The Killer's Game

 Joe Flood (Dave Bautista) is a nice guy. He's also a contract killer, but that's ok, because his agency, managed by Ziv (Ben Kingsley doing what he loves best: putting on another accent), only kills criminal scumbags.

 While killing a Russian mobster at a high-scale avant-garde musical performance, Joe saves a dancer, Maize (Sophia Boutella), from the aftermath of the assassination. Maize turns out to be a nice gal, too, and after a couple of dates (and a very fun montage intercutting their dalliance with Joe going about his day job) they fall in love.

 Things get pretty serious - enough that Joe approaches his handler to get out of the game; And hey, it turns out Ziv is a good guy too! He gives Joe some advice (quoting Dolly Parton, who of course almost immediately pops up in the soundtrack) and basically blesses his star assassin's retirement.

 But there's got to be some conflict somewhere, and it ends up coming from Joe being diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease; he's only got three months to live.

 Now, there have been a few movies in the last few years about hitmen struggling with dementia and whatnot... but this film's a comedy, so the script (credited to Rand Ravich and James Coyne) opts for that old 'patient samples swapped' chestnut instead. So here's the rub: while convinced he's going to die, Joe breaks up with Maize and goes to another assassination agency - one where the boss (Pom Kiementieff) hates his guts - to take out a hit on himself (the justification is that if he kills himself he won't get life insurance, which raises all sorts of fun questions about what the insurance company thinks he does). 

 The confusion with the test results is quickly sorted out, but the boss of the hitman agency Joe contacted hates him so much she doesn't just refuse to cancel the hit - she goes all in and brings in multiple teams to take him out. Colourful teams, of the sort that necessitate an introductory vignette where their names are spelled out in neon, or blood, or whatever.

 So the second half of the movie turns into a glibber version of Smokin' Aces, as a bunch of themed hitmen try to take out poor Joe. This movie is nowhere near as good, or as coherent, as that one, but it does have a few cards in its sleeves. Namely, in that it's directed by J.J. Perry, a former stuntman and all-round action connoisseur, and in that the man has enlisted an impressive number of action talent for the antagonists. Well, maybe not that many: "just" Marko Zaror, Scott Adkins and Daniel Bernhardt. But they go a long way.

 The rest of the killers are fine, even if their fights aren't anywhere as impressive. Terry Crewes plays the main antagonist (one wonders if maybe the original choice was Michael Jai White). His schtick is that he's a suave blaxploitation throwback, and he's forced to partner up with an Ali G impersonator (George Somner). It's... fitfully funny, but Crewes is great as usual. Elsewhere there's Shaina West and Lucy Cork (who both have pretty decent action credentials) as a pair of fun-loving killers who use stripping as their cover, a bunch of Koreans, a couple of people who use bikes as murder weapons... it's a solid, fun mix of ideas.

 So far, so good, right? The problem is that - as counterintuitive as it may seem - the first act, the romantic part - is the only part of the movie that truly works. It makes a convincing case for the couple, and both stars are more than able to sell their romance. Honestly, they're both adorable, which is not something I'd ever thought I'd say about Bautista.

 As the script goes on and the action gears strain to, say, keep Maize in the picture, things get more and more implausible. And not in a good way (though there's plenty of that, too). I mean that things become a morass of dropped threads, missed opportunities, and shitty contrivances. Pom Klementieff gets a little sword-swinging introduction... and that's all she fucking gets, for example. Bernhardt, West and Cork's appearances are very underwhelming - and, honestly, so is Crewes, who gets a ton more time verbally sparring with his idiot hanger-on than with the protagonist.

 Entire interactions and plot elements seem to be there just to pad the runtime (a whole deal is made of Joe needing to come clean to Maize about what he does, just for it to be waved away). Some jokes feel improvised - that's the only explanation I can find for an extended gag where wrestler Drew McIntyre shits himself.

 Worst of all, the entire third act is a complete disaster, even as it gives Dylan Moran a pretty substantial role; Talk about wasted talent. All the plots get resolved in insultingly perfunctory ways.

 The action is not as great as it could -should- be, either. Adkins and Zaror fill the screen with impressive acrobatic action, but the choreography doesn't fully work with Bautista's more static fighting style. The guy's a certified badass and has a great presence, but he can't really be described as gymnastic. So there's quite a bit of awkward editing to cover the gaps. His persona in this film is also a little too drab to pull off the Arnie-like one-liners and stupid little jokes the script throws his way.

 Shit gets violent, and there's a lot of blood spilled. But aside from someone getting their teeth knocked out, it doesn't feel particularly violent. It's all blood, and no gore - CGI blood. If I were feeling kind I would say the cartoon blood is there to keep things from getting too dark, but... fuck that, it looks terrible.

 The camera movements are energetic, at least, and later scenes at a sun-drenched church prove that the film can look good. (Cinematographer: Flavio Martínez Labiano)

 The Killer's Game is one of those movies that's been in development hell for decades - the script was first written in the mid-90's and it's gone through endless iterations since. It shows, and the end result bears the marks of a troubled production on top of that. A shame, because a lot of it does work. Even with all these problems, the movie remains enjoyable - lightweight and dumb, sure, but also very likeable, slickly directed, and, despite the non-ideal editing scheme, it manages some great action.

