American Ultra

Sometimes movies can surprise you. For instance, American Ultra looked like it was going to suck based on the trailers. Surprisingly, it was pretty damn good.
To explain this, I'll ask you a question. What do you get when you cross The Bourne Identity and Blood Punch with a tad of classic Bond thrown in for good measure? You get American Ultra.
Look at that poster. First, there's Jesse Eisenberg, who can be really good in some movies and really bad in others. Next, there's Kristen Stewart, who has acquired a rather undeserved reputation for not being able to act. Funnily enough, Eisenberg has that reputation in some circles too.
Let's break this down based on this movie, BvS, Now You See Me, and The End of the Tour, the later two of which had trailers included on this film's DVD. In BvS, Eisenberg played an egomaniac with a commanding personality. He had the air of a supervillain to him, the kind of thing you'd expect out of Lex Luthor. He carried himself like he owned the place, and spoke like he expected to be heard. Then there's Now You See Me, where he plays a cocky son of a bitch. A smirking, cocksure, swaggering douchebag who feels like he can do anything he wants, while also acting detached from his environment. Then there's The End of the Tour, where he basically seems like any guy you'd expect to meet on the street. He acts like a background element, someone who just sort of blends in, while interacting rather effectively with his co-star, Jason Segal. Then there's this movie, where he's got perfect command of his characters' insecurities and quirks. Not only that, he constantly shifts back and forth between the passive, nervous stoner and his Bond-esque combat persona. To say that Jesse Eisenberg can't act is blatantly untrue. He doesn't change up his voice much, but he completely overhauls his mannerisms and the way he speaks for almost every role.
Then there's Kristen Stewart. Thanks to the Twilight movies, and Snow White & The Huntsman, she's been painted as a pretty face without much talent. Namely, a blank expression with very little obvious interest in what she's doing. Having seen Tara Reid in action, not only is Kristen Stewart not a bad actress, by any means, but she actually manages to carry her end of the film. In fact, if not for her expressionism and her expressive acting, this movie would have easily fallen flat. Stewart plays the straight-man to Eisenberg's wise-guy, in what is essentially a duo-comedy film.
Eisenberg plays Mike Howell, a stoner with anxiety issues living in Liman, West Virginia. He wants to propose to his girlfriend, Phoebe Larson in Hawaii, but at the airport Mike has a panic-attack and they miss their flight.
Mike and Phoebe go back to their lives of doing small things in a small town. Mike as a clerk at a local convenience-store and Phoebe at the bail-bonds office. Mike begins freaking out that he's holding Phoebe back, but decides to try and overcome his failings to make a spectacular statement. So he talks to his drug-dealer, Rose (John Leguizamo) to get ahold of some fireworks.
At the CIA headquarters in Langley, an agent named Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton) is called on a secret phone and told that one of the experimental agents she oversaw, codenamed "Wise Man" is about to be terminated by "Tough Guy." Lasseter headed up Wise Man, while her colleague, Adrian Yates (Topher Grace, better as a villain here than he was in Spider-Man 3) headed up Tough Guy. Lasseter tries to get Yates to back down on killing the last Wise Man, (Who happens to be Mike) but he refuses. She decides to activate Mike so he can have a chance at not being killed, but he doesn't seem to be phased by his trigger-words as much as the guys from The Manchurian Candidate were. She decides to bug out before Lasseter's men show up to kill Mike, and leaves him to his fate. Naturally confused, Mike makes himself some soup for dinner, but notices a pair of guys messing with his car. He goes out to try and stop them, but they pull guns on him. Mike's training then re-activates itself, and he kills the two with a spoon and a gun he stole from them. After this, he freaks the hell out and calls up Phoebe to tell her what happened. Naturally, she's freaked out by all of this. Then a plastic-bag lands on Mike's car and the bombs the two guys he killed planted, explode. Fortunately, he took the fireworks out first. The two are then arrested because of these killings, and tossed in jail. Because two guys planting a bomb on your car and attacking you with guns doesn't justify killing them in West Virginia somehow. Before the cell-door is closed though, two more Tough Guy operatives, Crane and Laugher, lay siege to the Sheriff's Office. Mike's training then kicks in once more, and he manages to keep them from killing him. Laugher is left with broken teeth, and Crane is dead as a doornail.
