Pacific Rim (2013)

Pacific Rim starts with the word “Kaiju” on the screen, along with a definition: Japanese, meaning, essentially, monster. Beneath that is the word “Jaeger,” defined as German, meaning hunter. Then we get narration from a dude who will turn out to be the protagonist. The first thing you notice is that this dude has a weird, unplaceable accent, sort of like a British guy doing an American accent but not quite nailing it because he is in a movie that, notwithstanding what must certainly be a colossal special effects budget and enough extra scratch lying around to hire the much-celebrated Idris Elba, seems to have run dry when it came to dialect coaching. I sort of wonder what made anyone think they needed this guy to be American, given the fact that the whole premise of the story is that all the nations of Earth have rallied together to fight a great menace and there are lots of supporting characters who are not American, the aforementioned Elba being just one, but who knows – maybe market research showed that American audiences simply wouldn’t connect with an English hero (Notting Hill notwithstanding). Anyway, our Anglo-American hero, whose name we will later learn is Raleigh Becket, tells us at the beginning that as a kid, he would feel alone and small, and so, to make himself feel better, he would look up at the stars and imagine that maybe there was life out there somewhere. On the screen, we see a starry night sky. Before we have time to ponder what sort of terrible, isolating childhood would make someone forsake all worldly connections for the remote promise of extraterrestrial connections, Raleigh tells us that it turns out he was looking in the wrong direction. As he says this, we realize that what we thought was a starry sky is actually silt floating in a dark underwater scene. Nice! Raleigh tells us that aliens started attacking by coming through an interdimensional portal between two tectonic plates at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and we see some lava coming up through the sea floor and rocks breaking, and then BAM! We cut right to an awesome and enormous lizard-type creature wrecking the Golden Gate Bridge, and you’re like, “Yes! I came to see huge monsters fight robots, and within a minute, we have enough backstory to see half of that wonderful cinematic equation!”

So the monster wrecks San Francisco for a while and knocks some fighter planes out of the sky, and eventually gets killed, and Raleigh tells us the horrible toll: 3 cities wrecked, a bunch of people dead, etc. That happens a few more times (Manila, some other cities) and then mankind realized that this wasn’t going to stop, and that fighter jets and tanks aren’t the best way to fight these monsters. “So we created monsters of our own.” Yes – two minutes in, and we are seeing enormous fighting robots! As an aside, that line would have been a great moment for this movie to take a totally different turn, into a dark meditation on how power corrupts – the mighty kaiju-fighting robots could have been used as tools of oppression by the newly coalesced alliance of world governments, and this could have been a dystopian future with huge fighting robots, cool monsters, and compelling politics. But no.

Raleigh narrates that the robots – called Jaegers, because that means hunter and so that the movie can be full of lines that seem like cautionary tales about college binge drinking – are so enormous that it’s too hard for one human brain to control them, which we learn by seeing a dude looking frazzled and having a nosebleed, because nosebleeds are what happen to movie people when their brains are overwhelmed. So a system is developed where two pilots are used, one for each hemisphere of the enormous robot’s brain, and the pilots do some kind of mind-meld called a drift. Apparently it helps the functioning of the drift for the pilots to be kin, because as Raleigh narrates about how these Jaeger pilots (ha ha) become celebrities, there’s a clip of some of them on a talk show, and they are twins. We see more footage of the Jaegers in action, and basically what they do is engage the Kaiju in huge-scale fistfights. There are a lot of reasons why this doesn’t make any sense, since these fistfights mostly seem to take place in cities and smash a lot of stuff (and presumably kill a lot of people). I mean, we have nukes, and we have missiles, so why wouldn’t we just shoot nuclear warheads at the Kaiju as soon as they emerge from the sea? I mean, sure, there’s all that radiation, but is that so much worse than smashing the shit out of all these cities? On the other hand, a pretty good reason for defeating huge sea monsters in cities with huge fistfighting robots is, well, defeating huge sea monsters in cities with huge fistfighting robots. So yeah.

Fast-forward to the moment from which Raleigh is narrating. An alarm goes off and he is climbing out of a military type bunk and rousing another dude from another bunk. A Kaiju has just come through the breach! It is bigger than any of the preceding Kaiju (Category 4!), and Raleigh and his brother are Jaeger pilots who must get up right away, put on cool-looking costumes, and go fight! I don’t remember the brother’s name, but disappointingly, it is not Durham. Anyway, Raleigh is super excited to fight Kaiju! His brother is not so excited, and also not so handsome, and when they walk dramatically down the worn and shoddy bunker hallway, Raleigh has tremendous swagger – almost too much, almost comical – while his brother just walks like a guy on his way to a dangerous monster-fighting mission. We learn that they are in Alaska, and that the commander of the Alaska Jaeger unit is the preposterously named Marshal (that’s his rank) Pentecost (that’s his surname). He has a first name that we learn later, but I didn’t catch it. He is played by Idris Elba, which is confusing because, well, Stringer Bell from The Wire.

Anyway, we get to see the brothers Becket suit up in their cool suits, do their drift, which involves a brief series of quick-cut, black-and-white memories, and then strap into the standing position inside a room-sized capsule whence they will do their fighting. The capsule is actually the robot’s head, which then goes down a big elevator shaft to get plunked onto its body. When they’re all ready, they punch one of the robot’s fists into its other palm, tough-guy style, and then a whole bunch of helicopters carry the robot out and drop it in the ocean, where it is waist deep, because it is a very big robot. As they wade out toward destiny, Idris Elba tells them there’s a fishing vessel in the area (oh, and it’s nighttime and super stormy), but that they shouldn’t worry about saving those ten lives because they are protecting a city of two million (which, um, I don’t know. Anchorage has about 300K and Vancouver, BC, has 600K. Anyway). Almost immediately, the brothers Becket decide that they will save the boat, which they do by picking it up and moving it to another spot in the ocean. In addition to being really neat, this tells us something about the insubordinate, Tom-Cruise-in-Top-Gun ethos that prevails among the Jaegermeisters. Then they fight the kaiju, and it is definitely cool, but apparently the fact that this kaiju is bigger than any that preceded it proves problematic. It rips one of the Jaeger’s arms off and eventually pokes some tentacly appendage into the robot’s head and tears Raleigh’s brother right out! Raleigh mans up and controls the crippled Jaeger on his own and eventually kills the kaiju. Then he stumbles to shore and the whole robot collapses on the beach in exactly the way a person would, falling first to its knees, then face-forward on the sand. Luckily, an old dude with a metal detector and a little kid are there to render assistance (predictably, the metal detector goes crazy as the huge robot approaches).

Five years later, the world coalition of annoying dudes in suits has decided that the Jaeger program isn’t good enough for the ever-increasing size of the Kaiju, and they’ve started phasing Jaegers out in favor of the Wall of Life, which is a huge-ass wall constructed along, I guess, the whole Pacific coastline. Raleigh, once an elite pilot, is now an ordinary welder on the wall in Alaska. We see a gathering of the men working in this punishing endeavor, where a foreman tells them there’s good news and bad news. The latter is that three men died the previous day working at the top of the wall, and the former is that, hey, three job openings at the top of the wall! We learn that rations are only given to those who work, and there’s another hint of the dystopian, Blade Runner future that could have been the essence of this movie if it were District 9 instead of Pacific Rim. We see that the workers don’t have safety harnesses and that they get down from high heights by sliding down the sides of I beams like firemen on a brass pole, and we’re like, whoa, no OSHA in the kaiju future? But whatever. The workers are suddenly all watching a news report that the wall around Sydney, which had been billed as impregnable, was easily breached by a kaiju (this having apparently been the wall’s first test), and that only the deployment of a Jaeger ultimately saved the day. The workers are all disgruntled and shout, “What are we building this wall for, anyway?”

Is Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro offering us a cutting criticism of calls in the United States to build a border wall to keep out immigrants, and signalling the ultimate futility of such a tactic? Maybe. But what alternative is he proposing? That we build robots to engage illicit border crossers in fistfights in the Arizona desert? Or maybe that’s too literal. Maybe American workers are like the hapless city residents, caught between the kaiju, representing downward wage pressure created by the presence of undocumented immigrants, and the jaegers, representing both mechanization, which has brought about the loss of skilled and unskilled manual labor employment, and globalization, which has spurred the loss of domestic manufacturing employment to overseas sites where labor is cheaper. And the ultimate resolution to the kaiju problem [SPOILER ALERT] – exploding a nuclear bomb in the kaiju home world that destroys the portal through which kaiju come to Earth – represents a radical upending of the stratified economic schemes that cause so much of the world’s proletariat to see immigration to the U.S. as the only viable way forward. Del Toro is telling us that we shouldn’t build a wall to keep undocumented immigrants out or punish those immigrants once they’re here. Instead, we should stop endorsing economic aide plans that prop up third world elites at the expense of the working class, and in this way undermine the very system that spurs transnational economic migration. Brilliant! Also, robots fighting monsters.

Anyway, right before the scene at the wall, Idris Elba was on a video conference to a bunch of world leaders, who told him the Jaeger program would be defunded in six months and he should take his remaining Jaegers to the Hong Kong base. He grumbles about it, and then the Canadian government dude says something in a sneering voice that struck me as decidedly un-Canadian.

So after the workers see the kaiju break the wall in Sydney, Idris Elba shows up at the Alaska wall in a helicopter, now in a very sharp suit, rather than the brass-buttoned uniform he had before. The odd thing is that the suit will prove just as out of place in the non-uniformed, frequently insubordinate Jaeger base as the spiffy admiral costume did. When the helicopter lands, Raleigh somehow knows that it’s Marshal Pentecost and walks right out to greet him as he gets off. They have a surly exchange in which Raleigh initially resists going back to robot driving, but is persuaded by Idris Elba, who suggests that if the world is going to end, Raleigh might as well be in the thick of the fight.

In Hong Kong, they are met by Mako Mori, Idris Elba’s diffident assistant. Everyone speaks a little bit of Japanese. She has a pageboy haircut with the bottoms of a few locks in the front dyed blue. That seems like it wouldn’t comport with military regulations, but, you know, brave new world, I guess. We learn that Mako has been studying Raleigh’s fighting style and stuff to determine who will be the best copilot for him. There are many candidates for this job, but of course, she secretly hopes to have the job herself, because she has trained as a Jaegermeister and is 51/51 in simulations, which is apparently really good. But Idris Elba feels protective of her because, we learn, he adopted her when she was little after her family was killed by a kaiju – later there will be an amazingly cheesy flashback where she is hiding from the rampaging kaiju, then it gets killed by a Jaeger, and Idris Elba emerges from the Jaeger and removes his helmet with the sun shining from behind him and terrorized child Mako inexplicably smiles.

