two on the whole is an improvement. There are less matches, or at least fewer glimpses of matches, but that’s largely a function of the movie having gotten all its throat-clearing out of the way. Here we see our principals get in some higher stakes match-ups (even Frank takes a few blows!), as well as bringing back some of the non-speaking fighters from earlier on. Well done.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: One more post and then it’s Splitsville.

Go ninja, go ninja, go!

Toss one more off.

Look folks, not all the puns can be winners.

Here we are at the grand finale!

8) Frank Dux vs Paco

The Fighters:

• Frank Dux, the kumite’s new man-to-beat. Possessed of a new determination to win after visiting his buddy Ray in the hospital, and even outwitted the CID thugs pursuing him so he could attend. Played by Jean-Claude Van Damme.
• Paco, the Muay Thai kickboxer we’ve seen a few times already. Never addressed by name on film and without any spoken dialogue, he nonetheless leaves an impression. (Would a modern action film give little bits of characterization to secondary/tertiary competitors like Pumola?) Played by Paulo Tocha.

The Fight: Actually a nice little rev-up before the main course, suitably difficult for Frank but not an easy stroll through the park like his early fights.

As they start, Paco does the classic cheesy villain/bad guy wrestler thing where he holds out his fists so the two can bump together as a sign of respect, only when Frank goes in, Paco sucker-punches him in the face. Ha! Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

Ahem. Frank, always one to turn lemons into karate-lemonade, retaliates by tripping up Paco while he’s still on the ground. Paco gets up and Frank takes him down again. Soon enough, both are on their feet and just outright trading blows, even outright inviting the other to take free hits, which they absorb into their meaty thighs. It’s actually very cool, in its raging-testosterone way.

There’s a deleted scene right after where they each drop their pants and see who’s got the biggest junk.

This goes on for longer than you might expect. Eventually, Frank’s power is too much even for Paco’s surely formidable calcium deposits, wearing him down. Dux finishes his enemy off with, what else, a high spin kick. On to the finals!

9) Chong Li vs Chuan Ip Mung

The Fighters:

• Chong Li, the villain, of course. Played by Bolo Yeung.
• Chuan Ip Mung, who seems to be one of those super fast kung fu fighters we saw before. Played by Dennis Chiu.

The Fight: Gonna be honest: this fight was unremarkable enough I apparently forgot to get any screen grabs for it.

Instead, just look at this and revel in what could have been.

Chuan is very fast and gets in a couple licks on the champ, but not enough to faze him. Soon, Li is countering everything, which puts the challenger down. He finishes with a verrrrrrry drawn-out punch to Chuan’s face while he’s lying motionless on the ground, which outright kills him.

Chong Li wants to revel in the glory, but is angered when the judges– and soon the crowd– turn away from him in order to pray for the fallen fighter. Writing them off as sentimental fools, Li has a quick warning for Frank before he sits back down: “You are next.” (Which sounds like “necks” with his accent, but I wouldn’t laugh at his English if I were you.)

10) The Final Showdown:

The Fighters:

• Frank Dux
• Chong Li

They prop up all but the middle the ring beforehand for some reason, so that most of the ground is now slightly inclined. Presumably it’s for the added challenge, but it seems unnecessary. Does any other sport do this?

Badminton, maybe?

Also, as the two prepare in their respective corners, the camera makes sure we see Chong Li’s coach furtively stash a little capsule of something into his shorts. Foreshadowing!

The two meet, and before the ref calls things to a start, Li– sporting Ray’s bandanna tied around his knee, because why not– does another nice little bit of intimidation: “You break my record. Now I break you.” [points to bandanna] “Like I break your friend.” The man has a way with words.

The Fight: Frank kicks Li right in the face as soon as the match starts. Proactive! Li responds by grabbing the referee and throwing him right at Frank, which makes you wonder why the ref (to the extent he serves any purpose to begin with) has to be physically IN the ring anyway– it’s at ground level, not like an elevated boxing ring, so he could still see just fine from a few steps outside. Anyway, the tactic is useless, because Frank just climbs right over the ref and delivers another jump kick.

“They don’t pay me enough for this.”

