Theme: Cops

Until Death (2007) – Jean-Claude Van Damme and Selina Giles

Van Damme looks tired in this movie, and looks a bit weird with them sideburns. But at the same time, his job is probably easier since he’s playing a cop who can get away with whatever he wants – until he gets framed.

The lump on Van Damme’s forehead is also looking particularly bloated in this movie. The mood is pretty sour too. Like Van Damme doesn’t really want to be there, and maybe half of the crew don’t either. But they kind of made this tiredness match the moody genre — a poor excuse for an action movie, with unnecessary flashes of sleaze and even Van Damme heating up his own opioids on a spoon. By the end of the first hour, I have to rate it a couple levels below average, making it about So-So. It’s certainly not unwatchable though, providing you haven’t seen it in years and don’t very well remember how it goes and are sufficiently bored.

The movie has a major permanent change of mood around half way in — towards the end of the second hour — after Van Damme’s character was shot, barely survived, and slowly starts waking up from a coma. Here his wife, who was about to divorce him, spends quality time with him and they become a close couple again – free from the plague of his former vices, since he’s lost his memory and essentially started his life again — but his memories slowly return.

It gets particularly unpleasant about 20 minutes before the end, when the murderous crooks walk in on Van Damme’s pregnant wife while he’s away. The ending from that point on, is highly skippable if you’ve seen it before — the wife gets kidnapped and it’s just a boring standoff and shootout until the end, a bit like the boring long shootout ending of the otherwise top Van Damme movie Hard Target minus a few stunts. Massive missed opportunity with the interesting plot that unravelled around the middle of this movie since it arrived too late and rolled out too slow from there on until the long boring ending came about.

Selina Giles plays the lead female about adequately, and the actor playing chief of police does a good job too. Van Damme isn’t up to his usual standard — partly due to the poor script and partly probably because he’s having trouble with his personal life at the time.

Honest Thief (2020) – Liam Neeson

This movie starts out slow and boring, but not impossible to watch since it’s clearly just warming up to something via a tedious, inefficient backstory. 10 minutes in, things clearly indeed appear to be warming up, as Liam Neeson‘s character Tom rings the police to confess to being a famous uncaught bank robber.

Half an hour in is when the action really kicks in though, as the FBI agents sent to investigate his confession find the money, then attempt to kill Neeson, then get surprised by their own boss and kill him while Neeson gets away in a bullet-showered car chase.

By 45 minutes in, Tom decides to attempt to clear his name before handing himself in, and by 60 minutes in, his girlfriend Annie (played by Kate Walsh) has been almost killed, and he goes on the attack against the two rogue agents.

The rogue agents themselves are played by Jai Courtney (from Divergent) and Anthony Ramos (from Transformers: Rise of the Beasts). Ramos’s character here has a conscience but is constantly led astray but his more psychopathic friend played Courtney, who by 70 minutes in (with 30 minutes to go) is pretty much a lone ranger, having alienated his partner in crime, his new boss, and of course Tom & Annie.

The old boss of the two rogue agents, who they soon killed, was played by Robert Patrick (the liquid metal antagonist called T-1000, from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991). The new boss of these two agents, who gets tipped off by Tom, is played by Jeffrey Donovan with vibes like a cross between Clint Eastward, Jesse Enkamp and Magnus Carlsen.

A slightly clever ending somewhat saves this movie, solidifying its rating as better than merely Watchable. Indeed, I rate it So-So.

The Commuter (2018) – Liam Neeson

This movie kicks off with some terribly tedius non-plot quasi drama scenes that attempt to build backstory but are executed in a seeminly intentionally messy muddled way.

Within 10 minutes, things start to get real, as Liam Neeson‘s NPC type character gets a rude awakening in the form of an unexpected termination from work. But the movie goes straight back to muddled drama mode.

20 minutes in, it starts to get interesting, as Neeson’s character meets a strange woman who sets him a challenge with a large cash prize, and the core concept of this movie begins to reveals itself.

