Eliminators (2016)

Eliminators (2016)

 

Starring: Scott Adkins, Stu Bennett, Daniel Caltagirone, James Cosmo, Ty Glaser, Olivia Mace, Stephen Marcus, Nick Nevern, Lily Ann Stubbs
Director: James Nunn
Action Director: Tim Man

 

The year 2016 was an especially busy year for Scott Adkins, him having no fewer than eight movie roles that particular year. The biggest movie he showed up in was as one of Mads Mikkelson’s goons in the MCU blockbuster Doctor Strange, while he had smaller roles in movies like Criminal (with Kevin Costner and Ryan Reynolds) and The Brothers Grimsby (with Sacha Baron Cohen). He had non-fighting roles in the suspense-thriller Home Invasion and the 13 Hours knock-off Jarhead 3: The Siege. Only three of those movies really gave Adkins a chance to show off his martial arts skills, being Hard Target 2; Boyka: Undisputed; and this one.

Adkins plays Martin Parker, a mild-mannered widower who’s raising his eight-year-old daughter, Carly (Lily Ann Stubbs), while making a living as a security guard somewhere in London. One day, a trio of hooligans break into his house looking for a stash of cocaine, beating Martin silly with aluminum baseball bats. The joke’s on them: they got the wrong address. However, as Martin has seen the ringleader’s face, they decide to off him anyway. Martin switches into (heh) Eliminator-mode and dispatches all three of the ruffians with killer efficiency, after which he passes out from blood loss.

Parker wakes up in a hospital, handcuffed to his hospital bed because he’s now being accused of murder. Apparently, British laws involving self-defense, trespassing and Stand Your Ground are either nonexistent or they have some crappy police officers working there. Martin is declared a public menace, his daughter is handed over to Social Services, and his face is plastered all over the news.

Before you can say History of Violence, two groups of people go into action. On one hand, some government agency in the United States—for whom Martin has apparently worked—gets word and sends one of their number, Ray (Daniel Caltagirone, of Outpost: Black Sun and Time Machine: Rise of the Morlocks), to help get Martin—whose real name is Thomas—out of trouble. On the other hand, an arms dealer named Cooper (James Cosmo, of Highlander and Braveheart) also finds out and sends Europe’s greatest hitman, Bishop (professional wrestler Stu Bennett, credited as his wrestling moniker “Wade Barrett”), to ice Thomas. And thus begins the race against time for Mart…er…Thomas to rescue his daughter and find safety at the American embassy before Bishop gets to both of them.

Eliminators is a solid little action-thriller directed by James Nunn. Nunn had previously worked with Adkins on Green Street 3: Hooligans and would team-up with Adkins a few laters for One Shot. Nunn also worked with WWE studios, who produced this, on the fifth (!) and sixth (!!) entries in the Marine franchise, which is one movie that I never thought would birth so many sequels—see The Scorpion King for another film starring a professional wrestler that bore more sequels than anybody thought necessary. Nunn keeps the pace moving after the initial ten-minute introduction of our father-daughter pair, making sure that there is as much suspense as there is violent action. Despite having four parties of characters doing something at any given moment, Nunn wisely keeps the focus on the Adkins-Bennett cat-and-mouse chase and avoids any unnecessary convolutions in the plot.

While not a flaw per se, one of the strangest decisions that this movie makes is to cast Englishman Scott Adkins as an American…albeit one living in London. His American accent is passable, I guess. But with so many other movies in which he plays a British expat in the States, you’d think the filmmakers would just embrace the British setting and make him English. Whatever.

The action duties are once more handed over to Tim Man, making this his third collaboration with Scott Adkins (of ten overall) in the past decade. In my opinion, the best choreography comes early on when Thomas is escaping from the hospital and has to face two policemen armed with batons. There is some nice two-on-one choreography as Adkins has to fend off their simultaneous attacks until he can steal one of their weapons and unleash the hatred with the baton. It’s a quick scene, but it has a nice Jackie Chan-esque one-on-many vibe to it. There are a couple of quick fights that feel a bit more influenced by brawling and MMA.

