Close Range (2015)

Close Range (2015) Aka: Dust Up

Starring: Scott Adkins, Nick Chinlund, Caitlin Keats, Madison Lawlor, Tony Perez, Jake La Botz, Anthony L. Fernandez, Randy Hall, Scott Evans, Jeremy Marinas, Ray Diaz, Jimmy Chhiu, Bryan Cartago

Director: Isaac Florentine

Action Director(s): Jeremy Marinas, David Wald

Close Range was Isaac Florentine’s next film after the well-received Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, which also starred Scott Adkins. I’m pretty sure that the hopes were high for another classic martial arts opus from these two geniuses on either side of the camera. Although Florentine brings his eye for action to this film, giving it a unique “modern Western” feel, people expecting another Ninja or Undisputed sequel will be disappointed. But don’t let that stop from enjoying this short-but-sweet action thriller.

The film opens in Hermosillo, Mexico—where my paternal grandmother’s mother hailed from—at a building that houses members of the infamous Garcia Cartel. A white guy, later identified as Colton MacReady (Scott Adkins, of Undisputed II and Triple Threat), enters the building and goes through the metal detector without a problem. Once in the elevator, he slips a small knife from behind his belt buckle and stabs the two men in the elevator to death. Once on their floor, the proceeds to slice everybody on that floor to pieces as he searches for a kidnapped girl. That would be Hailey Reynolds (Madison Lawlor, of Rise of the Valkyrie and The Axe Murders of Villisca), MacReady’s niece. He rescues Hailey and kills the cartel bigwig, Victor (Ray Diaz), who had her holed up. He pockets the key to Hailey’s handcuffs, not noticing (or maybe he does) the flash memory stick hanging from the same keychain. The two then make a break for it back to Arizona.

Obviously, the head of the Cartel chief, Fernando Garcia (Latin Dragon’s Tony Perez), is not very happy about this. First of all, Victor was his nephew. Even more important (to Garcia), is that the flash memory has all of the details to his operation on it. Losing it would be bad enough. If it fell into the hands of the DEA, then the results might be outright catastrophic. Garcia calls in a favor to Sheriff Jasper Calloway, who represents the law in the county where Hailey lives with her mother, Angela (Caitlin Keates, who had a small role in Kill Bill Vol. 2), and her asshole stepfather, Walt (Jake La Botz, Rambo and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). 

Long story short: Walt is a mule for the Garcia cartel. On one transport, he decided to keep a kilo for himself. Bad move. Victor and his men kidnaped Hailey and held her hostage. Although Walt returned the coke, Vic had took a liking to the girl and kept her longer—probably hoping that she would succumb to Stockholm Syndrome at some point. A desperate Angela contacted her brother, Colton, now a military fugitive, to help her. And now we got this mess, which is a handful of cadavers and a missing McGuffin. 

Fernando asks the Sheriff and find Colton and keep him around until Fernando and his “soldiers” can come and handle him (and get the McGuffin back). Although Jasper is on the take and thus indebted to Garcia, he knows MacReady from the ol’ days and knows that the man is really the wrong dude to screw with. It doesn’t take long before the film becomes Rio Bravo-with-martial-arts.

Scott Adkins feels like he’s in cruise control in this, with limited dialog and emotional range. His Colton MacReady is an ex-military badass, but the film mainly requires him to be angry or in active ass-kicker mode. Nick Chinlund, who looks like a discount Fred Ward, fares better in the acting department. Madison Lawlor mainly looks scared and afraid. Caitlin Keates gets to jump back and forth between “worried mother” and “mother who will protect her family at all costs.”

The bad guys are Mexican Cartel types. They run around shooting AK-47s and look intimidating. A few of them even know martial arts. Showing more range than them is Jake La Botz (looking like a discount Robert Patrick circa 1999) as the jerk-off stepdad, who is the cause of all this confusion: if he hadn’t tried to steal the flour, none of this would have happened. And man, that dude will throw anyone under the bus if it means saving his own skin.

Casual action fans will probably enjoy this a lot, although fighting afficionados may place this a bit closer to “above average.” A lot of the action is gunplay, some of it standard and some of it stylish. We do get some nice bloody bullet wounds and squibs, including a nasty head wound from one of the main characters. The gunplay is very much standard “stand-off” shooting until it’s time for someone to die.

The fight scenes were staged by Jeremy Marinas, who plays Cruz, the cousin of Victor (the cartel lieutenant who gets offed in the first scene). Marinas actually has a strong résumé as a fight choreographer, which includes The Beekeeper; John Wick 4; Silent Night; and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. He honestly does a good job and should get more recognition among fight choreographers than just the aging Hong Kong guard, Kenji Tanigaki, and Tim Man.  The fights are a nice mix of complex knife fighting, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and Adkins’s trademark kicking skills.

