Avenging Force pays homage to Enter the Dragon, and bears
similarities to Clouse’s great remake, Force: Five, but the cult
or sect it has to do with is an American band of Nazis with a curious variant
of the Hitler salute. They firebomb a black political candidate, and this
brings in a skillful chum who busts the bunch up.
The peculiar
beauty of the finale, a knock-down drag-out fight in a foyer, is that the big
chief of these brigands dies impaled on the spear of an ebony or bronze statue.
And so, something
as seemingly remote as Enter the Dragon comes home. “An image
isn’t great because it’s brutal or fantastic,” Godard points
out, “but by the distance of the associations it unites.”
The Alternate (Agent of Death)
In vain one looks
for the virtue that starves but is praised. Here is a film so bare in its
devices as to give full witness to the truth it places up on the screen, the
wing-collared traitor and parvenu.
That’s all,
and the entire film is a setting for his antics. Marvelously sublime they are,
too, taking advantage of a Machiavelli’s gambit to seize the day on a
cold calculation belied by the squint of madness that comes over him.
But take the
plot, a losing President’s re-election bid is meant to be boosted by an
adviser’s plan to stage a kidnapping under Secret Service auspices, only
the thing goes awry and the President is kidnapped for real. If that isn’t
value for money, what use is criticism?