High Risk

You’ve probably heard of ‘diss tracks’ – hip hop songs where the primary aim is to verbally attack or ‘disrespect’ another artist. 

For years, these songs were seen as mundane exercises in put-downs and point-scoring – bouts of schoolyard posturing from showy characters with brittle egos. But then one verbal joust between Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls sparked a series of shootings that left both men dead, and suddenly the jingly japes didn’t seem quite so hi-larious. 

Still, the tradition did live on in other ways. And High Risk (1995) can lay dubious claim to being an actual ‘diss film’. The moviemaker behind it – renowned Hong Kong producer, Wong Jing – really did carefully shape the movie’s content to construct a new (and unwelcome) orifice for legendary martial artist, Jackie Chan, while also eviscerating his action man credentials. 

The score-settling result is a savage – and surprisingly effective – send-up of the cinematic chop-socky star. What you might call a kung fu kick in the reputational goolies. 

The plot 

Frankie Lane is a martial arts movie star famous for doing all his own stunts. (Remind you of anyone?) But in reality – or the reality of High Risk - Frankie can’t be bothered with the rough stuff, so secretly delegates all the dangerous stunts to his bodyguard. Ouch. 

Unfortunately for Frankie, an ambitious news reporter has cottoned on to his fraud and is threatening a television expose. Then, just when it seemed his day couldn’t get any worse, our hero finds himself trapped in a skyscraper that’s been taken over by terrorists. Crikey! 

The backstory to the beef 

To say the Frankie Lane spoof of Jackie Chan is a bit ‘on the nose’ would be a gross understatement. (For a western equivalent, imagine watching a movie about a musclebound Austrian coward who’s scared of guns and loud noises, and called Harold Schwitzaneuger. You get the idea.) But why is everyone’s favourite, rubbery-faced risk-taker being portrayed in such an unfavourable light? 

The answer lies in a movie that Wong Jing and Chan made together a couple of years earlier: City Hunter (1993). Envisioned as a triumphant collaboration between two titans of Hong Kong cinema, the production quickly deteriorated into furious rows and on-set shouting matches – and Chan even tried to get Wong booted off the movie. 

Despite their feuding, the project did get finished – even if it was to no one’s satisfaction. (Years later, a still disgruntled Chan described it as the worst film of his career.) For Wong though, revenge was a dish best served in celluloid. And when he made High Risk – a formulaic Die Hard knock-off – a couple of years later, he saw an opportunity to get even with his former foe. 

A study in character assassination 

Playing the role of Frankie, Jacky Cheung presents an instantly recognisable caricature of Chan. With his mop-top hairstyle, bumbling manner and exaggerated facial expressions, he neatly skewers Chan’s clownish screen persona. Worse, Frankie is portrayed as a womanising drunk and coward no longer willing to do fight scenes or his own stunts, due to years of soft living. Miaow! 

It's raucous stuff and, for the most part, hugely enjoyable. But there’s one slight problem: Wong’s obsession with settling an old score ends up unbalancing the rest of the story. And that’s because Cheung’s Chan-baiting character, who dominates most of the screen time, isn’t actually the film’s hero. 

That role falls to Jet Li, who plays Frankie’s bodyguard and unofficial stunt double. So, it’s the pint-sized pugilist who leads the hostage rescue, does the heroics, and ultimately kills the villain – you know, standard movie hero stuff. But his character is continually side-lined throughout the film, so Wong can pour yet more merde on the Chan character’s head. To illustrate: think of Die Hard’s terrorist negotiating yuppie sleazeball Ellis. Now, just imagine if he had been given as much screen time as Bruce Willis, and you’ll see the problem. 

High Risk, High Reward 

Still, this is a minor quibble about what is unquestionably a wildly entertaining film. Ultimately, Wong presents grandly staged action sequences, cartoonish villains, and a deliciously acerbic critique of a cinema superstar. It’s a spectacular feat. 

