Part 5 – The Solid Craft
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Mediocre |
Part 10: The Poor |
Part 11: The Failures
Two remakes in this tier get it right and the reason is the same in both cases. The 2007 3:10 to Yuma keeps the negotiation and adds a road, so the two men have days together instead of hours. The 2016 Magnificent Seven keeps the recruitment, the training, the fortification and the assault, the four things the original was built on.
The other thread here’s legibility. John Wick made action readable again in 2014 by doing nothing more complicated than holding the camera still and letting the shots run, and the industry noticed.
An eight from me means I had a good time and can still point at what went wrong, and most of this page sits right on that line.
The remakes are a disappointment. Yuma and the Seven prove a studio can rebuild an old picture with respect, so when Total Recall and Ghost in the Shell keep the look and toss the idea, I take it personally. Both got eights from me on craft, and craft is all they kept.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the fifth of eleven parts.
3:10 to Yuma changes one constraint and justifies a remake, and the 2016 Magnificent Seven keeps four structural stages intact. Separate architecture from decoration in the Plot Handbook.
1. Man on Fire (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of Man on Fire (2004)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The first hour is the reason the second one works."
Tony Scott adapted A. J. Quinnell, moved the story from Italy to Mexico City, and shot it with stuttering frame rates, burned-in subtitles that move around the frame and color that changes inside single scenes. He’d wanted to make it since 1980 and waited more than twenty years for the rights.
The first hour is the reason the second one works. Creasy is a burnt-out former operative who doesn’t want the job, and the film spends real time on a bodyguard and a nine-year-old becoming friends over swimming lessons and homework before anything happens to either of them.
Denzel Washington plays the drinking and the self-disgust without any of the dignity the part invites. The sequence where he attempts to shoot himself and the round fails to fire is played without music, without comment and without any suggestion that it means something. Christopher Walken, Mickey Rourke and Radha Mitchell fill out the cast.
Dakota Fanning was nine during the shoot and Washington has said she’s the reason the film works. The film builds the relationship out of small specifics, a swimming start, a piano lesson, a question about whether he’s a bad man, and presents none of it as sentimental. The revenge half is methodical and ugly. Creasy works up a chain, he uses explosives and improvised tools, and the film never presents any of it as satisfying. The exchange at the end is the only decision he makes that the picture treats as a victory.
Washington is the reason this sits at the top of the tier, and the hour he spends earning that girl’s trust is the best-spent hour in any revenge film I can name. My complaint is Scott’s style. The stuttering frames and the subtitles sliding around the screen tire me by the second half, and a story this bare didn’t need that much varnish on it.
2. 3:10 to Yuma (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"A remake with a genuine reason to exist, and it adds a road."
James Mangold remade Delmer Daves’s 1957 film and made the single change that justifies the exercise.
The original is largely a hotel room and a clock. This version puts the two men on a road for days, so the negotiation has somewhere to go. Halsted Welles wrote the 1957 version from an Elmore Leonard short story.
Christian Bale plays Dan Evans as a man whose problem is money and whose real problem is his son’s opinion of him. He lost a leg at Antietam, he’s being pushed off his land over a debt, and the two hundred dollars matters more than the principle.
Russell Crowe’s Ben Wade is the film’s engine and Crowe builds the performance on offers. He keeps raising the number, he’s charming, he sketches, and every scene with him is somebody being invited to take an easier route. Peter Fonda plays the Pinkerton man and Dallas Roberts the railway representative.
Ben Foster’s Charlie Prince is the reason the last act has weight. His attachment to Wade is the only uncomplicated thing in the film, and the ending turns on Wade’s response to it instead of anything either protagonist does. Marco Beltrami scored it and was nominated for the Academy Award.
The station sequence is the payoff and the film earns it. Mangold shoots the run to the train through a town where every gun is pointed at the wrong man, and the decision that closes it’s made by the character who had least reason to make it.
3. Taken Trilogy (2008-2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Taken Trilogy (2008-2014)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"One perfect film and two that demonstrate why it worked."
Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen wrote a ninety-three minute film with no fat anywhere in it, and Pierre Morel shot it for around twenty-five million dollars. It took more than two hundred and made a fifty-six-year-old character actor into an action star. Neeson has said he expected it to go directly to video in most territories.
The telephone speech is the reason everybody remembers it and it works because Bryan Mills is telling the truth. He’s not threatening anybody. He’s describing his own professional capabilities to somebody who doesn’t yet know what he is, and Neeson plays it entirely flat.
Structure is the whole appeal of the first film. A clock starts in the opening act, the protagonist knows exactly what to do, and the picture never stops to let him grieve or doubt. Every scene is either movement or information and nothing else. Olivier Megaton directed both sequels after Morel left the series.
Taken 2 puts the family in Istanbul and asks the audience to accept the same premise twice, the problem every sequel of this kind has. The grenade-and-echo sequence is the one real idea in it and the film uses it well. Famke Janssen plays the ex-wife and Maggie Grace the daughter across all three.
Taken 3 abandons the abduction entirely for a murder frame-up, and the editing is aggressive enough that a fence climb takes roughly fifteen cuts. The series ends by removing the constraint that made the original work. Fox held the American release for close to a year after the European run.
The original Taken is ninety-three minutes of a man doing his job, and I enjoy every one of them.
The sequels are what pull my rating down. Istanbul is the same film with a thinner excuse, and the editing in Taken 3 is a damn mess. Fifteen cuts for a man climbing a fence tells me nobody trusted the shot.
4. Thor (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of Thor (2011)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Branagh directing Norse mythology as Shakespeare. The correct instinct."
Kenneth Branagh directed a Marvel film, a proposition that sounded absurd in 2009 and turned out to be the correct instinct. He brought a Shakespearean tone to a story about a father, two sons and a succession, and the Asgard material is played as tragedy instead of fantasy.
Tom Hiddleston auditioned for Thor and was cast as Loki, the single best casting decision Marvel made in its first decade. Hiddleston builds the performance on real grievance, and plays the discovery about Loki’s origin as devastation instead of as motivation. Anthony Hopkins plays Odin across the sequence.
The New Mexico half is the weaker one and the film knows it. Thor’s exile is largely comic, the supporting scientists are underwritten, and the screenplay assembles the romance with Jane Foster from about three scenes and treats them as sufficient. Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne share the screenplay credit.
The Destroyer sequence is where the picture states its argument.
Thor walks toward a weapon that will kill him, unarmed, and asks for his brother’s forgiveness. The film resolves the worthiness question with a man choosing to die for people he met a week earlier. Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard and Kat Dennings play the scientists.
Loki’s central complaint is factually correct and the film never argues otherwise. Build an objection that can’t be corrected, using the Antagonist Handbook.
5. Sucker Punch (2011) [full review]
► Read the full review of Sucker Punch (2011)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.0/10
"The point of view character is not the protagonist, and the ending destroys the film."
Zack Snyder made the most argued-about film of his career and the argument has never settled. A young woman is committed to an institution in the 1960s and the picture nests three levels of reality inside each other, with the action sequences occurring at the deepest one.
The reading most viewers missed is that the fantasy sequences are dissociation, and the film is explicit that each one corresponds to something happening to Babydoll while she’s not present for it. The theatrical cut removes several scenes that made this clearer.
The visual construction is extraordinary regardless of what anybody thinks of the film. Samurai automatons, a First World War trench with clockwork German soldiers, a dragon under a castle, and a bomb on a train, all photographed with real weight. Emily Browning leads and Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Jamie Chung complete the group.
The criticism about its presentation of its own cast is fair and Snyder’s defense has never fully answered it. The film asks an audience to critique a gaze it’s also supplying, and a serious number of viewers concluded that it wanted both. Snyder co-wrote it with Steve Shibuya and it’s his only original screenplay.
I rate this higher than most people do, and the images earn most of that eight on their own. The dissociation reading is real, and I think it’s the smartest idea Snyder ever had. What frustrates me is that he shot it so the surface would sell by itself, and no defense he’s offered since squares that.
