Tough guys in movies! Plus Quantum Leap

Next up in my Howard Hawks would have been Today, We Live but that melodrama didn’t turn up anywhere. Onward to VIVA VILLA (1934) which Hawks co-directed and co-wrote (with his frequent collaborator Ben Hecht) uncredited. Wallace Beery plays Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa who in childhood witnesses his father’s unjust execution, which inspires him to grow up into a Robin Hood-esque revolutionary before a saintly reformer convinces him to fight the tyrants more conventionally. After treacherous general Joseph Schildkraut seizes power and kills the reformer, Villa starts playing hardball.This is fun and Beery’s performance is full of energy, but it conforms too much to the Frito Bandito stereotype for my taste. This also leaves out his raid into Texas — while I can understand not mentioning that to an American audience, surely it’s what they’d know him best for. With Fay Wray as one of Villa’s many romances. “There is no need to clutter up the proceedings of justice with trivial details.”
JOHN WICK (2014) stars Keanu Reaves as a widowed, retired hitman who gets back into harness when a mobster’s son not only steals his classic car but kills the puppy Reaves’ wife gave him as a dying gift — a premise that ought to be laughable, but works perfectly well here. Part of the appeal is that it posits a world of assassins with their own hotel, clean-up services and transactions in gold coins, which I imagine they explore in the several sequels. With Willem Dafoe as a brother assassin and Ian MacShane running the hotel. “John Wick wasn’t the bogeyman — he’s the guy you hire to kill the fucking bogeyman.”

The second season of the QUANTUM LEAP reboot wrapped up and I enjoyed it almost as much as the first. When Ben (Raymond Lee) materializes in the season opener it’s been seconds since the last season; for his friends at the project it’s been three years and Addison (Caitlin Bassett) is now involved with someone else. Plus there’s a mystery woman, Hannah (Eliza Taylor) who keeps running into Ben in leap after leap.

While I enjoy the Ben/Hannah relationship and I loved the season ender (which I think is set up to be a series ender, just in case), having Hannah and Ben keep meeting each other felt a little deus ex machina, even given the assumption God’s manipulating the leaps. And it’s always bugged me that the point of MIA, the S2 ender of the original show, just got retconned out. That episode clearly showed Al’s marriage to Beth was a doomed trainwreck; fans didn’t like that which may be why the series walked it back (the series ender reunited them) and the current show continues that (I guess being a POW for seven years really shaped Al up). “Just FYI there’s a movie about a blazing building coming out this year — it might be triggering.”

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