Wright also has a supporting role in Ride With the Devil, a Civil War drama directed by Ang Lee (I'm something of a completist, and this was the only one of Lee's movies I hadn't yet seen). Somewhat better than I expected, it follows two Missouri Bushwhackers (guerrilla fighters siding with the Confederacy), played by Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich, through some thrillingly staged (though fairly gory) battles and a vastly less thrilling romance with Jewel. Some of the dialogue is overheated nonsense, and the characters are often difficult to tell apart, as the Bushwhackers all have beards, long hair, and wear hats that hide the parts of their faces the beards leave exposed. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers does his creepy, psychotic loon shtick yet again, looking alarmingly like Kid Rock, and Jewel is very irritating. Yet it's a good story, and Ulrich and Maguire are decent (though sometimes Maguire seems anachronistic in a way that I can't really pinpoint). Overall, pretty good.
Ang Lee's new movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, shares a heritage with Twin Warriors, a 1993 film being released in the U.S. on video to capitalize on Jet Li's rising star. Directed by Woo Ping Yuen, the fight choreographer for Crouching Tiger, it stars Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh and has some amazing fight sequences. The voices are dubbed, which is a shame, but the dubbing at least is a class job, not the laughably poor voice-overs done in Jackie Chan films. Its fights are in much the same style as Crouching Tiger, and it also has plenty of humor, some of it groaningly corny. An excellent example of the genre and a lot of fun.
Woo Ping Yuen also choreographed the fights for The Matrix, and one of its stars, Joe Pantoliano, is featured in The Life Before This, a movie that plays like Run Lola Run on sedatives. It opens with two armed men running into a coffee shop and shooting at each other, catching innocent bystanders in the crossfire. We then retrace the day of some of those bystanders and presumably see the little decisions they make that affect their fates in the coffee shop, although it's sort of hard to tell which decisions those are, because we never see the version of the day that got them to the scene we saw at the beginning. It's sort of an interesting concept, in the way that all these "what if" movies are, but the movie follows too many characters and, like I said, we don't have anything with which to compare the new version of "the life before this." It's kind of slow, and while I never felt like turning it off, I wouldn't call it gripping. Sarah Polley and Stephen Rea, both of whom I usually like and who worked so excellently together in Guinevere, are both sleepwalking through this one. And the director overuses certain special effects most annoyingly. It wouldn't be a wasted rental -- it's probably about par for the slim selection at Hollywood Video -- but it's not a recommendation either.
This is where my game breaks down. The last movie, which I can't figure out a way to connect to the others (except maybe that Ride With the Devil had a one-named rock star and this movie has Sting), was Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, written and directed by Guy Ritchie, a.k.a. Mr. Madonna. An energetic, hilarious film about various groups of lowlifes in London stealing money and guns back and forth from each other, it was clearly influenced by Quentin Tarantino but has its own distinct style. The actors are all tremendously charismatic, and the film's great fun.
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