Naturally, this brings up a few red-flags with Yates, who has already found out that two of his men have been killed. He works up a ridiculous cover-story and begins his siege. He blocks off the town so Lasseter can't escape, but she calls in an airdrop from one of her associates and gets herself a shotgun and pistol.
Mike and Phoebe get to Rose's house. Rose has tons of guns and an armored house, so they figure it's a good place to lay low. Rose and his henchmen have some pretty funny dialogue exchange with Mike, before Rose locks him and Phoebe in his rave-room after seeing Mike and Lasseter on TV as part of the coverup. Yates's men begin pumping poison gas into the house and kill Rose and his goons. They try to kill Mike and Phoebe, but thanks to Mike's skills and Phoebe's theft of one of their gas-masks, they manage to escape. Phoebe grabs a syringe from the body of one of the soldiers and injects the bleary Mike with it. She knows a bit too much about the gas and what it does, while Mike flashes back to various aspects of their relationship before coming back to reality. He realizes that she's probably a CIA agent, and she admits it. She was his handler back when he was with the CIA, but they fell in love. After he was brainwashed into amnesia, and dropped off in the town. She stayed behind rather than be reassigned, and we find out that all of his anxieties, all of his phobias and shortcomings were a product of the CIA suppressing his training. The whole reason Yates wanted to kill him was because he was slowly finding the ability to leave the town.
The two of them are then assaulted by Laugher, and Phoebe's car is set on fire, seemingly killing Mike. However, Lasseter manages to get him out before the flames get to him. Phoebe is taken back to Yates's base of operations, where he finds out that Lasseter and Mike are headed back to his house. Yates tries to call in an air-strike on Mike, but the guy he threatened into authorizing it, Lasseter's old assistant, Petey backs out, so Yates orders one of his men to take one of the Tough Guys out and take out the two of them. Meanwhile, Petey reports Yates' activities to their superior officer, Raymond Krueger, who sets into motion actions to shut Yates' operation down.
Mike takes out the guys who try to kill him and Lasseter, and takes their vehicle and his fireworks to Yates' base at the local superstore. Phoebe manages to get out of her handcuffs while Yates sends the last of his men after Mike. Mike kills most of them, but his fight with Laugher comes to a standstill when both of them are too heavily injured to continue, and when Laugher manages to gain enough lucidity to explain to Mike what the hell Yates did to him. Yates and his crew took mentally-ill people and screwed with their brains so they would obey orders they were given. The extent of Mike's brainwashing just blocked off his memories and gave him massive issues with anxiety. Mike gets to choose what he does, while Laugher is basically The Winter Soldier, but without the mental stability to be able to cope with what he has to do.
Mike lets Laugher get away, and Phoebe helps him get out of the building. They're then set upon by Krueger's men. Mike proposes and Phoebe accepts. The two are then tasered, Yates is executed, Lasseter convinces Krueger to make Mike into an agent, Mike accepts the gig, and he and Phoebe take up work traveling the world, killing people in unusual ways.
To put it bluntly, you could easily have told me this was a Hollywood remake of Blood Punch and I would have believed you. Despite lacking the supernatural elements, the plot of American Ultra is almost beat for beat the same as that of Blood Punch. Main-character doesn't know things about his situation, does drugs, has a hot girl who also does those drugs, the girl knows more about the leads situation than he does, there's a villain who wants to kill the lead and mess with the girl. Dark humor, kick-ass action, and a drug-dealer who turns on the leads after initially being friendly. Hell, both films start out with flashbacks, both are open-ended and both could either have a sequel or not and be perfectly fine. I could have pictured Milo Cawthorne as Mike, Olivia Tenent as Phoebe and Ari Boyland as Yates in a pinch.