 I'd still recommend it, caveats and all. As long as you know what you're getting into. I hope Perry gets to make another one; his one's a huge improvement over Day Shift, and the guy's obviously got chops.

Day Shift

 You could be excused if you completely discount Day Shift outright as a terrible-looking Netflix action movie. So many red flags: The red N, for a start, yet another modern urban fantasy mashup. Even worse, the tone of the trailer and the jokes... look pretty obnoxious. On the other hand it's directed by stuntman legend JJ Perry, who's been in the business since at least the first Mortal Kombat movie, and was a fight choreographer for Haywire and Undisputed 2; That's one hell of a resumé. And it's pretty safe to say stuntmen turned directors are doing pretty well these days.

 The movie starts well. Jamie Foxx, mid-pool cleaning gig, breaks out a hidden weapons cache, enters the house and picks a fight with the resident vampire. It's a great close-quarters gunplay and martial arts fight, full of cool reversals and great moves. The vampire moves a bit like Linda Blair when she crawled on the ceiling in the exorcist, but on speed, which makes for some nice bone-crunching shots - a cool and very original use of a contortionist in fight choreography.

 Once the fight is done and the scene moves out into mid-day LA, the camera pans up and we get a classic action movie title - it slams into the screen with a bang and there's flames and metal lettering and a stake for an I ... yeah, we're in good hands:

Now THIS is a title sequence.

The very next scene we're introduced to the movie's big bad - a pretty vampire realtor played by Karla Souza who, in the process of interring a vampire competitor, spews out that tired old "you know the definition of insanity?" quote, which quickly outs scriptwriters Tyler Tyce and Shay Hatten as either hacks or half-assing it. That's the sort of inane bullshit someone who's trying to sound smart would crowbar into a speech without saying anything intelligent*. And since this scene is working up a sweat to establish Karla as a credible threat... well, that's a pretty good indication of how bad the script for this is going to be.

 Oh, and it turns out that the vampire Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx's character) killed at the beginning was important to her. It's as good a plot kickoff as any other B-movie device.

 It turns out Jablonski uses pool cleaning as a cover for his real vampire hunting job - even after he's been kicked out of the vampire hunting union, he's able to scrape by selling fangs to the black market for a profit (why there's a black market for fangs, it's never explained.)  But in the sort of hacky contrivance that makes shit scripts like this tick, his ex-wife will be taking his child to Florida in a week unless he raises $5000. And to get the money, he needs better bounties.

 So off goes Jablonski to rejoin the Vampire Hunting union, from which he was fired for being a loose canon who played by his own rules etc. etc. He gets his old vampire hunter friend Snoop Dog (in cowboy getup and obviously having fun with the role) to pull some strings and get him back in.

 And it works... mostly. He's grudgingly admitted back into the Union, on probation, and he needs to take an overseer with him to make sure he doesn't break any regulations.

 And now it's a buddy action comedy. But, wait for it- his nanny is a straight-laced desk jockey (the normally dependable Dave Franco) who's never been in the field! He's got Photograph set as a ringtone, and his thing is to piss himself whenever he's in trouble! Hilarious, right?

 And so the stage is set for a series of vamp fights, with Karla as the boss at the end. Will the scriptwriters avoid the obvious cliché of  having her kidnap Jablonski's family and use them to get at our protagonist? Of course not, don't be stupid. Snoop Dog and a couple of vampire allies join the fray too for the final confrontation, including poor Natasha Liu Bordizzo, who gets a cool katana scene but also the worst and most underwritten and poorly set-up role in this whole sorry mess.

 The script for this movie is trash, and not good trash. At all. It's simultaneously overstuffed and half baked idiocy where the mythology is shit, no one acts like a human being, there's no interesting mystery (or... interesting anything) and none of the jokes land. People spout exposition at each other with information they both already know in the most inelegant way possible, and every. Single. Plot. Element is crap. There's nothing salvageable here, every element that's introduced is a shitshow.

 Wait, not every element! at one point Jablonski teams up with a douchy duo of fellow hunters (The Nazarian brothers, one of which is played by Scott Adkins), and they are actually funny! This was honestly a pretty big surprise, given the botched execution of every other single joke attempted in this film.

 But none of this can be laid at the director's feet - or indeed, any of the actors, other than the fact that they chose to run with the material. They do what they can with what they're given.

 The movie's considerable saving grace is that it's got a lot of great action sequences - not quite enough to fully redeem the script, because the pacing is off and it grinds to a screeching halt too often and for too long for some extremely unfunny business, but on the whole it makes it absolutely worthwhile. Doing justice to both genres in action comedies is hard (just ask Bullet Train, or so many Chinese martial arts movies); action this good deserves to be taken out of context and celebrated.

 The fights are fun, varied and inventive, and the one good thing I can say about the script is that it eventually facilitates them. As you'd expect from a stuntman director, there are a lot of acrobatics, tricky falls, and excellently choreographed mayhem.

Snoop Dog gets a Gatling gun, and gets to use it.

 I hope this does well and the talent involved gets chances to do more stuff - I'm eager to see what Mr. Perry does next. Lets hope he gets to do a decent script next time.

*You know who does the same thing expecting different results all the time? Scientists. Me, when rolling some dice. Stop using that glib piece of shit quote, and stop attributing it to Einstein.