The Mongoose Review

Rob Schneider is "The Mongoose." Naw just kidding, as if I'd see a film staring that guy today. (Or any day for that matter.)

Liam Neeson actually stars in the new movie called "The Mongoose," whose name is Ryan "Fang" Flanagan, which has got to be his most ridiculous name since portraying a guy named "Coxman" in 2019's "Cold Pursuit-" wonder if that's his full government name?

But I digress. In true Neeson fashion, his character is a decorated former army captain clearly suffering from PTSD. His wife, the always wonderful Marisa Tomei, divorces him over his refusal to seek help for his sufferings, despite the two still very much being in love. He lives his days drinking and, well, this isn't the kind of picture that really gives anyone much backstory other than their favorite drink.

Now there's plot: Ryan gets a call that his exes current lover has struck her, and since he's such a good guy, he promises to go and get her belongings. But wouldn't you know it, he ends up in getting a gun pulled on him, a brawl ensues that leaves him wounded and the other guy in a puddle of his own blood. If there was ever a time to call the police it'd be now, but Ryan knows he's a powerful guy, a lawyer I think with plenty of connections at the station, so he flees the scene in a stolen car.

But not just any car, oh no, specifically a Ford Mustang Shelby Super Snake. Car guys all the around the world just let out a collective moan. Ryan crosses over from Kentucky and ends up in Texas, where a scenery-chewing Michael Chiklis runs the cops as a sorta throwback to the tobacco chewing hick cops from 70's Hollywood, only Thompson Evans' script is either too smart or too dumb to lean into the racial stereotypes.

Much of the film has everyone's favorite Irish actor buckled into a car seat, leaning left, right or sometimes even forward(!) as he turns he turns the steering wheel. That runs the rrisk of having the film to end up, ahem, running on fumes, but the narrative has Ryan to have flashbacks to his time as a P.O.W. in Afghanistan. He's supposed to be I think twenty years younger, but instead of recasting, digital de-aging or clever camera angles, they just have him grow out his beard- the first time I saw him like this I had to contain my laughter. Can't have the surprisingly full theater of geriatrics judging me.

I read on the interwebs that "The Mongoose," though set in America, was actually filmed in Australia, which I'm sure is obvious to anyone, erm, lucky enough to ever walk into the Lonestar State, but it didn't bother me. Hell, I also read in the same article that Neeson doesn't actually do the driving! The movie magic, it's-it's gone!!

The director Mark Vanselow has previously had been the star's longtime stunt coordinator and double, and he makes his directorial debut here. He's actually pretty good. Most of the stunts appear practical, with only the rare moment of CGI jank to take you out of the moment, and if there's ever a trend that needs to return to modern cinema it's that one. "The Mongoose" may not make much sense and not do anything to move the road movie subgenre forward, but it's easily Neeson's best pure action film in years.

Worth noting that, despite the similar setting, this is not a sequel to Neeson's 2023 film "Retribution. If I had a dime for every Liam Neeson action movie where he's in a car most of the time, then I'd have two dimes, which is simultaneously not much and a lot.

Street Fighter Review

Legendary director Howard Hawks is credited with saying that the key to a good film is having "three good scenes and no bad ones." Well, this year's "Street Fighter" is all bad ones, except of course for all the awful ones.

There's specific kind of enjoyment one gets from terrible films, and while I don't quite think that the filmmakers were onto something, they most definitely were on something.

Based on the popular video game series of the same name by the company Capcom. A one-on-one fighter where players have a certain amount of time to kick the snot out of their opponent, and would you be surprised that this (the somehow third!) adaptation has a plot? Some narrative purpose is actually a good thing, helping set up the reason behind the mayhem, but there's way too much here and all it does is get in the way.

I mean, the whole point, the whole point of the series is to fight, so what do I care about M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) and his plot to hold the second World Warrior tournament, trick Ken (Noah Centineo) into the event as so to coax his estranged "brother from another mother" (and country) Ryu (Andrew Koji) out of hiding? What value do I get from this entire enterprise so the bad guy can take the good guy's powers? Ah, but you see, his powers are actually evil powers! Ooh so sophisticated...

It's so frustrating since just when these colorful cast of characters begin to smack each other around, the film cuts to Interpol agents, at least three characters with daddy issues, male bonding, anachronistic music, lots of people drinking, an odd amount of foot dialogue, Eric André trying his damnedest to be funny, hotdog jokes, and, wait, isn't this supposed to be about Street Fighter?