Part of determining Jaeger pilot brain drift compatibility apparently involves some kung fu fighting with sticks on a gym mat, so a series of dudes fights Raleigh and he beats them all handily while Idris Elba and Mako look on. Then Raleigh is like, Stringer, you should let her fight me, and all the cadets start to chant their approval, and Stringer Bell is like, OK, why the hell not? (Where is the military discipline in all this?) So they fight and she is very good and they also have sort of a moment as they are kung fu fighting, plus we see her in a tight-fitting tank top, establishing that she is hot enough to be the love interest. Despite the fact that she is way better at stick fighting than any of the other cadets, Stringer says no, he won’t pick her, he’s made up his mind, etc. She is crestfallen.

Along the way, we have learned who the other remaining Jaegermeisters are, and the Jaegers they will pilot. There’s a Russian brother-sister team who are both impossibly tall with dyed-white hair. They fight in an old-school jaeger that looks like it's going to say "Danger Will Robinson" at any minute. There’s a team of Chinese triplets called, I think, the Wei Tang family (presumably, they ain’t nothin’ to fuck with). Because they are triplets, they have a cool three-armed Jaeger. When they are not piloting it, they are ALWAYS playing basketball or holding the basketball – even in the base mess hall, you see them in the background with that goddamned ball. Then there’s a father-son team of Australians – the ones who defeated the kaiju after it breached the wall in Sydney. The father looks exactly like Lance Armstrong and is cool. The son is the classic, cocky movie asshole. If this were Karate Kid, he’d be the blonde kid from Cobra Kai. If it were Back to the Future, he’d be Biff. They have a bulldog that follows them around and is beloved by people on the base, and their is nothing distinguishing about their jaeger, it's just cool.

Also at the base are two scientists who are researching the kaiju to figure out how to defeat them. One is a kaiju fanboy (his disdainful partner uses the term “groupie,” but he’s definitely a fanboy), with a tattoo on his arm of the kaiju that killed Raleigh’s brother. That makes for an awkward elevator ride! The other looks amazingly like Willem Defoe, always wears a labcoat, has a plummy British accent, and moves in the stilted, limping manner of Dr. Strangelove. He is all about numbers and computations, which he does mostly on huge blackboards, even though everyone else has 3D touch computers and other cool stuff. The fanboy thinks the key to defeating the kaiju is in their biology. Willem Defoe thinks there’s some mathematical model. They bicker incessantly. The fanboy one is a cross of Rick Moranis in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, but only the part where he’s the keymaster.

So, surprise, Idris Elba does pick Mako to be Raleigh’s copilot, which Raleigh doesn’t find out till he’s in the robot’s head, waiting for someone to show up for their first test run. But! Mako has to do a mind drift for the first time, and something happens to her that is, I guess, a known problem, because she just spaces out and all the technical people watching from their little control room, including Idris Elba, are like, “She’s chasing the rabbit!” Then we see her remember the time when a kaiju killed her parents, except Raleigh is there in his cool Jaegermeister suit (it’s like interlocking black armor, sort of like Iron Man) trying to calm her little kid self. Then she kinda bugs out and starts to arm the plasma cannons on the Jaeger and WHY DID YOU DO A TEST RUN WITH LIVE GUNS? But whatever, the manual override button in the control room isn’t working and they have to unplug a massive cable, which is hard to do, and eventually everything is OK. Afterward, Mako is understandably disconsolate and Raleigh tries to comfort her, and then they are in a base hallway and the asshole Australian son is there talking shit, and Raleigh punches him and tells him to apologize to Mako for whatever rotten thing he said, and they fight a bunch, with Raleigh getting the upper hand, and then Idris Elba calls Raleigh and Mako into his office, where he tells her, not surprisingly, that she can’t be Raleigh’s copilot. Idris Elba’s office is super weird, with a walkway suspended above a pond, and a door at the back that is open to a skyscraper view of Hong Kong, as if you could walk out the doorway and plummet to your death.

So while all this has been going on, the scientists have been working on their competing theories. Willem Defoe has a chalkboard full of algebra to prove that the size and frequency of kaiju is just going to go from bad to worse. Rick Moranis has been doing all sorts of experiments with kaiju remains, including a still-living kaiju secondary brain (because, by the way, they’re too big to have just one brain, so they need two, like dinosaurs). He gets the idea that if he could do a drift and mind-meld with the kaiju brain, he’d figure stuff out. Idris Elba says no, you’ll die. Willem Defoe is like, yeah, told you so. So Rick Moranis cobbles together a drift set-up from garbage and does it anyway. He does not die, but does get a nosebleed and bursts some blood vessels in one eye, and comes back with the knowledge that the kaiju attack different planets and drain them of resources, that they are constantly evolving to be more badass, that they have one connected consciousness and the same DNA, and that they started on Earth a long time ago (the dinosaurs!) but the atmosphere wasn’t right, but thanks to all of man’s environmental degradations, “we’ve practically terraformed it for them,” and now they’re back and they’re going to keep sending bigger and badder monsters.

Stringer Bell's plan for the remaining jaegers has been to send them into the breach to detonate a nuclear bomb that will destroy the breach so that kaiju won’t be able to come from other dimensions. Apparently, the world coalition of governments has tried shooting nukes into the breach before, without success, which makes me wonder (1) why they think it will work this time and (2) why this movie doesn’t once contain the words, “once more, into the breach.” The answer to the first question is that Idris Elba thinks maybe if a jaeger goes through the breach and delivers the nuke to the kaiju world, that will work somehow. There is no good answer to the second question. So just as this plan was meant to get underway, and shortly after Raleigh and Mako’s disastrous try at working together, two kaiju come through the breach. The other three jaegers are mobilized to deal with the threat, while Mako sulks privately and Raleigh stands around with arms crossed and a grim expression on his face. The Russians and their jaeger are quickly torn to shreds. The Wei Tang Clan does an awesome thing where the three hands on the three arms of their jaeger turn into whirling blades – this is called Thundercloud Formation (they say a long sentence in Chinese with the English word “thundercloud” in the middle, because China doesn’t have thunderclouds, I guess) – but the kaiju spits acid on them and that’s the end of them. The Lance Armstrong and Son Australian jaeger is having a pretty good go of it till one of the kaiju emits some kind of crazy electrical wave that disables all of the power and operations of the control room back at the base and of the jaeger and maybe of some of Hong Kong too. The Australian jaeger is left standing in the water doing nothing. A tech dude in the control room explains that the electric pulse affected everything digital, and it will take him two hours to “reroute the auxiliary” and get the control room running again. None of the jaegers can work, he explains, because they’re all digital. “Our jaeger is all analog!” says Raleigh, a fact that was (1) conveniently never mentioned heretofore and (2) demonstrably not true, based on all the crazy stuff they did to control it, if I understand at all what the difference is between digital and analog. But whatever, now there is a reason for Mako and Raleigh to suit up! They do the drift and this time she does not chase the rabbit, so it’s all systems go. Helicopters airlift their jaeger to the battle. In the mean time, the Australians have climbed up on top of the head of their robot and are shooting flares into the kaiju’s face. This is not a good long-term survival strategy, but luckily, Raleigh and Mako get there and beat that kaiju with tough moves.

Before these kaiju made the scene, Rick Moranis had told Idris Elba about all the stuff he learned from his mind meld with the secondary kaiju brain, and Idris Elba was like, do it again. But the mind meld ruined the kaiju brain, so Moranis needed a new one. Stringer sent him to see a Hong Kong underworld kaiju body parts dealer named Hannibal Chau. It would have been great if he were played by Malcolm MacDowell, but actually he’s probably too old now. Anyway, it was actually Ron Perlman, who was almost as good, especially because he had on those kind of glasses that are round and super dark, like for welding, and gold-plated shoes, and he explained that he took his first name from his favorite historical figure and his last from his second-favorite Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn. Anyway, Rick Moranis connects with Chau in an area of Hong Kong where kaiju parts are bought and sold, called the Bone Slums (and Harmony!). Moranis tells Chau why he wants a kaiju brain (because Chau is like, they’re useless – no phosphates, just lots of ammonia!), and Chau looks at his bloodshot eye and is like, YOU ALREADY DID A DRIFT WITH A KAIJU BRAIN, YOU DAMN FOOL!

Just then, they hear the sounds of the kaiju attack (because one stayed in the bay to fight robots while the other headed for the city) and Chau is like, drifts are a two-way street, so now they know all about you and they’re coming for you! And with that, Chau repairs to his “kaiju bunker” while sending Rick Moranis to the street to fend for himself. Chau proves right, as the kaiju homes in on Moranis in a public underground kaiju shelter and breaks through the ceiling trying to get him. Just then, luckily, Raleigh and Mako finish with the other kaiju in the bay and start fighting the remaining one, distracting it from Moranis. A massive, Hong Kong-destroying donnybrook ensues. The robot hits the kaiju with a huge cargo ship. The kaiju hits the robot with a construction crane. The robot hits the kaiju with shipping containers. At one point, the robot punches at the kaiju and misses, and its enormous fist goes into an office building and slows down just in time to barely tap one of those suspended-ball, perpetual motion desk toys and set it gently in motion. There was probably symbolism in that.

Eventually, the jaeger defeats the kaiju. There is a point when it seems like the jaeger can’t win because it has exhausted all its useful weapons and the kaiju has suddenly revealed that it has wings and is carrying the jaeger up into the sky, and then Mako is like, oh, I do have one other thing, and it’s a huge Voltron sword that slices the bejesus out of the kaiju and makes the audience say, why in hell didn’t you pull that shit out twenty minutes ago and spare Hong Kong a bit of mayhem? But you know how it is – as with Voltron, robots that fight for good must slowly escalate their use of weaponry before finally winning with the sword.

Rick Moranis goes back and gets Chau to deploy his team of kaiju organ recovery specialists to get the secondary brain from the recently slain kaiju while it’s still alive. Unfortunately, while walking around in hazmat suits inside the carcass, they find out that it is pregnant, and the fetus burst out and kills them, and also Chau, before choking to death on its own umbilical cord. But it’s the perfect opportunity, and Rick Moranis and Willem Defoe get their brain drift equipment to the scene and find out from the kaiju fetus brain that the reason all previous attempts to send bombs down the interdimensional breach have failed is because the breach only allows passage to kaiju by reading their DNA, so the jaeger that delivers the death blow will have to go through with a kaiju!