The showstopper fight—Scott Adkins versus Marinas himself—represents the film’s greatest strength and weakness. The fight occurs at about the halfway point of the film and is a nice exchange of punches, kicks, arm locks, throws, ground fighting…the whole she-bang-a-bang. The choreography and rhythm are perfect and stands up to anything made in Hong Kong at the time. As expected from an expert like Florentine, the camera work and editing complement the fighting and never detract from it.

The problem is that this is the best fight in the film. There is a brief two-on-one at the end between Adkins and two cartel enforcers: Zavala (Jimmy Chhiu, who choreographed the Shazam! sequel and the Rebel Moon films) and Montez (Bryan Cartago, who has been a stuntman on lots of Hollywood films). The fight looks good, and ends on a particularly brutal note, but it is very short and never feels like Adkins will lose. It would have been better for the fight with Marinas to have been the last one, as it is the best fight, the hardest fight, and the most emotionally-significant fight, given that the Cruz character is fighting for revenge. Both Cruz and Victor were apparently high up on the cartel hierarchy, so it would have made more sense for him to be the final boss, fight-wise. Zavala and Montez looking intimidating, but Cruz as the main baddie would have carried more weight. This misjudgment of fight placement makes this “good,” maybe “very good,” but not “excellent,” much less “a classic.”

The Assassin (2015)

The Assassin (2015)
Chinese Title: 聶隱娘
Translation: Nie Yinniang

Starring: Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Zhou Yun, Nikki Hsieh Hsin-Ying, Sheu Fang-Yi, Ethan Juan Ching-Tien, Komuro Tetsuya, Xu Fan, Zuo Xiaoqing, Tsumabuki Satoshi
Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Action Director: Liu Mingzhe

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is one of the biggest names in Taiwanese cinema...or was one of the biggest names. I suppose his legacy still stands, but he recently retired due to Alzheimer's Disease (not unlike Bruce Willis and dementia). That said, he, along with Edward Yang, was one of the main figures associated with the Taiwanese New Wave movement. He was not extremely prolific, but was probably moreso than, say, Wong Kar-Wai, Hong Kong's premier arthouse director. He was quite active in the 1980s, but by the 90s, was averaging a movie every 2-3 years. The Assassin ended up being his final film before retirement.

The film is based on an old martial arts tale--8th century to be exact--by Pei Xing. During the latter days of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907 A.D.), there is your usual civil unrest, with some of the outer provinces distancing themselves evermore further from the Court. One of said provinces is Weibo (comprised of what today are the Hanban and Hebei states), which is currently ruled by Tian Jian (r. 796-812 -- yes, a real-life person, played by Chang Chen of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and The Grand Master). Tian Jian is the son of the previous Lord, or Military Governor, Tian Xu. Tian Jian was the son of a concubine, but was raised by Xu's main wife, a princess from the court. We never meet Tian Jian's parents, but they are nonetheless integral to the story.

Our story revolves around Nie Jinniang (Shu Qi, of Shanghai Fortress and The Transporter), the daughter of Commander Nie Feng (Ni Dahong, of Curse of the Golden Flower and A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop). Nie Feng is Tian Jian's uncle, which makes Jinniang the governor's cousin and, at some point, his betrothed. That stopped being a thing after a series of incidents that resulted in Jinniang being whisked away by a Taoist nun (Sheu Fangyi) for a "private education." What that ultimately meant was that Jinniang was going to be trained in the martial arts for the purpose of being an assassin for the Court. After a few "test" missions--including one she fails on account of not wanting to take a life in front of a child--Jinniang is given the mission to assassinate Tian Jian.

Jinniang returns home under the pretext of having completed her studies, and she is well received by her mother, grandmother, and even Tian Jian's wife (Zhou Yun, of Bodyguards and Assassins and Warriors of Heaven and Earth). It does not take long for Jinniang to reveal herself as an assassin, although one has to wonder if she really is cut out for this sort of work. The answer is "ultimately" no. The Assassin is a 108-minute film about an assassin who is given a job, decides not to do it, and then decides that she wants to do something else instead.

There are other things going on in the film, such as strife between Tian Jian's wife and Huji, his favorite concubine (Nikki Hsieh, of Tai Chi 0 and Tai Chi Hero). Tian Jian has problems with his own brother over what course of action to take regarding the neighboring provinces that would ingratiate (or not) the Court. There appears to be some sort of plot by the Court to kill different members of Tian family. That results in a prolonged sequence where Jinniang takes a break from her mission to protect the caravan taking a member of the Tian family to a new post from assassins.

The Assassin is definitely a minimalist film. The main plot is minimal. The dialog is minimal--Shu Qi only has a few lines in the entire movie. The action sequences are few. Exposition comes in fits and spurts from the characters, although nothing is explained quite enough to give us all the historical context we need, or the character background we're curious about. There is a lot we the viewer are expected to the meet the filmmakers halfway on.

