Movie Review

  • Remember My Name (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I have a weird mix of fascination and frustration at those films that straddle the line between straight-up drama and genre thriller. In theory, the line should not exist: Even those who love genres can argue that the slightest drop of genre elements in a film makes it belong to that genre (hence my fascination) but the problem is that some filmmakers will deliberately court genre elements before retreating to a somewhat down-to-Earth conclusion that practically renounces the genre elements that made the film interesting in the first place. (Hence my frustration.)  You can see that dynamic at play in Remember My Name, a gritty could-only-come-from-the-1970s film in which a man’s life is upset when his ex-wife, freshly released from prison, starts threatening everything he holds dear in a psychotic attempt to get back together. His new girlfriend is harassed, he is stalked, and the film clearly suggests that things are going to get much, much worse. Interestingly enough, much of the film is seen from the perspective of the psychotic ex-wife—a haunting portrayal from Geraldine Chaplin, who acts as if her character barely understood the basics of human relationship after spending so much time locked away. Our protagonist doesn’t play well with others, which doesn’t help the suspicion with which she’s regarded around town. There’s a clear disconnect between Chaplin’s frail physique and her toughness in action—maybe there are echoes of that in Linda Hamilton’s performance in the two first Terminator movies. Meanwhile, Anthony Perkin is not bad as the meek man at the centre of her attention, with a young Jeff Goldblum amusingly showing up as a petty store manager who hires her and Alfre Woddard as a resentful co-worker. Much of the genre elements come from the second third of the film, in which a steady campaign of harassment, vandalism, bad behaviour and outright stalkerish actions set the stage for a conclusion that should play according to violent genre conventions. But then… it doesn’t. Writer/director Alan Rudolph (under the tutelage of producer Robert Altman, which makes perfect sense) is not interested in genre elements, and so the conclusion simply walks away after making its point. Revenge is not always about going for maximum damage; sometimes, revenge is just settling scores. Whether I like the result is something else: “1970s New Hollywood Altmanesque drama” is almost a personal code phrase for “you’re not going to have any fun,” and Remember My Name at least exceeded my expectations by refusing to play by formula rules. I am begrudgingly appreciative of that… but it won’t go so far as to earn the film a recommendation or even a second viewing.

  • How it Feels to be Free (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2021) One of the unexpected benefits of a deep dive in Hollywood history is knowing what people are talking about when they bring up half-forgotten, underappreciated or ill-served artists of the past. When How it Feels to be Free set out to shine a spotlight on six black female entertainers of previous generations, I was on semi-solid ground: I don’t need to be told about Lena Horne, Nina Simone and Pam Grier’s greatness, and I was at least able to nod in recognition at the praise for Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson. Six homages in two hours is a lot, but director Yoruba Richen manages to be both specific and sweeping, talking directly about each one of its six entertainers and still using them as a group to make larger points about discrimination, representation and inspiration. Historical footage is blended with contemporary interviews with a decent roster of stars (Halle Berry, Lena Waithe, Samuel L. Jackson, Lena Waithe, co-producer Alicia Keys, etc.) and heirs. Part of the reason to watch the film is getting a reminder about why these women were so fantastic, part of it is digging deeper into some biographies and discovering equally great people (including getting a crash course in Lincoln’s activism, Carroll’s groundbreaking work in TV and Tyson’s own brand of race-aware role selection). The film works itself up to a powerful argument in favour of diversity on the production side of the entertainment world, pointing out that some stories will never be told accurately if they don’t come from those different perspectives. I enjoyed the result quite a bit, and not just in the scope of the film itself: In between watching How it Feels to be Free and writing this review, Cicely Tyson died and the loss hit me harder than merely being told that she was the star of Sounder. It was important to capture why she was remarkable that before it was too late.

  • Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)

    Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I probably need to slow down my intake of 1950s musical comedies, because they’re all starting to blur together and I’m having a harder time holding on to the spark of joy that attracted me to the genre. It doesn’t help that Two Tickets to Broadway plays in the exact same playground than many other musicals from the previous two decades—that of a backstage musical about young women heading out to Broadway to seek fame, fortune and romance. The tropes are very well worn, and the film has a harder time than it should in distinguishing itself. Which isn’t saying that I did not enjoy it—1950s movie musicals have graceful failure mode, and the worst thing you can say about the worst of them is something along the lines of “well, that wasn’t as much fun as I was expecting.” So it is that Two Tickets to Broadway feels familiar: a bit lazy, not terribly memorable nor particularly well executed. But there are highlights: My own favourite Ann Miller shows up in a fetching green dress in time for a great little tap-dancing number (although the film’s production history tells us that she was injured on set). Tony Martin and Janet Leigh bring some charm as headliners (they later married and stayed married for a decade), the film has good-natured fun in starring Bob “brother of the more famous Bing” Crosby and the script shows signs of having been written in the 1950s by featuring television rather than theatre as the heroines’ ultimate goal. Two Tickets to Broadway certainly isn’t a top tier 1950s musical, but keep in mind the ferocious competition—it’s not a dishonour to settle for mere entertainment.

  • La tour Montparnasse infernale [Don’t Die Too Hard!] (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) My expectations for La tour Montparnasse infernale were correct but still underwhelmed: I was expecting a French comic take on The Towering Inferno and that’s more or less what I got… except that the laughs weren’t as plentiful as I hoped for. I suppose that much of the disconnect comes from the very specific type of comedy from lead duo Éric Judor and Ramzy Bedia, a well-oiled team that clearly plays to their strengths here, even though the result may prove to be too dumb for some and alien for others. Familiarity with French culture is a must—in my case, I knew just enough to realize how much I missed in order to make sense of the result. It’s an aggressively, proudly dumb kind of comedy that takes from its betters (especially Die Hard, which remains funnier than this parody) but doesn’t manage to improve on it: The plot has stupid window washers foiling a high-rise hostage situation/robbery, but the script never flies too high. The reliance on French pop-culture references makes the result incomprehensible at times (a Wikipedia trawl clarifies some of them, but too late for most viewers), while the slapdash production values don’t really make the film pop in its limp action sequences. La tour Montparnasse infernale was a box-office success back in 2001, but it’s hard for contemporary non-French audiences to properly appreciate what the fuss was about: we simply lack most of the cultural references to even make sense of it and the film doesn’t have many additional cinematic qualities to make it worth anything on its own absent the prior knowledge required to enjoy what’s on the screen.

  • The Science Fiction Makers (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) As a Science Fiction critic on a decade-long hiatus, I haven’t given up my chops when it comes to commenting on histories of the genre. As a result, my expectations ran low for The Science Fiction Makers, a documentary examining the life, works and influences of three less-than-famous writers who contributed to the marginal Christian Science Fiction subgenre: Victor Rousseau Emanuel, C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle. The film is a follow-up to writer-director Andrew Wall’s previous The Fantasy Makers (which I really have to see now), which studied C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and George MacDonald as the first part of the “Faith in Imagination” trilogy. To lay my cards on the table right away, I had two major objections to the very premise of The Science Fiction Makers: First, a knowledge of the field of written SF that usually has me bemoaning superficial takes on the genre, and secondly a suspicion toward “Christian SF” that owes more to the American Evangelical Right having co-opted the label. (i.e.: Think Left Behind and then stop thinking.)  But The Science Fiction Makers easily met, then defeated my preconceptions: By focusing on writers from previous generations, it’s a documentary that avoids the charged political nature of more contemporary examples, and can see its writers’ careers in their totality. It’s also, to put it simply, a film that knows its stuff and digs deep into its topic matter. I’m reasonably familiar with Lewis and L’Engle, less so with Rousseau, but I was impressed by the way The Science Fiction Makers fit into my understanding of the genre, expanding into what I did not know. It’s also a documentary that resists grandiose claims that so often come with niche topics: Wall here correctly defines his areas of interest, carefully explains how it fits within a bigger scope and then thoroughly explores it. The film illustrates scenes from the life of its three subjects through dramatic re-enactment, but the meat is found in the analysis that accompanies the visuals. The interviews are interesting, and they propose the subgenre as being of spiritual interest more than a political persuasion—again sidestepping some of the most common objections that seasoned SF fans (by and large a non-religious—albeit often spiritual—bunch) may have about the topic of the film. In other words, I’m favourably impressed by The Science Fiction Makers, and I don’t make the claim lightly: I have seen a good chunk of the SF documentaries about Science Fiction writers, have shelves of SF criticism books and have written hundreds of thousands of words on the topic. This documentary is deeper and more thorough than many written pieces, and it even made me feel warm and sympathetic toward Madeleine L’Engle’s work, too often dismissed by readers outside her intended public. I have no problems recommending The Science Fiction Makers to hardcore SF fans and critics—it should especially be of interest to the tough IAFA/ICFA crowd. I’m really looking forward to the third instalment of Wall’s “Faith in Imagination” trilogy.

