New movie review: The Killer

Michael Fassbender, in The Killer

It would be a lot easier to be a big fan of the collected works of David Fincher. There is nothing controversial in proclaiming The Social Network one of the best films of the 2010s. No one bats an eye if you observe that Zodiac is a top-shelf crime procedural. There is, of course, the cult of Fight Club. The director is famed for his numerous takes, and over the years, his dedication to his process has become its own sort of mythology. I’m very happy for everyone, but it’s also okay to want more.

Speaking of wanting more, enter: The Killer. Fincher’s latest is a sleek little thriller that sure seems to be a lot of fun. After all, who doesn’t want to watch a globetrotting assassin story with Michael Fassbender at the center? Insert your Assassin’s Creed jokes here. The performance is great. The pictures are pretty. There is, however, an emptiness at the film’s core different from that intended by Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker.

The film is nihilistic to a fault, which in and of itself feels a tad “been there, done that” from the guys who made Se7en. But, at the end, this was not the emptiness I felt. Rather, I sensed a thematic void. The movie spends a lot of words – a lot of words; truly, Fassbender’s Killer is almost shockingly loquacious – saying virtually nothing at all. Its defenders would have you believe this is a feature, not a bug, but I’m not buying it.

I have heard the lead character is intentionally dull, that the point is the dullness. This would hold water if not for the fact that when push comes to shove, the unnamed killer pulls out enough Jason Bourne- and John Wick-style tricks to seem sufficiently badass for a college dorm room poster. Indeed, the image of Fassbender pointing his gun directly at you will make a nice companion piece to that Tyler Durden poster your freshman year roommate definitely had.

There is no point in penalizing a filmmaker for an audience misunderstanding his work. It is not Fincher’s fault that Project Mayhem now carries a lot of Proud Boy baggage for those who lack a sense of irony or self-awareness. Still, the director seems to have ascended in the culture to that rarified air where his weak spots are declared intentional satire, and detractors are accused of not getting the joke. Make no mistake, there are jokes, and I get them. It’s just that no amount of humor can cover for what’s lacking underneath.

For instance, it’s very funny that we hear the Killer repeatedly recite a set of rules for pulling off an assassination, then proceed to break every one of these rules and never pull off a successful assassination. But, that’s it. That’s the joke. It doesn’t mean anything that he tells us, in that incessant voiceover, he is one of the best assassins in the world, then proceeds to fail at the one thing at which he’s supposed to be an expert. At best, it’s a weak joke, and at worst, it’s a story flaw.

It gets worse the deeper you dig – and from here on out, spoilers if you intend to watch The Killer – so let’s dig. After the Killer botches the opening assassination, he is targeted for elimination by some other hired guns. Those hired guns show up at his house in the Dominican Republic and badly injure – but don’t kill; I guess they’re not very good either, despite us being told they are – the Killer’s girlfriend. 

We will never learn much about this girlfriend. Her name is Magdala, and she is played by Sophie Charlotte, who is given nothing to do. She’s just a function of the plot, a reason for Fassbender’s assassin to go on, what Tarantino might call, a “roaring rampage of revenge.” Ah, but therein lies the rub. See, one of those rules he lives by is to “fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.” He will spend the rest of the film working pro bono. Again, funny, but empty.

Finally, there is the movie’s most curious choice, one I have not been able to stop thinking about and pondering, ‘Why?’ The Killer does, in fact, kill a lot of people, and every single one of them is a woman or person of color. He is hired by a white, male billionaire to kill another white, male presumably billionaire, neither of whom ends up dead. So, where does that leave us? I see two options.

One, it’s a mistake of casting. The Lawyer (Charles Parnell) doesn’t have to be black. The Expert (Tilda Swinton; we’ll come back to her) doesn’t have to be a woman. The Brute (played by Sala Baker, who is Kiwi) does not have to be ambiguously non-white. Maybe it just happened to work out that way. But, I don’t think so. The famously meticulous Fincher doesn’t leave anything to chance.