6. Total Recall (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Total Recall (2012)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"A different film from the 1990 version, not a competing one."
Len Wiseman remade Verhoeven with a considerably larger budget, no Mars, no humor and none of the ambiguity that made the original worth arguing about. Colin Farrell is competent and the film gives him nothing to do with it. Wiseman had made two Underworld films and Live Free or Die Hard before this.
The production design is the one real achievement. A vertically stacked future city shot in permanent rain, magnetic vehicles, and a tunnel through the earth’s core connecting the two remaining habitable regions. Wiseman uses all of it for chases. Kate Beckinsale’s role was expanded considerably from the original picture.
The original’s central question is removed. Verhoeven leaves it open whether Quaid is dreaming, and the 2012 film answers early and moves on, converting a philosophical thriller into a pursuit picture with expensive sets. Bryan Cranston plays Cohaagen and Jessica Biel the resistance fighter. Kurt Wimmer and Mark Bomback wrote it.
The Fall is the best idea in it and the film never interrogates it. A gravity elevator through the planet, seventeen minutes each way, with a moment of inversion at the center. It’s a fine piece of design attached to nothing. It cost around one hundred and twenty-five million dollars and barely recovered it.
My eight is for the city and the Fall, and I’m a little annoyed at how much I enjoyed a film that threw out the best question in the original. Wiseman had a premise about whether a man can trust his own memory and a budget most directors would kill for, and he spent the whole lot on chases.
7. The Wolverine (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Wolverine (2013)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"Recovers the character from the 2009 damage, then loses the third act."
James Mangold took the character to Japan and adapted the Chris Claremont and Frank Miller run from 1982, the best Wolverine story anybody has written. The first two acts are the closest the franchise came to a real character study. Christopher McQuarrie wrote an early draft and Mark Bomback and Scott Frank rewrote it.
Removing the healing factor is the structural decision that makes it work. Logan spends most of the film able to be hurt, and the fight on top of a bullet train is tense because a man who can’t be killed suddenly can be. Tao Okamoto plays Mariko and Rila Fukushima plays Yukio.
The funeral sequence and the village material give Hugh Jackman more to do than any other entry in the sequence. He’s suicidal, he’s exhausted, he’s outlived everybody, and the film treats immortality as a burden instead of a power. Darren Aronofsky was attached to direct and left over the shooting schedule.
The last act collapses into a fight with a giant silver robot, exactly the resolution the preceding ninety minutes had been avoiding. The unrated cut improves it and can’t fix the structural problem underneath. Marco Beltrami scored it and the unrated cut runs twelve minutes longer.
8. Oblivion (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Oblivion (2013)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The production design is the best of its year and the plot cannot support it."
Joseph Kosinski adapted his own unpublished graphic novel and shot most of the film in Iceland, with the sky tower built as a practical set on a mountain in Hawaii using front projection instead of green screen. The light in the film is real. Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt share the screenplay credit with Kosinski.
The design is the reason it endures. The bubble ship, the drones, the white tower above the cloud layer, and a domestic interior with a glass pool suspended over nothing. Everything is clean, sparse and deliberately unlived-in. Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko and Morgan Freeman fill out the cast.
The structure is a slow reveal about what Jack is, and the film plants it properly. The recurring dream, the library, the reaction of the survivors, and a technician who keeps asking whether they’re an effective team. All of it pays. Claudio Miranda shot it the year he won an Academy Award for Life of Pi.
M83’s score is doing an enormous amount of the emotional work and the film would be considerably thinner without it. The picture is more atmosphere than plot, and the soundtrack is the thing holding the atmosphere together across two hours. Kosinski had made Tron: Legacy and went on to Top Gun: Maverick.
9. Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"A class argument disguised as a spy comedy."
Matthew Vaughn adapted Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons into a film that both celebrates and dismantles the spy picture, and it manages both because it commits to the celebration first. The tailoring, the gadgets and the manners are played entirely straight. Jane Goldman co-wrote it with Vaughn and the two had worked together since Stardust.
