Remember, No Guns | Bad City (2022) Review

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

Epic Misfire | 2009: Lost Memories (2002) Review

By the time 2009: Lost Memories exposes itself in the final third, forgoing language and subtlety for foaming rabid nationalism, there may be a sense of relief, as its interpretation of the police procedural was laborious: a mystery unfolding poorly. This is an alternate history action-thriller which posits that Germany, not Japan, was hit by the atomic bomb, and as a consequence, Korea was never liberated. In the present day of near-future 2009, the “Japanese Bureau of Intelligence,” or JBI, battles an underground Korean terrorist cell in what would’ve been Seoul, digging up old ghosts for ethnically Korean agent Masayuki Sakamoto. … More Epic Misfire | 2009: Lost Memories (2002) Review