“Finally! What the hell took you so long?”

I can tell the wait has distressed you.

Enter The Dragon! One of the most famous, beloved, iconic kung fu flicks of all time. Starring Bruce Lee, the man who, via a combination of superb skill, airy philosophizing, fiery charisma and a tragically early death, did more than any one man to bring chop-socky action to the wider world.

Is it a great movie? Good grief, no. It’s strange and choppy and at many times laughable. But is it a great action movie? Well… not entirely. It’s unevenly paced and there’s little suspense, given that the majority of the fights are so uneven. Indeed, this is the failing of most Lee movies: typically, his character’s arc goes from most fights where he is in no danger whatsoever, to the final fight(s), where he is in moderate danger. This is a type of action that’s meant to be enjoyed less for the suspense or excitement, and more as simply a showcase for the godlike physicality (and absolutely magnetic personality) of its lead. The Raid, this is not.

Again, this flick is just packed with fights, many of them small or inconsequential, so we’ll look at it as a retrospective and give each battle a light touch.

1) Lee vs Fat Guy

Still way less homoerotic than Top Gun.

Enter The Dragon certainly wastes no time getting down to business. Before the title appears and barely after the production company logos have faded, the audience is taken to an open-air duel between two men. Surrounded by Shaolin monks, the pair are for some reason dressed in nothing but speedos, shoes, knee-high socks and light boxing gloves.

The camera immediately and purposefully zooms in on Bruce Lee’s character (simply known as “Lee,” because why not), capturing his focused intensity. Of course even amongst perceived equals Bruce’s physique and persona would stand out, but here he’s faced off against a very unimpressive opponent. Visibly overweight, unimposing and never seeming particularly skilled, Lee’s unnamed foe is laughably doomed from the start. (Apparently this hapless opponent is a very young Sammo Hung, a contemporary/close friend of Jackie Chan and someone who would go on to become a Hong Kong legend both on and off the screen. All of which makes his non-entity appearance here more puzzling.)

As could be easily predicted, Lee wipes the floor with Sammo, taking him down multiple times with quick, powerful blows and skillfully evading all his counter-strikes. Hung performs a nice backflip evasion at one point (one of his career trademarks is how spry he is for such a large man), but he’s no match for the star. In the end, Lee defeats him by curling him up into a wrestling hold and making him tap out.

“Matte!”

Again, this is all too easy for Lee. It’s also fairly cheesy, full of the HK exaggerated sound effects that defined the genre at the time. Still, there’s a loose, unpredictable energy here that distinguishes the battle from the kind of action both sides of the ocean had been used to, and that’s all due to Lee and “Jeet Kune Do”– the actor’s self-created martial art/philosophy which mandated improvisation and adaptability, rather than other rigidly traditional Chinese disciplines and their limited move sets. (Many argue that Lee essentially created what is now modern mixed martial arts.) You can even see some of JKD’s more explicit influence, such as the wrestling-like move he finishes with, and a foot-punch he pulls off early in the match.

All in all, not a bad introduction.

2) and 3) Williams and Roper

Bunching these two together for brevity’s sake. They’re our secondary protagonists. Before they even got to the villain’s island, we already saw both of them in some quick defensive bits that are too simple to feature here, but very telling as to their characters: Roper beat up some loan sharks on a golf course because he’s a reckless gambler, while Williams knocked out a couple racist cops because he’s an awesome 70s black dude who doesn’t have time for Whitey’s bullshit.

As you can see, he doesn’t have time for this guy’s face, either.

Williams is played by the late Jim Kelly, a genuine karate champion who parlayed his role in this movie into a healthy stint as a blacksploitation star. Roper is played by John Saxon, apparently another black belt, who would later go on to be better known for his appearances in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

Both are apparently world-class martial artists, and have been invited to Han’s secluded island tournament. After a brief demo with spear-fighting, the first match is of Williams against an unnamed western fighter. Williams blocks all the man’s blows with ease, and puts him down twice, the second time for good. Afterwards, he gets some money from Roper, the two friends having an agreement to bet on each other with other viewers and then split the winnings.

The next match, in fact, is more dragged-out gambling joke than an actual fight. The “chump” these two pals are stringing along is a goofy-looking, middle-aged Asian man who inexplicably has a Hitler mustache. In addition to being a big gambler he’s also the most oblivious person alive because he fails to miss the painfully obvious collaboration Roper & Williams are doing right in front of his freaking face.

“Hey Williams, don’t forget to tell me when I can op-stay owing-thray the ight-fay.”

Basically, the plan is that Roper takes enough punishment to the point where their sucker agrees to tilt the odds/payout ratio heavily against Roper. I don’t really gamble so I don’t know, but this doesn’t strike me as standard betting procedure or even common sense– can you really change the odds in the middle of the contest, and if someone was offering to do that for you when it looks like they’ll lose, wouldn’t you suspect something? Anyway, Asian Hitler doesn’t, and after Roper gets battered enough, he finally goes along with Roper’s hoped-upon 8/3 odds. At a completely un-subtle hand gesture from Williams, Roper gets up and knocks his erstwhile tormentor out with one punch.

Which reminds me: I might have missed something but the rules of this tournament don’t seem really clear. You would think they have a “best of X falls” system, because when any fighter goes down, they both stop fighting and then line up against each other to start the next round. But so far the fights only end when one party is unconscious. Meanwhile, Roper hits the dirt a total of three times before he wins, so if there’s any TKO, it’s some time after three falls. Say what you will about Bloodsport, at least it established some firm rules.

Anyway, of these back-to-back sequences giving us a fuller introduction to our secondary heroes, Williams undoubtedly comes out better. Saxon is indeed enjoyable and his character has a certain lazy charm, but he pales (ahem) in comparison to Kelly’s size, power, and cool-guy attitude. Williams also gets the only thing resembling a real fight, whereas Roper’s is more of a comedy routine (which, arguably, pulls the “rake joke” trick of going so far past tiresome it actually comes back around to amusing).

4) Bolo vs Unlucky Guards

Uh oh. This guy look familiar?

He’s hard to forget.

Yep, our old pal Bolo Yeung had an early role in Enter The Dragon. Like Bruce, his character has one name but it’s actually not the same as his real name. Yeung was born Yang Sze and is credited that way in this movie; in a strange case of life imitating art, enough people started giving him the nickname “Bolo” because it’s the name of his character in this movie, and eventually it stuck.

Whatever his name is, young Bolo (see what I did there) is just as enormous and creepy as he would later be in Bloodsport, though so smooth-skinned and young-looking he seems almost boyish, like an embryonic Chong Li. But there’s nothing boyish about his hulking physique and the occasionally manic grimaces we’ve come to expect from before, though his rictus grins are more like a rough draft of what we’d eventually see in the Van Damme film.

Anyway, Bolo is introduced in this scene to dispense some very public punishment to four hapless guards who failed to stop an unidentified post-curfew prowler the previous evening (the culprit was Lee, skulking about doing recon, who knocked out or evaded all guards before they could identify him). Han shows he means business by having Bolo basically execute these chumps in front of the tournament crowd.

And an execution is definitely what it is. One at a time, Bolo calmly approaches and dismantles the terrified, smaller men. They try to fight back but their blows are either quickly blocked or calmly absorbed by the quiet killing machine. Bolo tosses one man casually over his head as if he were a rag doll (showing off that crazy strength) and then steps on his face, apparently fatally. After knocking the second opponent face-down to the ground, Bolo pulls back hard on his head from behind until his neck snaps from the pressure. Conspicuously, the third doesn’t seem to receive any killing blow, just a very painful-looking knee to the nuts.

But the final victim gets it worst of all: after being knocked around by the giant villain, he’s cradled in Bolo’s mighty arms almost like a child, and Bolo pushes him together until his spine breaks– he literally folds the man in half. Holy shit.

Is… is this even possible? Holy shit.

Not very exciting, of course; just a nice bit of focused cruelty. Even young, rookie Bolo Yeung is plenty entertaining, even if his move set isn’t much more complicated than what we saw in the rather simplistic Bloodsport fights. But this is all a lot less stiff.

5) Lee vs O’Hara

Finally, Lee shows up to work his mojo. (It only took, what? A little over an hour?) His designated opponent is one of Han’s top men, O’Hara, played by martial artist and veteran actor/stunt coordinator Robert Wall. The fight is a personal one for Lee, since it was O’Hara’s pursuit of Lee’s sister (who had been investigating Han) which ended with her killing herself to avoid capture. He got that ugly scar in the same encounter.

Lee simply gives one of his trademark smoldering glares, but his opponent opts for a more ostentatious approach, smashing a wooden board he’d brought along just for show. Lee is not impressed, uttering his famous “boards don’t fight back,” maxim. They line up, wrist to wrist, for the opening blow, and Lee scores it immediately, his fist striking out with blinding speed and intensity to hit O’Hara in the face and send him to his knees. Then he does the exact same thing again. The third time, his foe is able to block a bit, but Lee still gets him on the follow-up. (Again, any kind of “points” system in these matches and what indicates when they will take breaks from the fight to line up again is quite opaque.)

Eventually, O’Hara gets unhinged and desperate. He tries to grab Lee’s foot from the ground, which only earns him a backflipping kick in the face. When he tries to charge in with a powerful jumping kick, Lee simply ducks underneath him and puts his foot right where O’Hara’s nuts will land.

owowowowowowowowowow….

Rather improbably for a man whose genitals just had an unfortunate encounter with Bruce Lee and gravity, O’Hara can still continues to fight, though he only gets sloppier. Lee, however, only gets more worked up: at the beginning of the fight, he only moved to attack, but soon enough he’s bouncing around energetically, bobbing & weaving in the combat space.

Lee repeatedly puts O’Hara down with strong, single strikes, to the point where the audience even stops applauding since it’s not even a contest anymore. Lee puts O’Hara down harder with a strong kick to the chest he executes from very close, sending him into the audience.

Ooooooh that’s a lot of straightening for his leg to do.

It certainly seems like a finishing move– it’s even in slow motion and everything– but O’Hara can’t seem to get enough. Over Han’s objections, he breaks two random glass bottles nearby him and tries to take Lee out, barfight style. Lee doesn’t exactly say “wow, seriously?” but it’s implied. He easily disarms O’Hara and knocks him on his back. He ensures it’s the last time when he leaps onto the man’s (not shown on camera) body with a look of deranged intensity.

Some sort of doctor confirms it afterward: he’s dead, Jim.

This is an improvement from a lot of what we’ve seen before, but still not too great. For all his stature and build-up as the villain’s right-hand man, O’Hara is reduced to a stumbling ox for Lee’s swift, flawless strikes– basically a walking punching bag. Bruce is, as ever, fantastic and graceful in his almost-too-quick-to-see attacks, but this barely seems like a workout for him.

6) Williams vs Han

Having been shamed by O’Hara’s disgraceful behavior, Han cancels the rest of the day’s matches, and calls Williams in to his office for a private meeting. Han, played by longtime Hong Kong star Shih Kien (and whose voice was dubbed by Keye Luke), is a major criminal mastermind and drug trafficker. He holds these tournaments every three years as a covert way to find new talent and connections for his organization. He’s pretty much a straight-up supervillain, “right out of a comic book,” as Williams himself says in this scene. Dude even has a white pet cat he carries around sometimes.

He tries to get Williams to play ball by asking him who he saw snooping around last night, but Williams doesn’t have time for that jive crap. The confrontation turns ugly and Han calls in several guards, who the hero of course defeats easily.

Once Williams has awesomely dispatched those punks, Han springs into action personally. The American is immediately caught off-guard when his opening strike gets blocked by what turns out to be a heavy iron prosthetic replacing his left hand. Besides that, Han turns out to be a surprisingly agile and canny fighter in his own right, dodging most of Williams’ attacks and making excellent use of his handy (heh) advantage.

There’s some nice camera work here, such as alternating POV shots as the two trade blows, and a brief view of both characters’ silhouettes as they battle behind a paper screen. And a fun bit of background detail: after a stray blow from Han’s hand breaks open a bird cage, the occupants of which fly around the room and at one point into Williams’ face.

The fight spills through the wall into some kind of disco-themed opium den, where several slave girls baked out of their minds laugh uproariously at everything they see.

“Talk to the hand!”

An ignoble place to die, and too bad because the fight’s pretty much over for Williams at that point. Increasingly tired and beat up, he admirably continues to rise and gamely fight back, but Han is able to take him down for good with repeated iron blows to his back. Brutal.

This marks the unfortunately too early departure of Williams from the film, leaving us with the less interesting Roper as the sole secondary protagonist (and we all know why). But at least he goes down fighting, and in a scene which proves that the movie isn’t afraid to kill the guy you like halfway through. Not a bad fight, either, especially in the beginning. So long, Jim.

7) Lee vs Everybody

This is the big one, the centerpiece. The legendary sequence. It was even the centerpiece of this movie’s parody in Kentucky Fried Movie.

But here’s the thing: it’s… not very good. It’s not even the best fight in this movie.

“Dude, what are you talking about?” I inevitably hear when I say this. “It’s awesome! That’s the scene where Bruce Lee fights like 50 guys!” Well, that’s true in only the most technical sense. It’s more accurate to say it’s the scene where about 50 guys run right into Bruce Lee’s fists & legs one or two at a time, and stay down after they’re hit once. Less exciting, but more accurate.

Although one of those 50 guys is Jackie Chan. This one, I believe.

Not once does Lee ever seem like he’s in danger here, not just because the individual guards he attacks (setup: after he Metal Gear Solids his way into Han’s underground lair to find evidence and send a message to his MI6 handlers, someone sets off an alarm and Lee has to fight his way out) pose no threat to him whatsoever, but also because there’s barely any sense of scale to the conflict. Only once toward the very end is there an angle showing a large crowd of thugs at one time; otherwise, both because of poor camera-blocking and because Lee encounters the bad guys in waves, you really have no idea how many foes he’s facing at one time. On several occasions, the camera keeps so tightly on Lee you don’t know there’s anyone else in the room at all until one of the hero’s limbs lances out and strikes someone.

The poor execution mutes the concept of what it should be… and again, Bruce Lee is so perfectly invincible in the world of this movie it probably wouldn’t have been thrilling even if it had been shot better. Look at more recent scenes like the dojo encounter in Jet Li’s Kiss of the Dragon or the famous hammer hallway rumble in Oldboy if you want to see this sort of scenario done right.

As ever, the entertainment value is just in watching Lee’s dazzling speed and power. He strikes with sudden wild ferocity of a coiled snake (incidentally, Lee did use a poisonous cobra as an improvised stealth tool just prior to this scene), taking down each thug with ease. Eventually they start coming in with weapons, but he simply disarms them and uses them himself.

“Great, we just made him MORE dangerous!”

First a bo staff, then two smaller sticks, and finally Lee’s signature nunchaku. Curiously, he spends more time twirling those around to scare a bad guy than he does actually using them to take down opponents. Considering his remarks about O’Hara’s board-related antics, Bruce is oddly hypocritical when it comes to showing off.

The only other bit of interesting incident is when the fight wanders down to where Han’s prisoners/experimental subjects are being held behind bars. They provide Lee with some help by seizing guards who get too close to their cells, but it’s not like he needed it.

The fight ends when Lee is trapped between several slamming steel doors. Lee sits down resignedly to await his fate.

“I just took down like 50 guys and I get defeated by a DOOR?! fml”

You always have to wonder about what guys through the minds of henchmen in movies like this: “Hmm, I just saw this unbeatable superman mow through 30 of my colleagues, should I rush in at him too? Sure! One of us HAS to get lucky and it might as well be me!”

8) Roper vs Bolo

After Han captures Lee, he brings him to the tournament grounds, and demands that Roper– who he’d been courting as an employee– execute him. After some hesitation, the cocky American decides there are limits to his sleaziness, and he refuses. Incensed, Han has Bolo fight Roper, instead.

As the hulking fighter approaches, Lee moves as if to help, but Roper gestures him away, preferring to handle this himself. Pretty gutsy, if not suicidally so.

“You sure about this? I mean, you can see it’s Bolo Yeung, right?”

Their fight is the most entertaining one so far. They have a very solid back & forth, especially at the beginning. But soon Bolo’s strength advantage puts Roper on the ground, and Bolo pins him in an arm lock. Roper resists but he’s held quite tightly, and it looks like only a matter of time before his arm breaks. However, the plucky gambler takes the unusual step of biting Bolo’s leg, which lies conveniently near his mouth. Considering how much pain it puts Bolo in, and how he’s limping a bit after he finally lets go, Roper might actually have chewed some flesh right off.

but an hour later he was hungry again BECAUSE BOLO IS CHINESE GET IT HA HA

When they both get back up, Roper presses his advantage, but Bolo still comes back strong, at one point throwing him down with an overhead press. Eventually, Roper is able to wear him down with repeated, rapid strikes to the face, and finishes him with a deadly combo ending with a kick to the nuts. Down goes Bolo. Freddy Krueger will avenge him.

This one’s a lot more fun. It’s fairly quick but neither is it too drawn out, and is relatively varied in terms of content. Saxon acquits himself well and all kidding aside, between his performance and the choreography you can actually buy him being able to defeat this massive warrior. Indeed, for most of the fight it seems like either of them really could win at any second– a crucial ingredient in crafting a suspenseful battle.

“Okay, but this is just one of my early roles. Surely I won’t continue to be known as the quiet villain who loses to inferior white guys, right?”

Bolo’s boss, obviously, is furious about the outcome, so this segues directly into….

9) Free For All

Han starts barking out orders and having several students attack Lee and Roper at once. This goes about as well as you’d expect, but Han just keep sending in new ones. Hilariously, he keeps picking out random students by name, when it would be quicker and more likely to succeed if he simply said, “Everyone, attack those two!”

Since the heroes are effortlessly mowing down these goons left & right, this is conceptually similar to the underwhelming sequence of Lee in the dungeons, but it actually works a lot better. The camera pulls back enough so that we get a real sense of the number of enemies the heroes are facing, the takedowns are a bit more complex than just one or two blows, and the whole thing is faster, looser, more fun.

Unfortunately Lee & Roper merely fight as discrete units rather than actively cooperating, though they get the job done just the same. The sheer amount of foes might have overwhelmed the pair eventually, but we’ll never know because early into the encounter, a British mole within Han’s organization springs all the prisoners and sends them to even the odds. Now it’s total chaos.

A MAAAAAAADHOUSE

The film takes a little bit of time, but not too much, to savor in this free-form carnage. We see Lee & Roper continue to stomp away, but director Robert Clouse also takes the time to highlight a few other moments of combat amongst faceless fighters of either side. It’s pretty darn cool.

