Samurai Cop was a
top tier bad movie. It played everything
as straight as it possibly could, genuinely trying to be a good movie within
the b-movie landscape. A lack of
filmmaking skill on the part of every single aspect propelled it into that
enjoyably bad stratosphere that few movies manage to reach. It wasn’t entertaining out of irony. It wasn’t entertaining because it was fun to
make fun off. Samurai Cop was a genuinely entertaining movie that just happened
to be poorly made.
I discovered the movie in 2014 when it was included in the
Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’m not taking the
credit for uncovering it and giving it to the masses. All I’m saying is that I didn’t know about it
until I scheduled it. The name alone
made me think that it was something I should include in my journey through bad
movies. Usually the name thing doesn’t
work out, but in this case it did. It
quickly became one of my favourite movies from the blog, still only having two
or three movies top it. Of course I was
excited to hear that a sequel had been announced and that there would be more Samurai Cop on the way.
Samurai Cop 2: Deadly
Vengeance was released in 2015. It fell
into the trap that many action sequels fall into, and that took away from how
enjoyable it could have been. The first
movie portrayed a skilled police officer who took down a Los Angeles gang. He worked with his partner Frank (Mark
Frazer) and it was their teamwork that helped them succeed. The sequel didn’t take any of this into
account. It made Joe Marshall (Mathew
Karedas) into an unstoppable legendary figure of crime fighting. He could take down any and all threats
without so much as a scratch. Frank took
a back seat, rarely participating in the action. He simply moved Joe from one location to
another. It was less of a team and more
of a mythical figure that fought crime.
This is a common occurrence throughout action films. As franchises move forward, the setpieces
must outdo each other. They need to be
bigger. They need to be more
spectacular. This necessitates that the
hero does more ridiculous things, which turns them into more of a superhero
than the action star that they started out as.
Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance
fell victim to this method of action filmmaking.
Throughout this post, I’m going to take a look at a few
action franchises that followed the same path as Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance, and explain what worked or didn’t
work about the path. There are many
reasons that it could or could not work.
It all depends on the specific franchise. But we can learn from the examples what to do
and what not to do when it comes to moving forward an action franchise.
The Fast and the
Furious
One of the biggest franchises in action as of late has been
a franchise about people driving cars. The Fast and the Furious has eclipsed
all other car movies to become the biggest name in driving action. Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Ludacris, Tyrese,
Paul Walker, and Michelle Rodriguez have helped to push the franchise into the
stratosphere of popularity. Who knew
that would happen when it began with a simple movie about street racing?
The first movie, The
Fast and the Furious, was released in 2001.
Paul Walker starred as Brian O’Conner, an undercover police officer who
infiltrated the street racing world of Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel). It was a masked remake of Point Break, replacing the surfing and
stuff with cars and street races. Everything
was more grounded, with a semi-realistic yet simplistic take on the underground
gangland of Los Angeles, and how street racing tied into it. The characters were realistic. The story was believable.
As the series progressed, however, things would change. The franchise morphed from its underground
street racing roots into an espionage series involving cars. That began in the second movie as an
on-the-run Brian O’Conner was brought in by police to use his driving skills to
take down kingpin Carter Verone (Cole Hauser).
But it wouldn’t be until the fifth installment, Fast Five, that the series would truly go off the rails and become
something new. It would become the
explosive popular action series that it currently is.
Fast Five followed
close on the heels of Fast and Furious
(the fourth movie), picking up right where the previous installment had left
off. Dom’s crew was breaking him out of a
prison bus. It was in this moment that
the characters became mythological figures.
The movie proved that they could do anything. Characters from previous movies banded
together to create a super team that could survive driving off cliffs in
convertible cars. They stole police cars
and dragged giant safes full of money behind their cars in city wide chases. This was on the lower end of the crazy things
that the characters would do throughout the sixth, seventh, and eighth
installments.
