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Sergio Leone

Blu-Ray Review: A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE aka DUCK, YOU SUCKER! (1971)

December 6, 2019 / By / Leave a Comment

You would be forgiven for thinking Duck, You Sucker! is an unusual title for what turned out to be Sergio Leone’s penultimate picture, but the absurdity strangely works in the context of this most unusual spaghetti western.

It could be why the title was subsequently revised as the more playable A Fistful of Dynamite, which of course places it as an unofficial fourth companion to Leone’s most legendary work – A Fistful of Dollars, aka the Dollars trilogy. Duck, You Sucker! was a perceived popular American colloquialism Leone was convinced existed, and it speaks to the somewhat perverted lens through which Leone continues to explore the American experience in, what we will call for ease, simply Dynamite from now on. His tale of Rod Steiger’s sleazy Mexican bandit who finds comradeship in James Coburn’s fugitive Irish revolutionary at the heart of the Mexican Revolution of 1913 is messy, explosive and oddly romantic.

This could be why Dynamite has struggled to achieve the cultural or critical reach of Leone’s Dollars trilogy or his final film, Once Upon a Time in America. As much as his first picture, The Colossus of Rhodes, A Fistful of Dynamite is arguably Leone’s forgotten, at times semi-masterpiece.

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ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD: Tarantino’s Goodbye to All That

August 16, 2019 / By / Leave a Comment

There is a different aura around Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There is the sense of a film maker continuing to season, to look back, not just at his own legacy but that of cinema itself in the last half century.

The title almost says it all. Not just a nod and wink to the king of QT’s beloved Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone, and his epic Once Upon a Time in the West, but rather acknowledgement that Tarantino has crafted a Hollywood fable and, as a result, what has to be the most sweet-natured picture he has ever given us. Gone are the loud, vituperative gangsters or assassins, war heroes or slave traders, replaced by the most sensitive of all warriors: the actor.

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John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

May 17, 2019 / By / 2 Comments

Parabellum is not an ending. That’s the first point to make about the third John Wick movie. Rather than a conclusion, this is the next part in what is rapidly becoming Hollywood’s most anticipated action franchise.

This feels important to state because it goes some way of approaching Chapter 3 of what most people assumed would be the capper on one of the most fine-tuned and striking Hollywood action movie trilogies of recent years. John Wick and John Wick: Chapter 2 threw some striking components into a cinematic blender – high-concept, hyper-real Hong Kong and Korean kung-fu/action, post-Jason Bourne close quarter fight stylistics, the dark glamour of James Bond and even the comic-book superheroism of The Matrix and brewed them up with a Neo-noir, even Neo-Western visual spectacle. Chad Stalhelski’s franchise manages to do what Gareth Evans’ The Raid films never quite succeeded in doing; taking a pulp action movie concept, filled with influences from the last twenty-five years, and turn it mainstream. Keanu Reeves as the titular assassin no doubt helped – a familiar, likeable household name giving the one-two punch to the chest and reviving his career in the process.

The first John Wick film skews more toward Americana than the subsequent movies; while the chief villains may be Russian, they have a sleaziness about them which only allows Stahelski to hint at the deeper mythology lurking beneath the world Wick inhabits, and while it certainly lays necessary foundations for Chapter 2 and establishes the character successfully, it is only Chapter 2 when Stahelski turns John Wick into a truly iconic 21st century action anti-hero. Festooned with stunning visuals and exemplary action choreography which feels more like a violent ballet than a shoot-em-up, Chapter 2 expands the scale and brings death, throwing obstacle after obstacle in Wick’s way before leaving a tantalising cliffhanger on the bubble which suggested Chapter 3, subtitled Parabellum, would be an intense, thrilling experience.

While that *is* the case, John Wick: Chapter 3 is also somewhat less revelatory, and an emptier experience than the film that preceded it.

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In the Line of Fire (1993)

March 20, 2018 / By / Leave a Comment

In the Line of Fire feels increasingly like a cultural artefact in this day and age. Though in some ways rooted in the 1990’s, in an era divested of the Cold War but away from a future of terrorist uncertainty, there is a political timelessness about Wolfgang Petersen’s movie. It feels at though it exists between two worlds. Barring one exception, this was the last film starring Clint Eastwood in the title role that he didn’t direct and you perhaps feel at times Eastwood wants to jump out of In the Line of Fire and establish his own political sentiments on Jeff Maguire’s script and Petersen’s effective, if at times pedestrian direction.

Eastwood has at times asserted his fairly right-wing political leanings on his filmmaking, most notably in American Sniper, but In the Line of Fire remains essentially neutral in terms of political discourse. The President under threat is never even characterised, beyond the traditional American image of a white, middle-aged man. He could be Reagan. He could be Carter. He could even be Clinton, who was in office at the time. Petersen’s film isn’t concerned with the man Eastwood’s ageing Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan is determined to protect, simply about what protecting a President means.

The film is concerned primarily with age in terms of Frank and indeed America itself. The shadow of John F. Kennedy’s assassination hovers over the picture, given how Frank is, as he modestly describes himself at one point to René Russo’s junior agent, a “living legend”; the only remaining serving agent who was in Dealey Plaza on the day of the President’s assassination in November 1963. Thirty years after the most powerful event in modern American history, In the Line of Fire focuses on a character who has never been able to escape it. Frank, in many respects, is analogous to America as an entity.

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