Tag: jesse v. johnson

Boudica: Queen of War (Jesse V. Johnson, 2023)

~ Sean Gilman ~ 1 Comment

Just about the first thing that happens in Jesse V. Johnson’s low-fi epic  is that a bunch of Roman soldiers come across a praying band of Druids and slaughter every one of them in brutal detail. A close-up of an innocent belly being sliced open by a merciless soldier tells us exactly what kind of movie this is going to be, and then it just. . . stops being that kind of movie for the next forty minutes or so. Instead, Johnson takes pains to show us the idyllic normality of life under the Empire, at least for the family of the King of the Iceni, Prasutagus, devoted to peace with the Romans and submitting his state to them as a client kingdom. He lives in pastoral splendor with his beautiful wife and daughters, who are all clever and loving. Hints of the real world lie just outside: a vision of Christians rotting crucified on a country road, the danger of an overheard whisper that might disparage the Emperor (Nero at this time, circa 60 AD). A visit from the new Roman in charge, snide and, well, imperious, signals trouble ahead, as do closeups of the King’s sad-eyed second in command. And sure enough, soon the King is dead and the women in his family, disinherited by the Romans, are cruelly beaten, tortured, raped, and left for dead. Most of that we don’t see, but what we do witness is plenty to understand how a charming collaborationist wife and mother could suddenly find herself becoming Boudica, the legendary and long-prophesied warrior queen destined to lead the Britons to freedom. Or, failing that, at the least to kill a whole lot of Romans.

And so she does. After a couple of brief training sequences wherein Boudica proves that she has a magic sword (with an assist from some ghosts) and enlists the support of a band of experienced international mercenaries as well as the local Druids, she sets off to one victory after another, butchering soldiers and burning towns with relish. Colchester (Camulodunum), London (Londinium), and St. Albans (Verulamium) all fall to her band of painted and befurred Celts, before the Romans can finally organize a proper military response. In the meantime, Boudica’s victories cause the Romans at home to riot and burn the city down, inspire the mad Emperor to kill himself. Which isn’t actually what happened at all, Nero killed himself almost a decade later (even the fire was in 64), and the British revolt was only one of several that rocked his demented reign. Nor is it true, as far as I know, that Nero decreed that women couldn’t hold power or property (which in the film is the legal justification for disinheriting Prasutagus’s heirs), but this is a matter where something can be accurate without being true: Roman society was deeply patriarchal, much more so than the Celtic and Germanic nations on their periphery. So if one wants to adopt Boudica’s revolt as a stand for the rights of women, rather than merely a celebration of British nationalism, that seems reasonable. Similarly, if Johnson wants to fold aspects of Arthurian legend into Boudica’s story (at one point she has to dive into the water to retrieve her sword, becoming her own Lady of the Lake), I see no problem with that.

Jesse V. Johnson is one of the most accomplished indie action film directors working today, the man behind any number of straight to video classics starring the likes of Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, and Louis Mandylor I wrote about his Hell Hath No Fury here a couple of years ago, and that film has a lot in common with this one. Both are centered on a woman hero rather than a beefy Adkins-type. Both are set in the past, mostly in a forest. But where Hell is a small-scale story, set largely in one location which we learn in minute geographic detail in order to better understand and follow the intricately constructed action scenes that form the bulk of the movie, Boudica is Johnson trying something new, albeit with apparently the same limited resources he’s always had. The action scenes, because there are more of them in many different locations, are shorter, more impressionistic, but just as bloody. The emphasis is not on action for the sake of displaying the skill of the stunt performers or choreographers, but rather on the brutality of violence in the Classical period, and thus on the brutality of Empire itself. Boudica gives speeches about freedom, but she is never really interested in ruling or building a state. She’s on a mission to kill as many Romans as she can before they kill her, no more and no less.

