‘Blind War’
Stream it on Hi-Yah!
During a hostage crisis gone wrong, the SWAT captain Dong Gu (Andy On) loses his eyesight and Cena (Yang Xing), a villainous murderess, sees her sadistic lover die. As she’s hauled off to prison, Cena promises revenge against Dong Gu and the criminal gang who betrayed her. Months later, when Dong Gu’s violinist daughter is kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring, he unwittingly teams with the disguised Cena, who’s recently escaped from prison, to retrieve her.
Yang and On are a fascinating pair: Yang plays a corrosive open wound of a woman, while On portrays an honorable man pushed by desperation to the brink of evil. Both actors move with incredible dexterity, their infiltration of the baddies’ mansion recalls “John Wick” in its smooth fluidity. Those open compositions, allowing the choreography to breathe, and the easeful editing, give the director Suiqiang Huo’s film an unforgettable pulse.
‘Jigen Daisuke’
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
A character in the “Lupin III” manga series, Jigen Daisuke (Tetsuji Tamayama), the hero of the Japanese director Hajime Hashimoto’s same-titled film, arrives in Japan to find the celebrated gunsmith Chiharu Yaguchito (Mitsuko Kusabue) to fix his trusted combat magnum. Chiharu, however, doesn’t work on guns anymore. She’s a watchmaker. Jigen is befuddled until a girl named Oto appears with a damaged timepiece that Chiharu gave to a prostitute years ago who was seeking a gun for protection. To help Oto, Jigen confronts Adel (Yoko Maki), a deadly wheelchair user, and her shape-shifting henchman (Masatoshi Nagase).
As Jigen, Tamayama fully embraces the character’s dashing all-black fashion and graceful movements. He and the camera glide with uncommon agility. While Tamayama is breathtaking, Maki has an electric scene of her own, when in her wheelchair she drifts and slides around a room, shooting a bevy of assassins with pinpoint precision. The action is so sharp in “Jigen Daisuke” that by the end, even the villain is left smiling.
‘Rumble Through the Dark’
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
With its unrelenting tenacity, Parker Phillips and Graham Phillips’ “Rumble Through the Dark,” has answered my prayers for an American action film with style and substance. Jack Boucher (Aaron Eckhart) is a grunting, punch-drunk M.M.A. fighter haunted by the memory of his ailing mother. Often debilitated by a ringing in his ears, he is in a gritty, grimy, bare-knuckle tussle for survival featuring several obstacles, from his health to a local loan shark (an unflinching Marianne Jean-Baptiste).
Though building a life with his daughter, Annette (Bella Thorne), is paramount, he has a debt to Big Momma Sweet. If he wants out, he needs to step back into the cage. The fluorescent glow of green and red neon, and close-ups so extreme that even the actors’ pores are characters, adds tactility to the gnarly carnage in Jack’s final bout, where he lays his pains and demons to rest.
‘Red Right Hand’
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
After his sister’s deadly overdose, the reclusive ex-junkie Cash (Orlando Bloom) has dedicated his life to raising his niece, Savannah (Chapel Oaks), on the family farm. Their quiet life is destroyed when Cash’s alcoholic brother-in-law Finney (Scott Haze) borrows $100,000 from a brutal kingpin known as Big Cat (Andie MacDowell). To pay off the debt, Cash performs some unsavory jobs for Big Cat. When Cash and Big Cat’s partnership goes awry, he teams up with a manic preacher, Wilder (Garret Dillahunt), to set things right.
“Red Right Hand,” from the directors Ian Nelms and Eshom Nelms, is a slow-burn, pulpy Appalachian thriller punctuated by heavy, blood-soaked sequences, including a well-choreographed shootout in the woods. The drug trade is a messy business, leading to gruesome scenes of dismemberments. In the film’s most exciting moment, Bloom, armed with only a gun, runs toward a speeding vehicle driven by one of Big Cat’s goons.
‘Sixty Minutes’
Steam it on Netflix.
The German director Oliver Kienle’s “Sixty Minutes” features another M.M.A. fighter working to fulfill his daughter’s wish. With his gym drowning in debt, Octavio Bergmann (Emilio Sakraya) walks out of a big prize bout when his ex-wife threatens to pull visitation rights to his daughter if he doesn’t show up to her house within an hour. Octavio’s paternal love comes with a cost: The underworld powers that set up the black-market brawl are now out of their money, and they want his head.
Although the film clocks in a bit longer than 60 minutes (88, to be exact), its brisk escapades are thoughtfully mapped out as Octavio must run through alleyways, jump over walls, catch last-second trains in the face of pursuing thugs if he hopes to traverse the city in time. Kienle’s action thriller isn’t any more complicated than its basic premise. It’s an anxiously effective adventure that takes us from point A to point B.