And it’s worth dwelling for a moment on the singular nature of the filmmaker’s accomplishment. Despite being full of preening narcissists and swivel-eyed sociopaths (‘Hello, Harvey!’), the movie industry resolutely keeps its axe-grinding out of public view, instead presenting a vision of a world where everyone is super-fun to work with and simply a ‘dah-ling’. 

In that context, it took enormous chutzpah for Wong to make a major motion picture which had the explicit purpose of exacting personal revenge against an A-list colossus of the industry. That’s putting some serious cojones on display… 

Exploding helicopter action 

While Wong’s primary interest was clearly in obliterating Jackie Chan’s reputation, it’s nice to see that he also found time to do some truly horrific damage to a whirlybird. 

Here’s what happens: with the terrorists in control of the skyscraper, Jet Li hijacks a police helicopter – which of course, he can effortlessly pilot. As he ascends to the floor where the hostages are being held, the villains open fire, so our hero makes an improbable leap from the chopper onto a window ledge. The result? The pilotless copter crashes through the window, exploding multiple times as the wrecked fuselage skids across the floor. 

Artistic merit 

Excessive, extravagant, entertaining and extremely unlikely. It’s a bravura scene, in which the helicopter not only explodes multiple times, but we also get to see a baddie cut clean in half by a rotor blade. Huzzah! Added bonus: the viewer is treated to a frankly weird ‘point of view’ shot from the helicopter as it careers out of control and in flames. Encore, Mr Wong! Encore! 

Exploding helicopter innovation 

We’ve previously seen helicopters crash through the inside of buildings – in Heaven’s Fire, Golgo 13: The Professional and American Heist. But this one is a real doozy. 

Interesting fact 

Such was the aggravation caused by High Risk that Jet Li subsequently felt moved to apologise to Jackie Chan for his involvement in the film. 

The Expendables 3

It had to happen eventually: the Frankenstein of Hollywood has gone and made a big lurching Franken-movie.

Little Sylvester Stallone has always looked a bit cartoonish, and in recent years it’s become increasingly hard to tell him apart from his own Spitting Image puppet.

That sloping, strokey mouth. Those freakish, pumped-to-the-point-of-bursting muscles. (Thanks, human growth hormone!) The surgically smooth, semi-melted-waxwork face. Whatever’s going on with that tar-black blanket on his head we’re supposed to think is his hair. The platform shoes so stacked they’d make Bono blush. He’s an absolute riot.

And with The Expendables 3 (2014), he’s finally made a film that is as odd, over-stuffed and unlikely looking as himself.

Bursting at the seams with a parade of famous faces in a mind-frazzling array of cameos, this bloated sequel to a sequel becomes swollen to the point where it no longer resembles a normal film. The movie’s poster alone features 17 – yes, 17 – stars. That’s not so much a movie poster as a committee meeting. Or, given the result is such total wank, a bukkake party.

At heart, the first two Expendables movies worked because they followed a simple formula – build an ensemble cast, then add a carefully chosen smattering of guest stars.

But one gets the sense that ‘less is more’ possibly isn’t a dictum by which Sly leads his life. Thinking mathematically (and counting on his fingers), the old boy probably really did think that having literally twice as many characters in the new movie would make it twice as good. As opposed to shit.

The plot

Sly and his gang are getting old. At a certain point, all the hair dye and face lifts in the world can’t hide the fact that half this doddering lot are older than the cast of Last of the Summer Wine. So, after sacking the original Expendables crew, our ageing action star recruits a bunch of young, fresh-faced whippersnappers to take their place. (Cue a crazed, carousel-like introduction of new ‘characters’).

The first mission for the new team is to kidnap a notorious arms dealer (Mel Gibson) who also happens to be Stallone’s arch nemesis. Naturally, the assignment goes tits-up: the Italian Stallion barely escapes with his life and all his eager pups are captured.

With no time to introduce yet more characters, Stallone is forced to reunite with his old buddies (Statham, Lundgren, et al) in order to rescue the newbies who made such a Horlicks of their very first mission.