OK! Final mission! Raleigh and Mako are in their jaeger. The Australian jaeger was recovered and fixed, but Lance Armstrong hurt his arm in the battle and can’t pilot it, so Idris Elba suits up to go with the asshole son. By the way, all through the movie, Elba has been seen to take pills periodically from an Altoids-type box. We’ve also noticed him to be having some nosebleeds. What we learn in the scene right before the final mission, when Raleigh and Idris are talking in Idris’s weird office, is that Idris has radiation poisoning, because the early models of jaegers that he piloted in his heyday didn’t have adequate radiation shielding, and he’s been told that even one more jaeger mission would kill him (I remember waking up from a binge my junior year of college and thinking the same thing, ha ha). Also, we learn that he was the only other person ever to pilot a jaeger solo. Anyway, the point is that for Stringer Bell, this is a suicide mission. He is a badass. He has an Iron Man jaeger-driving suit and he makes an inspiring speech to everyone at the base, something about postponing the apocalypse.

The plan is for the two remaining jaegers to go into the breach and initiate the process that all huge robots powered by a nuclear reactor have, whereby they can self-destruct and make a huge nuclear explosion. The pilots will get away at the last minute in escape pods. Easy. But! Three more kaiju show up at the breach just as the jaegers are getting there, the last of which is a Category Five! The biggest ever! Underwater battling ensues. Idris Elba and the asshole son, their systems badly compromised from many ferocious monster punches, blow themselves up to dispatch a kaiju.

Willem Defoe and Rick Moranis rush breathlessly into the control room just in time to tell Raleigh and Mako that they have to use a kaiju to get through the interdimensional breach. This time, Mako and Raleigh don’t hold back on the sword, and manage to beat the kaiju and jump into the breach with the kaiju's body impaled on their vorpal blade. They fall through to the kaiju world, which is smoggy.

The battle somehow damaged Mako’s access to oxygen, so Raleigh connects his oxygen supply to her while they are falling, then puts her in her escape pod and launches it up into the breach (no kaiju DNA this time, but she goes through just fine anyway). Then he’s all gasping and running out of air and he has to initiate the reactor core meltdown, which for some reason can only be done manually, which involves descending into the torso of the jaeger, almost falling into the maw of its whirling machinery, and opening up some sort of hatch and turning a knob. He manages this, of course, and gets into the escape pod and gets through the breach. Then a kaiju notices this huge robot falling in slow motion and makes some kaiju monster sounds that seem to be saying, WTF, and this kaiju goes toward the jaeger and is making more kaiju screeches, and we see the core meltdown countdown clock just as it gets to zero and then we get one last look at the perplexed kaiju and then BOOM! Cut to the cool 3D rendering of the interdimensional breach, back at the control room, and it just sort of disappears, and everyone cheers! Ding dong the breach is dead!

But what about Mako and Raleigh? Her escape pod comes to the surface of the sea and automatically opens up, and she is OK, aside from being on a tiny raft in the Pacific. Then Raleigh's pod comes up, but it doesn’t open automatically, so Mako swims over to it, rather impressively, given the crazy body armor she’s wearing. She gets the pod open and looks if Raleigh is OK. He is nonresponsive. She has radio contact with the control room and says she can’t find a pulse. Everything is tense, and instead of doing CPR, she just sort of lifts him to a sitting position and hugs him. Then we hear him say, “Youre squeezing me to hard.” Hooray! He is alive.

They get back to the base and everyone is happy. Did I mention that there was a huge clock in the base with numbers that flipped over mechanically like old-time alarm clocks? There was, and its purpose was to measure the time between kaiju attacks, like those signs at factories that say “138 Days Without an On-the-Job Injury.” So Lance Armstrong is now the Marshal (that was Idris Elba’s rank, remember, but he’s dead now), and he gets on a microphone and tells the base, rather ceremoniously, “Stop that clock!” Everyone cheers. Earth is saved. The end.

Drive (2011)

OK, so here's what happens: Ryan Gosling plays this weird, maybe autistic dude who is good at driving. The movie opens with him explaining the terms of his getaway driver service: you tell him a time and a place and he gives you a five-minute window. He is very clear, and we will hear this a couple times throughout the movie, that if you do not get in the car within that five minutes, he will not be there for you. Unfortunately, we never get to see this rule put into practice, which is maybe good, because it's the sort of rule that would definitely hold up in a court of law (putting aside that any contract containing it would be void anyway because a contract to do a crime is against the public interest), but would probably not withstand the scrutiny or patience of criminals, who would likely want to exact some sort of thuggish revenge if their highly paid ride took off just because they were two minutes late, especially if the departure led to incarceration or a financial loss. Instead, we see him getting ready for a job: he goes to a garage and picks up a plain-jane, late-model silver Impala, which the mechanic helpfully tells us (a) is the most common car in California and (b) has been modified to have “300 horses under the hood.” That means it is super fast – more fast than a regular Impala. In case we weren't quite following, the mechanic adds, speaking to Ryan Gosling, who presumably knows this already, that the Impala will make him inconspicuous. It is a fairly standard, and probably unnecessary narrative device. Another standard narrative device, known as foreshadowing, would have been for the mechanic to add, “I wonder if it is inconspicuous enough to keep you from getting embroiled in a showdown with local gangsters, fuelled by revenge and a strange, inchoate romantic interest in a married woman.” Instead, we cut to the getaway. Some dudes in ski masks break into a place while Ryan Gosling, whose character never gets a name other than “the kid,” waits in the portentous Impala. We see his routine, which involves strapping a wristwatch to his steering wheel and setting it to midnight in order to time his contractually permitted five minutes. He turns on a police scanner and also a Clippers – Raptors game on the radio (I know! Who cares about the Clippers? But be patient – all will be revealed), and takes some care to balance the volume of the two. He hears the break-in reported on the scanner but remains calm. He hears that units are being dispatched to the area, and still, he is unperturbed. One of the two robbers comes back but the other dallies, and the first robber is nervous, but Ryan Gosling is chill. You will notice that Ryan Gosling remains calm pretty much all the time. One wonders if his forbearance comes from his state of namelessness, which, while presumably of his own choosing, must also lead to some confusion (like later in the film, when he calls his neighbor's seven-year-old and says, “It's me,” and the kid is like, “Hi,” and Ryan Gosling is like, “Is your mother there?” and the kid is like, “She's talking to the police right now,” and Gosling is like, “Well, tell her I called,” which is all normal, but we're left to wonder what the kid will tell her. “He called.” “Who?” “You know – him. The guy.”). Anyway, finally the other robber gets there and Ryan Gosling starts driving, and he's listening to the police scanner and playing a cat-and-mouse game with the cops, who have gotten a report of a silver Impala (darn! shoulda just gone with a Mustang or something), which involves pulling behind a parked truck and killing the lights, hiding under an overpass to avoid the roving spotlight of a police helicopter, and, briefly, accelerating and doing crazy skid-turns to shake one cruiser that has actually turned its flashing lights on and started to give chase. All the while, the Clippers game is on, and after he shakes the cruiser he turns it up a bit, and it happens to be the final seconds of the game, and just as it's ending, with the Clippers improbably winning, he turns into a parking garage, which is actually, it turns out, at the Staples Center, and he parks just in time for him and his (now unmasked) robbers to disappear into the unheard-of, post-Clippers-victory revelry that is engulfing the parking structure. (Get it? He's really good at what he does, and also totally unconnected to the quotidian concerns of ordinary men. You thought he cared about the Clippers? Ha! He was just planning the perfect escape. He would have done the same thing if it were the Lakers, because his only loyalty is to driving.)

The next day, he is in a police uniform, and for a minute we're like, “Whoa! That's a crazy wrinkle!” But it turns out he is just in costume, doing a stunt for a movie. The mechanic who provided the Impala, whose name, we will learn, is Shannon, is there, because apparently he also has some role in coordinating stunts for movies. Ryan Gosling puts on an awesome rubbery face hood thing so he looks like some other guy, then signs a release proffered by a geeky studio dude, then quickly flips a police car onto a median. Shannon runs over to check on him and since he has on the expressionless rubber mask, he just gives a thumbs up.

At his apartment building, he rides up in the elevator with his neighbor, a young woman whose name, we will eventually learn, is Irene. He asks her what floor and she says four, and he presses that, and they get off on the same floor, because they live down the hall from one another, and as they are each unlocking their respective doors, he regards her for a moment and it is evident that she is the love interest in this film, but it is equally evident that he is kind of creepy and maybe also some sort of simpleton or idiot savant or something. His apartment is very bare. Later, he sees her at the grocery store and learns that she has a son of about seven. He sees them before they see him and he calmly retreats to an adjoining aisle, where he briefly listens to them talking to one another playfully. When he gets out of the store with his single bag of groceries, he stands beside his car for a long time, gazing into space, which is pretty much in keeping with his laconic, dreamy disposition. But then we see that Irene and her kid are looking forlornly at the smoking engine of their car, and Ryan Gosling walks over and offers help – he was gazing right at them and deciding, I guess, whether to help or not. It's not clear if he fixes the car because the next thing we see is him carrying their groceries into their apartment for them, so we don't know if he gave them a ride or if he fixed their car, or what, but I suppose that doesn't matter all that much. In the apartment, he says very little. The kid, whose name is Benicio, appears wearing a scary pumpkin/skeleton mask, and Ryan Gosling, speaking as always in his working class accent that seems to originate from somewhere between Canarsie and South Philly, says, “Scary,” but he says it completely without affect. After a long pause, he says to Benicio, “You want a toothpick?” (because he always has a toothpick in his mouth – I forgot to mention that) and Benicio nods, and Ryan Gosling gives him the toothpick. Then Irene comes in and offers him water, which he grudgingly accepts, and he sees a little snapshot of Benicio and some dude and just looks at it, which is the equivalent of asking, “Who's that?” for a guy who never talks, and Irene says, “That's Benicio's dad,” and this time Ryan Gosling actually says, “Where is he?” and she says, “In prison,” and he doesn't say anything, I think, or maybe he says, “I'm sorry,” but if he does, he waits so long to say it that it seems like a non-sequitur. There is also, in this scene, some chat about what he does, which is drive in stunts and work at a garage, which he says is on Reseda Boulevard, which I know is a totally real place because it's in the Tom Petty song “Free Fallin'.” Then we see him at the garage, which is the same one where Shannon works, and he is, you know, working on a car, and Irene and Benicio show up and start talking to Shannon about how their car broke down right there, which, you know, what are the chances? But whatever. Ryan Gosling walks over and smiles, and it is evident to Shannon that they know each other and that there is, inexplicably, chemistry between them, and when Shannon learns that they are neighbors, he presses Gosling into driving them home, because he somehow knows right away that their car won't be fixed for a few days. He also confides to Irene that he underpays Gosling, and that Gosling is an excellent mechanic, and that he has been working there for maybe five years. Then Gosling drives them home, and he and Irene just keep looking at each other and half-smiling in the car, and then he's like, “Want to see something cool?” and they're down, so he takes them driving on that concrete culvert/river thing where car chases always happen in movies, which I understand is called the LA River, maybe? Anyway, they drive there and sometimes drive up on the diagonal side part, which is fun, I guess, and also no one is wearing a seatbelt but it is OK. Then they come to a place that is the end of the concrete part, where there is a real stream with trees and stuff, and they stop there and play or reflect or something, and weird music takes over for the lack of dialogue, music with a refrain that goes something like “A real human being, and a hero,” which, well, what the fuck? Then we see him carrying a sleeping Benicio into the building, which has got to be the most cliched thing ever when it comes to tough guys whose hearts are melted by little kids, especially little kids belonging to vulnerable but tough single women, and then he and Irene have a moment, in which they say very little, half-smile a lot, and he offers to drive them around during the weekend, presumably while the car is in the shop. He is wearing a dirty white t-shirt at this moment – a v-neck, which is in keeping with his general hipster look. His wardrobe through the whole movie consists of:

Skinny jeans;
A light blue v-neck t-shirt;
A button-up denim shirt/jacket thing;
Leather driving gloves of the holes-at-the-knuckles variety, like you might buy from the Sharper Image catalog. He wears these when driving and, on one occasion, when threatening a lady. Otherwise, they protrude from the back pocket of his skinny jeans like batting gloves in Ricky Henderson's Oakland A's uniform;
An ivory-colored, quilted jacket with gusseted sleeves (the sleeves are surrounded by black stretchy fabric) and a big yellow scorpion embroidered on the back. You want there to be some significance to this unusual jacket, but all we get is one moment when Ryan Gosling is talking on the phone to a gangster and asks him if he knows the story of the frog and the scorpion, and then says that the frog didn't make it across the pond, which is his way of saying that he has killed the gangster's partner by drowing him in the ocean. Ryan Gosling really likes this jacket and does not change out of it even when it gets a lot of blood spattered on it.

Anyway, he and Irene drive around together that weekend. At one point, he is hanging out in the apartment with her and Benicio (waiting for a babysitter, we will learn), watching that cartoon movie with the sharks in it where Will Smith does the voice of one of the characters, and he and Benicio have a conversation about whether all sharks are evil. Then he goes out with Irene to drive around. After a while, she puts her hand on his while he is driving. Then later she gets a phone call and tells him it was her husband's lawyer, calling to say that her husband will get out of prison in a week. When confronted with this (perhaps disappointing) news, Ryan Gosling says exactly nothing.

We find out that Shannon the mechanic has a plan to start a Nascar team with Ryan Gosling as his driver, and he goes to a local gangster named Bernie Rose for backing in this endeavor. While they are talking, Bernie is joined by his partner Nino, who asks Shannon how his leg is, to which Shannon replies, “I paid my debt,” and that is how we understand that Nino (who seems maybe Italian, but turns out to be Jewish and named Izzy) is a real leg-breaking type of gangster (pelvis-breaking, actually, we later find out), and that Shannon is a hard-luck guy who has an unhappy history with gangsters. Shannon gets Bernie to go see Ryan Gosling drive a racecar around a track, which persuades Bernie to pony up $300,000 for the purchase of this car (and related expenses, presumably), with an agreement that he will get 70% of profits. When Ryan Gosling meets Bernie at the racetrack, he is weird and laconic and takes forever to take his driving gloves off before even saying that his hands are kinda dirty and so he shouldn't shake hands, all while Bernie has his hand extended, waiting for a handshake. Bernie says, maybe a little ominously, that his hands are dirty too. Back at the garage, Nino disparages the racecar, which he says looks boring, and instead extolls the virtue of some swanky mid-50s convertible, declaring it a “pussymobile” or something. Shannon says, under his breath, that Nino could not find pussy in a whorehouse. Ryan Gosling, reliably, says nothing.

So then Irene's husband comes home from prison and there is a party at their apartment, in which weird music blasts and he offers a heartfelt toast to Irene for sticking by him, and says that he did a bad thing but is committed to making the most of his second chance. He toasts with a bottle of Budweiser and I wonder whether it might have been worth it for his wife and family to spring for something a little more top-shelf, but then I suppose there was a complicated deal with Anheuser-Busch to make that happen, just as there was a deal with Denny's so that Irene would be a waitress there, and with Chevrolet, for the Impala. While music from the party pounds on his wall, Ryan Gosling sits in the dark at a table with one bright light – the kind with the round, donut bulb that people use to do careful, up-close work - and tinkers with some mechanical thing – it probably goes in a car, but we never find out. He keeps poking at it with a flathead screwdriver, and there is a can of WD-40 nearby. At some point, he picks the thing up – it is about the size of sixpack of soda, but with less uniform dimensions– and fixes to leave the apartment. In the hallway, he encounters Irene sitting on the floor beside her door with no shoes on, the way people do in apartment buildings when they are a little bit overwhelmed by parties. They engage in the almost-no-talking equivalent of banter, her apologizing for the noise, him smiling and saying he was going to call the cops, her saying she wishes he would. Then her husband, who is inexplicably named Standard, comes out of the apartment with Benicio, carrying a bag of trash to be taken to a compactor room or dumpster or something. Standard and Ryan Gosling have a charged interaction in which Standard asks whether Gosling has been hanging around the apartment and “helping out,” and Gosling doesn't answer, and Standard is the only person in the movie whom this seems to bother, because he's like, “Hey! I'm talking to you!” and then Gosling answers, and that is that, and we think they will have a difficult relationship, but it turns out they won't.

Another day comes, and Ryan Gosling is again driving around. We see him drive through a parking garage and pass two dudes who look like trouble, one in a track suit, and as he drives slowly past the track suit one uses his finger to make a shooting gun gesture at Gosling, and looking back, Gosling sees that he is carrying some sort of baseball bat or club or something. Then he is out of the car and discovers Benicio standing in a hallway (of their building, presumably), looking terrified, and a short distance away, Standard is on the floor all beaten up. Gosling walks right past Standard's bloody self to make sure Benicio is OK. Later, the three of them are in Standard and Irene's apartment (she is out) as Standard cleans himself up, and he explains to Gosling that the track suit guy and the other one are dudes to whom he owes protection money from when he was in prison, and they beat him up and want him to rob a pawn shop somewhere in order to square up, but he doesn't want to because he's trying to go straight, and the dudes have threatened to come after Irene and Benicio next, so Standard doesn't know what he will do. Then we see that Benicio is holding an unfired bullet, given to him by the track suit guy and his colleague, with instructions not to lose it. Ryan Gosling says, in his nondescript northeast white guy accent, “You want me to hold onto that for ya?” and Benicio nods, and Gosling gives one of his weird half-smiles, which is extra weird given the circumstances.

Long story short: Gosling agrees to help Standard do the heist. He and Standard present this plan to track suit guy, who is accompanied by the tawdry-but-beautiful Blanche, whose gold earrings helpfullys say “Blanche.” Track suit guy is like, “Standard, whaddya need this guy for when you got Blanche? Look at her! She's beautiful!” This is true, if unconvincing as it concerns the potential success of the robbery, as Blanche is played by the lovely Christina Hendricks. She mostly pouts. Anyway, Gosling gives his five-minute time window spiel to track suit guy, who says, “Here's the amount I'm going to give to Standard, here's Blanche's cut, and here's what you get,” and he's writing on his hand with a marker the whole time, and then he shows his hand to Gosling and it says FUCK OFF! But Gosling doesn't bat an eye and he's like, look, I'll do it for free if you just let Standard off the hook for his debt, and track suit guy is like, OK. But here's what you don't know (but I know, because I saw the movie, so I'm telling you so it will all make sense): There's a small-time mobster from Philly who wants to get in on Bernie and Nino's action, and he has stashed a million bucks at a pawn shop, and Nino finds out about this and is apparently in some kind of cahoots with the pawn shop operator. Also, Nino lets on (later, when all this is explained) that he has a chip on his shoulder about being a west-coast, Jewish gangster, because when he is telling Bernie why he planned this heist to steal from the Philly guy, Bernie is like, dude, if you get the Mob on us we're both dead, to which Nino says, “Fuck them. They're the ones who called me a kike to my face,” or something to that effect. Anyway, so Nino has a plan to rob the pawn shop, or rather, to make it look like a regular robbery as a way to get all that money, and the whole plan is to have Standard do it then get shot dead (I think). So once Ryan Gosling inserts himself in the plan, the idea is for him and Standard to die, so when they go there, Gosling and Standard show up and Blanche is waiting outside. Standard and Blanche go in, and then Blanche comes out with a duffel bag o' cash, and then as Standard is coming out, he gets killed, and there is another car there, so when Gosling and Blanche pull out, the other car gives chase, and Gosling is driving a late-model Mustang that he stole effortlessly for the occasion, but whatever this other car is has just as much oomph as the Mustang, and it's trying to run them off the road, but Gosling does lots of fancy tricky driving, involving driving backward really fast for a bit, and eventually causes the other car to crash so he can get away.

Did I mention that after working out the deal (such as it was) with track suit guy but prior to undertaking the ill-fated heist, Ryan Gosling was invited to dinner with Irene, Standard, and Benicio on a couple of occasions, and Standard warmed to Gosling? That happened. Irene was unaware of the whole plan, or even of who had beat up Standard (he told her it was drunk kids).

