Ryuhei Kitamura

  • The Doorman (2020)

    The Doorman (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2021) The spirit of Die Hard is strong in The Doorman, at least in the basics of the plot: A protagonist with action experience; an implausibly isolated building; villains out for a quick safe-cracking score and a family to protect. There’s clearly an effort here for this to be a Ruby Rose vehicle, especially given her well-regarded performances in other action films. Unfortunately, a vehicle is better when it’s based on a strong script and this isn’t it — sticking close to genre tropes, The Doorman goes from one non-surprise to another until the end but can’t manage any wit or originality. Director Ryuhei Kitamura does occasionally use a flashy trick or two, but little of those tricks actually amount to a cohesive vision for the film: they feel more like trick shots you do when you get bored more than in pursuing a specific artistic intention. Rose is not bad in the role — if the point of a star vehicle is to showcase the star, that’s more than met here. There’s some additional pleasure in seeing Jean Reno as the antagonist — once more renewing with Hollywood when it’s looking for a French heavy, even more so considering that Reno’s indeed getting heavier these days. The Doorman got stuck in the mad COVID-time rush to release everything to streaming platforms, but it’s doubtful that it would have earned anything more than a straight-to-digital release even in calmer times. It’s that generic, and it doesn’t really work even as a failed homage to better movies in the genre.

  • No One Lives (2012)

    No One Lives (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Some movies seem custom-made to irritate me, and No One Lives threads perilously close to the point where I’d condemn the film entirely. It’s a horror film that plays rough: The violence is frequent and brutal, with pieces of people casually flying, spilling, exploding or flowing. It makes a protagonist out of an amoral serial killer that takes pride in the flamboyance of his evil and tries to get another character to follow in his footsteps. It’s largely shot at night in grimy environments. The plot doesn’t make sense if you think even slightly about it, depending on a paranoid vision of the world that only exists in horror movies. The line-by-line dialogue is frequently terrible, indulging in exasperating clichés. Perhaps worst of all, it’s far more interested in the detail of its gore than using horror to discuss larger topics. In other words, it has nearly everything that I truly hate about the dumbest variants of the horror genre — it’s the find of film that just makes me sad about humanity in general. Don’t watch No One Lives — it’s a nihilistic gore-fest that will only make your day worse. But even with that assessment, it does have one or two things to save it from worthlessness. The premise is mildly amusing, what with psychopath killers going after what they think is an easy mark in the form of a well-to-do travelling couple, only to realize that they’ve stumbled onto something much worse than they are. Then there is the above-average execution: director Ryuhei Kitamura is stuck with a terrible project, but his execution is dynamic and interesting even despite the gory interludes. Furthermore, Luke Evans is not badly cast as an utter psychopath. In other words, if you’re the kind of person who likes those movies, then this is a well-made movie in that genre. Too bad I’m not part of that group.