Let My Words Be Few

My thoughts on Boy Kills World, Cash Out, Enter the Clones of Bruce and Unsung Hero

In the inevitably dystopian future posited by Moritz Mohr’s Boy Kills World, everything is under the thumb of the cruel Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Jansen), who wields her power via an annual event called The Culling, in which 12 citizens are plucked by security forces and forced to fight to the death as part of a televised spectacle. Among those affected by her cruelty is a deaf-mute known only as Boy, who saw his mother and sister killed before his eyes by Hilda herself before escaping to a nearby forest where he was rescued by a shaman (Yayan Ruhian) and placed under his tutelage to train for the day when he might be able to avenge his family. Now grown into a bulked-up instrument of death (in the form of Bill Skarsgard), Boy—accompanied by nothing but an interior voice (H. Jon Benjamin) taken from an old video game and visions of his late younger sister (Quinn Williams)—starts chopping, choking, pounding, blasting and grating his way through endless platoons of Van Der Koy henchman, not to mention Hilda’s brother (Sharlto Copley), sister (Michelle Dockery), brother-in-law (Brett Gelman) and chief aide (Jessica Rothe), as he gets closer to his final target.

With the way he manages to snap back from each of his numerous brawls, Boy is seemingly inexhaustible but Boy Kills World proves to be exactly the opposite. Seemingly made by and for people who enjoyed the carnage on display in the likes of Kill Bill and The Hunger Games but who were nevertheless put off by the audacity of those films to focus on female protagonists, Mohr’s film takes a storyline that might have made for a flashy short subject and stretches it out to nearly two interminable hours of bloodshed and snark punctuated only by hammy turns from the cast, the snarky and increasingly irritating voiceover and a couple of late-inning plot twists, one of which is crushingly obvious and the other one putting an additionally gross spin on the already-rancid goings-on.  Even if you are only interested in seeing an endless array of carnage, the film comes up woefully short—while it seems as if every available surface is stained with CGI blood at some point, the fights are staged in such an alternatively hyperactive and soulless manner that they comes across as wearying rather than exhilarating. Unless you have been desperately yearning for a tedious testosterone fest that would follow in the not-exactly-celebrated footsteps as the long-forgotten likes of Free Fire and Hardcore Harry (both of which featured Copley, whose presence in an action film should now be taken as a warning to be heeded), a substance-free drag that is never as clever or stylish as it thinks itself to be and which even fans of mindless big-screen brutality may find to be far too much of a not-especially-good thing.

Cash Out is the kind of assembly-line thriller that is so familiar that if one of the characters should find themselves stumbling over their lines, most audience members could easily prompt them on what they are supposed to say or do even if they themselves are only watching it for the first time. Perhaps inevitably, John Travolta stars as Mason Goddard, a master thief who, along with his master crew, is masterminding the theft of a wildly expensive sports car, a heist that goes wrong when girlfriend/accomplice Amelia (Kristin Davis) proves to be an undercover FBI agent. Barely escaping the authorities, Mason disappears and decides to retire for good, even ignoring the pleas of his brother, Shawn (Lukas Haas), to join him on a seemingly foolproof bank job. Alas, Shawn and the rest of the gang decide to go ahead and by the time Mason arrives to try to stop it, things go sideways and the robbery turns into a hostage situation. Making things complicated is the fact that the bank’s holdings include certain bits of information that certain powerful people would do anything to avoid being revealed to the world. Making things even more complicated is the discovery that the negotiator brought in to try to resolve the situation is—Spoiler Alert!—Amelia.

Like most of the largely VOD vehicles of recent vintage toplining Travolta, Cash Out is not a very good movie by any means. The screenplay by Dipo Oseni and Doug Richardson is a wearisome collection of heist movie cliches and instantly forgettable characters that debuting director Ives is unable to put much life or energy into. The film also has a strangely choppy feel to it that at times suggests that whole scenes were either deleted in the editing or never even filmed—not that you will be yearning for an extended director’s cut restoration based on the available evidence of what remains. And yet, it must be said that even though Travolta may not be a particularly astute judge of material (a quality that extends back to the early days when he spit the bit on such projects as American Gigolo but elected to do Moment by Moment), you will hardly ever catch him sleepwalking as an actor—even when faced with the direst of scripts, he is always giving 100% when he is in front of the camera. Here, the story is as dopey and implausible as can be but he does everything that he can to breathe some life into it and while he ultimately doesn’t succeed, you kind of have to admire both the effort and his refusal to sleepwalk through the proceedings in exchange for a paycheck that, based on the surrounding film, probably ate up a considerable chunk of the budget. True, you have almost certainly seen worse Travolta films than Cash Out over the years (even the aforementioned Moment by Moment looks better in hindsight that much of his filmography) but just because it doesn’t sink to the depths of Gotti or The Fanatic doesn’t exactly make it worth watching in the end for anyone outside of hardcore Travolta completists.

