The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Mini Review

    

    This movie drives a Ferrari while wearing a leather jacket and getting its back rubbed by supermodels and it isn't afraid to let you know. Hot damn it was cool. I might be a western guy now? Should I put spurs on my crocs and take up smoking? 

    Even though it is one of the highest-ranking movies on IMDb I still expected to be a bit bored while watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It came out just four years after the first James Bond film, Dr. No, which was occasionally so slow I may have done a crossword or two while watching it, and it is over three hours long. But this boredom never came. Instead of stopping halfway through the movie so I could watch the rest later, as often happens with films of this length, I just kept on going. Sergio Leone, renowned spaghetti western director, truly crafted a masterpiece of the genre. 

    I'm not going to say anything new with this mini review. Much better writers than me have gone to much greater lengths to describe the sweeping scope of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly's cinematography, surprisingly deep themes, and fantastic soundtrack that everyone everywhere has heard regardless of whether or not they have seen the film. It's not exactly a revelation when I say that Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef are slicker and cooler than a greasy penguin with sunglasses. 

    The only real complaint I have is something that was inherent to the spaghetti western filming process in general, according to a cursory Google search. Many of the actors in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly spoke their lines in their native languages only to be dubbed in English later, making for some really awkward moments where the words don't even remotely match the lip movements. It can be super goofy looking, although I can't really dock the film for it because it was unavoidable when filming a movie about America in Spain with an Italian director. 

    It also drives me insane that the title does not have an Oxford comma. For this it only gets a 9/10. 

Predator: Killer of Killers

 

The titular predators of the Predator franchise are pretty tough cookies. They’ve taken on some of the best warriors the galaxy has to offer-- Comanche hunters, Schwarzeneggers, and even the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise once or twice. But could they totally beat up a Viking or a samurai or an Ace pilot from WWII? The answer is yes, yes they can, and this glorious action figure mashing happens in Predator: Killer of Killers, much to the delight of my inner twelve-year-old.  

Killer of Killers is animated much like the Spider-Verse films, as it has a purposefully low frame-rate that takes some getting used to at first. This sometimes makes the action look a little choppy and hard to follow, but it also gives the film a unique personality that is hard to deny. And if one of the action sequences is a bit indecipherable, don’t you worry... Killer of Killers has a whooooooooooooole lot of them that work amazingly. You could say, in fact, that it doesn’t offer much more besides these extended scenes of grizzly carnage. But what carnage it is! 

An anthology film of sorts, Predator: Killer of Killers visits three distinct vignettes based on three different earthly warriors from three different time periods. There is the revenge-obsessed Viking warrior, the samurai-turned-ninja outcast (this one was my favorite), and the plucky Floridian soldier who takes on one of the predators in the skies of World War II. These stories all get woven together in the final act, and the brutal action rarely pauses for any of it, despite a token attempt at character development or two.  

So did I like Killer of Killers despite the fact that it’s not exactly a cerebral work of art? Heck yes, I did. The action is what I came for and, my occasional gripes with the animation style aside, it did not disappoint. There’s stuff in Killers of Killers that you just couldn’t do in a live-action film, at least not without a budget that would rival the GDP of a small nation. Despite the low frames, the action is fluid and well-choreographed, and the predator species sure brought their a-game when it comes to fun new murder toys. It’s a shame that some people will undoubtedly sleep on this latest Predator film simply because it is animation, but it’s their loss. Because let me reiterate: In Predator: Killer of Killers some alien warriors fight a Viking, a ninja, and get into a dogfight with a WWII airplane. That’s cinema, baby!  

Predator: Killer of Killers is now available on Hulu.  

 

Dr. No (1962) Mini Review

There's no way this was only an hour and fifty minutes. By the time he got to Bad Guy Island I thought surely the movie must be close to over by now. Nope, he still needed to meet this movie's Bond girl as well as the villain. He still needed to do all the stuff to get to the base. He still needed to have his nice little dinner with the bad guy as he got the plan explained to him. This movie, despite having a good deal of the Bond tropes established right from the very beginning, was boooooring for long stretches. I didn't even get to appreciate the silly secret base and the Doctor's even sillier robot hand because by that time I was pretty checked out.

As you can imagine, some things aged pretty poorly (including Sean Connery, who was somehow a year younger than me when the movie released despite looking like he was in his early fifties already) but even the tropes that would prove to be more fun and exciting in later entries proved to be dull in this, all thanks to that lethargic sixties pacing. Maybe I'm spoiled by the faster pacing in modern movies or maybe a Bond movie where the most intense moment is the squishing of a spider just ain't it.