In the final act, Adkins has two separate bouts with Stu Bennett. Bennett towers over Adkins and his wrestler body makes him an intimidating opponent, Adkins’s own musculature notwithstanding. Both fights are a mixture of Adkins’s trademark bootwork and ground fighting, mixing jiu-jitsu with professional wrestling throws and slams. Bennett is practically a man-mountain and repeatedly goes all Zangief on our hero, even throwing in a nice drop kick at one point. Adkins does his Donnie Yen-influenced jumping double-side kick in the second fight, while ending the first fight with a nice backflip-turned-drop kick as well. This is the best work that Adkins has done, but it’s done well and we always welcome a David-vs-Goliath martial arts fight, which this movie comes close to giving us.

This review is part of our "September of Scott" at It's a Beautiful Film Worth Fighting For.

Two Scott Adkins Films Directed by Ernie Barbarash

Assassination Games (2011)
Aka: Weapon

 

Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Adkins, Ivan Kaye, Valentin Teodosiu, Alin Panc, Kevin Chapman, Serban Celea, Michael Higgs, Kris Van Varenberg, Marija Karan, Bianca Brigitte Van Varenberg
Director: Ernie Barbarash
Action Director: Stanimir Stamatov

 

A lot of fans of both Van Damme and Scott Adkins were disappointed with the results of their first face-off, Isaac Florentine’s The Shepherd: Border Patrol. The announcement of a second team-up, Assassination Games, gave fans hope that the film would rise above what they thought was the mediocrity of a film made by people who could surely do better. The director was to be Ernie Barbarash, best known for his work on the cult favorite Cube series—he wrote and produced Cube²: Hypercube and took on all three duties (writing, producing and directing) for Cube Zero. At the very least, fans could expect an exceptionally violent action thriller.

JCVD plays Vincent Brazil, a professional hitman based in Bucharest, Romania. He lives alone in a luxurious apartment hidden inside a shabby project, spending his free time playing the violin and keeping his pad as neat and tidy as possible. In fact, he’s such a neat freak that it becomes comical at times.

Scott Adkins plays Roland Flint, a retired hitman who was in the employ of Interpol? It is always interesting when movies in general portray Interpol as a law enforcement agency, when they mainly an crime intelligence agency who leave the work of actually arresting people to the local authorities; they mainly just gather and share information. Well, this movie actually understands that and points out that Interpol has been hiring assassins to wipe out criminals in places where the police are too corrupt to actually do anything. In any case, Flint lives in the Ukraine, where he takes care of his catatonic wife, Anna (JCVD’s daughter, Bianca).

The new Interpol chief, Wilson Herrod (Serban Celea, of Dragonheart 3 and Anaconda 3), is facing allegations of corruption and wants to eliminate any evidence of Interpol’s dabbling in for-hire killings. The two men behind the contracts, Godfrey (Avengement’s Michael Higgs) and Schell (JCVD’s own son, Kris), decide that Flint needs to be eliminated. To that end, they arrange for Romanian crime lord Polo Yakur (Ivan Keye, of “The Vikings”) to be released from prison. Polo and his men are the men who raped and beat Bianca and left her the way she is. That is enough to get Flint riled up and back in the game.

Both Roland and Vincent are given the same assignment to kill Polo, unbeknownst to the other. Both try to kill their target at the same time, but end up getting in each other’s way. The only person dead by the time the smoke clears is Polo’s brother. So now Polo wants revenge on his would-be assassins, and those two will not only have to contend with the corrupt Interpol agents, but with each other, too.

Despite the set-up, there is not a whole lot of action in Assassination Games. There are a few outbursts of violence and brutality, and even a bit of rape and torture, but this is mainly a story driven film. There is a sub-plot involving Vincent and a prostitute (The Rite’s Marija Karan) who lives in the next apartment over, through which the former gains much of his lost humanity. The film is constantly jumping back and forth between the four groups of characters as they try to out-manoeuver each other, although we know that Vincent and Roland will ultimately join forces. As good as Barbarash and his team make the film look, I do think his approach to the material (i.e. downplaying the action) is ultimately disappointing.