At this point it’s pretty much Frank’s game. Li does score some big hits and gets a throw in, but Dux always comes back and is clearly the more skilled. A series of awkward and stiff punches drops the reigning champ to the ground, but just as Frank charges in for the big finish, Li, having “stealthily” ground up the capsule into powder, tosses it right into his opponent’s eyes. Like, in full view of everyone.

Chong Li tries to get in an immediate follow-up kick, but Frank still blocks it, which is hilarious. Soon enough, though, the powder starts to take effect, damaging Dux’s vision to the point of near blindness. He stumbles around like a confused baby.

Many years later, Jean-Claude would make a similar face when told he’d be co-starring with Dennis Rodman

This was always the part I hated most as a kid, not so much because the hero was getting beaten up but because it takes him waaaaaaay too long to remember something the audience showed him flashing back to like 70 minutes ago: namely, that he specifically trained to be able to fight blind. I mean, come on. There’s only so much slow-motion flailing and screaming you can do before it mutes the payoff.

Meanwhile, Chong Li is just beating the crap out of the helpless hero, though his grandstanding tendencies keep him from finishing Dux off too quickly. With the help of a repeated flashback, Frank is able to finally calm himself enough to enter the Zen zone where he can magically fight blind. He demonstrates this skill right away by plucking Li’s next punch right out of the air.

He just catches that punch, by the way– he didn’t push it to the side right before this frame or something. It was nowhere NEAR his face. Is Chong Li blind too?

And I do mean “magically.” It’s not specified what the justification is for how he can fight without seeing (he can even distinguish between targets, as he proves when he deliberately doesn’t strike the referee when Li shoves the poor guy at him again), but presumably it’s by listening carefully and picking up the sounds/vibrations. However, this is a relatively small room filled with about a hundred screaming spectators– his sense of hearing would be completely boned here. Even the superhero Daredevil, whose powers are ridiculous, would have had his radar sense wrecked in this situation. But you know what? It’s that kind of movie. Frank Dux is a karate sorcerer, end of story.

In fact, if anything, Dux is even better from this point on. Before this, the villain was able to at least put up a good fight, but now he’s completely useless against Frank’s sense-deprived, slow motion and cheerful music-aided comeback; Li doesn’t even land a single hit. Dux should have blinded himself right from the beginning.

Frank knocks Li all over town, turning this into the biggest showcase yet for Van Damme’s acrobatic skills– the most impressive of which is when he for NO reason does a jumping split high into the air, and Li subsequently rolls right under it to no apparent tactical gain. This ridiculousness culminates with Frank delivering the exact same spin kick FOUR times, and Li just stands there like a dunce for all of them. After the last, Li falls to his chest, for once finding himself at the mercy of a deranged opponent.

“Ah, I see now how this is not a nice thing to do to people.”

With some helpful encouraging from Dux, Chong Li does the unthinkable, shouting “matte!” and willingly surrendering. Total ownage!

Day Three is kind to the viewer by not diving straight into the final showdown, though it might have helped showing Li be a little more vulnerable– especially considering how much the hero is going to school him anyway at the end. Similarly, while the climactic match has some strong choreography, it could have been handled a bit better, been more even, and descended less into absurdity.

Or would it? Bloodsport is a curious case, where nostalgia and an ever-escalating cheese factor really do serve the movie better than tackling the (let’s face it, very silly) material straight-on would have. It does make a strange sort of sense for the movie to take a hard left turn into full-on camp at the conclusion.

Grade: A

Recommended Links: Once again we turn to Internet hero Seanbaby for the best paean to Bloodsport in this language or any other.

Coming Attractions: A smashing good time.

The madder Hulk gets, the more teeth-grinding Hulk does

Tired blogger needs a break

Hey folks. You may have noticed there were no updates last week; there also won’t be any updates this week.  Without getting into the vagaries of my work schedule, home life and overall down time, I often have very small windows in which to obtain, watch, and take notes/screen grabs on subjects. This past few weeks, for various reasons, it just wasn’t happening.

At the moment I have two entries in the can and will hopefully be able to start some more drafts soon, so next week we should be able to return to a regular schedule of two entries (or one long entry) per week, so fear not.

Not that I’m getting a lot of desperate queries as to where the content went, or imagining that people are even wondering it; curiously, even as my page views have gone up dramatically this year, reader feedback has gone down. Writers are a needy bunch, so feel free to Like, comment, or share an entry which catches your interest.

