Skyfall (2012)

Less of a Random Killing Machine, More of a Personal Statement

Today’s review is an admission of guilt on my part. I saw this movie in theaters about three months ago and, even though my sister indicated that she was intrigued to find my opinion about this movie, I completely forgot to give it. And, after three months, the drink and drug affected my brain so much that I completely forgot I had a sister. Oh wait, I mean I forgot to review this movie. And it was even more important because old what’s-her-name wanted to hear my opinion. Well, it turns out I had waited long enough to review this movie that it’s already been released on DVD. And so I am finally able to bring you my review of Skyfall, written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan, directed by Sam Mendes, and starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Bérénice Marlohe, Albert Finney, Rory Kinnear, and Ben Whishaw.

A MI6 agent on his Majesty’s secret service by the name of James Bond (Daniel Craig) is on assignment with another agent named Eve (Naomie Harris). They’re in pursuit of a mercenary that has stolen a hard drive containing the NOC list from the first Mission Impossible movie, containing the identity of all the undercover agents in the world. While trying to get the hard drive back, Eve inadvertently shoots Bond, allowing the mercenary to escape. The death of James Bond sends shockwaves through MI6. Eve is suspended to a desk job and Chairman Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) suggests that it’s time for the head of MI6, M (Judi Dench), to retire. On her way back to her office, M finds that someone has hacked her computer, sending her a taunting message and blowing up her office. James, who has been banging women and drinking a lot, learns of the attacks and returns to duty, regardless of his injury. M approves him for duty even though his test results do not, and Bond sets about finding out who was behind this. Psst! It was Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem).

Now, I’m not really sure what old what’s-her-name thought about this movie, so I don’t know what her opinion was. Not that it would change mine, but I would at least have bullet points to argue with her if I knew. I liked this movie, I like the greater majority of the Bond movies, and I like the Daniel Craig ones most of all. I know a lot of Bond fanatics probably wouldn’t be down with that sentiment, but I like action movies more than I like suave spy movies, and the Daniel Craig ones meet that description much better. But that’s not to say this movie didn’t have its share of problems. The first thing that occurred to me was that the bad guy could post his video of the undercover agents on YouTube. One of my videos is still not allowed to be monetized because I infringed on copyrights in their opinion! And that didn’t get anybody killed! YouTube needs to get their shit together. Also, I know these new Bond movies want to set themselves apart like the Batman Begins of the Bond movies, being darker and more realistic. And, though I appreciate the shout outs to things that Bond fans would appreciate, they had a couple of “fuck you” parts that they shouldn’t leave in. It’s like in the first X-Men movie when Cyclops joked about how dumb they’d look if they were wearing yellow and blue tights. In this one, Q jokes about not having exploding pens because that would be so dumb. You know the Bond fans that are supporting your movies are probably not going to enjoy you saying that the things they liked were stupid, right? The name of the movie was also an annoyance to me. I had no idea what they meant by Skyfall when I saw the title. I didn’t know what it meant when it came up in the psychiatric evaluation. And when I found out it was Bond’s house, I was really let down. Especially when they go all Kevin McCallister with it, setting up traps like it’s Home Alone. I see this too often in movies that are trying to take themselves seriously recently. I heard a lot of complaining about this movie about how it was too M heavy, but I didn’t really see that. I understand the complaints that everyone always thinks what Bond is doing is reckless and crazy, but he also has saved the world about 23 times already and people should just get off his sack. But with the M thing, I assume Dench was ready to get out of these action movies since she’s pushing 80 now, and they wanted an emotionally resonant way to do that. I feel they accomplished that.

I was cool with the action and the look of the movie, but I could’ve used some more action. It made me laugh that they started the movie with Bond being visually obscured and then revealing only his eyes at first, as if we were supposed to not know who he was when you played the music score when he walked into frame. But that didn’t make me laugh as much as when this super spy was in a car chase with these bad guys and they pulled their car up right next to the villain in his car, and Bond’s big idea was to ram his car instead of maybe grabbing the gun that we know he has and shooting the guy with it. He could’ve put it point blank against the guy’s temple they were so close! Instead he chose the equivalent in effectiveness of reaching over and flicking his ear, which he could have done because he was so close to the guy. I also liked that they had a chase through a bazaar in Istanbul because I’m pretty sure I recognized it from one of the Assassin’s Creed games. And no, I don’t think it’s at all pathetic that I can only recognize famous global landmarks because I’ve been there in video games. I know what the Eiffel Tower is because it was in the fourth Alien movie and one of the National Treasures too! …Also I’ve been there. I liked the opening though. It was action-packed and a great way to start a movie. Then they go into those classic Bond-style credit sequences with that cool Adele song playing. How do they still come up with those crazy credit sequences when LSD isn’t as popular anymore?

