Facing the End Game

Conditions: Ill Wind Blows

The Road Home

In the wake of a woman getting shot to death in Washington while driving a car angrily, it is inevitable that some questions are being asked about how it all turned out.

The Metropolitan Police Department, heading a joint investigation with federal agencies, must determine the precise circumstances surrounding her death before it can conclude if the shooting was justified.

Any assessment should not lose sight of the frightening facts of this woman’s actions, much of them captured on video. She drove her car into a White House security post; she hit a uniformed officer; she led police on a high-speed chase through D.C. streets; she rammed a Secret Service vehicle; she didn’t stop when at least five officers had their guns pointed at her; and she penetrated a barrier on Capitol Hill. Another inevitable question arises: What would have happened if she had not been stopped?

- washingtonpost.com/

Well we know now that likely nothing would have happened, the woman didn’t have so much as a letter opener on her. But if we’re talking of a more metaphorical matter here, then might I humbly suggest that if the cops had shot the tyres instead of the driver, then that too would have brought the rampage to an end.

I don’t get where this attitude comes from. I don’t really understand how trained professional people can act in this way. I don’t comprehend how we can end up in a situation where a woman in a car is shot to death because she’s driving around angrily. I understand that in the age of the suicide bomber the authorities have been essentially trained to kill first and ask questions later. I also understand the principle of using force to project strength, the idea of how Washington must be seen to be protected at all costs, that anything that threatens the political elite must be shut down. I guess the problem lies in how do people allow their law enforcement officials to act in this way: as gunmen first and cops second.



Film Review: Riddick.

You can tell that this isn’t the movie they wanted to make. After Chronicles of Riddick proved to be disappointing at the box office, the studio wasn’t interested in whatever the regular sequel would have been. So the whole thing went onto the back burner. However in the meantime Vin Diesel went and became a big movie star, and along with director Twohy still wanted to pursue the continuing adventures in the Riddickverse. Taking back control of the Riddick franchise is one thing, but they still couldn’t make the big sequel to Chronicles they wanted. So instead they made this. A stripped-down call back to the first film, where we find Riddick banged up and abandoned on some horrible world, where he has to fix himself up, survive the local wildlife, and find a way to escape. Stumbling across some kind of Mercenary outpost, he presses a big red button and before you can say “Bat Signal” not one but two teams of Mercenaries are descending through the clouds. Now it’s a tense stand off between Riddick and the two teams, and between the teams themselves as it turns out Mercenaries don’t get along with each other either. After a few deaths the final act kicks in where the local alien beasts take advantage of a huge rainstorm to lay siege to the Mercenary outpost, and everyone still alive has to team up in order to survive.

This is obviously meant to be a nice parallel to the first film, but there’s a couple of problems. In the first film the characters were diverse and ended up on that planet by accident. Here they are all at varying levels of bad-ass, and came suitably prepared for battle, which lowers the tension. The first film was not just a movie about people being hunted by monsters, and it wasn’t just a film about a standoff between a mercenary and a killer. It was a film about redemption, where Riddick in the end decided to re-join the human race. That is what made the film work, and unfortunately that dynamic is not here. Instead we just have a C.G-heavy final sequence where Riddick and co has to fight their way through an army of nasty beasts. The theme seems to be Riddick deciding he needs to be more savage and less civilised, but there’s no change happening that I can see. He seems as tough and as surly as ever, when not trying to awkwardly put the moves on the only woman in the room, who happens to be a tough as nails lesbian.

They try with the cast of Mercs to have some distinctive characters, and it does work fairly well. The main trouble is there’s not that much for them to do other than look concerned, and ...die. Also, as they only drop in at the halfway point, there’s too many to get them all properly introduced. Still, most of them come across okay. There’s a weird dynamic between two in particular and Riddick: Dahl (played by Katee Sackhoff) and Johns. Johns is the father of the original Johns, who really really (really) wants to know what happened to the old chip-off-the-block two movies ago. He only wants the truth, but maybe can’t believe the truth, and perhaps doesn’t care about collecting the bounty on Riddick, despite coming all that way. And Katie, well. I think she’s meant to end up as something of a love interest for Diesel, but it seems strangely sudden and totally out of character for the tough Dahl, who spent the earlier part of the movie snarling and beating up fellow Merc Satana, not to mention inappropriate given the amount of death and gloom the movie revels in. It’s a strange movie, well made, atmospheric, but with kind of a deflated finale and a very deja-vu aftertaste. You kind of feel like both the character and the movie are capable of great things, but keep getting knocked down into the mud. Three sneers out of five.



- Peace out