For the week of September 9th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is releasing one of the year's best films: the breathtakingly beautiful actioner John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum. It is very tempting to look at the whole John Wick franchise and assume that these movies privilege unrelenting, precisely choreographed violence above all else. This is a mistake. Certainly, director Chad Stahelski and his skilled team of actors, stuntpeople, fight coordinators, and digital-effects editors have structured the Wick as a direct rebuke to the chaos cinema of the Bournes and Nolan Batmans. Stahelski rarely gives you a two-second shot when he's got a tightly composed thirty-second one in the hopper, so dearly does he loves stacking complex physical movement on top of one another. It's awfully hard to pick a Best-in-Show from Parabellum, but I keep thinking about the knife fight Wick (Keanu Reeves, obviously) has with a bunch of goons in an antique-weapons depot. Both sides hurl blades at one another as if they were snowballs (as per Stahelski's Ringer interview), and DP Dan Laustsen holds on the melee as hero and villain alike throw and deflect, pausing only to die or to pull out a blade from a non-vital organ and whip it back. If all John Wick 3 showcased was peerless craft, it would be one of the best movies of the year, and a contender for Best Action Movie Ever Made. No, what the Wicks love more than anything is style. Stahelski is a rarity - a blunt-force sensualist - and he's just as quick to linger over the immaculate surfaces that provide a backdrop for the action. He loves steel and brushed gunmetal and plush velvet and viscous bourbon and reflective glass and neon light fixtures and gothic columns. He loves Renaissance-era artwork and Grecian statues. Only in a John Wick are you likely to see skull fragments pepper a Restoration Hardware settee. Sometimes Stahelski paints his cast in lurid colors straight from a Dario Argento giallo; sometimes he'll stop the main action dead for a surprisingly complicated dance routine. These movies are like Nancy Meyers movies for John Woo obsessives, so committed are they to a certain lifestyle aesthetic. All of which means that even after three increasingly expansive, convoluted entries, this franchise still manages to feel transgressive and deliberately, willfully strange. It's the action movie as art installation, and I suspect that's why the Wicks inspire either ardent affection or abject contempt among its viewers: they're more interested in subverting the action-movie form than reinforcing it. This thing belongs in a museum.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the imperious nature of The High Table is actually personified in this installment in the form of one Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon), who starts making the rounds to the likes of Winston, the Bowery King and even the Director to let them know they're all in 'arrears' with regard to their required 'fealty' to the organization. There's also a completely bizarre plot development which finds John wandering through the desert in search of his spirit animal, or at least the so-called Elder (Saïd Taghmaoui), a rather youthful looking guy who offers to help John work out his 'issues' with The High Table, though, again, after another wince-able moment that might have been just as at home, if not more so, in 47 Ronin. Speaking of ronin, the Adjudicator also recruits a sushi chef assassin (there must be a lot of those, don't you think?) named Zero (Mark Dacascos), who is out to prove he's Wick's equal and perhaps superior. You can probably guess how that one goes. It's all relentlessly silly most of the time, interspersed with some absolutely graphic violence, but, much like the first two John Wick entries, there is such a nonstop array of action and such stylistic flair repeatedly on display that the kind of patently insane undertow of the film is never really a problem."
Much as I might tire of Hollywood's insistence on making Remake Culture, I can't begrudge the remake on principle alone (Satan Met a Lady begat The Maltese Falcon; The Thing from Another World begat John Carpenter's The Thing; Death Takes a Holiday begat Meet Joe Black), and so I understand the impetus to bring Aladdin from the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Disney made a lot of creative decisions here that seemed like the right ones: hiring Guy Ritchie to transpose his naturally hyperkinetic filmmaking style to the naturally hyperkinetic Aladdin, avoiding whitewashing when casting the major roles (Mena Massoud, who plays Aladdin, is Egyptian; new Jasmine Naomi Scott is of Indian descent; Marwan Kenzari, who costars as Jafar, is Tunisian; and Sultan performer Navid Neghaban is Iranian), and revising some of the earlier film's more regressive cultural politics (Jasmine is now less of a damsel in distress - she's a more active agent in the government of Agrabah). I don't even begrudge replacing Robin Williams with Will Smith as the Genie. What Williams did was indelible (original Aladdin animator Eric Goldberg based his designs off Williams himself, watching closely - and drawing furiously - as the late standup comic improvised riffs in character), but Smith has the same kind of effortless star power that could result in a different but equally engaging take on the character. But Disney - and I'm saying this because I love you - you've got to try harder. This new Aladdin isn't as wan as the live-action Beauty and the Beast or as creepy as the