Lights! Camera! Action!
Testosterone will flow in fall’s bumper crop of brawny (and sometimes brainy) star-driven action flicks. Robert Redford sheds his fuzzy-bunny Horse Whisperer karma in two roles — as a back-in-action CIA operative out to bring down doubling-dealing ex-partner Brad Pitt in Tony Scott’s Spy Game (Nov. 21) and as a three-star general who must fight his way out of a maximum-security hoosegow in Rod Lurie’s The Last Castle. (Oct. 12)… Elsewhere, martial arts machine Jet Li is on a mission to kick his own butt in The One, a futuristic actioner from James Wong and Glen Morgan, the writing team behind The X-Files at its best. Look for parallel universes, superhuman strength, and slick production values as good cop Li battles his dimension-hopping doppelganger, a vicious killer. (Nov. 2)… The Hong Kong zeitgeist rolls on as Miramax sends a restored print of 1994’s lighthearted kung-fu crowd-pleaser Iron Monkey into theatres. Stars Yu Rong-Guang and Donnie Yen are little-known stateside, outside of the fanboy crowd, but director Yuen Woo-Ping isn’t, thanks to his action choreography for The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The estimable Tsui Hark (the Chinese Ghost Story and Once Upon a Time in China series) produced and co-wrote. (Oct. 5)… John Woo re-teams with leading men Christian Slater and Nicolas Cage for Windtalkers, a panoramic (and reportedly $100 million) World War II epic about the friendship between a Marine (Cage) and the Navajo “code talker” (Adam Beach) he’s been assigned to protect — or kill in the event of capture (Nov. 9)… But don’t count on Collateral Damage, previously slated for release on Oct. 5. The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a grieving firefighter who launches a one-man war against terrorists (Colombian, this time) who strike on American soil. In a commendable display of restraint, Warner Bros. has postponed the release until sometime next year and has pulled the film’s ads, according to a sober press release on the film’s official site at collateraldamage.warnerbros.com.
This article appears in September 21 • 2001.