John Woo
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Which is to say The Hunt fails as a genre exercise too, busy being self-satisfied about its dud point-making to escape the shadow of funner, similarly themed “human hunt” films including Hard Target (1993), the Adkins-starring Hard Target 2 (2016), right back to pre-code The Most Dangerous Game (1932).
Richard Connell’s story, The Most Dangerous Game , has inspired movies from the literal 1932 adaptation to ‘90s hits Hard Target and Surviving the Game .
There’s usually some sociopolitical element involved—whether it’s about class commentary of HARD TARGET or SURVIVING THE GAME, or fascistic oppression like in TURKEY SHOOT, or commentary on government corruption that the Battle Royale novel utilizes or an indictment of the media as in the BATTLE ROYALE film.
The plot is based on a 1924 short story, The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, which has gone through multiple adaptations ( Hard Target , Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity ) and parodies over the past century.
The initial plot dynamics are right out of The Most Dangerous Game meets Hard Target playbook.
It reminded me of John Woo’s Face/Off (1996) in the way it drops without much comment a loony science-fiction concept into otherwise routine action thriller material and asks the audience to just roll with it.
There’s a hardcore action subplot buried somewhere – akin to, say, Face/Off – but seesawing tonalities try to legitimize a laundry list of wholly unbelievable genre-focused stupidity.
Director Ariel Vromen adopts a Euro-grit, Bourne-like aesthetic that is slightly at odds with the Face/Off-style high concept, but in amid the rollicking violence and obvious softer scenes - where Jericho develops "feelings" for Mrs Pope (Wonder Woman Gal Gadot) - there's a good dose of wink-wink humour.
The premise may cause you to think off Face/Off but this is no John Woo movie.
The high-concept is interesting (it has some similarities to the 1997 action blockbuster Face/Off) but it’s built on so many clumsy plot choices that it’s hard to understand why these characters make the silly decisions that they do.
This is a scenario to have fun with — and that’s been true across all genres, from untold adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the Steve Martin/Lily Tomlin classic All of Me to John Woo’s wickedly silly Face/Off .
Even the similarly themed (and equally redundant in its slash-mark use) "Face/Off," in which John Travolta and Nicolas Cage swapped mugs for director John Woo, had a sly self-awareness about its own glorious absurdity.
Recycling riffs from John Frankenheimer’s superior 1966 thriller Seconds (which in turn inspired Face/Off ), Tarsem Singh’s dopey romp signally fails to mine the identity-swap promise of its premise.
At times, so does the far more ridiculous "Face/Off" (due equally to the whole central switcheroo concept as well as that annoying, awkward slash in the title).
As in “Face/Off,” “All of Me,” “18 Again” and other body- or image-switching flicks, the charade comes with a wink and a nod.
Movies like “ Face/Off ” are enjoyably ridiculous in large part due to the fact that Nicolas Cage , John Travolta and John Woo KNEW they were ridiculous, laughing and winking at the audience throughout.
It’s not even the best Ryan Reynolds body-swap movie (that would be half-baked comedy “The Change-Up”) or the best guilty pleasure sci-fi thriller with an unnecessary forward slash in its title (John Woo’s “Face/Off”).
"Paycheck," like "Minority Report" and "Total Recall," is loosely based on a short story by Philip K. Dick.
"Blade Runner" (1982) was good, "Total Recall" (1990) was mindless, "Impostor" (2002) was stupid, "Minority Report" (2002) was great, and now we have "Paycheck," a fast-paced little potboiler that neither helps nor hurts the Philip K. Dick genre.
Of the futuristic films based on Dick stories, "Paycheck" has more in common with the straight-ahead thriller tone of "Total Recall" than the darker "Minority Report" or the less conventional "Blade Runner."
Dick wrote the short stories and novels that were the inspiration behind some of the better sci-fi action movies to have come out of Hollywood, namely Blade Runner , Minority Report and Total Recall .
Dick's work has inspired brain-teasing films such as "Blade Runner," "Total Recall" and last year's "Minority Report."
It’s a crackerjack set up for a B-movie romp, think “Face/Off” as a prime example.
If this film had been made in the 1990s by a filmmaker within Bruckheimer’s usual stable, this could have been a disposable but fun action sci-fi romp in the vein of Face/Off , but as is it doesn’t work as either a throwback or a modern blockbuster.
The gimmick, turning swiftly standard thanks to modern VFX — the script in some form has been circulating since 1997, contemporaneous with Face/Off’s release — is that both characters are played by Smith himself, de-aged with CGI for his younger iteration, with whom the older Smith often shares the frame.
