A Fistful Of Dynamite

How Would He Duck?

A Fistful Of Dynamite  
aka Duck You Sucker  
aka Giù La Testa  
aka Once Upon A Time... The Revolution
Italy/Spain 1971 Directed by Sergio Leone
Eureka - The Masters Of Cinema  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers if you’ve never seen this one.

Okay, so let’s talk about Duck You Sucker or, these days perhaps it’s better known by one of its other many names, A Fistful Of Dynamite. This is a beautiful new Blu Ray release from Eureka which my friend and I both got for each other at Christmas. A two disc special edition of what is, essentially, my favourite ever Western movie (occasionally alternating with this director’s previous film) and the last Western ‘officially’ directed by Sergio Leone... the next film directed under his own name, after a long interval, would be his swan song, the absolutely brilliant Once Upon A Time In America.

The plot is very simple but told in an entertainingly convoluted way. A Mexican bandit name Juan, played by Rod Steiger as an almost parody of the director (who I seem to remember he didn’t get along with during production) inadvertently teams up with an IRA terrorist named John, played by James Coburn, during the 1913 revolution in Mexico. The two start off kinda hating each other but do the whole male bonding over violence and adventures thing and, inexplicably and regretfully in the case of Juan, end up becoming heroes of the revolution.

The film looks beautiful and, although there are only a few incidents told in its lengthy running time, everything is stretched out in the way that only Leone can do it (and leave you wanting more) so that it feels like an absolute epic. Which, of course, it is.

The film has a lot of comedy in it, with one of my favourite scenes being the bank raid at Mesa Verde when Juan has been talking John, ‘the firecracker’ who is so good with explosives, into doing the bank job only to find, when he goes through with it, that it is he who has been manipulated by John all along as there is no longer any money in the bank. Instead, he finds himself freeing a hundred or so political prisoners. The look on Steigers face each time he opens a bank vault and instead finds prisoners is priceless in a montage scene beautifully backed for comic effect by Ennio Morricone’s truly awesome score.

The film is also very moving, with a wonderful, protracted sequence after Juan and John have stopped the bad guys in government from crossing the bridge and following the rebels where they go rejoin all the people they have saved, only to find they’ve all been slaughtered in a cave by another military troop. The scene is just Rod Steiger’s face for pretty much most of it as he looks around and talks to Coburn and you begin to realise what has happened and that Juan has lost his father plus all six of his children in the massacre. When he goes outside in a suicidal bid for revenge (only to be caught in time to be rescued later), it’s only then we are left with John and we see the many bodies piled up, with the machine gun bullets of Juan’s bid for vengeance outside the cave on the soundtrack co-opted by the visuals of the dead bodies of the rebels as a metaphor of the way they died. It’s a wonderful moment of sound juxtaposed with on-screen visuals to make a comment on what you are seeing and add a layer of dynamic context.

There’s also a moving scene earlier in the movie and, for my money, Steiger’s monologue from this scene is probably one of the best, if not the best, in cinema history. Now I don’t acknowledge politics or the necessity of them myself and I usually don’t understand them anyway but, twice in Spaghetti Westerns they’ve simplified thing so that even I can comprehend them and one of them is this speech, which I’ll quote here (the other is probably the end moments of A Bullet For The General, if I’m not confusing politics with morality that is)...

“I know what I am talking about when I am talking about revolutions! The people who read the books go to the people who can't read the books, the poor people, and say, "We have to have a change." So, the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? They are dead! That's your revolution! Sh... so, please... don't tell me about revolutions... And what happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!”

The photography in this is absolutely beautiful, of course and, it’s very easy to recognise that the meticulously designed shot compositions are by Sergio Leone. You have action scenes through horizontal slats in the foreground or mid-ground and the screen split up into sections with holes to view other things going on... not to mention an abundance on close ups of eyes and, in a brilliant part at the start where Juan is riding in the carriage with the rich people, their mouths full of food to show the way the ‘other half’ lives and how evil they are in this situation (one of them a priest, of course).

And as far as the composition goes... there’s that wonderful moment where a poster with a face on it is suddenly torn out from behind in a slat on the train carriage it has been plastered over to reveal Rod Steiger’s eyes looking out from inside and into the camera in close up... a shot which must surely have inspired the scene where Gromit does more or less the same thing hiding inside a box of dog food in The Wrong Trousers.

One particularly favourite moment of composition is near the start of the movie, when the camera is placed behind the guy riding shotgun on a stage coach and is looking down past him at the action. The brim of the guys hat fills the right third of the widescreen frame while we see Juan and the driver interacting on the ground in the left two thirds of the screen below... really nice stuff.