The action is brought to you by Stanimir Stamatov, a veteran stuntman who has also doubled for Van Damme on several occasions. Stamatov has some experience in the fight choreography and action direction department, including on the 2011 Conan remake and the more recent fem-empowerment action film The Princess. Sadly, he doesn’t have much opportunity to show off his talents. The highlight is a brief scuffle between Scott Adkins and Van Damme, which happens about halfway into the movie. Adkins shows off some of his bootwork, but not much. The climax is rushed and ultimately a disappointment—we want to see our heroes fight, not kill everybody with a remote-controlled machine gun. As I said, the film looks good and is generally well acted, but falls below the action potential of its stars.

 

  

Abduction (2019)
Aka: Twilight Zodiac

 

Starring: Scott Adkins, Andy On, Truong Ngoc Anh, Lily Ji, Aki Aleong, Daniel Whyte, Mike Leeder, Brahim Chab, Paul W. He, Philippe Joly
Director: Ernie Barbarash
Action Director: Tim Man

 

Oh, another Scott Adkins film directed by Ernie Barbarash. Assassination Games looked good, but was underwhelming. Barbarash had better luck with Adkins’s contemporary, Michael Jai White, on Falcon Rising, which a lot of martial arts fans says is one of White’s best movies. He also did a good job with Van Damme’s Six Bullets, which I’ve reviewed here. But…Abduction is a science fiction film produced by Roger Corman…so is the result closer to Cube? Or Black Mask 2?

The film opens in a strange chamber where a bunch of lifeless bodies are being dumped. A hulking man (Mike Leeder) is going from body to body, removing a spider-like robot from the back of the corpses’ necks. One of the dead bodies isn’t quite dead. That would be Quinn, played by Scott Adkins. Quinn slips away from Hulking Man and makes his way through the place to another chamber, where a bunch of people are being kept in cages with strange collars around their necks. Quinn recognizes one of the people as Lucy, his daughter. Before he can free her, a hooded figure appears and sends a bunch of mind-controlled fighters to stop him. Quinn dispatches his opponents, but is knocked out of the building, which is actually a castle in another dimension!

Quinn mysteriously emerges from a fountain in modern-day Saigon, where he wanders around with amnesia before he is ultimately arrested and placed in a psychiatric hospital. He is placed under the responsibility of Dr. Anna (Truong Ngoc Anh, of Rise and Tracer). She ultimately discovers that Quinn, for all his youth, had been around in the mid-80s when he claimed his daughter was kidnapped by aliens. So, why does he look so young?

While this is going on, a former Chinese soldier-turned-hitman named Conner (Andy On, of Invisible Target and Bad Blood) is dealing with a disappearance of his own. His wife, Maya (Lily Ji, of Skiptrace and Pacific Rim: Uprising), has disappeared. Does it have anything to do with the local Eurotrash mobsters whom he murdered? Or do his employers, Dao (Aki Aleong, of The Quest) and Sonny (Paul W. He, of Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), know something that Conner doesn’t?

Abduction is indeed a strange duck. It gives us interdimensional aliens who, according to some characters, are responsible for introducing Taoist iconography (like the bagua, or the Eight Trigram) to the Chinese. They also drain people’s qi for their own purposes, either to stay alive or to power their technology. Plus, robot spiders, hooded figures that belong in a Dark City rip-off, martial arts, the Russian mob, and giant crystalline monsters!

Despite being an American-Chinese co-production, the film doesn’t always look as good as it should. Ernie Barbarash is certainly no Alex Proyas. The CGI landscape of the castle is on the level of a SyFy original film. Some of the optical effects at the end are good, however. The main problem is that whenever the two main characters aren’t throwing punches and kicks, the film feels a bit slow, especially in the middle when Andy On is running around trying to make sense of the film’s story.