It seems that de-aging CG technology was finally decent enough (more on that in a minute) for a green light, but the finished product is something like Face/Off without the gonzo energy.
The concept for Gemini Man has been in the works since 1997, the year of John Woo’s conceptually related Face/Off and, despite the high-tech innovations, feels exhumed from a pre-millennium time capsule.
It looks, on the surface, to be a vapid throwback that can’t walk in the massive shoes left behind by similar hits like Face/Off.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
Directed by Tom Gormican
influenced by Face/Off (1997)
Themes
"Massive Talent" is a house of mirrors where he's able to poke fun at himself, his persona and his career, and there are references to his gonzo work in "Moonstruck," "Leaving Las Vegas," "Face/Off," "National Treasure," "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" ("underrated for sure," Cage quips), "Croods 2" and more.
At the very least, it’s an inspiration for one helluva triple feature idea in Face/Off (1997), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and Paddington 2 (2017).
The movie is equal parts comedy and action thriller, drawing inspiration from a vast catalogue of Nicolas Cage films, from Con Air to Gone in 60 Seconds to Face/Off to Raising Arizona to National Treasure.
Nic's latest, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent , is a reminder to keep remembering that.Written by two Nic nerds, Kevin Etten and Tom Gormican (who also directed), Unbearable Weight uses the highs and otherwise of Cage's 40-year film career and the gaudy financial tribulations of his personal life to concoct a shoot-and-shout action movie of the sort in which the actor himself once loomed large at the world box office (think Con Air , Face/Off , The Rock , etc.).
It opens with a clip from Con Air , contains tongue-in-cheek nods to The Croods 2 , Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Guarding Tess , and features a scene packed with Cage-flavoured props, from Mandy ’s chainsaw to the twin gold guns from Face/Off .
His unlikely action star status is also continually referenced, especially the holy trilogy of The Rock , Con Air and Face/Off .
The Raid 2 (2014)
Directed by Gareth Evans
influenced by A Better Tomorrow (1986), Hard Boiled (1992), The Killer (1989), Red Cliff (2008)
Visuals
Quentin Tarantino’s two Kill Bills are clearly referenced/homaged, as are the original Oldboy, the movies of Sam Peckinpah, the Infernal Affairs films (which served as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed) and the earlier Hong Kong thrillers made by John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam (particularly the A Better Tomorrow movie trilogy).
Each geyser of blood gets its own glamor-lighting, lending the depravity a balletic opulence that insinuates that Evans really just wanted to create a splatter-house adaptation of "Miami Vice" or John Woo's "A Better Tomorrow" series.
At their best, face-offs in the first film brought to mind the fluid, balletic destruction of prime John Woo, particularly Hard Boiled , and select set-pieces in the follow-up do impress.
With The Raid 2 Evans has escalated action filmmaking the same way that the gun fu classics The Killer and Hard Boiled did back at the turn of the 1990s.
With The Raid 2 Evans has escalated action filmmaking the same way that the gun fu classics The Killer and Hard Boiled did back at the turn of the 1990s.
For the last decade, the action genre has been divided into four distinct sub categories: the superhero movie (The Avengers, The Dark Knight), the “geriatrics with guns” movie (The Expendables, Taken), the arty martial arts movie (The Grandmaster, Red Cliff) and the ever popular shaky cam thriller (The Bourne movies, Safe House).
But The Killer was also inspired by Melville’s French arthouse classic, Le Samourai (1967), a film that Woo has publicly professed his love for.
From them he borrowed stylistic techniques, such as Scorsese’s use of slow-motion during non-action scenes to highlight emotional extremity, and story beats, particularly from Melville’s 1967 film Le Samouraï which also follows the doomed relationship between a hit-man and a nightclub singer.
A huge fan of Jean-Pierre Melville (particularly "Le Samourai") and Martin Scorsese, Woo attempted to follow in their footsteps with his stories about glamorous and brutal gangsters.
I did like his honouring, openly and honestly, Jean-Pierre Melville and the real extent to which Melville's Le Samourai influenced The Killer.