Eventually, Han decides it’s time to join in on the action, and he gets his bear claw. Not the pastry, an actual bear claw. His iron hand is detachable and can be replaced with several other alternates, one of which is a bear claw with fur and everything. He and Lee eye each other amid the chaos.

Bruce Lee making this face at you is a more surefire guarantee of your death than seeing the Grim Reaper with a rocket launcher.

10) Lee vs Han

Wasting little time, the two have a great battle outside for a little while, with Han’s uncanny agility actually giving Lee some trouble at first. After the villain takes a fall and loses his bear claw when a missed swing embeds it in a wooden board, Han hightails it out of there while Lee is briefly distracted by a random goon.

He flees back up to his office, where Lee quickly catches up to him just as he’s attaching an even more deadly claw: an all-metal one with four knife blades. Lee is unfazed by the Wolverine-wannabe and coldly informs him “You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple.” SICK BURN. The melee continues outside unabated but no one else has followed them to this odd little office/trophy room. Now it’s just Lee against Han, solo.

Lee mostly sticks to long-range attacks here and doesn’t follow up most of his successful strikes, in order to stay away from the claw. Still, Han gets in a few slashes on his face and torso, though they’re mostly just on the surface and Lee is clearly the superior. He’s able to pull off this classy move where he doubles Han over, puts him in a headlock, and delivers a scorpion kick to his head. It’s almost as painful as it is insulting.

He also gives Han a close-up view of his butt. Rude.

Even crazier, Lee executes this wild double-trip thing where he slides his whole body in to attack one of Han’s legs, then, while Han is off-balance, Lee pivots his whole body and kicks Han’s other leg from the other side. It’s completely bonkers and I love it.

Knowing he’s losing, a dazed Han seizes a spear from a nearby statue, but it’s of little use and only ends up embedded in a nearby wall. Said wall turns out to be a revolving door– a hidden entrance to Lee’s private hall of mirrors where their showdown finally ends.

This is the other iconic part of the movie and it’s just so weird. Why does Han even have this place– did he have it built for just such an occasion? If so, that’s amazing. Also, I don’t think I’ve even been to a normal, non-supervillainous, funhouse hall of mirrors– are they as disorienting as the movie makes them seem?

Yeah, that’s definitely a stuntman as Han and not Shih Kien.

It certainly is plenty disorienting to Lee, almost cartoonishly so. He advances cautiously everywhere he goes, not knowing which Han he’s seeing is real and which is the reflection. The hero’s confusion defies believability at a few points, because he does manage to stumble into the villain a few times and nail him, but then somehow can’t find him again a mere second later. Is Han disappearing into the mirrors somehow, like by magic or something? It almost seems that way.

Also triggering your “come ON!” alarm is the point where Han is able to sneak right up behind Lee and rather than deliver a killing stroke– he really does have him dead to rights– instead opts for a light slash on the back of his shoulder. Maybe next time aim for an artery, dumbass.

As with the big underground brawl, this is a great concept but somewhat underwhelming in execution, not to mention repetitive and overlong. There are only so many times you can watch a dozen refracted images of Lee sidling forward an inch at a time while a dozen refracted Hans sneak up behind him.

The whole thing comes to an end when Lee remembers his master’s advice about an enemy using “illusions” to win battle (a piece of wisdom that seems suspiciously apt for the bizarre uniqueness of this encounter), and he smashes every mirror he can reach. This allows Lee to easily find the Freddy-wannabe and kick him hard enough to impale him on the spear he’d left sticking through the wall.

Schwarzenegger would have found a great way to make a “seven years’ bad luck” pun here.

Bye bye, Han.

In the end, though Enter The Dragon is highly flawed and disappointing, it’s hard to hold that against it. Since the film was such a breakthrough in so many ways (not the least of which was it being the first Hollywood production of an authentically Chinese martial arts film, a clash which accounts for much of its awkward sensibility), it pioneered a lot of what was to come. Earlier I compared the dungeon fight unfavorably to similar battles in more recent films, but without the success of Enter The Dragon and Bruce Lee’s legacy, it’s doubtful the scale of action would be where it is today. It’s the perfect example of a movie that needs to be seen primarily within the context of its time, and, in what’s recurring lesson here at this site, proof that movies are more than the sum of their parts.

There were no grades given for the ten fights in the movie; it seemed unnecessary. But the top three worth truly singling out are, in order: the final Lee/Han duel, Roper vs Bolo, and the wild brawl which happens between the two. Strangely those happen to be the last three fights to happen– a rare treat for such a succession of excellent bits to happen one after the other. Wataa!

Coming Attractions: It’s time to go back.

I don’t know about other blog systems, but WordPress has this nice feature where it tells you what search terms (though not all of them; apparently it doesn’t interface with certain search engines) have brought people to your site. Or maybe just which search results your site has popped up in, I’m not sure.

For my site, most of these are quite predictable– “connor kurgan highlander,” “best rocky fight scene” etc. But some of them are a bit… unexpected, or just downright unconventional. I figured that as another part of celebrating the blog’s anniversary month, I’d share some of the more eyebrow-raising ones I’ve noticed. What follows is that list, with any commentary from me in brackets. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

julie san karate kid

gamera turtle justice league unlimited

catfights stomping & kicking using feet

porn movies with action and fighting scenes [That’s one tag I haven’t used yet.]

what is written on becks gun in the run down

punch count rocky movies

picfic rim filght secne

vegeta it ain’t ralph level

pinned by sex mako 53

prince humperdink villain or not [Ha ha, seriously?]

morpheus and niobe wedding

a metallurgical history of ancient sword making by brenda wyatt book cover

shirtless comics “stripped to the waist” punishment whipping army

movie world gone wild from 80′s guy getting chomped by dog

star wars prequels are unwatchable

rob roy faces like this are why punching [Glad to see that caption’s catching on.]

beckwith mashup(boss)2013

surf ninjas black guy

how to make unhurtable traps

hoc vs thor

apollo knock rocky down

yari film 2013 wayne gretzky [On steroids?]

what grade 2 looks like on a man all over

end of eighties fighting comics man fighter could transform into bigger muscles

what is the name of the katana-toting scotsman in the original “highlander” movie?

2 dragons fighting over sex

april o’neil unconscious

are there alot of fight scenes in ironman 3 [Nope.]

tmnt shredder stabbed raph how did it begin

miss march unrated scenes

peterpan records superman vs the elite

where can you find an omnidroid

film where human fights alien where computer adjusts fighters strength to make it a fair fight

the incredibles-sexy elastigirl in her costume observes her butt

helen parr tied up and gagged

who is the real hero of transformers movie series optimus prime or sam witwicky

was camera work good for movie thor

ninja hattori anus

Hey, remember that big superhero movie we covered, like, a year ago?

Let’s have more of that.

Jon Favreau’s sequel to his 2008 smash hit gets a bit of a bad rap. Sure, it makes some questionable decisions– many apparently the result of a rushed schedule and studio meddling to “build the universe”– but it doesn’t deserve its fanboy scorn as the black sheep of Marvel’s Phase One films. It’s quite entertaining and even improves on some of its predeccsor’s shortcomings.

One of those improvements is action. While the novelty is indeed gone, there are places that Iron Man 2 delivers where Iron Man didn’t. Let’s see if we can’t whip up a few examples.

Get it, ‘cuz whips… okay, I’m sorry.

1) Iron Man vs Whiplash

The Fighters:

• Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, our returning hero. In the time since the first film he has “privatized peace” by effectively serving as a deterrent to tyrants, terrorists and other geopolitical bad actors. (This sounds unlikely.) Meanwhile, he’s been secretly dying of radiation poisoning from the miniature arc reactor that saved his life, and has been acting increasingly reckless as a result. Played by the one and only Robert Downey Jr.
  • Armed with: Here, the Iron Man Mark V armor, a new variant of the suit which can be folded up into a briefcase– likely a reference to the comics equivalent which Tony often carried around, disassembled, in a briefcase. It’s also distinguished by silver coloring rather than gold, and a thinner, more stripped-down appearance. Presumably the armor sacrifices some features for its portability– we never see Tony fly in it, for instance– but that’s not explored.
• Ivan Vanko, the film’s main villain and a twisted, Russian version of Tony. Vanko is an incredibly muscled, taciturn and brilliant scientist whose recently deceased father was a former colleague of Tony’s dad, and feels he was cheated out of his share of the Stark fortune. Working off stolen blueprints, Vanko builds his own arc reactor, and tracks Tony down for revenge. The character is a combination of the comic villains Whiplash and Crimson Dynamo, though he isn’t called by either name in the movie. Played by Mickey Rourke, enjoying his career revival.
  • Armed with: Unlike Tony, Vanko didn’t have the resources to make a fully-functioning titanium suit, so his arc reactor merely supports a thin exoskeleton and powers two highly charged whips he holds in each hand. The whips have incredible destructive capability, able to slice through just about anything and even deflect Iron Man’s repulsor beams.

He’s Jeff Gordon’s worst enemy.

The Setup: Part of Tony’s thrill-seeking behavior has led him to participate in an F1 race in Monaco. (One would think driving a fast car would be a little underwhelming after you’ve worn a suit of advanced armor that not only goes faster but also FLIES and blows up bad guys, but okay.) It’s here that Vanko has decided to make his very public, and likely suicidal, attack on Stark.

The villain has infiltrated the proceedings dressed as a mechanic, but as Tony’s car comes around the corner where he’s chosen the confrontation to be, Vanko opts for the direct route, and marches right onto the track. In a neat little detail, as he activates the arc reactor, the machinery it powers heats up enough to burn through his jumpsuit.

Strangely, it doesn’t seem to bother his skin.

Vanko whips one approaching car in half, and does the same thing to Tony’s shortly after, causing a magnificent wreck that leaves him mostly unscathed. Still, he’s at a distinct disadvantage.

The Fight: Once he frees himself from the car, Stark has to rely on pretty much just his wits to survive against a superior opponent. He disappears from Vanko’s sight when he can, he lures Vanko into sparking an explosion in some loose gasoline, he flings some car wreckage at him, and he employs some surprising agility when those whips get too close.

Fortunately for him, Tony’s bodyguard Happy Hogan shows up and rams an SUV into Crazy Ivan, pinning him against a wall. Before Tony can get in to escape, Vanko comes to and attacks the vehicle, preventing the trio (Pepper’s along too, of course) from getting away. Fortunately for Happy and Pepper, Tony is able to find enough time to get the briefcase and don the Mark V armor, which unfolds automatically over his body and evens the odds.

“Now I have an arc reactor-powered suit. Ho, ho, ho.”

The fight seems like it’s going to take a turn for the better here, but oddly, it doesn’t. Iron Man does kick the car to safety, but every blast he fires at Vanko, the villain parries with well-timed swings of his whips. Immediately after that, Ivan is able to wrap Tony up in his whips and fling him around a bit. The pulsing electricity from the weapon damages Stark’s armor somewhat, making him falter and his viewscreen flicker.

Down but not out, Iron Man decides to use the whips’ now-stationary (because they’re holding him down) position to his advantage, and seizes one by the hand.

Pulling himself forward one step at a time, Stark gets to Ivan pretty quickly, and subdues him with a few punches. When he falls, the hero leans in and plucks the bootleg arc reactor right off his chest, neutralizing him for good.

Iron Man and the other good guys are all more or less okay, but Ivan gets the last laugh as police drag him off, telling Tony “you lose!” repeatedly. Because while the villain had indeed wanted to follow through with killing Stark here, he already accomplished his baseline goal: proving very publicly that Iron Man is not invincible, and the technology to make him can be replicated.

Not a bad opening bit of action, though it’s unfortunate the movie takes so long to get to it. Despite being over quickly it includes some variety: Tony in the car, Tony struggling outside of it without his armor, the comedically tense bits as Happy distracts Vanko, and then finally Tony’s frantic struggle even after he gets the suit on. Once Iron Man finally gets to lay a hand on his foe, it’s pretty much over, but then of course it would be: Vanko’s apparatus provides him no real defense. In a way this is what the confrontation between Spider-Man and Dr. Octopus should have been like, logically.

Also, note that in contrast to the first film’s first big action sequence, Tony Stark experiences not an empowering moment as he frees himself from captivity, but an upsetting & humbling one as he gets knocked from his arrogant perch. Origin movies build the hero up, sequels gotta bring him down.

Grade: B-

Recommended Links: Mood music.

Coming Attractions: Think you’ve had some regrettable fights when you need to rein in your drunken buddy?

At least your drunk buddy wasn’t a superhero.

Time for the real Real Steel.

Iron Bros

2) Iron Man vs War Machine

The Fighters:

• Iron Man, aka Tony Stark. You know the drill. Played by Robert Downey Jr.
  • Armed with: the Iron Man Mark IV armor– he’s made some unknown improvements to the Mark III he finished the last film in.
• War Machine, aka Lt. Col James “Rhodey” Rhodes, the U.S. military’s liaison to Stark Industries and Tony’s BFF. Rhodey has an inner playfulness that helps him bond with Stark, but most of the time he’s very much the no-nonsense type and has to play frustrated straight man to his friend’s antics. Note that while Tony uses the term “war machine” in this scene, it’s an offhand remark and he’s never formally called that in the movie, though by Iron Man 3 it’s acknowledged he did officially go by his comic book alias for a while before switching to (sigh) Iron Patriot. Played by Don Cheadle, who is not Terence Howard.
  • Armed with: One of Tony’s Mark II prototype suits, unpainted and plain, but still quite formidable. It’s unstated in the film but between the fact that the suit has an external power source and also how well Rhodes handles himself in it, Stark has clearly built this suit FOR his friend to use and has already let him practice in it.

The Setup: At the peak of his dying-induced nihilism, Stark is holding a birthday bash at his house, and is entertaining a legion of phony “friends” by hosting in his Iron Man armor and engaging in reckless entertainment. (If anything, this element is probably the biggest contributor to Iron Man 2 leaving a sour taste in many fans’ mouths: narratively necessary and ultimately redeemed such antics might be, it’s just not that fun to see Tony Stark act like a self-destructive dick for such a chunk of the movie.)

Rhodes heads out to not only stop this behavior, but as a last-ditch effort to get Tony to comply with the US government’s demand to turn over his Iron Man technology. Unfortunately Rhodey’s pleas fall on deaf ears, so he has to go downstairs and hop into something that’ll help him be heard.

“I’m the party pooper.”

Ordering everyone out (you only have to ask once with a giant suit of advanced armor), Rhodes tells Stark he doesn’t deserve to have such amazing technology. Remarkably, the DJ has stuck around, and Tony orders him to play some music for them to fight to. The DJ picks “Another One Bites The Dust” by Queen, so it’s good to know Tony got his money’s worth when he hired the guy.

The Fight: They grapple a bit and Tony rockets the pair through a wall. They land in Tony’s personal gym which, fittingly enough, has its own boxing ring. Iron Man tries to dismissively walk away, but Rhodey starts throwing weight plates at him. Stark retaliates by grabbing a barbell, shaking the bottom weights off, and whacking Rhodey with it like a baseball bat, sending him right through the arena.

Rhodes seizes another pole (hard to see, probably one of the boxing ring’s corners) and knocks his friend through the ceiling, which takes the fight into a foyer where most of the guests had fled (are they waiting for their valets or something?). Here the two exchange in some extended fisticuffs.

“Jarvis, execute file RockemSockem.exe”

It’s amusing to watch them go back & forth, punching and throwing. Each blow lands with a distinctive clang that is both exciting and funny. Eventually Rhodey goes down pretty hard, leaving Tony to face a crowd of frightened onlookers. After a pause he leans in and angrily roars at them until they run away. It’s right about here that the music dies down, signaling that, like many parties hosted by an narcissistic drunk we’ve all been to, we’ve shifted from fun & games to self-hating anger. Hopped up on booze and adrenaline, Tony is disgusted with himself and everyone around him.

War Machine gets back up and brains his friend with the DJ’s turntable (that’s why the music stopped!), sending him into the fireplace. Rhodes just want to de-escalate the situation, but Tony points his repulsor-charged hand at Rhodey and goads him into doing the same. After a quick exchange of frantic dialogue, they blast at nearly the same time and the beams hit each other in the middle, creating a huge explosion which separates them and dazes Tony.

What did we say about crossing the streams?

Rhodes flies off with the armor, leaving Stark to stew in self-pity and a wrecked house.

Like most of Favreau’s action sequences, this is short but packed with so much rapid-fire goodness, if not greatness (the movie’s still saving all of its best cards for later). It plays out exactly like such a thing should play out. Yes, that seems like an obvious thing to say/expect, but that really is so much more difficult to pull off than it sounds, when it comes to a mix of CGI and live-action depicting two Iron Men (one of whom is drunk) having a contained brawl inside a mansion, so hats off to the special effects guys, sound team, storyboarders, etc. Downey and Cheadle do great work as well, albeit mostly as voices and occasional disembodied faces, their dialogue a perfect mix of genuine frustration and macho taunts.

In addition to injecting a much-needed burst of action into the film, this fight serves its purpose well in kicking off the final plummet to Tony’s personal nadir. The fact that it’s quite a bit of snappy fun at first makes it go down easier, but when it turns harsh at the end, the movie doesn’t shy away from the genuine ugliness of what the hero’s going through. Favreau pulls off the neat trick of making you want to see Tony take a good beating here, but still feel bad for him when it’s all over.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: Justin Hammer’s guards have 99 problems, and they are ALL this lady.

She’ll send you to ghost world

Can you handle a surprise break from our previous subject? Guess it’s time to TEST YOUR MIGHT

Ooh, did I ever love this when I was a kid. Like many in my generation I got caught up in the hype around this franchise, and went gaga over the film adaptation when it came out. Since then even its former fans have turned their noses up at it, but it needs a re-appraisal. No better time than the present.

1) Liu Kang vs Nameless Thug

The Fighters:

• Liu Kang, a Shaolin monk who has only reluctantly joined the tournament because hahahahaha you didn’t REALLY think I was going to do Mortal Kombat, did you? This movie is terrible. Gah, I’d grade the Van Damme Street Fighter movie before I did this one, because even though it’s objectively worse it’s also way more amusing in its badness. April Fool’s, sucker.

Back to regular updates tomorrow. As for this terrible trick… well, I won’t say I’m sorry.

Recommended Links: Why Mortal Kombat fighters should never show mercy.

Redheads. Am I right, fellas?

