Black Cat (1991)

La Femme Cat

Black Cat
aka Hak Mau
Hong Kong/Canada 1991
Directed by Stephen Shin
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

It would have been around the mid 1990s that I first saw Black Cat on a widescreen VHS release. I remember liking it a fair bit (turns out my standards were lower then, I think) and so I thought I’d revisit it via the new 88 Films boxed edition restoration (if they’d have boxed it together with the sequels, which I haven’t seen... I would have been more happier but, hey, maybe they wanted to see how the sales of this one did first... but count me in for the Naked Killer movies too, please).

One of the things which puzzled me about the new release is the blurb on the box which says that it was originally intended to be a remake of La Femme Nikita (one of my favourite movies by Luc Besson, known only as Nikita over here in the UK when it was first released... I watched it to death, week after week, at the old Lumiere cinema) from the year before but, when Disney bought out the rights to that film, the director was apparently forced to rethink. Hmm... well you could have fooled me. I remembered it as being a pretty blatant rip off of Nikita at the time I first saw it (one of many but, I could never bring myself to watch the American remakes... I knew the creativity would probably be sucked dry from the original concept) and looking at it now, I can only conclude that, yeah, maybe the director was forced to rethink but, having thought for a bit, maybe thought “Oh heck, I’m going to remake it anyway... up yours Disney.”

At least, that’s what I imagine his thought process was because, apart from having the main character and Anne Parillaud stand in Jade Leung, as character Catherine/Erika - Codename: Black Cat (depending on which personae she is adopting) going on different kinds of missions in the last third of the movie, there are a lot of similarities to Besson’s master work. And I mean a lot.

The set up is a different way for Jade Leung’s Black Cat to get into trouble with the law but, in this, her outright criminal mentality from the source movie is converted into a ‘cornered animal reacting to protect herself to survive’ set of incidents but the outcome is more or less the same. She is recruited by a special government section (actually named as the CIA later in the movie but, honestly, I would be worried about how the CIA was being portrayed here if I was part of that outfit) when she’s escaping her captors in this one. Then she is trained up in a very similar training montage to Nikita and then, after a similar ‘betrayal of a test mission’ by her recruiter, she is put out into the field to perform assassinations... but then becomes involved with a new boyfriend who she tries to protect from her bosses.

And that’s all I’m giving you on the story because, it does have very slight variances from the original material here and there but... not much.

Now, there are some nice shot compositions every now and again where the director and DP will do things like use either colour or large areas of minimalistic dead space within a shot to highlight a character but, for the most part, the film looks competent rather than visually enticing. It’s a ‘work a day’ action film and, on that level at least, it hits spot on. It’s biggest problem, however, because it does tend to ape Nikita right down to some of the costumes, props and various moments taken right from the original - the judo lesson, thrusting the spare gun clip (from pretty much the same gun) into the cleavage of pretty much the same dress etc - is that you can’t help comparing it to Besson’s earlier movie and, well, do that and pretty much anything else is doomed because Nikita is one of those almost perfect films where pretty much everything is done just right (although another partial remake, The Villainess,  which I reviewed here, is not a bad homage). Even the music by Danny Chung, plays like the editor used the Eric Serra score for Nikita to edit to and so, you can clearly hear the temp track coming through loud and clear as almost everything in the score (barring the cheesy romance music) is orchestrated similarly and bears a striking resemblance to that earlier score... like a low rent version of it (and I’m not blaming Chung here, he was obviously told to make it sound like the other score... which he certainly succeeds in doing here).

Now there are a couple of original (in terms of new to this story) concepts injected into this one but they are kind of underused. Black Cat has a chip implanted into her brain which gives her headaches to make her more obedient, so she is reliant on the pills provided by the company to stop the debilitating attacks which hit her very much in a similar manner to the old Sutra headache that Tripitaka used to inflict on the title character of the Monkey TV show in the 1970s. However, it's kind of under explained in terms of the other benefits she’s told it will give her and, yeah, it seems almost incidental to the plot. Similarly, a gun which shoots a bullet of ice which you have to remove from refrigeration five seconds before it’s loaded and fired, so the bullet dissolves in the wound and makes the weapon untraceable, is used only once and, again, it’s kind of incidental.

What saves this movie for me is the absolutely brilliant, almost feral performance by Jade Leung as the title character. Yes, the temperament of the character does match the one that Anne Parillaud manifested as Nikita but, even so, it’s a great turn provided by Leung here and she really goes for it. Some of it looks like it might have been a tough shoot too so, power to her. I wish the same could be said from some of the small, bit parts played by the American and Canadian actors but, yeah, some of them are just awful.

All in all though, Black Cat is actually quite an entertaining movie, once you stop comparing it to Besson’s version... a nice switch your brain off actioner. Now, I have to say that although 88 Films have done, I’m sure, the absolute best they could with the transfer, something seems off with the print... it’s almost like it was scanned in from an old video transfer but, I know that can’t be the case because this thing was run in 35mm in cinemas. But the film stock did look a little washed out, to my eye, in many of the scenes. However, the packaging of this one, if you get the first edition boxed with perfect bound booklet and lobby cards release, is absolutely first class... nice artwork and a box similar in quality to some of those put out by labels like Severin and Vinegar Syndrome lately so, yeah, overall it’s a cool package. And I hope 88 Films do some more of these films in the near future... as I said earlier, I’d love to see both the two sequels to this movie and the Naked Killer films given similar (or even better) treatment.

Lucy

Every Which Way But Lucy

Lucy
2014 France
Directed by Luc Besson
UK Cinema release print.

Warning: There are some spoilers here but I’d be very surprised if you hadn’t already worked everything out just from the trailer, to be honest.

