From the Rental Vault: Another Trio

What do you do when you're a person of honor who works at the command of those without any? Lieutenant Li of the Chinese army during the Tang Dynasty in around 700 AD was faced with such a choice when ordered to massacre Gokturk women and children after a battle. His refusal led to his becoming a fugitive, wanted for mutiny by the Emperor.

He finds himself the sole surviving escort of a desert caravan transporting a precious Buddhist relic across China's Xinjiang province, and is eventually joined by some old comrades, in the 2003 martial arts movie Warriors of Heaven and Earth. He's also joined by Imperial Emissary Lai Xi, who was sent to kill him but realizes the importance of getting the caravan safely to its destination. The two promise to meet after arrival to settle their dispute.

Director He Ping keeps the action flowing as Li must first try to recruit guards in some small towns and as Lai Xi must help Wen Zhu escape a local warlord. The story shifts back to the desert trek when Lai Xi and Wen Zhu accompany the caravan for their protection and so Lai Xi can complete his mission. He uses the vast Xinjiang desert well, backdropping the emptiness Li has felt since being ordered to murder innocents and that Lai Xi, a native of Japan, feels after so many years away from home. Even though it's essentially a long and sometimes slow chase scene, He and his competent cast hold interest. A little bit of special effects silliness closes the movie in connection with the Buddhist relic, but it doesn't do any lasting harm.

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The Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite in Portuguese), is one confusing movie to follow. Loosely based on a 2006 book about Brazil's SWAT-like BOPE military police commando unit, it highlights the ins and outs of local governments less honest than the criminal gangs they oppose and of gang allegiances themselves that can change in mid-firefight. Squad was a box-office smash in Brazil and its sequel became the biggest seller in Brazilian history.

The initial story starts with narration from BOPE Captain Roberto Nascimento, who describes the interrelationships between regular Rio de Janiero police and the drug gangs that infest its neighborhoods. Althought the BOPE officers themselves don't take money from the drug lords, they are no choirboys and have what we in the U.S. might see as a rather elastic view of what constitutes civil liberties of their informants or potential informants.

Brazilian box-office star Wagner Moura anchors the movie as Nascimento and offers a convincing picture of a man who walks a fine line between what sacrifices he will make in the cause of doing what's right. André Romiro and Caio Junqueira as rookie officers facing the reality of their corrupt system show the toll the dismal situation takes on honest and idealistic young men. In the end it's almost impossible to know who's on who's side and that can make for a confusing final image, but according to the source material that's about the way things are in real life police work in Rio anyway.

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The only bit of innovation in 1953's Gun Fury was its 3-D release and a scattered handful of scenes meant to take advantage of that process. Other than that, the talented team of Rock Hudson, Donna Reed and director Raoul Walsh have combined to present a piece of Western formula that loses even that small novelty when seen in DVD on your TV screen.

Reed and Hudson are to be married and are traveling by stage to the town nearest Hudson's new ranch. But they run afoul of bandits, led by the team of Philip Carey and Leo Gordon, and Hudson is left behind as the bandit gang heads south for Mexico with the loot and Reed. Hudson will pursue, picking up a few allies along the way but encountering many people who see dealing with Carey's gang as someone else's problem. I left the character names off because it really doesn't matter; these people are interchangeable with any one of a dozen other movies that have almost exactly the same story. The best Westerns were ones that used their genre to tell a bigger story than just a horse opera, but Westerns like Gun Fury are content to go through the motions and ask nothing more of its story than an obvious beginning, middle and end.

There's some attempt to give Carey a little dimension by showing him longing for a pre-Civil War life of genteel wealth and dignity that he sees Reed represent, but although he could prowl and growl rings around most of the cast as Asa Buchanan on One Life to Live, he's not a good enough actor to pull it off here. Walsh directed a multiplex worth of great movies but here has next to nothing to work with in terms of story, and a cast that, like Carey, was competent but not capable of rising above this material -- which says a lot when you realize that Reed was about to win an Oscar for From Here to Eternity. There's not a lot wrong with Gun Fury...but that's because there's really not a lot to it period.