Saturday, 25 February 2023
Sunday, 19 February 2023
Mutronics - The Movie
Listless nonsense that, bizarrely, combines the slapstick suit acting of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze with the cutting-edge splatter gags seen in Brian Yuzna's Society. Co-directed by special effects artists Screaming Mad George and Steve Wang, Mutronics - The Movie nominally adapts Yoshiki Takaya's Bio-Booster Armor Guyver manga, the never-ending tale of mutated high-school children taking on the extraterrestrial overlords who have woven themselves into corporate Japan. Mutronics lifts the action out of bubble-era Tokyo, relocating it to a tagged and trashed American wasteland shot through with spacious warehouses and steaming boiler-rooms. Following the bone-melting murder of his prospective girlfriend's father, Jack Armstrong's Sean Barker stumbles across an alien artefact that covers his body in a sparkling toxic slime.
This seeping encounter leaves the otherwise deathly dull Sean able to summon a biomechanical armour that multiplies the strength and stamina driving the teenager's apprehensive Aikido skills, allowing him to tear muscled arms off snake men or send oversized Gremlins sailing through the air. These creatures - if not the situations or choreography that underlines their confrontations - are easily Mutronics' greatest asset. Although rubbery enough to facilitate sustained mayhem, these (surprisingly diverse) latex threat displays, as portrayed by Levie Isaacks' sympathetic lighting and camera work, carry these suits through the prolonged scrutiny demanded by an all monster finale. The mottled pigments airbrushed onto the hide of the close-up Guyver costume are especially impressive, accentuating the strange invertebrate qualities - in this case a lobster - inherent to this specific strain of masked hero tokusatsu.
Mutronics is Kamen Rider taken into the techno-organic realm; with twisting transformations that are inflicted upon our heroes rather than willingly, or tidily, summoned. Despite this excellent menagerie, Mutronics remains a boneheaded film riddled with missed opportunities. While the special make-up effects trespass into the realm of genuine horror, the hairbrained mulch that surrounds this smoking sludge somehow seems to be pitched directly at very young children. The most tantalising of the film's would-be innovations is a particularly aggressive insert shot that focuses on a component of the defeated Guyver wrapping its pulsing veins and jet black wiring around the wrist of Vivian Wu's Mizuki. For a brief moment the intention seems to be that, rather than have to scurry away from the plaster moulded brutes that have kidnapped and poked at her, this beleaguered love interest will be elevated to the level of active participant. Sheathed in the Guyver armour Mikzuki could take on her tormentors and avenge her father's murder, all thanks to a parting infection from a brief, romantic, dalliance. Sadly this escalation was not to be.
Friday, 17 February 2023
Tuesday, 14 February 2023
Sunday, 12 February 2023
The Wandering Swordsman
The Wandering Swordsman, directed by Chang Cheh, charts the rambling adventures of David Chiang's eponymous ranger, a lightly supernatural presence in Ming Dynasty era China who combines the altruistic intentions of Robin Hood with a weightless mischief reminiscent of JM Barrie's Peter Pan. There's also something of Toshiro Mifune's sauntering bodyguard about the character too; an expert swordfighter trapped between two equally matched factions. However, where the older (itchier) Yojimbo was able to leverage his spectacular martial arts skills to manipulate his competing troublemakers, Chiang's much younger man is himself hoodwinked and exploited. Although Chang's film takes a significant amount of time getting there, Chiang's rootless swordsman is, eventually, tricked into working alongside a group of dastardly thieves, cast as their difference maker.
While a litany of disguised officials and treacherous bandits go about their circuitous treasure transportation, director Chang repeatedly returns to a Cheshire Cat image of the smiling Chiang. The actor is photographed in the manner of a pop-star pin-up, his pearly white teeth shining out of the creeping greenery that hangs like a haze over these claustrophobic Shaw Brothers sets. No matter the occasion, Chiang is the subject. This pointed attempt at star making could come off as obnoxious where The Wandering Swordsman less dedicated to chewing up its characters: Bolo Yeung, in his feature film debut, has his face cut in half while the heroic Chiang is skewered more than once, forced to wrench swords from his oozing trunk. Chang and cinematographer Hua Shan stack their frame with layered limbs and glistening weapons, perhaps as a way to generate depth on these stock, artificial locations. The combat sequences that conclude The Wandering Swordsman may be filled with the theatrical twirling and tumbling typical of this period, but Chang's camera doesn't stand apart from the bloody violence. Instead of observing at a discreet distance, our viewpoint rushes headlong into the sparking flurries, making itself a willing participant in the unfolding slaughter.
Thursday, 9 February 2023
Tuesday, 7 February 2023
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Like many Marvel sequels before it - Iron Man 2 and Avengers: Age of Ultron spring immediately to mind - Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a second instalment that takes the runtime minutes used in the previous episode to introduce or provide nuance for the characters and cultures important to this specific property, then trades them for a more cynical kind of scaffolding. Presumably these knots that Wakanda Forever ties itself into will be untangled either by spin-off streaming events or subsequent film phases. When writer-director Ryan Coogler does afford himself the space to explore the more personal pains generated by the death of King T'Challa, both within this film series and the real-life passing of actor Chadwick Boseman, Wakanda Forever distinguishes itself; allowing an emotional wavelength, distinct from the flippancy of the unending Marvel production line, to bleed in.
Angela Bassett, resplendent in funeral whites and Tyrian purples thanks to costume designer Ruth E Carter, holds court in every scene she occupies. She sits at the centre of the frame, her brow furrowed with weary. When roused, the bereaved Queen hammers the shrinking curs who share her screen with a pounding rhetoric steeped in grief. The actress, more than once, delivering a righteous storm of justified and sustained slander. Bassett's performance, not to mention the very real trepidation rolling off Letitia Wright's Shuri as she is slowly elevated from a talkative sidekick to the driving force of the franchise, would seem to demand a narrower focus in this sequel. Sadly the film sprawls constantly, inviting in new players and the computer generated robot suits they disappear into. This is a recurring disconnection in Wakanda Forever: characters that the audience are presumed to have become attached to are all transformed into anonymous digital marionettes.
As the stakes begin to rise in Wakanda Forever, the human element shrinks. The genuine jeopardy experienced by an audience fretting over their favs evaporates into loosely arranged strafing runs or a mobbed violence that we only glimpse from the detached viewpoint of a bird. The fraying emotions of the film's heroes experience a similar, unceremonious, dismissal too. Shuri, having clawed her way out of a nightmare vision after having chugged her own artificial approximation of the heart-shaped herb (the plant that allows prospective Black Panthers to connect to a churning dream realm), instantly has her pain brushed off with an axis grinding gag so we can transition into the next expositional report. Although the wider demands of the Marvel slate threaten to make paste of Wakanda Forever, Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw do extend a determined sense of sympathy when photographing the trepidatious Wright. The physical smallness of the actress - especially when compared to Tenoch Huerta Mejía's muscled Namor - is accentuated rather than obscured. In this way Shuri, even when positioned as looming and triumphant, always has an aching sense of vulnerability about her.
