From the Rental Vault: Red Notice (2021)

Caper movies walk a fine line. The centerpiece is usually a skillful and daring heist performed against impossible odds and armies of guards. Something has to be stolen, but a caper movie is supposed to carry itself lightly, so the theft may be committed against an evil opponent, a faceless corporate museum or a private hoarder unwilling to share his or her treasures with the world. Otherwise an audience may disconnect once it realizes it's cheering for criminals and some poor person is going to suffer the loss of a treasured and perhaps irreplaceable heirloom or beloved personal item.

Second, the thieves must be basically good people. Yes, they're breaking the law, but they're not really hurting anyone. Hapless guards may succumb to knockout gas or find themselves locked in a now-empty vault after being outwitted by our clever protagonists, but no one is seriously or permanently injured. They're just having fun and using their great skills to get rich quickly and proceed to their life of ease that precedes the closing credits.

And most of all, there must be some surprising twist that no one saw coming -- in fact, no one even saw that no one saw it coming and this unanticipated twist can send the audience home happy if it's pulled off and rolling their eyes if it isn't.

The Netflix offering Red Notice, featuring what should be a power trio of Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot, overlooks several of these important points and thus winds up with an audience that may ask itself, "Why did I watch that?" Johnson is John Hartley, a by-the-book FBI profiler who helps Interpol nab the skilled thief Nolan Booth (Reynolds) until skilled thief Sarah Blake (Gadot) plants evidence for Interpol that Hartley is not an FBI agent at all and gets him thrown into the same Russian prison as Booth. They escape, and Hartley realizes that in order to clear his name, he's going to have to help Booth steal the second of three golden eggs made as presents for Cleopatra so he can turn it over to Interpol. Blake keeps complicating things and eventually the trio must find the third, long lost egg, in order to achieve their individual goals.

The three leads have good chemistry. Johnson and Reynolds are essentially playing themselves and Gadot shows she can pitch in with the quips as well as either of them. But fun dialogue and likable leads only go so far, and Red Notice winds up frequently funny without being at all fun -- the cast is having a heck of a time, but it all stays onscreen and doesn't make the move to the viewer. The set pieces are all predictable -- Johnson will win his with brute strength, Reynolds with slick patter and misdirection and Gadot with smoking hottery diverting the opponent before kicking his butt. And there's too many of them; Red Notice is a nearly two-hour movie that should have been a half-hour to 40 minutes less.

Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber, a co-producer along with Johnson, has said that sequels are possible -- but Red Notice in some ways already feels like a sequel. If you're a fan of '80s movies, imagine watching Jewel on the Nile before Romancing the Stone and you'll have a pretty good sense of what it's like seeing Red Notice.

From the Rental Vault: Naam Shabana (2017)

When his 2015 action thriller Baby did well at the box office and with critics, director Neeraj Pandey planned sequels that showed how each member of the "Baby" spy team came to work for Indian intelligence services.

The first was 2017's Shabana, which focused on Taapsee Pannu's character Shabana Kahn. Pandey handed the director's reins to Shvam Nair, and not with the best results.

After a turbulent home life that saw her placed in reform school for killing her abusive father to protect her mother, she crops up on the agency's radar and they keep tabs for her possible recruitment. When a friend of hers is killed but the perpetrators escape justice because of their wealth, spy Ranvir Singh (Manoj Bajpayee makes her an offer: He will help her take vengeance on the killers of her friend if she will join the secret agency he represents.

Shabana's mission of vengeance completed, she begins to train with the spy agency for her first mission, targeting an arms dealer whose last escape from Indian intelligence resulted in the death of the agents that pursued him. She will attempt to get close to him and place him in a setting where he can be arrested or killed, backed up by her future Baby team members Om Prakesh Shukla (Anupam Kher) and Ajay Singh Rajput (Akshay Kumar).

Pannu makes a good action heroine, training heavily in mixed-martial arts fighting and Krav Maga for her fight scenes. She presents Shabana Khan as a young woman mostly emptied by the losses and violence she's suffered in her short life, animated by a desire for revenge and justice. Only as she begins to trust her team does she show any hints she believes something more in life than these two motives are possible. Manoj Bajpayee hits the right marks as the steely mentor who knows his new recruit must be tested to her limits in order for her to learn just how much she is capable of achieving, and Prithviraj Sukumaran is appropriately cold-blooded and nefarious as the arms-dealing villain. 

One of the story's most interesting features mostly hamstrings it -- Ranvir Singh's offer to help Shabana gain vengeance before she joins the agency is certainly a different sequence of events than thrillers often follow but it also brackets a large section of the movie as an "in-between" kind of set piece that keeps us from getting to the eventual training and mission sequence that's the point. That disconnect may have hurt Naam Shabana at the box office and put Pandey's plans for other prequels on hold. Pannu is effective as both a talented actress and a butt-kicking heroine, but Pandey's convoluted storyline and extraneous moving parts keep her on the shelf for too much of the movie, even when she's front and center on the screen.

Naam Shabana is a Bollywood movie and one of the song sequences best illustrates what Pandey and Nair may have been trying to do -- the ubiquitous training montage is set to the contemplative tune "Zinda" as a way of trying to mix together the dual impulses driving Shabana herself. Violence for vengeance and protection is no problem for her, but it still provides her no peace. The dichotomy of fighting and physical effort shown over the reflective vocals of Sunidi Chauhan makes a contrasting blend that works for the length of the song. But Nair can't make it work for the whole movie, leaving the effective acting from Pannu and her well-done punch-and-kick sequences adrift without the context they should have.

From the Rental Vault: Buccaneer's Girl, 1950

Most swashbuckler's feature the fellas moving the action. Even when a woman holds her own (and more) as Maureen O'Hara does opposite Errol Flynn and Anthony Quinn in Against All Flags, men drive the narrative and plotlines most of the time. Every now and again, though, the lady gets her chance to take the wheel as Yvonne DeCarlo does in Buccaneer's Girl, and DeCarlo runs with it to make an entertaining comedic adventure laced with the proper amount of romance. The poster even gives it away, with DeCarlo's name both larger and above that of Philip Friend, who plays the dual-identity Baptiste the pirate and Robert Kingston the respected businessman.

DeCarlo is Deborah McCoy, a New Orleans singer and entertainer stowing away on a ship later captured by Baptiste (Friend). Though he holds her captive, she escapes and lands at Mme. Brizar (Elsa Lanchester)'s "school for young ladies," or as it is known outside the world of Hollywood's 1950s censors, a brothel. Mme Brizar's students make their money -- and, fingers crossed, catch the eye of an eligible bachelor -- by singing at different parties and entertainments given by New Orleans' upper crust of society. Debbie is astonished to learn that the pirate Baptiste is also a member of that same society, despoiling his fellow aristocrats to fund a relief fund for injured and aged sailors they discard. Although she is drawn to him as Robert Kingston, she finds Kingston engaged to Arlene Villon (Andrea King), another member of New Orleans elite. There is more business than affection in the match, though, especially when the snooty and faithless Arlene is compared to Debbie. If these shoals aren't enough to imperil Kingston/Baptiste, his rival businessman Narbonne (Robert Douglas) is close to trapping Baptiste, aided by the scheming Patout (Norman Lloyd).

