(Even when he loses a limb, the magical CGI worms in Manji’s blood find a way to reattach it.) A young girl hires Manji to avenge her murdered family, and he accepts, partly out of boredom and partly because she reminds him of his dead sister. A malevolent Takuya Kimura stars as Manji, a ronin warrior unable to die. But where past Miike samurai movies like Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai and the 2010 masterpiece 13 Assassins have carried a mythic weight, Blade of the Immortal is more of a giddy, cackling bloodbath. Blade of the Immortalįor his 100th movie, the Japanese madman director Takashi Miike is back on familiar ground: The samurai movie, his homeland’s rough equivalent to the Western. But when it gets into its flashy, bloody set pieces - a bus crash that turns into a massive fistfight, a first-person-shooter-style POV brawl in which our heroine kills countless enemies - it finds a wild brilliance. Storywise, the movie is an unashamed rip-off of La Femme Nikita, with a generous side helping of Kill Bill, and it’s a little heavy on maudlin melodrama. And thanks in part to digital trickery, it’s made to look like one continuous shot. I can’t possibly stress this enough: This is a combination motorcycle chase–sword fight. She drives into an abandoned tunnel, lit in sickly neon-green, and then proceeds to have a high-speed sword fight with her pursuers. A catsuited assassin is making her getaway on a motorcycle, and a crew of black-suited goons gives chase. This batshit South Korean murder party peaks early. Here, he brings a different kind of vulnerability. We’ve spent decades watching Chan injure himself in end-credits blooper reels. But as the grieving, vengeful father of a daughter killed in a London bombing, he also puts in a soulful and shattered performance. He slides down drainpipes, sets First Blood–style deep-woods booby traps, and fights a knife-wielding commando by putting two sticks up his sleeves. Chan, now 63, still gets to be an action hero. The result: a story about warring factions of radical Irish Catholic separatists that also has kung fu fights where guys jump around on wires. In The Foreigner, Campbell strips away the virtuosic slapstick that made Chan a screen icon, throwing him instead into the ash-gray skies and violent diplomatic betrayals of the Bourne and Taken movies. Now he’s done the same thing with a different cultural institution: the Jackie Chan movie. The Foreignerĭirector Martin Campbell has rebooted the James Bond franchise twice - with Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye and with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale - and he’s made it meaner and grittier both times. Here’s our list of the best that 2017 had to offer. And more and more often, they’re coming from big Hollywood studios. These days, great action movies are coming from Asia, Europe, and the American straight-to-VOD circuit. Fight scenes continue to get better and better, especially as the hectic, choppy editing that Hollywood loved in the last decade falls further and further out of favor. The long, unbroken tracking-shot fight scene - whether genuine or accomplished through digital illusion - has come into vogue in Asian cinema, while Hollywood movies are still drawing on the operatic gunfights that John Woo helped pioneer in Hong Kong. There have even been some pan-global collaborations, like the misbegotten Matt Damon vehicle The Great Wall. We’re more and more likely to see South Korean stars show up in American movies, or American actors fighting homegrown stars in Chinese movies. And around the world, action filmmakers are pulling ideas and images and stars from one another. Globally, two of this year’s five highest-grossing movies - China’s Wolf Warrior II and our own The Fate of the Furious - come from the genre. But this is also a sneakily great time for another genre: old-school, grounded, punch-you-in-the-face action movies. We are neck-deep into the superhero-movie era, the time when films about men and women in capes, literal or metaphorical, are dominant at the box office.
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