The cast was all pretty good in this movie. Daniel Craig is a pretty awesome Bond, and I’m told he’s attractive as well. I felt like his one-liners weren’t nearly as good in this one as they have been in the past, but that’s not really his fault as much as it is the writers fault. Another thing they did with his character was only use the fact that he wasn’t as good of a shot anymore when they needed it. Twice in the movie they show him not being able to hit anything with a gun, but you put a shotgun in his hand and take him back to Skyfall and he’s a champion skeet shooter. Javier Bardem made a strange choice for the villain. I don’t think they’ve had a flamboyantly gay villain before. Besides Nick Nack. And sure, he didn’t SAY he was gay, but come on… At first I thought he was kind of laughable as a villain, and then he did that William Tell thing with the sexy chick and the shot glass. That was pretty fucked up. Even more so because she was hot. And then he pulled out his dentures and told his sob story and I was kind of in with his performance. Naomie Harris also did a good job in the movie, and was nice to look at throughout (although I still maintain that she hasn’t topped her hotness in Pirates of the Caribbean yet), but was it really supposed to be a surprise when she said her last name? Could people not have guessed that when they had her in the secretary’s office? I’m not even the biggest Bond fan and I figured that one out.

Skyfall was a good movie with its share of problems, but not enough that it would hinder my enjoyment. Solid story, decent action, and good performances. They had some things that didn’t make sense, and some of the one-liners fell short, but I enjoyed the experience. I saw this in theaters, bought it post haste on BluRay, and will look forward to Daniel Craig’s next outing as Bond. Skyfall gets “Enjoying death” out of “I say ‘Day’ and you might say …’ ‘Wasted.’”

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Ninja Assassin (2009)

The Breath I Take After I Kill You Will Be the First Breath of My Life.

Today’s movie was requested by Christie Moscoscomosco.  Today, her Asianness took control of her and caused this request.  It’s a movie that I’ve seen before and currently own on BluRay, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in regards to my feelings about it.  I took a gamble with this movie.  I had not seen it when I purchased it.  I looked at the two words that made up the title to the movie and said, “This seems like it’d be for me.”  The first word was right in my wheelhouse, and I’ve looked to try to find a really awesome movie about this group of people that I had not yet found.  And the second word is usually something I’m down for as well.  Do these two great tastes taste great together?  We’ll find out as I review Ninja Assassin, written by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski, directed by James McTeigue, and starring Rain, Naomie Harris, Sho Kosugi, Anna Sawai, Rick Yune, Ben Miles, Joon Lee, Randall Duk Kim, and Sung Kang.

Orphans are taken in by Lord Ozuna (Sho Kosugi) of the Ozuna Clan of ninja to undergo brutal training to become the world’s deadliest assassins.  One notable orphan is Raizo (Rain), notable because … he’s the hero of the movie, I guess…  Raizo develops a romantic bond with a kunoichi named Kiriko (Anna Sawai), who is far too nice to be a very good ninja.  She attempts to escape the clan despite Raizo’s pleas and is caught and killed by Raizo’s Ozuna brother Takeshi (Rick Yune).  This action loosens Raizo’s bond with his clan, eventually erupting in him trying to kill Lord Ozuna and inflicting heavy casualties on the clan before eventually being injured and left for dead.  In present day, Europol agent Mika Coretti (Naomie Harris) has been investigating political assassinations that she believes leads back to the Ozuna.  Getting too close, the Ozuna send an assassin after her, but Raizo saves her.  Together they will try to … uh … kill a lot of ninjas…?