The plot seems a little too intricate for its own good and several times it almost is, but director Frederick DeCordova keeps it moving forward when it might falter and draws our attention back to action, fun and romance. The movie is clearly DeCarlo's, giving her the central arc of falling in love with Kingston, spurning him when learning he is engaged and then being romanced by him once he decides to pursue her. Rather than shrink back while the menfolk fence around the set, she's the think-on-her-feet planner of the schemes of derring-do that help our heroes combat the nefarious villains.

Both the script and her performance make DeCarlo's leadership role organic rather than artificial and help make an enjoyable romp, even if not nearly as much of the action takes place on the bounding main as the title might lead one to hope.

DeCarlo would later wind up as Moses' wife in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments and as Lily Munster in TV's The Munsters. DeCordova would be the longtime director of The Tonight Show during the reign of late-night king Johnny Carson, and Norman Lloyd would be the patriarchal Dr. Daniel Auchslander on the small screen's St. Elsewhere. At 106, he's still active and performed as recently as 2015.

From the Rental Vault: Against All Flags (1952)

Errol Flynn had an unusual worry when he began reading the script for his 1952 swashbucker Against All Flags. It wasn't that the movie had an unrealistic historical setting or featured a clearly Anglo actress as the supposed Princess Patma, daughter of the Moghul Emperor of India. It wasn't that the ship movements depicted onscreen seemed very little affected by the supposed wind (a captain at one point orders his crew, anchored alongside a wharf, to "make ready to come about").

No, the problem was that he was supposed to have a sword fight with a woman and he felt it wouldn't fit with his traditional image as "the bravest guy onscreen." But the woman was Maureen O'Hara, who had by that point gone face-to-face with John Wayne onscreen and John Ford in real life and come up the winner. Director George Sherman had worked with O'Hara before and told Flynn that she could hold her own with swords, pistols or her fists and he'd better get in shape. She could, he did, and the result was 80 minutes of frothy fun on the seas near Madagascar in the year 1700.

Flynn is Brian Hawke, a man pretending to be a disgraced British East India Company officer embittered by ill treatment and seeking to join the Madagascar-based pirates sailing out of Diego Suarez. O'Hara is Prudence "Spitfire" Stevens, a woman captain who inherited her piratical position from her father. She's wary of Flynn but thinks she can use him to get out of Madagascar and enter legal society back in England. Anthony Quinn is Roc Brasiliano, another captain whose desire for Spitfire only magnifies his mistrust of Hawke. Alice Kelley is the aforementioned "Princess Patma."

Hawke tries to keep Patma safe while keeping Brasiliano at a distance and woo Stevens -- in addition to his original mission of locating and disabling the pirates' land-based fortifications so Royal Navy ships can destroy their base.

As mentioned above, it's a completely superficial romp that hits all the right notes -- Quinn glowers and schemes, Flynn swashes, buckles and swaggers about and O'Hara keeps her powder dry while making it clear she is a woman who decides things for herself. Flynn was 43 and his hard-living personal life was taking its toll, but he takes on everything his role demands, even down to a stunt that involved sliding down a sail to the deck with the aid of a rapier thrust through it. He did break an ankle at one point, in a more ordinary scene, which allowed Universal to recast the sets and shoot the B-picture Yankee Buccaneer while he recovered.

Against All Flags has a number of scenes that make a modern viewer uneasy -- the sale of Princess Patma's captured retinue as "brides" is treated with too many jokes in light of what it really represents and Alice Kelley is not in the slightest an Indian or a Moghul, although she and Mildred Natwick as her governess are funny in the right spots. Still, it was a movie made in 1952 and a lot of things about it -- from its special effects to its sensibilities -- are likely to make a modern audience wish them done better. But the solid performances from Flynn and Quinn, as well as the proto-lady warrior played by O'Hara, make it an interesting watch in the sea of similar features.

From the Rental Vault: Harlem Nights (1989)

Eddie Murphy was at the peak of his influence in the late 1980s and leveraged it to be able to produce and direct a movie featuring some of his own heroes amid a largely African-American cast. Coming out several months after Spike Lee's debut Do the Right Thing, some movie writers suggested Harlem Nights could also be important to African-Americans in the movie industry, since Murphy's greater star power would mean bigger box office. It did indeed make more money; $95 million to Right Thing's $37 million, but it did not post numbers like previous Murphy vehicles and did not do well with critics.

In the later years of the Great Depression, Club Sugar Ray is a Harlem hotspot, a dance club also offering gambling and fronting a brothel owned by Madam Vera (Della Reese). Ray (Richard Pryor) runs the club with the help of a younger man whom he raised as his own son, Vernon "Quick" Brown (Murphy). Although de facto segregation still divides New York City, Club Sugar Ray has white clientele as well and it success draws the attention of mobster Bugsy Calhoune (Michael Lerner). Calhoune starts leaning on Ray for a percentage of the club and brothel take, using corrupt cop Phil Cantone (Danny Aiello) as his weapon.

Ray realizes that he can't win in a fight with a mobster at Calhoune's level so he decides to shutter the club and run a con game on Calhoune. The complicated plot relies on the mobster's greed as well as Cantone's and on the cleverness of Ray and Quick.

Seen from a 30-year distance, some of the reasons for Harlem Nights' underperformance at the box office are even clearer today without Murphy's megawatt stardom overshadowing them: It doesn't have very many laughs for a comedy, it's glacially paced for a caper movie and it's got far too many moving parts for a star vehicle. Murphy was a first-time director and had also written the script, which left far too few voices to crop up and say, "Are you sure this works?" Murphy himself, recalling the movie many years later, remembered how all of the comedians on the set (Redd Foxx, Arsenio Hall, Thomas Mikal Ford and Robin Harris also had roles) kept everyone laughing non-stop between takes -- but he never seems to be able to channel any of that humor or energy onto the screen.

All of the performances are competent; most of the cast had quite a few roles in their filmographies even if only in bit roles. If Murphy's vision had been augmented with some advice on the script and direction, and if he had been able to make up his mind which direction he wanted to take -- comedy, caper flick or high-concept star vehicle -- Harlem Nights could have helped break through some of the stereotyping walls built around African-American directors and their work. Lee and other directors like John Singleton were proving that an African-American-directed movie centered on African-American experiences with an African-American cast didn't have to be a comedy or belong to the "blaxploitation" genre of the 1970s. A critical success for Harlem Nights might have demonstrated such movies could also perform at the box office and broken a lot of barriers (All but the most virulent racists figure out how to deal their differences when it comes to the color green). But the curiously lifeless result of its combined talents kept that from happening, and leaves the movie itself memorable for what it failed to do instead of what it did.

From the Rental Vault: Agent Vinod (2012)

Bollywood spy movies have to walk a fine line. On the one hand, the audience expects song and dance numbers -- it's why they're watching a Bollywood flick to begin with. Song and dance numbers can make a movie a little on the silly side, because in real life people don't start singing and dancing. Many musicals embrace this and just go for the silly; others will settle for being stories that use the musical numbers to create a mood and may feature other narrative aspects that people understand are not true to real life.

