Maverick (1994)

 

Place Your Brets

Maverick
USA 1994 Directed by Richard Donner
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This review contains a big
spoiler about a character from the outset.

Maverick was a big budget reboot, by director Richard Donner and actor Mel Gibson (the director/actor team of Lethal Weapon fame) of the classic James Garner small screen character of Bret Maverick, who had been in many iterations of the show (you can read my reviews of the various variants of Maverick here). And it’s kind of open to interpretation to just who Gibson is playing in this one as he’s called Bret Maverick and, just like Garner used to, provides a voice over narrative as he goes along on his adventure... although I could have honestly done without the added swearing here because it didn’t seem quite right sitting in the Maverick universe but, hey ho, I guess the writers maybe imagined it was edgy or something.

The thing is, though, James Garner also plays a major role in the movie, as a Marshall called Zane Cooper, which I’m assuming is an homage to the two Western writers Zane Grey and James Fenimore Cooper. However, at the end of the film he is revealed to also be a Maverick, running an elaborate con with his son, Bret. Now, you can either take that as he’s playing Pappy (as he did once in the original show where he played both father and son in one episode) and Gibson is the original Bret or, like me, despite the lack of timing continuity between pretty much every iteration of the show in various forms, you can interpret it as he’s still playing Bret Maverick and also called his son the same name. Either way, this is a fairly affectionate nod to the original show (asides from the swearing) and is a nice addition to the original stories.

It has a stellar cast such as Jodie Foster as the main romantic lead (another con woman and this is not unusual for what would have been an episode of Maverick), Alfred Molina as a villain and James Coburn in another prominent role in the last third of the movie. There are also a lot of old time cowboy show (and Maverick show) cameo appearances by various actors such as Leo Gordon (Big Mike in the original show and also one of the original series' writers) and Doug McLure, not to mention lots of uncredited cameos too, including Garner’s brother turning up once again, plus some country and western singers too, for some reason.

One cameo moment is wonderful when Danny Glover, Gibson’s co-star from the Lethal Weapon movies, comes face to face with Gibson while robbing a bank... and the music suddenly goes into a dead-on parody of Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton’s score for the Lethal Weapon films. That’s very nicely done.

Another great uncredited cameo, larger but still short, is the inclusion of a character played by Margot Kidder. Of course, Kidder also played James Garner’s regular love interest in his post-Maverick TV show Nichols (which I reviewed here) and it’s nice to see the two sharing the screen together again (come to think of it, she also worked for this particular director in her most famous role as Lois Lane in Superman The Movie and its sequels).

And, getting back to the musical cameos... Randy Newman’s score for the film incorporates a heroic melody line for Gibson’s Bret character that is almost, but not quite, an instrumental version of the shows original theme and song. It’s like he’s been asked to do it straight but delete one note and change two others and I can’t quite understand why because, well, Warners would surely have owned the rights to the music from the original show. Maybe, going with the idea that this was actually the original Bret Maverick’s son, the composer decided to make it a variant, possibly intending to bring the full version of Garner’s theme back later for... the big reveal. That doesn’t happen but, it’s quite close and fans of the old show will certainly hear the old theme in it when Gibson does anything heroic here.

And it’s a nice film with some interesting scenes, nice action and a real suspenseful finish to the big poker game near the end of the movie. It’s also very humorous, in exactly the way the original show was although, certainly Gibson’s young Bret is more willing to pull his guns out, it seems, than the original character was. There’s a big problem with the film though... and I’m not just talking about the waterwheel on the ferry changing speeds between long shot and close up in one scene either...

I’m sure the various plot twists... Jodie Foster actually after Maverick’s money whenever she can thieve it, the James Garner reveal, the Indian who turns out to be an old pal of Bret... would have seemed fresh or at least unpredictable to the younger segment of the audience who were unfamiliar with any of the various versions of the show over the years. Old hands at Bret’s game though, through Garner’s always pitch perfect and immensely entertaining portrayal, will see a lot of the reveals coming way before they happen because they’ve become almost cliché by this point in the franchise. So, yeah, I think this movie appeals to two different audiences but, luckily, it holds it own quite well and at least meets the expectations of an older and more familiar crowd.

Maverick, the movie version, is a real hoot, to be sure and definitely one to watch. It doesn’t come close, it has to be said, to many of the earlier versions of the character but, that’s okay, Gibson does well in the part, as does Foster and they’re both helped out tremendously, in my opinion, by the presence of James Garner returning, effectively, to his roots here. A lovely, romantic Western flavoured with just a favourable dash of its powerful legacy of ingredients. One to watch.

Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome

Thunder Woman

Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome
Australia 1985
Directed by George Miller & George Ogilvie
MGM Blu Ray Region B

So I finally watched the last movie in the original Mad Max trilogy... but this seemed like something completely different to what had gone before and, frankly, didn't seem nearly as sympathetic to the style of the previous two movies as it perhaps might have been. Turns out there’s a couple of good reasons for this which I was unaware of when I was watching this thing.