recent Lion King deep-fake experiment, but it doesn't do nearly enough to justify its existence. The previous Aladdin was a trim ninety minutes; this one is 128 minutes, and that length differential gives you a pretty good sense of what the new Aladdin brings to the table. For the most part, it's content to do exactly the same things as the animated version while padding the runtime enough to make it seem like you're getting value-added. The problem is, the almost-shot-for-shot redos don't work. Ritchie can't improve on the original's crackerjack pacing, so the early parkour-and-chase scenes lose much of animation's natural velocity. Only the "Whole New World" sequence feels comparable, and most of it is CGI-animation anyways. And the additions just feel long. I appreciate the screenplay (by Ritchie and John August) trying to give Jafar some human complexity, but ultimately, he's not interesting when played as a mopey Iago (as in Othello, not the animated film's talking parrot - here, Alan Tudyk replaces Gilbert Gottfried, and no one calls it "Iago"). And the big new song, "Speechless," gives Jasmine a feminist anthem that, while politically progressive, torpedoes the film's already stodgy forward momentum. Smith's Genie best exemplifies the tension between the remake's halting changes and its rigid adherence to the past. When the Genie is in human disguise, Smith is actually pretty great - this is very much the glib, high-energy Will Smith of Men in Black and Independence Day (and he has great chemistry with Nasim Pedrad, who's very funny as Jasmine's incredibly thirsty handmaiden). But since this is Aladdin, the film feel obligated to trot him out in big blue garb more often than not. It's a shame - not only is the CGI atrocious (we're always aware of the disconnect between Smith's face and the pixels surrounding it), but it reminds us, and in the worst possible way, of how seamlessly the 1992 Genie married its aesthetic to Williams' singular talents. Not everything here is uninspired. Aladdin isn't a painful sit, and Scott is phenomenal as Jasmine (it's as if the animated character walked out of the screen into the real world, Purple Rose of Cairo-style). But at a certain point, audiences are going to want more from these Disney remake, and I don't know if Disney is ready yet.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman offered measured praise, that "as a live action film [Aladdin] works well at best and well enough at worst. It's certainly lacking the charms of the original picture as it attempts to balance an approachable, breezy, and light front of fun and music against the ferociously dark beats that surround the characters' plight and fight against the ruthless Jafar. Yet even in Jafar, the filmmakers seem bent on walking that fine line between approachability and heinous villainy. Kenzari never seems to be able to take the character as far as he thematically needs to go. There's a clear wrestling with the rating and the story's needs, a balance the animated film could walk with more confidence. Here, there's an effort to mask a somewhat tame and not at all risky portrayal under a deluge of sight and sound that allows Kenzari to ham it up rather than go full-on wicked."
Want to mount your own comparison? You're in luck - Disney has released a "Signature" edition of the 1992 Aladdin on the same day as the remake. As aggressively and smartly paced as the film is, it remains one of the most sanitized takes on the Arabian Nights stories; it even lacks the visual weirdness and poetry of the Kordas' 1940 masterwork The Thief of Bagdad. The title character (Scott Weinger) is spirited but bland, a charge that one could also file against his heavily Westernized love interest Jasmine (Linda Larkin). Heck, this thing is so safe that Jonathan Freeman's Jafar has to work hard to establish any dramatic stakes (although to his credit, Freeman makes for one of Disney's most menacing Big Bads, so silky-sadistic is his villainy - the remake errs big time in dropping the moment when Jafar turns himself into a Godzilla-sized cobra). Yet the film deserves a seat among the studio's most iconic animated features for one reason, and one reason alone: the presence of Robin Williams as the Genie. Narratively, Williams is just the comic relief, spinning his improvisatory genius into G-rated gold, even if Aladdin would have no earthly clue who the Genie is referencing with his Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Buckley, and Jack Nicholson impersonations (and really, animation provides the perfect medium for Williams' brand of humor, with supervising animator Eric Goldberg free to transform the character into the subject of whatever free-association riffs Williams dreams up). However, as was often the case with the best of Williams' screen work, he wasn't content to be just be funny (although it helps that he is funny as hell in the role). Williams lends the Genie such open humanity. It's in his easy bond with Aladdin (another knock against the remake - Smith is great at giving Aladdin crap, but he never seems to really like the title character), or the tremble in his voice when he falls under Jafar's subjugation. The Genie is as vivid as the best of Williams' live-action performances, and whenever he enters the film - which is often - Aladdin sparks like little else in the Mouse House. For Williams's fans, this Blu-ray is essential viewing, if only for the outtake reel that offers some never-before-seen Genie material that Williams generated in the studio. Just be prepared to watch it and cry.