The espionage business, as shown in movies, are replete with such aspects. Even when they don't incorporate science-fiction elements they show spies who are so high profile it's pretty much impossible to believe that everyone doesn't know who they are as soon as they show up. So a spy movie with musical numbers can in fact work, as long as it doesn't tilt too far one way or the other. Unfortunately the 2012 release Agent Vinod makes the mistake of thinking that matching an excess one way with an excess the other way as a way of walking the tightrope. It turns out not to be.

Vinod (Saif Ali Khan) is put onto the trail of Russian criminals who murdered a colleague after he had learned just a few introductory facts about their planned operation. Armed only with the clue "242," he takes the place of a courier and gets into the orbit of a Tangiers criminal boss who may be ready to sell abandoned nuclear arms. The crime boss's personal physician, Ruby Mendes (Kareena Kapoor) is quite obviously more than she seems, but Vinod doesn't know for which side. Burrowing in more deeply, he finds rogue elements in India's rival, Pakistan, may be trying to acquire the nuke in order to set it off in an Indian city. Only that may not be the end of the conspiracy, and Vinod may wind up with only himself to trust.

Director/co-writer Sriram Raghavan keeps his action sequences taut and compact and doesn't waste too much time trying to make Agent Vinod's squirrelly convoluted plot make any more sense than it has to in the moment. Saif Ali Khan makes a suave and sophisticated leading man who sells the familiar idea of the roguish charmer spy fairly well, but Kapoor is not as well served by the part of Ruby Mendes. With a couple dozen-plus roles in her filmography, she's one of India's most versatile female stars -- but the Mendes role is too flat to let her do much with it beyond some hinted comedy and action of her own. And even though Kapoor and Khan would marry the same year the movie came out, Raghavan and co-writer Arjit Biswas can't bring much of a spark to their onscreen interaction.

Song-wise, "I'll Do the Talking Tonight" is a good macho-bravado tone-setter for the steely-eyed Vinod, adding some Russian-influenced instrumentation to its dance-floor thump."Raabta," a romantic piano ballad played as Vinod and Ruby face down a John Wick-styled hit squad, is an interesting contrast of music and onscreen events.

Vinod was co-produced by Saif Ali Khan and probably intended as a franchise kickoff. But pre-release problems, political missteps and a plagiarism lawsuit added up to a strong box-office headwind that the movie's undecided personality and uninspired execution couldn't sail against.

From the Rental Vault: White Vengeance (2011)

Although imperial China has a long history, the very first imperial dynasty, the Qin, had a short lifespan, falling victim to what was seen as its own cruel tyranny once it forged its many different predecessor kingdoms into a single nation. After just 15 years in power, the Qin fell apart into two main kingdom groups and several smaller ones in 206 BC. The two most significant powers were the Western Chu, led by the Hegemon-King Xiang Yu and the Han, led by the King of Han, Liu Bang. Formerly allies, Xiang Yu sent Liu Bang to the far edges of the former Qin Empire in order to keep him at bay. But the wily Liu Bang didn't stay pent up in his outland realm and almost immediately began a campaign to retake power and the lands ruled by Xiang Yu. He won a final battle over Xiang's forces in 202 BC and established himself as Gaozu, the first Emperor of the Han Dynasty, which would last four centuries.

This history is the framework on which the 2011 Donnie Lee movie Hong Men Yan was based, taking for its title a banquet at the Hong Gate that was a major meeting between the two leaders. When it was released in English, it was given the title White Vengeance in reference to the strategy game weiqi or go played by the two leaders' respective advisers in the movie. Liu Bang's side played white and was defeated and humiliated by Xiang Yu, but his later victory was seen as his revenge.

The movie plot keeps the main characters and events but shifts them in order to make the four-year struggle between them fit into a 2 hour, 15 minute movie. Quick scenes establish the battlefield camaraderie between Liu and Xiang, and then Liu's humiliation when he is initially sent off to a far kingdom with the errand of seeing Xiang's consort Yu to one of his palaces. At first Liu tries to rival himself for Yu's affections but she returns to her true love, Xiang. Though at first it seems Xiang's forces are too powerful for Liu to win, he eventually wins over the support of some of the other, smaller kingdoms and faces Xiang with a larger army as two meet at Gaixia for a final confrontation.

Given the convoluted history of this time between the end of the Qin dynasty and the founding of the Han -- my recap leaves out at least a dozen kings, generals and advisors -- trying to tell the story is a daunting job for director and writer Lee. He structures it almost as a series of discrete episodes with some dialogue packages designed to cover the intervening events, but it's entirely successful.

Part of the problem is casting; Xiang Yu's fatal flaw as a leader was said to be his cruelty and viciousness but as played by Feng Shaofang he's more somnolent than sinister. He saves the most emotion for scenes with his advisor Fan Zeng and a little bit for some concluding scenes with Yu (played by Liu Yifei, star of the live-action version of Disney's Mulan). Otherwise he's mostly blank. Leon Lai doesn't do much better as Liu Bang, most of the time giving off an air of grim puzzlement.

The role of Yu is also not very creative; she's almost an ornament to be competed for until the very last of the movie and the way the movie presents Liu Bang as desiring her could have opened the door for her to have been far more active and interesting. Historically that probably was the role Yu had, but the movie's already taken plenty of liberty with the actual events and one more couldn't have hurt. Lee seems to want to show us the people at the center of these swirling and violent events more than simply recite the complicated history but his own storytelling choices and the overly mannered and restrained performances from his three main cast members drain White Vengeance of most of the heat the title would lead you to expect.

From the Rental Vault: American Assassin (2017)

The war on terror has no battlefronts, no divisions, no maps or territorial objectives. Its initiators make a point of attacking non-military sites and slaughtering non-combatants, and those who would defend against them can't limit themselves to the old traditional understanding of war. They will need ruthlessness, cunning and the ability to strike from the shadows just as surely as do their foes, breaking the laws of war as surely as they break the laws of nations.

CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy thinks she's found a new soldier for her fight in Mitch Rapp, a young man who lost his girlfriend in a terror attack and later managed to infiltrate the very terror cell that planned it. Raw, unskilled and undisciplined, Rapp will be trained by veteran operative Stan Hurley in order to join him in a hunt for sinister forces who've acquired plutonium, a nuclear trigger and the expertise to build a working atomic bomb. Though at first they think they're tracking Iranians they find that a rogue American operative, one who has history with Hurley, is deeply involved and deadlier than anyone else on the board. Except, perhaps, for Mitch Rapp, the titular American Assassin.

Assassin is based on Vince Flynn's 2010 book of the same name. It's the origin of his CIA uber-agent, Mitch Rapp, even though it's written well into the series. Flynn wrote it as a flashback, setting it in the early 1990s, but moviemakers decided to bring it into the modern day. Teen Wolf and Maze Runner star Dylan O'Brien takes on the role of the driven Rapp, with Michael Keaton as Hurley and Sanaa Lathan as Irene Kennedy. Taylor Kitsch is the rogue operative Ghost.

The underlying mood of every Rapp book Flynn wrote was barely (and not always) contained rage. Rapp worked with a love of country and a deep desire to make every terrorist everywhere pay for the loss of his girlfriend in the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing. Rapp seethes pretty much from title page to endpaper, only marginally less at the people on his side who he believes stand in the way of What Needs to Be Done. By contrast, the movie version of American Assassin is curiously bloodless -- perhaps because O'Brien's wooden instead of cold-blooded performance doesn't communicate much of anything at all, let alone rage. He's not helped much by the script, which alternates between telling us how out-of-control Rapp is and having him constantly be dressed down by Hurley about putting the mission first and deceased colleagues out of mind.