Around half way in, Neeson’s character gets framed for the murder of an FBI agent, all the while staying on a commuter train where he’s been for most of the movie already. At this point, this movie looks set to be rated Watchable – no more, since the first half has been so boring with such little going on. Sure, there’s a vibe of mystery among the semi-helpless angst but that’s literally the entire movie thus far summed up already, so it’s not a great fit for an action hero movie fan but not completely off the mark either.

Unfortunately, this movie doesn’t get any better until the last half hour. The angty stress & tension takes a long time to subside. It turns into a bit of a horror train ride in the secod half, and takes forever to let up. It’s a very one dimensional movie in this respect, and falls short of the ideal vibe us action hero movie connoisseurs are most interested in. But it’s not completely off the mark – Neeson still plays a bit of an adept hero – kind of. He especially comes into his own in the last half an hour, when he takes the lead and starts telling everyone on the crashed train what to do, to help them survive. From that moment on, he gets more dominant as the movie goes on, until in the closing scene he’s full re-instated as a cop and re-finds the woman behind the phonecalls.

In the end, I rate it So-So. A couple levels down from Bang Average, and just a few levels up from utterly Unwatchable. But this doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it at all – it’s still a level above Watchable.

Non-Stop (2014) – Liam Neeson

This movie begins with Liam Neeson‘s character acting rather stressed and dazed in an airport, ignoring random people who speak to him, and looking at everyone suspiciously, especially a man dressed like a traditional muslim. Within 5 minutes you can probably guess where this movie is going, and why it’s been commissioned – to make everyone look at everyone suspiciously in public places, especially airports and train stations etc – and especially muslims. And the speech by the actual hijacker in the last 15 minutes is really pushing this narrative hard, so much that if you’ve ever seen this movie before, you might be tempted to switch off at that point in order to skip that nonsense while knowing you’re not missing anything special in the ending. Anyway, there’s nothing new about Neeson pansying to this kind of agenda, so let’s get back to seeing how the movie goes down.

In the 11th hour, ahem, the 11th minute, things finally start to get the slightest bit interesting, as Neeson’s character texts a message to someone saying “we are go” when the plane’s about to go. This tells us he’s probably doing some kind of job on that plane, but we still don’t know quite what it is.

In the 15th minute we see he is indeed an air marshall, or at least, he has the gun and badge of one while on the plane. Then one minute later, someone starts texting him, to mess with him, and the movie really kicks in, as the anonymous texter threatens to kill someone every 20 minutes until 150 million dollars is paid into his account.

The movie proceeds into a session of scrutinising all the passengers, trying to figure out who is the killer. In the real world, of course, bank accounts get frozen very easily, so this whole “wire me the ransom money” concept that’s so common in movies like this, is utter nonsense.

This one a very gritty, suspenseful action mystery movie with an extremely simple yet still confusing plot until the last 15 minuts. I have to rate it Below Average, and even that’s complimentary considering the BS it’s pushing. First time viewers may rate it more highly, but when you remember the vague outline of the story, there’s not much left to rewatch it for, until several years later by which time you’ve mostly forgotten how it goes and can kind of enjoy it again until it get ridiculous near the end in which case you might want to switch off early.

The Shepherd (2008) – Jean-Claude Van Damme and Scott Adkins

The Shepherd is a movie of three parts, in terms of quality. Excusing the pointless, irrelevant & boring opening scene that drags on for 5 minutes, it soon gets off to a very interesting start after that, with a great bar scene reminiscent of the iconic scene outside the bar in Hard Target. Then it tails off into a still interesting but less brilliant movie, as Van Damme deals with criminals crossing the border in his usual kickass style, massively outperforming his comrades. Then the backend of the movie becomes a bit monotonous though, as Van Damme gets trapped in a Mexican prison then handed over to the cartel where he gets tortured a bit and eventually fights his way out, and that’s pretty much the end of the story although there’s half an hour to burn while he’s in the cartel’s hands so the ending is over extended and gets a bit boring for those who’ve seen this movie a few times before even if not in the last few years.

