McBain (1991)

Vietnam, 1975

A squad of men receive word that the war is over and they are to pull out.  They climb aboard a Huey and fly over the jungle.  However, they spot some POWs being marched along and decide to engage.  Among the POWs is Robert McBain (Christopher Walken).  He offers eternal gratitude to the leader of the squad, Roberto Santos, offering to repay the debt.  Half of a $100 bill is given as a token of this debt.

Columbia, 1990

Santos is a revolutionary who fights El Presidente and his narco-terrorist enablers.  He has planned to assault the presidential palace and overthrow the government.  Instead, he surrenders to save innocent lives and is executed on live TV.

Christina Santos (Maria Conchita Alonso) travels to NYC to locate McBain.  She gives him the other half of the hundred-dollar bill.  McBain swings into action, assembling the very men who rescued him with Santos.  One of them, Frank Bruce (Michael Ironside) has become immensely wealthy as an arms dealer.  They travel to Columbia and restart the revolution.

Though it has an interesting plot, the execution is mediocre to weak.  The characters have all the emotion of a potato.  Walken is bland and boring.  The script gives the characters nothing to do.  The battles are ludicrous.  Everyone loves to stand exposed while they shoot, only to be utterly amazed when they prove to be easy targets.  Of course, the principle cast doesn't have to worry about that.  Christina stands up from cover and no bullets hit her.  Ditto for McBain.  Sigh.

Hard pass.

The Anderson Tapes (1971)

Robert "Duke" Anderson (Sean Connery) is released from prison after a 10-year sentence.  His first order of business is to hookup with his old flame, Ingrid (Dyan Cannon).  She happens to be living in an upscale building, thanks to her sugar daddy, Werner (Richard Shull).  The wealth on display get Duke's larcenous desires sparking and he starts planning a heist.  He will need help, including funding and manpower.  He checks in with local mob boss, Pat Angelo (Alan King).  Of course, Angelo is under surveillance and everything that he and Duke discuss is recorded.  Then Duke checks in with the Kid (Christopher Walken), a youth who was released from prison the same day as him.  The Kid was in for drugs and is under surveillance, so everything Duke says to him is recorded.  This repeats with each new recruit, though a different law enforcement agency is recording.  In one case, a private eye is doing the recording.  All the pieces of the planned heist have been revealed but no one sees the whole picture.  The caper launches with the police in the dark.

The story is told in a non-linear fashion.  The various residents of the apartment complex are being interviewed on site as the police carry away bodies on stretchers or attend wounds to the tenants.  Clearly, something went seriously wrong with the heist, but what?  Were the police in the know?  Had they been lying in wait?  How many of Duke's men escaped?

The movie is a commentary on the surveillance state that the US had become but also the uselessness of that surveillance.  Indeed, even today it always turns out that the various law enforcement agencies - most notably the FBI - have a file on the latest mass shooter or bomber.  Is Lumet arguing that surveillance does not help prevent crimes?  Maybe.

This was Christopher Walken's first big screen role.  The halting cadence that is frequently used to mimic him is absent here.  Where this was Walken's first movie, it proved to be Margaret Hamilton's last.  She plays one of the tenants here though she is most remembered as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939).  Also of note, Garrett Morris plays a cop.  This predates his debut as one of the original SNL cast members in 1975.  When I first saw this movie, I expected him to be comic relief rather than a police commando.

This is one of 5 collaborations between Sean Connery and Sidney Lumet.  The first was The Hill (1965), which is the best of the bunch.  Next was The Offence (1973), which is a bleak, dark film.  Then Murder on the Orient Express (1974), where Connery has a small role, and lastly Family Business (1989), which was mediocre.

Just okay.

King of New York (1990)

Frank White (Christopher Walken) is released from Sing Sing Prison.  A one-time bigwig in the drug trade, he looks to resume his old position.  His chief enforcer, Jimmy Jump (Laurence Fishburne), has already cleared away some Columbian drug dealers.  Clashes with Chinese drug dealers soon follow.  Detective Roy Bishop (Victor Argo) knows that White is responsible and tries to intimidate him into better behavior.  No go.  Two of Bishop's cops - Gilley (David Caruso) and Flanigan (Wesley Snipes) - decide that more extreme measures are needed.

There is not a lot of story here.  Gangster released from prison returns to his criminal ways, clashes with cops and other gangsters, lots of gunfights, and lots of people die.  The visuals are good, but the car chase is much too long.  How can that many bullets be fired and none of them hit?  There are no characters to like.  The gangsters are obviously bad but so are the cops.  In one confrontation between White and Bishop, White explains how everyone he kills has it coming.  In fact, he is the lesser evil.  Someone is going to be selling drugs; why not him?  After all, he has been funneling money to the financially troubled hospital in Harlem.  He's a businessman.  Interesting view.

For fans of the genre, this might be worth seeing.  I found it mostly boring.  Gangster movies just don't do anything for me.  If everyone dies, that's the happy ending.

Skip.

