Rock You Like A Hurricane

March of 2013 was a great month for me as an action movie fan. How great? I shook hands with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. That’s pretty f*ckin’ great.

Sorry to brag, but y’know, when dreams come true, you kind of have to. This is my first post in a blog that is going to be all about action movies, so shaking hands with The Rock is a pretty fitting way to kick things off. I wasn’t really a fan of his for a long time, but over the last couple of years he’s skyrocketed up there and become, for me, the most exciting person in Hollywood blockbuster action movies. In real life, he was one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met. On and off camera, he was friendly, charming and funny, and he didn’t mind that I spent a lot of the interview ogling his muscles.

I put it to him that he is the new Arnold Schwarzenegger, which he said was “great”, “a great compliment” and “awesome”. The word “awesome” was used four times in our six minute chat, which is pretty awesome. You can check out my Nightline piece with The Rock here.

Dwayne Johnson has four movies coming to cinemas this year, all of them exciting, all of them showcasing the man’s charisma, enormous muscles and ability to shoot guns well. The first is the film I met him doing publicity for, G.I. Joe: Retaliation. It’s a lot of fun, with some really well done ninja combat and gunbattles. It fetishizes firearms in a way that I dug quite a lot too, including The Rock getting a rookie to suck on a bullet to calm his nerves. Check out Dom Corry’s great review here on Flicks for more on why you should go and see that on the big screen while you can.

As enjoyable as G.I. Joe: Retaliation is, though, it’s Fast and Furious 6 that has me really excited about The Rock in 2013. Snitch and Pain & Gain are both very appealing for different reasons, but it’s the ‘vehicular warfare’, as Tyrese Gibson calls it in the trailer, of Fast and Furious 6 that make it one of the most exciting films of 2013 full stop. The last movie in the franchise was hugely enjoyable, much more so than any of the previous ones, filled with deeply satisfying fistfights, gunbattles and car chases. It was also the first of the series to feature The Rock.

The trailer for this year’s Fast movie indicates that they’ve taken what made part five great and upped the ante further, adding tanks and planes into the mix. SO EXCITING!

Side-note: There’s something that pleases me about filmmakers Justin Lin and John Chu both being of Asian descent and being responsible for two of Hollywood’s biggest action films of 2013, along with Kim Jee-Woon directing Arnie in The Last Stand. That’s just cool.

Reports have emerged that Jason Statham will have a cameo in Fast and Furious 6, leading to him being the villain in Fast and Furious 7. This has not been confirmed and may amount to nothing more than movie website gossip, but it is extremely exciting. We’ve already seen heavyweights The Rock and Vin Diesel go at it in part five in an incredible fight. The trailer for six has that same duo double-teaming some other dude, complete with a trademark Justin Lin jump-punch, and also a Michelle Rodriguez vs Gina Carano fight that I’m very excited to see. But if in part seven we see Statham vs The Rock, that really is a clash of the titans of contemporary action cinema that will drive me into ecstasy.

Speaking of Statham, a trailer recently dropped for Hummingbird, in which he wears a disgusting/awesome long-hair wig for some of it before going back to that shaven head we all know and love. The film looks more like a thriller than an actioner, written and directed by Steven Knight who penned Eastern Promises, but of course Statham punches some dudes’ faces. Choice.

Before I move on from rambling about Fast and Furious 6, I must insist that if you don’t like Vin Diesel’s Facebook page, you rectify that as soon as possible. It’s amazing. He frequently updates it with hilarious photos of himself, normally topless, with digitally painted things like eagles and pineapples surrounding him, often alongside love hearts and inspirational poems. Oh and videos of him singing Rhianna at karaoke and stuff too. It’s so mint.

I also spoke with Zoe Bell during March, one of New Zealand’s best arse-kicking exports. She stars in and is producing a female fight film coming out this year called Raze. It’s kind of a Naked Weapon meets Battle Royale meets Saw deal, with 50 odd women abducted and forced to fight each other to the death. The trailer is not so great and doesn’t tease any of the fight scenes, but I’m hopeful that it’ll focus on great, tightly choreographed unarmed combat.

