And she kidnaps Li’s semi-boyfriend (Lam) to make sure Li turns up for the contest. Wong (Yukari Oshima), who is the victim’s brother, as well as the promoter’s wife, demands a winner-take-all match to the death. When that happens, but leaves her opponent permanently paralyzed, Mrs. To both get revenge, and earn enough money to stabilize things, Li goes to Wong, and demands an underground rematch against his fighter. The death also throws into jeopardy the family training gym/healthcare establishemnt, which was already financially shaky. Li Feng (Lee) is visiting her kickboxer brother in Hong Kong, when he is killed by a cheating opponent, after refusing to take a dive on the orders of Mr Wong (Lung). Star: Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld, Muna Otaru, Sam WorthingtonĪ truly crappy plot here, used to link fight scenes that range from the boring – that would be the actual kickboxing, which greatly outstays its welcome – to the impressive. While infuriatingly flawed in a number of ways, not least Barber’s over-obvious direction, Marling’s performance in particular does make it worth watching, and the story reveals a side of the war not previously brought to the screen, to my knowledge. It’s a shame, as there has been a strong sense of looming and ever-encroaching violence, right from the opening scene, depicting an encounter between a slave and a stagecoach. While not irrelevant, it really needed to be somewhere else in the film, as it derails all the tension built up to that point. It has to be said, I was close to yelling “Shoot him in the head! IN THE HEAD!” at the screen there.īarber also has a flawed concept of pace, the film grinding to a halt just when it should be escalating relentlessly, in order for the maid to deliver a lengthy monologue about an incident that happened when she was 10. When Louise tries to deflect a chore by whining, “She’s the nigger, she should do it,” her sister chides her in response, “Like I told you, Louise: We all niggers now.” However, even Augusta falls prey to the convenient flaw most commonly seen in the “final girl” of slasher films: failing to finish off your opponent when you have them at your mercy, in this case wandering off and leaving Otis after knocking him out. Augusta, in particular, is a great exponent of this, pragmatic and down to earth. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over,” and that’s an appropriate quote, since the moral here appears to be that there are times when barbarism needs to be met with equal or greater force. This opens with a quote from Civil War General, William Sherman: “War is cruelty. He takes a shine to her, but she rebuffs his advances at the point of her rifle that only spurs the men on, so they follow her back to the house and lay siege to the three inhabitants, driven by an apparent combination of lust, and a desire to take revenge for their humiliation. When Louise is bitten by a racoon, her sister rides into town to seek medicine, but encounters Moses (Worthington) and his colleagues, the advance guard of the approaching Union army. In this case, it’s two siblings, Augusta (Marling) and Louise (Steinfeld), along with their black maid (Otaru), who are barely scraping a living out of the land. This is another along similar lines, though also has a debt to Cold Mountain, sharing a theme of Civil War women forced into surviving on their own, with the menfolk off fighting each other. We’ve already had the likes of Bone Tomahawk and The Revenant, with The Hateful 8 due out imminently. The second half of 2015 seems to have seen a flood of “revisionist” – whatever that term means – Westerns.
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