Fumika (Akari Takaishi, Baby Assassins) is your average college student. She has a crappy job, constantly fends off creepy men pestering her, and she’s very clumsy. Seriously, she falls down. A lot. Things change a wee bit, however, when she meets the ghost of a vicious hitman, Kudo (Masanori Mimoto, First Love), who occasionally possesses her and takes control of her body. It’s like Upgrade or even Venom at times as the two consciousnesses occupy the same space. (Or All of Me with fisticuffs?) After some coaxing, she agrees to help him exact revenge against the people who killed him. So goes the plot of Kensuke Sonomura’s new action-oriented ghost story Ghost Killer.
A team up between star Marko Zaror and director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza already has my attention. The duo is responsible for Redeemer, Fist of the Condor, Mandrill, and more face-kicking excellence, and Zaror is, for my money, the most unsung martial arts movie badass working today. One way to up the ante is to add Scott Adkins into the mix, like they do in their latest, Diablo, and hot damn. This was on my most-anticipated list for good reason, and it delivers the goods.
Tony Jaa. Muay Thai. Revenge. Bone-breaking action. Any one of those terms is likely enough to entice most of us to watch a movie. If we’re being honest, we’ve all watched movies for less. Combine all those elements, however, and you’re onto something. Which is exactly what Striking Rescue does. The latest from director Cheng Si-Yu (the woefully underseen Tai Chi Master, which you should also seek out if you haven’t), is 100% the movie it looks like, and though you’ve seen this many times before and won’t find any surprises lurking around the corner, it’s 100% the movie it looks like in the best possible way.
Hear me out, Donnie Yen stars as a lawyer. But don’t worry, he may wear a silly robe and wig combo in the courtroom, but he still has ample opportunity to punch, kick, and otherwise pummel his way through throngs of faceless goons on the streets. Thus, we have The Prosecutor, directed by none other than Donnie Yen himself. And dammit if he doesn’t want an Oscar, or equivalent accolades. This movie leans hard into the “I have something to say!” of it all.
The Raid on a Blank has become the new Die Hard on a Blank, action movie shorthand wise, and I’m here for every last one. And the easiest way to describe Indian director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill is as The Raid on a Train. That is, of course, reductive and not the whole story, and while awesome, Kill is no Raid. (What is? That’s an unfair comparison.) Still, what follows is a brutal, badass time full of gnarly, head-smashing, bone-snapping violence steeped in sweet melodrama that’s one of the best times at the movies this year.
A big part of the charm of Rowdy Harrington’s 1980 cult classic Road House is, aside from Patrick Swayze kicking all the ass and being cool as hell while doing it, how straight-faced it plays everything. From lines like, “Pain don’t hurt,” to a monster truck pancaking a small Missouri town, to a world where bar bouncers are world-renowned celebrities, it’s all presented as very serious business.
Lights Out knows what you came to see. (And it's not the horror Lights Out.)You came to see Frank Grillo throw down. And throw down he does. Constantly. It’s also precisely the movie it advertises itself as, and while your mileage may vary, if this is your thing, this is very much your thing. It begins with a tactical running battle and moments later there’s a bar brawl. If that sounds like a good time, you’re in luck.
We’re barely into 2024 and so far, the new movie releases have twice returned to the guy-with-a-mundane-job-who-used-to-be-a-government-agent well. First came Renny Harlin’s The Bricklayer and now star Jason Statham and director David Ayer have thrown their hat into the ring with The Beekeeper. (The Custodian feels the obvious next step.) Bigger, badder, and wilder than the Harlin joint, this plays like deep EuropaCorp trash filtered through a lens of mean-spirited American animosity and excess. The result is relentlessly absurd, but also absurdly entertaining. It's utter nonsense, but fun nonsense that’s in on the joke (to an extent), and even funnier because everyone plays it straight faced.
When you have a checkered past, a new, idyllic life complete with a pregnant wife and newly minted hopes and dreams, and are a badass fighter, you know you’re utterly, absolutely screwed. Cinematically speaking of course. Such is the case for Samir (Nassim Lyes), the protagonist of Mayhem!, the latest violent offering from director Xavier Gens (The Divide, Gangs of London). Vicious and all kinds of mean, this offers up a dark, brutal slice of fantastic action for those so inclined.
