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Straits Times
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
At The Movies: Karate Kid: Legends is charming in its corniness, The Ritual is beyond salvation
At The Movies: Karate Kid: Legends is charming in its corniness, The Ritual is beyond salvation Karate Kid: Legends (PG) 94 minutes, now showing ★★★☆☆ The story: After a family tragedy, martial arts prodigy Li Fong (Ben Wang) leaves Beijing with his doctor mum (Ming-Na Wen) for a fresh start in New York City. She makes him promise no more fights, but he is a new kid in town facing bullies. Plus, he has a beloved four-decade lore to honour. Karate Kid: Legends is the sixth film in The Karate Kid franchise dating from the 1984 Hollywood sleeper hit. It is the classic rite of passage of an outsider teen meeting a girl, Mia (Sadie Stanley), and attracting unwanted attention from her psychotic karate champion ex-boyfriend Conor (Aramis Knight). Mia's dad (Joshua Jackson) owns the neighbourhood pizzeria. He was a prizefighter, and there is a cute bit of role-reversal, where Li coaches him for a comeback match to pay off his debt. Li is otherwise the acolyte. Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan first played Shifu Han in 2010's The Karate Kid and returns as Li's revered mentor from China, while Ralph Macchio, the original Karate Kid, is now sensei Daniel LaRusso with a Netflix spin-off series Cobra Kai (2018 to 2025). The two masters journey in to teach Li a hybrid of Han's gongfu and LaRusso's karate, which is the teen's only chance of defeating Conor in the inevitable climactic tournament. Feature debut director Jonathan Entwistle brings together every past iteration for a remake-revival-crossover that is charming in its corniness, despite a formulaic story. Beyond the nostalgia, it introduces an Asian hero. And 25-year-old Wang (American Born Chinese, 2023) is an appealing newcomer, who reclaims the martial arts tradition with his humorous and acrobatic moves. Hot take: Part fan service, part generational update, there is much to like in this legacyquel. The Ritual (NC16) Al Pacino (right) in The Ritual. PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION 98 minutes, opens on June 12 ★★☆☆☆ The story: Two priests must overcome their differences and work together to free an innocent soul from the devil's grip. Emma Schmidt is the most widely publicised case of exorcism in 20th-century American history and one of the few officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church. An award-winning director of The Killing Of Kenneth Chamberlain (2019), another true account, David Midell researched the personal dairies, psychiatric evaluations and 1935 pamphlet Begone Satan! for The Ritual. Still, his dramatisation is like nothing so much as a parody of The Exorcist (1973). Al Pacino at his hammiest plays the Capuchin friar Theophilus Riesinger, a glinty-eyed emissary of 'the Lord's Army' who arrives at a secluded convent in 1928 Earling, Iowa, to do furious battle with the devil. He has previous experience as an exorcist. Father Joseph Steiger (Dan Stevens) is the young parish priest reluctantly overseeing the detailed documentation of the 23-day ritual, the straight guy to Riesinger's crusty mystic. He advocates medical intervention even when Emma (Abigail Cowen) begins levitating, ejecting excrement and speaking in supernatural tongues, generally exhibiting every symptom from the religious horror playbook by week's end. Riesinger chides Steiger for his lack of faith. Their debate on science, spirituality and the human condition is without a single original thought or frisson, and the self-seriousness has only the unfortunate effect of making the glum proceedings all the campier. 'I have a sister with a torn scalp and another with a crushed hand,' Steiger reports of Emma's escalating violence. If the line does not elicit laughs, the sight of said nuns, huddled in petrified terror, surely will. Hot take: This hackneyed demonic possession thriller is beyond salvation. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Straits Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
At The Movies: Queer's star plumbs new depths, Havoc falters outside action scenes
Daniel Craig plays William Lee, a middle-aged dissolute in a tale of romantic obsession with a young former serviceman. PHOTO: SHAW ORGANISATION At The Movies: Queer's star plumbs new depths, Havoc falters outside action scenes Queer (R21) 135 minutes, opens on May 1 ★★★★☆ The story: William Lee (Daniel Craig) is an American in 1950s Mexico City, a lonely exile cruising gay bars until the day he sights a spiffy stranger new in town and becomes hopelessly besotted. Do not think James Bond. Recall instead the 1998 British biopic Love Is The Devil, in which Craig played the seedy boy toy of infamous English artist Francis Bacon. The Hollywood leading man started out as a raw character actor, and Queer by Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, 2017; Challengers, 2024) is an adaptation of Beat Generation countercultural icon William S. Burroughs' 1985 autobiographical novella that brings the actor full circle. As William , a Burroughs surrogate, he is now the middle-aged dissolute in a tale of romantic obsession with a young former serviceman. Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) is this Adonis, with the aloofness of someone aware of how good-looking he is. He is unreadable and may not even be queer. William does get him into the sack. Still, he gets no closer to his beloved's heart. Against Guadagnino's sensual, shimmering imagery and an oozy score by his regular American alt-rock collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, William sweats desire, neediness, shame, cheap tequila and heroin through his cream linen suits. His desperation takes him into the Amazon jungle, in search of a psychotropic botanical he hopes will grant him the telepathy to connect with Eugene . The movie, comprising three disparate chapters plus an epilogue, is thereafter hallucinatory. It meanders, and can be shallow and showy. But Craig's agony is genuine. He turns such artiness as William's subsequent disembodiment, spinning across a lifetime's solitude, into an expression of self-annihilating love. Hot take: Craig's aching performance leaves you shaken and stirred. Havoc (NC16) 105 minutes, available on Netflix ★★☆☆☆ Tom Hardy in Havoc. PHOTO: NETFLIX The story: After a narcotics deal goes wrong, a burned-out homicide detective (Tom Hardy) must battl e a ruthless underworld syndicate and citywide corruption to rescue a politician's son. Havoc unfolds in an anonymous urban hellscape of socioeconomic despair and neo-noir genre cliches. It is a saga of revenge and redemption with nothing not seen before, except Malaysian actress Yeo Yann Yann shooting gangsters dead. English actor Hardy stars as the brooding anti-hero Walker Mackey, tormented by the demons of his past. Forest Whitaker plays a crooked mayoral candidate whose son (Justin Cornwell) is suspected of stealing drug money and is on the run from Yeo's vengeful triad matriarch and her lieutenant (Singapore's Sunny Pang). The gangland intrigue is further complicated by a squad of dirty cops. The lone good officer is Walker's idealistic rookie partner (Jessie Mei Li) – she, too, a stock character. All will converge midway for a bone-cracking brawl in a nightclub recently vacated by John Wick . H ere, at least, despite the predictability, Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans shows his chops. The architect of the apartment block punch-ups The Raid (2011) and its sequel The Raid 2 (2014) can really stage hyper-violence. There are a good three or four major action set pieces. The opening sees a washing machine chucked out the back of the criminals' speeding truck, through the windshield of a pursuing police car, and the climax is an orgy of savagery in a woodland cabin. How could a movie of such adrenalised carnage featuring every gonzo use of human limbs, weaponry, broken glass and even a fishing harpoon be so lazy in its story? Hot take: Formulaic in plot, this crime drama scores only in its body count. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
