A recap of my month in movies and media, featuring Red Notice, Halloween Kills, Army of Thieves, The Harder They Fall and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Disney+)
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is the first Marvel film since March 2019, when Captain Marvel swooped into cinemas, to introduce a wholly new hero to the sprawling universe.In the lead role we have Simi Liu as the titular hero, a young man who is forced to confront his past when his father, Wenwu (played by Hong Kong cinema icon, Tony Leung), leader of the nefarious Ten Rings organisation, reappears and threatens to unleash a mystical evil force unto the world.
Inspired by Chinese legend, wuxia cinema and fantasy films, Shang-Chi is a lot of fun. Acrobatic and inventive action, likeable characters – Liu is a charming lead alongside Awkwafina as lifelong friend Katy – and the customary laugh-a-minute script from Marvel, all work in tandem to shape an all-round great, enjoyable entry in the series. The first half is definitely stronger than the second, when the fantasy elements come to the fore and the fights becomes flashier and bouncier, but the action is never hard to follow or ugly to look at.
If, like me, you didn't get round to seeing this one in theatres – it's now included with a standard Disney+ subscription.
Halloween Kills (In theatres)
I'm not a huge Halloween aficionado; setting aside John Carpenter's excellent original for a second, it took 2018's legacy sequel slash reboot from director David Gordon Green to really spark my interest. So, I was curious to see where Halloween Kills, a sequel (also directed by Gordon Green) that picks up immediately after, would go next.Series mainstay Jaime Lee Curtis is somewhat sidelined here; confined to a hospital bed after the events of the previous film. So it falls to her onscreen daughter Judy Greer and granddaughter Andi Matichak, to pick up the slack, along with a jumbled ensemble of other townspeople who have crossed paths with Michael Meyers over the years.
The premise is simple; the people of Haddonfield have had enough, and vow to band together to put an end to Michael once and for all. The only issue is, everyone in the town has a combined IQ of 80, because they all split up, go their seperate ways, and wouldn't you believe it, get picked off one by one in increasingly gruesome and gnarly ways. Dumb people is a troupe of horror movies; but this is something else.
The middle chapter in a trilogy – part three is due out next year – Halloween Kills is spinning its wheels and running in circles to prolong the plot. The core cast is wasted and Michael's kill count is borderline ludicrous here. Let's hope the final film in this modern revival gets things back on track.
The Harder They Fall (Netflix)
As directorial debuts go, you'd be hard pushed to find one quite as entertaining and confident as Jeymes Samuel's The Harder They Fall.Full of colour and swagger, this gun-toting, whip-cracking Western boasts a talented principal cast of black actors (Jonathon Majors, Zazie Beetz, Regina King and Idris Elba, to name just a few), a wholly original screenplay that melds modern sensibilities with historical figures, and a great soundtrack featuring original tracks by the likes of Jay-Z and Kid Cudi.
If you thought Western was a dead genre, think again – because here's a filmmaker who understands that even the most antiquated of genres, can be polished up and repackaged for a new era of audiences. This is a 100 per cent, pure-blooded Western, with all the trimmings you would expect from the genre. The thing that sets it apart, is the slick, energetic execution. The Harder They Fall isn't just one of the best films this year, it's one of the best Westerns in years.
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