I Am The Killer - Dominic Sawicki I am torn about I Am The Killer. It's a fun little movie, a hitman turns on his hit structure and there's fighting. LOTS OF FIGHTING! The fighting is of varying levels of awesome; at times swings seem timid, and the choreography is off at points. The story is clear, and fairly secondary, and yeah, there's fighting. And blood. And it's like watching a short film from about a decade ago called Kwoon that didn't make a lick of sense, but was lots of fun fighting. Here, I had trouble with a few parts of the filmmaking, while it was shot well, and the pacing was good, when you're basically making a one-note film (in this case, brawling!), you better well do that one thing really well. Here, the fighting's decent, at times even really good, but it doesn't go far enough into the "OHMYGHODTHATSAWESOME!" realm to make it a must-see. The Cinematography is really smart, especially the use of harsh lighting to set up the fight scenes. The filming drew me in, and maybe it's just the amount of fighting I've watched both live and on video, but the fights lost me at time. For example, a largely wonderful fight between our 'hero' and a masked villain goes on damn-near perfectly paced, and with a few cinematic moments that are really strong, but then there's a drop kick, and it's used as the highlight of the fight, and it's an obvious miss, and in one take a glancing blow, that HAD to connect to sell the entire scene and the coup de grace. A drop kick is an easy move to throw, but a hard move to film and make it look like it can actually knock a sucker out! Watch pro wrestling sometime and you'll see just about the only way to film it and make it look killer. Here, it let the scene down, though I will give them points for trying to be very Jackie Chan with that as the finisher. Ultimately, it's a short that's got a lot of fun elements, but that just doesn't hold together. I would love to see what these folks could put together with a bit more fight training time, because they obviously know how to shoot this kind of action. |
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Klaus at GunpointA Film Journal dedicated to all film.A segment of Office Supply Publishing. Archives
March 2021
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