Meanwhile, this month marks the one-year anniversary of the blog. Wow! That snuck up on me. I have to say it’s been a fun ride, with about 35 different subjects covered and 120 entries. I’ve enjoyed the reader feedback I have received so far and I’m happy if I’ve entertained or enlightened any of you, but I’m equally happy just for the opportunity to examine at length a topic I love and to have a place to express myself. (Finding even a minor way to monetize this project would be great as well, but getting ads on WordPress seems to be a harder process than I was led to believe.) So the blog’s birthday is just as good an excuse as any to take a two-week break.

Keep reading,

-Eric

They have an Army, but we have a…

Um. Not quite.

2008′s The Incredible Hulk is underrated. It’s not great by any means, being underwhelming in certain aspects and lacking in others. But its heart is in the right place, and more importantly, it helped continue the groundwork its same-summer companion Iron Man had just recently begun. Again, this sort of thing is taken for granted in Marvel movies now, but all throughout the film you can feel a solid sense of respect & affection for the source material, an understanding that these people get the property, and want to have fun with it.

Certainly it can be credited with swerving the franchise sharply away from the dour, pretentious Ang Lee version. The director of the reboot, Louis Laterrier, is generally known as a genre schlockmeister, but in addition to all the competent action Laterrier actually pulls off some very striking shots and a few other nice tricks.

Unfortunately, while the movie fulfills its action quota, only two of its action beats could be reasonably qualified as “fights.” The first real Hulk-out, in a bottling plant after a tense chase through Brazilian favelas, is excellent but over too quickly and takes place mostly in the shadows; in one of the film’s smarter moves, it’s seen mostly from the perspectives of Hulk’s tormentors, and plays out more like a horror sequence.

But there’s still plenty of fun left to be had.

2) Hulk vs The Army

The Fighters:

• The Incredible Hulk, aka Bruce Banner. In case you haven’t heard, Banner is a mild-mannered scientist who, thanks to a lab accident involving gamma radiation, turns into a nigh-unstoppable rage beast whenever he becomes too angry or afraid. (This movie seems to tie the transformations directly to his heart rate reaching a certain threshold, a rather bland interpretation.) The Hulk is enormous, incredibly strong, durable, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. He’s also typically seen as “dumb” in contrast to the brilliant Banner, but this varies with each adaptation and even more so throughout the comic’s history; some Hulks are child-like idiots, some have a normal intellect, and some have just flat-out been Bruce Banner in a big green body. More recent work has even claimed that all incarnations of the Hulk retain Banner’s genius on some level, allowing the creature to intuitively calculate his seemingly random destruction so as not to harm innocent bystanders. Also important: not only does rage trigger the Hulk’s transformation, increased anger will amplify his power. “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets.” Played by Edward Norton, who acquits himself well as a brooding & thoughtful man of action, and also apparently did extensive but uncredited re-writes of the script.
• A small element of the United States Army, maybe a few dozen. They’re mostly equipped with small arms, but have several Humvees, a few of which are mounted with .50 caliber machine guns, and two more have some other interesting tech. Additionally, there’s a helicopter gunship nearby. (They’re also all wearing the woodland-camouflage Battle Dress Uniform, which the Army had fully phased out before 2008, the year this was released– let alone by 2011, the year this apparently takes place. Oops.) The troops are led by Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, a general deeply involved with the DoD’s gamma radiation/”special weapons” department, who has been obsessively hunting the Hulk for years and is also the father of Banner’s ex-girlfriend, Betty (awwwwwwkward). Played by William Hurt.
• Emil Blonsky, Ross’ point man in this endeavor. A British Royal Marine “on loan” to Ross for the Hulk chase, Blonsky is a cold-blooded special forces veteran. As the lone non-casualty of the bottling plant encounter, Blonsky has a bone to pick with Hulk, and Ross has worked to enable this rematch by pumping Blonsky full of an unthawed attempt at a re-creation of the super-soldier serum– the same one that made Captain America. Played by GFS hall-of-famer Tim Roth.

“Huge invincible super-monster? Pfft, we got this.”