For all I said about the title of the movie in the first paragraph, it actually made me nervous about the movie.  With a title as bland as Ninja Assassin, your movie will really have to set itself up as pretty spectacular to overcome it.  This movie did not do that.  It’s fine, but it had much less impact on me than a movie about ninjas should have.  I love ninjas!  But this movie was about half martial arts movie, have love story.  It spends a whole lot of time getting us caught up on Raizo’s story and doesn’t actually jump fully into the story of this movie until about halfway in.  I know we need a little bit of backstory, but the movie makes no forward momentum until Raizo gets together with Mika, and even then they don’t move forward very much.  They try to keep us interested in Raizo’s upbringing by mixing it with ninja glory shots of Raizo training with various weapons in his apartment, but you probably could’ve had the same effect by actually making him fight people for a reason than just scenes of “Look what this guy can do with this knife on the end of a string!”  And I have the same question about this movie as I’ve had with similar movies in the past, but what makes Raizo so much better than the hundreds of Ozuna brethren that he slaughters?  He received the same training as them, and they arguably should be better because they continued to train with the clan well after Raizo departed, but the greater majority of them are just blood-filled fodder for him as he hacks his way to either Takeshi or Lord Ozuna, who are the only two people that can make him put in any effort.  But I guess I can’t really judge as I’m the one who’s so immature that I saw a German sign in the movie that said “Ausfahrt” and I started to giggle.

So there really wasn’t much to the story of this movie, but I can’t imagine they were trying that hard.  This movie really does feel like it was written after they had already filmed the action scenes and were told they needed to hold that together with a story.  But even the action is kind of disappointing.  A lot of it is solid, and most of it tended towards being very stylized, but with as weak a story as this movie had, it really should’ve had a lot more spectacular action.  I guess part of the problem was that they seemed really intent on showing how cool the ninja ability to disappear into the shadows and be cloaked in darkness was.  This is something that needs to come along with a ninja movie, but the problem is that if you’re doing it well, the audience probably can’t see most of what’s going on.  Like the scene when Mika is trying to see Raizo and another ninja fighting in an apartment, and she keeps trying to get the flashlight on them to see what’s happening but can only catch glimpses of what is probably an epic battle.  I imagine this is what two ninja fighting would look like, but I have to use my imagination because the movie isn’t showing me anything.  When you could see, the martial arts were never really all that impressive and they seemed to rely more on gore, which they had a lot of.  Lots of CG red paint and body parts flying around in this movie, but only about two fights in the movie seemed like anything cool was happening.  I liked most of the final fight, especially the part where it’s shown in silhouettes through a paper wall that occasionally got splattered with red blood, but that fight’s ending was boring.  They had this big martial arts duel until Raizo got upset about something, then he just disappears and a black shadow makes the other guy’s body parts fall off.  Then it’s just over.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the performances in this movie.  They were fine.  They didn’t blow any minds, but that probably would’ve been a waste of time when there were some more buckets of blood to fling at the screen.  Rain did a fairly good job in the movie.  At first I was just thinking that he was going to have a really hard time pulling off “badass” and “intimidating” when he was so gangnamed pretty, but I think he did as much as he could.  Sho Kosugi did plenty enough badass and intimidating for the both of them, so I wasn’t really worried about it.  Naomie Harris didn’t bring anything to mind in regards to her performance, but I did spend a lot of time trying to figure out why she looked familiar when I watched the movie the first time.  I eventually figured out that it was because she played Tia Dalma in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.  Then I spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out how she looked so much hotter to me when she looked dirty, sweaty, and had really bad teeth in the Pirates movies than she did as just a normal, pretty girl.  Then I realized that I have mental issues and I moved on with my day.

When the name of your movie is as boring as Ninja Assassin, you really need to bring it in the action department.  No one is going into your movie with high hopes about story and performances, but that action must be top notch.  And when I refer to top notch action, I don’t mean a couple of decent fights and lots of fake blood thrown around the set.  It’s the difference between a “Scary Movie” and a “Slasher Film”.  One actually intimidates the audience with suspense; the other just makes the audience queasy with lots of red corn syrup.  Altogether this movie was okay and maybe worth a rental if you’re in the mood, but there are better ways to spend your time.  You can skip it.  Ninja Assassin gets “Weakness compels strength.  Betrayal begets blood” out of “I’ll tattoo the ceiling with your fucking brains!”

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