Tag: Action and adventure

“The Specialist,” directed by Luis Llosa

specialist

By Ray Sawhill

“The Specialist” is moronic and inept, and it put me in a very good mood. It’s an attempt at marrying a woman’s romance to an action-adventure plot. Sylvester Stallone is a bomb expert with something awful in his past. He’s in Miami, living the embittered former-soldier-of-fortune lifestyle — i.e., bunking down in an abandoned warehouse, practicing martial arts, playing intently with lethal gizmos that beep and make the camera cut to anxious close-ups. Sharon Stone is an enchantress who talks him into a risky job. Her parents were murdered when she was but a girl, and she wants Stallone to blow away the Latino gangster family responsible. Rod Steiger, really working that accent, is the ancient Latino patriarch, Eric Roberts the dumb stud son. The question is: can Sly and Sharon get over clinging to their pain and learn to trust each other?

The film has a luxury-resort quasi-glamour; it seems to have been made on sets that didn’t make the cut for De Palma’s “Scarface.” The visual scheme is tropicalismo: candy pink and neon blue, cabanas and palm trees. The script, by Alexandra Seros, shows a woman’s touch, if not perhaps to its best advantage. Stone to Stallone: “So that’s it? We just walk away? Forever?”

The director, Luis Llosa, may be bereft of filmmaking skills, but that doesn’t stop him from seeing everything in legendary terms. Steiger is unspeakably powerful; James Woods, playing Steiger’s Mr. Fixit and Stallone’s nemesis, unutterably unprincipled; Stallone indescribably masterful; Stone unthinkably beautiful. The bad guys smoke cigars to show how corrupt they are. John Barry contributes an appropriately excitable score. During one scene, the triumphal-yet-ominous horns and strings call up images in the mind of mounted lawmen arriving in town for the final showdown. What’s actually on-screen is Stallone carrying a bag of groceries.

Although watching Stallone struggle with his feelings is like watching cement being mixed, he’s surrounded by world-class hams. Eric Roberts is a sleek, spoiled viper. Woods wears domineering, double-breasted sports jackets, and throws a couple of fits as mean and funny as anything in “Pulp Fiction.” Both are as meek tyros beside Steiger, who chews scenery for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and stays hungry. In one scene, he pushes his face up to the camera and literally snorts like a bull. Woods, for maybe the first time ever on camera, looks a little intimidated.

In a swanky party scene, Stone makes a swivel-hipped, babe-on-a-catwalk entrance; she’s a stunning camera subject. She can act, too, and her tiny-featured, airline-stewardess prettiness makes her commitment to emotionality all the more vivid. Pursuing Roberts in order to watch him die, she allows herself to be caressed and made love to by a man she wants to kill. She does the arousal-crossed-with-revulsion touchingly well. In a daytime scene with Roberts at a bar, she’s wearing flowing cream slacks and a mostly-open cream tunic; her hair and makeup are more subdued than usual. Everything about her is taking in light and returning a soft glow except her narrowed eyes, which glitter. She looks well-fucked, financially taken-care-of, and venomous. (The guys behind me said “Damnnnn!” and “Sheeee-it!” admiringly.)

Is there another actress who compares to Stone as an incarnation of what America — alluring, narcissistic, deceitful, troubled — means to immigrants, and would-be immigrants? She’s the blonde who heroes in chop-socky movies sometimes won, and sometimes had to renounce. Many of the working-class people and recent immigrants I saw “The Specialist” with brought their kids and infants along to enjoy the bombings, beatings and nudity. We were all pretty cheerful afterwards. It’s a film that doesn’t make you feel sour about getting exactly what you paid for.

©1994 by Ray Sawhill. First appeared in The Modern Review.

“Monday’s Warriors” by Maurice Shadbolt

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By Ray Sawhill

The action in “Monday’s Warriors” (Godine), Maurice Shadbolt’s new novel, has a roughriding excitement, and the language is sharp — there are no ominous premonitions or nameless dreads. This crackling Conradian adventure yarn is based on a true story. Kimball Bent, an American conscript in the British Army in New Zealand, deserts, and talks the Maori who find him into sparing his life. It’s the late 1800s, and the British have mounted a military campaign to wipe out what remains of Maori resistance. Bent gradually realizes that he hasn’t entered an inchoate, savage world — he’s entered a culture in disarray. The Maori are at odds with each other over how to deal with the whites.

When the English, determined to teach the Maori a lesson, crush one of their peaceful villages, Titoko, the village elder, who has been a spokesman for peace, consults the ancient war gods and talks several tribes into reinstating the old customs and going on the attack. The body of the novel concerns this war, one of the last Maori uprisings against their invaders. As Titoko wins battles, more and more Maori join up, and he grows close to Bent, whose realistic yet detached viewpoint he values. The Maori use the Anglos’ fearfulness against them; essentially, Titoko suckers the English into defeating themselves.

Is Titoko having a lucky streak, or has he really summoned the ancestral magic? Or is he just futilely acting out what history demands? Bent, the American, provides the reader with an opening onto a world of Maori ambivalence. Whipped and out-smarted, the settlers demonize Bent, convinced the Maori couldn’t outfight and outthink Her Majesty’s troops without some kind of Caucasian help.

Maurice Shadbolt is almost entirely unknown in America, although he has written over a dozen books. “Monday’s Warriors” is his first to be published in this country since the defiant, supercharged 1987 “Season of the Jew,” one of the least-noticed, least-discussed major novels in recent years; still available in paperback, it, too, concerns the Army and the Maori in the 19th century. The two novels are each complete, self-contained works, yet are also fine companion pieces.

They’re also very funny. Is there something about the Maori — their mocking humor and ferocity, perhaps, and their apparent invulnerability to sentimentality — that leads to treatment of their tragedy as black comedy? In both of these daring epics, the conversations and faceoffs have the rapidfire wit and formality of a high level karate match — and Shadbolt never tries to glamorize his terseness or style. The scenes of slaughter, and the evocation of the New Zealand landscape, have an Elizabethan unruliness and splendor; the author suggests a mystical component without dragging the stories down. If we’re drawn to marvel at the senseless trouble people cause themselves and each other, Shadbolt leaves us on our own to do it. He sets us down in the mistrust and beauty and keeps the dramatic tension keyed way up. Readers may feel that at its best Shadbolt’s work outdoes Hemingway.

© 1992 by Ray Sawhill.