The Setup: Ross, as usual, is chasing Bruce Banner. This time around he’s pinpointed the fugitive’s location to the sprawling university campus where Betty works, after he’d re-surfaced there seeking assistance. Uncle Sam wants Banner alive, so they can figure out from his body how to re-create the Hulk, so as before they’re going after the guy with non-lethal means. After the hero bolts, Betty tracks down her father and implores him to stop. She is less than successful, and gets detained on the sidelines.

Though Banner’s inside, Blonsky and the majority of the troops remain out front, knowing that’s where they’ll need to be if they can’t subdue him before a transformation. In a neat practical effect, Blonsky is shown very easily out-running the rest of the infantry behind him– a cool way to introduce the effects his “treatments” are having.

Banner leads them on a merry chase across the campus, stopping at one point to swallow a thumb drive containing important data. Gross, but a necessary move for a guy whose pockets are about to get jacked up. Eventually, Banner finds himself trapped in a nifty glass walkway separating two buildings. Soldiers lock the doors on either side, and on Ross’ orders they fire knockout gas into his confined space. He starts to succumb, but when he looks outside and sees Betty distressed, his eyes turn green….

And then this happens.

The Fight: At Ross’ order, all the soldiers start to unload on him, mostly with M16s. It’s little more than an annoyance to Hulk’s thick skin, and deters him not at all as he charges forward. A few Hummers with mounted .50 cals show up and begin firing, but even good old Ma Deuce can only cause Hulk moderate pain. Before they can even try to do worse, Hulk knocks over the nearest Humvee to him, then picks up another and smashes it repeatedly into a nearby sculpture, then the ground. Not one to let a nice piece of wreckage go to waste, the beast rips out part of the vehicle’s engine block and hurls at at a third Humvee, hard enough to knock that one into another Humvee. They both explode, which is always welcome.

This leaves Blonsky to take on the Hulk directly. Armed with a grenade launcher, he starts closing in on the Hulk, firing at intervals the whole way. The first couple rounds catch Hulk before he can react and do knock him back a bit, but soon he’s able to display some battlefield improvisation, and seizes two huge chunks of the metal lawn sculpture and uses them as shields.

Isn’t the guy with the super soldier serum supposed to be using a shield?

After he gets in close enough, Blonksy drops the weapon, though it’s not clear if it’s because he ran out of ammo or if he lost his grip when he has to leap forward to avoid Hulk’s first counter-swing. Either way, Emil is reduced to just using his sidearm from here, which obviously doesn’t faze the big green guy at all. But his acrobatic dodging is quite incredibly, leaping and flipping all around Hulk’s would-be swings.

Ross, impressed, orders Blonsky to draw the target into the next phase of the plan: the sonic cannons.

Sonic BOOM

These new weapons (apparently made by Stark Industries, of course) are non-lethal devices which fire visible waves of “sound” into the air and somehow incapacitate the target. It’s not clear if they do so merely by causing overwhelming pain to the target’s hearing/inner ear, or if they have their own concussive force, as is implied when Blonksy gets grazed by one just as he’s jumping out the way, which sends him tumbling too. But either way, you have to love these things: they’re SUCH a deliciously comic book-y contrivance, symbolic of how much fun this movie’s willing to have.

The cannons, once they’re both trained on Hulk, actually fix him pretty well at first, bringing him to the ground in pain. But once again, Hulk draws his strength at the sight of Betty’s visible distress over him, and forces himself back to his feet. Mitigating the sonic waves somewhat by first putting the metal shields in their path, and then he throws one right down the middle of the vehicle it’s mounted on, blowing it up. With the damage output reduced by half, Hulk is free enough to leap right onto the other cannon, destroying it personally.

Nearly out of options, Ross calls in the nearby gunship. Overly confident and disregarding orders to stand down, Blonsky takes a few more rifle shots at Hulk. When he’s out of ammo, he confronts Hulk face-to-face, daring him to continue their wildly disproportionate duel. “Is that all you got?” he taunts.

This seems… unwise.

Disgusted, Hulk casually but swiftly boots Blonsky right in the chest, propelling into a tree about a hundred feet ahead. It looks like it hurts.

Betty tries to get close to the Hulk to make him calm down, which her dad somehow fails to notice before the gunship closes in. He tells them to not fire but it’s too late, leaving Hulk to use his body to protect her from the hail of powerful ammunition. The entire patch of grass they’re standing on is reduced to a smoking pit by the strafing helicopter, but Hulk survived it. Cradling an unconscious Betty, he leaps away to safety. Mark this one as another loss in the government’s War on Hulk.