Olga Kurylenko plays Boudica and it’s a striking performance if the only work of hers you’re familiar with before seeing this is Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, where she eats at Sonic, makes Ben Affleck sad, and twirls her gorgeous way through fields of sun-dappled wheat. That’s really the outlier in Kurylenko’s career, though. She’s spent most of the past decade making action movies, with parts in various sizes in everything from the Timothy Olyphant-starring proto-John Wick Hitman (2007) to this year’s Extraction 2. Here she’s equally at home in both halves of the film: memories of Malickian fields in the early scenes, battered and scarred and broken toothed in the action scenes, twirling through them like a ballerina with a magic sword. If Johnson is the low-budget version of a Paul WS Anderson or Luc Besson, then Kurylenko is the indie Milla Jovovich, and Boudica is her The Messenger. (I mean that as a compliment.)

Triple Threat (Jesse V. Johnson, 2019)

~ Sean Gilman

Blog_Triple-Threat

The second very fine action flick released by WellGo in two weeks, alongside the Vietnamese film Furie, Triple Threat for some reason played but one night only in theatres before making its way to VOD. That’s somewhat understandable, given its straight-to-video pedigree, with both director Jesse V. Johnson and star Scott Adkins being major SVOD stars. But one would hope the ridiculous stack of martial arts movie talent would have earned the film a broader release, or at least the chance not to get buried in the hype around Netflix’s similarly-titled Triple Frontier. As it is, Triple Threat is a major event for afficianados of filmic fisticuffs, featuring several of the greatest screen fighters of our time. Joining Adkins are Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais and Tiger Chen, along with Michael Jai White, Celina Jade and, just for kicks, none other than Michael Wong. It’s a blunt instrument of a movie, eschewing anything approaching character or theme in favor of simply throwing its stars into a generic plot and sitting back to watch them do their thing. The best thing you can say about Johnson’s direction is that he doesn’t get in the way.

Uwais, the Indonesian star of the Raid movies who had his talent memorably wasted in The Force Awakens, is the victim of a terrorist jailbreak in the Burmese jungle, where White and his band of mercenaries free Adkins from imprisonment. He tracks down Jaa and Chen, who had unwittingly aided the bad guys in navigating the jungle (their laughable but earnest excuse is that they thought they were on a humanitarian mission, apparently the most heavily-armed one in history), and the three join forces to take revenge. Meanwhile the bad guys try to kidnap Celina Jade (the woman in distress in Wolf Warrior 2), but Jaa and Chen rescue her. The dividing line between Asian good guys and Euro-American bad guys is obvious but thoroughly unexplored.

The fights are in keeping with the dominant 21st Century style, pioneered by Jaa in his Ong-Bak movies and in Donnie Yen’s MMA-influenced films like SPL and Flash Point, fast and hard, with lots of flying elbows and knees. Adkins and White and the other beefy white guys are much bigger and stronger than their Asian foes, making every fight essentially about the little guy out-thinking the bigger one. This is where the choreography shines: it’s honestly the only creative thing in the entire movie. Chen comes off particularly well in this respect, as you’d expect from a protegé of Yuen Woo-ping. Uwais seems somewhat underused in the fights, though his character is nursing an injured arm through the whole movie, but he does get the coolest outfit. Adkins seems a natural fight as the bad guy, though he isn’t nearly as much fun as White is, or Frank Grillo was in Wolf Warrior 2 for that matter. As is usually the case, Tony Jaa outclasses everyone around him, not just in the fight scenes, but with his ever improving acting, briefly even showing a flair for comedy that was too-often absent in his Thai films.

In many ways, Triple Threat hearkens back to Wheels on Meals, that mid-80s highpoint of martial arts cinema, starring Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. That film too featured a trio of Asian stars uniting to defend a pretty girl from gangs of evil Europeans. But Johnson doesn’t have Sammo’s interest in film form or in comic set-piece construction, and his film has no emotional or intellectual resonance outside the visceral thrill of its fights (this is the reason why Furie, though just as generic in plot and filled with lesser stars, is more affecting). I suppose every generation gets the Wheels on Meals it deserves, and Triple Threat as such is a fine match for our dumb, brutal, meaninglessly efficient age.