When martial arts legend Bruce Lee died in 1973, just before the release of Enter the Dragon, the film that would forever solidify his position throughout the world as an action film icon, his sudden passing sent shock wave throughout the Hong Kong film industry that he had almost single-handedly revived. In response, a number of HK studios and filmmakers decided to exploit Lee’s name and legacy by crafting a number of increasingly weird and dubious films starring hitherto unknown martial artists who were given names that were meant to suggest Lee’s and featuring narratives that tried to explicitly position them as Lee’s natural successor. The new documentary Enter the Clones of Bruce offers viewers a look at this strange phenomenon via clips of many of the films in question (the loopiest being The Dragon Lives Again, a wild 1977 epic in which the soul of Lee goes to the Underworld and befriends/battles cut-rate imitations of everyone from James Bond and The Man with No Name to Popeye and Emmanuelle) and interviews with a number of the participants, including Ho (“Bruce Li”) Chung-Tao, Moon (“Dragon lee”) Kyung-seok, Bruce Le, Angela Mao (who played Lee’s sister in Enter the Dragon before doing a number of her own films) and Sammo Hung, who got his start in the Brucesploitation film Enter the Fat Dragon.

As a fan of most any deep dive into the history of exploitation cinema, I enjoyed Enter the Clones of Bruce to a certain extent but even so, I could help but feel as if it was at times a bit of a missed opportunity. The basic problem is that this particular area of cinematic scholarship is so rich that trying to cover it in only 100 minutes—less if you subtract the opening 15 minutes or so dedicated to the real Lee’s rise to fame and sudden passing—seems like a bit of an exercise in futility. The interviews with the participants are entertaining (especially the one involving Mao, who has only rarely been heard from since leaving the industry) but they often come across as truncated as director David Gregory hops from one topic to the next. Hopefully when the film arrives on Blu-ray, it will include longer versions of these interviews that will help provide a fuller exploration of this odd and mostly-forgotten corridor of cinema. That said, genre fans who would like to expand their knowledge of one of the odder byproducts of grindhouse cinema will find it to be of interest and no doubt inspire them to take another look at some of the titles highlighted here.

Based on a true story, Unsung Hero begins in the early 1990s as Australian concert promoter David Smallbone (played by his real-life son, Joel, who also co-directs with Richard L. Ramsey) has just lost a bundle on a big Amy Grant concert that failed to sell out (due to the economy, we are reassured) and is on the verge of financial ruin. Taking an insane risk, he packs up his six children and relentlessly optimistic pregnant wife, Helen (Daisy Betts), and moves to Nashville after hearing about a potential job offer. When that gig inevitably fails, he and the rest of the family find themselves struggling to make ends meet by mowing lawns and cleaning homes, including the house of Eddie Degarno (Jonathan Jackson), an artist that David had hoped to promote. While Helen tries to put on a brave face and keep pushing on, David sinks into a despair that deepens when he reacts badly to the generosity of his rich neighbors (Lucas Black and Candace Cameron Bure). He seems to have one ace to play in the form of eldest child Rebecca (Kirrilee Berger), who has a lovely singing voice that he tries to push on record company executives in ways that do more harm than good. I wouldn’t dream of giving away how it all turns out but since the family has gone on to spawn two top-selling Christian music acts—Rebecca (known as Rebecca St James) and For King and Country, a duo consisting of Joel and brother Luke—my guess is that you can probably figure it out on your own.

For all intents and purposes, Unsung Hero is a faith-based version of The Fabelmans, allowing the family to present their origin story on the big screen. Whether you respond to it will depend to a great degree on your interest surrounding the Smallbone clan going into it. If you are fans of them, then you will probably find this to be a reasonably uplifting saga of the indomitable nature of the human spirit or something like that. If not, you might find yourself growing increasingly irritated with the treacly narrative, the slack pacing and the fact that it weirdly focuses on the wrong story to tell. Most of the focus is on David and his sad-sack attempts to make a success for himself and his family before learning to stop being his own worst enemy and accept the blessings of the world, all of which unfolds in a plodding manner throughout. Meanwhile, the story of Rebecca learning to gain confidence in herself and find her voice as an artist—which I would argue is the more interesting narrative thread—is too often relegated to the sidelines for most of the running time. There is one funny bit towards the end, in which the bound-for-stardom Rebecca is encouraged to change her last name, but other than that, Unsung Hero is little more than an elaborate home movie—entertaining enough if you have some kind of connection to the people up on the screen, less so if you don’t.