Yes, unfortunately.

3) Black Widow Cuts Loose

The Fighters:

• Black Widow aka Natasha Romanoff. A former Russian spy & assassin who’s become one of SHIELD’s greatest assets. Supremely skilled at infiltration, interrogation and various forms of combat, Natasha is the ideal agent. The comics have all sorts of wild stuff about how she got her abilities but so far the movies have wisely avoided that. But one element is that she’s a former ballet dancer, which definitely shows up in her gracefulness here. The Widow has gone undercover in Tony’s organization as “Natalie Rushman” in order to… it’s not really clear. Monitor him for SHIELD and help out just in case any supervillains show up, I think? Anyway, it’s fortunate she’s around for this. Played with understated gusto by Scarlett Johansson.
  • Armed with: Like, half a James Bond movie’s worth of little toys and weapons, all secreted in her various belt and wrist pouches. A pity the Avengers movie eschewed most of these in favor of simple if effective guns.
• Security guards, about six or seven of them, working at the offices of Justin Hammer, Tony Stark’s corporate rival. Played by stunt men.
• Also present is Happy Hogan, Tony’s loyal bodyguard, but he’s sort of a humorous non-factor here. Played by director Jon Favreau, who’s so money, baby.

The Setup: Hammer has secretly been conspiring with Ivan Vanko, our friend from Fight #1, to utilize arc reactor technology to make his own set of weaponized Iron Man-style drones. When said drones, along with a manually overriden War Machine, run amok at the Stark Expo, Romanoff and Hogan drive off to the Hammer building to investigate. On the way over, Natasha changes in the backseat into her special ass-kicking outfit.

When they arrive, Happy insists on coming in to “help.” Tee hee.

The Fight: It is so cool, you guys.

The first guard accosts them and Hogan immediately engages him in a fistfight. Black Widow just keeps right on moving, and when a second guard approaches, she nonchalantly slides right past him and, still moving, turns around and tosses two little discs towards the guard which paralyze him with a slight electrical charge.

This pretty much sets the tone for the entire sequence. Johansson’s Romanoff is graceful, smoothly unpredictable, and frighteningly competent. She’s not always moving forward but she definitely never stops moving– she slides, jumps, runs, dodges, ducks, dips, dives, and all the rest with purposeful swagger. Every move and decision just flows seamlessly into the next. It’s glorious to watch.

The other little technological tricks Natasha employs are two small gas pellets she throws around the corner to stun another pair of guns so she can lay them out, and later she hooks one guard’s neck with an extendable cord (not a wire, those are for killing) to hold him in place while she takes down his buddy.

But occasion permitting she often goes the physical-0nly route, as well. She rides a push-cart and jumps off it to double-kick one guard in the chest. She slides (again!) in-between another foe’s legs and attacks them as she does so, then jumps off his double-over body to land on the shoulders of another.

The best is the penultimate takedown, when she tackles a guard and does this crazy thing where she spins all over his body while he’s still standing, raining blows on him the whole time. Then as she strides calmly away she uses his chemical spray to do a no-look neutralization of the last straggler just as he tries to sneak up on her.

This is all over in a minute or so, and the action keeps cutting back to the progress of Happy’s brawl with the very first guy. It takes some doing, but Hogan finally knocks him out with a strong uppercut, and jubilantly looks up with “I got him!” only to find this:

Between the red hair and this, are we sure she’s actually Russian and not Irish?

It’s a gag that works all the more effectively because the movie treats Happy’s artless tumble with just one guy with the same gravitas as it does a super ninja-spy methodically destroying half a platoon; whenever the camera cut back to Hogan, there weren’t any overtly comedic signifiers like a change in music or something. You get caught up in all of it equally and, like Happy, don’t realize how much she accomplished while he was toiling away. Very clever.

This scene does cheat a little. On close examination (ever the bane of the summer blockbuster), a good number of Widow’s attacks really should not have incapacitated her targets. There are times we merely see her punch someone’s leg, shoulder or what-have-you, and then boom, the guy’s down for the count. Doesn’t matter how hard she’s hitting, unless she’s packing knockout darts or doing some kind of crazy nerve strikes (neither of which is visually apparent or brought up in the dialogue at some point in the film), they simply shouldn’t be getting knocked out.

However, no amount of rewinding and freeze-framing can get around the fact that this is ridiculously fun. Again, it’s brief, but the scene just glides with the same effortless charm as the Widow herself does, possessed of a too-cool-for-school cockiness that’s just on the right side of the endearing/pandering balance. In a movie that’s about high-tech armored superheroes blasting and whipping each other, a quick sequence starring a 5’3 jumpsuited girl in a running around in a hallway comes perilously close to being the best fight of the bunch.

The scene’s not perfect but it’s breezily, joyfully confident, and just like all those sleazy pick-up artists book tell you: confidence goes a long way.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Take down Iron Man?? Ha, you and what Army?

… oh.

In which Iron Man teams up with his greatest ally.

Er, no.

4) Iron Man and War Machine vs Whiplash and Hammer drones

The Fighters:

• Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, our hero. Doing a lot better than before, since he’s not dying. Played by Robert Downey Jr.
  • Armed with: The Mark VI Iron Man armor. It’s powered by a new element Tony invented (building off his father’s unfinished work), and in addition to powering his suit better it also overcomes the issue of the old arc reactor slowly giving Tony palladium poisoning even as it kept shrapnel out of his heart. (Iron Man 3 would later skunk this entire plot development with the casual revelation in the epilogue that Tony could have just had surgery to remove the shrapnel in the first place. Which… huh?) Along with the triangular chest plate that Joss Whedon hated, the Mark VI boasts a few modifications, though it’s not clear which are new.
• War Machine, aka James “Rhodey” Rhodes. Stark’s reconciled pal and Air Force big shot. Played by Don “The Dragon” Cheadle.
  • Armed with: The same Mark II suit as before, but kitted out with tons of extra armaments courtesy of the DOD and Justin Hammer. Plus a new paint job, trading in the too-shiny silver for ominous grey.
• Hammer drones, a couple dozen of them. Built by Vanko for Justin Hammer. There’s some slight variation amongst them depending on what function (land, sea, air) they’re built for, but they’re largely the same: arc reactor-powered, remote-controlled robots based loosely off the Iron Man designs. Outfitted mostly with automatic and missile weapons, and able to fly. They also go down very easy, whether it’s to a repulsor blast, a strong punch from the Mark VI, or a barrage of regular bullets; it’s strange because these are supposed to basically be Iron Man replacements, so they ought to be more durable. Perhaps Vanko deliberately built them to be inferior, or maybe they’re just prototypes.
• Whiplash, aka Ivan Vanko. Stark’s new nemesis, who escaped prison and built up some new toys thanks to Hammer. Played by Mickey Rourke.
  • Armed with: A much more sophisticated version of his last getup. The improved Whiplash armor covers Vanko’s entire body much like the Iron Man suit. It’s also huge, though not quite the size of the Iron Monger. It contains a couple neat tricks like retractable plates in the feet which are good for locking down an opponent, but its main offensive capability is the two extra long energy whips housed in its forearms. There are cycling mechanisms visible in the back which make the whips extendable and constantly charged with electricity. It’s an intimidating design, but oddly lacking the iconic look of the previous incarnation, with all its fearless & bare-chested simplicity.

But, you know, this works too.

The Setup: Vanko has baited Tony into a trap at the Stark Expo in New York. After Iron Man arrives there and greets War Machine (who’d been demonstrating his new look on stage along with the drones), Vanko takes remote control of all the drones, as well as War Machine, and sends them all against Iron Man.

This launches an amazing chase sequence where Tony draws his pursuers away from the Expo and out into the streets & skies of Queens, evading fire and even managing to take out several of them. Eventually Iron Man is able to isolate himself and War Machine inside a large garden dome. Tony contains its attacks without hurting the helpless pilot inside until, in the aftermath of glorious Fight #3, Black Widow gets into Hammer’s computer systems and restores control of War Machine back to Rhodey.

The two’s reconciliation quickly devolves into macho one-upsmanship as they squabble over whose suit is the best; it’s highly amusing to watch such a silly argument play out with both characters wearing super high-tech armor. They spend so much time bitching that they don’t quite get into tactical position before the drones land and, one by one, surround the pair.

“We’re surrounded.”
“Good, that means we have them RIGHT where we want them!”

Without saying a word, the two close their face plates and go to work.

The Fight: At first, there’s actually no music– Favreau lets the endless cacophony of battle provide all the noise he needs. And what a cacophony it is: staccato bursts of automatic fire from the drones and War Machine, occasionally punctuated by repulsor blasts from Iron Man.

So much is happening at once you barely know where to look at any given time. The camera pans around smoothly to show the carnage as the two heroes unload at and dodge fire from the iron platoon surrounding them. Rhodey fires from both wrist gauntets and his shoulder cannon simultaneously, while Stark mixes in repulsor rays with punches for those that get too close.

After the initial shot just showcasing all-purpose chaos, Favreau goes on to highlight a couple moments of particular badassery. War Machine grabs a drone that had gotten close and delivers a point-blank spray of machine gun fire that cuts it in half down the middle. Iron Man reprises a hit move from the first movie when he leans back casually to dodge an incoming missile (in a subtle detail, we hear a beeping sound from his HUD to indicate the computer has detected a lock), then returns fire in the form of small missiles from a hidden compartment on his wrist, which take down three drones at once; it’s so neat Tony even happily calls it out, and his friend compliments it.

It’s about 45 seconds of perfectly exhilarating CGI chaos– intense, glorious, undiluted. And it doesn’t outstay its welcome, either: when Stark realizes that there’s just too many bad guys to deal with, he orders his friend to duck and then activates two extremely powerful laser beams, which cut down all remaining drones as he pivots in a circle.

Tony responds to Rhodey’s quite reasonable suggestion that he should lead with such an attack next time by pointing out that the beams are a one-time thing; they burn for a few seconds and then they’re done. Which is too bad, because what they initially think is just the last drone coming in is actually Vanko himself, big as life and twice as ugly.

After some talk, Rhodes launches what he assumes will be his secret weapon, the “Ex-Wife,” but it fails terribly, bouncing harmlessly off Whiplash’s armor and falling to the ground with a pathetic little fart noise. It doesn’t really make sense (would Vanko really know it wouldn’t work? Shouldn’t Rhodey have gotten farther away if HE thought it was going to work? etc) but it’s a fun excuse for just one more joke at Hammer’s expense.

Tony fires his own opening salvo– in another callback to the first film, it’s all those little smart dart-rockets he used against the terrorist hostage-takers in his Mark III debut) at Vanko’s exposed face, but his helmet comes back instantly and deflects them. Now it’s Ivan’s turn.

From then on, it’s really mostly Ivan’s fight. The new Whiplash armor provides a seemingly perfect mix of durability, speed, and offensive capability. War Machine’s more conventional weapons can’t put too much of a dent in Vanko before he’s able to evade or fight back, and Iron Man’s quick maneuvers are canceled out by the long reach of those unpredictable whips. In what turns out to be a fairly brief struggle, both heroes are repeatedly knocked around, seized by the whips and slammed to the ground. Poor Rhodey even gets his shoulder cannon cut right off.

Stark gives Vanko the best run for his money when he comes in hard with a flying punch as Vanko is distracted by beating up on Rhodes, but a few blows later Ivan comes back even harder with a headbutt. Soon, Whiplash lassos a hero in each whip, holding them on opposite sides of him. It seems pretty bad at first, but at Tony’s suggestion, the two re-visit the idea of “crossing the streams”– having their two repulsor blasts meet in mid-air and creating an enormous energy feedback, this time with Whiplash in the middle.

Whaddya know, it works.

The irony is, at that point the heroes didn’t necessarily have to resort to such a crazy tactic, because the very nature of Ivan’s double-hold meant that he left himself wide open to any attack. They were free to shoot at him in more direct ways as well.

After the smoke clears, a dying Vanko reprises his words from the race track, telling Stark “you lose.” Pulling a Metroid, Vanko starts the timer on bombs built into his suit as well as those of all the fallen drones, hoping for a Pyrrhic victory. Unfortunately for the villain, it would have been, in the words of comedian Doug Benson, more accurate for him to say “you lose… unless you happen to be wearing a suit of armor that flies really fast,” because the bombs have a long enough fuse for Stark & Rhodes to not just fly out of the blast zone but also for one of them to swing by and get Pepper to safety. Whoops.

For all Iron Man 2′s faults, where it really improves on the original is in its climax. The first film ended on a sort of limp note as it had the hero hobbled from the beginning and only barely limping to the finish line. The sequel, on the other hand, is a three-part roller coaster ride that starts with an extended chase scene, segues quickly into the chaotic destruction of the drones, and ends with not one but two fully-powered heroes up against a seemingly implacable boss.

The final fight is, unfortunately, a little too one-sided, but this is balanced out somewhat by just how one-sided (in the other direction) the showdown with the drones was. Also, while “believability” is a relative term when it comes to things like this, Whiplash’s dominance comes not from objective superiority but from a mix of quick-thinking tactics, technology, and surprise– exactly the kind of thing that would let you prevail in such an encounter. Just as in a real-life fight, you don’t win by gradually wearing down the other guy’s “hit points” or some such, it’s all a matter of acting decisively and applying just the right amount of pressure at the right place & time.

Well done.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Stop.

Hammer Time.

“Can fifteen years of imaginary training really be put to use?”

Honestly, the fact that the dude on the ground with a knife in his back manages to win this fight isn’t even the third most shocking thing to happen in this movie.

A lot of times people tell you that a movie is “so messed up” that it will “blow your mind” and it mostly turns out to be either mindless garbage (e.g., Riki-O) or tiring “provocative” pap (e.g., pretty much every Tarantino-wannabe in the wake of Pulp Fiction). Oldboy, the original 2003 cult film out of South Korea, is one of the few films that really lives up to that moniker.

A tale about the depths of revenge and obsession, Oldboy is a thriller but not a true action movie; nevertheless, one of its most talked-about (and believe you me, there is a LOT to talk about when it comes to Oldboy) scenes is an extended fist fight around the middle. Even without hearing the hype, when you first see the movie and come across this sequence, you know instinctively you’ve witnessed the birth of a new legend, and that director Park Chan-wook has made something indelible and unique. And he did it all in a single, continuous take.

Oldboy: The Hallway Fight

The Fighters:

• Oh Dae-su, our protagonist. A philandering, alcoholic businessman whose life took an abrupt turn when, without warning or explanation, he was kidnapped and imprisoned. For fifteen years Dae-su was locked in a hotel-like room with no contact with the outside world besides the TV, and eating the same food shoved under his door every day. Trapped for a decade and a half, Dae-su goes more than a little crazy, and hardens his body & mind into an instrument of vengeance against his tormentors. Then, with just as little warning, he’s set free. Played by Choi Min-sik.
  • Armed with: An iconic hammer. Not like a medieval war hammer or something, just a simple household tool.
• Thugs, about a dozen or so. Employed by the man who runs the place where Dae-su was locked up. They’re mean but unpolished, and in various degrees of fighting trim.
  • Armed with: Several have simple wooden boards or tubes as crude weapons.

The Setup: After a little while on the outside, Oh Dae-su has tracked down the place where he was locked up, but the man who runs the place is not the man who ordered the imprisonment, nor does he work directly for him. Apparently this kind of thing happens enough in Korea to warrant such a dedicated third party’s existence. After some decidedly physical interrogation of the business owner, Dae-su learns everything he can from him, and holds him at knife-point as he approaches a hallway full of thugs who block his way out.

He asks the goons which of them have the same blood type as their boss, and when he gets a volunteer, tells him to take the tortured man to the hospital so he’ll live. Then, without wasting a moment, our “hero” charges into battle. Notably, he drops the knife he’d been holding.

A questionable call, tactically speaking.

This is significant, because, along with his helping to save the life of the man he’d just brutalized, it shows that for all his pent-up aggression looking for an outlet, Oh Dae-su isn’t looking to kill, at least not yet. He’s looking to hurt.

It’s pretty messed up.

The Fight: Dae-su’s fighting is both canny and frantically unfocused, paradoxical as that might sound. He does what he can to keep moving and changing targets, not staying in one place long enough. Still, it’s not long before he finds himself surrounded by the goons rather than having them all to one side, and he tries to correct that by seizing one around the neck as a temporary hostage, keeping the others at bay.

He can’t keep that up for long, of course, and quickly loses control of the situation. He takes a few hits, loses his hammer, and goes down, getting repeatedly kicked & stomped by the mob. Surprising the group with his ferocity, Dae-su gets back on his feet and tackles the goon nearest to him, shoving him back into the crowd.

But numbers are numbers, and the underdog gets put down again, this time for even longer and with far more blows. When one thug stabs Dae-su square in the back with his own dropped knife, everyone seems to think it’s over, as they all back off while the intruder stays doubled over in pain for many long seconds.

Incredibly, Dae-su rises again and goes back on the offensive; this is the sort of thing that can happen when you spend fifteen years building up your Beast Mode. This time he manages to remain on the opposite side of the hallway and take his foes on in a more manageable way– largely because they seem, and not without good reason, afraid of this unpredictable wild man. The gang’s collective body language conveys a sort of “I don’t wanna be next, YOU be next!” feel, as they stay clustered at a safe distance and only close in haltingly.

Many are still armed with wooden boards, but few can really put them to good use as Dae-su is able to avoid them (one snaps against the wall in a wild swing) or break them with his elbow like a badass. Between the protagonist’s intimidating wildness and their own exhaustion & injuries, the gang gets even sloppier, missing easy blows and even just falling to the ground of their own accord. One of them picks up Dae-su’s hammer and tries to use it, but Dae-su is quicker and puts him down with a series of punches.

The last man takes several blows to go down, but when he does, no one gets back up again. Dae-su’s the last man standing in a corridor full of wounded, tired, terrified thugs. With, incidentally, a knife still stuck in his back.

Triumphant, Dae-su retrieves his hammer and heads for the elevator. He doesn’t even react when a cut in his head finally starts gushing blood. After a few seconds, he breaks out in a deranged smile, and since we can’t see what he sees, we assume it’s just pure self-satisfaction, pride in what he’s done.

This is not the smile of a well-adjusted man.

But the next cut reveals that it’s even creepier: the elevator has just opened to reveal another handful of glaring goons. Dae-su’s not happy because he survived a gruesome ordeal, he’s happy because it isn’t over yet.

Moments later we see the elevator open up on the ground level, and Dae-su exits amidst a cluster of slumped over enemies. Of course.