Muy por encima del promedio de imitadores como Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodríguez, Luc Besson y Johnnie To, Woo en esta oportunidad retoma gran parte del andamiaje narrativo de Le Samouraï (1967) de Jean-Pierre Melville y lo vincula a sus intereses de siempre a nivel de la idiosincrasia misma de sus obras, léase los ralentís y las hermosas carnicerías del Sam Peckinpah de La Pandilla Salvaje ( The Wild Bunch , 1969) y Perros de Paja ( Straw Dogs , 1971), los duelos, dilemas morales y motivos musicales para cada personaje del Sergio Leone de Érase una vez en el Oeste ( C’era una Volta il West , 1968) y Érase una vez en América ( Once Upon a Time in America , 1984), y la obsesión cristiana y las odiseas bien bizarras de redención en sintonía con el Martin Scorsese de Calles Salvajes ( Mean Streets , 1973) y Taxi Driver (1976).
The novels and stories of the late Philip K. Dick have already provided the basis for eight movies, some of them very good ("Blade Runner," "Minority Report"), some so-so at best ("Imposter," "Paycheck"), and at least one of them godawful ("Screamers").
Lee Tamahori’s film is loosely based on the Philip K. Dick story “The Golden Man,” and if you know your Dick, you know screen adaptations of his work are all over the map — just compare Blade Runner with slack crap like Paycheck.
The results have been uneven to say the least, and while Next is hardly in the same league as Blade Runner or Minority Report (2002), it’s certainly better than Impostor (2002) or Paycheck (2003), and less of a muddled drag than A Scanner Darkly (2006).
“Next” had a distinct feel of another recent P.K. Dick adaptation, “Paycheck,” which I thought was okay, but hardly a great film.
The torpid "Next" may actually trump "Paycheck" as the worst film based on a story by the late, highly regarded, science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick - whose works have been turned into "Total Recall," "Minority Report" and "Blade Runner."
Face/Off isn't quite a body-swap movie in the same way, but who doesn't love seeing John Travolta channeling Nicolas Cage?
The writer Philip K. Dick has inspired Hollywood to both highs ("Blade Runner", "Minority Report" ) and lows ("Paycheck", "Imposter") with his cautionary tales set in very recognizable futures.
Based on Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel that was informed by the author's own drug experiences, the film, which retains the dark humor often missing from other Dick adaptations such as "Blade Runner," "Minority Report" and "Paycheck," is at once dated and eerily prescient.
But for every Minority Report or Blade Runner, we’re stuck also with a Paycheck or (shudder) Total Recall.
Based on a novel by Philip K. Dick -- whose works have inspired films both good ( "Minority Report," "Total Recall") and bad ( "Impostor," "Paycheck" ) -- "Scanner" is set a few years in the future, in a heavily surveilled America where 20 percent of the citizens are addicted to a new illicit drug called Substance D. An organization called New Path is providing rehab for recovering D addicts, but their methods are mysterious and their treatment centers are not open to public scrutiny.
Most of these, such as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990), Gary Fleder's Impostor (2002) and John Woo's Paycheck (2003) were instantly underrated upon release, and A Scanner Darkly is likely to join them.
North by Northwest (1959)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Paycheck (2003), The Killer (1989), Face/Off (1997)
Visuals Plot
With Paycheck, Woo again superficially recalls Hitchcock (by way of split-screen fanatic Brian DePalma, who made Mission: Impossible) and, more substantively, Spielberg; in particular, Woo mirrors the former's North By Northwest and the latter's year-old Minority Report (which, like Paycheck, derives from a Philip K. Dick story).
Woo, who wanted to make a neo-Hitchcock (who doesn't?), here credits Affleck with modelling his character's wardrobe after Cary Grant's in North by Northwest and admits that he's "never had any desire to make a sci-fi movie."
To show that he’s having fun with the genre, Woo dresses Affleck like Cary Grant in North By Northwest and even shoots some scenes with the soft focus of that film.
In a lot of ways, Hard-Boiled fulfills the same summary function as Hitch's North by Northwest , in that it's a greatest-hits compendium manufactured with almost too much facility--a consummate work of passionate intensity told by a confident liar who's borrowing (borrowing back in some instances) scenes from Die Hard and The Terminator .
The opportunities for putting a modern twist on the Hitchcockian dilemma of mistaken identity that was used so well, for example, in "North By Northwest," must have seemed irresistible to director John Woo and writers Mike Werb and Michael Colleary.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
Directed by David Leitch
influenced by Mission: Impossible II (2000), Hard Boiled (1992)
Plot Visuals
Its storyline closely parallels “ Mission: Impossible II ,” and in the last decade and with more those films have leaned into intense pseudo-realistic stunts, where Hobbs and Shaw are something more closely akin to “ Moonraker .”
