Tags: blog, film, action, comedy, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Monday September 01st, 2025
That's my gun! Give it back to me!
What if: John Wick but the assassins guild is just like every other service industry, with sub-contractors and middle-managers and they hire bored teenagers to fill out the shifts.
That's it, that's the pitch.
Chisato is a super-eager, absent-minded dork. Mahiro is a shut-in introvert with an eating disorder1. Like many teenagers they don’t listen to instructions, are incredibly easily distracted, permanently bored and staggeringly annoying. They both have a propensity to solve their frustrations with the modern world with extreme and excessive violence.
Surprisingly, for the majority of its run time, the film focuses on their lives as awkward teenagers trying to navigate the world of part time jobs and flat shares. Their apathy and total disconnection from the bullshit jobs and meaningless managerial speak is hilarious, with the comedy coming equally from both the stupid situations they find themselves in and their complete inability to deal with it in anything like a mature manner.
The apathetic attitude is shared by the films general direction. Whole scenes are shot as if someone’s plonked the camera down and buggered off. The actors do their thing for five minutes and that’s a wrap. The editing is occasionally non-existent, Edgar Wright this is not.
The script bumbles around, mostly aimlessly, occasionally remembering that there was a plot around here somewhere that needs to be advanced.
Thankfully, the two main actors manage to consistently walk the fine line between teeth-gratingly annoying and adorably funny so it never loses you completely. Their friendship is believable and relatable. You spend the whole film invested in it and rooting for the two of them.
Eventually, the film realises that it needs an ending and so the two girls need to face down an entire Yakuza clan. At which point, from out of nowhere, suddenly erupts the best one-on-one fight scene I’ve watched in a decade. No frills, no fancy weapons, no special effects, barely even a set. Just two fighters absolutely tearing into each other. Like the rest of the film, the camera stays steady with minimal cutting, focused on the martial art moves and story telling. The result is a fight that feels believable and nasty, with real stakes, where you can see the skill, technique and ferocity involved.
It’s not quite as good as the lift fight in Merantau, but it’s not far off it either. It’s blistering.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. Of the ‘Airplane’ kind.
↩
Tags: blog, film, action, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday September 07th, 2025
And a re-al hero...
Edith Meanie is pulled back to do one last job after her ex-boyfriend messes with the mob.
It’s not an original set up but the execution is superb. Your immersion in the film rests entirely on the shoulders of Samara Weaving and Karl Glusman, their relationship being the thing that the entire film revolves around. And they pull it off superbly. John is an entirely believable fuck up who, infuriatingly, takes the wrong choice in every single moment, but never-the-less is also believably endearing. And Meanie is an entirely believable smart-but-not-educated ex-con trying to go straight who can’t ignore her affections and sense of duty.
The film builds it’s plots, characters and sub-plots convincingly and entertainingly, as it crescendoes to the big heist and final car chase and then…
…kind of just fizzles out.
That final car chase, the escape from the scene of the crime, is a bit limp. It’s not bad but the chase at the start of the film is a lot better. It’s just very underwhelming considering the excitement the film built up in the lead up to it.
Worse still, the film decides to throw in some crime drama plot twists that suddenly gets really, really dark. Pitch black in fact. But the film hasn’t earned that tonal shift because it’s put all its effort into a big car chase inside a casino and jokes about running someone over in a Tesla. It just happens out of nowhere, without the character work to make it believable.
So in the end we end up with a film that neither works as a car chase action movie nor as a complex crime drama of loyalty and betrayal. The two things end up tripping each other up.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, action, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Thursday September 11th, 2025
And figured this out and no one gets hurt
The first film is a pretty ropey film with some decently violent fight scenes that really explodes at the end into an orgy of Looney Tunes scale ultra violence. John Wick re-written by Rick Mayall and Adrian Edmondson. The surprise of the sheer scale and glee of that final fight glossed over how threadbare the rest of the film was.
The second film is pretty much exactly the same except it’s on holiday and the final fight is rubbish. Everything is sign posted, nothing is a surprise. No wit, no style, no panache.
Celebrity guest cameos:
- RZA’s does his watered down Ghost Dog impression. He’s decent again.
- Sharon Stone doesn’t so much chew the scenery as rip it to pieces with her bare teeth. Sadly, the script is dull and lifeless and she’s wasted.
- Christopher Lloyd turns up. He doesn’t do anything, at all, but he does turn up.
- The dog gets the best laughs of the film but is only in it for a minute.