This leaves option 2: It’s intentional and meant as commentary. I’ll take a stab at it: When the elite clash, marginalized people suffer. Fine. It is perhaps marginally subtler than Fight Club in its messaging, but there is no more meat on the bone. The Killer represents whatever function of capitalism you wish to rage against, but he’s still fun. He’s still the POV character, and Fincher and Walker position him as the person we’re meant to root for, without reservation.

It is the Tyler Durden problem once more. Fincher, a consummate stylist, simply can’t make the character anything less than cool. With his keto diet, Smiths playlist, and eighth-grade nihilism, he certainly seems like someone who would listen to Joe Rogan. This is a person I know for a fact Fincher hates, but the script and filmmaking lack the restraint of style to make the critique stick.

A quick word on the performances: I will highlight two in particular, though everyone else does lovely work. Fassbender is in nearly every frame of this thing, and he is magnificent, reminding us why we loved him in the first place. Coming off a rough stretch (including The Snowman, X-Men: Apocalypse, Assassin’s Creed, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, all reviled) and time away from acting to raise a family and race cars, this will be seen as a huge win for the actor. Warmly received and popular on streaming, if not at the box office, we can say that Fassbender is back, and hopefully, he gets more chances to do his thing.

Swinton, meanwhile, anchors the film’s finest stretch. As one of the assassins hired to kill the Killer, she is sitting down to a quiet meal alone in a fine-dining establishment when the Killer takes a seat across from her (along came a spider who sat down beside her). The dialogue is no great shakes, but Swinton and Fassbender sell the hell out of it. And for once, Fincher lets the actors lead, setting his camera down and just watching these two great performers work together. I could have watched 90 minutes of just this scene, but alas, there was more to be done, none of it equalling these heights.

Ultimately, maybe I’m not criticizing the movie Fincher made so much as the movie people will see. But, you would think the guy who made Fight Club would have learned to be a little more careful with his aim. As the Killer would know, the ricochet can be brutal.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary Short

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Documentary Short

The nominees are:

The Elephant Whisperers

Haulout

How Do You Measure a Year?

The Martha Mitchell Effect

Stranger at the Gate

Maybe it’s not fair, but I have long associated this category with a despair that beggars belief. I think it goes back to 2015, when the five nominated films covered, in no particular order: Ebola virus, Agent Orange victims, the Holocaust, racism in the criminal justice system, and honor killings in Pakistan. Each was well made and powerful, but it was a brutal 2 ½ hours at the movies. Anyway, it has been a joke between my wife and I that if we’re going to see the nominated doc shorts, someone better bring tissues.

Imagine our surprise, then, when this year’s crop of nominees failed to rip our hearts out and stomp on them. Instead, we got a batch of solid, intelligent movies that cover a wide range of important subjects with style and insight. I am not saying I have a problem with unrelenting sadness at the movies – quite the contrary; those are my favorite kinds of films – but at least for one season, this eclectic group offers a breath of fresh air for the category.

The Elephant Whisperers – That said, just because these films aren’t inherently dark and tragic doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ready to shed a few tears. Case in point, Kartiki Gonsalves’ film about an Indian couple that finds love while caring for orphaned baby elephants is a shot straight to the heart. Bomman and Belli work at a national park in southern India, and their special gift is the ability to raise baby elephants, who generally die when separated from their families.

We meet two adorable baby elephants during the film’s 39-minute runtime, and it would take a heart of stone not to fall instantly in love with both. They are truly miraculous. But, Gonsalves has more on her mind than cute baby animals. She explores the root cause of their abandonment – human encroachment on wild land – and the depth of emotions these creatures are capable of experiencing. They are more like us than they are not, and Gonsalves argues that if more of us realized that, maybe we wouldn’t treat them so shabbily.

Stranger at the Gate – I had mixed feelings about this film. On the one hand, director Joshua Seftel expertly uses the tricks and tropes of the documentary form to set the audience up for one story, then pulls the rug out from under us at the last minute. Seftel’s mastery of the narrative structure he is exploiting is quite a sight to behold. However, all of that formal trickery is ill-suited to the actual story of the film and ends up feeling more manipulative than imaginative.