So, why watch this? Mainly because of the visuals. The entire film is like a series of Romantic landscape paintings. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Mark Lee (Director of Photography -- Tiger Cage II; Wing Chun; Millenium Mambo), and Yao Hung-I (Cinematographer - Reflections and Hometown Boy) transform the film into this great palate of beautiful Chinese landscapes, much like you would see in a museum. Almost every scene could be freeze-framed and transformed into a Romantic painting, like Albert Bierstadt's "Yosemite Valley" series of paintings, or the works of Henri-Joseph Harpignies and Giuseppe De Nittis. Like paintings where the humans are dwarfed by the grandiosity of the nature. Even one of the fight scenes is filmed like that. The more intimate scenes between the characters are filmed in a way that, if paused, could make an excellent subject for a 19th-century Orientalist painting. To sum it up: The Assassin works as a moving gallery of Romantic-era paintings.

What it does not work as, however, is as a film for action and fight choreography aficionados. There are five or six fight sequences, each of which lasting anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds, give or take a couple of seconds. The action director is Liu Mingzhe, whose work as Assistant Martial Arts Director on films like Reign of Assassins and A Battle of Wits suggest that he was a protégé of sorts with Stephen Tung Wai. The fight sequences are portrayed the way most authors--excepting Scott Blasingame--would write them in prose: just a few moves and then back to the narrative. Where Mr. Blasingame will take a 10-minute fight scene from an imaginary film and convert the entire thing into prose, the fights here are like the ones described in Matthew Boroson's The Girl With Ghost Eyes.

The Assassin is not a film for everyone, but it is not a bad film. It makes for a fascinating comparison with Zhang Yimou's wuxia films, what with their Expressionistic use of color symbolism and Rococo levels of opulence. Contrast with the more Romantic ideals of art that Hou Hsiao-Hsien uses in his visuals here. Both filmmakers can be accused of being too pretentious, although action fans will definitely get more out of Zhang Yimou's works than The Assassin. But fans of general cinema should make an effort to watch this film, in any case.

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (2015)

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe (2015)
Chinese Title: 九層妖塔
Translation: Nine-Story Demon Tower

Starring: Mark Chao, Yao Chen, Jin Chen, Li Feng, Tiffany Tang, Rhydian Vaughan, Wu Jun
Director: Lu Chuan
Action Director: Chen Jia-Fu

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is one of those movies where the DVD box cover (and promotional poster) is a lot more exciting than the actual film. You have a cover with a bunch of attractive young people holding AK-47’s, plus a bald guy (that reminds me of a young Gai Chun Hwa) armed with a sword, with a kaiju-sized dragon looming over them in the background. Now *that* looks like an appealing fantasy adventure film. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what we get in the end.

The movie begins with a montage of important archaeological discoveries in China, including the discovery of a tomb in which the body inside is magically preserved, even after thousands of years. That particular find becomes the impetus for the creation of Bureau 749, the sort of outfit that Hellboy or Abe Sapien might work for. You know, when things go bump in the Mainland, they bump back? Their current investigation is in the Kunlun mountains, where soldiers are helping the scientists to excavate a cave in one of the mountains. This scene is particularly bizarre in an “only in the PRC” way, where we see young, attractive nurses singing patriotic songs to exhausted laborers in an attempt to keep them working. All that is interrupted by an “explosion” that takes several lives.

In the wake of the disaster, a team of volunteers is put together to investigate the cause of the disaster. Among the volunteers are our hero, Hu Bayi (Mark Chao, Young Detective Dee); Yang Ping, a young nurse (Yao Chen, Journey to the West: Demon Chapter); Yang Lin (Wang Qing Xiang, The Grandmaster and Red Cliff), the head scientist of Bureau 749; and Hu Bayi’s commanding officer (Hu Jun, of The Warring States). They head back into the cavern where the explosion had occurred and discover a new shaft, which leads to a great abyss. Carved into the walls of the abyss above them are statues of various gods, which makes for some neat imagery. Descending into the abyss, our heroes find an ice cavern, which leads to another exit from the mountain, into a snowy valley within the range.

The team come across the footprints of Something Humongous, but before they can find out what it is, they are beset by a horde of “fire bats,” which cause whomever they touch to become engulfed in blue flames until they are reduced to ashes. The Something Humongous turns out to be a dragon, which causes an avalanche to kill several more volunteers. Our heroes, while fleeing the avalanche, jump into another ice cavern, where the rest of the Expendable Meat die. By the end, the only survivors are the ones I mentioned by name.

