Tag: Martial Arts

Thrice | KPop Demon Hunters (2025) Review

July 6, 2025

I have a friend who’s a bit of a troll. She wanted to watch KPop Demon Hunters and wanted more, perhaps, for me to watch it. Her logic was sound: “You like K-pop!” to which I noted I also like movies, and that doesn’t mean I’m rushing out to watch F1 this weekend. Nor for that matter, Elio, live-action Lilo & Stitch, or live-action How to Train Your Dragon – really, guys? Three at the same time? Anyway, my logic here is sounder: those movies are for babies. Of course, I’ve enjoyed movies for babies, especially when I was a baby, as well as movies empty of thought or weight. One doesn’t need to approach a work of art or entertainment in the exact same way each time, and we understand this implicitly, setting different expectations based on genre, content rating, and so on. Still, a lot of the criticisms I have for KPop Demon Hunters can be brushed aside with “It’s a kids’ movie,” leaving me in the impossible situation of having watched a movie I wasn’t meant to watch. … More Thrice | KPop Demon Hunters (2025) Review

Swan Lake of Blood | Ballerina (2025) Review

June 7, 2025

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is a strong contender for “movie with the worst title of the year,” and incidentally, the subtitle (supertitle?) is both strength and weakness. My question, from the moment the film was announced in 2019, was “Why does this have to be a spin-off?” There’s nothing about a ballerina-turned-assassin that screams John Wick any more than it does La Femme Nikita or 2023’s own Ballerina, though the lead character in that one wasn’t the titular ballerina. In fact, 2025’s Ballerina starts on the most stock-standard note: her father is killed, and she seeks revenge. That’s every action movie! It’s also why the original John Wick was such a breath of fresh air: action movies are bad. … More Swan Lake of Blood | Ballerina (2025) Review

Japanese Fighting Girl: The New School

April 15, 2025

So, I got into anime relatively late in life, and it was a lateral move, from an existing interest in science fiction movies. As a big fan of The Matrix, of course my first anime was Ghost in the Shell. And I liked Trinity, but wow, the Major? Now, there was a helicopter-wrangling, tank-wrassling straight shooter – and unlike what I was used to, she wasn’t alone. There’s her cousin Deunan Knute in Appleseed, Priss and the Knight Sabers in Bubblegum Crisis, Nausicaa, Battle Angel Alita, Armitage III, the Dirty Pair, Gall Force, Iria: Zeiram the Animation. It’s an embarrassment of riches. An embarrassment. … More Japanese Fighting Girl: The New School

Old Myths, Old Men | Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024) Review

February 20, 2025

There’s a Wikipedia page for the topic “epic film,” which gets into some of the back-and-forth in film scholarship about whether the term applies exclusively to historical-style movies or to those in other genres as well. If the latter, then 2001 is (as designed) a “sci-fi epic,” and The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy epic, though that’s somewhat obvious. What about the less obvious genres, like comedy? I can only think of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And then there’s action, which might be even trickier. This is our punchy genre, often driven by a single hero rather than an ensemble, and inside a contained scenario instead of sprawled out across time and space. I’d actually make the argument for The Night Comes for Us, for its multiple perspectives, its backstory, and the scale of the fights. Consider, too, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, running at a touch over two hours and setting its action inside the real-world megastructure Kowloon Walled City. … More Old Myths, Old Men | Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024) Review

Remember, No Guns | Bad City (2022) Review

February 2, 2025

The year is 2022, and we’ve had decades of action movie innovation. The bare minimum has to be: “What hasn’t been done yet?” which must be how you get “megaphone as melee weapon.” In Bad City, a white-haired badass squares off against a group of thugs disguised as a baseball team, and after shouting at them through the megaphone at point-blank range, beats them with it to the peculiar rhythms of director Kensuke Sonomura’s light-speed fight choreography. After clobbering several bad guys, he tries to use the megaphone again as intended and finds it’s broken. Already, this is a marked improvement on Sonomura’s previous film, the bewildering Hydra. Inexplicably presented, that movie would’ve benefited from a simpler script guided by cliché, and so it was, initially, a relief that Bad City acquits itself with a police investigation, corrupt politicians, and evidence stored on a USB stick. … More Remember, No Guns | Bad City (2022) Review