The film is an exploration of the life and motives of former US Marine turned wannabe domestic terrorist Richard McKinney. Seftel interviews McKinney, his ex-wife, and step-daughter, as well as a number of members of the Islamic community center he planned to bomb. I’ll let the movie hang on to its surprises, but suffice it to say that by the time Seftel pulls his magic trick toward the end, he had already lost me. Not what you’re hoping for as a filmmaker trying to get across a message of peace, understanding, and forgiveness.

The Martha Mitchell Effect – The Martha Mitchell effect, the condition after which this film is named, refers to an instance in which a medical professional diagnoses someone as delusional despite that person’s fears being accurate and true. In the common vernacular, it’s gaslighting, or: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. If you watched the recent Julia Roberts miniseries, Gaslit, in which Roberts plays Martha Mitchell, you understand the origin of the term.

If you didn’t watch it – no shame intended; I didn’t either – Anne Alvergue’s and Debra McClutchy’s film covers the same territory in a scant 40 minutes. Martha Mitchell was the wife of US Attorney General John Mitchell during the Nixon Administration and was one of the early whistleblowers around the Watergate Scandal. The administration attempted to silence and discredit her, but she persevered to see Richard Nixon resign the presidency. The film does an excellent job of establishing Martha as a person outside of Watergate before touching on the scandal. It is fascinating, informative, and not just a little funny.

How Do You Measure a Year? – Experimental documentary filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt was nominated in this category last year for When We Were Bullies, a reflection on a bullying incident in which the director was involved when he was in the fifth grade. This time, he turns the camera on his own child for a fascinating consideration of what it is like to grow up and where all that time goes when children age. Starting when she turned 2, Rosenblatt filmed his daughter, Ella, answering the same set of questions every year on her birthday.

We watch Ella grow and change from a precocious toddler to a shy adolescent to a depressed teen to a mature young woman on the verge of adulthood. Rosenblatt never goes backward, nor does he ever take us out of the film to reflect on anything he presents. In this way, he emphasizes the slow march of time and the ways we can never get that time back. Ella will never be 2 years old again. She will never again be the 9-year-old belting out songs from Rent. But no matter how old she gets, she will always be connected to her family, and that, in the end, seems to be the point.

Haulout – My favorite of the bunch is also probably the least likely to win, though it has received accolades from a number of international film festivals where it has played, so all hope is not lost. This quietly haunting nature doc comes from brother and sister duo Maxim Arbugaev and Evgenia Arbugaeva, who lived with marine biologist Maxim Chakilev for three months as he observed the annual walrus migration at Cape Heart-Stone on the far northeastern tip of Russia. The first time the walruses surround the hut in which the trio lives, it is one of the strangest and most striking images in any movie this year. 

The walruses stop at this beach to take a break during their migration. Each year, fewer walruses survive the journey because as oceanic ice flows melt, there are fewer places for the walruses to rest on their trip. Many die from exhaustion. In 2020, the year this was filmed, record-high temperatures led to a record-high number of walrus deaths. The camera observes Chakilev as he tallies the dead. It is profoundly sad and serves as irrefutable evidence of our warming climate’s effect on the natural world, even in places we rarely see.

The final analysis

Netflix has had at least one nominee in this category in each of the past seven years, fielding two winners (The White Helmets in 2016 and Period. End of Sentence. in 2018). Last year, the streaming giant had three of the five nominated doc shorts, though all lost to the New York Times-produced The Queen of Basketball. This year, what I would call the two frontrunners both come from Netflix: The Elephant Whisperers and The Martha Mitchell Effect. 

Between the two, I would give the edge to The Elephant Whisperers, which has the benefit of a sweet, compelling love story between its two main human subjects, in addition to the beautiful elephant footage. A spoiler could come in the form of Stranger at the Gate, which has the whiff of political relevance, and voters may take to the central story arc, which I found questionable but some may find inspirational. For now, I’m sticking with my gut.

