Face/Off (1997) Dir: John Woo

Very silly, very noisy action sci-fi guff from Hong Kong's Sultan of Stunts John Woo.
The plot.
Nicolas Cage is Castor Troy, supercriminal, one of the most wanted men on the planet, involved in arms, drugs and terrorism.
John Travolta is Sean Archer, a cop haunted by the death of his son at the hands of Troy, his sole focus catching the child-killing son of a bitch, to the exclusion of all else, including the love of his wife.
We join the action as Archer finally manages to take down Troy, almost killing him, which wouldn't normally be a problem but, thing is, Troy has planted a bomb somewhere in L.A. and only he and his brother know the exact location, and his brother won't cooperate.
Using a new scientific procedure, Archer is able to take the face of Troy - literally take the face right off and stitch it to his own - to infiltrate the prison gang of Troy's brother
All goes well until Troy kills everyone who knows about the swap, leaving Archer in prison with another man's face, and Troy on the outside world, acting as husband to Archer's wife......
It's totally ridiculous, of course, but there is no denying the entertainment factor.
Cage and Travolta seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves, effectively playing each other, attempting to affect the mannerisms of the other man.
Sure, the plot creaks like an old walrus, but the leads are engaging enough, Cage perfectly suited to the mania driven performance and Travolta is just plain fucking weird anyway, so seems well cast.
The action set pieces are efficiently crafted, as you would expect from Woo, but the movie does suffer from unnecessary length and, had twenty minutes been shaved off in the editing room this would be a genuine action classic.
As it is, damn good fun, but flags towards the conclusion.
Good, though.

3 out of 5

The Mechanic (2011) Dir: Simon West

Come on folks, you know what you are going to get with a Jason 'Staffam' Statham movie and, in every regard imaginable, this is no different.
The plot: The Stath plays Arffa' Bishop, a hitman or 'Mechanic' called in by his contacts when a clean hit is essential.
He slips in, does what he needs to do and gets the hell out, leaving a corpse, sure, but a means of death that will ensure suspicions lie elsewhere.
When called upon to take out his long time mentor, Arffa' has to comply and, in so doing, sets in motion a sequence of events that will see him taking his mentor's son under his wing to train him in the art of being a 'Mechanic.'
And it's derivative as hell, with the requisite tit shots, intermittent explosions, gun-play, close quarters fisticuffs and general Uber-male activities that make us mere mortals shrink into our cinema seats in shame. I could actually feel the larger of my testicles shrivelling in embarrassment at all of the manliness on screen, emasculating me more and more with each passing scene so that I was left to shuffle out of the theatre as the credits rolled, shamed to the point of agonised, pitiful tears.
Staffam does what Staffam does, which is fine with us here at Smell the Cult HQ, and Ben Foster is OK as the trainee Mechanic.
It will pass an hour and a half, folks, but it is guff, really.
Average.
Very average.

3 out of 5

Salt (2010) Dir: Phillip Noyce

Angelina Jolie action 'vehicle' Salt is a rather silly, surprisingly dull affair.
The plot: When a Russian defector walks into CIA Headquarters voluntarily to turn himself in, Jolie's Evelyn Salt is sent in to interrogate him, to find out what he knows and, just as importantly, to find out what he wants in return for his information. The man is unusually co-operative and, most intriguingly, he claims to want nothing in return.
Then he drops his bombshell:
He claims that an agent named Evelyn Salt is a Russian double agent, one of a batch of sleeper agents set in place by the KGB during the height of the Cold War in readiness for Day X, the day Russia would strike out at America and crush it once and for all.
Salt is rattled, her superiors more so who intend to take her captive, but she has other ideas, making good her escape in a manner so complicated and contrived it brought a genuine smile.
So begins a cat and mouse game of 'hunt the rogue agent,' Jolie protesting her innocence, claiming that she is just trying to protect her husband.
Famously intended as a Tom Cruise movie, the makers had to switch genders when he pulled out to make that height of banality Knight and Day instead, though this isn't much better, in truth.
The set-pieces are ludicrously unrealistic, which would be OK, but they are handled poorly, too, the CGI woven into the onscreen mayhem in a very slipshod manner.
Jolie is OK, I suppose, though she doesn't get to say much, her role pretty much confined to running around a lot, pouting with those freakish rubber lips and clinging on to the top of moving vehicles.
Interest levels aren't helped any by the casting of Liev Schreiber as supporting male, an actor so boring and lifeless he seems to suck the energy out of every scene in which he appears.
Whilst not as bad as I may be implying, this is effectively a watered down version of far superior espionage thrillers; Bourne, Alias, even Bond and, ultimately, just feels a little plodding and tame.
Yawn.

