For the week of April 21st, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing Taken 3 to Blu-ray. In terms of setting the stage, we're pretty far from the formula of Takens 1 and 2. See, this time out, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) isn't trying to recover a kidnapped family member; no, now he's out for revenge after some baddies kill his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) at the end of the first act, and all while dodging the clutches of a dogged LAPD inspector (Forest Whitaker) who's under orders to bring in Mills on the murder charge. That's right, folks: Taken 3 is The Fugitive with more throat punching, and if director Olivier Megaton had an eighth of Andrew Davis' facility for staging and executing action sequences, we'd be in for a fun romp, even if no one is technically "taken" (returning as Mills' daughter Kim, Maggie Grace gets saddled with all the boring domestic drama and the film's most ludicrous/offensive beat: her dad has to drug her smoothie to save her life. Yep, you read that right). However, it isn't just the original Taken plot that we've gotten away from. It's the original's fleet sense of menace and fun. Sure, the story was alarmist tripe (no, your teenage daughter isn't immediately going to be abducted by sex traffickers if she travels alone to Europe), but Neeson was the most believable thespian badass since Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, and director Pierre Morel maintained a crunchy, fleet, but not too spatially incoherent approach to the many shootings/beating/stabbings/tortures. Megaton, on the other hand, took over on Taken 2 and put the combat into an editorial blender, and his direction is even worse here. Not only does the action reach some kind of unintentionally abstract apex (the concessions made to the PG-13 rating don't help), but Neeson might as well be fighting through a series of static poses. He's never seemed less engaged, although one could level that charge at three-quarters of the cast, with Whitaker standing as Neeson's logy equal. One hopes that this unrated Blu-ray will restore the sharp edges sanded off from the PG-13 cut (the previous Takens are far more graphic on Blu-ray), but I'm not sure if extra brutality would be enough to salvage this dispiriting noise. Neeson is so much better than the material - here's hoping he starts acting that way.
From Shout Factory comes the 1981 cult sci-fi epic Escape from New York. One of director's John Carpenter's biggest financial successes, Escape from New York deserves some kind of acknowledgment as a grindhouse classic for creating a grand sense of scale from almost nothing in the way of a production budget. With only around $6 million at their disposal (about $17 million when you account for inflation), Carpenter and his team engineered, as Roger Ebert once noted of Citizen Kane, an epic from scraps; instead of shooting in New York City (which would have been impossible) or on a studio back-lot (which would have looked fake), Carpenter took the production to downtown St. Louis which, in the early 1980s, was a fire-ruined hellscape perfect for this dark tale of a master criminal (Kurt Russell) tasked with breaking into a dystopian, futuristic NYC in order to rescue the President of the United States (a hammy, unconvincing Donald Pleasance). What Carpenter lost in familiar Manhattan touchstones (minus one fleeting glimpse of the Statue of Liberty), he gained in atmospheric grit. He and cinematographer Dean Cundey shot 360 degrees in the city, their prowling widescreen frame helping to turn this combination of St. Louis' urban blight and Joe Alves' striking production design - because he didn't have to worry about the same location/permits headaches that would have accompanied New York, Alves was able to put a junked Boeing VC-25 in the middle of the city to simulate the wrecked Air Force One, and he turned St. Louis' now-beautiful train station into the queasy, tetanus-friendly arena where Russell's antihero must fight to the death. The film is a triumph of scrap and ingenuity over budgetary limitations, and one would think that this was the movie Carpenter was born to make (the premise sets it up as nothing less than a city-wide version of the siege picture the director damn near perfected with Assault on Precinct 13), so it's almost a shame to report that Carpenter and Nick Castle's script is nowhere near as taut as Carpenter's direction. After a cracking opening that sees Lee Van Cleef's covert agent forcibly conscript Russell's Snake Plissken into serving his country, the film settles into one long groove of Snake wandering into one dark, ruined location after another, with the occasional appearance from members of the absurdly eclectic supporting cast (Adrienne Barbeau, Ernest Borgnine, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Frank Doubleday, Harry Dean Stanton, and Mr. A-Number-One, Duke of New York himself, Isaac Hayes) existing to break up the tedium. It's a true grindhouse movie, for better or worse, but that said, it remains essential viewing, both for the production design and for Russell's lead performance. His Snake Plissken is an iconic movie badass - the combination of eye-patch, black tank-top, and bad attitude should be too campy for words, and it is, but here's the thing: Russell knows he's playing an OTT character, and he revels in the absurdities, turning Snake into the coolest protagonist Clint Eastwood never got to play as well as a loving parody of same. If ever one needed a reminder of why Russell is our most underrated movie star (besides the fact that he's currently stealing scenes from the likes of Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson in Furious 7), then look no further than Snake Plissken.