Will win: The Elephant Whisperers

Should win: Haulout

Should have been here: The Flagmakers

A note about my favorite snub: I had a chance to catch The Flagmakers, from directors Cynthia Wade and Sharon Liese, as part of a free National Geographic film series at the American Cinematheque. I found it a stirring dissection of what a symbol like the US flag can mean to the immigrants tasked with manufacturing it. Never shying away from difficult questions and hard truths about this nation, the film would have been a more than worthy inclusion on this list.

Next time: Documentary Feature

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Animated Feature

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Animated Feature

The nominees are:

Encanto

Flee

Luca

The Mitchells vs. the Machines

Raya and the Last Dragon

The Oscar for Animated Feature is in its 21st year, and a sameness is beginning to fall over the category. A couple studios – one studio, if we are being really honest – take up all the air in the room, and the rest are left to fight for scraps. The films nominated this year range from good to great and include one flat-out masterpiece, but the systemic problem remains.

Looking at the numbers, in the 20 years prior to this year, Pixar Animation Studios has garnered 15 nominations and 11 wins, more than half of all Animated Feature Oscars. One of the years it lost, it lost to itself (last year, when Soul bested Onward). DreamWorks Animation has had 13 nominations and two wins, while prior to this year, Disney has been responsible for 11 nominations and three wins. Combined, those three studios – and Disney now owns Pixar – represent 80 percent of all wins in the category. It is not a coincidence that they are three of the biggest animation brands in the world.

One could argue that makes them the class of the animation world and that they are, therefore, deserving of the accolades. In many cases, this may be true, particularly when it comes to some of the Pixar winners. However, what we are really talking about is money. These movies have big budgets, they make boatloads of money at the box office, and their studios can afford pricy awards campaigns. It is often by pure luck an independent animated film is produced at all.

Which brings us to the newest player in the animated feature game: Netflix. Three years running now, Netflix has had a nominee in the category, and I expect the streaming service to continue to compete for this award as long as it has interest in doing so. In the previous two years, Pixar has taken home the prize (Toy Story 4 and Soul), but the Pixar entry this year might be the least likely winner, while the Netflix film has a real chance. Perhaps, this is a changing of the guard, but it feels pretty lateral, as Netflix simply represents another major studio with nothing but money to throw at the problem of winning this award. 

Encanto – One of two Disney nominees this year, Encanto caught fire over the holidays as soon as it dropped on Disney+, and it has not looked back. The conversation about the film stretches beyond its chart-topping soundtrack and ear-wormy No. 1 hit single. Viewers are responding to its tale of generational trauma and forgiveness. Its cultural specificity has brought it much love from the communities it depicts, and its universal themes of love and acceptance have brought audiences from around the globe to this movie.

Set in Colombia, Encanto centers around a young girl, Mirabel, who tries to keep her magical family intact as their magic runs out. They have suffered greatly in the past, and the family matriarch will do anything to prevent them from suffering again, even if her actions threaten to tear them apart. It is beautifully directed by Jared Bush, Byron Howard, and Charise Castro Smith and features amazing songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a stellar voice cast led by Stephanie Beatriz and María Cecilia Botero.

Flee – Encanto would be the best nominated film in most years, but this year, that distinction belongs to this Danish documentary about escaping a war-torn Afghanistan. Flee is the first film ever to be nominated in all three of the Animated, Documentary, and International Feature categories at the Oscars, and there could not be a more deserving film to hold that honor. From director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Flee is an absolute marvel, the flat-out masterpiece I referred to above.

The movie uses animation to bring to life the story of horrors and bravery told by its subject, Amin, whose true identity is withheld to protect him and his family. As a gay boy growing up in Afghanistan at the start of the revolution, the dangers are many for Amin and his family, and animation makes these threats visceral. We do not have to imagine Amin’s terror. We are allowed to see it, in full color, in a way that puts us right there with our true-life hero.