This is a rare cinematic feat where a sequence dives so hard into the mundane that it comes out the other side as Epic. This isn’t a titanic clash between a champion martial artist and a group of skilled opponents; it’s a simple brawl between hard men. The weapons are crude and ordinary. Given that it’s all in one take, there’s very little room for cinematic trickery to make the combat and the combatants seem more impressive than they are. Even the music is understated, a haunting mixture of sadness & excitement. There’s even neat little touches, like the slightly chubby, shirtless thug who takes a hammer to the thigh early on and spends the rest of the battle limping.

Oldboy’s signature fight seemingly breaks so many rules of cinematic fighting, and while rubbing your face in gritty realism it somehow makes you believe the impossible. Quite the achievement indeed.

“Apparently, it can.”

Grade: A+

Coming Attractions: FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

Ah, the things homeschoolers miss out on.

Finally, a true clash of the titans!

Can’t you just smell the epicness??

Three O’Clock High is a bit of a forgotten film from the 80s, unknown even to many of the people who tend to like this sort of thing (I hadn’t even heard of it until less than a year of ago). Watching it now, it’s easy to see why, tragic though that might be, it fell to the cultural wayside. It’s an uneven movie, aiming as it does for an odd balance of broad farce, random weirdness, and straightforward drama… but what works about it really does work quite well, and the rest of it is inoffensively silly enough. Not a great movie by any means, but one that’s hard not to like, considering the creativity and effort that’s bursting awkwardly from its seams. (It also didn’t help the movie’s box office that it had no major stars of the time in it. Even the cast members who went on to become famous are largely on the sidelines.) It’s certainly more memorable than at least half of John Hughes’ overrated angst-fests.

Bottom line, the film has personality. That counts for a lot.

Three O’Clock High: Jerry vs Buddy

The Fighters:

• Jerry Mitchell, a senior at Weaver High School. Jerry is sort of an Everyteen, admirable but relatable, with no defined place in the school ecosystem Hollywood always insists is so rigid. He’s clean-cut, smart and hard-working, well-liked enough by people who know him but not popular, coolly casual most of the time but nervous under pressure. Played by Casey Siemaszko, the bane of spell-check.
• Buddy Revell, a new transfer student from a school for delinquents. Buddy’s reputation has preceded his arrival, with half the students gossiping about his epic propensity & capacity for violence. Surely the rumors are exaggerated, but he’s clearly dangerous enough. Hulking, surly, and dressed in the torn-jeans-and-leather-jacket look that’s been universally accepted American shorthand for “bad boy” for the better part of a century, Buddy is one mean-looking dude. In one of the more refreshing aspects of Three O’Clock high, Revell does not “suddenly” become a good guy or be revealed as a misunderstood nice guy. While he is more than you might think at first, he is still basically what he appears to be: a violent & cruel bully. Played by Richard Tyson, who you probably recognize as the bad guy from Kindergarten Cop. His mom isn’t here to help him but she’s not so tough without her car anyway.

There’s some small but pivotal intervention by others, and a brief use of brass knuckles.

The Setup: Due to a misunderstanding in the men’s room (er, not what it sounds like), Jerry becomes the target of Buddy’s rage, and the new student informs him that at the end of the school day, the two of them will have a fight.

Given Revell’s reputation, that sounds more like an execution, and word of the upcoming duel spreads, building to a fever pitch amongst the student body. All Jerry’s attempts to get out of the fight fail or backfire until, using money he purloined from his campus job, Jerry bribes Buddy to leave him alone for several hundred dollars. Buddy agrees, but regards Jerry with open and genuine disgust for his cowardice. Fittingly, the blow to his dignity puts our hero through far more turmoil than the threat of physical violence did.

He goes to be sad about it in the bathroom. Lotta bathroom stuff in this movie.

After some soul-searching, Jerry decides it’s time to face the music. He re-confronts Buddy, demanding his money back and telling him the fight’s back on. The bully demurs at first, but finally grants him his wish. As the school day winds to a close, Jerry strides purposefully to their battlefield in the parking lot, soon finding himself surrounded by an almost comically large crowd of frenzied, cheering students. Siemaszko’s body language here is impressive: despite his diminutive size and buttoned-down appearance, he actually comes off like a bit of a badass, charged with a renewed sense of purpose. He carries himself in a subtle way: not cocky and assuming he’s going to win, just determined to face his destiny like a man.

As with the characterization of Buddy, the lack of subversion here is refreshing. There are no “higher lessons” imparted here where the characters learn that violence isn’t the answer or some goofy shit like that; the movie promises you a fight and it GIVES you a fight. It’s a bit of a throwback– fitting, since it’s openly modeled on/a satire of classic Westerns.

The Fight: How does a guy like Jerry beat a guy like Buddy? Well, a straight victory was never going to happen. Our hero displays some canniness & luck, but he also gets by with a little from his friends.

The first punch thrown doesn’t actually hit either of the two combatants. Just as they square off, they’re interrupted by the school’s principal, confident in his ability to put a stop to such shenanigans.

His confidence is… misplaced.

But Buddy doesn’t give a crap for authority, and when he touches Buddy’s arm to pull him away, Buddy decks him, and tells a shocked Jerry it’s his turn. This actually makes Jerry’s newfound confidence waver a bit, which Buddy takes advantage of by pushing him fiercely into the side of a van.

Fortunately, Mitchell gets a breather from the intervention of his not-girlfriend, a goofy hippie named Franny. Unfortunately, she’s little more than an irritation to the huge bully.

But what an irritation she is.

Revell gives her a relatively chivalrous dismissal in the form of a harsh shove to the face. Franny’s mistreatment stirs Jerry a bit, enough to rise, taunt Buddy and rush back into battle.

Jerry gets a punch to the throat for his trouble, but while he’s down he pays the bully back with SWEEP THE LEG! a nasty-looking kick to the shin. He follows up with the questionable tactic of jumping on Buddy’s back.

After some frantic spinning around, Buddy tosses Jerry overhead and he lands on a car hood. The school’s maniacal security guard (played by a hammy Mitch Pileggi, who would later be better known as Skinner from The X-Files) also tries to break things up, but even he falls to a single blow from Buddy. Meanwhile, Jerry stands again to give some more trash talk, and even gets a straight punch to Buddy’s nose that surprises both of them.

Unfortunately it’s not enough to bring him down, and the villain retaliates with a huuuuuuge roundhouse that leaves Jerry slumped on the ground in a helpless daze. Seeing this as the proper time to deliver the Fatality, Buddy gets out his brass knuckles. As he marches slowly over to Jerry, the director pulls a common but neat trick where the camera focuses first on the brass knuckles themselves, then they go out of focus as we see Jerry’s reaction to them.

Buddy hoists Jerry up and rears back his other hand. But just before he can deliver the final blow, he’s interrupted by a flying tackle from Vincent, Jerry’s best friend who he’d had a falling out with earlier in the day. While the scrawny Vincent tries to redeem himself by raining mostly ineffective blows down on Buddy, Jerry’s younger sister spies the dropped knuckles and brings them to her tormented sibling.

Digging into his last reserves of strength, the battered Jerry rises yet again and faces off against Buddy, who had just downed Vincent with a knee to the crotch. The crowd senses this will be the final showdown, and their cheering reaches a fever pitch. Individual characters are shown all urging the hero to triumph, with even the principal awakening from his stupor to deliver an uncharacteristic (and hilarious), “Don’t f–k this up, Mitchell!”

Buddy, finally wary of Jerry’s tenacity, lunges in with a punch, which Jerry barely dodges. Then, in super slow-motion, Jerry channels all of his might into one brass-enhanced blow to Buddy’s sneering mug. The bully weebles, wobbles, and finally falls down.

You’d think after losing to a guy like Jerry, for his next adversary he’d pick somebody besides Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Jerry wins, and the crowd surges around him as the triumphant hero.

Afterward, in order to show their appreciation for Jerry and make up for the “robbery” he’d staged to get the bribe money, the students all show up at Jerry’s campus store and “purchase” standard printer paper at a dollar per sheet, effectively donating a huge sum of money to him. Finally, Buddy himself shoves his way to the store’s counter, and looks Jerry in the eye as he personally returns the wad of money the hero had given him earlier. He regards Jerry with a look that’s not quite a smile, just enough of a softening of his face to indicate his well-earned respect. Again, this isn’t an after-school special; the bully doesn’t suddenly turn good and become Jerry’s pal, but he is man enough to admit defeat.

As silly and uneven as the movie is, this stirring and fairly straightforward fight is oddly fitting for it. The staging actually makes Jerry’s eventual victory seems plausible, and while the actual “fight” fighting is pretty thin, the whole thing unfolds quite thrillingly regardless. Giving this absurd & petty confrontation an un-ironic bombast actually serves to make the story more honest, perfectly conveying the outsized emotional lens through which teenagers live their lives; everything feels so epic and important you’re in high school. In fact, in that way it’s a bit of a precursor to Joss Whedon’s approach to Buffy.

Grade: A

Recommended Links: Comedian and podcasting emperor Chris Hardwick recommends Three O’Clock High as a lost classic.

Coming Attractions: “MORE superheroes? Jeez. Will you at least pick something that everyone likes this time?”

… maaaaaaaybe.

No no, don’t run. It’s okay. This is a safe place.

Don’t I look trustworthy?

Spider-Man 3 gets a bad rap, only some of which is deserved. It’s overstuffed, self-indulgent, and filled with are you-effing-kidding-me plot developments. Yet it’s not without its charms. The performances still mostly work, it’s ambitious (if too much for its own good), and in many ways, the action is more inventive than ever. So while it deserves to be studied as a textbook case of Franchise Bloat, the fanboy rage aimed at it is a bit over the top.

Most of all, I can’t fully hate it because it does offer a veritable buffet of fights. To finish what we started with this film series, let’s dive into them.

It also has the best Bruce Campbell cameo, but that, sadly, is out of this site’s purview.

1) Spider-Man vs The New Goblin

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man. You know the drill on his powers and whatnot. A lot happier than he’s been for pretty much the entire saga, and preparing to propose to his lady love. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• Harry Osborn, son of the first film’s Green Goblin. Driven to take revenge against Spider-Man for his father’s death and newly armed with the knowledge of his secret identity, he undergoes the same chemical treatments. The procedures increase his strength, durability and reaction time, but don’t seem to result in any multiple personalities. Guess that’s only an occasional side effect. Note that he’s only called “the New Goblin” in supplementary materials, not in the movie itself; when Harry took up his dad’s mantle in the comics, he just went by “Green Goblin” again. Played by precious snowflake James Franco.
  • Armed with: A (thankfully) streamlined version of his dad’s equipment: the mask is simpler & retractable, the glider (which can also automatically return to Harry if separated) is about the size of a skateboard, and rather than bright green armor Harry has opted for a comfortable set of black clothing with light padding and a few attachments. He also has a set of retractable blades hooked up to at least one of his arms, and carries a green, katana-like sword. And while this Goblin tends to go for more up-close fighting, he also his father’s pumpkin-themed bombs and whatnot.

The Setup: At the end of the first film, Norman Osborn’s last-second attempt to kill Spider-Man inadvertently caused his own suicide, and Harry, ignorant of his father’s dual life, blames Spidey for it since that’s who he saw dropping the body off. At the end of the second film, Harry learned not only his “nemesis” Spider-Man’s true identity, but, after stumbling onto one of his backup lairs and talking to ghosts in the mirror (yep), about his father’s own legacy. Somehow his dad’s status as a certified supervillain (especially one who almost got Harry killed and either endangered or actively tried to murder his girlfriend Mary Jane on two separate occasions) doesn’t alter his view of Spidey’s apparent actions back in 2002, because apparently the Osborn intelligence genes skipped a generation.

And so it is that as Peter Parker is zipping happily along in a motor scooter, the masked Harry zooms in from out of nowhere and plucks him into the air.

Then again, look at that face. Can you really blame Harry?

The Fight: Our hero’s spider-sense may have been conveniently forgotten, but not his fighting instincts. As the two swerve all around the New York skyline, Peter doesn’t hesitate to trade punches with the mysterious figure who attacked him in broad, uh, nightlight.

The Goblin gets a good surface slash along Peter’s belly with his arm blades, but then Peter breaks free and webs himself to the spire of a tall building. As he swings slowly around it he fires several web “bullets” at his adversary, most of which have little effect.

Osborn cuts through the web rope and punches Peter hard enough to embed him into the brickwork of another building. It’s here he reveals his face to his genuinely surprised friend, telling him “you knew this was coming.” (Did he? It seems an odd thing to expect.) As he continues his attack, Parker tries to explain what he should have two movies ago– i.e., your dad was a freaking nutbar who accidentally killed himself while trying to murder me for no good reason– but Harry’s too worked up too listen. A few missed punches knock a whole section of wall off, with the uncostumed Spider-Man clinging to it as it falls. As it tumbles end over end through the air, Raimi tracks and slowly pushes into it, and somehow manages to pull off a sneaky transition from CGI to the real Tobey Maguire.

Peter leaps to safety but gets knocked around in mid-air some more, then seized and dragged against a building. After getting thrown through two sets of glass windows, he loses the family heirloom ring he’d been planning to give Mary Jane. Pissed off, he’s able to get solid footing on Harry’s board, wrestle him a bit, and knock him off. While Peter goes to retrieve the ring just in time (it should absolutely have hit the ground by then), Harry’s board auto-homes in on him and saves him from splattering on the pavement.

Perhaps sensing that his opponent’s flight gives him an advantage in the open air, Parker tries to escape down a series of narrow alleyways. The Goblin orients himself sideways gives chase at high speed, narrowly avoiding many obstacles as he closes the distance.

James Franco, serious actor.

When he’s near enough, Harry whips out that sweet green sword and takes a few swings. When that doesn’t work, he launches a handful of his dad’s guided pumpkin blade/bombs, which Peter mutters that he (quite reasonably) hates.

Unable to dodge while being pursued, the hero gets cut up a good bit. But a vertical turnaround (he swings all the way straight up and reverses course in mid-air) puts Harry right in the line of fire instead, giving him a taste of his own medicine and Peter enough time to deflect most of them with his webbing. He grabs the last one with a web rope and flings it right at Harry, who manages to survive the explosion mostly unscathed.

Somehow.

But the ka-boom was only a distraction for Spider-Man to set up his real finisher. As soon as Osborn looks up, he runs neck-first into a web-clothesline Peter was holding taut. His trip comes to a brutally abrupt stop, and he even manages to hit a few more obstacles on the way down. Yowch.

To see how far superhero cinema had come in such a short amount of time, one has to do nothing more than look at this fight. Both characters’ abilities are creatively explored, with a few surprising developments that still arise organically from the way they operate (e.g., the finishing clothesline). As is the mark of many a good fight scene, there is a reasonable sense of give-and-take between the two; the New Goblin is formidable but not invincible, with Spidey needing to employ a combination of power and smarts to take him down.

Not only that, it happens in a wild, fast-paced frenzy; indeed, the action is so inventive and fast-paced here that it borders on ridiculous. We’re a long way from the original movie, with its admirable but stiff attempts at using special effects & stunt work to capture impossible combat, and where a simple lack of sucking prompted a collective sigh of relief. This fight here is more complex than anything in the first and arguably even the second film, and it’s the opening battle. There are surely other, legitimate reasons people found this movie disappointing, but a big one was that by 2007, we were plenty spoiled.

And, of course, the fight does end with this happening:

Classic.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Bring me a dream.

Make him the cutest that… well, we can forget that part.

Enter Sandman.

Uh, not quite.

2) Spider-Man vs Sandman

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• Flint Marko, aka Sandman. An escaped convict with a heart of gold, Marko seems like a vicious thug but really commits all his crimes to help his sick daughter (awww). In a fan-maddening retcon, this movie “reveals” (i.e., invents) the fact that Marko was not only the partner of the crook who robbed the wrestling arena, but also the one who really killed Uncle Ben… then at the end of the movie they undo the retcon, but only slightly. Anyway, while on the run from Johnny Law, Marko fell into a suspiciously unguarded scientific experiment involving some sort of weird new radiation and a pit of sand, so of course now he’s a sand monster. In addition to being able to shift his body into pretty much any sand-like shape he wants, Sandman is effectively invulnerable against conventional attacks: the harmed pieces of his body just turn into sand, and eventually they re-form. He’s pretty much the T-1000, but with sand… and short of a handy lava pit, there seems to be no guaranteed way to kill him. It should be noted that composer Danny Elfman, at the behest of Raimi (as always, showing his campy roots), devised a musical theme for Sandman that’s something straight out of a 1950s monster movie. It’s simultaneously laughable and irresistible. Played by Thomas Haden Church, in the midst of a very unexpected career resurgence.

Thomas Haden Church, serious actor.

The Setup: After getting the hang of his abilities in a poignant scene, Marko decides to return his old past time of reluctant crime, in order to pay yet more medical bills for his cherubic little daughter. For his public debut, he opts for the tried & true route of attacking an armored car in broad daylight. He enters the vehicle while it’s still moving and takes out the security detail.

Unfortunately for him he didn’t try this in some nearby city that doesn’t have its own superhero, because New York’s current favorite son, Spider-Man, notices these goings-on and swings into action. Flint tells the vigilante to back off so he won’t get hurt, which Spidey brushes aside.

The Fight: Cocky as ever, the hero dodges the first punch and throws a devastating counter… which goes harmlessly through Marko’s chest.

My spider sense is telling me this is going to be a tad one-sided.

Sandman retaliates by enlarging one of his fists (that’s a thing he can do) and knocking Spidey through the back of the vehicle. He only barely keeps up by webbing back on to it and getting dragged from behind on a piece of broken door he rides like a skateboard.

Marko gets on top of the van to escape (seems impractical), and Spider-Man launches a few web bullets at him. They form a few temporary holes in the crook’s chest, but mostly just seem to annoy him. A bigger inconvenience is when Spidey gets to the top, avoids Marko with some nifty spin moves and kicks Sandman’s legs right out from under him. Literally.

But even while just a torso, the villain is formidable up close, and knocks Spidey away onto a bus while he rebuilds himself. Undeterred, the hero comes back and clings to the side of the van, which unfortunately leaves him wide open to a hammer-shaped blow from Sandy that knocks him clear through the other side of the van.

Thor’s gonna be pissed when he sees you stole his MO

Parker survives, but the vehicle is out of control. The hero just barely saves the two drivers from an impending collision, and when he checks back for Marko, his new foe is gone, though he had to leave the money behind.