Shoot the Sun Down (1978)

The story opens with some background.  It is 1836 and the area around Santa Fe is dominated by Navajo and Apache, who are killing each other as well as settlers.  The towns in the area are dominated by corrupt Mexican soldiers.  However, Americans are proving to be successful traders.  It so happens that three groups arrive in Santa Fe.  There is the captain (Bo Brundin) and his woman (Margot Kidder).  She puts on the airs of a lady while he claims to be a former ship's captain who now hopes to earn money by trading with the Indians.  There is scalphunter (Geoffrey Lewis) and his three underlings: Angel, Conquistador, and Delaware.  He claims to hunt buffalo, but is really - as his name exposes - a scalp hunter.  The Mexican government pays for Indian scalps and he's eager to collect.  Lastly, Mr. Rainbow (Christopher Walken) is on his way to Texas to join the revolution.  Unusually, he is armed with a revolver, which is a new invention at the time.

As the principal characters interact, motivations are exposed.  Most importantly, the captain has a treasure map and a nugget of gold to go with it.  Scalphunter wants to steal the gold for himself.  The woman is not the lady she pretends to be.  Mr. Rainbow is a deserter because he got tired of slaughtering Indians for the army.  This explains why he saved a Navajo (A Martinez) from a well-deserved beating by a bunch of men he was cheating at dice.  From Santa Fe, the principals soon find themselves at an abandoned village where they must work together against marauding Apache.

Regarding the setting, it gets some things right and others wrong.

• The Patterson Revolver was first available for sale in late 1836.  Mr. Rainbow is indeed carrying around a Patterson, which impressed me.  However, the gun only fired 5 shots though it is shown firing 6.  Also, it was a single-action revolver, meaning the hammer needed to be manually cocked before you can pull the trigger.  Therefore, his opening gunfight with the trio of bandits was incorrect.
• Mr. Rainbow claims to be coming from San Francisco.  There is no San Francisco in 1836.  It was called Yerba Buena.  However, he may mean San Francisco Bay.
• California was also in rebellion during this time, but that came to nothing.  Mr. Rainbow is therefore accurate in this observation.
• Jefferson Davis was never a captain.  He resigned from the US Army in 1835 as a First Lieutenant.  During the Mexican-American War, he raised a volunteer regiment - the Mississippi Rifles - and was its colonel.
• Indentured servitude was still legal, though it had largely been replaced by slavery in North America.
• One of scalphunter's goons called Mr. Rainbow a Gringo.  The term has not yet been invented.  It was coined during the Mexican-American War (1846-48).
• Scalphunter's goons are playing rock-paper-scissors.  This is a Japanese game that didn't migrate to the West until the 20th Century.
• Sunbearer is using a modern bow rather than an authentic Navajo bow.
• The Mexican government really did offer bounties for Indian scalps.
• The Golden Wheel of Montezuma would be immovable with the people on hand.  It looked to be at least 4 feet in diameter and at least 6 inches thick.  If it were pure gold, it would weigh 15 tons or so.  That rope they used to lower it onto the wagon was laughable.
• The Journey of Death - a noted stretch of desert in New Mexico - appears in the film.  While the characters are passing through, they are said to be within 3 days of Santa Fe.  Socorro - the nearest point of the Journey - is 140 miles from Santa Fe.  A wagon might go 25 miles in a day.
• Mr. Rainbow states he is going to Fort Alamo in Texas, painting the impression that he will be one of the defenders who dies there.  It is 700 miles from Santa Fe to San Antonio.  He cannot arrive in time for the Battle of the Alamo.  Besides, his gun was unavailable during the battle (Feb-Mar 1836).  This may just be a case that his news is old and he will arrive long after the Texas Revolution has been won.

There is plenty of potential in the story, but it is poorly handled.  There is a lot of talk, but not so much action.  This is a slow-moving western.  Though most of the cast is fine, Christopher Walken was a strange choice.  He doesn't have that hard-as-nails loner quality to him.  He looks much too boyish for a man who has seen too much killing.

Mediocre.

The Jungle Book

Though I am sure I saw the animated version as a child, I have virtually no recollection of it.  I have never read the book (is it a book or a short story?) but Mowgli and gang are iconic enough that I still have a working knowledge of the story.  The movie followed my scant knowledge perfectly and was most entertaining.

Mowgli is a boy raised by wolves in the jungles of India.  We meet him as he is running from a panther.  It looks like he might escape when a branch snaps and he instead falls in the path of the mighty cat.  And then they start chatting.  Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) is an avuncular figure for Mowgli, the kind that usually scowls and scolds.  He has Mowgli's best interests at heart though he often seems dissatisfied with Mowgli in practice.  During a dry spell, Shere Khan (Idris Elba) the Tiger discovers a human among the animals and demands that he be handed over when the rains return.  So it is that Mowgli must leave the wolves, which results in a number of adventures.

 

Baloo (Bill Murray) steals the show as a honey-loving bear with a soft spot for the clever human but also a keen interest in what the boy can do for him.  Without question, he delivers the best lines and offers the most comic relief.

 

King Louie (Christopher Walken) was HUGE, an impossibly big orangutan.  In fact, he is supposed to be an extinct and giant variant of the orangutan because they are not native to India (at least, that is what I read on IMDB).  He is much more menacing than I expected.  His song during the credits was lots of fun.

 

All in all, a very enjoyable movie.