Vengeance of an Assassin (2014)

Plot summary (story synopsis): Orphans Thee (Dan Chupong) and his brother Than (Nathawut Boonrubsub) live in a village with their uncle (Ping Lumpraploeng). They work as mechanics, fixing motorcycles and cars.

One day, Thee's uncle catches him looking through confidential documents that had been locked away. Thee had disobeyed his uncle and was looking for clues as to how his parents had died. His uncle throws him out and Thee heads to the big city to continue his investigations.

Thee hooks up with one of his father's old colleagues and becomes a freelance assassin. One day, he is hired to kill Ploy (Nisachon Tuamsungnoen), the daughter of a powerful man.

He decides to not kill her, which is fortunate because he was being set up for her murder. Ploy and Thee go on the run, pursued by various hired killers including femme fatale Nui (Kessarin Ektawatkul).

Nui seriously injures Thee in a fight. Ploy takes him to her family doctor (Ooi Teik Huat) and then back to his uncle to recuperate. The bad guys track them down and Thee's brother and uncle are now drawn into the fight.

***

Like too many martial arts movies, Vengeance of an Assassin is all fight and no sense. I'm not going to give a movie a pass just because it's Asian (Thai, in this case). If it stinks, it stinks.

Sure, there are lots of fights, most of them pretty good. And sure, I'm not expecting much of a story, even though one would be good. What pisses me off about Vengeance is the stupid, cliched, melodramatic story.

If you want to make a fight movie, go ahead. Lay on some simple, stupid story as an excuse to string fights together. I won't complain too much. But make me suffer through some melodramatic nonsense? I didn't sign up for a Korean drama.

The brothers' arguments with their uncle are overwrought. We don't really know who they are - the characters don't get much introduction - and are forced to watch virtual strangers squabble. It makes you uncomfortable. And for no reason - there's no message, no moral. It's just an excuse to set up some fights.

I know a guy who writes scripts for short films. When he needs some drama, his immediate reaction is to throw in some hard luck story - the character is dying of cancer or something. For martial arts movies, the cliched trope is vengeance for a murdered family member. That's lazy and boring. We've seen it before.

Then Thee suddenly becomes a cold-blooded killer-for-hire? And skilled too? Where did he learn to fight and shoot? His brother learns from watching his uncle's VHS videotapes (which look like terrorist training videos). Maybe Thee did too. Only you can't learn how to fight and shoot just from watching TV.

Okay, enough about the story. The fights are good. A nice blend of realism and too-fancy-to-be-true athleticism and no obvious wire work. The Shaolin Soccer fantasy football match at the start is especially fun.

But keep it short, guys. Look at Kick-Ass. Heck, look at Jurassic Park. There are only 14 minutes of dinosaur special effects in Jurassic Park, but look at their impact. Less is more. Trust me, don't trust the Hong Kong guys.

There's a fancy long-take (no cuts) fight sequence that is shot entirely from knee level, I kid you not. Why knee level? It's just the director showing off how creative he is (my apologies to the late Panna Rittikrai). The problem with this is that it distracts the audience, throws them out of the movie. You don't want the audience to think, Wow isn't the director good? You want them to think, Wow isn't the hero awesome? Of course I was thinking, What a showoff asshole the director is.

The Thai martial artists and stuntmen are good. They deserve better scripts than this.

Bonus gripes:

• You do not survive a metal pipe through your stomach without immediate hospital care, let alone recover enough to fight within a day or two.
• Twisted train tracks will not launch a speeding train into the air. The train fill flatten the tracks.
• If you shoot someone with a rifle at close range (maybe 20 meters), the bullet will go through him and kill the pretty girl behind him.

Taken 3 (2015)

Plot summary (story synopsis): Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) finds his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) dead in his house. The police are after him for the murder and he goes on the run. He tries to evade the police who are led by Franck Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), find out who really killed Lenore, all the while keeping his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) safe from the killers.

***

Taken 3's problem is that it has no theme, or what William Goldman called the story's spine. The Fugitive was about hard-nosed policeman Tommy Lee Jones doing his job, versus nice guy Harrison Ford saving lives even as he was on the run. Tommy Lee Jones's determined "I don't care" reply to Harrison Ford's "I didn't kill my wife" was powerful because it was believable, consistent with his behavior.

The first Taken was a straight out rescue - Liam Neeson as the one-man Die Hard cavalry. Taken 2 was less compelling but at least there was an overall consistency with its focus on MacGyver gimmicks.

Taken 3 has bits of The Fugitive but there's no real connection, antagonistic or otherwise, between Liam Neeson and Forest Whitaker. There's no "I don't care" moment. Oh there's something like that in their dialog, but there's no impact. There's another Fugitive moment when Forest Whitaker finds out that Liam Neeson took a policeman's gun, but didn't use it. But absent The Fugitive's consistent effort to portray Harrison Ford as the selfless good samaritan, it's a wasted effort because there is no follow up.

There's also an attempt to give Liam Neeson an overriding priority to his actions - keeping his daughter safe, versus Forest Whitaker's "doing my job" but it doesn't really work. His daughter's reciprocal absolute trust in him is a nice touch, but somehow also fails to achieve liftoff.

The pacing of the movie is off. It doesn't have The Fugitive's or Taken's sense of urgency. Taken impressed with Liam Neeson's cold-blooded determination to do whatever it took to rescue his daughter - torture, kill, shoot his old friend's innocent wife. In Taken 3 the stakes are not as high. His daughter is sometimes in danger but most of the time he is "only" trying to figure out who killed his wife. His violent means to this relatively not urgent end, seem excessive and he loses our sympathy.

Action movies require a certain level of forgiveness in terms of taking liberties with reality. But there are limits. Liam Neeson goes around killing people when no lives are in immediate danger (like when he storms the bad guy's penthouse - he's not rescuing anyone). His friends pull guns on policemen. And in the end, the only thing Forest Whitaker complains about is him accessing the police computer database without authorization.

Liam Neeson doesn't have any memorable lines and his character just seems to be coasting instead of convincing us of what a bad ass he is. There's a cool twist where he says "good luck" to Forest Whitaker, a line the bad guy said to him in the first movie. But this little gem is already revealed in the movie's trailer, so there's less impact when we see it.

Forest Whitaker never really had any tough guy or edgy persona. But he at least used to have some crazy, quirky energy about him. In Taken 3 he's just totally bland. He's playing the same role as he did in Schwarzenegger's The Last Stand, and doing it with less energy and attitude.

Writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen did a good job with the first Taken, making a permanent addition to popular culture and internet memes. Their attempts at sequels have fallen flat. With such a weak and confused script, there's little that director Olivier Megaton can do. Not that he's any kind of genius - Taken 3's action sequences are confusing, confusing enough to throw you out of the movie.

The frustrating thing is that you can see Luc Besson trying to put a fresh spin on things and failing. Just as he tried and failed with Colombiana and Lucy. You can see the effort he puts in, trying to come up with original ideas and avoiding cliches. He hasn't sold out or anything. He's just out of gas.