There are plenty of differences, however. For one thing, American Ultra lacks the downer-ending of Blood Punch and some of the (no pun intended) punch of the action. Not to say that it isn't visceral, but Blood Punch had a lot more focus placed on the kick of the action, while American Ultra is filmed like a more-loose, less shakey Bourne movie. Not that that doesn't work, the cinematography and editing is basically perfect in framing the characters actions. On top of that, American Ultra lacks the incredibly poorly-choreographed wide-shot of the final battle-scene that could have been cut entirely that was my one major complaint about my favorite film of 2015. American Ultra also has far-better audio-effects editing and mixing than Blood Punch does. On the other hand, Eisenberg and Stewart are clearly breathing out CGI smoke in the beginning of the film, while Blood Punch relied far more heavily on practical effects for small things like that. Something they both share is the ability to sell the action no matter how ludicrous it might seem, and the use of either practical effects or very good CGI for most of the important scenes. You're not going to see any effects-failures on the level of The Expendables in this film. Hell, you don't see anything as cringeworthy as the parade from The Hunger Games despite the fact that this movie had about a third of that films budget. Just goes to show that it comes down to how you make a film and not how much money you've got.
All in all, while this film was a bit shaky in some aspects (Namely it's not paced quite as well as Blood Punch was) it's a damn good action-comedy with punchy writing, editing and acting alike. Just a shame it didn't make its budget back at the box-office. I would urge anyone who liked Blood Punch, or likes black-comedy action-films to buy this movie on Blu-ray or DVD and watch it. It isn't quite on the level of the suicidal brilliance of Blood Punch's morbid humor, but it's well worth watching to the end. Hell, it might even be worth a sequel. For that matter, the comic Mike wrote in-universe sounds pretty good as well. I'd like to maybe see a comic-book or some animated shorts about Apollo Ape.
In the end, I give American Ultra a 9.0*. It's a fun film to watch, and if you want to laugh at some punchy jokes, this is a good film to do that with. Plus, the ending-sequence is well worth watching.

If you want to pick something for me to review, or if you just want to kick me a dollar or two, check out the Patreon I made for the site. I'll see ya'll next week!

Attack The Block

Every now and again, one way or another, some cult-film crosses my path somehow. Either by total accident, or because I just couldn't ignore it any longer. This time, Netflix was out and the PSN wouldn't connect to download the Amazon Prime app while the free trial is valid, so we wound up browsing through YouTube looking for something to watch. Eventually, we stumbled upon this film somehow, and I recommended that we keep watching because it has John Boyega in it. I wasn't really expecting much, since I'd never heard anything about the film except that it existed. What I got was possibly one of the best horror-comedies of all time. Not exactly Blood Punch levels of hilarious and brutal, but still pretty damn freaking good, especially for a directorial debut. The directors of The Angry Birds Movie could learn a thing or two from Joe Cornish. Not that these movies share a genre or anything, but if someone made an Angry Birds horror-comedy I would watch it. Probably wouldn't be that great, but it'd be interesting to see.
Spoilers inbound as usual, let's go!
While walking home on Guy Fawkes Night, Samantha Adams (Jodie Whittaker) is robbed by a gang of hoods, consisting of Pest, (Alex Esmail, not the second Gorgoroth front-man) Dennis, (Franz Drameh) Jerome, (Leeon Jones) Biggz, (Simon Howard) and the leader of the gang, Moses, (John Boyega). They steal some things from Samantha, but a meteorite crashes into a nearby car, allowing her to get away.
Moses goes to check it out and loot the car, but is scratched by a creature that emerges from the wreckage. The thing runs away, but the gang gives chase, and kills it. If you've seen Ben 10, just picture a hairless, miniature Wild-Mutt.
The gang hauls their prize back to the council-estate (Government-funded public housing) they live in, nick-named "The Block" and get high at their drug-dealer, Ron's (Nick Frost) apartment while they discuss their plans to get rich off the corpse of the alien.