In a post-superhero summer with no new Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movie — yet hilariously cribbing almost the same plot as M:I-2 — it was only a matter of time before this pair of broad-shouldered box office beefcakes teamed up.
The Fate of the Furious saw Jason Statham decimate a plane’s worth of enemies à la Hard Boiled and The Rock push a torpedo away with his barehands; their cinematic match-up as a duo was inevitable.
This umpteenth variation on The Most Dangerous Game has a comic-book creepiness.
"Hard Target," patterned loosely on Richard Connell's famous short story "The Most Dangerous Game," is about ruthless businessman Henriksen's high-stakes, big-money pastime for sadistic businessmen.
Also also he lives with a mother (Joanne Baron) who belittles and slaps him when she isn’t kissing him full on the lips and works for his junkyard-owning father (Rick Moose) who just wants to watch Hard Target and is given to saying things like, “I hope you find love, son.”
A decir verdad lo único que funciona como es debido en Halloween Ends es -nuevamente- la música de sintetizadores ochentosos de Carpenter, su vástago Cody Carpenter y Daniel A. Davies, hijo del gran Dave Davies de The Kinks y ahijado de John, ya que las casi dos horas de duración se hacen insoportables y cualquier otra referencia al pasado resulta dolorosa y se siente debilitante en comparación cual osteoporosis artística crónica, desde las referencias al paso a The Thing (1982) y Hard Target (1993), de Carpenter y John Woo respectivamente, hasta las alusiones implícitas en el arco de desarrollo del personaje del eficaz Campbell, como la nombrada Psycho II -metamorfosis de victimario en recuperación a victimario consciente de por medio- o esa misma introducción que invierte el género sexual de la leyenda urbana de “la niñera y el hombre de arriba”, por cierto ya adaptada a la gran pantalla en Scream (1996), de Wes Craven, When a Stranger Calls (1979), de Fred Walton, y aquel opus primordial d…
There have been some good ones ("All of Me," "Switch," "Face/Off," "Freaky Friday"), but they're few and far between and "The Change-Up" is one of the worst.
But Bateman and Reynolds never get into the hall-of-mirrors mimicry that Nicolas Cage and John Travolta so enjoyed in “Face/Off.”
As for the acting, no one will confuse what Bateman and Reynolds do as similar to how Nicolas Cage and John Travolta handled a like-minded situation in John Woo’s underrated actioner, Face/Off.
(It’s the one aspect that the similarly themes and far superior “Face/Off,” with Nicolas Cage and John Travolta switching identities, disregarded).
It's always fun to see good actors ape each other (think Face/Off) and a particular joy to see Bateman get to cut loose.
While not as operatic or elegant as John Woo’s output from that era, there are clear parallels and references to “Hard Boiled,” “Hard Target” and even his maligned “Mission: Impossible” sequel.
Davis pays homages to the likes of John Woo's "The Killer" and Besson's "The Professional" but except for a funny take on "Point Break's" parachuting shootout, they play like an enthusiastic film school kid's recreations on a limited budget.
The Transporter (2002)
Directed by Corey Yuen
influenced by The Killer (1989), A Better Tomorrow II (1987), Hard Target (1993)
Visuals
Where the film fails is in its resemblance, ironically, to Yuen's own work on The Bodyguard from Beijing (and even the awful Women on the Run) and in its uncomfortable similarity to John Woo's Hong Kong output--a cribbing owed as much to Yuen as producer Luc Besson, who has made it something of a closet industry in his action films to borrow liberally from The Killer and Hard-Boiled (and, in this particular instance, A Better Tomorrow II).
Which is not to say that it's up there with such Hong Kong classics as John Woo's "The Killer" or Jackie Chan's "Supercop."
Action fans be warned: The Transporter is little more than a cheap knock-off of John Woo’s The Killer.
Where as Woo's "Hard Target" was ill-served by a meandering, talky, sentimental script--and the burden of Jean Claude Van Damme--"The Transporter" has almost no script at all.
Where the film fails is in its resemblance, ironically, to Yuen's own work on The Bodyguard from Beijing (and even the awful Women on the Run) and in its uncomfortable similarity to John Woo's Hong Kong output--a cribbing owed as much to Yuen as producer Luc Besson, who has made it something of a closet industry in his action films to borrow liberally from The Killer and Hard-Boiled (and, in this particular instance, A Better Tomorrow II).
You'd think no director could possibly pull off that kind of Grand Guignol medical procedure -- even though the whole idea has echoes of Georges Franju's 1959 French horror classic "Eyes Without a Face."