Frequent Scott Adkins collaborator Tim Man handled the action and does a great job, for the most part. The opening fight places Adkins against a bunch of fighters armed with poles and nooses. It’s a well-choreographed fight and starts off the film perfectly. Adkins also gets to beat up a pair of Vietnamese cops with nightsticks in a short, but sweet fight. After that, Adkins is more or less sidelined while Andy On picks up the slack. Andy On has certainly grown as a screen fighter since his early Black Mask 2 days (which also pit him against Scott Adkins) and he uses a lot of his grappling and groundfighting moves that he picked up in films like Unbeatable and Special ID. On has a prolonged shootout in a hotel with Russian gangsters that is the first highlight of the movie and worth the price of rental.

The real showstopper, however, is when Adkins and On throwdown near the end as we viewers hoped they would. It’s the perfect mixture of crazy footwork and MMA, with Adkins’s character being super-powered by this point. So be prepared for Adkins’s jumping back kicks and killer spin boots. Andy On matches him move for move in this sequence. It doesn’t quite reach the level of Special ID or Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, but it certainly a great showcase for On’s skills. It’s almost enough to forgive the movie for forgetting to have a proper climax…almost.

These reviews are a part of "September of Scott" at It's a Beautiful Film Worth Fighting For:

Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013)

Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013)

 

Starring: Scott Adkins, Kane Kosugi, Miki Hiiji, Shun Sugata, Markus Waldow, Tim Man, Mukesh S. Bhatt, Vithaya Pansringarm, Jawed El Berni
Director: Isaac Florentine
Action Director: Tim Man

 

Ninja: Shadow of a Tear is of those instances in which the sequel trumps the original. It is clear that Isaac Florentine and his crew actually learned from their mistakes. There is more and better action, a better final villain, beautiful SE Asian locales, a more believable plot, less horrible CGI blood, and more acting from Adkins. It is one of the top twenty (if not ten) martial arts films of the past 10 or 15 years and just gives us oodles of well-choreographed fight scenes, which is what we the viewer want.

Sometime after the events of the first film, Casey-san (a returning Adkins) has married his sweetheart Namiko (Rogue Ninja’s Miki Hijii) and has taken over her father’s dojo in Japan. To makes things even sweeter, Namiko is pregnant with their first child. Casey even has enough money to buy her nice jewelry! It’s all sunshine and smiles in the Bowman household!

One day, Casey has a violent run-in with some local hoods. Despite the random nature of the attack, Casey notices that one of them is an exceptional martial artist (most muggers can’t perform jumping triple front kicks) and is armed with a dagger with special characters engraved on the handle. Nonetheless, Casey keeps those facts to himself and resolves to not involve the police. Later that evening, Namiko is murdered at home while Casey is out buying her chocolate and algae for her pregnancy cravings. A distraught Casey assumes that the thugs from earlier were responsible, tracks them down, and murders them good.

A mourning Casey travels to his senpai’s dojo in Thailand to train off his bad emotions. Master Nakabara (Kane Kosugi, of Blood Heat and Coweb) thinks that the change in scenery will help Casey get over his wife’s premature death. After some time, one of the students (prolific stuntman Jawed El Berni, whose résumé includes Black Adam and The Suicide Squad) is murdered in the same fashion his wife was: choked/bled to death with a cord covered with metal barbs. Nakabara informs Casey that the only ninja to use that fighting technique is Goro (Shun Sugata, of Blade of the Immortal and Kill Bill: Vol. 1), a big bruiser in the Golden Triangle drug trade. Goro’s brother had been a ninja shadow warrior stationed in SE Asia during World War 2 and was killed in a duel with Casey’s own master, the late Sensei Takeda. Armed with this information, Casey heads over to Myanmar for some good ol’ fashioned ninja revenge.