And then there’s Ennio Morricone’s score adding to every scene of course. This is one of my all time favourite scores too and one of my ex-girlfriends used to get so tired of me bringing it to play in the car every time we went out. At times jaunty but ultimately containing some of the most moving melodies he ever wrote... especially for the scenes where John is remembering his IRA past, which we see more of as his back story is revealed over the course of the movie.

Actually, if you go with the title Once Upon A Time... The Revolution and realise it is sandwiched between the director’s other epic movies Once Upon A Time In The West and Once Upon A Time In America, we see the director’s obsession, as I see it, with memory and how important it is to the characters who inhabit these three films (and also his earlier film, For A Few Dollars More). Like it is in some of Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies, memory seems to be almost an added character to the story and the events of the present time in the film are always affected by what has gone on in the past of the character’s lives. I won’t spoil James Coburn’s full character arc for you here if you’ve never seen it  but, it’s a sad and tragic one and explains, to a certain extent, why he sees the actions of one specific character in the film as a betrayal of sorts... although he doesn’t, as we at first think, do anything about this betrayal. He does inadvertently pave the way for redemption for that character towards the end of the film though.

Eureka’s wonderful two disc set of A Fistful Of Dynamite, including both the American version of the film and the much longer Italian cut (which is the one to watch but maybe choose the English dialogue track option on the audio because that’s what the two main American actors are speaking throughout) is loaded with extras (none of which I’ve yet had a chance to watch) including separate commentary tracks from both Sir Christopher Frayling and Alex Cox plus a beautiful slipcase housing a book of essays about the film. If you call yourself a film buff (I wouldn’t), a cineaste, a movie goer or any variant of a lover of cinema then this is a film which you should always have a version of on your shelves. One of the great movies of cinema and another that I’ll always try and revisit every five years or so. Get this version before it sells out.

You Were Never Really Here

Hammer & Bickle

You Were Never Really Here
2018 UK/France/USA Directed by Lynne Ramsay
UK cinema release print.

Warning: In order for me to talk about a couple of scenes in the way I want to talk about them, it’s necessary to have spoilers here, including the ending of the movie. Please go see the movie before you read my thoughts on it.

Based on the novella by Jonathan Ames, You Were Never Really Here is Lynne Ramsay’s fourth feature length film. It stars Joaquin Phoenix, an actor I’ve never really appreciated until his star turn here, as the title character Joe. Joe takes on brutal, illegal jobs rescuing children from pedophiles for cash... always carrying a trusty hammer to smash his way through people to reach his goal. So, yeah, pretty much a hit man with a conscience. If you understand my title for this piece, you’ll know I’ll soon be making the much noted comparison of this movie to a rather more famous film of the 1970s and I know, already, people are getting sick of hearing this comparison from other commentators on the film. However, like I said, I will get to this in a minute because, frankly, Ramsay seems to be doing everything she can in the movie to invite this response and... she does a fine job with it too.

Now, I usually stay away from films featuring Phoenix if I can but when I saw the trailer for this I was intrigued and, frankly, when I saw who the director was then I knew that I would have to see this one. Including this movie, I’ve only seen three of Ramsay’s four feature films and her last one, We Really Need To Talk About Kevin, really didn’t do much for me, truth be told. However, anyone who directed the absolutely astonishing movie version of Morvern Callar, which I found much more interesting than the book (the book isn’t bad, mind you, but the characters seem pitched a little differently), is someone who has my trust for life.

As it happens, You Were Never Really Here is a truly great movie. There are times when it becomes an almost hypnagogic experience due to the way the images and the stark musical score by Jonny Greenwood work together, too.

After establishing the main character Joe by way of showing us the end and aftermath of a ‘previous job’ and then showing us his loving relationship with his ageing mother, who he lives with, the film drifts fairly rapidly into the main plot set up... where Joe is asked by a senator to rescue his daughter from a child prostitution ring... which is something which is a vast simplification in terms of the political damage the exposure of such a ring could do, it turns out. We follow his mission to rescue young Nina, played brilliantly by Ekaterina Samsonov and then, as Joe waits to deliver her back into the hands of her father, everything goes wrong for Joe and Nina. Joe barely manages to escape with his life. When he returns to his familiar places, everyone he knows has been tortured and killed in an effort to find him, including his mother. Joes mission now becomes to once more rescue Nina from the clutches of the politically powerful, child slave swapping ring that have created this situation in the first place.