Anyway, Ryan Gosling and Blanche end up in a motel with a duffel bag full of loot. They are at some sort of rendezvous spot or something. Gosling is bugging out, of course, because, well, why was that other car there? And then he turns on the news and there's a report about the robbery where the pawn shop owner says there was only one robber, the one who got shot (Standard). Well, that's not going to fly with Ryan Gosling! He starts slowly, deliberately putting on and adjusting his driving gloves, like Derek Jeter, but less frenetic, and as he's doing this, he's asking Blanche, “Why would he say there was only one robber?” and Blanche is basically blanching and she's like, I don't know. So Gosling gets his gloves on and comes over to Blanche and asks her again, pretty much, like, what the fuck, the other car, etc.?! And she says again that she doesn't know, and he smacks her, and then he holds her down against the bed with one hand over her mouth and holds his other (gloved) hand above him as though he had a gun, but it is just a fist, and he tells her that when he takes his hand away, only the truth should come out of her mouth or he will hurt her, and sometimes he makes his non-gun-holding hand into a pointing hand that strains against the confines of the driving glove in a way that says, “I don't have a gun but I am perfectly capable of poking you in the eye or some other unpleasantness, so you'd best do as I say.” Well, Blanche buys that, and she explains that it was a set-up, that the other car was meant to slow them down, etc. He points at her a couple more times menacingly, finds out track suit guy's name (Chris Cook, maybe), and finds out where he can be found (you will not be surprised to learn that it is a strip club!). Then Blanche is released to touch up her makeup in the bathroom, and while she is there, her phone buzzes and Ryan Gosling looks at it, and at the text message that the buzz presumably announced, then looks at her and starts to grab the mattress off the bed to put it against the door, the knob of which has just started to twitch as if handled from without. Just then, a dude appears outside the window to the bathroom, although Blanche does not see him because she is looking at herself in the mirror, and he actually blows poor Blanche's head pretty much off. It is really gross. At the same time, someone starts banging against the locked front door of the motel room. Ryan Gosling has been hit in the arm by some shotgun pellets but he remains calm and stands just outside the door to the bathroom. When the shotgun guy, who has come through the bathroom window, heads into the main part of the motel room, shotgun barrel first, Gosling grabs the barrel, pushes the butt of the gun back in the guy's gut, then really beats the tar out of him till he's dead. (I remember seeing Hawk from “Spencer for Hire” use the same technique of grabbing the barrel of a gun as it poked into a room in order to get the better of the gun's unsuspecting wielder, so I understood as I watched the film just what Ryan Gosling was doing. I wonder if he saw that episode of “Spencer” too.) Just as shotgun guy is subdued, front door guy breaks the door down, and Ryan Gosling shoots him with the shotgun. Gosling's face and his awesome scorpion jacket are totally covered in blood spatter. He will wear the jacket for the rest of the movie, pretty much – it's like his revenge talisman or something. (Also, speaking of the jacket, there was this other scene, pre-bloodbath, where Ryan Gosling is eating at a diner, and this was the scene where I first noticed the scorpion jacket's awesome gusseted sleeves, and in the scene, there is a trucker-looking guy down the counter from Gosling who keeps looking at him, and my first thought was that he, like me, was appreciating the gusseted sleeves, but then he comes over and says, “remember me?” because Gosling was his getaway driver at some point, I guess. So Gosling listens to this guy talk conspiratorially for a sec, and then he suddenly lifts his head up and says, “How about this? Shut your fucking mouth or I'll kick your teeth down your throat and shut it for you.” The guy slinks away.)

So Ryan Gosling and his bloody jacket go to the strip club where Chris the track suit guy can be found. Upon entering, Gosling encounters a scantily clad woman standing in some sort of corridor, looking at an iPhone, which is notable because everyone else in the film has an old-as-fuck flip phone, which suggests that for all their gangsterism and big-money heists, these folks are not maintaining as steady an income as a middling stripper. Maybe there's a message there. Anyway, Gosling asks iPhone stripper where Chris is at. There is a needlessly long pause (and I mean, needless for me. Ryan Gosling's character seems to thrive on this kind of communication inertia, so maybe this pause made her the hottest stripper ever in his book) and then she says, “In the dressing room.” Naturally, he pauses for fucking ever, and then asks (wait for it), “Where's the dressing room.” Eventually, she says, “over there.” It's the sparsest, most unimportant dialogue ever, but it has been stretched over the frame and time of a meaningful scene, which is, I guess, cinematic artistry. As Gosling walks down another corridor to the dressing room, we see that he is carrying a hammer, and then we know that he is about to engage in some ass-kicking (or carpentry!). Chris the track suit guy is in the middle of a bunch of seated, naked strippers who look decidedly non-plussed. Ryan Gosling kicks his ass with alacrity and then holds the bullet that Chris once gave to Benicio against Chris's forehead, as one might hold a nail if one intended to hammer into the forehead of a guy wearing a track suit, with his other hand holding the hammer aloft. The strippers act totally uninterested, as though this type of shit were not only run of the mill, but actually, affirmatively boring. So Ryan Gosling is in the middle of a room full of busty naked ladies with exactly the same disposition as he has. Nevertheless, he keeps his cool. He gets Chris to tell him who he works for – Nino – and then asks to talk to Nino, so one of the strippers gets Nino on the phone. Nino and Gosling have a heated exchange about the money from the heist, how Gosling will give it to Nino, and then Gosling hangs up and makes Chris swallow the bullet. Did I mention that Ryan Gosling was wearing his driving gloves during this scene? He was. Driving gloves, swallowed bullets, and bored naked chicks. This is America.

So at first I was a little confused by the exchange between Gosling and Nino, because Gosling says he wants to meet to return the money, but he doesn't say where. Also, Nino asks (sensibly), “what do you get out of it?” and Ryan Gosling responds, showing a flair for language that we didn't heretofore know he possessed, “That's just it: out of it.” Nice. But really, does he think he'll get out of it? He's crossed mobsters and taken their money, and you don't have to see that many movies to know that it won't end well for a person in that situation. Even the backstory of this movie tells us that Ryan Gosling will end up, at the least, with a broken pelvis, like Shannon. Oh, and what about Shannon? Where does he figure in this mess? Well, when the heist first went wrong, Ryan Gosling told Shannon about it. This was before they realized that Nino (and, by extension, Bernie, his partner) was behind the whole thing, so Shannon stupidly told Bernie about the whole mess. Then at one point when Ryan Gosling and Irene were in the elevator of their building, there was another dude in the elevator, a mobster-looking dude, and as they were all standing in the elevator, Gosling sees that he has a gun under his white sport coat (!). So Gosling kisses Irene in a slow-motion way that is so intense that it makes the lights in the elevator dim and the background music swell, and then Gosling just wilds out on the dude, smashing his head into the side of the elevator and ultimately stomping on his head until it crunches disgustingly. He actually grabs onto the railing of the elevator to gain head-stomping leverage, and the sound effects are truly, truly revolting. By then, the elevator has stopped at the garage and Irene steps out and just looks back at Ryan Gosling with the sort of look you might have on your face if you had just watched a laconic pretty boy kill a guy with his shoe. She then walks away, but the point is that Gosling realizes that Nino's thugs were IN HIS BUILDING, so he meets with Shannon to be like, WTF, and Shannon admits talking to Bernie, and Ryan Gosling is soooooo pissed, but he just tells Shannon to leave town and never come back, but that doesn't work out because as Shannon is lugging a suitcase through his darkened garage (in a subsequent scene), Bernie is there and kills him. Bernie, at another point, kills track suit Chris by stabbing him in the eye with a fork and then in the throat many times with a kitchen knife. These two killings tell us that, although he is played by Albert Brooks and seems sort of lovable, Bernie is every bit as cold-blooded as Nino, who is played by Ron Perlman and is appreciably less appealing. Also, Ryan Gosling later finds Shannon dead in the garage and tilts Shannon's head to one side to look at his faded neck tattoo of a horseshoe. Ryan Gosling is sad at this point but neither talks nor cries.

So Shannon is dead and there is no set appointment for the exchange of the loot, but Ryan Gosling, still in his blood-spattered scorpion jacket and skinny jeans, goes to a trailer on a film set and just walks inside, probably because he is a known stuntman, and Hollywood people don't even bat an eye when stuntmen show up covered in blood, and inside he gets a rubbery mask like the one he wore in the stunt scene early in the movie. Then we see him parked outside Nino's pizzeria at night (did I mention that Nino has a pizzeria, which appears to be a front business? He does. It's where a lot of the conversations between him and Bernie happen, and where track suit Chris got killed). He puts on the rubbery mask and goes up to the door, which is mostly painted over in a red checkerboard pattern. Looking through, Ryan Gosling sees Nino, some other wiseguys, and a bunch of pretty ladies dancing and engaging in mobster-type revelry. Ryan Gosling goes back to his car and waits, and eventually Nino leaves in another car, with a livieried driver, and Gosling follows. If you were hoping for an awesome chase scene here, which, frankly, a movie called “Drive” ought to have more of, well, sorry. He just follows Nino at a safe distance for a long time, then speeds up and rams Nino's car from behind in such a way as to send it skidding to the side of the road near a cliff by the beach. The chauffeur gets out at that point and looks around, but he and Nino are all alone, so he gets back in and Nino says, “let's get the fuck out of here,” but just then, headlights and revving engine and BAM! Ryan Gosling slams his car into Nino's from the side so as to send it flying off the cliff. It lands on the beach about 30 feet below, and as Nino stumbles away, Gosling looms up with his freaky rubber stuntman mask and holds Nino's head under the ocean water. There is probably symbolism in this.

Afterward, Ryan Gosling having said his cryptic frog/scorpion thing to Bernie Rose as a prelude to arranging a meeting with him, they meet. I really don't see the angle on this one, but Bernie apparently does, because he tells Gosling right away when they meet in a Chinese restaurant (with our man still sporting the bloody scorpion jacket) that he will guarantee Irene's safety if he can just have the money. Ryan Gosling is cool with that, and he's basically, inexplicably, willing to throw away his whole carefully constructed, bare apartment, taciturn lifestyle for a lady he really barely knows and definitely hasn't slept with, or, for that matter, exchanged 100 words with. But whatever, they go to the car to get the money, but Bernie stabs Ryan Gosling (of course!), but Ryan Gosling has his own shiv and stabs Bernie back, and then we see the shadow of the two of them struggling, and luckily, Ryan Gosling has his Tim Raines batting gloves thing going on with the driving gloves, so we can tell whose shadow is whose and we see that it is Bernie who crumples to the ground. Then we look at Ryan Gosling sitting very very still in the car with his eyes open for a very very long time. It's so long that were it anyone but his character, we'd conclude that the person was definitely dead, but with him, the camera might pull back to reveal that he is in an animated conversation with another person. In fact, he is neither dead nor in a conversation. Eventually he blinks and somehow his stab wounds end up being OK, and he drives off, AND THAT IS THE END OF THIS WEIRD MOVIE.

