For the week of December 25th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is offering a 4K remaster of James Cameron's iconic 1991 actioner Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It is certainly easy to resent Judgment Day for what it hath wrought. Cameron pretty much solidified what we know now as the modern Hollywood mega-blockbuster, its $100-million budget little more than grist for extravagant CGI effects, nonstop mayhem, and four-quadrant polish. Terminator 2: Judgment Day sports an R-rating, but viewed in context, it's almost as cuddly as your average Michael Bay or James Bond picture. Gone is the relentless menace of Cameron's 1984 original; Arnold Schwarzenegger's taciturn T-800 is practically Teddy Ruxpin with a body count, protecting young John Connor (Edward Furlong, who peaked with this one movie) from the advanced T-1000 model (Robert Patrick, working around the character's CGI morphing effects to create a palpable threat) and maybe, just maybe, learning to love in the process. In Schwarzenegger's underrated action-comedy Last Action Hero, the actor counters charges that his films are getting too violent by cluelessly asserting about a movie-within-the-movie that "we only killed 48 people, where we killed 119," and you get the sense that he's riffing on Judgment Day, where the T-800 kills almost no one, electing instead to graphically kneecap his human pursuers as a concession to his young ward (and his increasingly younger audience members). Yet despite all of that, Terminator 2: Judgment Day somehow represents Peak Cameron. It works you up so much that you couldn't care less how shameless it is. As he did with his other big sequel (1986's glorious Aliens), Cameron plows through clichés and sentimental pap with the verve of a great tightwire artist. Like Terminator's big car chase through the neon-lit streets of Los Angeles? Judgment Day has at least three comparable setpieces, with the much-lauded big-rig-vs.-motorcycle skirmish and the helicopter-chases-van sequence (where Cameron actually flew a real helicopter under a freeway overpass) ranking as first among equals. An assault on the tech company that holds the key to Skynet's digital revolution is a mini-masterpiece of action: sometimes, I wish Cameron would just make a proper war movie already. Even the CGI works beautifully in context, especially since most of the carnage unfolds in terrifyingly kinetic practical effects. Much as we might lament Cameron's descent into the ones and zeroes of the Avatar universe, movies like Judgment Day (and The Abyss, if Twentieth Century Fox would get off its ass and release a remastered Blu-ray) reveal what a master he once was at playing with the biggest, most destructive toys. And dammed if the kinder, gentler Arnie doesn't work like gangbusters. When the T-800 says his final goodbyes to John, the moment has the same emotional pang as the end of freakin' City Lights. So yes, Terminator 2: Judgment Day destroyed adult moviemaking as we know it, and yes, it represents all that is most opportunistic about the movie business. But it's also a full-fledged classic, and to say otherwise just ain't cutting it.
If Terminator 2 is what happens when you gussy up violent pulp with a nine-figure budget, then S. Craig Zahler's Brawl in Cell Block 99 is the no-frills real deal: cheap, mean, and relentless. I loved it. In some ways, you get exactly what you'd expect from a movie with a title like Brawl in Cell Block 99: Zahler takes his antihero (Vince Vaughn's struggling criminal flunky), plugs him into a no-win scenario (a criminal organization wants him to ice a prisoner in a maximum security hellhole or else they'll abort Vaughn's unborn child from inside his mother), and promises bloody mayhem. And certainly, once the film gets going, it treats viewers to some of the gnarliest carnage I've ever seen outside a Mel Gibson picture. However, the operative phrase here is "once the film gets going." Anyone familiar with Zahler's 2015 horror-western Bone Tomahawk knows that Zahler loves his characters more than any shattered heads or disemboweled bodies, and he takes his time luxuriating in the characters. Bone Tomahawk indulged every oddball conversation between its central quartet (Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, and a wonderful Richard Jenkins), and with Brawl in Cell Block 99, Zahler burrows deep into Vaughn's psyche. This isn't a Western, but Vaughn treats the character like a weary former gunslinger; he knows the Bad Old Days will return, and he confronts them with a resigned defiance - Vaughn operates with brute efficiency during the (many) fight sequences, like he's doing whatever possible to shut down the fight as quickly as he can. Yet there's room for warmth here. Part of the reason I love S. Craig Zahler the screenwriter is that he's always