And it’s drawn a lot of comparisons to Taxi Driver and... I really can’t disagree with that slant.

Joe’s similarity, in some ways, to "God’s lonely man" Travis Bickle and Nina’s dead-eyed version of Jodie Foster’s Iris are things I don’t think I imagined as the writer/director seems to be almost pushing these similarities on us. The visual metaphors of the streets of New York where Joe drives his car in an almost direct parody of the shots and lightning of DeNiro’s cab driving scenes in Taxi Driver can’t, I’m sure, be anything but deliberate. The seedy apartment building where Joe first rescues Nina could easily be the same building where Travis Bickle makes his final stand to rescue Iris in Scorcese’s phenomenal classic and the distancing that Scorcese achieves in some of that last shoot out (with voyeuristic, overhead shots etc) are mimicked here but in a completely different way. The film is violent in intent but, actually, not that violent in what it shows... you feel it more with the gut crunching sound design and the juxtaposition of visual information rather than see most of the violence and the way Ramsay chooses to show that first big rescue is on perpetually cycling Close Circuit Television screens as we track Joe’s progress through the pedophile's lair via media within media.

Other parallels with Taxi Driver would include the diner where Joe and Nina drink their milkshakes at the end of the movie and there’s even, during that 'New York by night' drive-by sequence, that shot where the camera focuses on what’s outside the front windscreen before shifting so the rear view mirror comes into sharp focus.

So, yeah, I can’t really blame people for talking about the Scorcese movie in relation to this one. It even, in some ways, seems to have the same plot as Scorcese’s noted influence on his version. That being that of the central story of John Ford’s The Searchers, where Nina takes on the motivation associated with the Natalie Wood role in that film.

One of the other influences which I think some people are maybe missing (or maybe it’s just me seeing what I want to see), is that of the cinema of Sergio Leone. In a lot (not quite all) of Leone’s cinema, we have the characters (and audience) being constantly informed and updated by memory flashbacks to a back story outside the current one and this is what Ramsay does with Joe’s character so that, by the end, we have an understanding and sympathy with the character as his own childhood trauma is made accessible to us. Ramsay is also exceptionally clever here because those little flashes of memory kind of creep up on us almost unannounced in a lot of instances and she does this, I believe, by showing us lots of random details in little flashes in a similar way. For instance, we might see a floor polisher suddenly filling the screen for a few seconds or Joe’s mouth at a water fountain. These little cut aways make the other cutaways to Joe’s turbulent past and his obsession with breath play and constant contemplation and fascination with suicide a more palatable and easy thing to accept in the general flow of information as this gem unfolds.

There are some really great moments here, too, which are real flashes of the Ramsay genius and I think my favourite of these is the moment where Joe buries his mother in a lake and weighs his pockets down with rocks too... in a bid to bury himself with her. As we see Joe and the black plastic bag that holds his mum float down to the bottom of the lake, we hear Joe counting in his head on the soundtrack... counting down to his own death, We are then instantly reminded of Nina’s countdown to something on the soundtrack earlier in the film and when Joe opens his eyes at the realisation that he really has to go rescue her again, we see Nina swimming up from the bottom of the lake in Joe’s mind too, as he liberates himself from the water which seemed to be the answer to his obvious death wish.

Now, the ending of the movie is brilliant but I’ve seen some people saying that it competely changes the perception of everything that happens before it. Now, maybe I’m just exceptionally slow or stupid but... I beg to differ. And this really is a big spoiler here folks so, you know, look away and go off and see the movie instead, if you haven’t already done so...

When Nina goes off to a restroom in the diner, Joe takes a revolver and blows his own brains out on the table. Everybody else around him carries on like normal and the blood spattered waitress even plonks his bill down on the table in the big pool of red fluid forming and we realise that he is just imaging this, as Nina returns and wakes him from his revelry. Now, some people are taking this and the prominence of pills he pops to try and keep his haunting childhood memories at bay as testament that none of the things in the movie actually happened and that it was all in his head. I don’t think so... I think this is a natural progression for the two characters and everything did, indeed, happen as we saw it. And besides... Joe still has that big hole in his cheek where he was shot through the face earlier in the movie. So.. a great ending yes but, game changing? No.

And that’s all I have to say about this one. Like Morvern Callar before it, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here is an absolute classic of modern cinema and the blatant references to Taxi Driver (which only affect the reading if you’ve seen the earlier movie and are frankly not impactful on the story) in no way hinder the movie... they just indicate a confident director’s acknowledgment of cinematic history within the context of her own movie. A true masterpiece and one which I hope sees her getting a lot of recognition and well deserved praise.