Did I mention that the credits are in that weird, half-cursive font that looks like it was used in “Into The Night” with Jeff Goldblum, and possibly also “Cocktail” and “Flashdance”? They are. It's a weird choice. The soundtrack is also strange, with lots of synthy music of the sort that is recent but sounds like it is trying to be from the 80s.

Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (2003)

One of the great things about modern martial arts movies (and by modern, I mean post-1984, more or less), is that they have all the same silly plot tropes (fight in a restaurant; fight in a crowded marketplace; fight on a dock; etc.) but way better cinematography, PLUS cool video game music. Ong-Bak distinguishes itself even from the modern pack by adding instant replay for extra-specially awesome moves, which was especially useful to me as I was watching it because I was feeding it from Netflix to the TV, so the only remote control is the mouse, which I can't reach from the couch, so no rewinding to watch dope muay thai hits over and over again the way I do when I Tivo Bloodsport.

Anyway, Ong-Bak starts with a whole bunch of shirtless dudes covered in dried mud and standing around a big baobab-type tree, completely still, while crazy, arrhythmic drum music plays, and it's a long enough shot, and the scene is just trippy enough, that you think maybe this is more of a Crouching Tiger sort of kung fu movie, in the sense that it is upscale and meaningful. Then you see that there is an orange flag protruding from the top of the big tree, and then all the muddy guys holler and start running at the tree and climbing up ferociously, and they're pulling one another off and making each other fall, and sometimes as they fall the smack into lower branches, and they always end up landing in the mud with a sickening thud, and the whole thing is just surreal. Then one especially catlike guy gets the flag, ties it around his chest in the smart, impossibly quick way that kung fu people seem to have of always knowing how to secure unwieldy items for carrying-while-fighting, and proceeds to hop, skip, and jump his way down the tree, dispatching some other muddy guys on the way - not by hitting them, mind you, but with gentle pushes (as much as any push that sends a guy careening out of a tree can be gentle (see A Separate Peace)), and finally he lands on the ground, holds the orange flag up above his head, and the camera pans around to show a disheveled, dusty village-worth of people looking on apprehensively, and then someone says, "Ting has won this year's contest!" and they all cheer. Ladies and gentlemen, WE HAVE A PROTAGONIST.

So Ting (no relation to the Jamaican soda, as best I can tell) is just a regular Thai country boy from the little village of Nong Pradu. The contest is connected to a big festival that happens every 24 years and is important for alleviating droughts (we will later learn). Everyone's happy about the festival and good times seem to prevail in the village. If this were a Jean Claude Van Damme movie, there would also be a part as Ting walks around the village where he catches the eye of young lady and you kind of understand that he's the village champ, she's ready to roll, and he pretty much has a good life laid out for him. That doesn't happen in Ong-Bak, but Ting is still clearly a stand-up guy. Conveniently, he is also really good at Muay Thai, which is pretty much Thai for kung-fu, but in the translation from Chinese, a lot of chops and punches get turned into hits with elbows and knees. Naturally, he has been trained really really well (we see him do one of those routines where he does a series of moves and says the name of each one, but again, the translation from Chinese to Thai turns animal kingdom reference names like "monkey chases snake" to Buddhist/Hindu myth reference names like "Hanuman visits Lanka"), but has never ever actually fought and never will, which we learn when his old-ass monk trainer says, "I have taught you Muay Thai and you have learned it well; now you must never use it," and Ting is like "Yes, master," and the viewer is like, "Um, no master, because otherwise this would be the boringest movie ever." Right there, though, we know that this will be a Reluctant Hero type of film.

Luckily, it is not a Reluctant Plot Advancement type of film, because the next scene shows a cocky young city guy arrive in Nong Pradu and try to buy some amulet from some old dude. The city guy, named Don, clearly really wants the amulet, and offers 200,000 baht ($6,055 US, according to Google). The country guy is phlegmatic like country people are the world over and insists the amulet is not for sale, because he's saving it for his son when his son becomes a monk. He says, "I never told you I'd sell it." Don is like, "Well, call me when you change your mind," and the country guy walks away, saying, "I don't have a phone," which makes you wonder how Don ever found his way to Nong Pradu and managed to get even this far in his fruitless negotiations. Meanwhile, the orange flag that Ting retrieved has been tied around Ong-Bak, the village Buddha, and that night, for reasons not entirely clear, Don breaks into the temple, snuffs some old guy who hears him prowling about, and cuts off Ong-Bak's head before absconding with said head to Bangkok.

It won't surprise you to learn that the village is devastated and that after some perfunctory wailing and fate-cursing, someone says, "We need Ong-Bak back to do our festival," and an old lady with a bouffant hairdo that is startling for its perfection, given the setting, starts wailing about how the village is doomed, and some other guy sternly asks, "How will we get Ong-Bak's head back from Don?" AND GUESS WHO VOLUNTEERS? YOU ARE RIGHT IT IS TING!! The village gives him all the money they have, his uncle gives him a letter to carry to his cousin Hum Lae (who had, apparently, set out some time earlier for the big time), and various other trinkets are given to him and placed in his shoulder bag for the journey. The he rides off on the back of a truck.

Suddenly, we cut from Thai Pastoral to a slickly filmed urban scene with club music and people betting on street motorcycle racing. A race finishes and a chunky guy with close-cropped, dyed blonde hair (like Sisqo used to have) takes off his helmet in disgust because the other, still helmeted racer, has beaten him. Then the racer unhelmets and reveals that SHE is A GIRL, and much indignation is displayed by Sisqo. Then Sisqo and the girl racer argue with some sort of gangster guy in aviator shades about prize money. The girl racer storms off, pointedly bumping her shoulder against Sisqo's, but somehow aviator shades gangster man knows that Sisqo and the girl are in cahoots, so after the girl is gone, he and his goons beat up Sisqo and don't give him some money he thought he was entitled to, explaining that he actually owes more money to aviator shades man, and Sisqo pleads for just enough money to gamble with, and in this way we learn he is a chronic and compulsive gambler. What we do not understand is WHO THE HELL IS HE AND HOW WILL HE ADVANCE TING'S QUEST FOR ONG-BAK?

All in good time, my friends. All in good time.

So Sisqo, whose name, we learn, is George (naturally), meets up with the girl motorcycle racer (and I'm not being sexist and infantilizing here - she looks youthful, maybe sixteen or seventeen) and they argue about how he didn't collect from their motorcycle racing scam (the nature of which I don't understand) and how he's the one who always takes the beatings. Then Ting shows up and he goes to George/Sisqo and is like, "Hey Hum Lae, what's poppin' bro? I come with bad news from Nong Pradu," and George Sisqo Hum Lae is like, "I don't know you, son," because he's George now, get it? He's left that country living behind for the fast living, periodic beatings, and low-grade criminality for which we have all come to love Bangkok. Ting, naturally, is naively insistent, girl partner thinks the whole thing is hilarious, and eventually Hum Lae realizes Ting has money in his shoulder bag and invites him to stay at the apartment.

Of course, Hum Lae is a reprobate, so he urges Ting to have a shower and immediately takes the money from Ting's bag and goes to a fight club - no, not the Fight Club for which the first rule is "don't talk about Fight Club"; the one for which the only rule is "come place bets on dudes beating the tar out of each other while video game music plays, sexy waitresses do weird dances, and a ruthless gangster in a wheelchair who talks with one of those tracheotomy robot voice machines watches from a second floor balcony and places enormous bets on each fight with another gangster, who is constantly giggling and being massaged by two ladies" (it's a comprehensive rule). We (and Ting) know that Hum Lae has gone to this place because while Ting is showering, he says on the phone that he will meet somebody at the place. So then he rides off on his motorbike, Ting comes out angrily and finds his loot looted, and then we cut to the afforementioned den of iniquity.

Hum Lae seems to be known by the bet-taker at the fight club, who sneers at him. When he arrives, a fight is ongoing and one guy is really pummeling some other guy. The pummeller, we learn, is called (disappointingly, I think) "Ali," because Hum Lae says to the sneering bet-taker, "Is there still time to place a bet on Ali?" There is, Hum Lae does, and wouldn't you know it, the white guy he's pummelling suddenly comes alive and vanquishes him, prompting Hum Lae to make a sad sack face. Just then, Ting finds the place and asks Hum Lae where his money is at, and Hum Lae sadly explains that he has lost it, pointing to the bet-takers little booth. Ting, being painfully naive, makes to walk across the open fight area to the booth and ask for his money back, but he gets immediately conscripted to fight the white guy who just beat Ali, who, by the way, looks kind of like that magician/hipster stuntman David Blaine. The ringmaster, who looks like a scrunched up, miniature Mr. T (not because of a mohawk and gold jewelry, both of which he lacks, but because he just looks like him), announces the fight and asks Ting what his name is. Ting says the country thing to say, which is "Ting, from Nong Pradu," which Mini T changes to "The Pradu Legend." The tracheotomy-robot-voice gangster quickly gives his giggly friend three-to-one odds on Ting, which bet the giggler takes, and then David Blaine comes charging at Ting and Ting knocks him out with a single punch, which is awesome as far as I'm concerned, and as far as Hum Lae is concerned, but causes the crowd to boo, because first-round knockouts are BOOOOOORING. To add more naivete to injury, Ting won't except the wad of prize money and insists instead on getting his actual money (far less, mind you) back from the bet-taker, which he does.

I forgot to mention that while Hum Lae was placing his losing bet on Ali, we saw Don show up in Tracheotomy Robot Gangster's area and tell him how the old guy wouldn't sell the amulet, so Don brought back the head of the village Buddha instead, and at that point he opens a large briefcase to display the head. Tracheotomy Robot Gangster has a totally reasonable reaction, which is, "What the fuck am I supposed to do with a stone Buddha head," and Don - who also looks a little like David Blaine - slinks away sheepishly.