Spider-Man retreats to dump sand out of a boot (who knows how many other crevices it got into. Somewhere, Anakin Skywalker nods understandingly) and wonders where the heck all “these guys” come from.

A short, varied introduction to what Sandman can do. Both characters behave believably under the circumstances, with reluctant villain Marko fighting intensely & but savagely, and Spidey adapting rapidly to the situation. Sandman’s practically intangible nature makes anything resembling extended fisticuffs laughable, so Raimi & co had to come up with some creative acrobatics in order to compensate. Setting the whole thing in and around a moving car during heavy traffic ups the ante as well. Nothing special but a respectable placeholder.

Grade: C+

Coming Attractions: Spider-Man’s deadliest asset is the thing ability Sandman doesn’t have: the ability to change clothes.

At least Flint still has that winning smile.

Clear as mud.

Ew.

3) Spider-Man vs Sandman, round 2

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker aka Spider-Man. Our hero’s gone down an increasingly dark path ever since an alien symbiote he unknowingly encountered* has bonded with him and created a blackened suit, which grants him increased power while subtly amping up his negative qualities, such as aggression. (It also makes him act like a jackass hipster, in one of the movie’s most criticized indulgences.) Unfortunately it enters his life at the worst possible time: just as he’s going through a messy fight with Mary Jane and facing the revelation of Marko’s involvement in Uncle Ben’s death. So like the kind of alcoholic who drinks because deep down he WANTS to act like a drunken a-hole, Peter enters a self-destructive spiral where he keeps donning the suit to enable his worst impulses. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• Flint Marko, aka Sandman. Nothing new here. Played by Thomas Haden Church.

[*The symbiote crawled onto Peter's scooter after landing nearby, in one of the quietest meteor landings in history. A bit  convenient, but the way Spidey finds the thing in the original comics is considerably too... involved to adapt here.]

The Setup: Not much to it. Shortly after Peter has gotten re-adjusted to his new suit, he hears some police reports of Sandman committing yet another robbery, and heads off to where he was last seen. On the way, he encounters Eddie Brock, Peter’s new professional rival, and they have an ugly confrontation. This will be important later, duh.

Marko has headed underground (in a subtle touch, Spider-Man throws respect for property to the wind by simply ripping a huge chunk of concrete away to make his entrance, rather than finding a more conventional way) and Spidey slowly stalks him through a darkened sewer/train tunnel area. For a little while, at least, it’s the sneakiest he’s been since he chased down carjacker Dennis Carradine back in 2002.

Metal Gear Spidey

The Fight: Peter surprises his prey by lowering down from the ceiling right in front of him, and after dodging some blows, taunts him about Uncle Ben’s death– something that visibly unnerves Marko.

When a subway train roars by, Spider-Man webs himself to the side of it, letting its momentum pull him in for a strong double-kick against Sandman. The crook goes flying, dropping his bags of money (again) and lands on another platform in between two tracks. The hero tries to swing in again, but this time Flint is ready.

Acrobatic even in the confined underground, Spider-Man recovers from his fall, loops all the way around from underneath the platform and strikes Marko from behind. The two then engage in some solid, painful-looking fisticuffs as two trains come simultaneously from opposite directions. Peter gets bounced around back & forth between the fast-moving cars like a human pinball, but Marko’s turn is even worse, as he gets half his face sheared off when the increasingly merciless hero grinds it up against one of the trains.

Sandman recovers his mass with some nearby dirt, but still, probably not the best experience.

After a little while of this, hero tackles villain off the platform and they both take a long fall, hitting a big pipe on the way down. Marko lands in a small puddle, and finds that the water is making it hard for him to maintain his cohesion. Spider-Man notices this too, and when he swings Marko’s way again, it’s not to hit him but to reach the big water pipe nearby. He violently opens it, making a burst of water come out and hit his opponent.

Degenerating into Mudman, Flint gets washed away in the flood, eventually coming apart completely as he hits a grate. Without remorse, Spidey smugly bids his foe good riddance.

A comic villain having an ambiguous “death” scene and getting carried away by water? Surely this will be the last we see of him.

The rematch with Sandman is short but an improvement in the Exciting department. Raimi & co get around the issue of the character’s seeming invulnerability not just by finishing him off with his Kryptonite-equivalent, but by having Spider-Man employ aggressive and creative techniques to keep pressing his advantage. This has the handy side benefit of further establishing not just the increased power offered by the black suit, but also emphasizing its effects on Peter’s personality; as fun as it is to watch this fight happen, there’s an undercurrent of “wrongness” to Spidey’s callous brutality. It’s the rare superhero fight where the villain feels like the victim… though, granted, Raimi had already stacked the deck beforehand by letting us in on Marko’s hard-luck story.

The underground setting is a new one for this film series, and handily allows the hero’s dark behavior to be complemented by the literal darkness of the surroundings. Who knows how “realistic” it is– half the time it just looks like a straight-up cave, but also has trains and giant water pipes running through it everywhere– but it definitely fits in with the movie’s cartoony aesthetic. Also, New York’s mass transit system played a big part in the previous movie’s climax, but you almost forget that because of the different role the trains play in this battle. Clever.

Grade: B-

Coming Attractions: Spider-Man vs Wolverine!

Ha, you wish.

In which two bros can’t just hug it out.

It’s like this, but it’s also not like this.

4) Peter vs Harry

The Fighters:

• Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man. More accustomed than ever to his black suit. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• Harry Osborn, aka the New Goblin. Renewing his ill-fated quest for vengeance against Spider-Man. Played by James Franco.

The Setup: In what is possibly the most ridiculous head-slappers of this movie, Harry got freaking amnesia from the injuries he suffered at the end of his last fight. Amnesia. Is there any more clear sign of screenwriters just transparently giving up at finding a way to put a character in narrative “time-out” until it’s convenient? Gah. Specifically, a form of his amnesia that transported him mentally back to around 19 or so, before his life started turning to crap. (Judging from some of Franco’s performance, though, he actually regressed all the way back to kindergarten.) This plot device wears off just after Innocent Harry had an inadvertently romantic moment with a vulnerable Mary Jane, and Osborn decides to seize on this as his chance to hurt Peter on a personal level before baiting him into another confrontation.

Harry blackmails MJ by promising to kill Peter (you know, that thing he’s determined to do anyway) if she doesn’t pretend to dump him for good. After the staged breakup, Harry rubs salt in the wound by violating the Bro Code and telling Peter he’s been having an affair with her. Peter, ever the genius, realizes soon enough that Harry has regained his memory, and goes off to confront him at his home as he melodramatically mixes cocktails in anticipation.

Weird how so many people don’t take this movie seriously.

It should be noted that while Peter, shocked at what his new “outfit” was making him do, had taken it off for a while and made an effort to straighten his life out. But when he goes to face Harry, he deliberately puts the suit back on, wanting it to enable his negative behavior.

Also note even though Peter is wearing most of his black suit underneath civilian clothes and Harry’s packing a surprise up his sleeve, both fighters are essentially out of costume. In fact, both times these two fight in the movie, they’re unmasked. Hence the title entry using their real names rather than their alter egos; this isn’t superhero vs supervillain, it’s two “friends” settling old scores.

The Fight: After some more taunting from Harry (he even lifts Sean Bean’s pervy line from Goldeneye about MJ tasting “like strawberries”), Peter goes straight to fisticuffs. He gets in a few good licks, but his eyes open wide when he gets a surprise stab to the gut from his old pal.

“I just realized I had sex with Iron Man in Wonder Boys!”

The dagger doesn’t go very deep before Peter slowly pushes Harry’s hand away, but just as the knife is removed from play, Osborn swings at him with some of those forearm claws concealed underneath his dress shirt. He’d been expecting this confrontation.

The weapon is pretty effective at pushing Parker back for a little while, and he even gets a close call when he barely stops it from going right into his eyeball. He catches a lucky break when an errant swing lodges in the wall, allowing the hero to break the blades off with a blow to Harry’s arm.

The two continue to have a pretty solid, mutual beatdown, knocking each other into walls and through windows. The taunts make it even better. After one nasty blow, Osborn asks “How ya like that, Spidey?” to which Spidey replies “That all ya got?” Even better is Harry, when it’s his turn on the ground, growls “I used to protect you in high school, now I’m gonna kick your little ass!” which elicits a delightfully sarcastic “ooooh!” from Peter. It’s not exactly Stan Lee, but it’s appropriately schoolyard.

Franco makes a couple interesting choices in this scene, using subtle body language & snarls to act animalistically– i.e., like a goblin, in contrast to Parker’s graceful, arachnid-like movements.

He gives good Dafoe Face, too

For this portion of the fight, there’s no webs, no gadgets, no flying and no swinging. If not for the superhuman strength on display and the extraordinary abuse their bodies are taking, you’d swear this was just a regular fight between two normal people. And that was surely a conscious choice: by keeping the brawl relatively simple, Raimi not only provides variety from the movie’s more wild encounters, but he makes it more personal for the audience.

Eventually, Peter tackles Harry through the mirror that’s actually the entrance to Osborn’s secret Goblin lab. Harry immediately grabs that green sword from its place and starts swinging away again. Peter dodges it all skillfully enough so that it instead ends up hitting pretty much everything else in the lab, including the spare glider that had been idling in the center.

Freed from its tether, the glider goes spinning uncontrollably around the room as the fight rages on. Sensing an opportunity, Peter does a nifty spider move where he grabs Harry by the lapels and pulls them both to the ground. When the board comes around again, Peter throws him into its path. He gets smacked in the face and goes flying into a rack of pumpkin bombs.

Remarkably, none of them go off, but Harry’s pretty hurt anyway. He asks if Peter will kill him like he did Norman, but the wayward hero expresses disgust rather than pleading for understanding. He twists the knife by telling Harry his father despised and was embarrassed by him, playing on his friend’s worst fears. Especially jarring is how he finishes it with a “what? You gonna cry?” like he’s a grade school bully.

Harry tries to rise to continue to fight, but a swift chop to the neck puts him right back down, and Peter storms off like Harry is utterly beneath him. Osborn tries to get the last word in by throwing one of the grenades at his old friend, but Peter side-steps the projectile, snags it with a web and returns it to sender.

The world’s deadliest yo-yo trick

Blessed with no such reflexes, Harry can’t get out of the way in time, and gets caught up in a small explosion. Peter doesn’t even stick around to see if he lived.

This one’s probably my favorite. It’s just the right mix of genuinely fun while still being legitimately off-putting (vis a vis Peter’s behavior), and the more humble choreography is both a bold choice and a welcome change of pace. Being able to see the actors’ faces and know that they’re not being swapped out with a bunch of digital pixels helps to draw you in closer to what’s a very intimate conflict. Granted, if every fight in the franchise were like this, it wouldn’t really feel like Spider-Man, but it’s nice to see Spider-Man branch out a bit every now and then.

The music is serviceable if not spectacular, a dark & playful little tune that revs up appropriately with the action. If there’s any flaw it’s that it ends too soon after they get to the lab, and the blow that knocks Harry into the wall and effectively ends the fight, while surely painful, seems a bit anticlimactic for what had come before. But Peter’s cruel taunts and the too-cool bomb throw back help put an appropriate punctuation mark on the encounter.

Grade: A-

Coming Attractions: Spider-Man might be tough, but Venom is Topher.

At least he’s not Kutcher.

In which Spider-Man receives help from an unlikely ally!

Uh, no, she’s not who I’m talking about. But it’s about time she contributed

5) Spider-Man and New Goblin vs Sandman and Venom

The Fighters:

• Spider-Man, aka Peter Parker. Back in his red & blue outfit. Played by Tobey Maguire.
• The New Goblin, aka Harry Osborn. About half his pretty face got burned real ugly in the last confrontation, but considering the size of the explosion he was lucky that’s all he got. Playing the hero this time. Played by James Franco.
  • Armed with: His full bag of tricks.
• Sandman, aka Flint Marko. He’s using the excessive amount of dirt in the vicinity to make himself bigger and denser than ever. Played by Thomas Haden Church.
• Venom (he’s never called that in the movie), aka Eddie Brock, Peter’s sleazy rival. Brock’s role here is roughly the same as in the comic– disgraced journalist blames Peter Parker & Spider-Man for his troubles, even though they’re really his own fault– but the character has been subtly tweaked to be a “dark,” conscience-free version of Peter even before his transformation (the casting of Grace enhances this, considering the comic Brock has a physique much closer to, well, Thomas Haden Church’s). After Peter expelled the symbiote suit from his body, it bonded with the nearby Eddie*, creating a monster with every reason to hate Spider-Man. As Venom, Brock sports an altered version of the black Spidey costume, and boasts physical strength and black webbing that are superior to Spider-Man’s. Missing from the comic book is how the symbiote allows Venom to bypass Peter’s spider sense, and the unnerving way Venom, being two personalities in one body, refers to himself as “we.” Played by Topher Grace.

Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane is along as the bait yet AGAIN. She helps out a smidgen this time, but mostly her role in this consists of falling through the sky over & over. Oddly, the movie never addresses the fact that the big obstacle between her and Peter in the first two movies is how her being close to Spider-Man could make her a target, and yep, that’s exactly what happens here. Speaking of which, how come nobody else in New York ever asks why this lady keeps getting held hostage by supervillains looking to rumble with Spider-Man? The first and third kidnappings were quite public, and the police at least knew about her abduction at Doc Ock’s lair in part 2.

[*Eddie was nearby because, in an amazing coincidence, he just happened to be downstairs in the church while Peter was ridding himself of the symbiote. Everything creepy & weird about Brock is encapsulated in how he a) went to that church to pray for God to murder Peter Parker for him, and b) he addresses Jesus as "sir."]

The Setup: Fairly involved. Having worn the suit for too long, Peter eventually hit rock bottom and accidentally hit Mary Jane after an evening spent emotionally humiliating her. Knowing that the suit is enabling his behavior, he tries to take it off, but it resists, having bonded too closely. Only the ringing of a nearby church bell seems to stun it long enough to him to escape its grasp. (This is actually straight from the source material.) The suit desperately heads for the nearest replacement host, who happens to be Eddie Brock.

Soon enough, the suited Venom finds Sandman (… somehow) and offers an alliance, seeing as they have a mutual interest in stopping Spider-Man. One would think that Marko would have every reason to stay faaaaaaar away from Spider-Man, actually, but instead this noble victim of tragic circumstance immediately agrees to team up with psychopathic alien monster so they can murder a hero together. Makes perfect sense.

Rather than opting for something sensible like sneaking into his house at night and stabbing him, the two abduct Mary Jane and dangle her from an enormous web structure atop a construction site. Yes, a superhero fight at a construction site, sorry to blow your mind. When the news cameras show up, the villains ensure their invitation is suitably blunt.

Another weird thing about Eddie Brock was that he took the COMPLETE wrong lesson away from reading Charlotte’s Web

Between the two of them, no police are able to get close enough to effect a rescue, and apparently the city’s National Guard unit was on field maneuvers or something.

Meanwhile, Peter correctly figures this is too much for him to handle alone and goes to Harry to ask for help. Harry lays on the guilt trip again, but rather than apologizing or quite reasonably pleading self-defense, Peter offers a simple “she needs us.” Harry waves him off, but later on his elderly butler strolls in and offers his unsolicited medical opinion on how Norman’s wounds were clearly caused by his own glider, so maybe Harry should get over himself already.

Still, Spider-Man shows up alone, though the gathered crowds still cheer him and he takes a second to pause before Old Glory one last time. He makes his way to where MJ’s being held in a taxi suspended high up and tries to comfort her, but Venom ambushes him shortly after.

The Fight: With his advanced speed & strength, Venom shuts Spider-Man down pretty quick, and pins him to a bed of webbing dozens of feet below Mary Jane’s taxi. Revealing his face, Eddie taunts his rival for a bit, urging him to remember the humiliation he put Eddie through. Ever lacking in his comic counterpart’s verbal dexterity, Peter just sits there silently, rather than reminding Eddie that he only “humiliated” the guy in response to false & defamatory pictures Eddie made of him. Oh, and also while under the influence of the very same suit Eddie’s wearing now. But whatever. Not like he’s persuadable by logic at this point.

“Well, I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way. Good point.”

All this monologue-ing gives Mary Jane plenty of time to retrieve a loose brick and drop it on the back of Venom’s head just before he delivers the killing blow. While Venom shrieks, Spidey breaks free from the webbing and fights back, causing both to lose their footing. As they tumble through the air, they have a silly but fun mini-battle, slugging it out and launching web projectiles at each other in free-fall. Spider-Man tries valiantly but the villain largely gets the better of him here, finally restraining the hero once again. Peter eventually frees himself but doesn’t web away in time to entirely negate the impact of his fall… in a pile of sand. Ruh roh.

Soon enough the ground itself starts moving, and Sandman emerges, bigger than ever.

At least he didn’t try climbing with MJ to the top of the Empire State Building.

Our hero avoids Marko’s lumbering swings for a while, then heads back up to rescue Mary Jane, who’s started to fall through the webbing. This leads him wide open to getting blindsided by Venon again (priorities!), and the villain pins him on a girder, then hops down and holds him in place from behind via webbing around the neck.

Sandman repeatedly brings his huge fist down on Spider-Man, slowly pounding the life out of him as the crowd (and one particularly overwrought newscaster) watches in dismay. But just before Marko rears back for the final blow, a small projectile lodges in his neck from off-screen. As the background music fades to hear its rapid beeping and the camera zooms in, we see it’s one of those damned pumpkin bombs.

Hooray! Harry showed up after all. It’s the most predictable Marvel Team-Up ever, but Raimi juices it up with the expert timing of the grenade reveal. As Sandman reels in pain from his half-exploded head, the New Goblin flies by and knocks Venom down for good measure. Raimi continues his directoral swagger by having the inspirational hero music play up as Harry rises dramatically on his glider and offers his friend a hand.

Back to back, the two get to work immediately. Harry first uses the momentum from his board to spin Spidey into a perfectly timed kick at a leaping Venom, then he turns his jets directly onto Sandman, super-heating a good chunk of him into glass.

Sick burn

They fly up together and Peter gets dropped off to save their mutual ex-girlfriend, who had started falling down again. They have a bit of a tender/awkward moment as he drops her off higher in the same building (not down below with the police to keep her safe or anything, that would be crazy) and returns to help Osborn deal with Sandzilla, which only gets him punched and knocked down into a half-finished building.

Apparently tiring of this, the Goblin gets sufficient distance from Marko, and fires two missiles at him. Both hit their target with sufficient force to make him topple and break.