Oh... and for the record... Joaquin Phoenix is absolutely brilliant in this.

Ben Hur

Are Judah One?

Ben Hur 
USA 1959 MGM
Directed by William Wyler
50th Anniversary Blu Ray Box 
Region A/B

You know, I actually bought this super duper, “everything and the kitchen sink” new Blu Ray remaster of Ben Hur to watch and review for last Easter. However, rather than taking their customary small amount of time to get it to me, Amazon actually took many weeks to deliver this one so, by the time it had arrived, the Easter period was long gone. So I saved it for watching this year instead.

I’m not really a religious person and Ben Hur is a film I discovered fairly late in life (I’ve only been properly watching it the last 20 years* or so) and, like lots of other movies I seek out, it was all due to the musical score that I got interested in it. Miklos Rosza’s monumental score for this epic picture is an absolute masterpiece and, because it was always included in the top 5 polls of greatest soundtracks ever written, I figured I should definitely have a listen. And, of course, once I’d heard the score to this I really wanted to see how it supported the film itself... like many of my later filmic discoveries (see my upcoming review of The Car for a similar musical entry point).

The film is the second of only two movies shot on a special camera used by MGM called Camera 65 (the first being the 1957 movie Raintree Country) and, depending on how the print is being projected, it gives you one of three, extremely wide aspect ratios: 2.66:1 when processed on Super 8 film, 2.76:1 on 70mm and 2.55:1 on 35mm. I’m never quite sure which version is being put onto the various home video versions of the film I’m seeing (I have this movie on VHS, DVD and now Blu Ray) but it’s certainly a lot of a longer frame than the standard 2.35:1 Cinemascope ratio most people are familiar with these days (not to mention the standard 1.85:1 ratio most movies post mid-1950s are made to be projected at). This, of course, contributes to the epic feel of the film and matches the emotional splendour of something which is often touted as being, to quote its sometimes used subtitle and borrowing from the 1925 version of the film, A Tale Of The Christ.

Well, I have to say that, although it certainly hypes itself as being a tale of Christ, and it certainly owes the deus ex machina style ending to the crucifixion, it’s actually more a revenge story and it uses the little dips into the periphery of Christ as impetus for fulfilling it’s own story needs, more than anything else. It’s also a very slow and rambly film in some ways and I imagine a lot of younger audiences wouldn’t really want to put up with a stealthily paced, sprawling Biblical epic like this, these days, but... you know... there’s definitely gold in “them thar hills”.

The film deals with the fall from grace of Judah Ben Hur, played by a fairly young and slightly spindly version of Charlton Heston, at the hands of his once boyhood chum but adult antagonist Messala, played by Stephen Boyd. Messala ruins Judah over an unfortunate accident by sending him to be a slave on a Roman Galley while his mother and sister are left to rot in a dungeon. The two ladies are eventually released back into the world when it is discovered they have both caught leprosy. The film certainly sounds like a standard revenge flick in this way... and it truly is, actually... but once you factor in Rosza’s six minutes plus of Overture before the movie opens and a short sequence detailing the birth of Christ, it’s actually around about an hour into the film before Heston is even sent to the galleys, encountering Christ as a man, who kindly defies the Romans to give Judah water when he is being trekked across the desert to his shipboard destination.

After this, we follow Judah, and pretty much only Judah, on his course for revenge as he escapes the galley and, through a strange twist of fate, becomes a citizen of Rome to finally return to his home town to ride against Messala in the film’s fateful and infamous chariot race (although the stories about fatalities in the filming of this sequence in various versions of the film seem to be an exaggerated myth, it turns out). And then, once all these boxes have been ticked, there’s a lengthy end game to the film where everything ties back in to Jesus, leading up to the film’s final solution in the crucifixion scene... but I’m not going to tell you what happens here. I’m not even going to tell you who wins the chariot race either... if you want to know you can find out by watching the movie for yourself.

Although it’s based on the book by Lew Wallace, it’s actually quite a bit different from the novel, as far as I can remember (been a while), which I seem to recall was as much about Judah Ben Hur raising an army to fight the Romans in the name of Christ than the tale as it is presented here but, whether it’s a good adaptation of the original novel or not, it’s certainly a spectacular looking movie. The action scenes are few and far between but the dialogue is quite interesting in places and it’s definitely a movie about the broad strokes in terms of story... jumping a year or three at certain points until it brings itself back to the bits it needs to get to, in order to fulfil its own end game.