The church sequence is the most technically aggressive thing Vaughn has shot. It looks like one continuous take, it’s assembled from several, and it runs roughly four minutes of Colin Firth killing a congregation to Free Bird while the audience is asked to enjoy it and then isn’t permitted to.
Firth was fifty-three and had done no action work at all. He trained for six months, performed the majority of the choreography himself, and the casting is the film’s central joke and its central asset at the same time. Samuel L. Jackson plays Valentine with a lisp and a fear of blood.
The class argument is more serious than the surface suggests. An institution that describes itself as meritocratic rejects Eggsy, the test sequence is rigged in ways nobody acknowledges, and the film states its position on that and then acts on it. Sofia Boutella plays Gazelle and had been a dancer before the production.
The ending is where a considerable part of the audience gets off. The head sequence is played as comedy with fireworks, the final joke is crude and deliberate, and Vaughn has never apologized for either. The sequels progressively lost the balance. It took over four hundred million dollars against a budget around eighty-one.
The Wolverine removes the healing factor and every scene gets its risk back. Disable instead of escalating, using the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
10. John Wick (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of John Wick (2014)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Legible action, because the camera holds still and the shots run long."
Chad Stahelski and David Leitch were stunt coordinators who had doubled Keanu Reeves on The Matrix, and the film exists because they wanted to prove action could be shot wide and held. Nothing in it is cut to disguise a performer. It cost around twenty million dollars and took more than eighty-five.
The premise is famously minimal. A retired assassin’s dog is killed and the film spends the rest of its length on consequences, with no subplot, no romance and no second objective. Derek Kolstad’s script is about a hundred pages of escalation. Kolstad originally wrote the character as a man in his seventies.
The gun work is the detail specialists point at. Reeves trained for months in a close-quarters shooting discipline and the film shoots his reloads and transitions in frame, so the audience can see a magazine change happen instead of hearing it offscreen. Leitch went uncredited as co-director and later made Atomic Blonde.
The world arrives entirely through props and procedure. Gold coins, a hotel with rules, a cleanup service that arrives with a van and a price list. Nobody stops to explain any of it and the film is stronger for refusing. Willem Dafoe, Ian McShane and Lance Reddick appear across the picture.
Michael Nyqvist plays the crime boss and gets the film’s best scene, a telephone call informing his son what he’s done. The exasperation is real and the performance gives the picture an antagonist who understands the situation completely. Reeves has said he did roughly ninety percent of the fighting himself.
John Wick gave me back something I’d given up on in American action, which is being able to see the fight. After years of shaky cameras and a cut every half second, two stunt coordinators held the shot and trusted the choreography, and I’m grateful to them for it. My reservation is the plot, so thin that by the last stretch the escalation starts to feel like a treadmill.
11. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"The ensemble craft holds and the film is carrying too much freight."
Whedon returned and has been open since about how difficult the production was, describing studio pressure over sequences the film was required to contain. The result is a picture with a real idea in it and a great deal of obligation stacked on top. Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson join as the Maximoff twins.
James Spader’s Ultron is the best thing in it and the performance is doing something unusual. He’s petulant, he makes jokes, he’s visibly modeled on Stark, and the film understands that a machine built by a man would inherit that man’s worst qualities.
The farmhouse sequence is the material Whedon fought hardest to keep and it’s the reason the film works at all. Hawkeye has a family nobody knew about, the team stops moving for twenty minutes, and every later decision costs something. Paul Bettany moves from voicing JARVIS to playing the Vision in person.
The Vision’s creation is the film’s strongest single idea and it arrives too late to be developed. A being made from Stark’s assistant, a stone nobody understands and Ultron’s own body, who picks up the hammer and the film doesn’t comment on it. It took over one and a half billion dollars and Whedon left Marvel afterward.
The action is the weakest in the sequence to that point. The Hulkbuster fight is long and weightless, the Sokovia finale is a digital city over a digital sky, and the film has too many characters to give any of them a legible position in either sequence.
12. Doctor Strange (2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of Doctor Strange (2016)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The visual grammar is new and the arc is compressed."