They find a huge pagoda inside another cave, which Yang Lin identifies as the Demon Pagoda. In addition to housing some sort of demon, it also holds the secrets to the mythical “Ghostly Tribe,” the remnants of an alien race that once ruled the Earth before being defeated by Prince Yi thousands of years ago. Only a descendant of Prince Yi can enter the Pagoda, and lo and behold! Hu Bayi just happens to be a descendant. As they are opening the Pagoda, Hu’s commanding officer interrupts them, leading to a series of disasters that result in the officer’s death, the disappearance of the Yang family, and Hu almost getting burned to death. And this marks the end of the first act.

The second act is set three years later, where Hu Bayi has been released by duty. We learn that Bureau 749 is trying to recruit him (presumably), he ends up in the hands of Mr. Wang (Jerry Li Chen, of Saving General Yang and Aftershock). Mr. Wang manages a very special public library which, according to him, is full of the rarest manuscripts and tomes in China. Hu starts receiving correspondence in the form of books and articles by the late(?) Dr. Yang, where he learns about the Ghostly Tribe. Three years after that, we learn that Mr. Wang is the Guardian of the Tomb (of Prince Yi) and that Hu was infected with the essence of the Ghostly Tribe after he almost got incinerated by the fire bats. The Ghostly Tribe need him to open the Pagoda, and if that means sending demon-troll-werewolves into Xinjiang to ferret him out, that's what they'll do. Oh, and Yang Ping is back, now looking like a low-rent Shu Qi.

Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is a generally unsatisfying adventure film in the vein of Indiana Jones, mixing fantasy and science fiction (probably because overt supernatural elements would be censored by Mainland officials). There is too much going on and the backstory of the titular Ghostly Tribe is a bit too convoluted to really make sense or become compelling. The love story between Hu Bayi and Yang Ping is a little more effective, but Hu spends much of the movie being ineffectual and only becomes more proactive in the final third.

Moreover, much of cast isn’t onscreen enough for us to care about them. Almost everybody we meet, even briefly, in the first act is dead by the end of the first half hour. And then we meet a *new* expedition team in the last act, but we also don’t spend enough time with them to really care about their plight, so the script is basically telling us to care “because these people are young and attractive,” and that’s obviously not enough. Compounding that is the fact that several important characters, as in those who provide us with most of the exposition during the second act, disappear once the final expedition is under way, which constitutes bad writing by any metric. Having a second info dump after the climax drags out the denouement more than it should, too.

The technical side of the film is hit-or-miss. There is *a lot* of mediocre 90s-level CGI on display, as is wont to happen in these big budget Mainland films. We have avalanches and sandstorms—I half expected Arnold Vosloo’s face to appear in the sand during the latter sequence.  There are lots of floating objects that might’ve looked interesting in 3D, put just look fake and cheesy in regular HD. There is some beautiful photography--you cannot go wrong with Chinese mountain ranges and deserts. I also liked the sense of wonder and whimsy when the characters are exploring the caves in the first act. Too many "adventure" films have become excuses for big action set-pieces, but slack off in the adventure department.

The monsters fare the best. We have the aforementioned dragon that shows up in the first act, and then the final act is a running battle through a devastated town between our heroes and an army of giant werewolves. Those creatures looks a lot better onscreen than some of the other digital effects, so I’ll give them that. Too bad the script fails to explain what they actually are supposed to be in relation to the Ghostly Tribe. Some characters refer to them as demons, so I think they are the original creatures that came to Earth, some of which assumed human form, intermarried with our species, and became the Ghostly Tribe. But I'm not sure. They look pretty cool on screen, though.

The film has a credited “martial arts director”, Chen Jia-Fu, whose other major credit is Ameera, a horrid post-modern take on the Girls n’ Guns genre. But back to this movie: there are no actual martial arts to speak of. Even when shadow demons invade the royal library where Hu is working in the second act, and Hu’s boss pulls out a traditional sword, we don’t actually see any martial arts. Boring! The climax consists mainly of people fighting werewolf-troll monsters with assault rifles and RPGs, which is fun…but where’s the actual martial arts, people?

A follow-up to this movie, Bureau 748, was supposed to be released in China in 2019. Then it got pushed back to 2022, which is the current year at its HKMDB entry. Douban states that it's slated for release in 2026, but another article I read states that production finished this year (2024). Sadly, the plot synopsis I read suggests that this story will not be continued, instead focusing on the exploits of the bureau in the near-future. This saddens me, as Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe ends with a major plot thread—the disappearance of Dr. Yang Lin—unresolved, despite that being the reason for the entire third act in the first place! It also leaves the fate of Yang Ping ambiguous, which is also rather infuriating—she had a major role in the first and last acts, but we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen to her, if anything at all.

As it stands, Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe is mainly a big disappointment. The script needed a few edits, the CGI needed to be more consistent, and we needed some actual wushu on display. If you want a Chinese version of Indiana Jones, stick with the Operation Condor, some of those early Wisely movies, and Dr. Wei and the Scripture with No Words. This one tries, but doesn't quite make it.