The first being that this was initially conceived as the story of a group of children in a post apocalyptic environment who would be found by an adult... which is pretty much the second half of the movie as it currently is. It wasn’t until a later stage of the script writing, however, that it was decided that the adult who finds them would turn out to be Mel Gibson’s, somehow strangely iconic, Mad Max character. So the pitch of the original story was never, in its original version, intended to follow on from the style of the first two films or even have Max in it... until it later took that direction.

Secondly, the producer of the first two films and friend of George Miller, Byron Kennedy, died in a helicopter crash scouting locations for this one. I guess this obviously had an effect on Miller and so he only handled the action scenes in this movie (and I can hazard a guess as to exactly which big sequence he did get involved with but I’ll get to that a little later)... the bulk of the film being directed by George Ogilvie.

Now, I don’t know for sure whether the film would have turned out radically different in style had Miller been directing the whole thing but, what I do know is that it noticeably doesn’t match the feel of the first two. Maybe because there was a bigger budget with American money in it... I don’t know... but it feels a heck of a lot more polished and, strangely and perhaps because of it, feels the most dated of the three films. You can tell just by looking at this one which decade of cinematic history it comes from.

The film feels different from it’s predecessors straight away because, as a standard credit roll starts, we have the first of two Tina Turner songs written for the film playing over these credits... which completely shifts the tone of this installment and pushes it into 'magical 1980s land' straight away... I’m surprised there wasn’t a load of break dancing inserted into this film somewhere, too.

After the credits we have another thing which took me out of the whole Mad Max feel of the saga... sweeping panoramic helicopter/plane POV style shots... this just seems totally out of place here. This is then followed by what is probably the strongest sequence of the movie, bar the final, obligatory chase scene and it’s a little scene of a vehicle being driven by camels followed by a pilot and his son disabling the driver with a dropped rock, stealing the vehicle and then heading into one of the two main locations of this film, Bartertown... where the Thunderdome of the title resides. When the driver of the camel towed vehicle wakes up he is revealed as Mel Gibson’s Max and he goes to the post apocalyptic town in search of the people who took his car.

Max now looks completely like the “star” version of Mel Gibson we all know and recognise but they’ve still kept certain elements of his look relating to injuries received in previous installments... they’ve also gone and given him the “full Elsa Lanchester” make over when it comes to a less toned down version of the double white hair streak in this one... as opposed to the single streak he had in the second movie. Gibson also carries a mauser for a few shots, which would have added greatly  to the whole iconic look of the character if he'd kept it all the way through but... this leaves his possession pretty early in the film. Which is a shame, really, because it’s a definite wink to Westerns like The Great Silence, which I suspect Miller would probably, judging from his directorial output in the trilogy, have been a big fan of.

Bartertown is a tough place to get into and looks vaguely like it belongs in a Conan movie but Max manages to cut a deal with the main leader of the town, Auntie (played by Tina Turner), so that he can get all the transport and gasoline he wants in return for killing half of a two man team that make up, together, the more powerful leader (although not in name) of Bartertown. The two in question are the midget Master (who runs the power in the community) and the giant henchman whose back he rides, Blaster (the two together make up... Master Blaster... this film is so 1980s).

Tina Turner is pretty iconic in herself, thanks to her costume, which hastwo  additional series’ of hoops circling through each ear.What this means is that, every time you see her looking straight on at the camera, the two sets of hoops on either side of her face form these striking, vertical patterns which are totally reminiscent of the headdress of an Egyptian queen or Pharaoh... which I thought was a nice touch with the costuming carrying an almost subconscious echo of her status as the official leader of Bartertown.

Max’s deal ultimately leads to a big fight scene, halfway through the movie, which may have looked good in the 1980s but really is just two geezahs in a big dome/cage (sorry... I meant the Thunderdome) trying to catch, punch, cut and mutilate each other while hanging from big bungee wires... this is so camp and laughable it’s unbelievable and I can’t imagine Gibson sitting still for this kind of thing these days but... hey... the 1980s.

All well and good but when Max holds back from killing Blaster, once he sees his face and understands a basic home truth about him, Max is thrown out of Bartertown into the desert with no food or water, to die... wearing something which largely resembles the exact same head masks that the Autons used in certain scenes of Doctor Who: Terror Of The Autons actually (reviewed here) ... so I’m guessing it must be a traditional mask design which has passed me by and not hit my radar anytime over my life (either that or George Miller is a closet Doctor Who fan).

And then the story goes somewhere completely different and this is another tonal jump for the saga because, in the second film which ties into the first, everybody is after the gasoline as a resource they need to survive and, although that particular carrot still holds true in this one... in this film it’s just a secondary driver to a more complex plot. That is to say, it’s not a single “do this to get that” mission kind of story... it goes all over the place. So when Max is rescued by a bunch of children who think he is the second coming, in the next half of the movie, the story almost splits into two separate things which the writers then try and tie back up in the end with an almost “tacked on” sequence where Max has to take a small group of them back to Thunderdome and then escape all over again, this time with various custom vehicles in hot pursuit. So the single mindedness and purity of the first two installments is jettisoned for something which is overly complicated and flashy... at least comparitively, in terms of being a Mad Max movie. It’s also a whole sequence of film which has a heck of a lot in common, both visually as well as in terms of the attitude of the content, with The Lost Boys from J. M Barrie’s famous story Peter Pan. I can’t help remembering an interview which Tina Turner gave at the time this movie was released. I probably saw this interview on something like Film '85 (as it would have been then) and Ms. Turner was asked what it was like working with Mel Gibson. I think the answer at the time was something along the lines of “Mel Gibson is a little boy/captures his inner child” etc and now, having seen the film, I wonder if she was latching onto the bizarre thematic element of the second half of the movie when she was contemplating her answer.