Scott Derrickson made the most visually inventive Marvel film and the folding-city sequences are the reason. Buildings rotate through each other in a way that’s no equivalent elsewhere in the franchise, and the effects team spent close to two years on the kaleidoscopic material. The origin is the standard arrogant-man-humbled structure and the film moves through it efficiently. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Strange as insufferable before the accident and the humility arrives slowly enough to be credible. Jon Spaihts, C. Robert Cargill and Derrickson share the screenplay credit. Michael Giacchino scored it.
The Ancient One casting was a real failure and Tilda Swinton and the studio have both acknowledged it since. The character is Tibetan in the source material, the studio made the change for market reasons it stated openly, and it diminishes the film. The ending is the best decision in the picture. Strange defeats a cosmic entity by trapping himself in a time loop and dying repeatedly until the entity finds it intolerable. It’s a resolution through persistence instead of force, and almost no film in the genre attempts it.
The time loop ending delighted me, and I can’t think of many superhero finales I’d say that about. Strange wins by being too stubborn to stay dead, and that’s a better idea than any beam of light in the sky. The Ancient One casting is what holds it to an eight for me. It was a bad call made for market reasons, and the film is smaller for it.
13. The Magnificent Seven (2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Magnificent Seven (2016)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"A remake that understands which parts were load-bearing."
Antoine Fuqua remade the 1960 film, itself a remake, and kept the four things the structure is built on. Recruitment, training, fortification and assault, in that order, with each stage given enough time to register. Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk wrote it after True Detective’s first season.
The ensemble is the reason it works and the casting does the characterization. Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Byung-hun, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Martin Sensmeier are each introduced through a demonstration instead of a biography. Haley Bennett plays the widow who hires them and drives the recruitment.
Hawke’s Goodnight Robicheaux is the film’s most interesting element. He’s a celebrated marksman who can no longer bring himself to fire, the film treats it as a real condition instead of cowardice, and his return is earned. Fuqua had worked with Washington on Training Day and The Equalizer.
Peter Sarsgaard’s Bogue is thinner than the structure needs. He’s a mining industrialist with no argument for himself, and the original’s Calvera had a better speech about sheep than anything this version gives its antagonist. It took over one hundred and sixty million dollars worldwide.
I enjoyed every stage of this one, and somebody deserves credit for still believing a big western could work in 2016. Bogue is what keeps it at an eight for me. A villain with no argument turns the last act into target practice, and Calvera’s speech about sheep in the original gave me more to think about than Sarsgaard gets in the whole picture.
James Horner scored it and died before completing the work, having written it without a contract as a gift to Fuqua. Simon Franglen finished it, and the Bernstein theme arrives over the closing credits instead of in the film. Mauro Fiore shot it in Louisiana and Arizona.
Man on Fire spends an hour on swimming lessons and The Foreigner removes every trace of Jackie Chan. Two kinds of investment in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
14. The Foreigner (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Foreigner (2017)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Jackie Chan at sixty-three playing grief instead of agility."
Martin Campbell cast Jackie Chan against everything he’d done for forty years, as a London restaurant owner whose daughter is killed by a bomb. There’s no comedy, no prop work and no charm anywhere in the performance. Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman was published in 1992 and the title was changed.
The film is really two pictures. Chan’s half is a grieving man conducting a one-man campaign in the Northern Irish countryside. Pierce Brosnan’s half is a former paramilitary turned government minister managing a political crisis, and Brosnan is excellent in it. Campbell had directed GoldenEye and Casino Royale, both Bond debuts.
Quan Ngoc Minh’s background is delivered in pieces and the film trusts the audience to assemble it. Special forces, Vietnam, two other daughters already lost, and Chan plays the role as exhaustion instead of rage. Chan produced it through his own company and took a major pay cut.
The action is deliberately unglamorous. He’s sixty-three in the film and it shows on purpose. He hides, he sets traps, he’s hurt badly and slowly, and Campbell never lets a sequence look easy for him at any point. It was shot in London and across Northern Ireland over about three months.
15. Wonder Woman (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Wonder Woman (2017)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"It is built around what its lead can do, not what she cannot."
