It was the role of Liam Neeson in Taken which many people view as a dramatic shift in action movie stardom. At the time, it seemed unlikely that the 56-year-old would launch a major action franchise, and everyone was surprised at how much it bounced off the cultural canvas, with additional older men making action movies, from Keanu Reeves to Bob Odenkirk. It really wasn’t a big deal though. Older Men Have Been Heading Action Movies Ever Since There Were Action Movies – Roger Moore Was 57 in View of a KillSean Connery was 66 inches The stoneand even Daniel Craig was 53 then No time to die was released, looking only at actors who have played James Bond. Older male action stars are nothing new; older females, however, are a different story.
Apart from Helen Mirren’s nice performances in the Red movies (when she was in her 60s), Jamie Lee Curtis’ recent Halloween movies, and Michelle Yeoh’s recent turn in Everything Everywhere All at once at 59, there really haven’t been any older female action stars. At age 62 Allison Janney has just proved that there must be. While her new movie Lou may not be as good as her performance, but the Netflix movie is still captivating.
The movie Lou is not as good as the character Lou
Janney plays the titular Lou, a grumpy older woman who lives alone 10 miles outside of town. She is a loner incarnate, and although the film’s script often paints her as a fake version of Lee Curtis’ gray-haired character Laurie Strode in the Halloween reboot, Janney makes Lou her own wife. She’s the kind of tough, capable person who drags a gutted deer through the woods by the antlers after killing more food for her freezer. In addition to hunting with her dog, she is the landlord of a young mother and her daughter, Hannah and Vee. She’s curt with them, but Janney opens spaces between sentences that indicate much more depth than the weak script gives her.
If Lou seems more like she’s in hiding than in the golden years of her retirement, it’s because she is. The film is set in the early 1980s after the infamous Iran-Contra affair, which Lou knows a lot more about than the average American (then and today unfortunately). She was an agent for the CIA, had worked in the field for nearly three decades, and she has the classified documents and film negatives to prove it (the film does this in a painfully obvious way, to the extent of surprising that she didn’t literally label a movie bus with the word “Zapruder”).
However, she is not a glamorous, romanticized spy and the film actually begins with her preparing to commit suicide. She is interrupted by her tenant Hannah after Vee is kidnapped by the father, who was previously presumed dead. In what initially seems like a really stupid, overblown coincidence but turns out to be more than it seems, the paternal kidnapper also turns out to have a CIA background. He faked his own death after the agency tried to arrest him for sadistic torture and murder of civilians (which hardly seems criminal to the CIA), and now he’s back for his daughter. Lou, who decides to do something good for the world after ruining it with the CIA for years, takes it up to track him down and save Vee.
Allison Janney Kills it in Lou
The very first frame of the film shows Janney’s silhouette in a door frame, instantly reminiscent of that John Wayne classic The seekers and his iconic final shot. It’s a clever way to introduce a film about a kidnapped child and the tough old fool who hunts her down, swapping the sexes and setting the stage for the film’s similar themes – broken families and cycles of violence. If the violently unstable Phillip, his ex-wife Hannah and their daughter Vee are the narrative dots, then the equally violent Lou connects them.
The emotional connections, on the other hand, are never really sold. Jurnee Smollett (here plays Hannah) is charming and persuasive on her own, but she doesn’t have much chemistry with anyone in the film, not even her daughter Vee (played by Ridley Asha Bateman, who seems surprisingly uninterested in everything that happens. ). That lack of chemistry actually makes sense to Lou, as Janney’s character is a damaged and distant woman who has realized that the only way she can stop destroying others is to avoid them altogether. Janney is as good at this as a fearless killer (an excellence that will be a consistent chorus in virtually every review of Lou), who carefully displays a deep desire to make contact before immediately crushing any vulnerability with swift ferocity.
There’s practically no one else in the movie with enough dialogue to be a character except Phillip. As the crazy, dangerous kidnapper, Logan Marshall-Green is given the impossible task of playing a storytelling device. Marshall-Green, so great in 2015 The invitation and the spectacular but underrated Upgrade, does its best with its woefully underwritten, generally mind-boggling character, but it’s a fight no one could win. Phillip’s motivations and actions make it seem like he’s in a completely different movie, disconnected from… Lou in the same way as all other characters. Even Lou has no connection to Loubut at least that makes sense.
Anna Foerster Directs Great Action For The Otherwise Mediocre Netflix Movie
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Ridiculously and emotionally flat, however common it is, Lou remains entertaining all the time thanks to Janney’s dedicated performance and director Anna Foerster’s action movie intelligence. After directing great action scenes for the television shows Marvel’s Jessica Jones and west worldand working on every Roland Emmerich movie full of explosions, except the patriotFoerster has developed an innate sense for the kind of visuals Lou needs. Unfortunately, there are really only two or three scenes that unleash her potential, although they are exceptional.
Between Janney, Foerster and the fight choreographers, the three action scenes are the best part of Lou, beyond Janney’s brooding. Using rain, campfire, shadows and other minor elements to enhance each scene, the fights in this film are brutal and usually surprisingly realistic. The organically awkward nature of some of the fights lacks John Woo/Wick grace, but is brimming with bone-crushing, bloody authenticity. Janney is somehow completely believable as a killing machine, a little out of the ordinary but extra dangerous because of her suicidal ‘nothing to lose’ mentality. Lou starts the movie wanting to die, and the amount of pain and suffering she gives and gets, Lou could fulfill her wish.
The final set piece and fight scene, while quite ridiculous, is also very well done, with tight editing and beautiful cinematography. Just like the movie starts with a wink to The seekersit ends with a direct reference to the famous battle on the beach at the end of Samurai III: Duel on Ganryu Island, a perfect film in which two morally compromised characters are drawn into an inevitable deadly duel. The combat stands out from the rest of the film, with the sound cutting out and the whole thing becoming truly operatic, taking the aforementioned themes of child harm and cyclical violence to a poetic extreme.
Lou should have been over the action
Lou is a movie that wants to be a thriller, but should have been a straight action movie. If Foerster was able to let go with Lou and to create more great action scenes than this one, it would have been a pretty wonderful movie, one that was truly worthy of Janney’s amazing performance.
in the end, Lou is just like its titular character – detached, damaged and dark, but with enough sparks of brutality in it to surprise. If only the film was consistently more intense, emotionally involved and dramatically coherent. Then it would look more like Janney than her character. From JJ Abrams’ production company Bad Robot, Lou is now streaming on Netflix.