Will Sly save his kindergarten comrades? Can he settle his grudge with Gibson? Have all the elder Expendables taken their daily aspirin? Oh, the tension…

Who’s in this?

Frankly, with a cast this size, it’d be quicker to tell you who isn’t in this film. But here goes. First, the usual gang of Expendables are all in attendance: Stallone, Statham, Lundgren, Crews, Li, Schwarzenegger and Couture. Tick.

Wesley Snipes: Keeping the receipts this time

They’re joined on this outing by Nineties action also-ran Wesley Snipes, for whom this movie was something of a comeback effort following an unfortunate two-year spell in Sing-Sing for tax evasion. In the hi-larious opening scene, our Wes is – nudge-nudge, wink-wink – sprung from a top security prison by our jowly heroes. Ho, ho. See what they did there? Snipes really was in prison in real life, and now they’re showing him locked up in the movie and…oh, you did get it. Sorry.

Also relishing the opportunity of a little light career rehabilitation is Mel Gibson. Work has understandably been a tad scarce for Mad Mel in recent years, due to him being so busy with his alcoholic, wife-beating, anti-semitic and homophobic commitments. (Incidentally, if we’ve left anything out, forgive us; it’s hard to keep up with Mel’s misdemeanours).

And the additions don’t end there. There are walk-on roles for a clearly bored Harrison Ford, a mugging Antonio Banderas, a redundant Kelsey Grammer and walking Clearasil advert Robert Davi as the uber-villain. Phew!

Mercifully, there is one noticeable absentee: Bruce Willis. Despite appearing in the previous two entries, the chrome-domed diva was promptly dropped after demanding $1m dollars a day to work on the movie.

“Where’s Church?” asks Stallone in a pointed reference to Bolshie Bruce’s character. “He’s out the picture,” replies Harrison Ford, winking at the camera. It says a lot that this is not even close to being the crassest line of dialogue in the movie.

Excess all areas

While that outline of the cast may have been exhausting, it wasn’t exhaustive.

Human punching bag Rhonda Rousey

As brighter readers will have noticed, Exploding Helicopter hasn’t yet mentioned the baby Expendables – which includes Twilight heart-throb Kellan Lutz and MMA badass Rhonda Rousey (these were the days before too much lounging around movie sets transformed her from an undefeated cage marauder into a human punch bag).

As you may have guessed by now, there are a lot of ‘main’ characters. And therein lies the film’s problem. There are simply too many people on screen, waiting around to deliver their one line of unconvincing dialogue. There’s no plot to speak of, just a succession of scenes crowbarring another actor into the action.

At times The Expendables 3 feels like watching a Royal Variety show. A succession of famous faces take centre stage for a couple of minutes, perform a potted version of their most famous act, then gladly disappear off into the wings. Had Bruce Forsyth suddenly come tap-dancing across the screen, it wouldn’t have been too much of a surprise. And he’s probably younger than half of them.

Exploding helicopter action

Given the film’s whole-hearted commitment to excess, you won’t be fazed to learn there are no fewer than three exploding helicopters to report.

One chopper bites the dust early in the film, always a cheering sign for aerial conflagration groupies. Having completed the daring Snipes rescue raid, and with no further use for the whirlybird, Stallone gives the viewer a cheap thrill by triggering an explosive charge and blowing it up.

The next chopper fireball scene, which takes place during the climatic action sequence, admittedly comes as quite a surprise. When two enemy choppers close in to take out our heroes, who should suddenly appear expertly piloting a helicopter but, er, Harrison Ford. Before you ask: Yes, that is the same Harrison Ford who, in real life, crashed a plane onto a golf course two years ago and, earlier this month, almost hit a commercial airliner carrying more than 100 people. Was this really the best casting decision? Maybe in the next instalment, Mel will be playing a gay rabbi who volunteers at a women’s shelter.