  • Kisses for My President (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) While much of Kisses for My President can now be tolerated as an amiable but full-throated example of fragile masculinity, I have seldom seen a period film self-destruct itself for modern audiences so spectacularly in its last thirty seconds. Let me explain: As the film begins, we’re meant to sympathize with the male lead, the husband of the first elected woman president of the United States. Played by the normally likable Fred MacMurray, this first ever “First Gentleman” sees his identity threatened in several ways: Ushered in the normally feminine offices and duties of the role, he bemoans having to divest himself from his previous company due to defence contract conflicts of interest. Adding to his misery, his wife (a really good Polly Bergen) is occupied by matters of the state, while an ex-flame now safely divorced expresses an interest in him that goes far past the professional. When a South American dictator shows up in town, it’s up to him to try to mend international relations, while figuring out the role he’s expected to play in this then-comedic gender inversion. MacMurray is easily the rock on which the film is built for modern audiences: seldom less than incredibly sympathetic, he lets his charisma roll over the severely outdated (and frankly insulting) assumptions of the script—his befuddled expression rescues the film from several inexcusable logic holes and twenty-first-century objections to the moronic ways the characters behave. Kisses for My President was never meant to be anything but a comic film—but even by these standards, you would expect its characters and institutions to behave as if they had half a brain. MacMurray is arguably funnier now as a paleoanthropic remnant of a previous generation’s male stereotype having to fit with the times. Except that the film’s final indignity is allowing him to get away with it all—in the final moments of the film, his wife discovers that she’s pregnant, leading her to—wait for it—resign as president of the United States for the joys of motherhood (and putting her family back together), leading the couple to walk out of the White House as he crows, “It took you forty million female voters to get you in here and one man to get you out.”  Cue anyone’s astonished expression as the credits roll. While much of the film is grating but still funny, the ending kills off any remaining good intentions. Now generally forgotten by history (although it did win an Oscar for Costume design), Kisses for My President is perhaps best buried and unearthed only by cinematic political junkies and Fred MacMurray fans—it is by far the most Problematic of the Problematic movies I’ve seen recently, and considering that I watch Golden-Age Hollywood movies by the double truckload, that’s saying something.

  • The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

    The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) You can always watch The Falcon and the Snowman for being one of Sean Penn’s early performances, but I found something more interesting in director John Schlesinger’s depiction of a specific time and place—the mid-1970s Southern California defence tech industry, and how the political disillusionment of the time could drive otherwise normal young Americans to propose information to the Soviets thanks to some ill-defined ideal of détente. Or at least that’s what one of the two characters believes, because the dramatic linchpin of the movie is the duelling relationship between the two leads—an idealist competent (played by Timothy Hutton), and a far less reliable friend (Penn) who acts as the go-between with the Soviets. Taking up in spycraft and the complex relationship between source and case officer, except with the inverted perspective from what we usually see, The Falcon and the Snowman remains a mildly effective thriller in which we do root for the spies to be caught red-handed (and one of them more than the other). Perhaps delighting in inversion from spy movie clichés, it’s specifically about spies who end up vastly outclassed by the demands of the lifestyle, and soon seek to get out of it once it doesn’t live up to their romantic notions of it. It does all amount to an effective period piece, down-to-earth and somewhat merciless in puncturing the clichés of the genre while still being effective in its procedural details. No wonder it’s based on a true story.

  • Black Robe (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) On paper, Black Robe sounds like the literalization of my high school years’ driest history lessons—a throwback to 1634 Nouvelle France, as a newly arrived Jesuit missionary goes beyond the rudimentary settlements to establish a mission deep in native territory. The tale is violent, raw and ultimately futile. But I’m far more receptive to interpretations of history now than I was as a teenager, and Black Robe now looks quite intriguing through its splendid re-creation of Canada’s early days. The nature cinematography is terrific: the film starts in bright colourful fall, with the maple trees turning red everywhere the camera can see. Then it’s a steady slide into winter, just to remind us of the modern comforts we take for granted. While Black Robe is not above historical inaccuracies, it’s comparatively authentic and more sympathetic to the native viewpoint than many other films set in similar (or even later) periods. The recreation of period settlements can be astonishing at times, and the time-capsule aspect of the film alone is worth the effort of going through the downbeat narrative. Director Bruce Beresford, working from a script by Brian Moore adapting his own novel, executes the material with skill. I now realize with some amusement that Black Robe came out in the middle of my high-school years, meaning that there’s an alternate universe out there in which I may have seen this film as part of high school history classes. I probably would not have been as good a public back then than I am now.

