One beef: the sounds for the fights weren’t as good as the first movie, or the theatre I was in isn’t as good as listening to the DVD on my headphones. Seems like in the first movie you heard each punch; in this one it’s a lot more muted.
Then again, there’s a LOT more punches to put in sound effects for in the sequel — that’s my impression anyway.
Oh, and related, mean-spirited, non-matrix thing:
Gina Torres (married to Lawrence F. in RL) must be a hell of a good cook. Damn.
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Oh come one now, you’re going to have to explain that last one…
Lawrence is clearly loving the home cooking is all I’m saying.
NOT a man you need to see shirtless. Cottage cheese. Damn.
Hey….
Cuban food rocks…I really can’t blame him.
The sound thing bother me too. I’m glad and frutrated that it wasn’t just me. I think that the music was too over the topish. Too in front of the fighting on the whole sound pallete thing. the Music needed to be more background to the sounds of the fight.
My one beef would also be the sound. Not surprisingly any more, I guess. The music during the fights just didn’t seem to fit.
Oh, well. I guess I’ll have to see it five or six more times to figure out what it was.
(Spoilers may follow… read on at your own risk.)
IMO, it was that the fight scenes lacked internal progressions. They didn’t tell a story, they were just a series of (very impressive) stunts (and CGI, blended quite well). But if they were edited back into a different order, they would be almost indistinguishable.
Internal storytelling is the difference between a good fight and a great fight… Jackie Chan is great at it. In most of his own films (where he stars and directs), every fight is a progression, each spot sets up the next, order is critical.
Compare to, say, Neo vs. the Mob ‘o Smiths. Every spot there is interchangable except the very first and the very last. Most of the time, there are too many Smiths to count. For all the face-punches, NO ONE loses or even cracks a sunglass lense. Property is destroyed, but the wreckage is not used in interesting ways. All the neat spots could have been in any order (and probably were re-ordered in editing several times).
Same with the fight in the gallery/stairway. Tons of spots, but little progression. And there, add the incredible unwillingness to show us the fight! Neo uses Sai… but he reverses them and punches with the handle almost every time. It’s an “R” rated movie, you can show someone getting stabed! It’s not like he doesn’t kill them anyway (violently crushing one at the end… but off-camera!).
Now, the car chase had some continuity and development (and even a few nice twists), which made it the most successful set piece of the film, I think. There we had story, we had problems established, overcome, and results used to set up new problems. It was almost exactly right (“almost” because Trinity zipped off-scene for no reason I caught… but I may have missed it).
Neat stuff happened, I’ll be back in the fall… but I wasn’t nearly as happy as I had hoped to be after the first (which had good continuity in pretty much all its fights and chases).
Interesting write-up, Jack G. I’d never thought of fight sequences in quite that way, but I can see what you mean about the way a Jackie Chan fight is a specific sequence of events instead of just random interchangable kicks, punches, and wild takes.
This reminds me of (yet another) problem I had watching D&D (see recent angry rant on my site): What’s up with the television-inspired stupidity of holding a sword but using the pommel to pummel instead of the blade to butcher? Huh? HUH? Why not just give the protagonists brass knuckles and get it over with? Argh.
I wonder if it’s too late to add that to my entry. Hmm.
I will admit that my viewpoint on the narrative content of fight scenes is strongly influences by my time as a pro wrestling fan. The best wrestlers do just as Jackie does in his films, create a continuity and a flow between the spots rather than just going from stunt to stunt to pin. Trying to figure out why some matches were “good” or even “great” and others with pretty much the same spots weren’t was a real challenge until I stumbled on some fan discussions where the issue of storytelling and which wrestlers could do it well was brought up.
Unfortunately, this lack is a BIG problem with US action movies.