We end with a pair of Lionsgate 4K reissues. The first - and best - is John Flynn's massively entertaining Lock Up, starring Sylvester Stallone. Although Lock Up remains a perennial catalog favorite (it's made the transition from every major home-media to the next, beginning with VHS and ending with this new 4K disc), I've always suspected it owes some of its popularity to getting bundled alongside more popular action vehicles (case in point: the "Legends" double-feature with Universal Soldier or the Stallone Collector's Set with First Blood and Cop Land). And that's a shame. This prison melodrama has a lot to offer. Stress "melodrama" - the film eschews conventional action beats for the kind of two-fisted male weepie that died out with Paul Muni and James Cagney. When we first meet Stallone's Frank Leone, he's dusting some treasured old photographs, and all to the strains of Bill Conti's twinkling, gentle piano score. The implication is clear: Leone is a good man, who got busted for tuning up some very bad dudes and is now just trying to serve his remaining six months as peacefully as possible. The rest of the film, then, does its level best to break Leone, mostly in the form of Donald Sutherland's venal Warden Drumgoole. At no point does Lock Up risk doing anything innovating or surprising; it trots out every prison-movie cliché imaginable, including (but not limited to) a brutal stint in the hole, a couple of sleazy guards, the tough-but-principled guard captain (John Amos), the sardonic lifer (Frank McRae), the young hothead (Larry Romano), and, of course, the resident prison-yard psycho (Sonny Landham). But Flynn keeps these beats coming at an entertaining clip, and he gets the most out of both Stallone and Sutherland. I suspect Sutherland had nothing but contempt for the project, but his studied apathy ends up working for the movie: he slithers out his lines with measured indifference, and that willingness to underplay his most villainous moments makes them all the more loathsome. And Stallone is, no kidding, a wonder. If you've ever seen him talk about movies, you'll know what a warm presence he is - he's uncharacteristically thoughtful and sensitive - and Lock Up comes the closest to reflecting what he's like in person. The film uses his gentle presence to build to a surprisingly deft bit of social commentary. When Leone finally starts breaking bad, we realize that the system made him violent, that prison itself is responsible for so much of the ritual dehumanization of inmates. Just as we think the movie will lean into the idea, it pivots so Stallone can act like an action hero for the last fifteen minutes, and Lock Up deflates ever so slightly. Still, this is a terrific movie with one of Stallone's most underrated performances.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "for whatever reason, Lock Up hasn't attained quite the stature of some other Stallone entries, but it's a consistently entertaining and often exciting story, even if it's also resolutely predictable almost all of the time. This is a film that virtually wallows in a kind of pent up anger that accrues over the course of almost Job-like injustices suffered by Frank, and the fact that Donald Sutherland plays the martinet warden like a character from Grand Guignol only heightens the anxiety."
Finally, Lionsgate is also bringing the sci-fi horror feature Daybreakers to 4K Blu-ray. This is a…weird movie, to put it mildly. If you've seen the Blade, you'll know that some of their most interesting scenes focus on the vampire subculture that exists just below our world; the Blade villains and familiars operate within a different set of social codes and rules. Daybreakers expands that sort of material to full length. We open in a future (sort of: Daybreakers came out in 2009 and takes place in…2019!) where vampires rule the world and humans are an endangered species. But the fanged majority has so thoroughly decimated the human minority that the vampires now are at risk, and so they've been forced to ration their blood supplies. This shortage has widespread sociopolitical implications, particularly once Sam Neill's greedy corporate overlord plans to control as much of the human-blood supply as he can in order to sell it to the highest bidders. This stuff is genuinely clever, and I'd be intriguing in watching a horror allegory about the class divisions between the haves and have-nots. However, Daybreakers abandons interrogating this concept right after bringing it up, and we have to settle for a gory thriller about a sympathetic vampire hematologist (Ethan Hawke, who's predictably good) who joins a group of humans (led by Willem Dafoe) in order to try and cure vampirism. This material vacillates wildly between creature-feature mayhem – if vampires don't get a steady supply of blood, they turn into the bat-like "subsiders" that will feed on vampires – and turgid soap opera – Hawke has a fraught relationship with his brother (Michael Dorman), while Neill's estranged daughter (Isabel Lucas) who rather die than support her father. It's all over the place; I appreciate the Spierig Brothers' visual eye and attention to world building, but I wish they were better storytellers. They just can't handle their own ambition. As such, Daybreakers functions as a compelling misfire, albeit one more appealing to genre fans than not.
Jeffrey Kauffman felt similarly, that "Daybreakers is probably another prime example of style triumphing over substance, but in that regard, it's notable that the film does offer some really interesting visuals and an equally appealing sound design…There is a kind of tepid, mediocre feeling to some of the storytelling, and there are at least a couple of moments that may well leave even some fans rolling their eyes (my personal favorite is toward the end of the film when the 'main damsel in distress,' played by Claudia Karvan, is more or less kidnapped during a standoff with armed troops, with a vampire just emerging from a door behind her and Ethan Hawke in what actually plays almost comedically)."