The Mitchells vs. the Machines – The cool-kid pick, directed by Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe and produced by the Into the Spider-Verse team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, this is a movie by film lovers, about film lovers, and for film lovers. It is a family comedy dressed in the garb of a techno-apocalyptic action-adventure film. If that sounds like it crosses a lot of genres, it certainly does, and it does basically all of them well.

The film follows the titular Mitchell clan as they attempt to survive a Terminator-style rise of the machines. The main character, Katie (voiced by Abbi Jacobson of Broad City fame), is an aspiring filmmaker looking to break away from her family and become her own person. The general beats of the story will be familiar to anyone who has watched a lot of coming-of-age stories directed at kids, but the joy of the film lies in its specifics and its attention to detail. Not to mention, the animation is absolutely breathtaking.

Luca – The Pixar entry this year, directed by Enrico Casarosa, Luca is a lovely little story of boyhood and friendship and being yourself but which feels like it came out about a hundred years ago. Released in June 2021 on Disney+, Luca did what so many streaming films and shows do: It dominated the conversation for about a week after it was released, then quickly vanished as the cycle of conversation on the internet moved on.

That is no fault of or knock on the film, but rather an indication of the direction the movie industry is going, even as we transition out of the pandemic – or potentially into the next phase of it. Ten years ago, Luca would have been released wide on 3,000 screens, it would have made $200 million, and it would have been talked about and celebrated for months. We don’t live in that world anymore, and it is hard not to be a little nostalgic for a time when a good film would find an audience and generate real buzz.

Raya and the Last Dragon – This is the other Disney film in the bunch, and it came out even before Luca, released to theaters in March 2021, right as vaccines started rolling out and cinemas started to reopen. It made a little more than $130 million, and in another time, probably would have been a bigger hit. That said, directors Carlos López Estrada and Don Hall walk a fine line with the film’s story, and it does not always work.

Where Encanto succeeds in placing its story in a specifically Colombian context, Raya and the Last Dragon stumbles in attempting to be all things to all people. It is set in a fictional, vaguely East Asian land that is some parts Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and in that lack of specificity, it loses sight of the themes it truly wants to explore. The voice cast, including Kelly Marie Tran and Awkwafina, is fun, and the action is well executed, but one wishes the filmmakers had had a little more courage in their convictions.

The final analysis

Unless Flee can rally a lot of broad Academy support and sneak up from behind to take the prize, this really comes down to two movies: Encanto or The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Encanto is the movie of the moment, popular with everyone and very much in the zeitgeist right here and right now. The Mitchells vs. the Machines, on the other hand, taps into that part of the Academy that loves to reward artists for talking about artists. 

In the past nine years, only once has the Animated Feature Oscar gone to a studio other than Disney or Pixar. That was in 2018, when Into the Spider-Verse beat out The Incredibles 2 (Pixar) and Ralph Breaks the Internet (Disney), so Lord and Miller know a little about beating the House of Mouse. Still, Encanto is everywhere, and it is catching fire at the perfect time with ballots in voters’ hands. Netflix will get this Oscar someday, but for now, Disney is king of the animated castle.

Will win: Encanto

Should win: Flee

Next time: Best International Feature

Year in Review: A journey through the streaming landscape

At one point or another in 2020, my wife and I were subscribers to 11 different streaming services. As we embark on 2021, we have narrowed it down to six “essentials,” or as essential as on-demand television and movies could be considered. This is the landscape of home viewing now. It has been for some time, and the quarantine has served only to speed up this process. 

But, I do not need to do a state of the union on the streaming industry. Smarter, better-informed, better-connected people than I have done that and more. Instead, I thought a more personal reflection might be in order. After all, most of us do not engage with our home viewing as part of a broad social and cultural trend, but rather as an individualized entertainment experience. In short, most of us are just scrolling, looking for the next watch.

I watched 557 films in 2020, the vast majority on streaming services, which is a first for me. In every year prior, I would guess the majority of watches came from home video or theater-going. I suspect this was more of a tipping point than a one-year anomaly. As I write this, it is the 5th of January, and I have watched nine movies this year: all of them on streaming. It is an odd new reality after I spent so much of my life dedicated to physical media.