Patty Jenkins made the first good film in the DC sequence and the reason is tonal. Gal Gadot plays Diana as sincere, curious and completely without cynicism, in a series that had spent three films establishing that sincerity was embarrassing. Allan Heinberg wrote the screenplay and Zack Snyder shares the story credit.
The No Man’s Land sequence is the best scene in any superhero film of the decade and Jenkins had to fight to keep it. She walks into machine gun fire alone because somebody asked for help, the trench behind her follows, and the film states its entire argument in about four minutes.
Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor is doing more work than the part usually gets. He’s a competent professional who’s out of his depth, he never resents her capability, and the relationship is built on him explaining a world that doesn’t make sense to either of them. Themyscira gets a first hour more interesting than the genre normally permits. The training, the argument between Hippolyta and Antiope about whether Diana should be prepared, and a mythology delivered through a painted book instead of through exposition. Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen play Antiope and Hippolyta.
The last act is the film’s weakness and it’s the genre’s weakness generally. Ares arrives, the practical fighting becomes a digital one, and a picture about whether people deserve saving resolves into two beings throwing lightning at each other. It took over eight hundred million dollars and was the first of the sequence to profit clearly.
No Man’s Land is the scene I’d hand to anybody who says superhero films can’t move a grown man. Jenkins bet on sincerity after three films of sneering at it, and she was right. Then Ares arrives, a picture about whether people deserve saving turns into two glowing figures throwing lightning, and I felt cheated. That last act is the whole reason this sits at an eight for me.
16. Ghost in the Shell (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ghost in the Shell (2017)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"Reproduces the images and not the philosophy."
Rupert Sanders made a beautiful film with a hollow center. The visual design reproduces specific shots from the 1995 anime with enormous care, and an origin story has replaced the philosophical material that gave the original its weight. Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime runs eighty-three minutes and adapts Masamune Shirow.
The casting controversy overwhelmed everything else and the film’s own script made it worse by adding a plot explanation for why a Japanese character’s brain is in a white body. The defense and the problem became the same object. It cost around one hundred and ten million dollars and lost money for Paramount.
Scarlett Johansson is well cast for the physical performance. The Major moves wrong on purpose, the thermoptic camouflage sequences are the best material in the film, and the geisha robot fight is staged with real precision. Sanders had previously made Snow White and the Huntsman. Beat Takeshi plays Aramaki and delivers every line in Japanese while everybody responds in English, the only element of the production that treats the source with any confidence. Nobody in the film remarks on it. Clint Mansell and Lorne Balfe scored it together. Pilou Asbaek plays Batou alongside him.
I enjoyed watching it, and that pleasure is where the whole eight comes from. Johansson moves exactly right and the camouflage scenes are gorgeous. The flaw is how little faith the production had in the thing it bought. It copied the pictures, threw out the question that made the anime worth copying, and then wrote the casting problem into the plot as if an explanation would make it go away.
17. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Knows what it is and commits without apology."
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley made a film from a tabletop game and solved the problem nobody had solved: the game has no story. They built one about a heist crew and let the setting be the backdrop instead of the subject. Wizards of the Coast produced alongside Paramount.
Chris Pine plays a bard who’s bad at everything except persuasion, the correct joke, and the film sustains it. He talks his way through most obstacles, he’s useless in a fight, and the party carries him constantly. Michelle Rodriguez, Rege-Jean Page and Hugh Grant complete the principal cast.
The practical effects work is the reason it looks better than its budget. Displacer beasts, an owlbear and a dragon built as animatronics with digital assistance instead of replacement, and the creatures have weight the genre had mostly stopped attempting. Lorne Balfe scored it and the film cost around one hundred and fifty million dollars.
The graveyard sequence is the best comedy set piece in any fantasy film. Five corpses, five questions each, and the film establishes the rules of the spell precisely enough that the audience can see the constraint being worked around. It underperformed in cinemas and found its audience on streaming afterward.
The film’s tone is the achievement and it’s harder than it looks. It’s funny without being embarrassed by the fantasy, sincere about the characters, and it never stops to explain a rule the audience doesn’t need to follow what’s happening. Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis complete the party.
