Cradle 2 The Grave

Rap-fu? Kung-hop? Hip-hop chop socky? While there isn’t yet an official name for this peculiar action movie sub-genre, you’ll doubtless know the type.

Yup, we’re talking about movies such as Exit Wounds or Romeo Must Die. Films where, through barely plausible plot contrivance, a noted martial arts star is teamed with a rapper.

On the surface, these double acts appear to make little sense. But look deeper and you’ll find a cunning logic behind these oddball shotgun marriages.

Your average martial artist, while expert in unarmed combat, tends to murder dialogue as easily as an opponent. As actors, they really should let their feet and fists do the talking.

What’s needed then is a motor-mouthed sidekick. Someone whose non-stop stream of verbal diarrhoea will distract the audience from their partner’s lack of thespian chops. Less Enter The Dragon; more Yo, Bum-Rush The Rapper.

All of which makes Cradle 2 The Grave (2003) – which pairs martial arts legend Jet Li with hardcore rap king DMX – a perfect example of the form.

Trouble starts when jewel thief DMX steals a consignment of rare diamonds. Unfortunately, a ruthless arms dealer (Mark Dacascos) wants the gems too, as – wouldn’t you know it? – they’re also apparently the secret ingredient for a deadly new super weapon. You never get that at H.M Samuels.

Also on the trail of the stones is a Taiwanese cop (Jet Li) who wants to stop them falling into the wrong hands. So when Dacascos kidnaps DMX’s daughter, it’s time for the rapper and martial artist to buddy up and knuckle up.

Can our odd couple heroes rescue the imperilled tot? Have they any hope of stopping the super weapon threat? And will their fractious love-hate relationship blossom into one of grudging mutual respect? (Exploding Helicopter doesn’t like to spoil things, but if you’re after a genre convention-busting movie maybe best look elsewhere.)

The wisdom of pairing the beat-em-up star with the beat-master becomes apparent the minute Jet Li opens his mouth. His line readings are as flat as a pancake. The world may be facing global Armageddon but Li makes it sound as worrying as missing a dental appointment.

Nuff respec’, then, to DMX for livening things up with his garrulous ‘gangsta’ persona. All bling, muscle and sneers, atti-tood emanates from him like that famous glow from the old Ready Brek adverts. Dis muvver been taking care of bizness! For reals.

It’s not a subtle schtick by any stretch, but the rapper’s angry histrionics add much-needed pep to proceedings.

Even still, it seems the producers were in no mood to take any chances. And as the ancient Chinese proverb (possibly) has it: why have one sassy loudmouth when you can have half a dozen?

Perhaps familiar with the rest of Li’s Hollywood output (the diminutive actor’s charm and quirky energy seem to evaporate in English-language movies), the movie-makers have stuffed the cast with more fast-talking wise-asses than you could twerk your money-maker at.

As DMX’s gang members, Anthony Anderson and Gabrielle Union add bountiful levels of live-wire sass. And just in case there was still a danger of insufficient jibber-jabber, Tom Arnold turns up as a loquacious ‘Mr Fix-it’. (This, naturally, is a thinly veiled reprise of the irritating gob-on-legs act he’s been doing on-and-off since trademarking it in True Lies.)

At times, there’s so much shouting, in-your-face posturing and pushing on show, you half-expect Jerry Springer to spring up and calm everyone down, before delivering a ‘heartfelt’ moral message to the screen.

Unsurprisingly, amid such verbal overkill, wee, silent Jet runs the risk of becoming an anonymous presence altogether. After all, the only things he has that can talk are his fists. Happily, the producers – realising that no-one wants the star to become lost in his own film – throw in loads of improbably-conceived dust-ups.

Perhaps the finest example, in a film filled to bursting with unlikely confrontations, is a spurious cage-fighting contest, which is entertainingly (and entirely unconvincingly) crowbarred into the plot.

A similarly over-the-top approach is taken towards the rest of the film’s action sequences. A quad bike chase through the streets (and eventually across the rooftops) of Los Angeles is an exciting example of this extravagance. So too is the finale where we treated to not one, but two exploding helicopters.