Bell was clearly excited when I brought the film up, seemingly a little surprised I even knew about it. She expressed how difficult it was getting enough stuntwomen that could perform the fighting they wanted them to perform for the film, as well as how difficult it is to make a low-budget film in general, with a very limited number of days to shoot in etc. But she said a number of things about it that increased my excitement, for example: “I wanted it to be about the gruesomeness of actually having to kill somebody.” You can see more of my interview with her in the latest issue of Rip It Up magazine.

Raze is playing at the Tribecca Film Festival. Distribution deals haven’t been formed yet and I hope it makes the big screen here.

What has made the big screen here is a new Ip Man film, which opened in the last week of March. This one is directed by Herman Yau with Anthony Wong in the lead, a duo that has previously collaborated on notorious Hong Kong Cat III films including The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome. Having seen those shockingly obscene shockers, it’s kind of amusing to see them working together on a work about peaceful self-discipline. And guys beating guys up too, of course. Ip Man’s son Ip Chun helped them on Ip Man: The Final Fight, which focuses on the Wing Chun master and teacher of Bruce Lee after he moved to Hong Kong. Anthony Wong is no Donnie Yen, but Yau directs the fight scenes very well and I enjoyed this. I sincerely hope we get to see fellow Ip Man film The Grandmaster, from Wong Kar Wai with Tony Leung in the lead, also reach Kiwi cinemas this year.

The film I’m most looking forward at the moment is The Raid 2: Berandal. Director Gareth Evans is really great to follow on Twitter, dropping heaps of interesting info and pics from the production. This recent tweet, for example, reveals that there’s going to be car chases in this one. I’m very interested to see how Evans directs a car chase, seeing as his direction of fist and blade combat is so deliciously close to perfect, and his gunplay is also glorious. This sequel stars some notable Japanese actors as Yakuza in what is going to be some sort of Jakarta gang warfare movie. Will it be as violent as the original or toned down for a broader audience? This still he tweeted recently gives a resounding answer:

I’ll probably mention Scott Adkins in every blog I write, because I’m a huge fan of his sweet as kicking ability and angry facial expressions. His recent Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, alongside Jean Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, went straight to DVD here, but is definitely worth checking out. It’s a bizarre film, a combination of arthouse artiness and B-action blockheadedness. There’s some well choreographed and brutal violence captured in super long takes, which I dig a lot, as well as some Gaspar Noe-esque editing and JCVD being trippier than ever. Highly recommended.

Adkins will face Lundgren again in a film out later this year called Tomb of the Dragon, which I know nothing about. I know more about Ninja II, though, and am pumped for it as Adkins’ work in the original was primo – even out Dudikoffing Michael Dudikoff’s American Ninja efforts, for my money. And then there’s the exciting prospect of Adkins and Randy Couture smashing each other in Distant Shore, which is described as being “in the vein of Dead Calm and The Grey“. Interesting.

A movie that sounded cool but was actually shit that I saw recently is Kill ‘Em All. It’s named after one of my favourite albums and is very similar to The Tournament in its setup – bunch of assassins abducted, put in a room, forced to kill each other off. Despite the impressive kicking skills of one of the stars, a dude named Tim Man, the fight scenes were generally crappily choreographed and the other scenes were unwatchably bad. Avoid.

The last thing I want to do in this blog each posting is mention a classic action movie I’ve recently watched and recommend. This month that is Lone Wolf McQuade, the 1983 Chuck Norris and David Carradine film. It’s a great combination of western elements, kung fu and villains as preposterous as any of the silliest Bond movies. I’m talking a cackling midget in a wheelchair that disappears through a hidden revolving wall, that level of cartoonish. It’s surprisingly forward-thinking in terms of its racial diversity, but still has Chuck Norris being Chuck Norris. He gets angry at a woman for trying to get him to eat vegetables, take vitamins and clean his house up a bit – so angry he literally retrieves his beer from the trash can and skulls it back while scowling at her. Ahhh, Chuck.