I’ve always held the films of Luc Besson in high regard. Ever since I first saw Subway on TV many decades ago and had a look at whatever other films he’d done at the time. I remember introducing my friends to his work... The Big Blue was a big hit with them. I also remember seeing Nikita on the weekend of its release at the Lumiere cinema in London and going back another four times because I was so blown away by it. Besson still wasn’t that well known in this country but for us he was one of the big stars of the directing scene back then.

Besson doesn’t direct as much as he used to. He produces some very exciting action films and keeps his hand in now and again so... the prospect of seeing a brand new movie directed by him and scored by his old collaborator, Eric Serra, was an exciting one.

Alas, I have to say that I really wasn’t as impressed as I hoped I would be. The film tends to take up the naivety of some of his later projects (The Fifth Element springs to mind) and throws it up in the screen in such a way that the innocence of the content almost feels offensive. I’ll get to that in a little while but, from what I can see, the high octane action film promised by the trailer delivers at a certain level but is full of disappointment... at least for this viewer. There are three very serious problems to it, at least to me, and I’ll address those right now.

Number one is the trailer itself.

It’s a great trailer, actually, promising a story of a girl, played beautifully by the always gorgeous Scarlett Johannson, who accidentally accelerates her brain power beyond the 10% humans are mythically supposed to use (I think that’s actually an error by current thinking) and this gives her special, evolutionary powers. She goes to give her knowledge to a professor studying such things played by Morgan Freeman and all kinds of action hijinks ensue. Freeman, of course, has already been in a film which similarly covers the high speed evolution of human kind earlier this year and you can find my review of that film, Transendence, right here.

Unfortunately, the trailer pretty much shows the entire essence of the movie as, like the film itself, it counts up to the point where Lucy gets in touch with 100% of her brain capacity, and it’s pretty obvious to see exactly what the ending of this movie is going to be... just from the trailer. In fact, my cousin in Australia, where it had an earlier cinematic release, saw it a few weeks ago and I told him how I thought it would end based on the trailer and he basically said I didn’t need to watch it now. So, yeah, if you’ve seen the trailer you can pretty much predict how it’s going to end.

However, figuring stuff like that out doesn’t put me off seeing a movie because it can still be darned entertaining and, to be honest, a lot of movies are so predictable these days.

And in some ways, the movie does live up to the trailer in terms of the brilliant action and the superb performances all round. Eric Serra’s score is another great work and exactly what you would expect from him for a movie like this... although unless you like downloads (and I don’t have enough room on my computer for downloads) it has to be said that the only place you can buy the score CD at time of writing this review is from France... although, when I ordered it from French Amazon yesterday, it seemed to be a lot cheaper than it would have cost to purchase it over here so it’s maybe worth going on there if you like the score to this movie. I always enjoy Serra’s scores to Besson’s films... even if I don’t always like the film.

There are other problems with this, though, which I found far more problematic.

I said about the movie being naive but, perhaps, childish may be a better word. What it really is, however, is damned patronising. I thought I was probably alone in feeling that the delivery of the plot points was condescending but it turns out my friend who saw the film with me was made even more angry about it. Basically, every time somebody seems to make the slightest plot point in this film, we directly cut to a visual metaphor of what they are talking about. Talk about being spoon fed. It’s like even the most simple plot point is capitalised, emboldened and underlined in red pen and the director seems to be taking this tack all the way through. It doesn’t take long for it to become a truly insufferable technique.

At least when a director like Nicholas Roeg cross cuts to a relevant visual, it’s not a straight demonstration of the point that’s already been made... in fact, with Roeg, you often have to work hard to establish what metaphor he is trying to make and what consequences the disclosure of the little flashes of information will have on his characters. But in Lucy it’s just like somebody drawing an illustration after the fact. It really does insult the intelligence of the audience to the point where it very quickly became a distracting tactic. Not a fan of this “beyond dumbed down” approach at all, I’m afraid. It’s not like the central concept of the movie is in any way challenging so this really is just too much decoration of the cake, so to speak. So it would be safe to say that the editing style really grated with my mindset throughout the entire running time.

My final problem with the movie was in the ability, or lack of, in making me worry about the final fate of the characters. There’s no suspense there, partially because it’s pretty obvious what is going to happen to Lucy at the end of the movie but, mostly because Besson makes a mistake which has been the bane of some comic book writers for years. When you have a character who’s pretty much omnipotent, like Superman for example, you don’t worry about him being in peril and, therefore, don’t really care about what or who he goes up against in the course of a story. You know he’s going to be fine by the end of it. This is why the writers have to invent clauses to their original character set ups, such as Kryptonite, to have something which they can then bring in to put the hero under actual jeopardy. In Lucy, Besson makes the mistake of having a character who becomes completely able to handle herself and pretty much any situation within the space of the first half of the movie.

Consequently, when Lucy is facing down loads of mobsters and getting into car chases and gun fights, you have no worries that her life is in any way in peril. And so, of course, you don’t care what the writers throw at her... you know she’s going to be able to handle it without even trying. And so the film lacks a certain amount of suspense needed to give the action sequences the edge they really needed. This is not an easy problem to solve but I’m sure they could have had a stab which would have made sense within the confines of the story set-up if they’d have given it a try.

And so, my final thoughts on Lucy are that, while it is a pretty slick entertainment with good performances all around, excellent music and an interesting concept to play around with, the maddening, patronising execution of said concept is quite jarring and you will find yourself seething with anger and popping out of the spell of the movie at certain points throughout, I suspect. Not my favourite Besson by a long chalk but it certainly tries hard (perhaps too hard) to give us something we’ve not quite seen before in this particular wrapping paper and I just wish I could recommend it more. However, all this is swept aside when it’s got Scarlett Johansson shooting people and causing carnage... so if you are happy with that kind of level, then maybe go for it.