  • Les États-Unis d’Albert (2005)

    Les États-Unis d’Albert (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2021) The log-line entry for Les États-Unis d’Albert talks about how a young man in 1920s Montréal leaves to seek fortune in Hollywood—the kind of plot premise that has me interested as a classic Hollywood fan, even more so considering that it’s for a French-Canadian film. What would it have to say? How would it portray the time considering the small budgets of most local films? As it turns out, writer-director André Forcier reaches his objectives by choosing whimsy over realism and never following its protagonist to his destination. Éric Bruneau stars as a young Montréal man who, upon meeting Mary Pickford’s aunt, an elderly drama teacher, vows to learn acting from her, gets a letter of recommendation and leaves by train across the continent. It’s a strangely cute film that gets weird very quickly, as the protagonist kisses his elderly mentor to death (it’s cuter in the film than as described, especially given how often her ghost comes back to provide advice) and meets quirky characters on his way to his destination, eventually landing in the southwestern desert for much of the film’s last half. The film is not ridiculous with its film references (the Pickford/Montréal connection is halfway plausible if you’re aware of Pickford’s Toronto-area origins), but it’s really an excuse for a whimsical character-driven comedy film with quirky supporting characters helping our dashing protagonist through various adventures. By the time there’s a desert, a boat on a telephone pole, a wife afraid of heights, a serial murderer, a philandering gold pro and MGM representatives sharing the same sandy setting, it’s clear that we’re just having fun with a comic style almost impossible to properly describe. As such, it works reasonably well: the budget is stretched beyond recognition, but the fun of the result speaks for itself even if it escapes easy categorization. Bruneau is likable in a handsome but generic way, while Andréa Ferréol has fun as a grande tragédienne beyond the grave, and so does Émilie Dequenne in a short role that could easily have sustained her own film. Veteran French-Canadian actors such as Marc Labrèche and Roy Dupuis pop up elsewhere in the film, adding to the charm of it. Les États-Unis d’Albert is absolutely not something to see to study the relationship between French-Canada and Hollywood, but it’s good fun on its own, very specific terms.

  • Hellraiser: Deader (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) There are now ten films in the Hellraiser canon and Hellraiser: Deader is the seventh of them. As luck had it, French-Canadian horror channel Frissons TV had itself a merry little Hellraiser marathon from the first to the seventh instalment, and now that I’ve caught up with my DVR recordings, I have no intention of seeking out the later ones. To be entirely fair, Deader is not a completely terrible film. It has a few scattered ideas, some visual sense within the limits of its low budget and Kari Wuhrer in the lead as a journalist investigating a mysterious sect videotaped reviving someone from the dead. Originally written as an original script only to be retooled into a direct-to-video Hellraiser sequel, Deader shares far too many characteristics with the other members of the fifth-to-seventh instalments of the series. It has a halfway-promising premise half-heartedly retrofitted into the Hellraiser mythos (making the Cenobites irrelevant, and whatever “rules” the first instalments offered completely discarded), with some down-and-dirty low-budget visual style and lead characters that could have led to something better if anyone had been paying attention. Deader is branded as a “Stan Winston production,” but aside from a mildly effective scene in which the protagonist has to contend with a knife piercing her through the chest (somehow a survivable injury!), there’s not much here to do justice to the special effects legend. Like its previous two brethren, Deader does not scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of horror movies, but it’s still not that good and could have been better if not branded with the Hellraiser title—although, frankly, the entire series (now that I’m stopping at seven instalments) has specialized in wasting its opportunities. In retrospect, even the first film makes promises that it, let alone its sequels, never came close to fulfilling: there is something in its BDSM union of sex and violence that could have been profoundly unnerving but seems almost consciously toned down, either by the filmmakers’ incompetence, insufficient means, lack of audacity or a simple poor misconception of the potential they were handed. We’re left with half-formed ideas, bad special effects, no continuity of vision and what’s perhaps the biggest belly flop of the 1980s horror franchises. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the series still didn’t completely autodestruct by the fifth instalment, but I was going with very low expectations from the get-go.