It’s during the last 20 minutes that the film finally starts looking, and feeling, like a Mad Max film again.... with the inevitable chase sequence involving a load of custom, weaponised and armoured cars chasing Max and whoever he happens to be with, this time escaping in a train which suddenly seems to have a bizarre track stretching out into the desert. I’ve got no idea what’s going on here or why this track would even exist but I’m not going to let logic get in the way when this is the only half decent part of the movie. I’m guessing, and it is only a guess so please let me know if I’m completely wrong here, that this is the sequence of the film which is well and truly directed by George Miller. The stunts and high speed shenanigans are reminiscent of the similar scenes in both Mad Max (reviewed here) and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (reviewed here) and the ending to the chase is typical in that it leaves Max more or less exactly where the endings of the previous two had left him... a lone cowboy wandering the prairie plains to fend for himself and be a force of righteousness in a lawless land. Actually, as if the Western metaphors aren’t enough in this one, there’s even a scene in the first half of the movie, in the Thunderdome, where Max is announced as... The Man With No Name... so the writers of this are still, very much, wearing their influences on their sleeve, it seems.

One other thing that keeps the tone of the movie straying too far into proper Mad Max territory is a change of composer. This one isn’t scored by Brian May as the previous two were and, of course, it therefore has a different feel. This one is, in fact, scored by Maurice Jarre and it’s very hit and miss, at least in the sound mix in the movie, but contains some nice “metal percussion” elements and it’s quite appropriate to the images it’s supporting... it just feels a little too polished, again, for a Mad Max production but, definitely, works for what it was written for... so that’s a good thing, at least.

And that’s about as far as I’m riding with this one. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome really didn’t feel like it was a Mad Max movie at all for most of it’s running time and certain scenes, like the silly bungee jump fight scene, really shouldn’t be seen on anything outside of old TV episodes of It’s A Knockout, as far as I’m concerned. A competently put together movie, for the most part, but nothing too special and certainly not up to the level of the first two in the series. The fourth installment, sans Gibson in the title role, hits British cinemas in less than a week, at time of writing, and from the trailers, it looks closer in tone to the spirit of the first two movies while, at the same time, also looking terrifically overpolished for something to sit comfortably, shoulder to shoulder, with any of the movies in the original trilogy. Still, time will tell on that and you can be sure I’ll be reviewing it on here as soon as I’ve seen it. Please come back and have a read... if you’ve got a few minutes.

Mad Max @ NUTS4R2

Mad Max

Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior

Max Overdrive

Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior
Australia 1981
Directed by George Miller
MGM Blu Ray Region B

So I finally, after all these years of being told to watch this film because it’s based on the Judge Dredd strip The Cursed Earth, caught up with Mad Max 2. Although, I have to say that, while it may be debateable that certain parts of it have possibly been stylistically informed by The Cursed Earth, this is in no way a steal or homage to the Dredd strip in either its content or intent, as far as I can tell. Excepting, of course, the intent of giving everybody a good time.

Now this film has a curious thing happening on the Blu Ray print I saw of it in that, on the box art (which is the individual sleeve of a three blu ray boxed set), the film is just called The Road Warrior... which is not how I remember it at the time and I think this title was only used in certain American territories where the first film was really not released or not as well known. I remember it as just being called Mad Max 2 and, regardless of what the packaging says here, this is how the actual print on the blu ray itself is titled. Also, I think, years after the fact, it came to be known by the combination title of the two so... that’s what i’ve gone with for the labelling purposes of this blog post.

Regardless of what it’s called, this is both at once a widening of the main character’s scope in terms of story situation while, at the same time, still remaining consistent with the first movie in both budget and attitude. The print of the film used here also lays to rest a question I was puzzling over in the previous film (reviewed here) by explaining the state of the world that Max is living in. It’s apparently not in the original Australian print of the film, although I suspect it’s probably on all home versions, but the film starts off here with a flashback to the events of the last story and then shows us the recent history of the planet... Mad Max 2 and, possibly the first film too, takes place after an unspecified apocalyptic event which leaves the whole world in a state where gangs took over the highways and everyone is after as much fuel as they can get to keep themselves able to travel great distances... presumably to widen their area for scavenging for food and the like.

This narration is provided by an off screen character with a final revelation towards the end as to his identity... although, to be honest, most people will figure out who’s telling the story pretty much as soon as that character is introduced into the main narrative here. It’s a nice touch though and I just hope that the last bit of narration at the end of this one isn’t contradicted, continuity wise, by the events that take place in the third film of the series (I guess I’ll know soon enough).

