In the Blood (2014) – While on an adventurous honeymoon in Central America, a groom disappears after an accident on a zipline, and no one wants to help the bride find him. Fortunately, the bride is Gina Carano, so she kicks half the asses in the country in order to find him.
It’s weird, but the main demerit for Carano — who, of course, can kick asses for real — is that… she can’t act mean. Even when she’s torturing low-lifes to get information, she doesn’t seem like “a woman on the edge,” just like a nice girl who incongruously knows how to hurt people. Maybe if they leaned more into that “Mrs. Nice Guy” persona…
Danny Trejo is also in it (in a small but important role), but don’t get your hopes up for a “Trejo vs. Carano” showdown, alas.
(Oh, and if you think that maybe this is the one time that the shifty, ugly-as-sin police chief south of the border isn’t actually dirty… yeah, sorry there, too.)
The Magnificent Seven (2016) – A worthy remake to the original. A gunfighter (Denzel Washington in the Yul Brynner role), supplicated to come and protect a beset-upon town (this time American settlers menaced by, you guessed it, a greedy capitalist), assembles a team of quickdraws and outlaws to come to their defense.
Chris Pratt is case here in the perfect role for him: A charming guy who never needed to learn how not to be a jerk. And Ethan Hawke’s role as “the coward” on the team (Robert Vaughn’s role in the original) is given a very different backstory and emphasis.
The one false note is, yup, that greedy capitalist — who even cites “capitalism” as his justification. I’m not convinced that that’s the word a robber baron would have used in the wide-open west in the 1870s. It’s just a shoehorned-in contemporary political reference.
Reagan (2024) – I’m of two minds about this one. The story they chose to tell seemed unfocused (despite the framing device of Jon Voigt as an elderly Soviet spy explaining Reagan’s appeal to a younger spook), and that was only exacerbated by Dennis Quaid’s performance, which seemed more like impersonating Reagan than actually inhabiting the character (those who remember Great Balls of Fire (1989) should not be surprised). That’s even worse during the first half, when seventy-year-old Quaid plays Reagan at age thirty-five to fifty — no amount of prosthetics or CG could de-age Quaid enough. I have to wonder what a true thespian chameleon like Gary Oldman could do with the part.
Aside from Voigt, the supporting cast contains surprising assortment of known faces in small roles, including actors from the “right-wing ghetto” — Kevin Sorbo as the preacher who baptized Reagan as a boy, Robert Davi as Leonid Brezhnev, C. Thomas Howell as Caspar Weinberger, Lesley-Anne Down as Margaret Thatcher, Dan Lauria as Tip O’Neill, Xander Berkeley as George Schultz… (I kept waiting for a Scott Baio cameo, but no-go.)
Ultimately, I liked it, but I wanted to love it.
Abandoned movies:
Payback (1999) – Should Mel Gibson play the protagonist in a movie based on a Richard Stark novel? No, he should not.
Skin Trade (2014) – I’m all for watching Dolph Lundgren and Tony Jaa beat up human traffickers. Just don’t show me a wrenching abduction first.
7 Splinters in Time (2018) – Could have been good, if it didn’t rely so much on primitive visual effects.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure “capitalism” was not very widely known in the West, as its English form was only coined in 1850 (by French socialist Louis Blanc) and even Karl Marx didn’t use it in very much in his writings until late in his life (which ended in 1883). Even then, it was still almost entirely a term used exclusively in elite academic institutions; and unless one of those prissy academicians somehow made his way out to the frontier, chances that anyone would even have heard the word used out there are essentially zilch. Chalk that anachronism up to Hollywood’s Commie propagandists being lazy writers.