A Fist Full of Dollars
I'm trying to work my way through the trilogy as I've only ever seen the third movie. It's obviously not as good as as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but it also doesn't require an entire evening to watch coming in at around an hour and forty minutes. Eastwood is excellent as the cold calculating gun slinger playing two sides off against each other for his own gain. Also his hair is phenomenal. Overall it's a good way to spend an hour and a half. It's some bad men outsmarting and outshooting each other.
7/10
Project A
I think I saw this once back in the 90's and for some reason didn't like it much back then, but upon watching it again it's actually great. The stunt work is absolutely phenomenal, the bar fight/kung fu battle/slap stick comedy section was amazing. The bike chase is a work of genius. The stunt work is ridiculously good. How in the name of feck is Jackie Chan still alive? The slow motion fall from the clock tower where he lands on his head was bad enough, but then they showed a replay and it looked very much like he did it several times because those were not the same fall. Yuen Baio's agility is unreal. I remember seeing an interview where someone said Sammo before a scene told them to hit him as hard as possible and not hold back because he would do the same in return to make the fight look better. There were a few times in this film where Sammo was just levelling people, one in particular where he drop kicked someone in the back and you could tell it fecking hurt. There seemed to be a noticeable difference between him hitting people and the others hitting them.
The story is pure ridiculous 80's Hong Kong nonsense, but it's all in service to the action.
8/10
Extraction
A bit like Project A in that the story is pure nonsense and doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, but it's in service to 2 hours of almost non-stop action. Most of which is very good. Chris Helmsworth is a drunk dude hired to rescue a drug dealers son by another dude. There's a woman involved and some other dudes. So half the city gets shot up, car chases ensue, there's brutal hand to hand and knife combat. Explosions and crashes galore. It's a lot of fun, but the story bits were a bit pants and it could have used a bit of a trim to the run time.
Some of the explosions and crashes looked a bit computer generated. It felt at times like it was supposed to be a movie for the Indian special forces guy(who was awesome), but then they decided they needed an international lead to sell it outside of India. That might not be what happened and just a weird way of saying the Indian special forces guy felt like he could have carried this film just as well as Helmsworth if given the chance. I dunno his name and looking it up feels like effort that I'm not prepared to make.
7/10