On the plus side, it’s only 90 minutes long, doesn’t outstay its welcome and clips along at such a brisk pace that it’s never boring. But I kind of feel like that’s the bare minimum for an action movie. It’s like praising a pop song for having a catchy tune. Yes, that’s the point. You’ve done the absolute bare minimum that’s expected of you, now what?
In Nobody 2’s case: absolutely nothing.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, action, sci-fi, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Friday August 22nd, 2025
Lessons Learned from Predator I to Predator III
Lesson One. Tell the story through the action. Don’t have your characters sit around explaining the plot and backstory to each other, that’s just wasting time that would be better spent with something blowing up, which is what we came for. P:KoK1 absolutely rattles along. The total amount of time it spends where someone isn’t being punched, stabbed, shot, blown up or at least threatened with one of those probably amounts to less than five minutes across the entire film. It does not hang about. And yet it still manages to pack in four stories that each have a beginning, a middle and an end. Because the action is the story, not the thing that breaks it up.
Lesson Two. Have the characters do stuff because of who they are. Don’t have your characters do stuff just because that’s the only way for the next big set piece to happen. It just makes them look stupid and we’ll stop believing in them. P:KoK sets its characters up by telling us who they are and what’s important to them. And then everything that they do is because of those two things. They have to suffer the consequences of their decisions, both for good and for bad. There’s nothing complicated here, but it all works.
Lesson Three. Don’t explain everything, we don’t care. Big Alien Wants Big Fight, that’s it. Everything else is background detail and should remain there, in the background. If us scifi nerds want to delve deeper into this stuff2 then we’ll do it anyway. For god sake don’t slow the pace down by explaining stuff. Best case scenario: you ruin the mystery. Worst case scenario: you ruin the film. P:KoK has loads of interesting design stuff that it resolutely, point-blank refuses to slow down for. Blink and oh-no you’ve already missed it, too late there’s another explosion, guess you’re going to have to re-watch the film with your finger over the frame-skip button. There’s more interesting stuff happening in the background here than there is in the combined John Wick films and they last about five weeks.
In summary, this steps over the staggeringly low bar set by modern action films with ease. It’s not as great as Prey but it’s a lot of fun and keeps the anticipation up for Predator: Badlands.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
1. Yes, that’s what I’m calling it. ↩
2. And yes, yes we really do ↩
Tags: blog, film, action, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday August 24th, 2025
Under supervised
There’s a much discussed scene near the start of this movie where Lois Lane stages an impromptu interview with Superman. She asks him difficult questions about his recent actions stopping a war, questions that unsettle and fluster him because he can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t take his actions at face value; that he’s saving lives. It’s an interesting scene as it reveals so much about his character, about how he sees the world through a simple premise, that as long as he’s motivated by virtue, his actions will be (and will be perceived as) virtuous.
The problem with this scene is that, bluntly, Lois Lane is an arsehole. She rattles Superman because she takes on the classic centrist, view-from-nowhere voice that ‘respectable’ newspaper writers habitually use. The one where “some people might say…” is used to speak utter bullshit but not be held responsible for saying it. Where the whims of an aggressive, multi-billion dollar, military-industrial state and a people’s right to exist are points of view that carry equal weight. Where facts and opinion are the same thing.
Superman even tries to call her on out on her bullshit, referring to her quoting warmongers in good faith as silly and dishonest, but lacks the ability to articulate just how offensive this shit is. She even admits that she’s trading on her ignorance to make her point but seems to consider that to be a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Later, Lois does some actual journalism and finds there is staggeringly obvious corruption involved in the war that makes her questioning of Superman seem embarrassingly naive. Maybe if she had taken the time to learn the first fucking thing regarding the subject she was ‘just asking questions’ about, her and the Daily Globe could have the exposed the corruption and lies and, if not stopped the invasion, helped Superman with the public relations battle.
It may seem a minor point but it really rankled me. It sets the tone for the rest of the film, which wants to acknowledge the precarious political situation we find ourselves in, but has none of the intelligence, articulation, curiosity or courage to have anything to say about it.
On the positive side, Krypto lights up the screen in every scene he’s in. Hawkgirl’s screech is a delight, Green Lantern’s haircut is a violation of my human rights. Crucially, we get a really good depiction of Superman. His sincerity and good faith shine constantly and is completely believable throughout the entire film.
Sadly, it’s the only believable thing in the film. Unlikeable, paper thin characters stumble their way through a series of black-hole sized plot-holes, all while weightless special effects whirl around with no relationship to physical reality or basic story telling.
A boring waste.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, action, 2025
Author: KickingK
Date: Sunday August 10th, 2025
I put more effort into this review than was put into the making of this film
Terrible.