They ask Ron and his boss Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) if they can store the alien in the weed-room while they sort things out. Hi-Hatz agrees, but only if Moses will sell some weed for him. They go back to their weed for a bit, and then more creatures start falling from the sky. Feeling confident in their abilities, they head out to hunt more of the creatures. Armed with swords, bats, fireworks, a machete, and a dog, they head out on bicycles and a mo-ped towards the park. There, they find that the other creatures that have landed are big, brawny, and have glowing teeth. The dogs runs off and is presumably eaten by the creature, and the gang flees the scene.
Meanwhile, Samantha has told the police about her encounter with the gang, and the two officers who responded intercept Moses, and arrest him.They find the weed that Hi-Hatz told him to sell, and confiscate it. They throw him in the van, but both of them are killed by two of the monsters. The gang drops a smoke-bomb into the fray and Dennis dashes to the van and drives it away from the monsters.
Eventually they crash into Hi-Hatz' car, who doesn't believe that Moses and them were attacked by gorilla-sized aliens before losing the weed until him and his goons are attacked by one of them. The gang flees back to the block, but Pest is attacked by a monster and bitten, and Biggz is separated from the group, and winds up hiding in a dumpster.
Moses and company make their way through the building, eventually finding Samantha. Having found a hospital nurses ID in her wallet, they force their way into her apartment and make her treat Pest's injured leg. She doesn't believe them about the monsters until one of them forces its way into her apartment and Moses has to kill it with the Katana Dennis was using earlier. The gang flees the compromised apartment, and Samantha joins them since she's more likely to be safe with them than on her own, taking a kitchen knife to defend herself with.
They go to the apartment of... I think the sister of one of the gang members, who have a gate on their door. The gate doesn't protect them since the monsters climb up the side of the tower and break in. Moses tries to fight back, but the Katana gets stuck in the wall. Samantha stabs the monster going after Moses in the neck, and the other monsters get zapped, chopped and generally beaten to death by the girls who live in the apartment. In the hallway, the gang get attacked by Hi-Hatz and his crew, who have armed themselves with heavier weapons to kill the monsters faster. Fortunately, one of the monsters goes after Hatz and his crew after being attacked, giving the gang time to escape.They decide to barricade themselves inside Hatz's weed-room and wait the invasion out. On the way up, they meet up with one of Ron's customers, Brewis (Luke Treadway). Brewis was the one whose car the first monster smashed into at the beginning of the film. He's high off his ass on weed, and is kind of useless, but they take him with them back up to the penthouse. On the way they run into some monsters, and pull out some more fireworks to distract then. The hallway is filled with smoke, and the gang gets disoriented. Dennis smashes into a wall and gets jumped by a monster. Pest goes back to look for him, but a monster bites Dennis's head off, and the gang flees to the penthouse.
Meanwhile, Biggz is saved by a couple of local kids who kill a monster with a super-soaker full of gasoline and a rocket. Biggz calls up the rest of the gang to tell them the monsters are vulnerable to fire as well as bullets and swords. A good thing to know, since they can tank lots of bullets.
They come up with a plan to blow up the monsters, but can't figure out how to lure all the monsters to one place until they notice some stains on Moses's clothes under the black-lights. Brewis suggests that the smaller creature they killed earlier might have excreted pheromones onto the gang that cause the others to come after them, with Moses having the vast majority of the stains on him, since he encountered the creature first. Moses has Samantha go into his apartment and turn all the gas on in the place, and then to flee to the outside. They pack all the contaminated clothing and the corpse itself into Pest's backpack, and Moses makes a mad dash for his apartment. With the katana, a lighter, and two remaining fireworks in-hand, he rushes through the horde, blows them up, and saves the world, presumably. None of the other monsters really show up in the ending, and I'd prefer to think of this as a happy-ending. Yeah, there's the question as to why all of them landed in Britain in that one spot, but if you can believe it for Doctor Who you can believe it for this.
Moses is blown out of the open window, but catches himself on a Union Flag. He and a few other members of the gang are arrested by the police, but hailed as heroes by the crowd and defended by Samantha. I presume that they get commendations and knighthoods because of this, before being recruited by UNIT or Torchwood, depending on who gets to them first. Possibly both depending on who's running UNIT.