Game adaptations have earned my suspicion, and this one got right past it.
The graveyard scene delighted me, and I’m happy to see a fantasy film that isn’t ashamed of its owlbears. My knock is the stakes. It plays things so safe that I never once worried anybody in the party would pay a real price.
Honor Among Thieves states the limits of a spell and builds its best scene out of working around them. Give magic rules, using the World Builder’s Handbook.
18. Havoc (2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of Havoc (2025)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.0/10
"Gareth Evans in a studio, and the choreography survived the transition."
Gareth Evans made his first American film and the production was delayed for years by the pandemic and by reshoots. It arrived on Netflix in 2025 to a reception that was warmer among people who knew The Raid than among anybody else. Forest Whitaker, Timothy Olyphant and Jessie Mei Li fill out the cast.
The nightclub sequence is the reason to watch it. Evans stages a three-way firefight in a confined space with sustained camera movement, and the choreography is the closest anything has come to his Indonesian work in a Western production. Evans had made The Raid, The Raid 2 and Apostle before this.
Tom Hardy plays a corrupt detective in a way that’s closer to mumbling than to acting for long stretches, a deliberate choice the film never justifies. He’s exhausted, compromised and mostly incomprehensible. It was shot in Wales standing in for an unnamed American city.
The plot is standard and the film knows it. A dead son, a stolen shipment, a mayoral campaign and a triad enforcer, assembled from parts the genre has used for decades. Nothing in the structure is doing anything the action doesn’t need it to.
19. Battleship (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Battleship (2012)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"A board game with no story, and the one sequence that plays the game works."
Peter Berg made a two-hundred-and-nine-million-dollar film from a board game with no characters, no setting and no story, a harder adaptation problem than it sounds and one nobody asked to have solved. Jon and Erich Hoeber wrote it and Hasbro produced alongside Universal. Hasbro had pushed the property since Transformers.
The grid sequence is the film’s one moment of real invention. Tsunami buoys are used to generate a coordinate grid so the crew can fire blind at positions they can’t see, and for about six minutes the picture is playing the game it’s named after. The USS Missouri sequence is better than the film deserves. Surviving veterans in their eighties crew a museum battleship and take it out under steam, and the veterans on screen are real instead of performers. Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard and Liam Neeson lead the cast.
Everything else is Transformers with ships. The aliens are armored and shaped for toy manufacture, the human material is thin, and Rihanna is given dialogue nobody could have delivered. The film lost a heavy amount of money. Berg had made Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom before it.
I gave this an eight and I know how that sounds next to the rest of this entry. The Missouri did it.
Real veterans taking an old battleship out under steam moved me more than any board game movie had a right to, and the grid scene is the one stretch where the film seems to be having as much fun as I was. The rest is noise, and Rihanna deserved lines a person could say.
20. The Dogs of War (1980) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Dogs of War (1980)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"Far more interested in procurement than in combat."
John Irvin adapted Frederick Forsyth and Christopher Walken plays a mercenary hired to overthrow an African government for a mining concession. The film’s interest is almost entirely procedural and that’s its strength. Forsyth published the novel in 1974 after reporting from Biafra during the civil war.
The best half is the preparation. Reconnaissance under a false identity, arms purchased through a Spanish broker, a ship chartered, end-user certificates forged, and the film treats all of it as the logistics problem it is. Gary DeVore and George Malko wrote the screenplay.
Walken plays Shannon as somebody with no politics and no curiosity about the politics of anybody else. He’s a contractor, the job is a job, and the film declines to give him a conversion or a conscience until the last two minutes. Tom Berenger and Colin Blakely appear alongside Walken in the mercenary team.
The assault is short and ugly. That’s correct. Forsyth’s point was never the battle. The coup takes minutes, the mercenaries win easily, and the film’s last decision is Shannon installing a leader his employers didn’t want. Much of it was shot in Belize standing in for the fictional Zangaro.
Paperwork as suspense is a pleasure I don’t get often enough, and Forsyth knew exactly where the work of a coup sits. My reservation is Shannon. Walken plays him so empty for so long that the conscience in the last two minutes feels bolted on, and I end up respecting this film more than I enjoy it.