1 Star simply because it passes the Bechdel test like it's not even a thing.
Tags: blog, film, thriller, action, 2025, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Saturday September 06th, 2025
Young Blades (Go For It)
It’s been ten years since John Maclean last turned the Western genre on its head.
Slow West subverted expectations by having a very traditional setting that gradually unspools in very untraditional storytelling. This time he’s flipping it around. The story itself is roughly what you would expect. A story of thievery, criminal gangs, backstabbing and revenge. It’s very well done and has a slightly non-linear structure that works exceptionally well, getting into the drama without delay. Tension right from the off.
It’s the setting that tilts everything into a weird, off-kilter zone where everything’s familiar and yet unsettlingly
It’s still the Wild, Wild West, but now it’s the west highlands of Scotland. There’s plenty of quick-draw showdowns, twitchy hands, itching to draw weapons, but the weapons are swords. The main character is a samurai.
There’s also plenty of shots of the crisp, clear, sun drenched landscapes. But instead of feeling the parched heat, you get cut through by a frigid, Scottish spring breeze.
And the cinematography is pure Western. Wide, glorious, sweeping landscapes mixed with tight, tense close-ups of tight, tense faces. Usually covered in dirt, stubble and wrinkles.
All the actors turn in terrific performances. Tim Roth is superb as the gang leader, managing to be convincing as a brutal, ruthless killer, whilst still engendering sympathy for having to put up with and deal with the gangs stupidity and greed. I’ve always thought (probably terribly unfairly) that Jack Lowden comes across as an unlikeable tosser, so he’s perfectly cast as the most unlikeable tosser in a gang of complete scum.
However, the absolute star of the film is the composer, Jed Kursal, who turns in a moody, dramatic spaghetti western of a score. It’s rich and muscular and flows over every scene, adding colour to everything.
I’m a little torn. On the one hand, this is so good that I wish Maclean would speed up his output from one film per decade. Whilst on the other hand, if it’s going to be as good as this, it’ll be well worth the wait.
Poster Credit Where to Watch
Tags: blog, film, action, 2024
Author: KickingK
Date: Friday May 03rd, 2024
And Godzoooooky
This movie has literally everything I think of when I think of a Godzilla movie.
- Hammy acting
- Ensemble cast
- Main character with a tragic past looking for redemption
- Spectacular special effects
- Themes and metaphors
- Terrible special effects
It’s the themes part of that list that really stand out in Godzilla-1. PTSD, grief, survivors guilt, feeling betrayed by your own country, finding hope and family in the rubble of defeat. All of these, and probably a few more that I missed, are woven into the plot with great effect.
Admittedly, none of it is subtle and the script spells everything out for you like it’s teaching each concept to a small child. But that never stops it from being effective and frequently quite moving.
The Oscar winning special effects are superb. They manage to be both an homage to the original movies as well as being a modern special effects extravaganza. The scenes of Godzilla stomping around Ginza have this weird quality where the fidelity of the cgi, combined with the old-school monster design, make it look like a giant man in a rubber suit is actually flattening a city. It’s genius and goofy at the same time and I loved it.
The direction has an old-school feel to it as well. Shots are held for far longer than we’re used to in American movies, especially in action scenes. This results in a gradual building of tension and a feeling of reverence towards Godzilla. You feel like the film makers really want to do justice to the big-G and wanted the camera to linger on him long enough to appreciate just how great he is. Admittedly, it doesn’t generate the sense of thunder-struck awe that Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla managed but it comes surprisingly close.
Literally everything you could want in a monster movie.
Tags: blog, film, action, 2024, recommended
Author: KickingK
Date: Friday April 12th, 2024
Monkey Nuts
I don’t think I’ve read a single preview or review to this film that hasn’t mentioned The Raid. So let’s say this right from the start: this isn’t The Raid. It’s not as exciting and the fight scenes aren’t in the same league.
Having got that out the way, this is really impressive, imaginative stuff from Dev Patel.
It’s rare that action movies are overtly, consciously political. But Monkey Man is that rare beast. The story starts as a simple revenge story, but as Dev’s protagonist gradually and literally works his way up the Indian class/caste system he’s contextualised as a warrior for an entire underclass. This could end up being glib or trite, but the film commits to its politics as whole heartedly as it does to the violence. With its whole chest.
The use of music is absolutely superb, the soundtrack is practically a character in the movie. Its inventive, involving and, in one absolutely extraordinary fight scene, completely overwhelming.
So it’s not The Raid, it’s something very different and very much its own thing. More of this please.