All in all, this is one damn fine movie. It more than filled the gap between Star Trek Beyond and Suicide Squad. I would have watched the last Bourne movie, but I completely forgot that the new one was coming out. I wasn't even aware that Jason Bourne was the films final title. I thought they'd go for the name of one of the novels. Jason Bourne makes me think of Rocky Balboa or John Rambo, same-name sequels that aren't reboots.
The Anglosphere seems to do horror-comedy the way nobody else does. Visceral, punchy, and humorous in a way that's darker than the fur of the monsters in this film. As I said before, while the movie isn't quite as visceral and punchy as Blood Punch, it makes up for it with the moments of sheer laugh-out-loud absurdity that it does have. It's also got better visual and audio effects than Blood Punch, but that alone can't make it a better movie. I will say this though, at least there's no bizarrely-shot, poorly choreographed gun-fight towards the end of the film.
In the end, as much as I can compare it to Blood Punch, they are two very different films trying for very different feels. I give it an 8.5* rating.

If you liked this review, please consider donating to my Patreon. I publish new reviews every Sunday.

Image from Impawards.com

Kung Fury

When I originally heard about Kung Fury, I was completely on-board with it. If I'd had the cash to back it on Kickstarter, I probably would have. I thought the premise was cool, I thought the trailer was cool, and I was freaking stoked for this movie. When the theme-song debuted earlier this year, I was even more on-board. But by the time the movie came out, I was working flat-out on reviewing books and games. I wound up forgetting about Kung Fury for a few months until one of my friends mentioned it a little whole ago.
I tracked the video down on YouTube, saw that it was only thirty minutes long, and decided I'd watch it on the weekend, since Power Rangers: Dino Charge was taking a break that week.
What was my reaction? Weeeeelll.... It's not bad. Not totally great, but I'd rather spend thirty minutes watching this than most of what's on TV these days.
Not to say that it didn't deliver on what it promised, it's a welcome homage to the '80s. It's a good comedy movie that has some damn fine jokes in it. It's not as earnest as I'd like, but that's not really what we're here for, we're here for the comedy.
Before we get into the rest of the review, you should click here and watch the movie. It's only a half-hour long, and it's free to watch. Go ahead, I'll wait. No, I'm not being paid by Laser Unicorns, they're far more popular than I am, and they don't need my help to get traffic.
You done? Good. Let's get to that summary shall we?
Kung Fury is about a cop named.... Kung Fury. Kung Fury (No, we're never told if he's got a regular name) is a detective with the Miami-Dade Police Department. He's a lone-wolf because his partner was killed by a ninja back in the day. Before the ninja could kill Kung Fury, he got struck by lightening and bitten by a cobra, fulfilling the ancient Kung-Fury prophecy.
After beating-up an arcade-machine that came to life, Kung Fury is assigned a new partner, Triceracop. Since he doesn't want to lose another partner, he turns in his badge. But then Adolf Hitler starts shooting up the police-station through the phone, and Kung Fury is back on the job, getting sent back in time by his buddy, Hackerman. Hackerman is a computer-hacker who uses an NES Power Glove and some classic computer-hardware to hack Kung Fury back in time to kill Hitler, known as The Kung Fuherer in this film. The Kung Fuherer is here to kill Kung Fury and take command of the Kung Fury powers.
Unfortunately, Kung Fury overshoots the 1940s by a few thousand years, and he winds up in the Viking-age, where he runs into laser-dinosaurs and machine-gun wielding viking women, who take Kung Fury on a giant wolf to go meet Thor, who sends Kung Fury to where he needs to be by quoting MC Hammer at him, and sends him to the right time-period.
We then cut to Nazi Germany, where the Nazi's are having a Hitler lookalike contest. Kung Fury beats them up, busts into the Nazi base, and starts going all Mortal Kombat on the Nazi's. It's all a very wholesome experience.
Unfortunately, Kung Fury gets shot by Hitler, and dies.
