THE RAID 2 - It's rare that a film can be released, let alone a sequel, that outdoes Quentin Tarantino at his own game. The Raid 2 not only outdoes its own 1st installment
, it seamlessly blends what was so amazing about the first film with a sprawling story and an additional hour that the first film didn't have while losing absolutely none of the originality and vision that director Gareth Evans brings to his work. The aforementioned QT always brings story, humor and style to his displays of outrageous and extremely violent fight & shootout choreography in a way that has scores of directors, from green film students to seasoned vets, lining up to make an homage to him in the way that his films are homages to the masters of the past. Depending on who you talk to or how deep of a Google hole you go down, it seems as if The Raid, merely a couple years old, has already inspired a handful of copycats, from the gleefully bloody Dredd to the Paul Walker/RZA/Luc Besson film Brick Mansions this month. The conceit itself comes from just about every video game ever made, a one-man-army ascending from level to level, dispatching henchmen until the final battle with the big boss. Evans, this time around, kept in all the jaw-dropping hand-to-hand (or in some cases bat-to-skull or hammer-to-spine) combat scenes but added almost an hour and incorporated the entirety of the Jakarta criminal underworld for Rama, the hero of the first film, to infiltrate and dismantle from the inside. We also get a whole handful of nameless assassins (Hammer Girl, her brother Baseball Bat Man, an assassin known simply as The Assassin, among others) and mob bosses to color the landscape and add B and C plots. Evans has very clearly become a master at his craft in a very short amount of time and after this installment, he should have the ability to write his own ticket from here on out.Baseball Bat Man (who in one scene, calls his shot, a-la Babe Ruth, before drilling a baseball into the temple of a man 100 feet away) and even more-so Hammer Girl will surely become iconic in the way that Hit-Girl and Go-Go Yubari did after their respective characters hit the big screen. I can't recommend The Raid 2 enough and I don't know if there will be a third installment but if there is, Evans's groupies, me and QT, I'm sure, among them, will be there opening day.
THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN CAME TO EDEN - The Galapagos Affair is an interesting true crime/nature documentary about early settlers to the small island Floreana, among the Galapagos Islands, and the strange occurrences that happened between 1929 and 1934. Friedrich Ritter, a physician hoping to flee civilization and any of his duties as a doctor, brought his mistress from Berlin, Dore Strauch, to Floreana in hopes of becoming a modern-day Adam & Eve and living off the land to create an isolated paradise for themselves. After word got out about the mad doctor and his wife, the so-called modern-day Adam & Eve, another German couple, Heinz and Margaret Wittmer, arrived on Floreana, much to the dismay of Strauch & Ritter. Margaret Wittmer was pregnant and hoped to have Ritter help deliver her baby on the island and live out some kind of Swiss Family Robinson scenario. The already tense & odd scenario was made even stranger when the self-proclaimed Baroness Von Wagner (pictured) arrives on the island and claimes it and everything on it for herself. She had two husbands in tow whom she used as enforcers to take over the lives of the two couples on the island as well as the residents of the neighboring islands as well as visitors. She had hopes of building a tourist resort on the island and at one point, had the crew of a visiting scientific expedition make a movie based on her life, shot there on the island. What follows is a strange and tense struggle between the doctor who wishes to be left alone, the couple who wants to raise a family there and the power hungry woman with delusions of grandeur that ends in murder and affected the residents of the Galapagos to this day. The film is just as much the story of the people as it is a documentary showcasing the beautiful vistas and the endemic flora & fauna of the famous islands. The film also features a voice-over cast, including Cate Blanchett, Josh Radnor and Diane Kruger, as the voices of the principal figures through their letters and journal entries detailing their time on the islands.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER - It could still just be the residual effect of having just seen it, but I feel comfortable saying that this is my favorite of the Marvel movies, dating back to Iron Man. The Winter Soldier sets itself apart by giving itself the distinction of being an old-school style spy film that happens to be set inside a big budget superhero film. Captain America is the willing but reluctant weapon the USA and S.H.I.E.L.D. uses against all manner of threats but now, when he starts to question what his and his agency's role is in the world, things start to go south. As a fugitive, Steve Rogers struggles to trust anyone in his life and when he learns more about his life pre-thaw and finds out that his former best friend has been turned into a super-soldier by Hydra, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s enemy, he sets out to foil their plot. That's all well and great, pretty basic boilerplate stuff, but what makes this film so watchable is the chemistry between Evans and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff who flirt by trying to find Steve a date with a number of women in the S.H.I.E.L.D. office. Romanoff, like Rogers, struggles to come to grips with the fact that perhaps she is just a cog in the machine and that she is just being played by whoever is in power at any given moment. The poster above helps evoke the feeling of one of those '70's spy films that Robert Redford might have starred in that the directors were going for (I think). This film seems more grounded than some of the other Marvel projects, the action sequences and shootouts & car chases seem like something out of any old action movie, not the endlessly greenscreened CGI heavy films of recent years, including, of course, all the Marvel movies. The final battle is similar to some of The Winter Soldier's predecessors, which was slightly disappointing, but what's great about all these Marvel films is that each one is a set-up for the next and the next Cap movie and the next Avengers movie should be pretty great. This film gave non comic readers like myself a lot of history on the character and the agency as well as a lot of little easter eggs teasing future Marvel projects and other nerdy aspects for eagle-eyed viewers to relish in. In addition, Marvel's foray into the world of television, ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., has seen its world directly affected by the events of The Winter Soldier, which is pretty interesting. The world-building that Marvel is doing is pretty spectacular, at least for someone like me who knows nothing of the decades of history in the comics.
