Well-done Jobs

The modest pleasures of current B movie action movies

Something I’m often asked about is why I seem to spend so much time dealing with bad low budget action movies as opposed to similar horror movies that seem to track with my tastes more. That is true, and I’d often say good DTV actioners don’t hit as high notes as the best horror (they also tend to be very conservative in nature, something that I know is a deal breaker to some readers), but I’ve always appreciated the modesty in B movies and the feeling of a job well done, and this is something that these movies show much more often. A lot of the better low budget actioners are the work of longtime stuntmen making a go behind the camera, and it shows not only with the care they handle the action scenes but also the ethos behind the movies themselves. The work of film lifers happy to get to the next assignment. The first John Wick movie (which people don’t think about now but almost went straight to home video) is the ideal of these sorts of movies, and the later careers of the two stuntmen turned filmmakers, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, probably give a good sense of the good and bad of that, with the former taking the series in increasingly absurd and baroque ways as he gets more resources (a lot of the pleasure of the later Wick movies is watching Stahelski having a blast with the new toys his success has given him), while the latter has made a lot of bloated, wink heavy juvenilia.

I don’t want to make watching and making these movies sound romantic or anything; the thing people often left out of pleas for B movie making is that going through this stuff can feel like drudgery. It is lovely to see Jean-Luc Godard starting Breathless by dedicating it to Monogram Films, but actually going through their catalogue means spending a lot of time with crime does not pay movies of only limited aesthetic interest. I’m for cinephile gluttony, so I’m pretty okay at watching mediocre or worse movies in the hope of getting the occasional good one, so I go through a lot of badly lit cheap retreads of past crime/action movies in the hope of getting to the occasional good one like The Channel or Avengement.

Case in point: Mexicali, the directorial debut of stuntman Luke LaFontaine. I had two reasons to check that one: it stars Bren Foster, an Australian martial artist that got attention a couple of years ago when he directed a very solid star vehicle called Life After Fighting. It was also written and produced by Jesse V. Johnson, who is probably the best filmmaker in that small corner of movies. LaFontaine is a longtime friend who Johnson hoped to give a hand, and I suspect that he has for the past few years graduated to slightly larger budgets and more established stars than Foster.

There isn’t a lot going on in Mexicali; Foster plays a guy with a military past who is in Mexico helping a friend run an avocado farm and ends up having to deal with a cartel. Cues to lots of running and fighting. The only small complication is the presence of a power broker (played by Plutarco Haza, an actor I remember from an Arturo Ripstein movie that time forgot) whose motivations are ambiguous. Johnson’s script is the kind of thing people would call bad because they think screenwriting is plotting, but it is very solid, giving the movie a functional throughline and offering enough side interests for LaFontaine and the actors to work with. And there is Foster, who is a very good film presence.

Life After Fighting is a more interesting and uneven movie than Mexicali. It is a real long 125 minutes (the new one is 97, which seems about right), and I remember joking at the time that it should be Fighting without the Life, because the dramatic parts were painfully awkward. Foster is really great at kicking people, and the back half is mostly that and very good at it. He also, on the basis of it, stayed most of the pandemic hanging in right wing forums, as the movie plot about sex trafficking feels very indebted to the most conservative paranoid fantasies about it. What set that movie apart is that it had such primal energy to it. Foster, like a lot of action stars, has the mix of masochism and narcissism in him; he seems even more in love with himself when he is suffering and at his best when he can react to that. At its best, the movie pushes that energy ahead with a lot of force. Mexicali is far more straightforward, but use those qualities well. It gives Foster plenty of opportunities to fight, actually opening with a series of brawls before the plot kicks in. Foster does look great doing it, and I like that LaFontaine is good at mixing things up, moving from the more intimate one-on-one brawls to larger scope action when he goes on the run as well. The physical and gunplay action are shot nicely. People often overpraise movies like this because they refuse to overcut, but their main strength is the appreciation of actors bodies. Guys like LaFontaine and Johnson are good at knowing how Foster and the many stuntmen he is pitted against can show up on screen, and they make these physical dimensions count.

One of the many nice things about DTV action is that because it often stars veteran actors who used to be in bigger movies, they are very inclusive towards aging characters. A genre often made up of middle aged men (and they are usually men, although a few actresses like Olga Kurylenko show up in them often) who can make their world weariness count. That also suits the audience for these movies, which I suspect is older than most genre fare. On this, it does feel like an inheritor of the mid-to-low-budget westerns of the 1950s. Foster became known a couple of years ago, but he has been around the film industry since the early 2000s and turns 50 late this year. Mexicali’s dramatic stakes are within the farm itself and its promise; it is a movie about a guy who is very good at breaking people’s bones but would rather deal with avocados. LaFontaine, Johnson, and Foster are all good at making this matter. The movie’s thrills lie elsewhere, but the character’s exasperation feels real and earned. The downtime scenes early on have a nice lived-in feel to them, and the yearning in Foster’s eyes when he has to go through the B crime movie plot about revengeful gangsters and power plays is real and never gets in the way of the genre thrills.

Mexicali isn’t a great movie or anything, but it is an honest one. A throwback to when the American film industry still had a decent number of modest movies like this that were happy to deliver on their premises and find enough good spins to keep it going. There is virtue in that.