Word: fanboys
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...otherwise missing from the enterprise. And it's always great to see Liu, who bounded onto the Hong Kong screen as the head-shaved star of such '70s action classics as Challenge of the Masters and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin; his lingering impact in these roles led ex-fanboy Quentin Tarantino to cast him as a mob potentate in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and as the white-bearded Pai Mei in Kill Bill Vol. 2. Now in his early 50s, Liu still looks sinewy topless. This time his chief weapon is not his flying feet but a boomerang bowler...
Move is what Death Race does; it's an eight-cylinder vehicle from which some prankster removed the brakes. It's got the red meat of fanboy film ardor: cars with guns - the movie's tag line is "Gentlemen, start your weapons" - and cons with girls. Though the picture doesn't deserve to appear on any critic's 10-best list, it observes the minimum standards of modern action films, which is to say it looks smarter, talks sassier and moves faster than almost anything else on the market...
...Forgive the effusions of an alter-kocker fanboy, but the flinty glamour of Li and Yeoh - buttressed by the stolid, sneering presence of top Hong Kong villain Anthony Wong Chau-sang (who in 1993 appeared in 15 films!) - is the best reason to catch this third in the series of Indiana Jones knockoffs. Brendan Fraser returns as adventurer Rick O'Connell, who, after vanquishing the same mummy twice in the 1999 and 2001 films, finally gets a new old adversary. But it's the Hong Kong veterans who are entrusted with Mummy III's real action, physically and dramatically...
...early as last summer, months before Ledger's sudden death in January, Warner Bros. sensed that Nolan was filming something that might transcend mere fanboy fodder. With Batman Begins, in 2005, the director successfully rebooted the troubled franchise, but this time around his decision to go darker - and The Dark Knight is as mordant a superhero movie as there has ever been - dovetailed with the popular mood. "We saw the dailies coming in and we knew we had an incredible movie," says Fellman. Though Christian Bale's Batman is The Dark Knight's star, it was Ledger's knife-wielding...
...reason is the Heath Ledger factor. "It's been a very long time since there's been a posthumous performance of an actor that died in an untimely way that promised to be so big and intense and good," says author Mark Harris. "It's a movie with fanboy appeal, but it's also, in an odd way, playing out as a memorial service for Ledger." A bit grim for 6 a.m. - but then, Gotham City isn't known for its good cheer...