To es­cape the heat of the af­ter­noon, I dived in­to a movie the­ater down­town, and the movie I had­n't seen was this.

I am a fan of Samuel L. Jack­son. I think his role in Pulp Fic­tion is in­cred­i­ble. I think his screen pres­ence (and a lit­tle act­ing) makes his char­ac­ters in­ter­est­ing and in­tense, and larg­er than life, which is a good thing in many movies.

But why, please, is he trapped in­side of a fas­cist fan­ta­sy movie?

In this movie, 4 po­lice­men and a pris­on­er (who is de­scribed as evil, sure) are in a car, and be­cause of some­thing he says, just a nod from one of the po­lice­men prompts the oth­er to hit the pris­on­er. Who is cuffed, BTW.

Ok, so that is a felony comit­ted by one of the "good guys", with ac­qui­escense from an­oth­er. It is al­so, of course, a cow­ard­ly ac­tion, and think about it: just a nod, and whack. That shows habit, so the sub­text is ap­par­ent­ly that these nice guys, mem­bers of "the most re­spect­ed po­lice force in the world", rou­tine­ly hit de­fense­less pris­on­er­s.

Yup, those are the heros in this movie.

But let's put aside the ob­vi­ous­ly rot­ten ide­ol­o­gy this movie rep­re­sents, where it's ok for a char­ac­ter, just be­cause he is la­beled as "good", to break the law with­out con­se­quences, and with­out even sug­gest­ing that such a thing may be, you know, not the best thing to do.

Let's talk about cin­e­ma. This is the kind of movie where two char­ac­ters of sim­i­lar height and build fight, in a dark rail­road set, back­lit.

For min­utes, they punch, and kick, and throw them­selves at each oth­er.

And it's phisi­cal­ly im­pos­si­ble to see who the hell is beat­ing the oth­er, be­cause you can't tell them apart.

That's lazy film­mak­ing, and it shows this moral­ly bank­rupt movie is not even well done garbage.

At least Leni Riefen­stahl's movies are al­leged­ly beau­ti­ful to look at. What's the ex­cuse for this one?