The opening “back story” all takes place in a 4:3 aspect ratio at the centre of the screen but, when the film starts proper... mid-chase between Max and a pursuing, aggressive gang... it immediately opens out into the 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio which is to be desired for a film of this nature. So within the first five or ten minutes, we have the preciousness and importance of gasoline made clear to us in a much more visual manner and we are also confronted with a slightly changed hero. Mel Gibson’s face is slowly getting less characterless and closer to the star we know now and the movie makers have added a white “Elsa Lanchester” style streak to his hair... possibly, I suspect, as a visual symbol of the character’s mental trauma (if you’ve ever been around someone who’s experienced sudden and overwhelming mental health issues, you might well know what I’m talking about here). He also has a leg brace and a torn sleeve, both of which are shout outs to the wounds he received in the previous installment of the Mad Max saga.

It’s not long, in fact, before we get the iconic image from this film which everybody either remembers or, in my case, was made very aware of at the time in that it kind of pervaded the collective public consciousness and was often referenced in other things... the shot of Gibson standing there on the open desert highway with his gun and his dog. Smooth stuff.

And then the story gets going, such as it is, involving the gang that gave Max so much trouble in the opening chase and a bunch of honest citizens who are protecting a vast complex of fuel and trying to hold their own against the gang that is pretty much inflicting siege conditions on their small community. Max also wants a helping  of their fuel when he is made aware of it by a character played by Bruce Spence, known as the Gyro Captain (simply because he has his own gyro-copter). The two take it in turns getting the drop on each other... like a mini version of the two hander between Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s Hell In The Pacific, but a bond grows between them and when Max finds himself taken in, so to speak, by the community under threat, he and the giro captain both end up staying to help out... although Max is much more ambivalent in that he doesn’t let black and white morality get in the way of what he wants.

In terms of making a world more to suit the picture, George Miller actually puts more thought into this one and gives extra details and clues as to the environment, even putting filters on the camera for the post-apocalyptic moods of the sky at certain points (something which it looks like he’s gone colour correction crazy with in the new one, if the trailers for the upcoming fourth installment are anything to go by). This all helps, of course, to place the action of the mini war between the gang of thugs and the small community of survivors in a place where it’s easier to suspend any disbelief. As an aside here... the character of the gang leader, who stays masked the whole film, was originally supposed to have been Max’s old friend Goose. His body now burned, he was to have surprisingly survived the events of the original Mad Max to become the villain in this one... although the film-makers changed tack and references were 'mostly' removed from the screenplay.

All in all, this film has a more epic scope and visually it gets quite detailed but, it has to be said, Miller still seems to make the film seem more modest and small rather than epic... although that's really not a bad thing. While there are three or four main action set pieces throughout the movie, including the final celebrated chase scene, it’s still more of a mood piece than an action piece and maintains the grubby look and long shots of static takes and slow moving camera mixed into the shot design to a surprisingly high degree. Miller is still making a 1950s or 1960s American Western here and it really comes through. And he’s still cutting away from most of the really nasty stuff and letting the audience's imagination do its thing... which works better in this one than it did in the first, I think. For example, a killing arrow hit to a dog and another to a raped woman both happen off camera and instead, we are left with reactions to these events to convey the casual horror of their fate.

One of the things I will say about this is that, despite its title and subject matter, I really wouldn’t say that this is a road movie. Oh sure, it takes place on a road at times but mostly, as far as I’m concerned, road movies tend to be a metaphor for a character’s inner journey and little parts of that journey are picked up on the constantly moving scenery from point A to point B... Wim Wenders did a bunch of movies like that, to a certain extent. Mad Max 2 doesn’t really have Max or any of the others going on a specific journey or reaching a state of mind where they are a better person and, since most of the movie is just darting backwards and forwards between, around about three, specific locations... I don’t get a feel for journey from this movie. That’s okay though... it doesn’t have to be.

Brain May’s score for this film is a lot more prominent that in the first one and has a much more epic feel to it than his previous attempt... possibly due to the fact that there just seems to be more of it and that, being that it’s not a wordy film (Mel Gibson himself apparently only has 16 lines in the whole movie), the music is given more room to breathe on the soundtrack when it is used. That being said, there’s a really odd moment when a kid Max has “befriended” has to climb out through the front windscreen of the big tanker Max drives at the end and the sound design goes completely old school... with Brian May’s score suddenly disappearing and instead the sound of a heartbeat takes over and is used to ratchet up the suspense. I really had no idea film-maker’s were still doing this as late as 1981 although, if I remember correctly, a slightly more subtle sound mix moment happens with a heartbeat in certain scenes of Stephen Spielberg’s Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom a few years later... although those particular moments in that film make a lot more sense when you see them in their visual context than the inclusion of this rawer usage of the same kind of thing.

Another weird musical moment comes after the end credits where the music just... keeps on going. It’s noted on the blu ray as being exit music, which is something I generally associate with the epic films that have them such as Ben Hur (reviewed here) and How The West Was Won, which generally go on for a good few minutes after... as opposed to the 30 or so seconds here. So that’s a bit of a puzzler. I’m wondering if maybe this isn’t really exit music at all and more a symptom of something having to be removed for a shortened end credits roll somewhere along the line in the history of the film’s release. Does anybody remember seeing this at the cinema at the time of its initial release and can let me know if, indeed, it did have exit music? I find this kind of trivia interesting.

