Lima

With the first notes of Iron Maiden, which I don't hear in movies, I knew this would be the movie for me. The path set by John Wick all those years ago started tire me with the fourth movie, with dozens of dead bodies dropping like bowling pins, and the whole thing feels unrealistic. Here, in contrast, they don't play with the dead, they skimp on the action, and when it does happen it looks believable, like guys who have no superpowers, just like a normal fight between regular family guys vs one slightly more trained guy. Actually, it's not even an action movie, more of a focused drama about police corruption, so the oft-mentioned comparison to the first Rambo is no that warranted. Aaron Pierre is a revelation, that stoic calm, stern look, charismatic voice, he can convey everything in the slight twitches of his face. And when he gets his moves going, it’s amazing. So it's clear. The great, and again underrated here, Hold the Dark was no accident, Jeremy Saulnier is worth continuing to watch.

I wasn't drawn in. I almost cared more about whether the main character, a private eye, would find his way back to his cheating wife, a minor subplot here, than whether he would bring back to his stepmother her wandering stepdaughter from Florida, where things really drag on lethargically and where I was only entertained by the fine sexual tension between the detective and the blonde femme fatale. That's the first hour, then from a certain point onwards it picks up some momentum and the corpses pile up, including the final climactic ten minutes, which in its overwroughtness feels more like a bit of B-movie drama than a very slowly told story up to that point. Gene Hackman is great here, as always, with a young Melanie Griffith almost unrecognisable. And it has a fine jazzy musical score at times, but .... I was expecting something better from the seasoned Arthur Penn.

I can't say that I experienced the story of a mentally unstable hooker who helps a private eye in one of the cases in a particularly emotional way, Alan Pakula directs it in a distant way, with strange music that in tense scenes most of all reminds me of the production of street performers. There is, however, one big BUT. This is Jane Fonda's hugely great performance, which belonged in the 70s. The role of a lifetime, really. Those scenes, the great monologue and dialogue deliveries, they're a joy to watch. And when it eclipses even the legendary Donald Sutherland in that regard, who rather just slips in his somewhat boring role as the stoically calm, soft-spoken detective, there's something to be said for that. A very well-deserved Oscar for Jane. It's just that the clumsily told story fails to draw you in, and it escalates to a kind of weird, long static scene at the end, with the villain spilling all the beans in the face of his intended victim, which I find cheesy.