Step away from the controls Mr Ford

Luckily, contrary to popular rumour, fiction is way, way stranger than the truth. Because once the cameras are whirring, it turns out our Harrison is an excellent pilot. First, he effortlessly shoots down one whirlybird using his machineguns.

Then, pursued by the second baddie, old Han Solo deftly weaves in-between the giant chimney stacks of an old industrial factory – going perilously close to certain death – until his opponent loses control and crashes explosively into one of the vents.

And at no point during this scene does Harrison crash onto a large open green space nor almost fly into a crowded Boeing 737. Aren’t movies wonderful?

Artistic merit

A definite case of quantity over quality. The chopper fireballs are done with embarrassingly poor CGI. In a film with a near $100m budget, it’s inexcusable. Having said that, chopper fireball cliché fans will enjoy the classic hero shot of the Expendables coolly walking away from an exploding whirlybird.

(Note: The movie’s final conflagration once more brings up a perennial bugbear of this website: why are movie chopper pilots incapable of avoiding entirely observable buildings?)

Favourite line

When Schwarzenegger turns up in a helicopter to evacuate our heroes, he gets to rather predictably yell: “Let's get to the CHOPPA!”

It’s a groaner, but you can’t help but enjoy it.

Review by: Jafo

Cradle 2 The Grave

Rap-fu? Kung-hop? Hip-hop chop socky? While there isn’t yet an official name for this peculiar action movie sub-genre, you’ll doubtless know the type.

Yup, we’re talking about movies such as Exit Wounds or Romeo Must Die. Films where, through barely plausible plot contrivance, a noted martial arts star is teamed with a rapper.

On the surface, these double acts appear to make little sense. But look deeper and you’ll find a cunning logic behind these oddball shotgun marriages.

Your average martial artist, while expert in unarmed combat, tends to murder dialogue as easily as an opponent. As actors, they really should let their feet and fists do the talking.

What’s needed then is a motor-mouthed sidekick. Someone whose non-stop stream of verbal diarrhoea will distract the audience from their partner’s lack of thespian chops. Less Enter The Dragon; more Yo, Bum-Rush The Rapper.

All of which makes Cradle 2 The Grave (2003) – which pairs martial arts legend Jet Li with hardcore rap king DMX – a perfect example of the form.

Trouble starts when jewel thief DMX steals a consignment of rare diamonds. Unfortunately, a ruthless arms dealer (Mark Dacascos) wants the gems too, as – wouldn’t you know it? – they’re also apparently the secret ingredient for a deadly new super weapon. You never get that at H.M Samuels.

Also on the trail of the stones is a Taiwanese cop (Jet Li) who wants to stop them falling into the wrong hands. So when Dacascos kidnaps DMX’s daughter, it’s time for the rapper and martial artist to buddy up and knuckle up.

Can our odd couple heroes rescue the imperilled tot? Have they any hope of stopping the super weapon threat? And will their fractious love-hate relationship blossom into one of grudging mutual respect? (Exploding Helicopter doesn’t like to spoil things, but if you’re after a genre convention-busting movie maybe best look elsewhere.)

The wisdom of pairing the beat-em-up star with the beat-master becomes apparent the minute Jet Li opens his mouth. His line readings are as flat as a pancake. The world may be facing global Armageddon but Li makes it sound as worrying as missing a dental appointment.

Nuff respec’, then, to DMX for livening things up with his garrulous ‘gangsta’ persona. All bling, muscle and sneers, atti-tood emanates from him like that famous glow from the old Ready Brek adverts. Dis muvver been taking care of bizness! For reals.

It’s not a subtle schtick by any stretch, but the rapper’s angry histrionics add much-needed pep to proceedings.

Even still, it seems the producers were in no mood to take any chances. And as the ancient Chinese proverb (possibly) has it: why have one sassy loudmouth when you can have half a dozen?

Perhaps familiar with the rest of Li’s Hollywood output (the diminutive actor’s charm and quirky energy seem to evaporate in English-language movies), the movie-makers have stuffed the cast with more fast-talking wise-asses than you could twerk your money-maker at.