Anyway, that’s Mad Max 2... a much more accomplished film than Miller’s first stab at the character and it works at its own level, that of an old style Western, very well... it being quite entertaining. It even has a nice little twist reveal of something at the end, to do with the tanker Max is driving, which seems completely obvious in retrospect but which, astonishingly, I didn’t see coming, for once. So the fact that Miller’s script and editing didn’t telegraph this particular thing impressed me a little bit. A great little movie which deservs to be on an all night triple bill with other "hard" classics of the genre like The Ultimate Warrior and Soylent Green as far as I’m concerned. All geared up now, if you’ll pardon the expression, to take a look at the third film in the series soon. A review will, of course, follow shortly after.

Mad Max @ NUTS4R2

Mad Max

Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max

Far From The Mad “In Crowd”

Mad Max
Australia 1979
Directed by George Miller
MGM Blu Ray Region B

Warning: Some Mad plot spoilers in this.

Up until this week, this is the only one of the Mad Max franchise that I’d ever seen and, truth be told, the other time I saw this, in the very early 1980s, I really didn’t think much of it. But I should add here that, in those days, the odds were stacked against anyone into films really responding too much in terms of video releases because you probably weren’t going to be getting any idea of what the film was actually like from the home video version anyway. I remember renting this, at the time, from the Off Licence situated the next road along from me... the Off Licence is still doing a roaring trade to this day, in fact, but I think he ditched the video rental part of the business sometime in the early 1990s.

I must have been about 14 or 15 when I first saw this but I was already familiar with the adverts for the vinyl soundtrack album to this one on the back of old Starlog magazine covers... so I was quite looking forward to it but, like I said, the odds were stacked against me. Quite apart from being a typical, low quality video picture, the film had been dubbed into American English, I believe, and so I’m guessing the UK home video version was probably the one with the bizarre, alternate Amercian sound to it rather than the original Australian English language version.

Worse than even that though, and this is something that a generation of movie watchers below me may not realise, the majority of home video releases back in those days were pan and scanned from the original ratio and dumped into, what was then, a standard 4:3 aspect ratio. This causes havoc to the way you perceive films because, quite apart from the obvious problem, you also have the presence of shots where a camera is moving over either a static or already moving shot, changing the way you perceive the image and the speed at which you are supposed to be “reading” that image. You also have single shots cut into two or more shots, if the person doctoring the video to fit the standard 4:3 television sets of the day decided that the information on both sides of the screen was worthy of inclusion. This also, obviously, completely messes up the way your brain receives the film in question. I hate to sound like an old fogey but, seriously, kids these days with their widescreen TVs and perfect transfers don’t know how good they have it. That being said, certain companies like Warners, I’m told, have started chopping the tops and bottoms off of old TV shows in order to make them fit perfectly on widescreen TVs so... seriously people? Have they learned nothing?

Anyway, I wanted to check out the Mad Max films for a couple of reasons, even though I avoided the sequels back in the day due to my first, less than ideal, home viewing of this one. Reason number one is that a fourth installment in the series is coming to our cinema screens in less than a month and people have been getting quite excited about it, for some reason. I have to say that, when I watched a trailer for this in a cinema the other day, in front of John Wick (reviewed here), I thought I was watching an advert for a cartoon or animated feature for the first 30 seconds or so... the CGI was, well, less than realistic looking. To these eyes anyway. Still, it would be nice to take a look at it and if I’m going to do that then... I have watch the original trilogy.

The other reason I thought I should finally give these films another chance was that, for many decades, people have been asking me to check out the sequel, The Road Warrior. People have always told me it’s a much better movie and some folk even say that it’s inspired by a Judge Dredd story I read and loved, week by week, in the late 1970s: The Cursed Earth... which in itself is a good reason to give the second film a go (although The Cursed Earth was obviously inspired by the Roger Zelazny novel Damnation Alley... which was itself made into a movie).

So I guess all this meant giving the films a proper go at some point before the new one comes out and so, arming myself with a cheap boxed set of the trilogy in a nice Blu Ray transfer, this is exactly what I’ve done.

I have to say, now I am able to properly appreciate the way the film is photographed and edited without the whole 4:3 thing getting in the way, that it’s a much more interesting film than I’d originally given it credit for when I saw it back in the early 1980s. There’s certainly a raw, low budget edge to the look of the shots and, considering the subject matter of a group of motor bike riding thugs causing mayhem in a rundown landscape, it doesn’t detract from the movie in any way and it all feels about right for it.

Future star Mel Gibson’s Mad Max character is set up with a very long and spectacular, in terms of stunts, car chase with several police vehicles pursuing a gang member who has stolen a car with his lady friend. During the various hijinks of this opening chase, we get glimpses of Max monitoring the progress of the chase on his police waveband as he takes care of his well oiled machine (his car, okay?) and instead, we get shots of his boots, his coat and sun glasses from behind. Character details like that start to gradually build as he begins to “tool up” but we never see his face... the information of what he actually looks like (which to be fair, is nothing special) is withheld to give the audience a suspenseful introduction to the character so that when we finally get to the moment of being able to look him in the eye, it’s coupled with a heroic and violent resolution to the criminal problem, thus subconsciously identifying him as a hero figure in the collective, audience mind through release of tension. When Max makes that first kill he whips off the glasses and the music finally kicks in and swells up to further enhance the psychological manipulation. Simple and effective.