Meanwhile, Spider-Man is left alone in a half-finished building, searching for the elusive Venom. After creeping the hero out by making noise from unseen places, he soon reveals himself and smacks the hero down effortlessly, then webs him up once more.

Maybe James Cameron’s infamous “web bondage” script wasn’t so crazy after all

Eddie draws out Peter’s execution again, and Peter tries to talk him out of it, telling him he knows all too well the rush of evil power the suit can provide. In a line that perfectly straddles ridiculous and brilliant, Eddie calmly says “I like being bad. It makes me happy.”

Before he can skewer his nemesis with a length of jagged steel, he’s disarmed by two of Harry’s pumpkin blades. The Goblin himself flies in soon after, attempting to stab Venom with the blades in his own glider. Venom dodges and uses his webbing to seize the glider for himself. As Harry falls, he knocks over a few steel bars on the way down, the clattering of which has a brief but noticeable effect on the villain.

Venom leaps over to stab the still-trapped Peter with the glider, but Harry, taking one for the team one last time, leaps into Venom’s path and takes the blades instead, dying the same way his father dead but for the exact opposite reason. Bummer.

His friend’s sacrifice gives Peter enough strength to break free. He hits Venom pretty hard, and keeps him down by using the nearby metal poles to create a constant cacophony– boy genius Peter Parker has been able to deduce that the symbiote is weak against extremely loud noises. Spider-Man wastes little time exploiting this and, in one continuous CGI shot, shoves several poles into the ground around Venom and keeps clanging them together, effectively creating a “cage” of sound. It’s nifty.

Good thing it’s not a JOHN Cage of sound, as that would have accomplished very little

The symbiote roils in ever-escalating pain, and when it contorts itself loosely enough, Peter uses his webbing to pull Brock out of it. Meanwhile it becomes a big ugly mess, towering into an even more monstrous form. Spider-Man shrinks it back down with one more clang, and flings one of Harry’s spare pumpkin bombs into the writhing mass. Conveniently, Eddie tries to jump back in to save it, and dies in the same explosion that also destroys the suit.

Oh, and afterward, Harry dies in Mary Jane’s arms, and Marko shows up again in more human form but he and Peter just talk it out. Yawn.

This fight scene is basically Spider-Man 3 in miniature: it’s epic, overstuffed, convoluted, clever, and occasionally awesome. The setting is the very definition of generic, but it’s used well enough. You get the real sense of Spider-Man being overmatched by either of the villains separately, let alone together, thus making Harry’s arrival even more welcome– cheesy as it may be. The two friends make a good team, fighting not just alongside each other but cooperatively at a few key points.

But all the creative thinking on display contrasts pretty starkly with just how repetitive and uninspired the staging frequently is. For instance, it’s easy to lose track of how often Venom HAD his nemesis dead-to-rights only to delay giving the final blow juuuuuust long enough for some outside interference to give Spidey a break. After the third or fourth time that happens, the suspense dries out pretty quickly. Similarly, Mary Jane repeatedly finds herself nearly falling to her death– not to mention this whole setup of her as the hostage/bait to kick off the climax was done in each of the previous two films. And Harry’s sacrificial death is the least surprising thing this side of a Scooby Doo episode.

It’s flawed and ambitious, but big enough to make a fitting end to Raimi’s Spider trilogy.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: Let’s get mental.

City Trek Into Darkness

In which an unlikely hero finds a way to turn the tables.

Metaphorically and otherwise.

Dark City

What a little gem of a movie. A cult hit that’s aged reasonably well, Dark City beat The Matrix to the punch by more than a year, though the lead times on each production are too close for the Wachowskis to have truly ripped it off. Both films are darkly stylized & philosophical sci-fi thrillers which feature a protagonist who’s uniquely gifted to tear down the walls of his artificial world, and learns to develop his new powers while on the run from sinister, inhuman pursuers. Understandably, only the one with amazing kung fu battles & gunplay went on to become a trendsetting blockbuster, but don’t count Dark City out. It has its own pleasures, and culminates in an amazing sequence that stretches the definition of a “fight,” but we’ll see if we can’t tackle it anyway.

A note: if you haven’t seen this yet and my recommendation inspires you to do so, I strongly recommend you seek out the newer Director’s Cut edition. Not only does it have more footage, but most crucially, it cuts out the theatrical version’s opening voiceover (mandated by the studio against director Alex Proyas’ wishes) where one character explicitly spells out about 90% of the film’s backstory, rather than letting the mystery be slowly uncovered. Of course I’m about to spoil pretty much the entire ending for you right now, so.

The Fighters:

• John Murdoch, the film’s hero; it’s not his original name, if he even has one, but he’s sticking with it. One of the many inhabitants of the Strangers’ artificial world, John is a sudden step forward in evolution: he has the ability to “tune” or telekinetically alter the world around him. Having received only the slightest bit of his planned memory implant, John has spent most of the film as a virtual tabula rasa, but that’s all about to change. Played by Rufus Sewell, in a rare non-villainous role.
• The Strangers, but mostly their de facto leader, Mr. Book (they all have ominously mundane names like that: Mr. Hand, Mr. Wall, etc), played by Ian Richardson. They can tune as well, of course. Note that their human-like appearance is not their true form: they’re all actually a bunch of creepy worm creatures, inhabiting the bodies of corpses– hence their pale & ghostly visage.

“Tell your sister… you were right about me….”

Kiefer Sutherland, in the middle portion of his career (in-between the Hearthrob and Badass sections) where he was mostly tapped to play Creepy, plays a significant non-action part.

The Setup: The Strangers are home invaders in freaky masks a dying race of alien parasites, who have secluded a large number of humans in a large city where it’s always night and the details (memories, architecture, etc) are manually changed every few hours. Ultimately it’s revealed that this artificial habitat is really an enormous ship out in the depths of space, where the Strangers endlessly experiment with humans to see what makes them thrive.

John Murdoch, however, proves suddenly resistant to the Strangers’ power, and involuntarily fights back just as he’s about to be implanted with the memories of a serial killer. He spends much of the movie on the run, piecing together a past that turns out to be false and discovering the true nature of his world. Eventually, he surrenders himself to the villains when they hold hostage his “wife” Emma– their history together is fake, but he has come to feel genuine affection for her.

The aliens believe that Murdoch is the key they have been searching for, and decide to implant him with memories of their own collective history– effectively making him one of them. They wheel out Dr. Schreber (Sutherland), the doctor who invented the process of creating artificial memories in a test tube (a wonderfully wacked idea) and has since turned against his coercive masters to clandestinely help Murdoch throughout the movie. As the Strangers turn away to shut down their reality-warping machine for good, a seemingly docile Schreber explains his instructions to John… but he’s got other plans.

Since this was pre-Jack Bauer, being tied down while Kiefer Sutherland stands over you with a sharp object wasn’t nearly as terrifying as it is now

Schreber switches out the Strangers’ syringe with one of his own making, which John had pocketed earlier after being too wary to trust the doctor. Murdoch is injected with the mystery needle instead, and immediately a series of rapid-fire images with static around the edges (the movie’s established language for flashbacks and memories) starts up. At first it’s the fake “John Murdoch” life the protagonist was originally supposed to have– pleasant upbringing at the seaside until parents die in a fire, and so forth– but a version of Schreber (but more confident, free of the real doctor’s speech impediment and slight disfigurement) keeps recurring: as one of John’s teachers, a firefighter who saves him, a flower vendor on his first date, etc.

“Remember class, the terrorists are only Muslim in even-numbered seasons.”

As the adult John twitches at receiving an entire lifetime of memories at once, finally the varying Schrebers solidify into one who explains himself with the magnificently bonkers line “You’re probably wondering why I keep appearing in your memories, John. It is because I have inserted myself into them.”

The memory-Schreber explains to John even more fully the nature of the Strangers, the power they share with John, and the machine that is fueled by it. He tells Murdoch, and the audience, that this specialized memory implant is a shortcut to give John a lifetime of instruction on and practice with tuning (previously, he’d only tuned instinctively, and in minor ways)– hey, kind of like downloading kung fu skills directly into your brain. He tells John that he can take control of his destiny, as long as he’s willing to act.

Back in the real world, the Strangers can tell something is wrong, and discover Schreber’s switcharoo… but it’s too late. John comes to, wills the table he’s strapped to upright, and melts his bonds away to step free.

“Now *I* have tuning powers. Ho, ho, ho.”*

Lucy, you got some splainin’ to dooooooo

The Fight: As soon as John is free, the film’s score dives right into the full rendition of a composition it’s been teasing throughout the movie– one that’s been so ubiquitous in trailers and bad YouTube re-edits since then, you’ve surely heard it before even if you’ve never seen Dark City. Despite all the years of repetition, though, it’s lost none of its wild energy, sounding both inspiring and chaotic.

Murdoch wastes no time in putting his newly mastered powers to work. He unleashs a psionic blast that scatters several of the Strangers ahead of him, which makes the remaining villains scared and aggressive. Proyas visualizes tuning on-screen in an effective if not particularly original way: as shimmering ripples of otherwise invisible force, flinging people about wildly and often tearing up the scenery.

John frees Schreber and turns his attention back to the Strangers just in time to get blasted himself by Mr. Book, seemingly the only alien willing to stand his ground. Seemingly unhurt, Murdoch gets back up and returns fire. Visibly angered, Book changes up tactics a bit by ripping open the floor in front of John (which he seems to deflect before it gets to him) and dragging jagged beams up from underneath (which narrowly miss their target).

Rather than continuing to trade blows, the two eventually switch to a full-out mental arm wrestling contest, their psychic energies clashing in the middle.

A lot more people would watch Presidential debates if they looked like this.

As their brain battle rages, the resulting feedback starts damaging the area around them, ripping huge chunks out of the building and even somewhat reversing the gravity (!). The few Strangers who haven’t fled (why didn’t anybody help Book?) are lifted into the air.

Soon enough, Book and Murdoch float out of the ceiling and confront each other in the sky.

“MISTER Anderson!”

Mr. Book changes things up again by hurling a nasty-looking dagger at his foe, but despite the added telekinetic push, John is able to stop it just shy of his head, then flip it around and return to sender.

If it had hit, it would have hurt only slightly more than my hangover on Thanksgiving 2006.

Mr. Book takes it in the chest and goes tumbling backward, end over end. Murdoch tunes a nearby water tower to rise up high into his enemy’s flight path. Book collides with the new obstacle and, because the parasites are vulnerable to water, the creature piloting Book’s corpse dies shortly after. Go humans!

In many ways, there’s not much to the actual battle: a few psychic punches, a lot of yelling, a light show and what’s frankly a distant second in the cinematic annals of Tossing A Dagger Back & Forth (telekinetic powers are neat and all, but ultimately it’s all in the reflexes). Plus, the other Strangers’ lack of participation is glaring, there’s no logical reason for Schreber to be there, and if we’re being honest, the floating at the very end looks at least a little bit silly.

But looking past the petty stuff, there’s something really glorious about this sequence. As Schreber’s plan quickly becomes apparent there’s a palpable, electric excitement; you finally get to see John Murdoch realize his potential– if not his destiny– and turn the tables on his tormentors. That there’s still an element of danger as he takes his matured powers into battle makes his final victory all the sweeter; I daresay this scene is even more gratifying and well-handled than its equivalent at the very end of The Matrix.

Once again we’ve proven that while the execution of the actual fight is important, the buildup and emotional context can often be just as critical, if not more so. Dark City’s climax thrills like few others.

[Also, the movie is, along with many other things, essentially a superhero origin story. After swearing to give those a break I basically just did another one. Crap.]

Grade: A-

*Blogger Comment: I feel like I’ve paraphrased the “machine gun” quote from Die Hard about five times, but a quick site search makes it seem like it’s just the second. Either way, I’m not stopping any time soon, hope you’re used to it by now. Die Hard rules.

Coming Attractions: We get a lot more Studi-ous.

He’s quite the hearty warrior.

All right: for real now, we’ll ditch superheroes for a while.

It’s not even going to come flying back at him like Mjolnir.

The Last of the Mohicans, a throwback to old-style epic Hollywood filmmaking but with a new(-ish) gloss & polish. It’s a rare gem that’s both artfully elegant and genuinely exciting, thanks in large part to the lyrical direction of the Michael Mann– frustratingly unpredictable as ever.  It’s even got a star turn from the amazing Daniel Day-Lewis, from the period when he was just a very talented & handsome leading man and not a Mind-Blowing Super Actor with a yen for purloined milkshakes.

Let’s not get into the film’s historical inaccuracies. It’s a Hollywood action movie which is loosely based on an old book which itself was only loosed based on then-recent history; we’re quite a few layers away from “reality,” here. Also: I’m hardly the most politically correct guy in the world, but I’ll try to tread respectfully with regards to terms used to describe the story’s native characters.

1) Huron Ambush

The Fighters:

• Hawkeye, aka Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo, a British citizen who was raised by the vanishing Mohican tribe after being orphaned at a young age. Hawkeye (in Fenimore Cooper’s other stories he accumulates an impressive number of additional nicknames, including Long Rifle, Deerslayer, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, etc) is an excellent tracker, and is unparalleled in marksmanship. Played by Daniel Day-Lewis.
  • Armed with: A tomahawk/short axe and a Pennsylvania Flintlock Rifle. (Note this is not a musket as previously indicated; as a commenter points out, while most of the other soldiers and militias use various types of muskets, a marksman like Hawkeye favors the Pennsylvania Flintlock. More details here.)
• Chingachgook, Natty’s adoptive Mohican father. Noticeably older but still quite spry. Played by the late Lakota actor and activist Russell Means.
  • Armed with: In addition to his rifle, Chingachgook uses (I had to look this up) a gunstock war club, a length of thick wood that roughly resembles a long rifle but is actually a tricky weapon useful for both bludgeoning and stabbing.
• Uncas, Chingachgook’s biological son and Hawkeye’s adopted brother, renowned for his speed. Played by Eric Schweig.
  • Armed with: Musket and knife.
• Major Duncan Heyward, the British officer charged with transporting his commander’s daughters to their father’s command post. A competent soldier with an overly narrow sense of right and wrong. Played by Steven Waddington.
  • Armed with: Pistol and a stiff upper lip.
• Magua, the film’s villain. Out to kill the entire Munro family over grievances he has with the father, Magua is a ruthless, vicious yet somewhat sympathetic antagonist. Played by the great Wes Studi.
  • Armed with: Tomahawk, knife and whatever guns he can gets his hands on.

There’s also a small detachment of British soldiers, about two dozen, under Heyward’s command. Magua leads a similarly sized contingent of Huron raiders. The Munro girls are there too, but they mostly just stand off to the side looking scared. It’s not very empowering.

The Setup: Magua has been hired as a local guide for the Munro girls’ escort, but he’s secretly been plotting to betray them, and is leading the platoon into an ambush. Not long before things get in motion, Team Hawkeye finds the remains of the Huron war party’s camp fires, and decide to keep an eye out for them.

As the redcoats near the ambush point, Magua abruptly turns around and walks quickly to the rear of the marching column. He discreetly draws an axe from his cloak and, approaching a fresh-faced young lad in the back, buries the weapon in his face.

“For the last time: I will NOT sign your Street Fighter Movie poster!”

The Fight: Moving so quickly the Brits couldn’t react in time even if they weren’t shocked by the unexpected brutality, Magua immediately seizes the fallen soldier’s rifle and uses it to shoot down another. This acts as the signal for the other Huron raiders hidden in the wilderness to open fire. Most of the shots hit their targets, with several soldiers even tumbling down the steep hillside on the other side of the path. Magua chose the terrain well.

The stunned British quickly cluster together in orderly ranks, and send a volley of fire against the still mostly hidden Hurons. But the bad guys came prepared, and have already set up their cover. When the volley’s over, they charge down into the remainder of the platoon well before they can reload.

The redcoats are fairly well-trained, but in close quarters they’re no match for the natives. Mann treats the audience to an extended sequence of ugly carnage, consisting mostly of British soldiers being steadily felled in increasingly ugly ways.

This guy on the ground, for instance, is about to be sold some sporting tickets at an inflated price

It’s not pretty. Heyward is the only one who manages to hold his own. That’s mostly due to his being a little bit separated from the main action, but he does take down two bad guys by himself: one with a well-aimed pistol shot, another with some quick fisticuffs after Heyward’s horse is cut down and he’s faced with a lone straggler.

Soon enough the main group of Hurons finish up with the British platoon, and start to charge in on Heyward and the girls, when they’re interrupted by three shots fired from off-screen, each one of which takes down a Huron warrior.

Surprise! It’s the movie’s heroes, here to save the day. Which they actually do with cool efficiency, each of them shown joining the fight separately. Of course, it’s Hawkeye who comes out looking coolest, demonstrating some sweet moves as he cuts through two Hurons in a row just in time to stop Magua from firing on the Munro women.

A tomahawk will do in a pinch when you don’t have a bowling pin.

The two men have a brief gun face-off: Magua quickly swivels his musket to aim at Bumppo, but the hero dodges it, having instinctively begun ducking before Magua even pulled the trigger. Before Hawkeye can return fire, the villain escapes in the excessive smoke, disappearing into the woods like an evil Batman.

Chingachgook gets to finish out the encounter, cutting down the last fleeing Huron (along with Magua, most seem to have run out of fear and confusion) by hurling his war club in an overhead toss into the chump’s back. Nice little stinger of an ending and, in another nice touch, right before it Hawkeye prevents Major Heyward from accidentally shooting Chingachgook in confusion. The movie repeatedly makes Heyward out to be an overly fussy and foolish dweeb, which pays off at the end in a shockingly poignant way.

Mann and his choreographers employ a type of physical combat here that’s believably genuine and unpolished; stiff, but in a good way. Which makes sense, as these warriors are veterans in the art of killing rather than elegant combat. You couldn’t have a period piece about Indians who use a bunch of fancy & stylized ninja moves, that would be completely ridiculous.

This is not the grandest of fights, not even the best one in this movie, but in broad strokes it establishes everything we need to know about all the particulars: the heroes’ smooth competence, Magua’s villainy, the casual brutality of frontier life/combat, and how out of their depth the foreign Europeans are here in this wilderness.

Grade: B

Coming Attractions: The movie lives up to its title.

Also, this happens.

Don’t mess with the old man.

Or he’ll Chingach-get ya.