3 out of 5

The Expendables (2010) Dir: Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester 'pushing sixty five' Stallone delivers another pumping, high octane actioner.
The plot: A covert CIA agent (Bruce Willis) hires a motley crew of mercenaries, led by Stallone's Barney Ross, to take out the tyrannical ruler of a Gulf Coast island - played with some gusto by Dexter's David 'Angel Baptista' Zayas - and his wealthy American overlords.
Seriously, that's all you need to know.
As most will be aware, the lure of the movie is the red meat on show, with Ross' team made up of Jason 'The Stath' Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture (whoever he is) and Terry Crews (whoever he happens to be), half dozen of the primest specimens of manliness you are ever likely to assemble.
Stallone strings together a series of outlandishly implausible, yet riotously entertaining set-pieces, the script around which they are draped one of the weakest I have heard in manies the moon, with Sly making the classic mistake of trying to write comedy when, as a human being, he is about as humorous as a severe bout of throat cancer. A quibble, but a small one as, inevitably, it's the action that is the star here and, fortunately, it is just excellent.
Dumb as a bag of scratchings it may be, but this manages to showcase several scenes I have certainly never encountered in a movie before; the 'fuel dump' attack by the waterplane, The Stath's death move towards the end of the final showdown and a gun so powerful it makes those automated sentry guns in Aliens look like freakin' pea-shooters. Talking of THAT gun, whenever she appears there is the welcome addition of a touch of splatter, albeit of the CGI kind, though it is worth noting that CGI, for the most part, plays second fiddle to proper, live action stunt work done the old-fashioned way, lending the movie an air of credibility it may otherwise have lacked.
Set your brainwaves to dormant, stick matchsticks in your eyelids and strap yourself to an iron lung to keep your basic bodily functions active.
Then sit back and enjoy.

4 out of 5

The Rock (1996) Dir: Michael Bay

Those that have been following the blog or the website for a while now will have noticed a tendency of mine to lambast all things Michael Bay. Be it the hideousness of the Transformers franchise, or his spectacularly annoying intention to remake any horror film of note from the late seventies, early eighties, his is a presence on this Earth I could well do without.
Then I get to The Rock, and I have reason to pause for....say it quietly....it is not utterly dreadful.
Whether that makes it any good, I am yet to be convinced.
The plot: A troubled and rather angry soldier (Ed Harris) leads a platoon of fellow malcontents onto Alcatraz, the force in charge of enough corrosive nerve agent to render San Francisco's entire population a gibbering pool of semi-humanoid matter.
The US government see fit to send in a chemical weapons expert (Nic Cage) as well as a man imprisoned for crimes against the state and, as luck would have it, the only man ever to successfully break out of Alcatraz (Connery).
Can their combined intellect outwit those that seem to hold all the cards?
Will Cage demonstrate any degree of acting acumen?
And did Connery use the same techniques to make good his escape from Scotland?
All of Bay's trademarks are in place:
A massively prolonged run time, far in excess of what the plot actually deems necessary.
Action sequences directed with so many camera's deployed that no amount of planning or logistics or, you know, directorial skill are required, you can just lop it all together in the editing suite later.
An overtly pompous score that is one half patriotic, one half bile inducing.
Grimly depressing caricatures of social minorities that border on the offensive: the gay hairdresser cutting Connery's hair is simply extraordinary to behold.
All that being said, something about this movie just about works. As skull-thumpingly dense as all of it is, I found it impossible to despise and, believe me, I tried.
I ascribe none of the movies enjoyability to Bay, mind you, more to a stroke of serendipity.
Things can be good by chance, rather than by design.
I took a dump a few days ago that was shaped exactly like one of the heads on Easter Island:



I didn't mean to create fine art, it happened entirely by chance and here, the same can be said of Michael 'F' Bay.

Volcano (1997) Dir: Mick Jackson

Sometimes I get really depressed when I read comments made by the general public about movies.
I'm not talking about movie critics here, I'm on about the normal nobody bods such as myself who have a passion for movies and feel the almost unnnatural urge to spout their views about them, as if anybody actually gives a shit. I'm in their demograph yet sometimes I feel as if I know them not at all.
The reason for my griping?
Reading endless comments about how this movie was just about the 'special effects' or just about the melodrama, or there was too much focus on the human side of the tragedy unfolding on screen.
What do these fucknuts expect?
It's a disaster movie. That's what happens in disaster movies. It's like choosing to watch a martial arts flick and bleating about the men being too rough, or watching a porno and complaining about the nudity. It goes with the territory, you insufferable swellings.
*and relax*
Well, here we have Tommy Lee Jones leading the battle to spare as many lives as possible when a natural catastrophe strikes Los Angeles in the form of a volcano erupting beneath MacArthur Park.
That's all you need to know.
Honest.
Cue the usual highly fraught scenes of women and children, the ubiquitous 'pet in peril', as well as a less than subtle racial take on things, as blacks and whites are compelled to join forces to do battle against a new, colour blind foe: lava.
It's preposterous.
Of course it is.
But it's held together by the two leads and the fact that broiling lava is always an impressive visual spectacle. In truth, this is a 3 out of 5 rating, but the very presence of Tommy Lee Jones elevates it by one point. Seriously, he could tell me that I had cancer in every part of my body and I would still be entertained and more than a little aroused.
A disaster flick for the 90's, then, and more than adequate at that.