Events move to a small airport (always a favourite location for an action movie showdown). With his nefarious plans scuppered, Dacascos attempts to make an escape in a chopper. Fortunately, Tom Arnold has also turned up in a tank. (Don’t ask: it’s just that kind of film).

With Dacascos about to disappear into the skies, Arnold fires the tank cannon. The shell hits the chopper’s tail rotor which, in the time-honoured tradition of the exploding helicopter genre, causes the whirlybird to spin round wildly before crashing into the ground and exploding.

But wait. In keeping with the film’s bling-bling approach to excess, the first explosion of Dacascos’s chopper causes another nearby helicopter to blow-up. Cradle 2 The Grave? We call it Chopper To The Grave.

Artistic merit

The first helicopter is a bit of a swizz. Despite causing a sizeable fiery eruption when it crashes, the chopper remains curiously intact. Well, not that curiously, as Dacascos has yet to have his chop-socky showdown with Jet Li, so needs to be able to crawl out of the wreckage.

But with no major characters on-board, the second helicopter explodes with such force that the entire chassis is thrust into the sky before falling back to earth. We’re given plenty of time to savour the moment as the sequence is loving played out in slow motion and repeated several times for our delectation.

Exploding helicopter innovation

While not unique, this is an extremely rare example of a tank being used to destroy a helicopter.

Rambo III (1988) includes the earliest example we’ve seen, where the crazed General Zayan pilots one into a tank driven by Sylvester Stallone in one of the most gloriously over-the-top games of chicken ever put on the big screen.

Other examples can be seen in the film Courage Under Fire (1996) and XXX2: The Next Level.

Do passengers survive?

As already mentioned, Mark Dacascos crawls out of the wreckage though goodness knows how. Perhaps the villainous leather suit that he wears throughout has fire retardant qualities.

Positives

Cradle 2 The Grave has a ripe ridiculousness that makes it hard to resist. Logic and reality play no part in this film. Things happen for the sole reason that the audience may be entertained by them. And you know what? That's no bad thing.

Negatives

Martial arts fans presumably spent the whole film waiting for the showdown between Jet Li and Mark Dacascos. But when their fight finally comes we can’t enjoy it, as the scene is choppily filmed and the action keeps cutting to battles other characters are engaged in. Such shoddy editing ruins the flow of the duel and what should have been a highlight ends up as a damp squib.

Favourite line

Someone enquires of Jet Li: “What are you? Some kind of kung-fu James Bond?”

Interesting fact

Mark Dacascos was chosen as the villain for this film following a poll on Jet Li’s personal website asking which martial arts star his fans would most like to see him fight.

Review by: Jafo

The Eliminator

A dish is only as good as its ingredients. So when you take a generic storyline, add a non-actor as the leading man, and season with a low budget, you’re likely to end up with a plate of old tripe. Such is The Eliminator (2004).

Our star is former ultimate fighting champion Bas Rutten, who somehow decided a long career pummelling people in the face was ideal preparation for the thespian craft. But as this movie quickly shows, treading the boards requires a mite more skill and finesse than treading on someone’s windpipe.

He plays a down-on-his-luck professional powerboat racer, who’s drugged and kidnapped by an eccentric millionaire (Michael Rooker). It turns out the dastardly rich guy (aren’t they all?) wants Big Bas to take part in ‘The Eliminator’ - a deadly, kill-or-be-killed contest that pits uniquely talented desperadoes against each other.

Dumped on an escape-proof island, the contestants have to fight not only each other, but a horde of soldiers from Rooker’s private army. Still, the last man left alive will get a $10 million dollar prize. And the opportunity to continue breathing.

You’ll be forgiven for detecting a certain whiff of familiarity in the storyline, since it’s been reheated more times than a chip shop saveloy. (See The Running Man, Battle Royale and, more recently, The Hunger Games).

But at least those films threw in some cartoonish excess, savage social satire or earnest teen angst. And they had a few quid to throw around on splashy effects and diverting action scenes. The Eliminator, on the other hand, is not so much low-budget as no-budget.