2) Magua vs The Mohicans

The Fighters:

• Chingachgook, the Mohican elder. Played by Russell Means.
  • Armed with: Gunstock war club, same as before.
• Uncas, the young Mohican brave. Played by Eric Schweig.
  • Armed with: Knife and rifle. Later he grabs a tomahawk.
• Magua, the spiteful villain. Played by Wes Studi.
  • Armed with: Tomahawk and knife.

Magua is also leading a party of about a dozen Huron subordinates. Hawkeye is on hand but mostly just shoots down the cannon fodder.

The Setup: After having successfully killed Colonel Munro, Magua captures his daughters Cora & Alice (and Duncan too), then takes them back to a Huron village. Hawkeye arrives unexpectedly and tries to sway the local chief to have the girls set free. The sachem reaches a Solomonic compromise: have one daughter burned at the stake as repayment for Magua’s suffering, and have him take the other as his wife to heal his heart. This’d be an awkward arrangement for all involved, one would think.

Hawkeye tries to put himself in Cora’s stead (the sacrifice thing, not the wife thing), but Duncan, knowing that Bumppo stands a better chance than he at getting Cora to safety and rescuing Alice (and also finally accepting that Cora loves Hawkeye, not him), offers himself, which the chief accepts. Team Hawkeye leaves with Cora and, once they get far enough away, Natty use his rifle to perform a mercy killing on the burning Duncan to end his suffering.

This delay ends up staggering the party as they pursue Alice. Between his fleet-footedness and his own desire for Alice’s safety (the pair have been having their own quiet, parallel romance throughout the film), Uncas catches up to Magua at a scenic cliffside path far ahead of his father & brother. This will prove unwise.

See all those bad guys? It’s called “wait for backup,” genius.

 The Fight: Uncas moves so fast he actually gets ahead of Magua’s convoy, and ambushes the lead man by popping out from around a corner he was approaching. He cuts his way through several Huron warriors using a combination of guns and brute force. He finally gets to Magua, who greets the challenge with his own knife and tomahawk at the ready.

They clash, and Uncas makes crippling mistakes early on– he goes up against Magua too close, and isn’t ready for Magua’s craftiness. Whenever the villain blocks Uncas’ axe with his own, his other hand darts in and uses his knife to get several small but damaging slices on the kid’s torso. After this happens two or three times, Magua falls back to higher ground, and Uncas can immediately tell the seriousness of his wounds.

Whether through remaining recklessness or a Hail Mary attempt to finish things before he loses even more blood, Uncas refuses to let up. He clumsily shoves in closer to Magua, and the two end up tussling around on the surface of a flat rock. Magua again gets the upper hand and takes Uncas’ knife. This happens in wide shot and Mann doesn’t show us what happens immediately after– he cuts back to Hawkeye & Chingachgook in frantic pursuit, and Alice watching from nearby, crying & turning away as she can already see how this ends.

When the action comes back, Uncas is still on the ground, perhaps wounded more, and Magua is standing warily just a few feet away. Interestingly, the villain doesn’t take the opportunity to strike immediately, even though he easily could because Uncas takes a long time to rise unsteadily to his feet, leaving himself wide open. Magua’s giving him the chance to die honorably, on his feet.

Uncas tries to lunge in one last time, but Magua easily intercepts and stabs him in the side. He spins the Mohican around and plunges the knife in deeper, finishing the job.

Uncas cries out in pain, but there’s no real malice or gloating in Magua’s wordless execution– just cold, calculating efficiency. It’s rough stuff: Uncas was a likeable and noble co-protagonist, and it’s fairly horrifying to watch him die in helpless agony. Magua finally lets the boy go, and pushes him down the cliff.

Too late and too far away to help, Chingachgook is still close enough to see his son die. In a heartbreaking slow-motion shot, we see him scream in grief & protest, but his voice isn’t heard, drowned out instead by the unrelenting music. Russell Means’ haunted face does the job well enough on its own.

As the war party starts to pack back up again, Alice steps away from her captors, looking over the cliff side where her friend had just fallen. The villain confusedly beckons her to come back, and she quietly considers: a quick death alongside her love, or a life with Magua as her husband?

Good call.

Magua and his flunkies move on, but soon the good guys catch up with them, this time from the rear. Father & adopted son work quite well together to break through, with Chingachgook acting as the tip of the spear and Hawkeye supporting him from just behind with gunfire. Indeed, the old man is a single-minded engine of destruction, cutting through Hurons while barely slowing down.

Magua welcomes the new challenge, and the old warrior charges right at him. He ducks & rolls under Magua’s opening swing and, in one smooth movement, springs back up and bludgeons his foe in the back with his war club. Magua tries to counter-attack but the Mohican cuts it off prematurely by striking the swinging arm at the elbow. As Magua reels in pain, Chingachgook smashes his other arm, rendering both limbs useless.

Thankfully, Magua doesn’t try to continue using the “Monty Python Black Knight” offense

In just a few quick seconds, Magua has been completely shut down, left with nothing to do but stand there in awkward confusion. With victory assured, Chingachgook gives Magua an odd look: not vengeful or satisfied, just disgusted. With one mighty swing, the last of the Mohicans buries the sharp end of his club in Magua’s gut, and leaves him where he falls.

This is a great movie, but during its final stretch it enters another realm entirely. As soon as Duncan Heyward is tied up for his funeral pyre, a beautiful & haunting composition begins on the film’s soundtrack, and doesn’t let up until Magua dies. It often rises and falls in response to the on-screen activity… but it sometimes doesn’t, which in its way is even more affecting. It occasionally drowns out other sounds, most memorably resulting in Chingachgook’s silent scream, but the whole sequence is already virtually dialogue-free, featuring only one spoken word (Hawkeye calling out Uncas’ name after seeing him fall). It plays out almost like a silent movie.

The choreography is effective enough, but there’s relatively little complexity or traditional suspense in it. It’s all rather straightforward: Magua kills Uncas with little difficulty, then Chingachgook kills Magua with even less. But the way everything is handled– the music, the gorgeous backdrop, the various charged emotions that begin with Heyward’s awe-inspiring sacrifice, the ugliness of Uncas’ death and the bittersweet payback for it– combine to create an experience that’s far more than the sum of its parts, let alone the sum of just its punches, kicks and stabs. This is a straight battle that’s legitimately exciting but it’s also something lyrical, almost beautiful. Once again we’re reminded that it’s not just fights being graded here but fight scenes– the cinematic language is often just as important as the choreography. And this movie’s definitely speaking my language.

Grade: A

Coming Attractions: Yo ho ho.

One Piece is the greatest thing ever.

Try not to look TOO smug about it.

Okay, not really. There are at least several things better than One Piece (the Bible, true love, Robocop) but when you’re watching it, it can often feel like it really is The Best. And I would legitimately argue its status as one of THE great pop epics of our time.

And I do mean epic. One Piece is HUGE: a multimedia franchise that began in 1997, One Piece started as a manga by Eiichiro Oda which now has about 750 chapters and soon spawned a televised anime adaptation with over 600 episodes. Neither shows any sign of stopping, being a singular cultural juggernaut in its native Japan and beginning to penetrate the wider world. Considering his story’s amazingly ambitious scope, Oda has been admirably unafraid to keep making his fictional world ever-larger, more complex and rich, often planting plot seeds which take hundreds of chapters to bear fruit.

One Piece is the story of Monkey D. Luffy– possibly the ur-example of the single-minded & virtuously simple protagonist– his journey to become the next Pirate King, and the friends & adventures he piles up along the way. The show runs through a lot of themes, but most prominently, One Piece is about dreams, and what ends a man will go to accomplish them. There might not be any modern story which is so thoroughly optimistic as One Piece yet it doesn’t shy away from the dark realities of human nature: the story’s world is filled with good people who have failed or made compromises, and villains who have committed unspeakably vile deeds. But one way or another, none of them are unchanged once they cross paths with the relentless engine of goodness that is Luffy.

This blog could always do with a bit of branching out, so tackling a small slice of One Piece is both an opportunity to examine our first TV show (an animated Japanese show, at that) and hopefully nudge some Western readers towards a property that’s relatively unknown in their part of the world. (On that front: I hate to be such a cliched nerd, but avoid the dubbed American versions of this at all costs, especially the early stuff by 4Kids; seek out the subtitled material instead. Dubbing competence aside, the story & characters simply lose something in translation.) Also, it couldn’t hurt to pull in some traffic from otakus on Google.

And this will be a small slice, examining the five distinctive battles which occur at the conclusion of the show’s famous Alabasta arc, from relatively early in its run. The Alabasta storyline was not the first one to impress or win over new fans, but it was the first time the show engaged in some seriously long form storytelling and arrived at a thrilling conclusion that managed to pay off years of investment.

A word for the uninitiated: Many of One Piece’s characters have fantastical powers for one reason or another (the most common explanation is having eaten one of the rare “Devil’s Fruits” which grant the consumer a certain set of superhuman traits), but even many of the ostensibly “normal” characters are capable of feats far beyond actual human ability: impossible leaps, exaggerated strength, incredible endurance, etc. It’s just another one of the stylized conventions inherent to shounen anime programs, kind of like calling out the name of your special attack before you do it.

1) Usopp and Chopper vs Mr. 4 and Miss Merry Christmas

(Did I mention the show and its characters are very, ahem, colorful? Get used to that.)

The Fighters:

• Usopp, one of the more inexperienced and least powerful of Luffy’s crew. An incurable liar (complete with comically long nose) and often a shameless coward, Usopp is a good soul who can be counted on when it matters most. Voiced by Kappei Yamaguchi.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: Usopp has no special powers to speak of, and is not even physically impressive by normal human standards. His main asset is his advanced cleverness, both as an inventor of useful devices and quick-thinking battle tactics. His most common weapon is a slingshot, but he has all sorts of little gadgets with him.
• Tony Tony Chopper, the doctor of Luffy’s crew and its newest member. Although brilliant and talented, Chopper is very naive, having not seen much of the world; he’s very childlike in both attitude and appearance. He’s also a reindeer. Voiced by Ikue Otani.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: Yep, a reindeer. Specifically, he’s a reindeer who ate a Devil’s Fruit that gives the consumer human-like attributes: speech, intelligence, etc. Chopper can transform at will between a very human-like appearance, a powerful reindeer form, and a sort of hybrid form that’s about three feet tall and totally adorable– which is what he spends most of his time in. He has the considerable strength of a wild reindeer, and has also devised a special drug called the “Rumble Ball” which augments his abilities for a short while after consumption.
• Mr. 4, one of the high-ranking members of Baroque Works (see below). A huge, slow-talking, and slow-moving simpleton. Voiced by Masaya Takatsuka.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: Mr. 4′s powers are not supernatural, which is rare in his organization. He’s merely an incredibly strong human with a knack for baseball– his main weapon is a four-ton (!) baseball bat, which he uses either as a direct weapon or to smack exploding baseball bombs at his foes. The bombs are launched by his “dog,” Lassoo, which functions as a sort of pitching machine but with explosive cannon balls. It’s very weird.
• Miss Merry Christmas, Mr. 4′s partner. An obnoxious older lady who’s as agile and loquacious as her partner is slow and quiet. She’s the brains of the pair, and their abilities complement each other nicely. Voiced by Mami Kingetsu.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: She ate a Devil’s Fruit that gave her the abilities and appearance of a mole, allowing her to tunnel rapidly underground.

The Setup: At the risk of making this too long:

Monkey D. Luffy’s crew, called the “Straw Hat Pirates” due to their captain’s signature headgear, are a motley band of do-gooders in search of excitement and treasure. Soon after entering the Grand Line– the chaotic center of the fictional world’s vast ocean– the heroes run afoul of a criminal organization known as Baroque Works. BW is a vast, secretive enterprise which has currently set its sights on taking over the desert kingdom of Alabasta, and has been subtly fomenting instability there for years. This is discovered by Alabasta’s young princess, Vivi, who was able to infiltrate Baroque Works’ ranks and attain a fairly high position. Once the criminals discover Vivi’s true identity, she hires the Straw Hats’ help.

After a VERY convoluted series of events, the separated Straw Hat pirates end up in and around Alabasta’s capital city Alubarna, facing off against the highest-ranking officers of Baroque Works as a civil war begins to erupt around them. There’s a lot of overlap between their various battles, but first (and weirdest) is Usopp and Chopper’s showdown outside the Southeast City Gate.

[Baroque Works' higher ranking members work in male-female pairs, usually around a theme. The male half is assigned an alias corresponding to his rank, and the female's name is calendar-based (days of the week and holidays). It's delightfully bizarre.]

The Fight: Chopper is actually there first, and has to contend with the pair alone. He’s taken by surprise at their tactics and is seen getting hurt in some unspecified manner before the camera pulls away to elsewhere. When we return, a dazed Chopper is being roused by Usopp, who was sent over by Sanji after getting thrashed a bit by Mr. 2.

Usopp thinks they’ve run off, but they’re still underground, tunneling around ominously. Turns out, these two work as a pretty efficient, if bizarre, team: Merry Christmas (hmm, typing that name is going to get old REALLY fast) creates a local tunnel network with plenty of holes. Their dog, Lassoo, fires the baseball-shaped bombs, which are explosives on timers. The bombs either reach their targets or are lined up to be batted the right way by Mr. 4– who can get around those tunnels pretty quickly for such a slow guy.

Meanwhile, the much-faster female half is free to run interference, such as when she seizes Chopper’s foot to keep him from attacking her partner directly early in the fight; the young doctor only avoids taking a direct volley from Mr. 4 by reverting back to his tiny form at the last second, letting them sail harmlessly overhead.

The crafty Usopp takes this opportunity to disappear into the tunnels himself, and unnerves the villains a bit by calling them out from the unseen depths. He emerges and bashes Mr. 4 on the head with an enormous mallet before he can react, knocking the criminal unconscious.

Where had he been hiding that? Hammerspace, of course.

Usopp wields it with casual ease, despite the “5 ton” label on it, shocking all the others present. He talks trash– his usual brand of self-aggrandizing lies coming in handy for once– and pursues Miss Merry Christmas, though she keeps dodging him easily. The bit’s resemblance to a certain classic, non-digital arcade activity is unmistakeable:

Skee ball. It’s clearly skee ball.

It goes on for quite a while, and there’s even a hilarious, blink & you’ll miss it gag where Usopp drops the hammer for a second and flicks her with a rubber band– even calling out the “attack” name for it (simply “rubber band”) in sotto voce– just to annoy her. He never does whack that mole, but they both get visibly tired.

Unfortunately, Mr. 4 wakes up, not as injured as assumed, because as an attack from Lassoo soon reveals, Usopp’s hammer is a bluff– it’s just two frying pans he jerry-rigged together, then covered with fake vinyl and a “5-ton” label. Cute, but it infuriates Miss Merry Christmas, so she enters her combat mode where she can dig through the ground freely– no longer relying on the tunnels– and goes after Usopp.

She chases him to some nearby ruins, where he lures her into colliding with the underground wall, which she hits hard enough to bring the whole thing collapsing down on Usopp. Afterwards, she grabs hold of him from underneath, and drags him along with her, Jaws-style, as she “swims” through the ground, pulling him through several ancient walls and leaving Usopp-shaped holes like Bug Bunny.

This is starting to get downright cartoonish.

Meanwhile, Chopper contends with Mr. 4, who uses a technique where his dog fills the air with baseball bombs and explodes dozens of them at once. Chopper survives (… somehow) and uses his rumble ball to enter an enhanced intellect mode, analyzing Mr. 4′s tactics. He finds it, and scrambles over to Lassoo, splashing sand in the clueless dog’s face. Chopper then shoves the dog’s head down a nearby hole when it sneezes repeatedly in reaction, each sneeze launching a bomb from its mouth. Chopper links up with the wounded Usopp and both run from the tunnel network area just as it erupts in a massive explosion, engulfing both villains.

You’d think THIS would be enough, right?

It’s pretty big, but after a short breather, the bad guys reveal they still have plenty of hit points left. Usopp tries to run away one last time (it’s kind of his thing), but he’s seized from beneath by Miss Merry Christmas, who ends the episode on a cliffhanger by mocking the pair and telling them that Luffy’s dead– which, as far as she knows, is true.

Strangely, this drives Usopp to find his courage. He tells Chopper not to believe the news, and believe in Luffy instead. But the liar nevertheless gets dragged upright through the sand by Merry Christmas again, this time right smack into Mr. 4′s deadly bat. The poor kid breaks more than a few bones, and the impact sends him flying through the air.

What a Foul move.

Miraculously, Usopp survives, defiant as ever. The mole woman (who, incidentally, Usopp has repeatedly described as a “penguin,” much to her annoyance) grabs him and tries to pull another Batter Up, but this time the good guys are ready. Using the last remaining power from the rumble ball, Tony Tony Chopper enters his “Horn Point” mode: a hulking, four-legged appearance with enlarged antlers. He follows behind Merry Christmas as she drags his friend, and when they get close, Usopp uses a slingshot to fire a smoke pellet in the air, obscuring everyone’s sight.

He breaks free by slipping out of his shoes, and imitates the mole lady’s voice to give Mr. 4 the go ahead. Chopper uses his horns to scoop up Miss Merry Christmas and runs her right into her own partner’s waiting bat. Thud.

MMC goes flying, and without the brains of his operation, Mr. 4 can only stand in shock as Usopp uses Chopper’s antlers to create a massive slingshot, and puts a small (but real this time) hammer in it as the pellet. The launched mallet hits the batter dead-on.

“… and THAT’S how we settle things back home in Asgard.”

The blow knocks Mr. 4 into Lassoo and they both land next to Miss Merry Christmas. Just to put a nice bow on the whole thing, the dog accidentally barfs up one last grenade, which goes off right on top of them all. Good boy.

Usopp collapses and melodramatically prepares for his own death, and Chopper frantically calls out for a doctor, before being reminded that he is one. Then, the action freezes and this is slowly typed on the screen:

It’s definitely out of nowhere, too: the show is of course very stylized, but never in the preceding 100+ episodes has the action stopped to read out fight outcomes like it was a sporting event. It doesn’t just make for an unexpected capper to the fight but also provides a welcome bit of triumphant silliness to relieve the tension regarding the high stakes at play– remember, Vivi’s beloved kingdom is erupting into civil war thanks to Baroque Works’ machinations, and the heroes have recently suffered a set of severe setbacks (including Luffy’s near death). It’s nice to have an almost literal scoreboard pop up and essentially say “GOOD GUYS: 1, BAD GUYS: 0″

This is probably the oddest and easily the most convoluted of all the climactic clashes that are beginning to happen. Chopper and especially Usopp are ill-suited for direct physical combat, so this showdown necessarily has to happen in a wildly complex scenario, where the heroes get in their licks via mostly unorthodox means.

