Well chop my socks, it’s Burl, here to
review up some all-new nonsense action! Now, I say nonsense action, but doesn’t
Black Mask, the movie under review
today, really fit into the Ridiculous Action category, I hear you ask?
Shouldn’t it be mounted along the Via Appia with its fellows, among them the
equally guilty Raw Force and Deadly Prey? Ha ha, no I say, and I say
again no! While certainly ridiculous in parts, and not lacking in pep, Black Mask, for better or for worse,
lacks that certain extra edge of Total Ridiculousness!
But enough of trying to categorize it! Black Mask is a Jet Li extravaganza
featuring Jet as an extraordinarily bifurcated character: at once an inhumanly
violent, chemically altered supersoldier unmade and re-created in a lab so as to
be free of pain, empathy, and emotion of any kind, while capable of killing
enemies by the dozen in a thousand different ways; and a soft-spoken,
peace-loving, flower-sniffing librarian who only wants to be left alone! Ha ha!
And the split between his dual natures seems to trouble him not a whit!
But his fellow supersoldiers are not so
complacent! They feel the urge for revenge upon those who experimented on them,
and for this they seem to blame just about everybody! So the drug lords, the
cops, random doctors and nurses, and really just anyone who gets in the way are
destined to become the victims of the special commando squad! Ha ha, and they
come up with some pretty gruesome ways of dispatching their victims, like the
heart-bomb, or the acid sprinklers!
There are also plenty of punchfights, of
course, and very dynamically enacted and filmed they are too, with lots of
funky moves! When I saw this picture in the theater with my friend Pellonpäa, we practically stood up and cheered: the action sequences were
extremely effective, and they still hold up well today! They’re cartoonish, but
not as extremely so as we find in some Hong Kong action pictures! And they get
pretty gory too, which, I’ll admit, always brings an action picture up a notch
or two in my esteem! Ha ha, I guess it’s the Fangoria kid in me! (I didn’t care for the gift the commandos send
to the drug lord King Kao, however!)
The bulk of the story involves Jet’s
character, Michael, trying to stop the evil plans of the supersoldiers and
their long-haired, Lennon glasses-wearing leader! In this he’s helped by his
friend, the cop with whom he plays chess, and also a lady from the library, a
flibbertigibbet type who proves her mettle, but not without screeching a lot!
Well, if you like goofy high-octane action and Jet
Li at his fastest and most charming, you’ll probably like this picture! I
certainly feel an affection for it! You’ll forget the plot details immediately
upon finishing with it, but you’ll have had a good time! I’m going to give Black Mask two and a half exploding drug
lords!
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