Scott Adkins plays the main muscle of the bad guys. He does a fair job as usual – nice moves but skin-deep emotion.

Natalie J Robb plays the lead female quite well, with vibes of Kate & Ziva from early seasons of NCIS. She plays Van Damme’s boss in the New Mexico border force that he’s assigned to.

Overall I rate it an OK movie, although it had so much more potential early on.

Death Warrant (1990) – Jean-Claude Van Damme

Death Warrant is an OK-ish movie from early in Jean-Claude Van Damme‘s career.

Supporting cast includes Paulo Tocha from Bloodsport two years prior. He also appeared a few years later in another Van Damme prison movie called In Hell.

In this movie, Van Damme plays an undercover cop, who enters a prison where a lot of people are mysteriously dying. He’s on a mission to get to the bottom of it – to find out who is killing who and why – and of course to put an end to it. But everything turns to sheet when the guards pin someone else’s murder on him, then bring in his nemesis from the outside world to torture him.

It’s excessively uncomfortable on multiple occasions and for this reason I rate it barely OK. Let’s call it So-So. It’s got its strengths and its weaknesses – it’s got plenty of the good stuff you’d expect from any Van Damme movie, but when I set out to watch a Van Damme movie I don’t really want to be watching the kind of extended uncomfortable scenes that this movie has in several places, including repeated graphic depictions of Van Damme’s nemesis ‘the Sandman’ slowly embedding the tip of his knife into Van Damme’s abdomen as Van Damme gasps in agony. This stuff should have been condensed and made less explicit too.

Beverly Hills Cop (1984) – Eddie Murphy

Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

An oldie but goldie – if you’ve not seen this before, or not seen it in the last 10 years, get your popcorn ready now.

Before Kevin Hart, there was Chris Tucker and Martin Lawrence. Before Chris & Martin, there was Eddie Murphy.

Eddie does a good job as the lead character in this story of an uncontrollable detective on holiday in another police force’s jurisdiction. He travelled to Beverly Hills to investigate the powerful businessmen who he suspects killed his friend. The local police aren’t happy about the trouble he’s causing, but he’s not worried about that.

Other cast members do a decent job too, but Eddie Murphy is the centre of attention in this movie – a role he carries very well.

The plot is far from over-complicated, but has just enough going on to make for an enjoyable experience. It’s not so much a martial arts movie, but it’s a light-hearted action-packed cop drama with plenty of shooting and a little bit of hand-to-hand combat as you would expect.

If you enjoyed this movie, consider also watching the two sequels from back in the day: Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Beverly Hills Cop III (1994). They are all on a similar level – maybe the first and the third are slightly better than the second. Plus, in the spirit of Matrix Resurrections, this classic trilogy has recently been revived with a fourth instalment – Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024).

In its day

When televisions had only a few channels to choose from, a strong Eddie Murphy movie like Beverly Hills Cop coming on the TV was a big treat for the whole family to enjoy.

In the UK, most people had only four channels on their TV from 1982 (when Channel 4 came out) until 1997 (when Channel 5 was launched). Those who paid extra, for a satellite TV subscription, had only Sky One to enjoy from its launch in 1982, until it expanded to four channels in 1989. So for many years after its release, when this movie was scheduled to be aired on TV, it was something people often organised their day around.

Blue Streak (1999) – Martin Lawrence

Blue Streak (1999)

Blue Streak is a fun old-school action comedy starring Martin Lawrence (from the Bad Boys movie series) as a jewel thief posing as a police detective in order to recover the diamond he unwittingly stashed inside a police building.

Martin is entertaining throughout and the supporting cast are not bad. It’s mostly light-hearted action comedy, with a few fast-paced scenes. The plot is quite simple but works well for the genre. There isn’t much screen combat here, but it’s tactically interesting.