It’s nicely and clearly shot, which is just as well because it consists of very long takes for a lot of it and, while there are certainly a lot of shots which incorporate a fluid camera movement, there’s a lot of the film which is purely static shots so, the fact that they are composed and lit well certainly helps. There are some nice transitional shots too... such as going from a shot of the open mouth of a cave to the open shape of an archway. Stuff like this is all good but, like I said, if you’re not that into the music, then you might find certain pasages of this film to be fairly slow.

There are some nice roles, some of them very small, for great character actors like Andre Morrel, Jack Hawkins, Finlay Currie, Sam Jaffe, Hugh Griffith... even a role for Dad’s Army’s Sergeant Wilson, John Le Mesurier, in a scene showing the direct aftermath of the chariot race. Fans of spaghetti westerns, Italian giallo and other films of that ilk should also note that a pre-famous Giuliano Gemma also makes an appearance as a Roman officer in the scene where Judah escapes from Messala’s dungeons and confronts him in his office... once you know he’s there, he’s really not hard to spot. Italian movie fans might also like to know that one of the Assistant Directors on this movie was the legendary, director to be, Sergio Leone... although there is some doubt as to whether he actually had as much to do with the chariot race, as he claimed.

And what about that chariot race? It’s quite spectacular, even now. Fast and dangerous and you can tell that Heston and Boyd were really driving those things at speed around the circuit. There was no way to fake the medium close ups and long shots in those days like you can now and Heston used to get up every morning of the shoot to practice with the horses for a few hours. It really shows in the final product and the stunt men in certain scenes, headed up by stunting legend Yakima Canut, who was second unit director on this, all do stellar work. Canut’s son doubles for Heston in the race, including that really dangerous tumble that Judah takes when he gets thrown over the front of the chariot and into the horses and clambers back in while it’s still speeding along... that was pretty much unplanned and could have been the end of Canut’s son right there but, since he manages to quite impressively come out of it and back into a controlling position... it’s left in the film and Heston is only seen in close up to finish off the final climb back into the chariot. It’s truly jaw dropping stuff.

The chariot scene itself took five weeks to film (it shows... it’s amazing) and, since it was filmed at Cinecitta, which is notoriously next to an airport, it was filmed silently and the sound was all dubbed in later. Itself quite an achievement, when you think about the noise and fury of the arena in this sequence. Interestingly, the decision was made to leave the film without music during the entire chariot race and it really gives the sound effects a raw power of their own. This is an idea composer John Williams later used for George Lucas’ own version of the chariot race in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (reviewed here), only bringing in music towards the end of that particular sequence to heighten the effect of a specific incident (for more about the way Williams’ cue works, read my review of the Liam Neeson thriller Run All Night here).

The score, of course, it truly magnificent and, in addition to the background cues, which are left full on in the mix and loud on the soundtrack like they should be, we have Dr. Rosza’s opening titles (which only start up around a quarter of an hour into the film after a load of other cues), his overture and also his Entre Act music for the lead in after the intermission... all lovingly preserved on the Blu Ray and I’m thankful that MGM had enough sense to leave this stuff on the home video versions. Considering you can now even get a beautiful five disc version of the score, courtesy of Film Score Monthly, which is an improvement on even the old two disc book version from Rhino (in terms of content, not necessarily packaging design), I was surprised by how many passages in the film were actually left unscored. Even so, there’s a lot of score to get through (I think Rosza might have taken a year to write it all... if memory serves) and it’s all pretty amazing stuff... just the kind of film Rosza was born to compose. I say that particularly because I find some of the films Rosza has leant his incredible talents to, especially in later years when the stylistic trends in film making were a lot different to what they were in the 40s and 50s, seem almost overscored and old fashioned in ways that don’t always serve the best purposes of the films... but movies like Ben Hur are made all the more magnificent for his astonishing, in your face compositions.

There’s a couple of things I noticed this time around that I’d not noticed before... so I think I’ll finish up this little review by sharing those with you.

The first thing is specifically down to the new Blu Ray transfer, I think. When Judah’s boat is rammed by the enemy of his captors and he throttles the overseer to get the keys and release the slaves drowning in the deck below, one of those coming up through the hatch is missing his left hand. It’s all gory on the stump, like it’s been lost as a consequence of the other ship crashing through the hull. I’d never noticed this before and I then realised that the only way to achieve this effect was to actually have a man without a hand playing that role. Sure enough, when I was looking up a few facts of the film, it turns out that Wyler spotted that one of his extras was without a hand and another without a foot... so he made good use of these two by doctoring their stumps to make them look like ghastly injuries for their scenes. Still haven’t spotted the guy with the missing foot yet but... I’ll maybe catch up with him next time around.