Honorable Mentions: Action Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
A Touch of Zen (1971)
King Hu spent three years on a three-hour wuxia film that turns into something closer to a religious parable in its last act. The bamboo grove sequence is where the entire visual grammar of the genre was invented.
The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)
Chang Cheh made the first Hong Kong film to take a million dollars and built it on a hero who has to relearn his craft after a maiming. The broken-blade manual is the device every later wuxia picture borrowed.
Five Deadly Venoms (1978)
Five masters of different animal styles and a student who doesn’t know which of them can be trusted. The structure is a mystery instead of a tournament, and almost no martial arts film had attempted that.
The Prodigal Son (1981)
Sammo Hung directed a Wing Chun film where the protagonist discovers his father bought his entire reputation by paying opponents to lose. Yuen Biao is extraordinary and the opera troupe sequences are the best in the form.
The Bride with White Hair (1993)
Ronny Yu made a wuxia romance with conjoined twin antagonists and a color scheme closer to opera than to cinema. It’s strange and the tone holds for the full running time.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Ang Lee won four Academy Awards with a wuxia film built on restraint and unspoken obligation. The bamboo forest sequence is the image everybody kept and the teahouse fight is the better piece of choreography.
House of Flying Daggers (2004)
Zhang Yimou built a film around color, with a bamboo ambush, an echo game in a drum hall and a final duel that runs through four seasons in a single location. The plot is thin and the images aren’t.
The Assassin (2015)
Hou Hsiao-hsien made a wuxia film where the fights last seconds and the scenes between them last minutes. It divides audiences completely and the Cannes directing prize suggests which side the jury took.
Red Cliff (2008)
John Woo returned to China for a two-part historical epic running close to five hours in the original cut. The tortoise formation sequence is the largest thing he ever staged and almost all of it is practical.
Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)
Christophe Gans combined an eighteenth century French mystery with Hong Kong choreography and a Native American tracker. It shouldn’t work. It was the highest-grossing French-language film in America for years.
Fist of Legend (1994)
Jet Li remade Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury with Yuen Woo-ping choreographing, and the blindfolded duel at the end is frequently cited as the best hand-to-hand sequence ever put on film.
Come Drink With Me (1966)
King Hu gave Cheng Pei-pei the lead in a Shaw Brothers film that established the template for every wuxia picture afterward. The inn sequence is the origin of a scene the genre has restaged for sixty years.
Dishonorable Mentions: Action Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the budget, the cast or the premise and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Terminator Genisys (2015)
A film that rewrites the first two pictures inside its own opening and then spoils its central reveal in the trailer. The timeline requires a chart and the chart doesn’t resolve.
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
Cameron returned as producer and the film opens by killing the character two films were spent saving, a defensible choice that removes any reason to have watched them. It lost around one hundred million dollars.
Alien vs. Predator (2004)
Two R-rated franchises combined into a PG-13 film set under Antarctica, with a pyramid that rearranges itself every ten minutes so the characters can be separated on schedule.
Jumper (2008)
A premise about instantaneous travel anywhere on earth, attached to a protagonist who uses it to rob banks and sit on the Sphinx. The antagonists are introduced fully formed with no explanation of the conflict.
Priest (2011)
A post-apocalyptic theocracy, vampire hives and a train, converted to 3D after shooting and released into an indifferent market. The world is more interesting than anything the plot does inside it.
Season of the Witch (2011)
Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman transport an accused witch across plague-era Europe, a good setup resolved by a demon and a digital wolf pack. The ambiguity is dropped at the midpoint.
What Do You Think?
Two remakes in this tier justify their existence and two don’t. Yuma and the 2016 Magnificent Seven kept the structure, and Total Recall and Ghost in the Shell kept the images and dropped the thing people cared about in the originals. That’s worse than an honest failure, because keeping the look and tossing the idea is a decision somebody made on purpose. Tell me whether that’s the whole difference.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Mediocre |
Part 10: The Poor |
Part 11: The Failures