Fortunately, Hackerman hacks himself, Thor, the viking women, some laser-dinosaurs, and Triceracop back into the 1940s, and they kill all the Nazi's, and defeat The Kung Fuherer. Then, after Kung Fury almost arrests the angel of death for obstruction of justice, Hackerman hacks away Kung Fury's wounds, and brings him back to life. They then travel back to the 80's, and live happily ever after.
Except that The Kung Fuherer used his time-travelling golden bird robot to transport himself into the 80s in a fork of the Kung Fury timeline to corrupt the criminals of 1980s Miami into being Nazi's, ending on a cliffhanger.
Now that we've gone over the plot, it's time to start on some analysis.
Personally, I thought that the whole Viking section of the movie was completely unnecessary. Aside from making a couple of decent jokes, it doesn't serve any real purpose. Maybe if the movie was longer, I could possibly excuse its presene. Even then, it's still detrimental to the overall pacing. Maybe if they cut out the vikings, the movie could have had a proper climax, rather than sputtering out and leaving us on a cliffhanger until the theatrical Kung Fury movie comes out.
All of the scenes that take place in Miami are all fine, if I'd been making the movie, I would have left all of those in. For the most part, I also like the Nazi-Germany section of the movie, right up until the anticlimax.
See, I'm the kind of guy who likes to see an awesome action-scene accompanied by a piece of kickass rock and roll. Optimus Prime breaking the Decepticon line accompanied by The Touch, Rocky pulling off an awesome victory while Eye of the Tiger plays, Kurt Sloane knocking out Tong-Po as Never Surrender starts up, Goku going Super Saiyan while Bruce Faulconer's awesome score plays in the background, Sonic standing up to fight after being beaten-down while It Doesn't Matter starts up... You know the drill.
So, if you know anything about any of the stuff I just mentioned, you'll notice most of those examples came from the 1980s. Considering that Kung Fury is inspired by the '80s, and has an '80s star performing the theme-song, you'd think that Kung Fury would embrace the rock-anthem action-scene that you tend to think of when you think of really good '80s movies. Which begs the question, why didn't it do that? It had the awesome music, it had the potential for an amazing climax to accompany that music, but it didn't put those two things together.
If I had been making this movie I would have cut out the stuff about the vikings and put all of the effort that went into that sequence into the climax of the film. Have True Survivor kick in as Kung Fury makes a mad dash towards Hitler's podium. Have Kung Fury and Hitler have a massive climactic showdown with giant robots, some awesome hand-to-hand combat, and the best final showdown that the budget could possibly allow.
I'm not saying cut out the jokes, I'm just saying to relocate the effort that was put into the Viking sequence (And yes, I thought their version of Thor was freaking awesome.) into the climax of the film.
But that's just as a short-film. If you added another thirty minutes to the movie, tighten up the comedy and direction in the viking sequence, and then it'd be fine. But you'd still need to fix the ending. You could even leave the cliffhanger in if you wanted, but I'd still personally prefer a stronger ending.
Now, let's talk visuals. Kung Fury is presented as if it's being played on an old VHS tape, and they manage to make it look pretty convincing. The effects are gloriously archaic, while also looking really good as well. I love the use of the dog as a giant wolf, and I generally love the look and feel of the movie. However, at some points in the movie I wonder if the effects were intended to look as they do. For instance, in Germany, Kung Fury picks up a tank to smash Nazi's with, and the effects of him lifting the tank look slightly janky, and not in an '80s way, in more of a Sci-Fi original movie way. Although that doesn't take away from the humor of that scene in my opinion.
All in all, Kung Fury is a good movie, and I look forward to the upcoming full-length movie that they're working on. Unfortunately, I've got a bad feeling about the theatrical movie, since Kung Fury seems like a concept that should stick to shorts on the internet as opposed to a feature-length film. It's an idea that seems fairly easy to corrupt, and the final product could wind up being about as funny as a Seltzerberg movie.
In the end though, Kung Fury was an awesome little short, and it's definitely worth watching if you've got a half an hour of free-time. It's definitely a step in the right direction if they keep up the momentum they've gained. I give it an 8.7* rating. I'll see you next week with The Consuming Shadow, hopefully!

Image from Kungfury.com