Bas Rutten and Paul Logan have bromance moment

But for all that, you’ve still got to admire the gumption of the film-makers. After all, here they are, presenting a film about a powerboat racer that’s set on an island, when it appears their meagre budget didn’t stretch to filming anywhere near any real-life water.

This produces not a few comedy gold moments. Take, for example, the unmissable scene where Rutten has to build a raft to escape from the ‘island’.

Unsurprisingly, the only thing that really appears stranded here is the director. Stuck up a creek without a paddle (note: this metaphor is the closest the movie will come to actual water), he takes predictably desperate measures.

Namely, he plonks Bas on a patch of sandy-looking waste ground then dubs in the sound of invisible waves gently breaking on a shore. Honest, you can almost smell the briny.

Had a couple of stuffed seagulls suddenly dangled into shot at this point while someone made ‘caw-caw’ noises off-screen, it would have been no great surprise.

Further evidence of the film’s penury can been seen in the film’s pound shop cast. Bas Rutten may have eloquent fists, but is utterly defeated by the challenge of delivering a line of dialogue. (His reaction to being kidnapped and thrown into a death-match is to act as if he’s unexpectedly won an all-expenses paid holiday).

Even worse is muscle-bound beefcake Paul Logan (Mega Piranha), presumably one of few actors on the current scene to envy the range and versatility of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That leaves Michael Rooker alone among the cast as the as the only capable thespian on display. A reliable supporting presence in films such as JFK and Guardians of the Galaxy, Big Mike is incapable of giving a bad performance.

The cast, most of whom are eliminated

(This is partly due to his strange strangulated voice that adds an earnest intensity to everything that he says). Ever the professional, Rooker delivers a typically committed turn that the material scarcely deserves.

And it is Rooker’s mad and murderous millionaire that helps set-up the film’s exploding helicopter scene.

Tediously, we have to wait until the end of the film for our favourite fiery delight. Rooker orders in a helicopter to hunt down Rutten. After locating their prey, a soldier tries to shoot our hero from his aerial vantage point.

Taking cover behind a tree, Rutten uses a rifle to shoot the chopper pilot in the head. While Exploding Helicopter is always ready to be surprised, we were fairly confident from this moment on that the whirlybird wasn’t going to make a safe landing.

Sure enough, the chopper spins towards the ground where it crashes, explodes and is – in the parlance of the film – eliminated.

Artistic merit

In keeping with the film’s shoddy standards, the viewer gets swizzed with the chopper fireball.

Actually blowing up a helicopter – or even something that looked like a helicopter – was clearly a budgetary impossibility. Therefore a dirty little cheat has to be employed

As the whirlybird makes its doomed descent it momentarily veers out of frame. The director then cuts hard to a generic shot of a fireball, where it’s impossible to tell what’s been blown up. Disgraceful.

Exploding helicopter innovation

Amid the cynical chicanery employed in the actual explosion, there is a little creativity for the jaded viewer. After Rutten fires his miracle shot at the pilot’s head, we cut to a point-of-view shot of the bullet making its way through the air in slow motion towards its target.

While it’s a long way from the fancy ‘bullet time’ cinematography in The Matrix, we were grateful for these crumbs of inventiveness.

Positives

There is a surprisingly decent scene early in the film. After being drugged and kidnapped, Rutten wakes to find himself in the back of a cargo airplane with the other Eliminator contestants.

Before anyone can find out what’s going on, Rutten and the rest of the competitors are hurled out of the back of the plane with parachutes.

It’s a cool idea (which is why why it's been used more effectively at the start of Predators) and heightens the disorientating confusion for the characters.

Negatives

Having gone to great pains to establish Rutten as a powerboat racer, the viewer spends a lot of the film waiting for this fact to become relevant to the plot. Even now, long after the film has finished, I’m still waiting.

It rather makes you wonder if an elaborate, postmodern joke is being played. Why else would you make a film about a powerboat champion building a raft in a dry, featureless waste?

Favourite line

Given the film’s death match premise, the inevitable “Game over!” makes a predictable but enjoyable appearance.

Review by: Jafo