The plot is interesting. I do like the faux-WW2 footage establishing the use of ninja in Burmese jungle warfare. It’s consistent with what we’ve seen in various movies (and was possibly quite true) about the Japanese wanting to take over all of Asia, the way the Nazis wanted to conquer Europe, Russia, and whatever country was too strong for Italy to take over. While we have seen a bit too much of Thailand in recent movies, the fact that much of the action takes place in Myanmar is a nice change of pace. I can only think of the fourth Rambo movie that also has been set there (in terms of action films).

Where the plot goes wrong is the general sense of time. It has none. You see, assuming this film is set in 2013, then that would mean that almost 70 years has elapsed since the end of the war. Goro would have to be in his 80s, although Shun Sugata was 58 when this movie was made. There is also a scene where Casey uncovers a grave in the Burmese jungle and finds what I believe is supposed to be a picture of Namiko as a child. If she was a wartime-baby, than she’d be about 70, not in her late 20s or early 30s.

While it is feasible that Kane Kosugi’s Nakabara could be the son of a WW2 veteran, it means that his dad would have been in his 50s when he was born. The writer should have gone for the characters being grandchildren of WW2 veterans as opposed to children. That would definitely have been easier to swallow. This is similar to The Texas Chainsaw 3-D, in which Alexandra Daddario’s character is supposed to have been a baby during the events of the original film (1974), but is only in her twenties some 40 years later.

So, the action. There is a whole bunch of it and I really don’t think that Adkins will be able to outdo himself in this one. Hwang Jang Lee would be proud of all the aerial kicks he does, while he gets the spin on some his whirlwind kicks that’ll satisfy anyone who’s been waiting since Righting Wrongs to see someone get it right. The choreography itself is excellent, with lots of actual exchanges that keep the fights from becoming Thai-style show reels. While most of the weapons on display are katana and knives, Casey does get to kill a lot of people with kama, or sickles. I also love that one of the main ninja uses a variation on the kusari weapon, but made with barbed wire. Mix that with the fact that said character has a quirky neck twitch and is a poet, and you got a memorable villain.

The action was handled by Tim Man, and you can bet your top dollar that I’ll be keeping an eye on the man’s work in the future. He obviously knows what he’s doing, which is more than I can say with many Chinese/Hong Kong action directors today. He honestly knows what his audience expects and gives it to them in spades. Sure, some of the fighting is a bit more wushu than karate and kenjutsu, but it looks great, benefits from some excellent camerawork, and comes so fast and frequent that only the stodgiest of purists will really care. Man shows up in the film as Goro’s second-in-command[1], and his duel with Adkins has the feel of one of those Mad Dog fights in The Raid: Redemption. Tim Man performs some great aerial kicks and the fight is an excellent exchange of powerful and flexible kicks, hand-to-hand fighting, and knife techniques.

The finale is considered by many fans to be one of the hallmarks of Western/Hollywood fight action. Without getting into any detail about the circumstances of the fight, Scott Adkins has to throw down with his senpai, played by Kane Kosugi—it’s not much of a spoiler, since Kosugi hadn’t actually had a fight before Casey went to Myanmar. Most viewers will figure out that you don’t not put your second-billed martial arts actor in a fight unless you’re saving him for something big. And big it is. Two of the best martial arts actors just go buck wild on each other for a good five minutes. Lots of wonderful kicking from both men, plus complex exchanges of handwork. Casey’s character is said to be a demon with the bo staff, so of course he picks one up when Nakabara comes at him with a katana. The latter also goes Darth Maul on Casey with the double katana, which is really neat. And yes, there is a lot of Hong Kong-style furniture destruction in this fight, guaranteed to make more frail viewers (and some of us veterans) wince in discomfort. It’s such a great fight that it makes you sad to know just how underused Kane Kosugi is in the martial arts genre.

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[1] - Watch for the end credits where Tim Man accidentally shows up twice on the cast list!

This review is part of our "September of Scott" at It's a Beautiful Film Worth Fighting For.