Another week, another direct-to-video action-thriller. Lately, many of these stars either Aaron Eckhart or Olga Kurylenko, and director Jesse V. Johnson’s Chief of Station happens to feature both. (It truly only stars Eckhart, with Kurylenko relegated to a supporting role, but we’ll take it.)
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.
Remember to tip people who work in restaurants, and tip them well. Not only is it polite, but they have also unfettered access to do unspeakably vile things to your food should the need arise. Also, in the case of director Zach Golden’s new action thriller High Heat, the proprietor of the eatery in question may be an ex-KGB operative. So maybe don’t get on her bad side if you can help it.
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.
Mainstream American cinema, and by that I mean Hollywood, has largely abandoned the gritty, workmanlike mid-tier R-rated action films that had their heyday in the 1980s. It still exists, plenty of it, but it has primarily been relegated to the DTV market and indie productions. However, in Europe, especially France and Spain is seems, the genre is alive and kicking. There are a crap ton of recent additions on Netflix, and that includes Julien Leclercq’s latest revenge-tinged action thriller, Sentinelle.