This is good, if not great, stuff for the superhero genre. It’s a tight and confined to one location, but still fairly epic in its small-scale way; the 2003 Hulk disaster had another, bigger confrontation with the military which eventually wore out its welcome. Hulk goes up against not just conventional Army might but also some wonky sci-fi weaponry and a deranged, British version of Captain America (not to be confused with the other British version of Captain America), which adds to the fun. And throughout there’s nice beats like the Hulk’s improvised shields, proving the creature’s tactical intelligence.

We even some nice character moments: right after the Hulk transforms, Ross mutters to himself, “now she’ll see,” thinking that Betty will lose her affection for Bruce now that she personally witnesses how much of a monster the Hulk is. But ultimately it’s the Hulk who bravely rescues Betty from Ross’ own monstrous bad decisions.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Something abominable.

Ladies.

Rumble in the Bronx.

“WRONG BOROUGH, PUNY BLOGGER!”

2) Hulk vs Abomination

The Fighters:

• The Incredible Hulk, aka Bruce Banner. For probably the first time, Bruce has willingly triggered a transformation, hoping that he can, if not control the beast, then at least “guide” it to the right target. Played by Edward Norton, but mostly CGI.
• The Abomination, aka Emil Blonsky. (Note that this is the character’s comic book name, not something he’s addressed as here. There’s only a cute reference to the word when Dr. Sterns says it as a warning of what Blonsky could become.) The combination of Blonsky’s repeated treatments with an unstable super-soldier serum and a dose of Banner’s gamma-radiated blood have transformed him into an enormous monstrosity. He’s roughly Hulk-sized if not bigger, but more reptilian, with scaly skin and spiky bone protrusions. Unlike the Hulk he seemingly retains more of his intellect, as evidenced by his fluent speech, but between Blonsky’s previously deteriorated mental state and anything else the transformation might have done to him, the Abomination is wildly aggressive and hungers for destruction. Played by, again, Tim Roth and CGI.

The Setup: Once again the military has managed to track Banner, but this time they actually get him– probably because they quietly sniped him with a tranquilizer rather than charging at him with a small army in full view. They get him just after he’s hooked up with his digital pen pal “Mr. Blue,” aka Dr. Samuel Sterns (teased to become the comic villain “The Leader,” if Marvel Studios ever gets around to it), who gets some samples of Banner’s blood and manages to suppress a transformation. Before they can determine whether the process was permanent or not, Bruce gets taken out and the Army storms the lab.

Later, an unhinged Blonsky coerces Sterns into applying the Hulk formula to him, and the results are… ugly.

As in, “scaly Goomba Hulk without pants” ugly.

The transformed Blonsky rampages through nearby Harlem, easily fighting off the military’s attempts to subdue him. When captured on a video feed going to Ross, in a helicopter with Betty taking Bruce into custody, the Abomination bellows “GIVE ME A REAL FIGHT.”

Before you can say “challenge accepted,” Banner convinces Ross to release him into the urban war zone– send a monster to stop a monster. Relying on an adrenaline charge to trigger the transformation, Bruce has them drop him from very high. He apparently Hulks out at the last moment, emerging from a crater as his jolly green self.

The Fight: There’s a nice moment of quiet after Hulk’s crash landing, as the two eye each other. Hulk roars, and Abomination charges over gleefully. The two fling themselves at each other in a glorious slow-motion shot.

Abomination gets the better of the collision, tackling Hulk to the ground and immediately using his momentum to fling Hulk several dozen feet away.

The green guy is actually quite dazed after he gets up, but once he gets his head right, he displays a bit more of that tactical thinking when he rips open a nearby police car, then shoves one hand in each half of it, effectively turning the vehicle into boxing gloves. (This move is a longtime favorite of Hulk’s in the comic, even popular enough to make its way into a great video game several years before this movie.)

With the reach-advantage the car-gloves give Hulk, he’s able to get the first strike on his abominable foe, and beats him down quite thoroughly, until the car parts are all ground away and Blonsky is embedded in the pavement. However, the monster reveals his resilience with a callback to his line from the previous confrontation, taunting Hulk with “is that all you got?” Before Hulk can respond with a finishing blow, Abomination kicks him hard enough to launch him into the air and through a neighboring building.