Assassin really only breathes when Keaton is onscreen; he seems like the only cast member who figured he should work for the paycheck the studio cut him. Granted, the script is nothing special. The closest I've ever come to real espionage is the regular consumption of airport spy thrillers but even I can spot the holes in the intelligence tradecraft shown in this movie. But Keaton takes what he's given and works harder with it than it deserves in order to make Stan Hurley the most interesting person on the screen; it's not only his picture on the poster that's outsized compared to the rest of the cast.

American Assassin was conceived as the potential first in a series of movies based on the Rapp books, now being written by Kyle Mills following Flynn's 2013 passing. Its box office was respectable but about as uninspiring as the movie itself and no plans to follow it up have ever been seriously discussed.

From the Rental Vault: 14 Blades (2010)

All too often, conspirators who lack their own senses of honor rely on others who retain theirs, knowing that they can plot and plan taking advantage of a range of options not available to their opponents -- or, in some cases, their pawns.

That's the situation faced by Ming Dynasty secret warrior Qinglong (Donnie Yen) in the 2010 tale of palace intrigue, 14 Blades. Qinglong is the commander of the emperor's super-secret corps of bodyguard/assassins called the Jinyiwei. Selected as orphans and trained since childhood for brutal combat, the Jinyiwei also guard the artifact known as the "14 Blades," a box of special bladed weapons they can call on in combat. The Jinyiwei, or "Embroidered Uniform Guard," actually existed and were used as both guards and fighters. Their real power came not from an arcane artifact, though, but from their imperial authority to overrule any legal proceedings in favor of their own arrests, investigations, trials and punishments.

During Qinglong's tenure as commander, the Emperor himself is weak and incompetent. A royal eunuch, Jia Jingzhong, plots with his exiled uncle Prince Qing (Sammo Hung, in what amounts to a cameo role) to overthrow the throne. A key feature of the plot is the theft of the Imperial Seal, supposed to be carried out by Qinglong, but Qinglong uncovers the treachery at the heart of his mission and swears to stop the conspirators and avenge the deaths of his comrades. Against him are the renegade Jianyiwei commander Xuanwei (Qi Yuwu) and Prince Qing's adoptive daughter Tuo Tuo (Kate Tsui), a deadly assassin herself. But he gains unlikely allies in a bandit known as the Judge of the Desert (Wu Chun) and the daughter of a band of bodyguards for hire, Qiao Hua (Zhao Wei).

By this time in his career Donnie Yen was a master at playing the stoic "Man With No Name"-style lead. He's not necessarily a hero -- he commands the secret police, after all -- but when confronted with plots that go against his honor he remembers a little of what kind of man he once wanted to be. Setting himself squarely against the treachery surrounding him, he resolves to be that man now, even if it will only be service in a losing cause. The rest of the cast hit their own marks with more or less success. Qi Yuwu conveys a little of his own ruefulness at fighting his former comrade and killing many others. Wu Chun's Judge of the Desert brings the chaos to his "chaotic good"-styled character, unwilling to set aside his own prickly sense of honor because of Qinglong's rank and position. Zhao Wei properly mixes steely and spunky as the only daughter of the bodyguard agency, but Qiao Hua is not much different from several other characters she's played and her arc rises above average only in the movie's epilogue. Kate Tsui plays Tuo Tuo as a deadly cipher, present mainly to hack and occasionally slash.

Wuxia movies like 14 Blades rise and fall on their action sequences, and here director Daniel Lee proves unable to fully carry its load across the finish line. Some fight scenes early on hang together and flow well, but the longer the movie moves the more disconnected and perfunctory they become. The wire-fighting and CGI don't mix smoothly and the protagonists switch around enough that just who's fighting who gets a little fuzzy. In the end 14 Blades feels like one of the lesser Clint Eastwood Man With No Namers -- centered on a well-matched actor and character type he's used to playing, but surrounded by a story and supporting cast more flung than stitched together.

From the Rental Vault: The Far Country (1955)

Director Anthony Mann and James Stewart made six movies together through the early and mid-1950s, and the collaboration is often credited with helping Stewart shed enough of his "aw-shucks" image that he could convince audiences of his moral ambiguity in his later movies with Alfred Hitchcock. Both star and actor relied heavily on the standard features of westerns, working within and through them to give Stewart believable dimension in his performances.

The Far Country came in the middle of their period of working together. Jeff Webster (Stewart) and partner Ben Tatem (Walter Brennan) head north to the Klondike Gold Rush but plan to finance their stake and operations with the proceeds from selling cattle to the mining community of Dawson in the Yukon. But on their arrival in Skagway, the port nearest the path into the gold rush area, Jeff runs afoul of a local self-appointed and corrupt judge named Gannon (John McIntire). His cattle are seized and he's forced to hire on with saloon entrepreneur Ronda Castle (Ruth Roman) in order for him and Ben to even reach the mining area. Though he outwits Gannon and regains his herd, he exposes himself as someone willing to manipulate others without much scruple if it gets him what he wants, and he shows little need or desire to offer help to others in need unless it benefits him as well. As the situation in Dawson deteriorates into one not much different from Skagway itself, Jeff's attitude alienates him even from those who have been his friends, like fellow miner Rube Morris (Jay C. Flippen) and the beautifully earnest Renee Vallon (Corinne Calvet). Though it carries most of the trappings of the traditional Western, Mann and Stewart make sure that the conflict between the white hat of virtue and black hat of villainy happens much less on a dusty street than within the hearts of the characters.

The Far Country is in many ways the least satisfying collaboration between Mann and Stewart. Stewart's laconic manner and easy-going style don't back up Jeff's misanthropy and selfishly cruel "look out for #1" attitude. Too often it seems like Borden Chase's script teleports between narrative moments instead of navigating them, giving Jeff's arc a strangely truncated feeling. And this may be mildly spoiler-y, but by the end of the movie Jeff receives a redemption he has done little to earn, given the harm his brusque self-interest has brought to those who care about him.

Only McIntire rings true, and then only as the movie progresses. At first a seemingly eccentric jurist after the manner of a Judge Roy Bean, his malevolence slowly moves to the front until it glitters in the eyes behind his genial smile and verbal flourishes.

Although it's created out of whole cloth, Far Country borrows much from the different filmed versions of Rex Beach's 1906 The Spoilers, down to the hero facing a choice between a somewhat shady lady closer in age and temperament to himself and a younger, fresher face that symbolizes innocence. The familiarity of the storyline, the disjointed nature of Jeff's character arc and the frequently double-minded nature of the narrative leave The Far Country a confused and confusing destination.

From the Rental Vault: Footloose (1984)

Two of the things the 2011 remake of Footloose made clear were (1) How much the movie needed the then-new music video channel MTV to succeed and (2) how dumb the original movie really was. Without videos to keep the movie imagery in front of people 24/7, even the high-energy soundtrack could not have made this movie the blockbuster it was. And only the top-level performances of Kevin Bacon, John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and, surprisingly, Lori Singer could give Dean Pitchford's retread script the marginal shading of realism that it has.