  • Chao ji bao biao [Super Bodyguard aka Iron Protector] (2016)

    Chao ji bao biao [Super Bodyguard aka Iron Protector] (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2021) Movie subgenres come and go, but there are a few that I really miss, and one of them is the classic over-the-top Hong Kong martial arts movies of 1985–1995 (ish), in which the plot was only a clothesline on which to string a series of terrific action sequences, not always taking themselves seriously. I’ll be the first to admit that Super Bodyguard isn’t anywhere near the best of those movies, but it scratches, even momentarily, the itch I had to see another one of them. One of the reasons why it’s not a classic begins with the strange mixture of Very Serious Material interleaved with far more comical content. At times, such as in a particularly demented chase sequence, it’s not too clear whether the film offers a comic take on the genre, or one that simply does not care about continuity or plausibility. Some sequences are very funny (intentionally so); others, deadly serious. The protagonist (played by writer-director Yue Song, quite good) is the heir of a mystical order who accepts a bodyguard assignment to protect a young woman, escapes death in supernatural fashion numerous times through the film and every time he does, we sense the film’s credibility evaporate by half. Still, there’s a grandeur to the martial arts fights that I hadn’t seen in quite some time—a refusal to adhere to reality, and to go back to the over-the-top nature that made a generation of Honk Kong martial arts action movies legendary. It could have been better, but I’m holding Super Bodyguard as a promising calling card for Yue Song, who’s got the potential to create something terrific if he can capitalize on his strengths and patch over some of his weaknesses. Super Bodyguard certain feels like a throwback to the movies I liked in the genre, and even if it’s derivative, it’s more than I can say about many other martial arts films I’ve seen in recent years.

  • Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) Six entries deep into the Hellraiser series, we are now past the point of direct-to-DVD and into copies of copies of copies, and possibly scripts retooled to fit in the Hellraiser universe even if it doesn’t make sense for their stories. Hellseeker is, at its core, a somewhat unambitious horror film dealing with visions and an existentially challenged viewpoint character. If it had tried to develop its own original mythology, it probably would have done better: The script does show a willingness to play with the nature of reality that goes beyond most horror narratives, and there are a few good moments in here. (It’s also notably more eager to embrace nudity and sexual themes at the borderline of erotic horror, which is not often done and even more rarely done well.)  But it’s when the film cozies up to the Hellraiser mythology that it becomes less and less effective. There’s no reason to bring back Ashley Laurence as the heroine of the first films, given how her character seems to have changed beyond any recognition. Pinhead is more pompous than even as he speechifies, and despite good foundational elements, the film feels cheap and unconvincing when it tries to put them together. Hellseeker ends up feeling like a substandard Jacob’s Ladder led by creators who don’t quite understand how to use those elements effectively: it’s as nihilistic as a bad noir film without much in terms of thrills along the way. But it’s its mercenary association with the Hellseeker series that kills it off—we may have respected an original film treading the same grounds, but tying itself to a series only makes it feel even less competent.

  • Shang jin lie ren [Bounty Hunters] (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2021) It’s easy to dismiss Hollywood big-budget action comedies as easy movies to make, catering to the common denominator and letting action sequences make up the plot. But it’s not all that easy to do them well, as countless filmmakers eventually discover when they’re entrusted with besting Hollywood at their own game. Case in point: Chinese copycat Bounty Hunters, which ticks off all the right boxes on paper: A fast, fun action comedy featuring five attractive leads, nearly a dozen action sequences, some big-budget mayhem, plenty of digital special effects, bright cinematography and a breezy pace. At 105 minutes, it shouldn’t overstay its welcome while still having time to develop a moderately interesting intrigue. In terms of tone, the film does whatever it can to avoid the violent excesses of its American counterparts: the five bounty hunters only carry non-lethal weaponry, and while the villain makes plenty of credible threats, there’s never any fear that anything bad will happen to our leads. Lee Min-ho and Tiffany Tang make a good lead couple, although they have far less on-screen personality than their comic foils, played by Wallace Chung and Karena Ng, with Louis Fan rounding up the protagonists. At times, Bounty Hunters works really well when it gets to the mechanics of an action sequence. But the rest of the time, it’s a clunky film: the pacing is completely off, either slow enough to smother the film’s energy, or so fast that crucial bits leading from one scene to another are missing. The too-cute moments feel awkward, and the film as a whole does not have the smooth forward rhythm that action comedies must have in order to remain watchable. The jokes are hit-and-miss (even accounting for the cultural differences) and the contrivances are such that some action sequences become completely meaningless before they even conclude. It makes for a disappointing experience: Despite Bounty Hunter’s adequate production values and directorial ambitions from Terra Shin, the film trips over its own editing and suffers from a lack of polish that would have tied all of its good elements together. After all, it’s not as easy as one would think to ape what Hollywood does best.

  • Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) With Hellraiser: Inferno, the Hellraiser series takes a dive to the direct-to-video realm and (lower budget oblige) has to settle for something like a “Tales from Hellraiser” episode rather than provide a satisfying expansion to the series itself. Still, by direct-to-video standards, Inferno doesn’t do too badly: As a tale of a corrupt detective gradually realizing the depth of his depravity thanks to Pinhead, the Puzzle Box and a complete set of hallucinations, it makes a better-than-average use of available mythos elements. The plotting ambitions of the film are kept firmly in check, and you can argue that Inferno would feel far more interesting had it been kept separate from the Hellraiser title and mythos. Horror fans will note that this was Scott Derrickson’s feature-length directorial debut—which would lead to much better things later on. Otherwise, there isn’t much to add—a good chunk of Inferno feels like a slightly better direct-to-DVD horror film of the time, not unwatchable but not especially memorable either. It’s a step down from the theatrical Hellraiser films, but not a complete debacle.

  • Bad Boys for Life (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, January 2021) Complaining about bloody violence and police brutality in Bad Boys for Life is complaining about what has ensured the existence of the film in the first place. It’s also going a bit too quickly on how this belated third instalment (seventeen years after the second film!) consciously corrects or at least questions the sadistic abuse that was so troublesome in the second film. Taken away from the clutches of director Michael Bay (who nonetheless has an amusing cameo as a wedding MC), this late-career film keeps poking at how men at the edge of fifty can be action heroes, and how the newer, smarter approach to policing keeps producing equally good results as the cowboy tactics of the protagonists. Or at least one of those protagonists, because if Will Smith remains the firebrand shoot-first cop of earlier films in the series, Martin Lawrence seems surprisingly reasonable as a cop in retirement who doesn’t want to get back to the chases and shootouts. But action cinema has requirements that mild-mannered protagonists can’t meet, and so it doesn’t take much for the series to go back to all-guns-blazing racing through the streets of Miami with increasingly baroque vehicles doing increasingly impossible stunts. Bay may not be conducting the Bayhem this time around, but directors Adil & Bilall prove adept at orchestrating action sequences in a good old-fashioned bombastic fashion, modern CGI compensating what live-action shooting can’t deliver. From a pure thrill-ride perspective, Bad Boys for Life is about as good as that kind of filmmaking gets, and the violence limits itself to blood rather than the sadistic humour of dismemberment that was prevalent in the previous film—a sure improvement at a time when far too many “comedies” and action movies go for horror-grade gore. Still, it’s the script that shows the most improvement: Underneath its coarse action-hero trappings, this is a film that keeps circling issues of age, legacy and retirement. Thematically, the Will Smith character deals with issues that are surprisingly similar to his arc of Gemini Man, albeit with a far happier finale. (We also, finally, get to deduce a halfway plausible explanation for his far-too-expensive lifestyle—spoils from narcotraficante undercover work early retirement!)  Bad Boys for Life will never be mistaken for a deep film—but it’s better than most action movies, features great interplay between the two leads and features some nice character work by supporting actors (with particular notice for the captivating Paola Núñez) creating an interesting “next generation” crew. Miami is once again at the colourful forefront of the action, and while the film can’t help but go to Mexico for its more sombre moments (echoing a problematic tendency for American action films exporting their heroes for overseas justice), it’s remarkably more open-minded than its predecessor, even at the expense of some obvious jokes. My admiration for the purely kinetic mastery of Bay’s work on the previous Bad Boys movies was always more-than-tempered by his gruesome disregard for human decency, but Bad Boys for Life goes a long way into correcting this structural deficiency. It’s far from perfect, but it’s not a bad watch.