Sadly, the best parts of the fight are now all over. Abomination’s search for Hulk soon changes into him avoiding heavy automatic fire from Ross’ helicopter (which, incidentally, keeps getting way too close to its target for comfort).

The two titans tangle again when hero just barely prevents villain from tackling the helicopter (which also has Betty in it, because of course it does) right out of the sky. With Abomination dangling from the landing gear and Hulk dangling from Abomination’s leg, the chopper has to make a crash landing on a rooftop, trapping all inside and knocking everyone who isn’t a main character unconscious.

The combatants clash again at the crash site, with Abomination pinning Hulk against a nearby wall through sheer brute force. Telling him “you don’t deserve this power,” he stabs Hulk’s pectoral with one of his shoulder spikes and invites him to watch Betty die.

Opting not to, Hulk once again draws strength from the sight of Betty in distress, and slowly breaks free, then smashes Abomination’s head into the wall. He takes a moment to quell the fire spreading around the helicopter with the force of a super-powered clap (cool!), which gives Blonsky enough time to rise behind him and grab a chain attached to… something. I’m not really clear on what this very long, very heavy chain with a heavy weight on one end is doing atop this random Harlem building, but okay.

Abomination blindsides Hulk and puts him down with a couple swings from his chain. The villain begins to swing it again in preparation to bring it down on the chopper, asking the general if he has any last words. Hulk replies in Ross’ stead, bellowing his iconic “HULK SMASH!” for the first time on the big screen.

Curiously, what he actually smashes is the rooftop in front of him. The point of impact creates a wide crack that snakes over to where Abomination’s standing, trapping his foot inside.

Thrown off-balance, the monster loses control of his weapon, which falls right back down on his ugly mug. Hulk wastes no time grabbing the chain and choking his opponent with it, fending off all his scrambling attempts to fight back. Truly bloodthirsty, he seems quite ready to hold on until Blonsky stops breathing, but Betty cries for him to stop.

With Abomination subdued, Hulk has a quiet moment with his love and says her name, before fleeing again to leave Ross to clean up the mess so he can go do more sad-music-accompanied hitchhiking.

This is a lot of fun, but its biggest sin is that 90% of the fighting happens in one brief, furious spurt right at the beginning; from there it’s an uninspired chase scene that we know will come to nothing (come on, a whole battalion AND a gunship couldn’t take down Hulk in the last battle, what’s a lone helicopter going to do to Abomination now?) and some back & forth between the two on the rooftop.

That brief bout of fighting, however, is everything a titanic superhero fight should be. There’s suitable dramatic buildup to the confrontation, and the CGI is not just empty special effects; it’s obviously not real but there’s some genuine weight to it, and the combatants move in ways both believable yet fantastically impressive; you can almost feel the power behind each punch. Also welcome is how you can generally keep track of the action– a more significant accomplishment than it sounds considering it’s a night-time battle between two fast-moving CGI monsters of similar size & shape. And the Abomination, with motion-capture work apparently done by Roth himself, makes for a fantastic villain.

The fight’s ultimate solution is yet another example of a time when we find ourselves in a bind because it’s laudably clever/unexpected yet somewhat disappointing; you don’t usually expect a Hulk fight to end with him tripping his enemy and then choking him out from behind. Still, hearing Hulk say his trademark line (said by Lou Ferrigno, in a gratuitous but sweet bit of fan-service) goes a long way, and there is some cold brutality to go along with Hulk’s smart thinking. Not to mention the delights of the oh-so-comic-booky elements like the car gloves, the sonic clap and the aimable mini-earthquake.

As with before, the movie’s heart being in the right place helps smooth over its imperfections. That aforementioned dramatic buildup is something to be applauded– the movie has the courage to put some real action gravitas behind what is frankly a very boilerplate and predictable confrontation. It was very refreshing at the time for a big-budget superhero movie to be so straightforward and have the Hulk square off against what’s basically another, more evil Hulk… and not, say, a goofy absorbing weirdo who turns into a giant electric cloud.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: An even more dangerous man named Bruce.

Don’t make him Bruce Lee. You wouldn’t like him when he’s Bruce Lee.