The other thing I noticed on this viewing was, although the story is quite rambling and sprawls four years (three decades if you include the post-overture, pre-credits sequence), it's quite economical with the use of characters. That is to say, once a character has served his purpose - Andre Morrel briefing Messala on the situation in his new posting, Jack Hawkins making Judah a citizen of Rome and a son to his family, Hugh Griffith providing the means to take on Messala and progress Judah’s vengeance on Messala - the characters simply drop out of the narrative asides from, if they’re lucky, a mention or two later on by other characters. There’s no lingering around with them once their story purpose has been achieved... which I find kinda interesting, actually, considering the size and scope of this movie. It may be a little long winded in some sequences but it does make use of everything on screen to push forward a little more in the narrative stakes, it seems to me. Not necessarily my favourite attitude towards crafting a film but certainly a time honoured Hollywood one used more and more these days and an attitude which, obviously, has a long legacy.

And that’s about all I can say about this film except... maybe this one last little nugget, since it doesn’t seem to be mentioned on the IMDB section on the film and it’s one of my favourite little facts about the movie...

My understanding is that Wyler had been filming the classic western The Big Country the year before, with Gregory Peck playing the dashing lead and with Charlton Heston in a more villainous role. In the movie the two have a fist fight in some rocky terrain and, well, by the time Ben Hur was filming, Wyler realised he didn’t have all the footage required to make the fight scene work in The Big Country. So he had Gregory Peck fly out and he and Heston donned their costumes for that film and took some extra swings and tumbles for the fight scene in a rocky terrain (presumably some closer/tighter shots so they matched somewhat) in between takes on Ben Hur, so Heston was technically filming two films while he was out doing this one... which I always find an amusing item and makes me look at the fight scene in The Big Country in a different light every time I see it.

So there you have it. Ben Hur. Religious epic and instant Easter classic. Brilliant acting (although Heston gets a little ropey in a couple of scenes in this, I fear), magnificent sets, wonderful costumes and a drop dead gorgeous musical score. Not much not to like here, to be honest. Definitely a big solid recommendation from me and one that no lover of cinema should not have seen. Ben Hur... Judah man!

*Don’t worry, the movie is not actually 20 years long, 
although I’m sure it might seem that way to the less 
appreciative part of the audience. 


Ben Hur At NUTS4R2

Ben Hur - A Tale Of The Christ

Ben Hur (1959)

Ben Hur (2016)

Once Upon A Time In Korea

The Good The Bad The Weird 2008

Korea Directed by Ji-woon Kim

Icon DVD Region 2

Finally caught up with The Good The Bad The Weird after I’d missed it at the cinema a year or two ago... thanks goodness for HMV sales.

Let’s face it, there’s nothing like a good Sergio Leone movie... and this is nothing like a good Sergio Leone movie (drum sting).

What it is, however, is a fun, action packed movie set in the 1940s (according to the IMDB although I’m not so sure) which doesn’t really outstay it’s welcome and which has a very rich visual palette, saturated in references to various spaghetti westerns, particularly those of Sergio Leone (there’s even a piece of music made to resemble Cheyenne’s Theme from Once Upon A Time In The West). It never gets boring and though there are no really “great” set pieces, the cobbling together of several “very good and competent” action sequences to hang onto the loose narrative idea are all hugely watchable. Although it has to be said that the editing together of hand held camera and smooth gliding camera in the train sequence near the start of the movie is a bit jarring and may well pop you out of the film.

Nice colours, especially in the first half an hour or so and an interesting set of contrasting juxtapositions which are certainly welcome and which make perfect narrative sense in context of the scenes in which they play out (deep sea diving helmet in a shoot-out for example), so much so that I don’t see how the “weird” in the title can be in anyway applied to this movie as it is at no times surreal... unless the movie-makers meant the original definition of the word to mean a persons “fate”... which I don’t believe they did.

If there’s any reason for complaint then it might be found in the ending of the movie. There are a few alternative endings presented on the two discs on the UK DVD release and it has to be said, that although the final outcome of the movie is unchanged, the alternative Korean ending of the movie makes for a more satisfying conclusion and leaves you as to no doubt on the viability of a sequel should the audience ever require it.

A nice action epic for a Sunday afternoon’s viewing. Everything that Sukiyaki Western Django should have been a few years back.