Now the film is a revenge movie but it takes until, literally, the last 20 minutes or so to prepare us for this character’s vector. Although his friend Goose is killed off viciously about two thirds of the way through, it’s not until right near the end that the real motivator of his sudden, vigilante (if you read it that way) crusade is put into place. After that initial chase, the director starts hitting the emotion pedal by showing us an idyllic lifestyle when Max is not on duty. A simple man at peace with his girlfriend and young son. It’s revisited again after Max tries to quit the force following the death of Goose but, instead, is given some time off to think it over. It’s at the end of this last part where things go really wrong and the gang in question wait for Max to leave before visiting their own twisted revenge on him (for the events that take place in that opening chase sequence, right at the start of the movie) and run over his girlfriend and kid. When it comes time to switch the life support off on his dead family... Max goes on his rampage.

However, unless I missed something or it wasn’t made clear enough, he never actually gets the villain of the piece, just one of the guys responsible for the vendetta against Goose... so it’s kind of a strange movie in that the thing doesn’t actually get resolved*. I know there’s The Road Warrior up next, and I haven’t watched that one as yet, but I’m guessing, from checking the cast list of that one, that this revenge spree is left curiously unresolved in the scheme of things. So I did find that kinda strange, to be honest.

Now this is quite a gritty film, dealing with adult issues and done so in the grubby syntax of the period it’s shot... which seems to my mind to possibly be a little post apocalyptic, which would explain the lack of police helicopters and dilapidated, unkempt look of the police headquarters in this film. That being said, my cousin now lives in Australia and he said the place where they filmed this movie... always looks like that. So not really sure whether it’s supposed to be post-apocalyptic or not but... my guess is yes.

I also find it quite interesting that, for such a grimy film, the director shies away most of the time from actually showing the audience anything too graphic. I think we see the burnt hand of Goose but we never see his burnt face, for example, just Gibson’s reaction to it. And this kind of modus operandi is employed throughout the duration of the film. When a man is terrorised and his woman raped, for instance, we cut away from them being dragged away from their car to some nice, artistic shots of a crow flapping its wings etc. Instead of showing Max’s girlfriend and young son killed, we are just shown the aftermath of a shoe and a ball as a metaphor for what just happened. Now while it’s good that the director realised that a lot of the really horrible stuff would be made even worse if it was left to the imagination, it means that the actual graphic content of the film is surprisingly small and I do find that this particular visual cocktail film comes up a little short in a couple of places where showing just a little bit more (definitely not the whole hog, so to speak) would maybe have been a little more effective.

That being said... what do I know? It’s obviously an influential film, especially in terms of the spate of American and Italian post apocalyptic, gangs of thugs movies which came after it. I was thinking about this while I watched it and, honestly, I think even the villainous characters in a movie like Paul Veerhoven’s Robocop would be hard to imagine if Mad Max hadn’t come along first. They all seem to be very close cousins. And obviously, Neil Marshall’s own tribute to those films, Doomsday, also owes a tremendous debt to this film and, probably, The Road Warrior too (I’ll know soon enough, I guess).

Of course, Mad Max also has its own share of influences and with its motorbike drag scenes and Django-like scene towards the end, where Max has one of his hands run over and broken just like Franco Nero had decades before. It all points to the director being a fan of Westerns, if I’m not much mistaken. Mad Max and all those later derivatives seem to be about cowboys fending off against the marauding Indians... with the cowboys being the forces of law and order and the Indian tribes being renegade bike gangs soaring across their own desert land... their four legged friends replaced by two wheels and a big engine.

All in all, the film is a lot better than I was expecting and it has some nice photography to boot. Brian May’s score is a little bit overdone in places, I think, but overall it’s of its time and, although I can’t imagine a score like this being written for that kind of picture today, it gets away with it here I think. Not a great film but probably, in some insane B-movie parlour sense, a bona fide classic and, hopefully, the best is yet to come. Check back here soon for my review of... The Road Warrior.

*Since publishing this review, Grindhouse Dave has made clear to me that the villain of the piece does, indeed, get his come uppance... although before Max sorts out the guy who kills Goose. I've watched the clip and realised that it wasn't obvious, to me, that this death scene was indeed supposed to depict Toe Cutter, the gang leader, and personally I don't think it's very clearly presented but, it does seem to be in there. So thanks to the Twitter realm for clearing that up for me.

Mad Max @ NUTS4R2

Mad Max

Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Expendables 3

The Uncanny X-pend

The Expendables 3
2014 USA/France
Directed by Patrick Hughes
Cinema release print.

Well... this one kinda works well.