Following the change of the characters from realistic street
racers into superheroes with cars as their special powers, they did many crazy
things. Fast and Furious 6 saw the team take down a tank and a plane with
their cars. It also brought a character
back to life. Furious 7 saw one character run up a bus as it fell off a cliff,
another character roll his car down a mountain with everyone inside surviving,
and saw a third character flex a cast off of his arm and walk through the
streets shooting a helicopter with the rail gun from a drone. It also had cars parachuting out of a
plane. The eighth movie had a character
winning a street race while driving a burning car backward, another character
controlling every computerized car in New York, a character participating in a
shootout while caring for a baby, and the whole team taking down a nuclear
sub. These action beats were a far cry
from where the series began.
The other big note about the Fast and Furious franchise is how Dom Toretto became more and more
of a legend. It sort of started that way
in the first movie when he was a cocky street racer who saw himself as the best
in Los Angeles. As the movies
progressed, other characters began seeing him as the mythic figure that he
thought himself to be. He was a wanted
criminal that the law couldn’t capture.
By the eighth installment, Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) was breaking two
criminals out of prison simply because they were the only people who had ever
tracked down Dom Toretto. He was an
uncatchable driver who proved at the beginning of the movie that a good driver
could overcome any obstacles to win a race because the driver was all that
mattered. The cars don’t matter. The driver does. Dom’s driving solidified his mythical status
among the people who watched the race.
He was no longer the grounded, cocky racer from the first movie. He was a legend.
Die Hard
This one could probably be tied to the eras in which the
movies were made. I haven’t seen Die Hard with a Vengeance, so I can’t
get as in depth as I got with the Fast and
Furious franchise, which I’ve seen all of.
What it has in common with the other two franchises I’ve written about
in this post is that the main character of John McClane (Bruce Willis) went
from being a basic street cop to becoming a superhero by the time the franchise
got to its fourth entry.
The first movie followed a smart ass New York City police
officer who encountered a hostage taking while on a trip to a Christmas party
in Los Angeles. He worked his way
through the building to free the hostages and take down the hostage takers one
by one. The situations were grounded in
a reality with the dangers being believable, and John McClane sustaining
injuries during his mission. There were
still some moments that gave a slight bit of spectacle, but the movie felt more
like the real world than some heightened film universe.
By the time the fourth installment, Live Free or Die Hard, rolled around, John McClane was basically a
superhero. He was crashing cars into
helicopters and safely diving from the wing of an airplane onto hard highway
pavement. The character had become
immune to most situations that a person couldn’t physically survive. In the fifth movie, A Good Day to Die Hard, the climactic battle happened in a nuclear
reactive site, though both John McClane and his son came out of the climax
without a hint of radiation poisoning.
The movies were no longer in that realistic world that the first Die Hard had set up.
The biggest difference between the Die Hard franchise and the other two discussed in this post was
that John McClane didn’t become the heroic legend that the other characters became. He continuously stumbled into the situations
where he had to save the day. It never
had to do with him being called upon because of how many times he has taken
down bad guys. He just ended up in the
situation every time. He was not a
legend. John McClane was just a
superhero.
Samurai Cop
Samurai Cop was
like a low budget Lethal Weapon. There was the buddy cop teaming of Joe
Marshall and Frank. They teamed up to go
against a group of martial arts inspired gang members who were working to
control the streets of Los Angeles with drugs.
The action story was fairly grounded, with the only real heightened
stuff being that all of the people were martial artists. Joe Marshall was the average cop, though he
was good with the ladies and had learned the ways of the samurai. Frank and Joe worked together and took down
the gang piece by piece.
That all changed when the second movie came out some
twenty-five years later. The movie began
with Frank investigating a possible gang war in Los Angeles. There was only one man he could count on to
help him stop the war from getting out of control. That man was Joe Marshall, who had since left
Los Angeles after the death of his girlfriend Jennifer (Kayden Kross). Everyone in Los Angeles knew of Joe Marshall
because of what he had done during the events of the first Samurai Cop. They knew that
if anyone could take down the gangs in Los Angeles, it was him. That’s why Frank sought him out and brought
him back to the city to fight crime.
Joe came back as a different person than when he had
left. Sure, it had been twenty-five
years. Add onto it that his girlfriend
had been killed, and you have a changed man.