My shelves are full of books and I would much rather pull one down than reach for my Kindle. I much prefer reading articles in magazines to online. Perhaps it is the old print journalist in me. Things feel more real, more comprehensible when you can hold them in your hand. Never mind the 1,000 or so DVDs I treat as precious, shareable artifacts, filled with the knowledge of other worlds.

It makes me a little sad, of course, as all obsolescence is wont to do. Yet, if you had told the college-age me -- that 18-year-old student renting the maximum seven movies a week from the video store -- that he would have access to a sizable portion of the Criterion library with a couple clicks for a nominal fee, he would have been thrilled. Such is the push and pull of progress.

The Criterion Channel truly is among the most amazing gifts to the cinephile world. It essentially began life as FilmStruck, the Turner Classic Movies streaming service in 2016. When it shut down at the end of 2018, it was a blow to film fans everywhere. Its re-emergence in 2019 as a standalone service was a tremendous boon to the streaming world, and it is not a stretch to say Criterion played a major role in getting me through 2020.

The best of world cinema was right at my fingertips, and I tried to take advantage as well as I could: from Victor Sjöström’s silent classic The Phantom Carriage to Russian war masterpieces The Cranes Are Flying and The Ascent; Japanese masters such as Ozu, Kurosawa, and Kobayashi to Finnish iconoclast Aki Kaurismäki; films from every continent short of the Antarctic. My watchlist on the site is 150 movies strong, and it only scratches the surface.

Daisies, available on Criterion Channel and HBO Max

In May, HBO made its oddly confusing switchover to HBO Max. It was not the world’s greatest roll out, but the service itself is tremendous. It features a heavy rotation of stone-cold classics (including many Criterion films, mostly part of the Warner library), as well as an array of popular modern hits for anyone looking to fill in the gaps of their pop culture knowledge. If it sounds like I am trying to sell you HBO Max, I am not, but times are tough, and if you have $15 a month to put toward your streaming budget, this is where I would put it.

Of course, we made fair use of Amazon Prime, which is great if you want to rent movies you cannot find anywhere else and which makes it easy to add premium channels (such as Starz or IFC). Hulu and Netflix are still good, though Hulu is sometimes unnavigable and Netflix feels too bloated for its own good. We mostly keep Disney+ around for access to Hamilton, but we should probably just buy a DVD.

Ultimately, I am an old-school guy. My wife likes to joke that I was born middle-aged. That has never bothered me, although the closer I approach to middle age, the stranger that feels. I like my DVDs and I like going to the movies. That is why I founded this site. Movies just feel different in a theater, on a big screen. Nothing could replace that. The streaming revolution is great, and I am 100 percent here for it, but if I could take every dollar I spend on streaming every month and pay to see just one of these classics at the cinema, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Top 10 older movies I watched on streaming this year (listed alphabetically):

The Ascent, directed by Larisa Shepitko (Criterion Channel)

An Autumn Afternoon, directed by Yasujiro Ozu (Criterion Channel)

Le Bonheur, directed by Agnès Varda (Criterion Channel)

The Cranes Are Flying, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov (Criterion Channel)

Daisies, directed by Vera Chytilová (HBO Max)

Hara Kiri, directed by Masaki Kobayashi (Criterion Channel)

Le Havre, directed by Aki Kaurismäki (Criterion Channel)

Malcolm X, directed by Spike Lee (Netflix)

The Shop on Main Street, directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos (Criterion Channel)

Z, directed by Costa-Gavras (Criterion Channel)

Now Watch This: Assault on Precinct 13

By Sean Patrick Leydon

Contributor

The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by a group of natives.

The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, “Indians. Indians all around! Well, Tonto, ol’ Kimosavee, it looks like we’re finished.”

Tonto replies: “What you mean … ‘We?’”

– Mad Magazine No. 38 (1958)

Modern action films are much more predictable than their predecessors. With many action movies containing similar pacing and messages, the genre has become thoroughly homogenized. What makes Saving Private Ryan feel similar to Mission Impossible or other action films? They bombard the senses with big, flashy action sequences, and they pull at many of the same heartstrings: family, honor, respect, martial prowess, patriotism, etc.