There are a few demerits, the most prominent being the over-reliance on explosions, and how little those explosions seem to do. Over & over again, the villains and especially the heroes are caught within bomb blasts– not ten or twenty feet away but just a few feet or even inches away, and not only do the characters miraculously survive but they’re barely hurt, lacking the decency to even get all scarred up like Harry Osborn. Of course, it’s a cartoon and a willfully silly one at that, but even this kind of ridiculousness has its limits. Similarly, the abuse the heroes (particularly Usopp) withstand makes it hard to accept the idea that the villains go down for the count after taking a lot less.

But it is a good deal of fun, silly or otherwise. Usopp & Chopper engage in varied combat both separately and cooperatively. The staging follows a strong pattern: the good guys seem outmatched, they find a smart way to bounce back, the villains come back even harder, and finally the good guys are able to rally and win the day for good– it’s a template the other battles will follow, to an extent.

The battle is also paced fairly well, taking neither too long or too short: it begins at the tail end of one episode, takes up the bulk of the next (with a cutaway or two to Vivi’s efforts to reach the palace), continues on into the episode after that and ends before the commercial break. It’s a cliche to say that most of any given “fight” in Dragon Ball Z is really like 90% charging up and yelling at each other with 10% actual punching & kicking and dragged out over half a season… but it’s a cliche because it’s true. So it’s refreshing to break away from this obnoxious anime tradition, and have some battles that are over in about an episode and a half, with very little time wasted. One Piece is legitimately as cool as you thought Dragon Ball was when you were in high school.

Grade: B

Recommended Links: Chris Sims at Comic Alliance gives the series his own unqualified recommendation after reaching an earlier, but still great, point in the manga. Worth reading if you’re curious to learn more/other opinions about One Piece.

Coming Attractions: Remember when I said this fight was “probably” the oddest?

There’s a reason for that.

Some mixed gender violence.

The Japanese version of Swan Lake took a few liberties.

2) Sanji vs Mr. 2

The Fighters:

• Sanji, the ship cook of the Straw Hat pirates, and one of its more delightfully weird characters. In addition to being a chef who’s almost religiously obsessed with food, Sanji is self-consciously “cool” to the point of parody: he’s perpetually smoking a thin cigarette, is always laid back & sarcastic with his hands in his pockets, has hair draped over one eye, and never wears anything but a spiffy suit & tie. In the presence of beautiful women his laconic cool is instantly replaced with over-the-top, eye-bulging romanticism– the kind of transparent (yet oddly wholesome) horndoggery that would make Tex Avery’s wolf say “hey dude, dial it back a notch.” Voiced by Hiroaki Hirata.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: Sanji has no “superpowers” per se but is nonetheless one of the more dangerous of Luffy’s crew, largely due to his skill in the “Black Leg” martial arts– a fighting style emphasizing powerful & complex legwork.
• Mr. 2 Bon Kurei (real name Bentham) is an outrageous caricature of a self-professed “okama”– a Japanese slang word variously meaning gay man, cross-dresser or transvestite (yes, those are three different things). The only thing more flamboyant and ridiculous than his outfit is his personality, so aggressively manic and infectious is it. Though a vicious killer, Mr. 2 has a soft spot for melodrama, friendship and performative acts. Notably, Mr. 2 is the only officer-level member of Baroque Works to not have a partner; being a transvestite, he fills both the male and female halves of his “team” simultaneously. (“Bon Kurei” being a specific night in the traditional Japanese Obon festival.) Voiced by Kazuki Yao.
  • Powers/abilities/weapons: Bentham’s outsized temperament may be the polar opposite of Sanji’s too-cool-for-school stoicism, but their fighting styles are nearly a perfect match. Mr. 2 uses a dance-based martial art called “Ballet Kenpo” which similarly emphasizes footwork. Additonally, his Devil Fruit power allows him to instantly shape-shift into the appearance of anyone he has seen or touched. To activate it, he has to touch his right cheek, and turns it off by touching his left. During an earlier (and friendly) accidental encounter with the Straw Hats, Mr. 2 bonded with all the members of the crew, and learned to copy their forms to impress them… except for Sanji, who was belowdecks cooking, and whose existence therefore comes as a surprise to both Mr. 2 and Baroque Works. Additionally, the two decorative swans on Mr. 2′s shoulders double as flexible footwear (with hardened metal tips), adding more reach and power to his attacks. And the mascara marks under his eyes are sharp boomerangs.

[In case you're wondering, the story here is going straight from Mr. 4 and his team to Mr. 2 because the Straw Hats have already defeated Baroque Works' #3 pair several episodes back. Long story.]

The Setup: Mr. 2 is tasked with preventing Princess Vivi from reaching the royal palace. His first attempt at subterfuge fails and he pursues her through the city… until they’re intercepted by Sanji, who volunteers to hold the okama off while Vivi escapes.

Mr. 2 asks if Sanji is the unaccounted-for Straw Hat who has ruined several of Baroque Works plans recently, and Sanji asks if Mr. 2 is “the one who does those shitty impersonations.” The cook easily blocks Bon Kurei’s opening swipe, shocking him with his strength.

The Fight: We don’t come back to their showdown until after the conclusion of the fight at the southeast gate, and the two are already fighting furiously. After a couple clashes end in “draws” where they both finish by kicking each other in the face simultaneously, Mr. 2 tries a different tack, and uses his Devil Fruit power to custom-make the most ridiculous face imaginable, apparently in an effort to distract/unnerve his opponent.

Unfortunately it ends up mostly being Mr. 2′s own face, only with a longer nose.

If my dog looked like that, I’d shave his butt and run him over.

While Mr. 2 cries into a mirror over his injured vanity, Sanji boots him right in the face. Bon Kurei is offended by the lack of pity, and mimics a crew-mate’s (Usopp’s) face, in the hopes that it will make him hesitate to attack.

Predictably, this also doesn’t work. Sanji strikes again and gives a brief speech about being able to see through illusion and straight to the heart. Mr. 2 is shocked and admires his foe’s purity. In despair, he absentmindedly switches his face to Nami’s, lamenting how it wouldn’t work either.

Except it totally does.

Dude has issues.

Mr. 2 quickly catches on, and even he is shocked by how absurd Sanji’s behavior is. There’s a great bit of deadpan humor here, as he turns the Nami-transformation on & off repeatedly, and every time Sanji’s demeanor instantly turns to that of an enraptured sycophant, like flicking a light switch. The okama’s internal monologue keeps saying “It can’t be this easy.” He finally realizes how glaring his opponent’s weakness is, and grins evilly.

After a cut back to Vivi at the palace, the episode ends on a cliffhanger, and comes back to the fight continuing. Sanji suffers repeated blows because every time Mr. 2 switches to Nami’s appearance, he’s not just unwilling to hit a woman but nearly paralyzed with lust. At one particularly funny moment, Mr. 2 overcomes Sanji’s attempt at resistance by complaining about how hot it is and starting to unbutton his blouse (thereby nearly revealing “Nami’s” chest), then attacking him once again when he rushes over.

Boot to the Head

Sanji takes some more licks when the sight of Nami’s face keeps him from being able to dodge the backswing of the villain’s mascara boomerangs, cutting him on each side.

Mr. 2 decides it’s time to put an end to all this fun, and begins spinning around rapidly, building up power. But when he switches back to his normal form halfway through, Sanji figures something out: Bon Kurei can’t use his Ballet Kenpo techniques while he’s assuming someone else’s form. Knowing that Mr. 2 won’t switch while attacking, Sanji strikes him before he finishes his spinning technique, sending him crashing into a nearby building.

The okama is angry that he’s been figured out, so he uses his trump card and dons his swan shoes. Sanji dodges the first lunge, which puts a neat hole into the wall behind him, as if it had been shot by a rifle. The next time they tussle, it ends in another stand-off with the two striking simultaneously, only this time Sanji is stabbed through the shoulder while his own foot doesn’t quite reach the target.

Sanji thinks again and realizes that although 2′s reach has increased, wearing the swans will make him take longer to get in to an attack stance, so if he avoids the first strike he should be able to counter. He leaps over Bon Kurei’s next attack, but the villain tries to stifle him by quickly switching to Nami’s face. However, while Sanji is still in mid-air (anime physics are so awesome) he bluffs Mr. 2 into undoing it by telling him there’s something on his left cheek. The chef is able to deliver a few good hits, but 2 rallies and stabs his chest.

After a short breather, the two clash again. Now, they know all each other’s tricks and advantages, so it’s just a matter of skill and strength. What follows are two fairly extended, furious exchanges that are of outstanding animation quality, especially by television standards.

The two walk upside down on their hands while exchanging kicks, rising & falling as they take shots at each other. By the end, they’re both absorbing numerous blows as they frantically try to take each other down, calling out their distinctive moves all the while.

Finally, they both collapse, gasping for air. They pause, then leap at each other for one final shot, Ninja Gaiden-style.

Both land, and Sanji’s legs buckle, toppling him over in pain. But his legs only hurt so much because his blow was the one to land successfully– Mr. 2 howls in pain, and goes down for good (after flying into another building, apparently from some kind of delayed reaction effect).

Barely able to move, the okama willingly surrenders to Sanji and accepts any fate his opponent will give. Sanji (having risen and dramatically re-lit his cigarette, because of course he would) says he won’t kill him, that it was a good fight, and offers him a handshake. Touched by the gesture of honorable friendship, Mr. 2 Bon Kurei shakily raises his hand. Except:

The “Dark Helmet” tactic. FOOLED YOU!

Yeah, honor amongst adversaries is great and all, but there’s a civil war going on. You can’t leave a crazy bastard like this running around.

Sanji walks away calmly, thinking that he probably has a few more broken bones. But, you know– whatever.

GOOD GUYS: 2

As with the previous battle, this one takes up about an episode and a half’s worth of time, and the hero’s chances rise & fall on roughly the same trajectory. There’s a different vibe here, though, because even though Mr. 2 is quite powerful, we KNOW Sanji can kick some serious ass– if you’ve been watching the show up to this point, you’ve seen him do it several times. Between that and his cocky attitude, this is more of a pure strength-vs-strength contest, rather than wondering how the overmatched Usopp and Tony will overcome impossible odds.

And since it’s strength-on-strength, that means there’s more direct combat, and less of the weird dog-cannons and tunneling mole ladies stuff. This being One Piece, there’s no shortage of silliness, but it’s all in the service of enhancing & escalating the fight.

Mr. 2 is perfectly matched with Sanji, making for both great combat and hilarious interaction. I suppose it’s possible to be offended by this kind of trans portrayal, if you’re into being offended, but from a purely narrative standpoint, this villain is a delightful character. He’s just outrageous and silly enough for his shrillness to be endearing rather than irritating, and he’s actually likable enough while still being sold as a dangerous threat. Later (MUCH later) in the series, he’ll emerge as a heroic character of sorts, but for now he’s an effective villain.

Grade: B+

Coming Attractions: Chick fight!

… it’s not as sexy as you might think.

Today: a reminder that they can’t all be winners.

This is actually more silly than it looks.

3) Nami vs Miss Doublefinger

The Fighters:

• Nami, the Straw Hats’ genius navigator and quartermaster, and its only (not counting Vivi) female member at this time. Resourceful, spunky, and comically greedy, with a soft spot for her friends. Voiced by Akemi Okamura.
  • Powers/weapons/abilities: While athletic and canny enough, Nami does not have any physical skills beyond basic self-defense, and until now has played a more supporting or behind-the-scenes role in the crew’s battles. It’s revealed just before this fight, however, that she commissioned Usopp to create a special weapon to help her overcome her limitations. The item he made is called the Clima-Tact, a staff made up of several detachable segments and all sorts of hidden functions, mainly relating to either weather manipulations or party tricks. Up until now, she hasn’t practiced with it or even read the instructions.
• Miss Doublefinger (real name Paula), the female half of Baroque Works’ #1 team and therefore one of the most dangerous members of the organization. Her cold-blooded spitefulness is an odd contrast to the caricatured “sexiness” both in appearance and the exaggerated way she moves her hips while walking. The holiday her code name refers to is One Piece creator’s personal way of referring to New Year’s Day (1/1 = two index fingers held up side by side), which is also his birthday. Voiced by Yuki Tachibana.
  • Powers/weapons/abilities: Miss Doublefinger ate a Devil Fruit which enables her to turn any part of her body into spikes, something she uses in fairly creative ways.

The Setup: The #1 team encounters Zoro and Nami together on the streets of Alabasta, and at first pursue only Nami, correctly identifying her as the weaker threat which should be eliminated first. Zoro intercedes and squares off against Mr. 1, leaving Miss Doublefinger to deal with Nami.

The navigator promptly runs & hides, at which point we get the (convenient) flashback about the creation of the Clima-Tact. Drawing the weapon, Nami finds the courage to stand her ground… just in time for her opponent to stab her through the wall she’d been leaning against.

Fortunately it’s only through the shoulder (that happens a lot in this show), so Nami’s alive when Miss DF cuts her way through the wall and introduces herself. Time to fight!

(Or “fight.”)

The Fight: Nami quickly tries to fight back with some of the Clima-Tact’s features (most of them done using different configurations of the sections), but finds them to be, shall we say, less than useful. First it fires a small smoke cloud which doves fly out of. Then she shapes it like a gun, which only produces a bouquet of flowers.

Sheesh, even Piers Morgan wouldn’t be threatened by this.

Later it produces a cartoon boxing glove which doesn’t even reach all the way to its target, and much later it will shoot out small streams of water like a sprinkler (which Nami will actually use to her advantage). Throughout, Miss Doublefinger looks on at Nami with a mixture of pity and confusion.

In fact, this forms a loose pattern for the two’s duel: Nami will be chased, be cornered/fight back after reading & remembering more about the Clima-Tact, her opponent will stand by while Nami uses the weapon in a way that is varying degrees of ineffectual, and the cycle will repeat, with Nami suffering minor injuries along the way.

There are some very neat iterations of Miss DF’s powers. At first she just uses them in a fairly straightforward manner, such as turning her fingers into elongated daggers:

But as the fight wears on the villain deploys her thorny nature in several wild & inventive ways. She transforms other body parts (including her nose and the tips of her bra) into sharp points as well, she forms spikes out of her heels so that she can walk upside down on the underside of an archway, she turns her entire hair into a bed of needles, and at one point she even becomes one big giant ball of spikes and rolls after Nami like Sonic the Hedgehog.

Smack that bitch and takes her rings

Later on, she displays her own form of Beast Mode when she injects her own arms with her needle fingers, which somehow turns her into super-buff, spiky clubs.

For her part, Nami displays some ingenuity, both with and without her impossible weapon. She wins a little respect from her adversary by getting Paula to chase her through a window, then rips off her own cloak and tangles the villain up in it (while still in ball form) to buy herself some more time. She’s soon able to use the Clima-Tact to create a wind attack which fires off one portion like a boomerang, knocking the villain back a bit.

Eventually Nami comes to realize that the true power of the odd staff is how it can generate small spheres of heat, cold, and electricity… and due to the odd science rules that govern shounen anime, have the correct combinations of these otherwise harmless discharges add up to devastating effects. She can also create a mirage version of herself (which she uses to briefly trick Miss DF into thinking she’s been killed) by causing light refractions from the difference in temperatures.

Yeah, right.

Finally, Nami reads up on the Clima-Tact’s ultimate movie, a one-time only attack called the “Tornado Tenpo.” Since she only has the one chance to use it, she makes sure to create an opening. She creates a cloud by making a bunch of cold spheres, then merging them with hot spheres which have soaked up water from her sprinkler move, and when the cloud gets big enough, it close in on Miss Doublefinger and Nami juices it with some electricity.

Meteorologists LOVE this show.

Paula is hurt, but even more mad. She charges through what turns out to be another mirage, and Nami appears from behind, sarcastically telling her what the “forecast” is. However, she has trouble standing due to her wounds, but in the battle’s most inspiring moment, Nami thinks back on the suffering Vivi has endured thanks to Baroque Works, and knows she has to hold herself together for her friend’s sake. She even explicitly says that her pain is nothing compared to Vivi’s; this is the kind of outsized emotional bombast this genre is so well-suited for.

She even powers through getting impaled in the foot after Miss DF tries her urchin-head attack again. She uses the leverage to get close to her foe, then opens the Clima-Tact right in her face to execute the Tenpo. Surprising both of them, at first it only shoots out a pair of clockwork doves. Nami is enraged that it appears to be another joke, but shortly after the little birds wind their way around the target’s body.

Then the “T” bar on the end begins spinning rapidly, and with incredible centrifugal force, propels Miss Doublefinger through three buildings, knocking her out and then some.

Nami controls the horizontal, Nami controls the vertical.

Well, this is proof that even the best of the best isn’t always made up of 100% winners. It’s not offensively bad or anything– at about an episode and a half like its predecessors, it stops well short of outstaying its welcome– but it’s hard to love, too, especially sandwiched in amongst much better material.

Cool powers or not, Miss Doublefinger doesn’t present as great a threat as one would think, given her rank in Baroque Works. She’s conspicuously generous in waiting to let Nami pull off all sorts of complicated maneuvers, and after sustaining mostly mild damage throughout the battle, she ends up falling to an attack that seems fairly tame by One Piece standards.

The Clima-Tact is sort of an interesting idea, but it’s not handled well here (it will play out better later in the series). It’s always tough to know where to draw the line on believability, but for my money, the idea that it can generate a bunch of small charged blasts is on one side of that line, and the idea that it is somehow hiding several live animals and other party gags is on the other. To say nothing of the idea that Usopp would have designed the weapon primarily with amusing magic tricks in mind, or that Nami wouldn’t have studied & practiced with the Clima-Tact before now, given how important she made it seem to her in the flashback.

Credit is due for providing yet another left turn in terms of the nature of combat, compared to the more directing fighting in most of the other battles, and even the more explosive and convoluted maneuvers in the Southeast Gate throwdown. Plus it’s nice to finally give Nami her first big win.

Still, with the actual fighting too unevenly spaced and the silly plot mechanics, this is easily the weakest of a great bunch.

[Also, this was probably the beginning of the series' unfortunate trend of oversexualizing Nami; around this time (if not this actual battle, specifically right when Nami rips her cloak off), the artists started to draw her with Jessica Rabbit's proportions but far less modesty. So there's that.]

Grade: C

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