delivering some left-field idiosyncrasy that a) we'd never expect and b) enriches all the chaos. I'm thinking of the wry, sincere exchange Vaughn shares with his criminal connection (Marc Blucas) about the meaning of a charged racial slur. Or the surprising détente Vaughn orchestrates with the prison warden (a great Don Johnson) right as all hell is breaking loose. Or, best of all, the mesmerizing opening sequence, wherein Vaughn loses his job, learns his wife (Jennifer Carpenter, the film's one weak link) has been cheating on him, destroys his car with his bare hands, and then calmly and quietly returns to his wife, talking honestly about his failings as a husband as his hands bleed. Brawl in Cell Block 99 is a slow burn, but when the dialogue sings as much as it does here, you won't mind the ride. Furthermore, if Zahler's writing definitely eclipsed his amateurish, Z-grade direction in Bone Tomahawk, I'm happy to say Zahler the Director has made some pretty huge leaps here. He shoots like 90% of Brawl in Cell Block 99 in these Kubrickian, wide-angle medium shots - and he rarely cuts during a fight scene - and as a result, the film has this unbearable, claustrophobic intensity before we even enter the prison. I'm trying not to gush too much, but Brawl in Cell Block 99 is masterful pulp, and one of the most enjoyable film experiences of the year.
Finally, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing a bunch of catalog title to Blu-ray this week. First, the bad: stay far away from Fletch Lives. I adore Michael Ritchie's 1985 original crime-comedy-caper - it might be his best film, and it's definitely Chevy Chase's finest starring role - but the reason we don't have a whole franchise of whip-smart Fletch thrillers is because Fletch Lives went and tainted the bloodline. This time around, Chase's sarcastic reporter finds himself in rural Louisiana, where he stumbles upon a murder plot that involves the KKK, sleazy televangelists (R. Lee Ermey, doing exactly what you'd expect of him and no more), and toxic waste spills, but really, all of this is just fodder for tired stereotypes (I can't tell if Cleavon Little's character is racist or dumb or both) and an even more tired performance from Chase. Fletch Lives plays like screenwriter Leon Capetanos wanted to ape all of original Fletch screenwriter Andrew Bergman's style but then suffered a head injury and fell asleep as his hands started typing independently from his body. It's a garbage movie. Thankfully, Carl Reiner's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is much better - you can use it to wash away the taste of Fletch Lives. In just four films together (The Jerk, All of Me, The Man with Two Brains, and this), Reiner and Steve Martin cultivated such a unique comic style (think Mel Brooks meets Looney Tunes), and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid might represent the fullest expression of their work together. At its core, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is a noir parody about an idiot P.I. (Martin, natch) wading his way through a lunatic mystery, and to be sure, Reiner and Martin know the genre so well that we get a kick outta watching them tweak all its inherent silly components. However, they've used old Hollywood to embellish their work; Martin's character interacts with scenes and characters from a host of classic mysteries, including Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, and White Heat. Yes, these moments are funny, but the editing that allows Martin to chat with Bogart or Cagney is so seamless that the whole movie feels like a special effect. I'd equate it to those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where Bugs would give hell to Edward G. Robinson or Lauren Bacall. But the best Universal title might be Ron Howard's newspaper dramedy The Paper. The Paper, too, has its head in the past - Howard and writer David Koepp are enamored with vintage newspaper dramas like His Girl Friday or Call Northside 777 - and it successfully approximates that energy for its own purposes. They cannily structure the film around a timing conceit: we spend one very frantic day with the reporters and editors of the New York Sun as they investigate a politically motivated murder. Many of Howard's films, good as they are, would work better if they were fifteen or twenty minutes shorter, but not The Paper. It races along, with its talented cast (Michael Keaton, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Randy Quaid, Marisa Tomei, Jason Robards, Spalding Gray, Catherine O'Hara, and Jason Alexander) doing the kinds of verbal gymnastics that would make Howard Hawks proud. Ultimately, I don't know if The Paper functions at the level of anything more than a really well made homage, but when the craft and speed are this good - who cares about originality! A whole lot of fun.