Ren McCormack (Bacon) and his mother have moved from Chicago to the town of Bomont, Utah, where Ren quickly finds himself on the outside of town society looking in. Naturally rebellious, he finds the small town's restrictive culture even more repressive than do his classmates who've grown up there. The focus of the generational divide that's smothering Bomont's young people is rock music and dancing, both of which aren't allowed in city limits. Ren manages to make a few friends, including Willard (Chris Penn) and his girlfriend Rusty (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Rusty's friend Ariel Moore (Singer), the unruly daughter of what seems to be Bomont's only pastor, Shaw Moore (Lithgow). But Ariel's current boyfriend -- an abusive jerk -- and Ren's reputation for troublemaking only drive the wedge deeper. He decides that he has to get the city council to rescind its dancing ban and let the town teens enjoy themselves a little in order to save Bomont from itself.

As Pitchford writes his story, Ren's main antagonist is not Shaw Moore as much as the town of Bomont itself. This focus highlights a number of the narrative clunkers Footloose works with -- such as a Utah town where everyone sounds like they're from Georgia and a small rural town with its own high school gymnastics team. It's possible to imagine a Utah town without a Latter-Day Saints presence, but the rest of the story gaps show up even worse when watching this movie some 35 years after release.

As mentioned above, Footloose is saved by its cast and its soundtrack. It's Bacon's first major leading role, and his charisma and talent keep Ren from being the cardboard Teen Rebel the movie could easily let him be. Lithgow brought his two Academy Award Supporting Actor nominations to playing Shaw Moore, and invested him with genuine compassion and feeling where just about any other actor would have played a broad fundamentalist caricature. He's not a cruel fun-killer but a man who genuinely believes he is doing the right thing. Dianne Wiest takes the small role of Vi Moore and crafts a place as the conscience that Shaw hasn't listened to for too long.

One surprise a repeat watching can show is how well Lori Singer does in giving dimension and depth to what could also have been a caricature role. She makes clear that Ariel's bravado and sexually aggressive presentation mask her own grief at the loss of her brother and the estrangement from her father. When Shaw confronts and chastises book burners, Singer's face shows a dawning realization that her father is carrying his own burdens and dealing with them as best he can. He doesn't consider preventing her from enjoying life as his primary job after all. The rest of the cast does fine in their supporting roles but don't have the same room to stretch them and settle for what they're given.

As mentioned above, the Footloose soundtrack, with its insanely catchy Kenny Loggins title track, Deniece Williams' dance rouser "Let's Hear It for the Boy," Mike Reno and Ann Wilson's slow dance "love theme" "Almost Paradise" and Bonnie Tyler's anthemic declaration "Holding Out for a Hero" was a case of excellent timing. Music videos for the first two helped propel them to chart dominance and all four served to keep the movie on the pop culture burner longer than it merited.

Footloose had only limited success as a stage musical and as a remake -- probably because the original movie's success was so very much a product of its time. Even the movie poster was more or less unrepeatable, as a modern audience would have wondered at the Walkman on Ren's waist and the strange headphones over his ears. Nostalgia can make a brief return visit to Bomont, Utah, a fun little trip and even highlight some previously unnoticed features. But the story of its great awakening and of the people in it was a product of a particular time, and that time has passed.

From the Rental Vault: The Fire Down Below (1957)

The "smartest people in the room" theory suggests that someone wanting to hire a team might not necessarily look for people with the most experience in a particular area. Rather, someone who demonstrates they're intelligent and creative could, when pointed at a problem or project, come up with an idea that the experienced person might not. A group of such geniuses could be capable of anything, whether they knew all that much about the field or matter at hand or not. Similar ideas lie behind movies that assemble large casts of stars, figuring that such powerhouses of talent and charisma are bound to make even "meh" material a sure-fire hit.

The former idea produced Enron and a book of that title by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. The latter idea has given rise to any number of box-office clunkers when it becomes clear that some movie stars are better in their natural element no matter how great their performing cast winds up being, such as 1957's Fire Down Below, directed by Robert Parrish and taken from the novel of that name by Max Catto.

Fire is a story of folks generally dealt bad hands by life who have been burnt one too many times and are now trying to get by as best as they can. Even though it's filmed in Technicolor and set in the Caribbean, it's got noir written all over it. So naturally Felix,  the older, harder man in a potential love triangle is played by Robert Mitchum, a man whose drooping features and cynical wit would have invented film noir if it didn't already exist. The femme fatale Irena, an expatriate European lady with a shadowy past -- meaning much of it is unknown and the rest is not pretty -- is played by Rita Hayworth, whose personal life seemed like it came from a novel. Tony, the youngest leg of the triangle, is a wandering son of a wealthy man who doesn't yet want to anchor himself to regular life and so hooked up with Felix to make small-scale smuggling runs with their Jamaican partner Jimmy Jean (Edric Connor) in the tramp steamer Ruby. He's played by Jack Lemmon, a miscasting that sets Fire laboring against a strong headwind. Lemmon even at that point in his career was terrifically talented and his mantle held a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. But nothing about his demeanor either personally or professionally suggests the baggage of the past carried by his co-stars, making him simply unequal to Mitchum as a serious candidate for Hayworth's affections.

And when Fire shifts to focus on Lemmon solo when he is trapped inside a doomed cargo ship even the rather lightweight buildup of tension it's produced to that point blows away. Lemmon's Tony is the youngest and least interesting of the three, so no matter how good Lemmon is playing him it doesn't matter because the far more intriguing Felix and Irena are offscreen.

In the end Fire is more interesting for some coincidences and incidentals than for the movie itself: It was Hayworth's first movie in four years, Lemmon composed the harmonica theme used in the movie and would later play a "Felix" in one of his best-known movies, The Odd Couple, and Mitchum became so fascinated by the island music scene that he recorded an album called Calypso Is Like So. It was re-released in 1995.

From the Rental Vault: Code of Silence (1985)

Although these days his persona is one of invincible hero, Chuck Norris actually began his career playing heavies, usually getting his just desserts in the last reel. Even when he moved to being the good guy, the arena was still focused on martial arts action. The major difference was that instead of being unbeatable by anyone except the hero, he was now just unbeatable.

In the midst of his escalating superhero-dom, Norris showed up in Andrew Davis's Code of Silence, a movie about a Chicago cop that had been floated as a "Dirty Harry" possibility until Clint Eastwood passed on it. As Eddie Cusack, Norris doesn't spend nearly as much screen time in martial arts mayhem as he does in his previous movies. He's still the hero and still tougher than ten roofing nails, but his bad-assery is limited to strictly human levels instead of the outsized exploits he'd be known for later.

Cusack and his tactical squad are waiting to take down a major cocaine dealer as soon as their informant gives the signal. But a rival crimelord also has designs on the cocaine and cash, and the hit leaves behind a roomful of bodies, wounded officers and a young man shot by panicky burnout cop Cragie (Ralph Foody) who tries to cover the mistake with a drop gun.

