Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week has been entirely consumed by Silksong, and friends, the Silksong is good. Hollow Knight’s sequel picks up close to where the original left off in terms of platforming and combat complexity, assuming swift mastery and rewarding those who adapt to Hornet’s powers with one of the most precise, satisfying, and fundamentally elegant move sets in the genre. Every boss fight here is hard won, and as a result they each require adapting and evolving, ensuring you gain the skills to challenge ever greater foes. And of course, Team Cherry’s storytelling and artistry are as compelling as ever, with Silksong offering a sprawling, beautiful world full of endearing characters and forbidding mysteries.
It feels preposterous that a game carrying such lofty expectations could actually surpass them, but that’s where I’m currently at: bound by my consummate professionalism to write this article, longing to return to Silksong and divine the secrets of its imposing citadel. If you’ve no Hollow Knight experience, I’d strongly suggest playing that one before engaging with Silksong’s terrors – not only is Hollow Knight necessary preparation for the sequel, it’s also just a perfect game in its own right. But for now, let’s burn down the week in film!
First up this week was Timo Tjahjanto’s latest feature, The Shadow Strays. Aurero Ribero stars as 13, a young assassin who’s put in assassin jail after fumbling the takedown of a yakuza family. While waiting for her next mission, she befriends a young boy named Monji, and discovers his mother was killed by a local pimp. Her subsequent quest for revenge ends up painting the city red, and also drawing the ire of her own former handlers.
The Shadow Strays is basically Tjahjanto’s take on John Wick, and is precisely as bloody and satisfying as that description would indicate. No one does mortal, savage fight choreography like Tjahjanto, and even among his own work, the only comparison point for The Shadow Strays is the similarly blood-drenched The Night Comes For Us. Aside from the languorous bonding segments between Ribero and Monji, the film proceeds as a sequence of expertly designed boss encounters, with Ribero serving as a laudably convincing replacement for martial all-stars like Joe Taslim or Iko Uwais.
Tjahjanto is just operating at a whole other level compared to other martial arts maestros, a tier of speed, ferocity, and elegance matched only by The Raid. Where other action directors are content to see enemies “dispatched,” Tjahjanto demands they be dismantled, Ribero’s furious knife work ensuring no one who crosses her will be walking it off. Her battle with the massive Troika (Daniel Ekaputra) feels like an action all-timer, and several other encounters aren’t far behind; as one of the kings of our modern martial arts renaissance, The Shadow Strays does a commendable job of defending Tjahjnato’s crown. With its conclusion promising a sequel co-starring one of the greatest martial artists of modern cinema, I’m eager to see more from him and Ribero both.
We then checked out Look Away, starring India Eisley as Maria, a disaffected teenager who feels disconnected from both her parents’ condescending expectations and her callous classmates. Her only true friend is her reflection, a sentient being that lives in mirrors and calls itself “Airam.” Fed up with the frustrations of her life, Maria agrees to switch places with Airam, with predictably messy results.
It’s clear enough the various things Look Away wants to be: a character study of youthful alienation, a slow-burning thriller, and potentially even a horror movie. Unfortunately, the film is far too obvious, and its characters defined too broadly, for Look Away to offer anything of substance in terms of psychological inquiry. Its portrait of a crumbling family and painful social life are painted with clumsy, uninquisitive hands – the superficial vanity of her father, the mental dissolution of her mother, and the sneering menace of her bullies are all bullet points, templates, not lived-in performances.
This would be an acceptable deficit if the film had anything else to offer; unfortunately, it burns too slowly and pays off too insubstantially to qualify as successful horror, and its central “mystery” is solved by the opening credits. I appreciated the unity of purpose evoked by the film’s complimentary setting, color, and set design, and Eisley turns in a commendable dual performance as both Maria and Airam, but Look Away is on the whole an unfortunately meager offering.
Next up was The Legend of Tarzan, starring Alexander Skarsgård as an adult Tarzan now situated back in London, who is called back to Africa alongside Jane (Margot Robbie) in order to investigate claims of abuse and slavery by the Belgian overseers of the Congo. He is joined in this quest by George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), with whom he ends up challenging the region’s would-be governor Léon Rom (Christoph Waltz).
Quite the cast, eh? It’s a commendable lineup of A-listers and soon-to-be A-listers, and they all do their absolute best to elevate a film that is ultimately, inexorably undone by its total disinterest in any set design or location photography. Director David Yates puts his experience on the final four Harry Potter films to work in realizing a world where none of the background scenery has any substance or texture, none of the fights have any sense of weight or consequence, and none of the allegedly staggering, Congo-celebrating wide shots possess any more sense of grandeur than your average screen saver.
Like Jungle Cruise, Red Notice, and most of the later Marvel features, The Legend of Tarzan simply isn’t a real movie. The wholesale embracing of low-rent digital backgrounds and CG battles means every scene that is supposed to be beautiful is ugly and disappointing, every battle that is supposed to be exciting is routine and dull. Though the practical effects of earlier Hollywood eras might not come across as naturalistic or convincing, they are undeniably interesting, distinctive and beautiful and defined by the care of their creators. This era of CG muck will end up a footnote not worth revisiting, a waste of genuine talent funded by people who cannot see the beauty in the world.
Last up for the week was The Mutilator, an unassuming also-ran slasher centered on a group of college kids who are off to the coast for fall break. Shacking up at one of their parents’ beach houses, they’re all set for a weekend of fraternizing and fornicating when wouldn’t you know it, some jerkoff shows up with a battle ax and a massive chip on his shoulder, intent on mulching our poor vacationers.
Released near the end of the original post-Halloween slasher wave, The Mutilator is almost admirable in its predictability, offering no gimmicky twist on convention beyond the distinctive nastiness of a few choice kills. Really the only thing that sets this one apart is its soundtrack, which appears largely composed of a series of Full House-esque TV jingles just hungry for a sitcom to call their own. The film even has its own theme song, riffing on the original title of “Fall Break” to insist that this is totally a thing, fall breaks are nearly as compelling as spring ones, and this definitely wasn’t a brief and swiftly regretted attempt to define this film as a holiday-hitched parallel to Halloween or Black Christmas. If you’re looking for a traditional slasher, this is definitely one.