Rounding out the rest of the cast includes everyone from Cody Rhodes to Jason Momoa to even Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, and their performances range from overacting, underacting, good acting, bad acting and sometimes even non-acting. It certainly looks like a group that'd be fun to be on set with, but just hiring eclectic actors for the stunt of it doesn't mean it was a good idea.

"Street Fighter" is wrong-headed from beginning to end, so misguided and chronically unexciting and unamusing that it doubles over on itself and becomes fascinating in its bad excess and excess of badness. I was never bored during the nearly two hour long flick, but it's hard to really come around to properly enjoy something where almost all the characters speak in either screams or cliches.

Director Kitao Sakurai shoots much of the film with these awful closeups, so much so that you can never get a proper sense of scale of the action. I know its set in 1993 but in our 1993? Where are the cops? Why does the government only secretly get involved? And, more importantly, where is the fun? A lot of fists fly to be sure, but their impact lacks impact, like a spoon slapping jello. But don't worry, the limpless battle will soon be interrupted by more story so that we can formally setup a sequel.

Crawlers Review

I don't know what it is about apartment buildings and killer spiders, but that is apparently what's hot in B-movie land. But where 2024's "Sting's" budget failed its own ambition, this year's "Crawlers" knows exactly what it is and has just enough money to mostly realize it. This is a thoroughly goofy creature feature that, what it lacks in honest characters it more than makes up for it a cast with wacky characteristics. That goes for the evil spiders too.

The film begins with a text crawl about spiders, whether or not they're factual or not I don't know, but it amusingly ends with the text "there's probably a spider underneath your seat." Then an overweight guy returns from a business trip, ill from a real bad looking wound on his shoulder. He probably should have gotten it checked out, but instead decided to microwave some pizza, you know, because he's fat. Then he passes out on the ground and little, itty-bitty little eight-legged bugs escape from his flesh. There's no explanation as to where he went or why he was bit, but who cares? Let's get on with the monster mash!

Matilda Lutz stars at Serena, an aspiring musician who works at her apartment building as the maintenance manager. She hates it and the other tenants hate her too, especially since she had to hand out the owner's rent increase. I immediately sympathized with her and immediately hated the others, and was worried that the film wasn't going to be able to make me care what's going on, especially with its hour and twenty one minute runtime. The script, credited to Jayson Rothwell, doesn't spend much time fleshing anyone out, but it does give us just enough time to see one live-stream himself paintballing wall art. Another tinkers with computers while flirting with his AI girlfriend. It's all just so odd and unexpected that I began enjoying them and their silliness. But I still definitely wanted to see them turn into spider chow.

And boy do the little buggars eat. Hardly any time passes before the entire building is covered in their webs, but it wouldn't be a monster movie if the characters noticed right away. It's Serena who first notices the dead body, the source of the infestation, and the government quickly quarantines the building, no one in or out until scientists can determine the cause of death. Phone lines are eventually cut as is the internet, I think because the people in hazmat suits don't want the people to talk to anyone on the outside, but there's no way for them to report an emergency so I dunno. It's almost as if the filmmakers needed a way to force everyone out of their rooms to encourage the spiders to the attack. But this isn't the kind of movie where one is supposed to ask those kind of questions.

The body count swiftly rises as the creepy crawlies literally crawl out of every which way, but way before the characters notice the spiders, we the audience have noticed them long before. We see them sneak around the walls, creeping behind everything from the toilet paper to the TVs. There's one scene where an arachnid hides in a bag of chips, and we see both the person's and spider's point-of-view.

The cockeyed script bodes beautifully with Angel Gómez Hernández's snappy direction. "Crawlers" is filled with interesting camera angles and packed with environmental fake-outs. Take, for example, a leaky pipe in the building's lobby- I kept waiting for a character to be sprinting to what they think is their safety, only to slip and fall in the pool of water collecting. But that's not what happens here. Instead, the water grows and the puddle creeps over to the breakers to short the electricity. See someone puffing on a cigarette? A lesser film would follow that up with the hero creating a makeshift flamethrower, but no, not "Crawlers." Instead we get BDSM whips slapping spiders into paste, and it is glorious.