The thing is, it changed how the movie felt, too. He was now seen as a legend. He was an unstoppable force that the bad guys
worked hard to stop, knowing full well that Joe Marshall would defeat
them. The bad guys knew about the
narrative that had been sewn around Joe Marshall. They believed it. That’s how much of a mythical figure the man
had become.
He also spent the twenty-five years becoming the superhero
that so many action heroes become as their franchises progress. When Joe came back into the story, he didn’t
work with Frank all that much. He fought
most of the bad guys on his own. When it
came to the climactic fighting, Joe stormed the bad guys’ base by himself, with
Frank coming in later to clean up what Joe left behind. Joe was a one man killing machine, out to
avenge the death of the woman he loved.
Frank watched from the sidelines as Joe took out every ninja and bad guy
he encountered. In two movies, he had accomplished
what took two other, more popular franchises four installments to do.
Many action franchises have experienced growing pains in
which they shifted from being grounded, mostly realistic looks at the
characters dealing with dangerous situations to off-the-rails craziness. The
Fast and the Furious went from street racing to cars taking down a nuclear
submarine. Die Hard went from being trapped in a tower to taking down Russian
terrorists in a nuclear site. Samurai Cop went from stopping a drug
ring to taking down an entire gang war single-handedly. These are only three examples of this
franchise trajectory.
Sometimes this path of action can work. Fast
Five, Fast and Furious 6, Furious 7, and The Fate of the Furious play up the insanity. Instead of trying to place it in a world of
realism, the world of the movies changed with the characters. Samurai
Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance wasn’t as successful at the transition. They played right into the insanity of what
was going on but tried to force it. It
didn’t play naturally into the world, particularly with the needless callbacks
to the first movie. Die Hard just… That’s one just removed any of the interesting
character stuff that made the first movie stand out. It was a grounded movie about a
character. The later movies felt like a
different character in crazy situations.
Having the movies grow increasingly crazier all depends on
the execution. In some cases, it will
work. In other cases, it falls flat on
its ass. Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance was one of those movies that tried
to go crazy without having done the work to get there. It couldn’t back itself. It went crazy for crazy’s sake, instead of
trying to be entertaining. It played
into the fanboys by referencing what they loved in the most forced ways
possible. There was the potential to
make something entertaining but it fell victim to something I’ve heard about
before. When someone tries to sincerely
make something good and they fail at the basic filmmaking side of it, it can be
highly entertaining. However, if they
try to ironically make an entertaining bad movie, it usually falls flat. That’s what happened. They ironically tried to recapture what
seemed sincere in Samurai Cop and it
hurt Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance. I wish it had been better. I love the first movie.
- Here’s the post for the first Samurai Cop movie.
- Seven actors from Samurai Cop returned for Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance. They were Mathew Karedas, Mark Frazer, Tom Gleason, Melissa Moore, Gerald Okamura, Joselito Rescober, and Jimmy Williams.
- Mindy Robinson was in Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance. She has also appeared in The Coed and the Zombie Stoner and Chicks Dig Gay Guys.
- One of the main bad guys in Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance was played by Tommy Wiseau. He is most famously known for making The Room.
- Kristine DeBell had a role in Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance. You might recognize her for being in A Talking Cat!?!
- Finally, Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance featured Bogdan Szumilas, who was in Sandy Wexler.
- Have you seen Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance? What did you think of it? What do you think of any of these action franchises that go crazy as they move forward? You can discuss any of these things in the comments.
- The comments are also a place where you can suggest movies for me to watch in future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. Sometimes I write specifically about the movie and sometimes, like this week, I write about a topic related to the movie. If you don’t want to put your suggestions in the comments, you can let me know on Twitter.
- I have a snapchat where I sometimes put up clips of the bad movies I watch. If you want to see this or any of the other random stuff I put up there, add me. jurassicgriffin
- Now that I have that sequel behind me, I’m going to move onto another movie and another week of the Sunday “Bad” Movies. Officer Downe is on the docket for next week. I don’t know too much about this movie. It was suggested to me and I threw it into the schedule. I’ll be watching it soon and I’ll have something about it up next week. See you then.
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