In his, Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the film is a cat and mouse game of sorts as Snake meanders through the scary environs of a Manhattan completely overrun with lawless individuals. Along the way he's helped by an avuncular tour guide of sorts named Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), while ultimately teaming up with Duke's former right hand man Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and Brain's pulchritudinous main squeeze Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau). Perhaps surprisingly, and probably at least partially attributable to Escape from New York's relatively small budget, the film is not a series of big action set pieces, and instead tends to play out in smaller, more intimate, scenes, a choice that may frustrate those wanting a nonstop adrenaline rush. It's perhaps difficult to remember that at this stage of his career Kurt Russell was probably thought of as a Disney star as much as anything else. His Snake Plissken is the very definition of laconic coolness, and Russell brings a lanky athleticism to the role that's extremely appealing (he jokes with Carpenter in their shared commentary about Carpenter having the faith that Russell could drop some pounds and buff himself up for the role, something he obviously managed to do). Escape from New York is filled to the brim with colorful supporting turns, and its general premise is compelling enough to help the film overcome some of its hokier elements. Less of a visceral in your face action flick than its reputation perhaps suggests, Escape from New York is a charming, quasi-retro escapist movie that offers a uniquely dystopian view of Manhattan that may indeed be gone with the wind."
That said, Escape From New York is some kind of masterpiece compared to the Anchor Bay release Everly; here's a piece of grindhouse "entertainment" that can't even partially transcend its expectations the way the earlier film does. It would be different if Everly didn't try, if it were just the seedy, Taken-meets-I Spit on Your Grave mash-up the premise suggests, what with its sexually and physically imperiled title character wrecking havoc on all those that victimized her. There's a market for this kind of noise, and it used to die on the straight-to-DVD racks at Blockbuster. However, Everly clearly aspires for a stronger foothold in the annals of cult cinema: how else to explain Salma Hayek, whose movie-star presence ostensibly legitimizes Everly in the same way that Liam Neeson grounds the action-movie heroics of Bryan Mills in Taken? Hayek's talents encourage us to give the film the benefit of the ironic wink, but her game approach to action - and if nothing else, she makes a formidable screen asskicker, especially given the physical challenges posed by the film's single-room location (the whole film takes place in her apartment) - can't overcome the picture's leering gaze. Director Joe Lynch cut his teeth on such gory, pervy horror movies like Wrong Turn 2: Dead End and Chillerama, and while Everly is a full-fledged action movie, Lynch maintains the same exploitative tone. At the end of the day, this movie exists because Lynch gets a kick out of seeing Hayek slice and dice in various stages of undress, and that's it: there's no greater subtext (as with Steven Soderbergh's underrated Haywire), nor is Lynch such an accomplished action technician as to mitigate the ick factor (see Robert Rodriguez's stylish work on Grindhouse or the first Sin City). Much as one might disparage Taken 3, it's spiritually harmless stuff compared to this one.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that "Everly's laser-like focus on guns, bullets, F-bombs, and blood leaves no room for anything more than a cursory, empty story that really only seems important in order to give the audience's abused ears a few moments of middle movie time to settle down from the gunfire. The dramatic angles - whether Everly's or her family's - are threadbare at best and unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. Why is it that movies that need a story can't get one right, and movies that don't need a story, those few like this one that are so intent on just inundating the audience with carnage, waste time dropping one in? It comes off as disingenuous and adds nothing to the movie beyond a few pebbly rattles in an otherwise empty energy drink can that's marketed solely by the flash of its extreme label and the short burst of vitality it has to offer the consumer. If the movie's just a vehicle for violence, just shoot ninety minutes of violence. No need to be pseudo-artful about the secondary stuff."
Finally, switching gears we come to the Twentieth Century Fox release Cake. Just like The Good Girl or Nicole Holofcener's Friends with Money, Cake exists for one reason and one reason alone - to let Jennifer Aniston have another shot at the Serious Actress title. Patrick Tobin's script gives Aniston's character a vast spectrum of attention-grabbing tics: her Claire Simmons suffers chronic pain after a tragic accident, and the only thing worse than the physical scars all over her face and body is the terrible psychic guilt she carries, a guilt that manifests itself through a series of bitter, misanthropic remarks (Adriana Barraza excels as Claire's housekeeper and the one person who can stand Claire's vitriol). A better, more confident filmmaker (and film) would be content structuring Cake as a stark character study, but director Daniel Barnz doesn't have enough faith in human nuances. He lets the film play out as rote melodrama; Claire's pain over the death of a support-group member (Anna Kendrick) causes her to act out, alienating her nice-guy husband (Chris Messina) and making advances on the dead woman's widow (Sam Worthington), all in the service of a three-act fall and redemption story. There are no surprises here, but to Aniston's credit, it's a sturdy enough performance - for all of her uglifying makeup and all-encompassing miserablism, Aniston doesn't overplay or try to force her way into an Oscar nomination like, say, Julianne Moore's far broader turn in the similarly underwhelming Still Alice - but the movie itself isn't a challenge. It exists as a testament to her Range, when Aniston would be better off entrusting her image to a real directorial vision and letting it serve the movie, and not the other way around.