Homemade Gyoza Party | Baby Assassins: 2 Babies (2023) Review

January 23, 2025

I’m so excited that Baby Assassins ballooned into a media franchise, encompassing a trilogy of films, a TV series, a making-of documentary, and a making-of mockumentary, most of which came together in the last two years. Mahiro actress Saori Izawa has been working for a long time, as her action reels on YouTube plainly demonstrate – up to and including slicing a delivery pizza in half with a katana – mostly behind the scenes, even doubling Rina Sawayama in John Wick: Chapter 4. Our dear new franchise, then, is basically her proverbial (if not literal) John Wick moment, and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see her featured more prominently in another American movie soon. It’s weird that American action cinema is currently in a renaissance, but for Japan, movies like Baby Assassins are the exception – kind of. … More Homemade Gyoza Party | Baby Assassins: 2 Babies (2023) Review

A Killing at the Maid Café | Baby Assassins (2021) Review

January 22, 2025

In action movies, there’s always that moment in the final battle when the bloody-faced hero looks up at their opponent, and the line is something like, “I’m not giving up” or “Is that all you got?” In Baby Assassins, it’s more like, “She didn’t tell me about this strong guy.” That’s it. Just another snippet of an internal monologue that’s sometimes spoken aloud. At the start of the movie, this character Mahiro is introduced as a socially awkward teen doing something painfully relatable: bombing a job interview. Only, she cuts it short by shooting the hiring manager in the head (ideally, that’s less relatable). What follows is a frenetic fight scene choreographed by the modern master Kensuke Sonomura, where assailants lifting Mahiro into the air doesn’t stop her from repeatedly stabbing their shoulders and arms. Spoiler alert: this is most of the movie’s action until the final battle. … More A Killing at the Maid Café | Baby Assassins (2021) Review

Mouthguard Recommended | The Shadow Strays (2024) Review

October 18, 2024

Timo Tjahjanto is a filmmaker with the intuitive understanding that, in human nature, we’re at our angriest when we’ve taken a blade to the shoulder in a fight to the death. I don’t know how he knows this, but it does make sense, and in his latest film, it comes up a lot. For reference, The Shadow Strays could be described as a sequel to 2018’s The Night Comes for Us, though in spirit, it’s more like a prequel to that film’s own – tragically unmade – sequel, Night of the Operator, which would’ve spun off Julie Estelle’s assassin character. I was so stricken dumb by the “bones tearing through flesh” style of The Night Comes for Us that I didn’t realize how much I loved it until subsequent, wide-eyed viewings. I’ve watched Julie Estelle’s big fight scene so many times that I know every beat by heart. And so, the experience of The Shadow Strays is relatively unique for this movie-goer. Tjahjanto said, “Want more?” and I said, “I-I didn’t even know that was an option.” … More Mouthguard Recommended | The Shadow Strays (2024) Review

The Revelation of ‘My Undead Yokai Girlfriend’

June 8, 2024

As a man with an interesting life, one who pursues many hobbies, it’s only natural I’ve had occasion to add anthropology to the list. Sometimes I simply want to understand people who fascinate and repulse. For example, what kind of sicko watches a show called My Undead Yokai Girlfriend? This, friends, is how I came to watch the Amazon original from March of this year. It was purely academic. I swear. … More The Revelation of ‘My Undead Yokai Girlfriend’

Deduction, Not Reduction | Lady Detective Shadow (2018) Review

September 16, 2023

I’ll be honest, I watched this movie in three installments, against the ticking clock of a 48-hour rental on Amazon Prime Video. For the first few minutes of the second session, I was convinced the playback hadn’t remembered where I left off. “Didn’t I already see this part where they force their way into the inn, witness a fight, then talk with the police?” I sure had, but it happens again, with variations enough for a kind of “can you spot the difference?” puzzle. To be honest once more, I had no earthly idea what was going on in this movie, and I doubt an undisrupted viewing experience would’ve done the trick. I may be among that special few who find kung fu movie plots confusing, but I have a feeling, in this case, I can share the blame: myself, the movie, and fate (as authored by the logistics of international film distribution). … More Deduction, Not Reduction | Lady Detective Shadow (2018) Review