The next day (or some subsequent day), we see Hum Lae stroll into a gambling hall, but not with fighting, just a card-playing place, and the proprietor is like, "George, where you been? I've been short-staffed!" and Hum Lae is like, "Oh, you know, doing my thing," and the proprietor is like, "Come deal at this table so I can play," and Hum Lae does it and sends off the dealer who was there with some pithy insult. Then we see that, while he seems like an incompetent gambler and con man when it comes to scams involving motorcycle races and aviator shades-wearing gangsters, Hum Lae can really handle a deck of cards. He does all those cool shuffling tricks and then deals, and the proprietor immediately wins, then wins again, and we see that Hum Lae is dealing from the bottom of the deck (I mean, we don't see it, but it becomes clear to us). Then Hum Lae's partner in crime, the Girl Wonder, walks in and sits down at the table to play. She starts winning every hand, and the proprietor is bugging out, but he doesn't suspect Hum Lae, only the girl. They're playing some kind of blackjack-esque game, but the idea is to get a total of eight from two cards (although there may be some subtraction involved), and Girl Wonder keeps getting eight, and finally the proprietor waits till Hum Lae has dealt, then says for everyone to leave their cards on the table. He says Girl Wonder has beat him fifteen times in a row, and if she has eight again, he'll know she's cheating. So they look at her cards and she does not have eight (she has a nine and a four, and Hum Lae says, "she has five"), so the proprietor looks a little foolish, and Hum Lae makes a big show of kicking Girl Wonder out (she keeps her winnings), and it seems like the perfect con. The we see Hum Lae meet up with Girl Wonder in an alley to divvy up the loot, and they argue, and the aviator shades gangster sees them, and he and his thugs come over and take all the money and then start gratuitously beating Hum Lae, AND WOULDN'T YOU KNOW IT, ALONG COMES TING. He saves Hum Lae using the bare minimum of awesome muay thai moves (he doesn't go in for the Steven Seagal-style bone breaks or anything), and they meander off. Soon, though, the vanquished aviator shades guy finds them and he has a ton of thugs with him, so Hum Lae, Girl Wonder, and Ting start running away IN A BUSTLING MARKETPLACE!!!

Here, in no particular order, are some of the awesome things that happen during the lengthy chase, which inexplicably includes among the chasing thugs the card shop proprietor from the previous scene:

• Ting jumps over and/or through a lot of stuff, including pushcarts, tables covered in flour (or maybe cocaine), passing bicycles (Ting actually jumps through space between the rider and the box on his rear rack), two workmen conveniently carrying a large coil of barbed wire that makes a circle about three feet in diameter (for this one, Ting eschews the obvious headfirst dive followed by a roll and instead jumps up and passes through the circle of barbed wire with his feet and hands extended straight in front of him and his head tucked down), and two parallel pieces of plate glass.
• Ting does a headspin (the breakdancing move) on a table while surrounded by thugs, and as he spins around he kicks them all.
• Ting several times finds himself faced down by a whole lot of thugs, and rather than fight them all, he runs at them, then jumps up and runs along their heads and shoulders to make his getaway.
• Ting does goes from a full-out run to doing the splits while sliding along the ground in order to pass under a moving SUV.
• Hum Lae throws handfuls of hot chili powder at his pursuers, which they do not like at all.
• No one is made to pay for any of the products they casually use or destroy, even when the thugs steal all the knives from an old lady selling knives.

Eventually, Girl Wonder slips away somewhere while Ting and Hum Law end up in a dead end alley with a high wall, which Ting easily scales, leaving Hum Lae to get housed, until Hum Lae promises to help Ting find Don and return Ong-Bak to their village, at which point Ting lifts him to the safety of an adjoining balcony, whence they make their get away while the thugs angrily throw pieces of wood at them.

Somewhere along the way, and I don't recall exactly where, Ting ends up back at the fight club and beats another dude. Here are some neat things about his fighting style:

• He always fakes you out - like, he'll do a high roundhouse kick and his opponent will duck, and you're like, Oh snap, Ting, he read you like the Post on that one, and then HOLY SHIT - Ting's other foot is airborne and comes around and gets the guy right in the neck as he fixing to throw a punch.
• He loves the quadruple axle - he'l go into these flying kicks that take for-fucking-ever to land, and you keep thinking, OK, on this spin he's going to come with the kick, but then he just spins in the air AGAIN, and finally, when you're sure he's out of momentum, BAM! He kicks the guy.
• He likes to climb up on dudes' shoulders and hit them on the top of the head with his elbow, but not the pointy part of his elbow, the part just up from there, going toward his armpit. It doesn't look like the most painful or punishing maneuver, but it straight knocks fighters out.
• He never goes in for the gratuitous hit. When an opponent is on the ground, he just hovers over him with fists raised in muay thai readiness.

OK, so where were we? Ting learns that Don is a drug dealer and that he works (guess where! you're right!) at the fight club. Did I mention that this fight club is patronized by many non-Thai people - white people and black people, all men, who look like frat boys? It is true. I don't know if that's how it is at Bangkok fight clubs, but whatever. Anyway, Ting is prowling the fight club for Don. Meanwhile a guy called "Big Bear" is just beating the bejesus out of other fighters, and in between he insults everybody there in English (because he is Australian and looks like Slash from Guns and Roses) about how muay thai fighting ain't shit and they should try freestyle, or combined, or some such thing, and in between these harangues and ass-kickings, he gropes the waitress, and everybody sees Ting there and they know what a badass he is so they're urging him to take on Big Bear, and he's not having it, to the point where Big Bear grabs some other Thai guy and is on the verge of killing him, and the waitress tries to intervene and Big Bear smacks her, and THAT IS IT. Because when a big white guy smacks a Thai waitress, Ting cannot let it pass. He has a good fight with Big Bear . . . and wins! It's cool when he does his signature climb-up-on-a-guy-and-give-him-an-elbow-to-the-head move because Big Bear is huge and Ting is fairly diminutive. Tracheotomy Robot Gangster bets on Big Bear and loses, to the delight of the giggling gangster. Tracheotomy Robot Gangster also smokes a joint through his tracheotomy hole at one point, which is awesome. He also grabs his tracheotomy voice machine and presses it to his neck for the sole purpose of doing the classical maniacal bad guy laugh, but all robot style. He's a badass. He also looks like an aged and infirm Tom Selleck.

After Ting beats Big Bear, some other fighter steps up and Ting again beats him, although this guy is less brute strength and more technical savvy, which makes for a neater fight. Tracheotomy Robot Gangster loses money on this again, and nods conspiratorially to one of his henchmen, apparently in a way that means, "Arrange for a bunch of other guys to fight Ting until he loses and don't let him just leave." This message is relayed quickly to the fighting floor, where and acne-faced thug who looks sort of like Edward james Olmos except Thai prevents Ting from walking away by pressing a gun discreetly to Ting's gut, obliging Ting to fight some other dudes, whom he defeats, to Tracheotomy Robot Gangster's growing displeasure.

The final showdown of this scene involved the return of the David Blaine fighter, who this time, recognizing he cannot beat Ting the old-fashioned way, goes after him with many implements including broken bottles, chairs, tables, plates, glasses, and so on. Ting mostly just lets the guy break furniture on him, which is apparently not prohibited by any of the rules of this particular fight club, and eventually their fight moves to another room, which allows Ting to send the guy flying through a flimsy wall by kicking a refrigerator which bonks into David Blaine and makes him crash through the wall. But that is not the end, because after Ting has walked away, Blaine gets up, grabs an electrified sign from the wall, breaks it, and comes after Ting with the live wire. Sparks fly everywhere, and then they are superimposed on the screen in a weird repeating pattern that looks more like snow, and eventually Ting knocks the guy out, and all these people start throwing down coins in tribute to Ting, and the superimposed sparks are replaced with superimposed U.S. quarters, and Ting quietly glories in the adulation of the crowd, and it's kind of like Ting's Nok Su Cow moment. Not surprisingly, with all this hubbub, Ting completely fails to find Don.

In the next scene, we see Don undressing some comely young lady, and tucked in her bra are little packets that we assume to be drugs. He kisses her a bunch and then, from the angle of the shot and the weird way she's acting, we can't tell if they're sexing and she's in ecstasy or if she's just high or what, and then Don says to her, "What, you prefer the way your ex-boyfriend did it?!" which tends to suggest they are sexing, but they are both still in enough clothes to make sexing difficult, and you kinda don't know if that's movie modesty or if there's something else going on, but we withdraws from her and sits across the room and appears to be getting ready to do some lines, and he asks her what the problem is, and she says she doesn't want to sell drugs for him anymore because she is trying to kick the habit, and he gets angry and comes over and kind of stuffs some powdered drug substance (cocaine? heroine? flour?) in her mouth and nose. In this was the audience can fully comprehend that Don has absolutely no redeeming value as a human being. Then there is a knock on the door, Don gets up irritatedly from his line-doing, and sees through the peephole that it is a waitress from the fight club. But when he opens the door, BAM! It's Ting and Hum Lae, and they (well, Ting, mostly) start wilding out on Don and asking about Ong-Bak. Then Hum Lae notices the drug-carrying woman, who is now foaming at the mouth, and he seems to know her, because he's calling her by name and bugging out, and with this distraction, Don runs out. Ting and Hum Lae give chase, but Hum Lae stops at the building's front desk to tell the lady there to call an ambulance because someone is dying in apartment 22 (priorities).

When Don gets out, he hops in a little three-wheeled taxi cart thing, but somehow all the drivers of the 20-off taxi cart things are in cahoots with him, so suddenly Ting and Hum Lae are wildly outnumbered, so Ting just starts running, but Hum Lae manages to steal his own taxi cart, and after Ting has jumped completely over a couple of cars that are in his way, Hum Lae swings around and they start an awesome taxi cart chase scene. It will not surprise you to learn that they find their way to a blocked off construction area of the highway, and the reason it is blocked off is because a section of the elevated highway has not been completed so there is a huge thirty-foot drop-off! And if the taxi cart goes below fifty miles an hour, it will explode! Ting and Hum Lae hit the brakes in time while many of their pursuers go flying off, and then somehow the chase turns back the other way, and some shit transpires that I can't follow exactly, but Hum Lae is safe and Ting is on the same taxi cart thing as Don and they are fighting and wrestling for control of the taxi, and then they go up a makeshift ramp and flying into the water, and they briefly wrestle under water, but then something catches Ting's eye and he lets Don swim off because THE WATER IS FULL OF STOLEN BUDDHAS AND PARTS OF BUDDHAS, JUST LIKE ONG-BAK, AND THIS IS PROBABLY SOME SYMBOLIC STATEMENT ABOUT THE DEGRADATION THAT MODERN LIVING HAS CAUSED TO TRADITIONAL THAI VALUES, but I don't really get it because I am American. End result: police (and the "Department of Antiques") discover the secret stash of stolen antiquities, which belonged to Tracheotomy Robot Gangster, so now TRG is super mad at Don and Ting, because they have cost him so much money.