As DMX’s gang members, Anthony Anderson and Gabrielle Union add bountiful levels of live-wire sass. And just in case there was still a danger of insufficient jibber-jabber, Tom Arnold turns up as a loquacious ‘Mr Fix-it’. (This, naturally, is a thinly veiled reprise of the irritating gob-on-legs act he’s been doing on-and-off since trademarking it in True Lies.)

At times, there’s so much shouting, in-your-face posturing and pushing on show, you half-expect Jerry Springer to spring up and calm everyone down, before delivering a ‘heartfelt’ moral message to the screen.

Unsurprisingly, amid such verbal overkill, wee, silent Jet runs the risk of becoming an anonymous presence altogether. After all, the only things he has that can talk are his fists. Happily, the producers – realising that no-one wants the star to become lost in his own film – throw in loads of improbably-conceived dust-ups.

Perhaps the finest example, in a film filled to bursting with unlikely confrontations, is a spurious cage-fighting contest, which is entertainingly (and entirely unconvincingly) crowbarred into the plot.

A similarly over-the-top approach is taken towards the rest of the film’s action sequences. A quad bike chase through the streets (and eventually across the rooftops) of Los Angeles is an exciting example of this extravagance. So too is the finale where we treated to not one, but two exploding helicopters.

Events move to a small airport (always a favourite location for an action movie showdown). With his nefarious plans scuppered, Dacascos attempts to make an escape in a chopper. Fortunately, Tom Arnold has also turned up in a tank. (Don’t ask: it’s just that kind of film).

With Dacascos about to disappear into the skies, Arnold fires the tank cannon. The shell hits the chopper’s tail rotor which, in the time-honoured tradition of the exploding helicopter genre, causes the whirlybird to spin round wildly before crashing into the ground and exploding.

But wait. In keeping with the film’s bling-bling approach to excess, the first explosion of Dacascos’s chopper causes another nearby helicopter to blow-up. Cradle 2 The Grave? We call it Chopper To The Grave.

Artistic merit

The first helicopter is a bit of a swizz. Despite causing a sizeable fiery eruption when it crashes, the chopper remains curiously intact. Well, not that curiously, as Dacascos has yet to have his chop-socky showdown with Jet Li, so needs to be able to crawl out of the wreckage.

But with no major characters on-board, the second helicopter explodes with such force that the entire chassis is thrust into the sky before falling back to earth. We’re given plenty of time to savour the moment as the sequence is loving played out in slow motion and repeated several times for our delectation.

Exploding helicopter innovation

While not unique, this is an extremely rare example of a tank being used to destroy a helicopter.

Rambo III (1988) includes the earliest example we’ve seen, where the crazed General Zayan pilots one into a tank driven by Sylvester Stallone in one of the most gloriously over-the-top games of chicken ever put on the big screen.

Other examples can be seen in the film Courage Under Fire (1996) and XXX2: The Next Level.

Do passengers survive?

As already mentioned, Mark Dacascos crawls out of the wreckage though goodness knows how. Perhaps the villainous leather suit that he wears throughout has fire retardant qualities.

Positives

Cradle 2 The Grave has a ripe ridiculousness that makes it hard to resist. Logic and reality play no part in this film. Things happen for the sole reason that the audience may be entertained by them. And you know what? That's no bad thing.

Negatives

Martial arts fans presumably spent the whole film waiting for the showdown between Jet Li and Mark Dacascos. But when their fight finally comes we can’t enjoy it, as the scene is choppily filmed and the action keeps cutting to battles other characters are engaged in. Such shoddy editing ruins the flow of the duel and what should have been a highlight ends up as a damp squib.

Favourite line

Someone enquires of Jet Li: “What are you? Some kind of kung-fu James Bond?”

Interesting fact

Mark Dacascos was chosen as the villain for this film following a poll on Jet Li’s personal website asking which martial arts star his fans would most like to see him fight.

Review by: Jafo