If you’ve read my reviews for The Expendables (here) and The Expendables 2 (here) then you’ll already know that I have a soft spot for these movies and the sentiment behind them. I have to confess to being a little worried about the fact that this one’s gone for a much lower age rating than the previous installments and I’ll stand by that and raise some points about that lower on down in this review but... all in all, The Expendables 3 kicks ass if it’s a nice big dose of action you crave.

The cast is as solid as usual and has the usual, additional names added to the roster... this time in the shape of Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, Antonio Banderas, Kelsey Grammar, Robert Davi and Mel Gibson (as the villain of the piece). However, there’s also a new, younger team of recruits and future Expendables in this and they were all pretty likeable in here too, with special mention going to the lady in the pack, Ronda Rousey, who has great screen presence in this and does the action scenes just as well as her colleagues. Imagine my surprise when I just looked her up and found out that this is her first feature film.

The story is about what you’d expect from an Expendables film. It’s simple, clichéd, not very challenging to your mental capacity and, basically, does what you’d expect it to do from the message on the tin, so to speak. And there’s nothing wrong with this. I think trying to graft a more intricate plot onto a movie which is basically trying to recapture some of the atmosphere of those late 1970s and early 1980s action movies would have been a delicate tightrope walk to pull off. This movie ditches any attempts to remake its original intentions in this manner and, frankly, the franchise doesn’t need to do that anyway. The film works well at its level and supplies pretty much most of the right ingredients needed to pull it off in style.

There are some casualties though.

Once again, Jet LI has what amounts to a cameo role in this, coming near the end instead of the beginning like the previous movie. Robert Davi is also underused as a minor villain, it has to be said, but it was at least nice to see him. I say this having always pretty much disliked the actor but I think that’s probably more because I identify him with some of the villainous roles he’s played in the past and so, if you’re paying attention here... that means he must be a pretty good actor. I’ve probably unfairly mis-judged him over the years and so, like I said, it would have been nice to see him as a more major villain in this one, I think. Gibson works well with the script he has, though, but I still preferred his turn as the villain in Machete Kills (reviewed here), to be honest.

It’s an entertaining movie, no question, but if I was asked to rank it compared to the others I think I’d struggle with its placing. I think it’s definitely better than the first one, for sure, but I think I can’t say it’s any better or worse than the second one. It’s kinda swings and roundabouts and here’s why...

Okay, there’s been much fuss made about it going for a toned down, lower rating to get more money in at the box office and, while I can’t blame the stupid accountants in Hollywoodland who are the enemy of art and all about making money, I think this was a bad idea on their part. The Expendables franchise has had a pretty hard edge to it in terms of the depiction of on-screen violence and, while the inclusion of the goriness and the exclusion of it in this movie neither, in all honesty, attracts or detracts from the overall experience of watching a fun, action move... it does have two big negatives for leaving the “blood and guts” factor out.

One of those negatives is that it’s almost an essential part of what has become The Expendables brand. It does run the risk of not quite seeming like a bona fide Expendables movie... almost like an A Team kind of romp instead. It’s one of the things that sets it apart from what most of the other films in a similar genre are doing and it’s a shame that it loses the roughness which highlighted it and gave it a certain style.

The other big negative about cutting out the gore, for me, is that in doing so the film does what a lot of big action movies do these days in that it pretty much glamourises violence. Frankly, when you show the goriness of, say, a man being literally cut in half by a barrage of machine gun bullets, with bits of his innards flying everywhere... you are showing a very real and horrible consequence of the act of violence. It’s not glossing over it in any way and it makes you think twice about the possibility of doing violence yourself. However, when you lose the bloody consequences of that violence and cow-tow to the censors, and there’s a certain irony here, then you actually end up making that violence look like a very attractive element of life. And while I enjoy action movies as much as the next guy or gal... I think it’s important that youngsters need to get a feel for the fact that violence is something a human being should use as a last resort and not go in all gung ho and guns blazing. Just my two pennies worth there but it’s another reason why I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the DVD and BluRay releases of this movie are released in a much harder cut.

On the other hand, this movie does work better in terms of the way the characters are, mostly, all interacting and, for the most part, getting a pretty equal amount of screen time. The ensemble nature of the first movie, which was one of its big strengths and which I thought got a little lost in the second one (even though I preferred the second overall) is back and it serves the delivery of the story very well. Stallone and Statham should definitely work together more and the team they’ve got here all seem to have pretty good chemistry which, in this script more than the last, comes more to the foreground. So that’s all good.

At the end of the day, I can’t decide if I liked The Expendables 2 or The Expendables 3 more and, frankly, I don’t care... because whichever way you cut it you’ve got a great little action movie which works well and, like the first two, has a marvellous score by Brian Tyler, a composer I’ve been really getting into the swing of lately, since hearing his scores for the fourth Rambo movie and Battle: Los Angeles. Bits of the score definitely sound like they’ve been recycled from the previous movies but that possibly means this one is pulling the leitmotif together in an exceptional way (I’ll be clearer about it when I get my hands on the CD, on that count). So, all in all, if you liked either of the first two movies in this franchise then, despite the ratings drop, The Expendables 3 really delivers the goods on what you are expecting from the trailer (even though my favourite Banderas line of dialogue from the trailer didn’t make it into the final cut, by the looks of it). Definitely one to go see if you like these kinds of movies. I’ll definitely be picking this one up again on the home video release, for sure.

