The very new-age action-filled dark comedy that everyone’s talking about is Nobody, a movie that takes the “old guys kicking ass” genre to the next level. Like John Wick, there are plenty of fight scenes and good secondary characters but in the end, there’s just one guy that single-handedly takes on a small army of assailants. Keeping this in mind, so far this movie has been received as their best movie to date. From the same guys in The Night Comes for Us, the cast fully showcases their fighting and stunt skills that surely paved the way for these future projects. (As a result of his friendship with McCall, Miles gets to be a hostage for the final part of the film).In what some folks have come to call “the greatest action movie ever”, The Raid 2 is the high-octane sequel that greatly surpassed its predecessor in terms of quality and budget. In the meantime, he finds time to mentor a young artist in his building named Miles (the talented Ashton Sanders, who played teen Chiron in Moonlight), luring him away from street life by introducing him to good works and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. Her death is part of a series of double-crosses that are murky as plot points but give McCall his purpose in the film: hunt down and kill the guys who did it in various grotesque ways. It involves the overseas murder of his one friend, the operative Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo, returning from the first film along with Bill Pullman, who plays her husband). The centerpiece story is comparatively less compelling. Starring: Denzel Washington, Pablo Pascal, Melissa Leo, Ashton Sanders, Bill Pullman, Tamara Hickey and Orson Bean The best parts of the movie are these comparatively smaller assignments he undertakes on behalf of the besieged: recovering a stolen painting that belonged to a Holocaust survivor, rescuing the child of an independent book dealer from an estranged partner, breaking various limbs of some douchey businessmen who drugged and assaulted an intern, etc. It also provides a perfect cover-and inspiration for-his secret side hustle (not that it pays anything) as the Bay State’s deadliest task rabbit. Having left his job at the East Boston hardware store where he once worked (that tends to happen when you kill bunch of people in your place of business), McCall now makes due as a Lyft driver, a job that allows him to interact briefly but intimately with a wide swath of humanity. Let’s face it: without principles, Washington’s Robert McCall is essentially a Jason Voorhees who has traded in his hockey mask for a leather driving cap. Once the title character is separated from the absolute moral authority he wielded in the first film, the spell is broken, or at least less enchanting. These changes are important in a movie where the protagonist specializes in grotesque ways of offing people (Why use a gun to kill a guy when you can use a harpoon?) and the director soaks his frames in each act of violence as if it were a dish of Palmolive. Rather than righting universal wrongs, he’s basically just out for vengeance. The lead character’s intentions have shifted as well. This time, instead of tattooed Russian mobsters, the central bad guys are deep state equivocators, government operatives who are good or evil-depending on their mission.
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