Today, we’re taking a look at John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. It covers a lot of genres: cop flick, drama, thriller, cult. These days, we’d call it action, but now, that implies top-tier CGI budgets and the slickest editing known to man. Assault is different. Its moments of violence are more sickening and human. The feeling of the film is akin to Crash being bludgeoned over the head with Night of the Living Dead – a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of gang violence and racial tension.

There’s a trend in recent action films to ignore a character's ethnicity until it can become the subject of a shallow joke. I see this often when action films have a gang of heroes from racially diverse backgrounds, as in the remake of The Italian Job when Mark Wahlberg introduces his crew. We meet a crew of stylin’ white men with cool specialties and one black guy who likes to blow stuff up. It’s easy to pick on a flashy action movie, but do you remember that one time in Full Metal Jacket? When the troops are negotiating with a prostitute and the black soldier becomes the butt of the “too beaucoup” joke? Amid the horror of war and mounds of existential searching, Kubrick manages to find room for a well-hung black man joke.

There is a different atmosphere in Assault. The actors are different shades, but race is addressed in more serious and realistic ways. As Ethan, a black lieutenant, familiarizes himself with the police station he just took command of, the white receptionist Leigh asks him if he would like coffee. As Ethan accepts her offer, she asks, “Black?” to which he responds with a smile and says, “For over 30 years.” The joke falls on its ass with her. There’s no ribaldry. The conversation just continues as they get to know each other.

Another aspect that sets Assault apart is a sense of equality between the law and the outlaw. Criminals and police are both capable of bumbling stupidity or impressive insight into the real world, and this holds true in Carpenter’s vision. This pleases me to no end. The relentless othering of antagonists in film grosses me out. The distillation of conflict into a Smart Good Guy-Dumb Bad Guy binary is neither inclusive of what we observe in life nor conducive to good storytelling. Still, this staid form of conflict has become the expectation of the action genre.

The film opens with a negative depiction of police. As the film progresses, we meet characters we like and dislike on either side of the law. Conflicts blossom among many characters and groups, and we encounter the kind of classic inter-group conflict that arises in every zombie siege flick.

On a filmmaking level, parts of the film read as both more brutal and quainter than other similar films. Some of this is due to the inventiveness of Carpenter, while some of it is due to the era in which it was made. Of the many subtle aspects of Assault that set it apart from the action genre, my favorite is the treatment death receives. When characters die in action movies, we are accustomed to melodrama: “Tell my wife thing X,” or pulling the pin on the grenade, whatever. There’s a brief second life in which dying characters set things right in the world. In Assault, when you die, your ruined body falls to the ground – because you are dead, and that is what dead people do.

Mad Magazine No. 38 (1958); drawing by E. Nelson Bridwell

We’re familiar with rhythm in action films as simple as: The terrorists did X, so the commandos must complete Y. The sense of foreboding that Assault manages is largely due to the mysterious motivations of its silent antagonists. The result is that the film feels like less of a gimme and more layered with dread than other films. The violence depicted in Assault is random and chaotic. In action films, the main draw is the risk of death and how our hero overcomes it, but the hero is always aware of the source of the danger.

In Assault, characters die in the middle of mundane chores, unaware of the risks they were running being in an action film. Some of the tensest action occurs when Leigh needs to free prisoners so they can help fight off invading gang members. The pacing and editing do no let up. Everything needs to happen at exactly the right time, or our heroes die. The sequence brings together all of the film’s major themes – race, the threat of violence, the commonalities between cops and criminals – and the ultimate message is interesting. Teamwork is important. At one point, Leigh turns to Wells, a prisoner she has freed who is tempted to make a run for it. She says: “No sides to it. We’re all together.” A far cry indeed from “What you mean … ‘We?’”

Sean Patrick Leydon is a photographer, artist, and contributor to Last Cinema Standing. You can check out more of his work at nonotthought.blogspot.com.