Next, some guy comes and tells Ting and Hum Lae (who are chillaxing at Hum Lae's pad) that he knows how they can get Ong-Bak. The deal, offered by TRG, is that Ting has to engage in a rope fist fight (where fighters wrap their hands in twine, because that is super tough) at a fight club on the Thai-Burma border. His opponent is a bad-ass dude who has been standing near TRG through much of the movie, a dude who looks strangely like a Thai Corey Feldman, but way more ripped. Naturally, TRG and the Giggling Gangster are ringside, and TRG explains that he held the match out in the sticks so if there is a body to dispose of it will be easier (which makes me wonder what kind of gangster he is, because seriously, you have the resources to secret millions of baht worth of stolen antiquities in nets underwater, but you can't get rid of one body in fucking Bangkok?). Anyway, Giggles bets on Ting. We see both fighters get prepared for the fight which, in Ting's case just means wrapping his fists in rope and carefully selecting a rope headband, Rambo style. For Corey Feldman, though, preparation involves injecting something into his chest from a hypodermic needle - not botox, presumably. Anyway, to make a long story short, Corey Feldman wins.

In the next scene, Ting and Hum Lae are in some abandoned gas station with guns trained on them by thugs, and TRG is there, and he gives them a crate, which we thing will have Ong-Bak in it, because we learn that there was a deal: Ting throws the fight so TRG can win a bet against Giggles, and in recompense Ting gets the Buddha head and goes home. But TRG is stone cold, and they find the crate empty! TRG asks them if they really thought he would let Ting live, considering the many millions of baht Ting had cost him. (The answer is no, he was not going to let him live.) So TRG leaves with his crew and leaves a few thugs behind to kill Hum Lae and Ting.

GUESS WHAT HAPPENS: Ting kicks all of their asses. At one point, they are shooting at him and it causes some accelerant at the abandoned gas station to ignite, and then his pants are on fire, and he is just cool-as-you-please beats some dudes up with burning pants!!! Did I mention that Girl Wonder was there? I don't really remember why, but she was. Eventually, Ting vanquishes the thugs, the last of whom is Don, who tells him that TRG is "in a cave, on the other side of the mountain," and that's where Ong-Bak is. Then there is a weirdly touching moment where Ting wants to leave Hum Lae behind and go settle this ish once and for all, but he can't make some motorcycle start, and so Hum Lae gets it started and they go together to the cave place.

Now we're on familiar ground: heavily fortified mountain hideout guarded by a few dimwitted footsoldiers in the nefarious enterprise. Basically, it's Commando without the guns. Ting works his way through various levels of guards, using various cool weapons along the way. Hum Lae mostly hangs back and roots. Then they reach the inner sanctum, where a huge scaffolding has been erected so that some workmen can remove the head from a ginormous Buddha under TRG's supervision. It's still not clear why he cuts the heads of Buddhas, or if Buddha heads have value, it's not clear why he was so pissed at Don for bringing him one from Nong Pradu, but here he is, at it again. In his final and obligatory explanation of his criminality (the one which, if this were Scooby Doo, would end with, "I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you pesky kids"), TRG will explain that he thinks there is no god, and that he is god (he really says this; it's rather over-the-top). But first, time for fighting with henchmen while jumping from level to level on scaffolding - reminiscent of the opening scene with the game of capture-the-flag in the tree! Then it's time for a rematch with Corey Feldman (did I mention he was there? he was), and he injects himself with five hypodermic needles at once, so his insulin levels are off the chart and he is ready to fight. This makes him into a crazy, slobbering inferno and he and Ting have a nice battle. The key moment is when he seems to have gotten the best of Ting and is throttling him, with his thumbs pressed against Ting's neck under his chin. It seems as though Corey Feldman's thumbs are going to go right through Ting's skin at any moment, and Ting's eyes are bugging out all froggy style, and then Ting catches a glimpse of the huge Buddha (its head has not been removed yet, what with the interruption of righteous fighting) and is motivated to dig deep and beat Feldman. Just then, TRG shoots Ting in the shoulder with a gun, but before he can finish him with another shot, BUDDHA'S HEAD TUMBLES OVER AND IT IS ABOUT THE SIZE OF A VOLKSWAGEN AND TRACHEOTOMY ROBOT GANGSTER IS CRUSHED, because karma is a bitch, nahmean? Of course, Hum Lae is crushed too and Girl Wonder shows up just then and they have a moment (not a romantic moment, just a "I will miss you" moment). But whatever, you knew Hum Lae wasn't going to last, just like L.L. Cool J. in that Halloween sequel.

The important thing is that Ong-Bak is returned to Nong Pradu, Ting is happy, and guess what: The drought we'd periodically been seeing scenes of during this whole adventure (I forgot to mention that: every now and then, they showed people in Nong Pradu looking destitute and bemoaning their dry well) IS TOTALLY OVER AND IT STARTS RAINING. Hooray. Thank you, Buddha. End of the movie.

Ninja in the Deadly Trap (1981)

The opening credits to this movie are really cool, because they happen while the camera is focused on a pair of hands paging through what appears to be a ninja coffee table book, full of illustrations of ninja tools, some of them familiar (throwing stars), some of them novel (to me) but easily understandable (sharp-pointed metal thimbles to be worn on fingertips for ferocious enemy-poking), and some of them utterly inscrutable (weird rope set-ups that look like they should be anchored to to a bedroom ceiling to facilitate fancy sex positions more than they seem capable of being useful assassination weapons). When the credits end, we see an old-timey ruler of some sort (it's a period piece; everyone's wearing flowing robes and crazy hats) sitting in a chair holding the book while a coterie of retainers looks on. "This is a valuable book," he says in a deliberate, dubbed voice. "I'm going to have more copies made. Until then, take good care of it." And he gives it to some dude.

We learn that the guy is General Chi, and he is in the midst of a campaign against Japanese pirates who have been looting and pillaging towns along the Chinese coast. He wears a super-funny hat with drooping attachments that make him look like Goofy. He is routinely praised as a savvy general. After some strategizing, he and his crew go out to survey a looted village, which is in bad shape - everything burning, bodies everywhere, the regular. Then, suddenly, BAM, ninjas fly in the place! Oh snap! The Chinese footsoldiers quickly form a defensive circle around Chi and some other top brass dudes who are on horses. Ninjas keep setting off low-grade fireworks and then jumping off nearby rooves, swooping toward the soldiers with swords drawn, then swooping away. Frankly, it's sort of perplexing. Then, one of them gets stabbed by soldiers, and Chi and his crew go back to their base.

Now this is something I don't quite get: I always understood that Chinese and Japanese peoples historically had some hatred and lots of racism toward each other, and the plot of this movie fits in with that (as does one of the promotional titles listed on IMDB, "Hero Defeating Japs"), but when Chi et al are discussing the day's events, they seem totally perplexed about who those pajama-wearing attackers could have been, and they only conclude they were Japanese through some roundabout process of elimination. Couldn't they just take off the mask of the dead ninja and see that he was Japanese? Whatever. Chi and his main advisor decide they're dealing with Japanese ninjas, about whom Chi seems never to have heard (despite having looked through the ninja coffee table book earlier). "What will we do to combat them?" he asks his advisor. "Well," says the advisor, as though the notion of figuring out how to take on military enemies never ocurred to him, "there is this one old guy who lives near here who studied in Japan and knows ninja arts. He's called Master of Three Styles, because [wait for it!] he has mastered three styles of kung-fu. Maybe we could talk to him?" Convenient, right? Chi thinks so. He says, "I'd like to meet this old man." Advisor is like, "Master, those ninjas are clearly trying to assassinate you. You shouldn't go out into the community." Chi contemplates this and then his son - did I mention he has a son? he does; the son looks like a Chinese John Cusack - jumps up and says, "Father, I'll go meet the dude on your behalf!" and the camera zooms in on his face while intense music plays, as though he had just said something that really mattered a lot.

So Chi's son and a buddy go to meet the old guy, and they naturally run into ninjas, who were hiding in trees. A funny thing about these ninjas is that their pajamas, in addition to being beige in this scene ('cause it's daytime, I guess), aren't full-body and form-fitting. Rather, they're kind of loose and have three-quarter-length sleeves, which makes for a sloppy look. Nevertheless, they do have cool techniques. For example, when Chi's son (known as Mr. Chi, rather than General Chi) rides past a ninja's hiding place, the ninja shoots a little note with a bow and arrow to some other ninjas up ahead, who retrieve it, read the note, and in this way know that Mr. Chi is coming, Nextel direct-connect style. So they ambush Mr. Chi, and he fights them off a while and maybe the guy he came with gets killed, but I don't really remember, but then the ninjas abruptly go away (ninjas!) so he just keeps walking and immediately comes on the Master of Three Styles, who somehow knew he was coming (old guys!).

The old guy explains ninjas to Mr. Chi, saying that they are all trained in eight deadly arts, which he lists. I don't remember them all, but they definiteley included stealth, quickness, nimbleness, and gunpowder. But then, after listing the eight apparently essential ninja skills, he just goes on: "They are also very good at hand-to-hand combat, and escape." So is it ten skills no, MOTS? Chi doesn't press the issue. But after this brief rundown, MOTS is like, "Well, that's what I know about ninjas." So Mr. Chi is like, "Well, how do we beat them?" and now MOTS does like Gen Chi's advisor, and acts as though that question never would have occurred to him. "Hey," he suddenly says. I did one time train these three dudes in kung fu, except I trained each of them in only one of my three styles, and I did it separately, and they've never met, but they know the other ones exist and I've taught them a sign so they can recognize each other. Maybe they could help you." Chi, naturally, thinks this is a capital idea, and sets out to find the three. (The three specialties of these three fighters are armor-making, hand-to-hand combat, and climbing.)

I guess that when this epic took place, inter-town travel wasn't too frequent, because without any clues, Mr. Chi heads to a town and finds one of the trainees. At the time, the trainee is involved in dice game, and then a fight breaks out between the proprietor of the dice and some other dudes, and it's fairly convoluted, in terms of who is fighting whom, but then the trainee (who has a crazy, girly haircut with long bangs) is somehow on the ground in the midst of it, stealing people's money and tripping the fighters. He's the hand-to-hand combat one, we gather, because he is very good at quick, casual, awesome kung fu moves. Chi notices, and when trainee #1 and his confederate start to run away from the fight scene, Chi intercepts them.

After that, some other stuff happened, but I watched the movie a really long time ago and I've forgotten the rest. It was confusing.