Since we’ve already taken the time to look back on the year that was 2023, it only makes sense to now turn our gaze forward, toward the cinematic future. With that in mind, here are my top 50 most-anticipated movies of 2024.
John Woo is arguably the greatest action director of all time. So, you better believe when the master drops a dialogue-free Christmas-themed revenge movie, I am all over that. Silent Night sees Woo working in what closely approximates a low-budget 1990s direct-to-video action aesthetic. It’s a little sparser and a little less slick than in his heyday, and at times it’s very clear he’s working with a smaller budget, but the Woo still shines through. Though the finished product has been divisive, and certainly doesn’t live up to the director’s career highs, this is a blast of fun, high-octane holiday retribution.
Epic scope and scale on a bargain-basement budget. That might be the best way to describe DTV action auteur Jesse V. Johnson’s newest film, Boudica: Queen of War, starring Olga Kurylenko, who has carved quite a niche for herself in this realm.
You’ve seen this opening countless times in an endless parade of Lifetime movies. It’s the day of the big wedding. Everyone is at the church. The handsome groom hangs out with his boys. The hunky best man struggles to put the finishing touches on his toast. The bride, radiant and ever so in love, looks into the mirror and gets cold feet. Even the title font and opening score scream this specific brand of light, fluffy, inoffensive made-for-cable romantic fare.
By the time you get to the third installment of a franchise, you often know what to expect. Sometimes that can be repetitive and stale, but when it comes to The Roundup: No Way Out, the sequel to 2022’s The Roundup, itself a follow up to 2017’s The Outlaws, the filmmakers know exactly what audiences want—star Ma Dong-seok punching dudes very, very hard and being droll and hilarious as he does—and delivers a substantial amount of that. And it is good.
It’s entirely understandable if you don’t automatically assume a movie about a teenage member of a royal family titled The Princess, released by a Disney property, features a lot of head-stabbing. However, in the case of the latest from director Kiet Le-Van (Furie), a movie coincidentally named The Princess newly available on Mouse-House-subsidiary Hulu, if you make this assumption, you’d be quite mistaken. There is, in fact, a fair amount of head-stabbing, eye-gouging, and general death and violence. What we get on screen can best be described as Rapunzel by way of The Raid. Or to be more accurate, a kind of reverse Raid. (The protagonist must battle her way out of a tall building.) And it’s damn fun.
2021 was, as usual, a great year for movies. They always are, even if the moviegoing and movie watching experience looks different for most people these days. (I watched 300+ movies for the first time this year, 11 in theaters.) But now that the calendar has turned, it’s time to look forward to our most anticipated movies of 2022.
A low-budget, Dolph Lundgren-directed, Scott Adkins-starring DTV action film. If those words mean anything to you, and if they do and they pique your interest in a positive way, Castle Falls has something for you.
The “one take” film, movies staged to look like they play out in a single, unbroken shot, have been used quite a bit as of late. There’s the upcoming thriller Boiling Point, Japanese horror One Cut of the Dead, and the highest profile recent uses, the Oscar-winning Birdman and 1917. Results can be mixed and the approach has limitations and pitfalls, but it’s an ambitious undertaking. The latest from director James Nunn (Eliminators), the unoriginally titled One Shot, uses this strategy to craft a strong gritty, low-budget DTV-style action film. And it’s hard to go wrong with a movie fronted by Scott Adkins.
A group of guerilla filmmakers set out to shoot a low-budget zombie movie in a condemned building. Unfortunately for them, a gang of vicious criminals also want to use the soon-to-be-demolished structure for their own nefarious ends. When the crew witnesses a brutal execution, they have to figure out a way to survive. Which more or less means sending their stuntman and master martial artist, Donnie (Jean-Paul Ly), to fight the bad guys.
Directed by Joe Carnahan (The Grey) and fronted by Gerard Butler (Den of Thieves) and Frank Grillo (The Purge: Anarchy), it’s easy to envision what a movie titled Copshop is likely to deliver. If you expect and hope for a violent, irreverent slice of tough-guy action thriller, you will not be disappointed.