Machete Kills

Machete Junction Kills

Machete Kills
2013 USA/Russia
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Yeah, there’s gonna be some fairly big spoilers here.

The original Machete movie was a spin-off movie of a fake trailer used in Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse project (released separately as Planet Terror and Deathproof over here in the UK). Like other projects made from the fake trailers in Grindhouse, such as Hobo With A Shotgun, Machete was a modern movie masquerading as a 1970s exploitation picture but made with a dash of self-conscious nostalgia for the sub-genre.

Both Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again were put up at the end of the original Machete as two films in which the title character ... um... Machete (played by Danny Trejo), would return. And now he has, in the promised Machete Kills. This was a film I’d really been looking forward to.

The film opens with a new fake trailer, that for the third movie in the Machete trilogy which has had something of a title revision since the last movie. Now the next Machete movie after this one, if the series gets that far, is Machete Kills Again... In Space. And indeed, the trailer looks wildly silly, it has to be said. Laser beams, Buck Rogers robots, light-sabres, light-machetes and a host of other things referencing the boom to plunge a character into the sci-fi milieu left in the wake of the original Star Wars movie’s cinematic success. Although this trailer is quickly referenced again at the end of Machete Kills (amongst other pre and post-credits chunks of “Machete movie moments”), I think that this should maybe have been left completely to the end of the movie because, this opening trailer tells us some important and spoilery things... one very quickly and then a bunch of stuff when you get into the last third of the movie.

The thing it ruins straight from the start is the fact that it reminds audiences the original Machete started off with a scene where he lost his partner. As you know from the previous movie, Machete’s new partner was also his new girlfriend, as played by Jessica Alba, a role this actress reprises here. However, since she isn’t in the trailer for Machete Kills Again... In Space, it doesn’t take much to figure out her character probably won’t make it until the end of this movie. Remembering that last film’s opening sequence on top of that, it’s not hard to realise she probably won’t even make it through the pre-credits sequence of this one before coming to a nasty end and... alas.... this is indeed what happens.

The other stuff you’ll realise, as you go through the movie, is that things are all pointing towards this one dovetailing straight into the next one. When Mel Gibson’s villanous Voz is shown to have a Star Wars fetish and intends to colonise the moon with his hand picked people and super-clones, much in the same way as the “off course” Bond film Moonraker did in the late seventies, you start to figure out where this is all going and, when he shows the silver mask worn in the Machete Kills Again... In Space trailer, you realise that this whole film is leading up to some kind of cliffhanger ending which takes Machete and the main villain careening into more mayhem in space... and that is also the correct conclusion.

For while Machete is clearly playing a more Bondian role in this one (he has his gadgets and knows how to use them... and is clearly a parallel here for “the many lives of John Shaft”... specifically the Shaft of Shaft In Africa) and the movie is quite blatant in its Moonraker references towards the end (with even some of the underscore sounding particularly late 70s Barryish at certain points)... it’s obvious that Machete Kills is Rodriguez saying to his Grindhouse audience... “Okay, so this is Machete’s version of The Empire Strikes Back.” And that is quite literal too... some parts of the sets are modelled on corridors and textures from Cloud City, Gibson has his own landspeeder and, after one of the regular Machete characters is blinded, Voz freezes her, encases her in carbonite and absconds with her in his spaceship.

Okay... so, this is all good and it certainly demonstrates the way films were getting high-jacked mid-production and turned into hastily changed science-fiction vehicles in the late 1970s. However, one of the things it has done, perhaps, is dilute down the already parodic Machete character into something else. It’s certainly a valid thing to do and it was very entertaining, but it was a bit more epic in scope than I wanted and a bit less punchy, I felt, than the first movie in the series.

Don’t get me wrong, it was fast paced as hell and the actors were all firmly committed to their tongue-in-cheek seventies roles, but I just didn’t have quite as much fun with it. That being said, however, there’s still a lot of laughs to go around and it brought a smile to this face on more than one occasion. It even had a follow up to the gory intestine joke of the previous film, which wasn’t quite as funny as the first but had a lot of people laughing. It’s very much a rip roaring time at the cinema and, what it lacks in the rawness of the first movie, it certainly makes up for in the sheer stupidity of its ideas... which includes flick knife smart phones, gatling gun bras, a miniature “strap-on” bazooka which shoots when you twerk, a helicopter blade ride with a difference and a 3D sex scene that will definitely leave you wanting more... especially as the print isn’t even in 3D, if you catch my drift.

Machete Kills is not quite the grimly humoured gore fest of the previous movie (although it certainly has its moments) but this shouldn’t stop the same audiences who liked the first movie from getting into this one... and with actors and actresses like Danny Trejo, Mel Gibson, Lady Gaga, Michelle Rodrigues, Amber Heard, Cuba Gooding Jr, Antonio Banderas, Charlie Sheen and even gory make-up legend Tom Savini, reprising the character he played in the first movie (but with a twist) going along for the ride... you’ll probably find something you’ll enjoy if you liked the first one. Definitely glad I saw this one and certainly looking forward to Machete Kills Again... In Space.