I’d make a joke about needing this to get the taste of Vanquish out of my mouth, but this is actually me clearing up some unfinished business. Like, more so than usual when it comes to my December catch-ups. I was originally set to see this film at a preview screening for FilmInk earlier in the year but… well, you can probably guess what happened that caused the screening to be cancelled. Which was really a shame because, beyond the deliciously idiosyncratic title, the cast is quite enticing, and I could do with some more consistent female-led action material from this year. And sure enough, I feel quite cheated not getting the chance to see this on the big screen, because this is dynamite.
First off, the action scenes. I love the hell out of these sequences. Yeah, there’s a grand-scale shootout with all the characters that serves as a big rousing moment, but the creativity put into the rest of the scenes is satisfying also. The bowling alley throwdown, a delightful take on a car chase, not to mention the hospital fight where all four participants are in varying stages of ‘there for a reason’; there’s a lot of cool shit happening here, and it’s bulked up by the actors involved. Karen Gillan in the lead is a stable central performance, and her chemistry with the others is tight (especially with Chloe Coleman as her ward), but I gotta be honest: The real joy comes from seeing Lena Headey, Carla Gugino, Angela Bassett, and Michelle freaking Yeoh teaming up to lay waste to dudes.
It feels redundant to bring such things up, but it bears mentioning: The world-building here may not be as in-depth as something like John Wick or even Pig, but when it’s on point, it is easily on the same level. Once again set in the grimy underworld of professional assassins, with its own distinct locales and codes of conduct, it creates a fairly interesting world for the characters to operate in, and that library… holy shit, I never thought I could fall in love with a place as hard as I have with this library. Not only is it a nice spin on the typical armoury setting in these kinds of stories, and serves as the setting for the film’s biggest fight scene, it’s also the centerpiece for the film’s main themes and ideas.
So, in essence, this is the story of women struggling to survive in a system run by men. The Firm that connects all these people and places together is basically the epitome of patriarchy, where they direct everyone else to do their bidding and, when things inevitably go wrong, cut their losses and brush away any of their involvement… even though it’s directly because of them that shit went wrong in the first place. The chemistry between the actors here becomes a rather vital part of the puzzle the further it goes on, emphasising sisterhood and equality in decision-making to really bond them together. The main subtext of books as weaponry… yeah, it’s kinda corny, but not only does the production as a whole sell that idea really damn well, it coming largely from an Israeli woman as director/co-writer in Navot Papushado adds some interesting textures to the idea.
This being at all derivative really shouldn’t be considered an immediate downside to the production, since what it’s building from is stuff that’s worth building from. It takes aspects of more modern world-building-heavy action thrillers and some of Tarantino’s retro stylings to tell a proper feminist tale, all about ‘arming’ one’s self to help break the cycle that maintains the divide between the sexes. I had a lot of fun with this film, both as a straight-forward action flick and as quite possibly the coolest reading PSA I’ve ever watched.
No comments:
Post a Comment