The ensuing gang war only amplifies the bloodshed, as Luis Camacho (Henry Silva) swears revenge for his murdered brother and kills most of the family members of the crimelord, Victor Luna, who engineered the hit. Only Victor's daughter Diana (Molly Hagan) remains alive, and she's safe only because Cusack thwarted her abduction. Luis eventually manages to get to Diana, though, threatening her life unless Cusack can produce Victor Luna. Abandoned by his fellow officers because he breaks the titular "code of silence" and won't stand by Cragie in the complaint against him, Cusack has to take on Camacho's thugs himself.

Silence is a no-frills crime drama, sketching its characters in broad familiar strokes and letting the actors fill in the blanks as needed. Davis doesn't meander from his path either, showing the ability to weave action set pieces into a story that would make Under Siege and The Fugitive successes as well. Cusack has his share of encounters with baddies, of course, but Davis doesn't design them as martial arts displays. They're in service to the overall plot, not showcases for flying fists and feet. Even in the finale, Cusack causes most of his mayhem with an automated police robot, not his fists. The role doesn't ask Norris to do much beyond be tough and stoic. Except when he interacts with Hagan, when it asks him to be stoic in a paternal, big-brotherish manner. He's more than capable of meeting that standard and by joining the rest of Code of Silence in not doing more than it needs to, makes a watchable 100 minutes of tough-cop crime story.

From the Rental Vault: Outlaw King (2018)

Like a lot of people who know a little bit about history, David Mackenzie understood that Mel Gibson's 1995 blockbuster Braveheart was not an accurate retelling of the 14th century Scottish war for independence. But unlike a lot of those people, Mackenzie could do something about it and did, by making a movie about the man who ultimately won the throne following those conflicts, Robert the Bruce who was to be crowned Robert I, King of the Scots. So he did, distributing it through Netflix as Outlaw King.

Gibson's movie focused on freedom fighter William Wallace, named one of Scotland's Lord Protectors as Scottish nobles attempted to remove the heavy English yoke from their necks. Wallace is not to be found in Outlaw King except in part, as a piece of his drawn and quartered corpse is displayed in warning to potential rebels. A scene which included a meeting between him and Robert was trimmed from the final version of King.

As a more faithful retelling of some of the events surrounding Scotland's fight for independence, Mackenzie succeeds, as this Popular Mechanics article outlines. But as a plain ol' movie, it lags considerably in many areas. Some scenes feel curiously drawn out while others are choppy and rushed. A number of plot points hinge on what happens to certain characters but we don't learn enough about them to figure out why these events are important, either to Robert or to the story. Mackenzie cut about 20 minutes from the version of the movie shown at the Toronto International Film Festival so it's possible some of the flow and explanation we're looking for is in those minutes, but their absence harms not just the pacing but the whole payoff of the storyline.

Chris Pine largely succeeds in showing Robert as a man haunted by the years of fighting that precede the timeline we're watching, and rendered weary and detached by it all. The people around him may want to play this particular game of thrones, but he's tired of it all and would rather sit it out. A pair of scenes showing the harsh way Edward I of England imposed his rule on the Scots are meant to show us how Robert awoke to the injustice of that rule but they flash so quickly it's hard to see how they have that great of an impact. Billy Howie sounds mostly one note as Prince Edward (later Edward II) -- desperate mania to prove himself a worthy successor to his father and proves mostly a cardboard cutout rather than a properly hate-able villain. Florence Pugh displays stalwart strength as Robert's imprisoned wife Elizabeth, but again whatever arc she is supposed to have stumbles through the end in more of a series of vignettes rather than full development.

Robert eventually decides to drop his guerilla campaign in order to face Edward in battle, unwilling to be an "outlaw king" any longer. One of the cut scenes showed him meeting a haggard Wallace when the latter is hiding out, his cause and support vanished. Retaining that scene could have helped show why Bruce suddenly decides it's time to fight in the open as he realizes only a decisive defeat of the English can end his de facto exile, end their oppressive rule and free his family.

Historical dramas rarely hit the screen at anywhere above 80 percent in accuracy, because real history stubbornly refuses to conform to the most effective storytelling aesthetics. Real people mix heroic and base qualities, events don't always match a good narrative sequence and resolutions can take quite awhile to flesh out clearly. Mackenzie may have reached his goal of showing a more historically accurate vision of the Scottish wars of independence, but he probably needed a little more Maxwell Stoddard in the mix in addition to some more foundation and some earlier fire from his lead. History is made up of facts, but movies are made up of legends and Outlaw King doesn't have nearly enough of the latter.

From the Rental Vault: St. Elmo's Fire (1985)

I have a small soft spot of nostalgia for Joel Schumacher's "Brat Pack" outing, the ensemble picture St. Elmo's Fire. Following on the heels of the Baby Boomer's The Big Chill in 1983 and the high school introspection from earlier in 1985, The Breakfast Club, Fire seemed like it was the movie talking about people closer to my age at the time (The irony there being that stars Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson and Ally Sheedy played in both Breakfast Club and Fire, aging some four or five years in the span of four months). The seven friends shown in the movie have just graduated college and are starting out in the workforce and adult life, with varying degrees of success.

But real life, it turns out, is complicated, and the safety net provided by the college environment is nowhere to be found out in that world. Party man Billy (Rob Lowe) finds that no one hires for those skills, which is even worse when you are married with a child. Alec (Nelson) and Leslie (Sheedy) see that living together may not be just a step along the path to marriage -- especially when Alec has a somewhat different understanding of monogamy -- and Kevin (Andrew McCarthy) discovers that just because your longtime crush breaks up with her longtime beau doesn't mean she wants to start something with you. Kirby (Estevez) will come to know that there are some good questions to ask the fair maid you've worshiped from afar, like "Do you have a boyfriend already?" Jules (Demi Moore) will learn that an affair with your married boss will not give you job security and that credit card debt is not an ideal fiscal foundation. Wendy (Mare Winningham) seems to discover that asserting yourself and creating your own life can involve finally consummating a relationship with the bad boy she's always fantasized about, but since he's planning on moving away and the movie ends right afterwards, it's kind of hard to say that's any sort of progress.

The script, by Schumacher and Carl Kurlander, is not really any kind of straight narrative as much as a series of snapshot vignettes. But the way the characters interact in those vignettes suggests there is supposed to be some kind of story arc, which means Schumacher and Kurlander's script is just not any good at pulling it off. The two or three crisis moments that are supposed to set up a resolution ring false, and the real problem is that with one or two exceptions, the whole group is a bunch of jerks. The major life lessons that they are supposed to acquire come with a healthy helping of "Duh, you idiot," and the talented cast has so little to work with it's tough to feel good for them when they finally take their Big Step Forward into Grown-Up Life. Especially since for several of them Grown-Up Life seems to still be pretty solidly adolescent.

As I said, I have a couple of nostalgic soft spots for Fire. In addition to remembering it "finally" as a movie about folks in my own age and experience bracket, I resonated a little with McCarthy's character, a fledgling reporter dealing with an unrequited crush on one of his best friends (Although Schumacher and Kurlander's breakthrough event for him was pure fantasy -- the Washington Post is not going to give column inches to a 22-year old to write a piece called "The Meaning of Life").

