Fisted.

You have offended my family and you have offended the Shaolin Temple.”

- Bruce Lee in ‘Enter The Dragon”.


If we consider the martial-arts film to be an art form, what then are we to make of ‘The Man With The Iron Fists’? It is a ballet with Russell Crowe reciting poetry stage left. It is a Ming vase tagged with graffiti. It is Haiku with a uh, uh, uh at the end of every line. It is Bruce Lee with bling. It is The Man With The Iron Fists - with ‘DOPE’ tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and ‘FAKE’ tattooed on the other. It’s Kill Bill Unchained’, all gangsta rap arrogance and grindhouse thrills, but it’s never as good as you want it to be and never as good as it wants to be. The fighting set pieces (and we all in came for the fighting, right?) have gory, comic inventiveness but nothing seems to happen in real time and they are poorly edited and badly scored to hip hop beats and sampled cues. There is no sting to the action and no purpose to the plot. It was a mistake to run with RZA as he has no screen presence at all. Russell Crowe in Clint Eastwood drag channels Richard Burton and ends up like your uncle doing a Brian Blessed impression. Lucy Lieu still thinks she’s on the set of ‘Kill Bill. The villains look like they’re in a big hair/cock rock video. Worst of all it teeters uncomfortably between homage and crap the whole way through meaning you can never really go with it. You’re expecting it to fall on it’s feet at any moment and when it doesn’t you convince yourself that it’s actually quite good but then along comes something else to make you wonder if anyone knew what they were doing. It’s very strange, an homage to martial arts films that misses all the points about what made them so enjoyable in the first place and a weird clash of cultures that loses everything in translation.

Not With A Bang....But A Whimper

As the final part of the self proclaimed ‘Three Flavours Cornetto’ trilogy this is solid entertainment but sadly I just didn’t find it funny enough.


I felt it was inferior to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz even though it successfully hits the same vibe and is helped along by a superb soundtrack. Maybe it all feels a bit too familiar this time out. Simon Pegg is certainly starting to outstay his welcome and his character here purposefully remains an irritant from beginning to end which doesn’t help. The cream of current British acting talent is here and nobody lets the side down but it’s a bit like everyone has signed on to  appear in a fairly mundane episode of Dr Who. That’s a large part of the problem. The alien invasion theme doesn’t seem to offer as much comic potential or genre bending possibilities as the zombie and action movie spoofs that precede it. it lacks that extra hit of inventiveness that I was hoping for.

All the cornettos have been eaten and this is the way the world ends …not with a bang

…but a whimper.

Z's Undead Baby. Z's Undead

The world is a horrible place full of weird hotspots like Korea and Israel where bad stuff happens that we don’t really understand. Bad stuff like wars and humanitarian disasters and zombie epidemics. But we don’t need to worry about that because Brad Pitt (who looks like Jesus) is going to figure it out, stop it happening and then we can all get on with our lives.

Fortunately World War Z isn’t too bothered by subtext any more than it’s bothered by using it’s literary source material. It’s a big fuck off zombie and it knows it. What we we have is set piece after set piece and the ace up it’s sleeve is a money shot of hoards of zombies coming at ya. There’s thousands of them and these aren’t your shambling cadavers, these are your 28 Days Later zombies on red bull.

It’s tense, it’s frightening to think about and it’s awesome to look at. Think Cecil B DeMille rather than George Romero.

It focuses too much on Brad’s wife and kids. I don’t care about Brad’s wife and kids and they’re only in the movie to show that Brad has personal responsibilities. The wife could have been much better used if she had some skills or was an equal to Brad as a scientist or reporter working on the problem from a different angle in another part of the world. But no, she’s there to give him a bit of a nagging, slow him down when they’re raiding the supermarket and basically just cause him problems. The wife and kids get to stay on an aircraft carrier which is pretty cool but it doesn’t take long before the military figure out that they’re a waste of space and want them off the boat. Like I say, nothing but problems.

Meanwhile, Brad flies all the way to South Korea just so that he can touch down and run away from zombies. This bit is like an action movie. Then we see him lobbing grenades in Jerusalem at all these zombie intruders breaching the walls. This bit is like a war movie with suspect politics. Then he gets on a plane…but…get this…there’s zombies on the plane! So this bit is like a disaster movie.

The final act is a bit weird. After all this epic globetrotting activity we end up in a World Health research laboratory in Cardiff. Yes, Cardiff. You see Brad has figured out that zombies aren’t too keen on munching on people who already have terminal illness. I’m not sure why he had to go round the world to figure this out when surely a visit to any hospital would have revealed the same thing, but then I’m not a UN advisor like Brad.

So it scales stuff down for the finale - just Brad, a handful of zombies and some vials of terminal illness that need to get from point A to point B. This bit isn’t quite as nerve wracking as it should be because we know Brad’s going to make it. He’s Brad Pitt.

Any great zombie movie needs a dark ending. This is not that movie. This is a massive budget Brad Pitt movie so we get a dumb “This isn’t the end. Not even close." message. They should have just ended with his wife and kids getting eaten. Something bleak like that. Something horrible. But no, it’s clear that we’ve been building towards a damp squib of an ending.

Another disappointing blockbuster.

Taken 2 The Cleaners

Taken was a surprise hit in 2008 with Liam Neeson’s ‘very particular set of skills’ giving an otherwise routine revenge thriller some credibility and a ruthless protagonist.

This sequel tries to ratchet up the intensity by having Neeson’s character looking out for himself as well as protecting his daughter and his ex-wife but the plot quickly paints itself into a corner. There’s no real third act. No climax. No satisfying showdown. The killing and disarming of the endless supply of chubby Albanians becomes tediously repetitive to the point that you start noticing details about the decor of rooms, and also there’s a car chase that seems grafted on from another movie.

It has one good idea - Neeson passing on his field craft to his daughter so that she can rescue him - but this ultimately takes us nowhere as he  manages to free himself without her help anyway.

The lasting impression is that we’ve jumped straight from Death Wish to Death Wish V in the space of one film.

Better than a Steven Seagal film. But not much better.

Cancel the Apocalypse. Please. 'Pacific Rim'.

Big fucking robots


Big fucking monsters


Big fucking robots hitting big fucking monsters


Big fucking robots hitting big fucking monsters in the rain


Big fucking boat


Big fucking city


Big fucking robots hitting big fucking monsters with a big fucking boat in a big fucking city in the rain


Bigger fucking monsters


Bigger fucking robots


Big fucking waste of time