But it's a lousy movie from stem to stern, nostalgia notwithstanding. Had it not come out only four months after The Breakfast Club it would have been seen as a clear attempt to capitalize on that movie's success, but the truth is that ensemble coming-of-age stories are not uncommon. It's just that Schumacher and Kurlander are nowhere near as talented as Lawrence Kasdan (Chill) and John Hughes (Club). Columbia Studio execs may have thought they were getting a younger version of their Big Chill smash, but they would up with a clumsy mess that is far better remembered from across a span of years than watched in real time.

From the Rental Vault: The Hangman (1959)

So once upon a time, Ginger Grant, Davy Crockett, Steve McGarrett, Ben Cartwright/Commander Adama and Thelma Lou were all in a movie together, which starred Robert Taylor and was directed by Academy Award nominee Michael Curtiz.

The movie, The Hangman, was billed and marketed as a Western, but it was really more of a character drama than an oater, with no gunfights and only one outing of Ye Olde Fisticuffs to speak of. Taylor plays U.S. Deputy Marshal Mac Bovard, who is out to track down the last man accused of a Wells Fargo holdup that resulted in murder. Bovard has a reputation as dogged and merciless, bringing in the worst criminals to face justice at the end of a rope, so he has gained the nickname "The Hangman." The problem is that he's never seen the man, John Butterfield, and has no way to identify him. When Bovard gets a lead on a town where Butterfield might be, he finds a woman who knew him when he was serving in the Army who can identify him. But Selah Jennison (Tina Louise) owes Butterfield and is reluctant to betray him to the law, even for the $500 reward Bovard offers. She refuses, but he cynically predicts she will come around.

Once at his destination, Bovard becomes suspicious of a man named Johnny Bishop (Jack Lord), but local sheriff Buck Weston (Fess Parker) says he will have a hard time convincing anyone that Johnny Bishop is any kind of criminal. Bovard counts on Selah Jennison to make the identification, but when the days drag on without her arrival he grows frustrated. When she finally does arrive she doesn't identify Bishop as Butterfield, but the suspicious Bovard doesn't trust her.

Taylor is far and away the biggest name in the cast, with his co-stars either best known for TV roles like Parker or Lord, or relative newcomers like Louise. He displays Bovard's bitter cynicism well, blaming it on all of his years of hunting and moving among the worst of humanity. Fess Parker's easygoing manner offsets him well, as his Sheriff Weston seems genial even when expressing frustration at Bovard's obsession and mistrustful nature. Tina Louise was said to have hated the impact her three-year stint as airheaded actress Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island had on her career. She demonstrates here that she did have a pretty good range, handling the different layers of Selah Jennison's pivotal role with more than a little skill.

Hangman, based on a story by Western writer Luke Short, tends to be a little talky in spots and sometimes tells when it should show, as though Dudley Nichols' screenplay doesn't trust his cast to act instead of read exposition. It swerves Taylor back and forth between the cynicism that he claims to hold and regretful ruminations on that same attitude without as much foundation as it should have built. It suggests a relationship between the 48-year-old Taylor and 25-year-old Louise that makes little sense and has even less foundation. But it's still interesting, and offers some food for thought on what can turn an idealist bitter, and what might also manage to make a bitter person rediscover his or her ideals.

From the Rental Vault: Warlock (1959)

Although some great Westerns happened along during most decades that we've had movies, the 1950s stands out for offering some of the tops in the field -- both as Westerns and as movies. Hollywood's top directors, actors and screenwriters did not disdain the genre but often viewed it as the pallette they used for their work. It could serve to get an important idea in front of people who might not otherwise encounter it, as long as it was a good story with good work.

Warlock, with Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Dorothy Malone and Anthony Quinn, was one of those "thinking person's" kind of Westerns. Widmark teamed with one of his favorite directors, Edward Dymytrk, to bring Fonda and the other top-level cast on board in filming Robert Arthur's adaptation of Oakley Hall's Pulitzer-nominated novel.

The southwestern mining town of Warlock is suffering because it is not incorporated and can't hire a sheriff of its own. Stuck with ineffective deputies, the townspeople are at the mercy of outlaw leader Abe McQuown until they decide to bring in gunslinger and town tamer Clay Blaisedell (Fonda) as a marshal. Blaisedell, along with his partner Joe Morgan (Quinn) set up shop in a saloon and soon begin to impose their own order on the town and the outlaws, forcing a confrontation.

As tensions have built, one of McQuown's crew -- Johnny Gannon (Widmark) -- has grown tired of the killing and decides to take on the role of deputy sheriff. His desire to uphold the law puts him at odds with his old friends but not entirely on the side of Blaisedell, whose authority is primarily backed up by his speed with a gun rather than a statute. Gannon's growing relationship with Lily Dollar (Malone) complicates the entire situation, especially since she has come to Warlock to see Blaisedell killed for gunning down her fiancé. Blaisedell himself is growing closer to townswoman Jessie Marlow (Dolores Michaels) and thinking about settling in Warlock, to the consternation of his partner Morgan.

First known as the psychotic gangster Tommy Udo in 1947's Kiss of Death, Widmark rested on a string of great roles by the time Warlock came around. He was originally cast as Blaisedell, but lobbied studio heads to get Fonda for the part so he could take the against-type role of Johnny Gannon. At first merely disgusted with the violence of McQuown's gang, Gannon gradually grows to understand that the rule of law can in fact make things better -- including a man like him. His belief in it transforms him and instills in him an honor he might have thought was lost, if indeed he ever had it at all. Widmark completely sells the idea of a man who increasingly finds dignity within his work and then, almost as though surprised, within himself.

Fonda's eerie calm renders Blaisedell almost as a kind of automaton. He's on the side of order, no doubt, but it's an order imposed by his will and his willingness to kill rather than statute or any kind of consent of the ordered. In some ways it previews his villainous turn in Once Upon a Time in the West nine years later: he's flat-out evil in that but here is still more than a little scary as a man who knows only his own law and will. As a relationship develops with Jessie Marlow, Blaisedell begins to think he can settle down himself, despite the opposition of Morgan. That opposition, combined with an almost doglike devotion to the first man to overlook his handicap, pushes Morgan to try to manipulate events so that Blaisedell defeats not only McQuown but also Gannon.

It's a fascinating swirl of humanity, made even more so as we see the two women in the story grow closer to the two different men. Gannon and Blaisedell both seem to grow as the relationships develop, but events will prove which, if either, actually becomes a different man than he has been.

Although the scenery is classic -- a dusty town, a steely-eyed lawman, a cruel villain and a gal with a heart of gold -- the screenplay, direction and performances open up wide ranges of human experience to exploration and discussion. Warlock is as stylized as any Western when it comes to the real-world history of its time and place. But it shows that when talent, intelligence and craft are brought to bear on the human condition, the genre of the vehicle is no obstacle to quality and insight.

From the Rental Vault: Whispering Smith (1948)

By the late 1940s, Westerns were starting to show signs of a maturing movie genre -- eschewing some of the sillier conventions of the genre like the idea a bandana "mask" would prevent a miscreant from being recognized by people he was around every day -- and offer more layered and nuanced characters than the simple assembly-line oaters of earlier years.

The transformation wasn't complete, so movies like 1948's Whispering Smith still have genre tropes like the aforementioned non-disguising masks and horse chases. It mixes them with characters who have to figure out how to come to terms with the moral dilemmas they face.

Alan Ladd is the title character, railroad detective Luke Smith. He earned his nickname for his quiet mannerisms and speech, but he is dogged and deadly when it comes to outlaws who menace the line he works for. While pursuing the last of a bandit trio, he meets up with an old friend, Murray Sinclair (Robert Preston). A gunshot wound puts him up convalescing at the home of Murray and his wife Marian -- a situation that could wind up significantly complicated by old feelings between Smith and Marian Sinclair (Brenda Marshall). Murray's ambition has led him to a foolish partnership with shady rancher Barney Rebstock (Donald Crisp). That and the tighter restrictions the railroad home office place on emergency rescue and salvage crews like his push the friends apart and push Murray towards the shady side of the law himself. Smith does his best to pry Murray away from Rebstock and his gang, but pride and greed prove stronger.

Whispering Smith was the last of five movies Ladd and Preston did together, and was the first major Western for Ladd after his rise to success in This Gun for Hire and The Blue Dahlia. He offers a kind of proto-Shane -- like that later gunman he understands that he can't offer the kind of settled life he would owe to people who loved him. Preston's larger-than-life persona faces some of the same issues, as new policies cramp the kind of free-wheeling anything goes rules by which he and other railroad rescuers and salvagers have always lived. Marshall invests Marian with a deep sense of longing for the man she once loved and of loyalty to the man she loves now. In spite of Murray's descent she offers to abandon their secure ranch life in order to escape the consequences of his actions. Whispering Smith was her second-to-last movie role; she would retire from acting about two years after it was finished.

Whispering Smith was based on a series of stories by Frank Spearman and would later become a TV series with Audie Murphy. The mixed palettes it uses to paint its characters and more ambiguous storyline paved the way for some of the great "thinking Westerns" of the 1950s, including Ladd's own Shane or Preston's The Last Frontier. Though it still wears its Western pulp novel conventions quite openly, it offers a clear example of how a talented storyteller, cast and crew need not be limited by the genre.

From the Rental Vault: Jack Reacher (2012)

The casting of Tom Cruise as Lee Child's wandering hero Jack Reacher brought no small amount of consternation and confusion from Childs' fandom, who go by the collective name "Reacher Creatures." The Jack Reacher of the books has about a foot of height on Cruise, often using his physicality to get his way even before he throws a punch. But Childs himself said that the attitude Cruise brought to the role was even more important than getting an actor who matched the size of the character in the books. So Cruise took to the screen in 2012's Jack Reacher, based on Childs' 2005 One Shot novel.

One Shot was a good choice as a basis for the movie, offering a properly twisty plot as Reacher probes what seems to be an open-and-shut case of a former U.S. Army sniper gone bad. James Barr's fingerprints and van put him at the scene of a sniper attack that killed five people. He can't really say one way or the other, because an attack by other inmates left him in a coma. Before that, though, he told investigators one thing: Get Jack Reacher. Because Reacher had investigated an earlier case against Barr, one that got dropped because Barr's victims were themselves criminals and because Reacher himself promised Barr any kind of repeat performance would bring him back for an accounting. Barr's attorney, Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike), convinces Reacher to help her so that he can get his own questions about Barr answered. With Reacher doing the pulling, the fabric of the case against Barr starts unraveling, which only makes things more dangerous for Rodin and Reacher. Of course, the more dangerous things get for Reacher, the more dangerous things get for those trying to stop him.

Cruise does seem to have a feel for Reacher's relatively uncomplicated view of the world. He spends his life on the road, riding buses, stopping where he wants to stop and only staying as long as he likes. He also sells Reacher's keen observational eye and supreme self-confidence, as well as his ability to move from zero to maximum breakage in an eyeblink. Pike is not simply a shrinking violet female role in an action picture, displaying her own brainpower and guts as called for. Reacher slims down the One Shot plot, excising the character of Barr's sister. Director Christopher McQuarrie takes full advantage of Cruise's desire to work action sequences himself, without stunt doubles, and helps the actor convey the intensity that makes up so much of Reacher's character.

And Cruise does sell the role, even though he's essentially playing a variation on his Mission: Impossible character Ethan Hunt. Or Thomas Anderton of Minority Report. Or Pete "Maverick" Mitchell from Top Gun. Or heck, maybe even Joel Goodson from Risky Business; Cruise has never leaned towards demonstrative roles during his career and especially in his action pictures the main differences have been the supporting cast and the context of the story.

Jack Reacher did decent box office, but not enough to propel the character into the film series the studio wanted. One more Reacher movie hit the screens, 2016's Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Despite pairing Cruise with the kick-butt charisma of one of the better action-movie actresses working today, Cobie Smulders, it was less successful than the first movie and the studio put any plans for extending the series on hold.

From the Rental Vault: The Sea Wolves (1980)

Although thousands of miles away from the battlefields of Europe, India was the site of its own theater of World War II, with a large focus on the shipping the Allies sent through the Indian Ocean to the southeast Asian front against Japan. In early 1943, German U-boats are having a field day against Allied shipping, seeming to know exactly were merchant vessels as well as military craft will be traveling. British agents Col. Lewis Pugh (Gregory Peck) and Capt. Gavin Stewart (Roger Moore) are tasked with finding the source of the information and stopping the secret transmissions putting the Allied ships in the Nazi crosshairs in the 1980 movie The Sea Wolves.

Unfortunately they learn the transmissions are secretly coming from a German freighter anchored in the neutral Portuguese harbor of Goa, meaning that British military can't touch it. The actual leak source can't be traced, so Pugh and Stewart recruit retired soldiers from the Calcutta Light Horse reserve unit to stage a commando raid on the freighter and destroy its transmitter. Pugh travels with the majority of the unit via a decrepit river craft that should allow a stealth approach, and Stewart pulls strings onshore at Goa to entice the German sailors ashore and distract from the sabotage mission in the harbor. He also finds himself in an affair with a beautiful widow, Agnes Cromwell (Barbara Kellerman), who may be something other than what she seems.

The Sea Wolves has a lot of fun with its over-the-hill commando squad, featuring some longstanding character actor mainstays of British moviemaking as well as a few headliners like David Niven and Trevor Howard. Peck is his usual stalwart self and fits right in with the English cast despite his all-American background. Moore offers a slightly toned-down version of his James Bond antics, although he does manage to be the only cast member with a romance. But it's hard to see "Gavin Stewart" in anything he does here, especially since the character is an intelligence agent.

The movie is based on a 1978 novel by James Leasor, who combined a couple of real-life operations from WWII to make his Boarding Party. One of those operations featured the real life Calcutta Light Horse and was similar to the raid described in Wolves, and it might have been worth it for screenwriter Reginald Rose and director Andrew McLaglen to have developed a script from that actual incident. Wolves itself at two hours starts to slog more than move and could jettison a half-hour to its great benefit. Some of the espionage escapades from the first hour and the entire Moore-Kellerman storyline are good candidates; neither strengthen the movie's centerpiece raid by the middle-aged commandos finally given the chance to do their part for their country in a meaningful way.

As it is, The Sea Wolves isn't so much of a chore it can't be enjoyed, but its construction makes the fast forward button a lot more tempting than a movie-maker would like it to be.