MOVIE REVIEW: "MR. MAJESTYK"

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX: MR. MAJESTYK

Your first thought, just by looking at that poster, might be “How the hell does a guy get a last name like Majestyk?”, and I have the answer for you – shut the fuck up or Charles Bronson will hide in a tree outside your house with a shotgun and kill anything that walks out your front door.

Your second question might be “What is Mr. Majestyk about?”, but you’re only asking that because you’ve never seen a Charles Bronson movie before. Let me tell you about Charles Bronson. Charles Bronson thrives on revenge. Charles Bronson’s body is an indiscriminate, death-dealing killing machine that is oiled with the blood of rapists, muggers, dirty cops, and gang members.

The biggest mistake anyone can make in a Charles Bronson movie is fucking with Charles Bronson. You rape his family? Hang his brother? Kill his daughter? Or, in the case of Mr. Majestyk, shoot his motherfucking water melons? That’s when Charles Bronson turns the knob on his brain from the default GRUMPY OLD MAN setting to REVENGE-INDUCED KILL FRENZY (there are no settings in between) and starts pumping shotgun rounds into dudes’ chests.

Mr. Majestyk, just like every Charles Bronson movie ever made, is about Charles Bronson hunting down and murdering the stupid people that piss him off. Bronson plays a guy named Vincent Majestyk, who, when he's not trying to explain a very improbable last name on what must be a daily basis, spends his time running a melon farm somewhere near the Mexican border. There’s conflict with a local thug, who’s just some asshole cowboy douchebag that wants to replace Majestyk’s loyal migrant workers with his own hobo workforce. Majestyk, because he’s Charles Bronson, responds by throwing the guy over the hood of a car and smashing him in the testicles with the butt of a shotgun.


While he’s in jail for crushing that guy’s balls, Majestyk ends up pissing off a Mexican hitman. This will come back later, because the Mexican hitman escapes from jail and teams up with the asshole cowboy douchebag to teach Vince Majestyk a lesson. Their methods of terror include a ten minute scene where they heartlessly execute Majestyk’s melon crops with machine guns, another scene where they crush a Mexican dude’s legs with a big-ass 70’s Cadillac, and lots of “Grrrrr, I’m gonna get that Majestyk!” dialogue. Bronson finally has enough, flips that switch, and starts his rampage. The trailers for the movie say some shit about Charles Bronson being “the hero inside all of us” or something, because maybe when somebody pisses you off you want to push their car off a cliff and watch it explode with cold dead eyes, but Charles Bronson is the guy who actually does crazy shit like that. I’m not even sure there’s anything technically heroic about shooting at cars from the back of a speeding pickup truck hauling ass through the desert, but it is definitely pretty damn awesome.

And, like, I don’t know exactly where Mr. Majestyk takes place, but you know it’s the South, because for one thing every other character is named Miguel or Juan, so it’s near Mexico, but also there are lots of cops running around, but as far as I can tell they don’t actually do anything at all, and seem to be perfectly happy watching Charles Bronson execute motherfuckers in their own houses and shit. Me, I live up North, and around here shit like that’s considered a crime, or even multiple crimes, but in this town it’s apparently just how you do things. At one point some cop is like, “Hey, should we do something about Mr. Majestyk's murder rampage?” and the chief detective guy on the case is like, “The fuck do I look like, the law or something?” and then in the next scene Charles Bronson hides behind a big rock and kills off like four guys sniper-style. All the cops ever do is shake their collective fingers at him, like, “Oh, you crazy Mr. Majestyk. Who will you kill next?”

The answer to that question, of course, is anybody he fucking wants to. The whole thing comes down to what I call “SHOWDOWN AT LOG CABIN”, where Majestyk sits outside the Mexican hitman’s rocking 70's log cabin, and basically kills anything that moves. The hitman tries to be all sneaky, and sends a dude out to fake a truce, but motherfucking Mr. Majestyk is hiding on the goddamn roof and shoots the guy through the top of his head.

When all the killing is finally over, the cops don’t even arrest Mr. Majestyk or anything, even though he's pretty much technically a serial killer at this point. I guess from their stance the only thing Mr. Majestyk ever did was kill a bunch of assholes who needed killing anyways, so they basically tell him to get lost so they can cover the whole thing up.

The lesson of Mr. Majestyk, and every Charles Bronson movie ever made, is that sometimes the law just doesn’t give you justice, and you have to get it yourself, usually by grabbing your shotgun and killing people until you feel better.

HOLY FUCK RAMBO

Have you seen Rambo yet?

Ho.

Lee.

Shit.

I walked into the theater thinking I was a man. An hour and twenty minutes later I left knowing that before I was not a man, but Rambo had just made me one. Rambo is an action movie that lines up every action movie made in the last decade or two and fucking shoots those pansy-ass movies in the head execution style. Then Rambo takes their heads off with a machete and puts them on spikes as a warning to other movies that want to call themselves action movies. Rambo takes the bar and sets it so high it automatically becomes the best action movie released this year, and it fucking dares any other movie to try and top it.

Here's what you are going to do this week: First, rent First Blood, because you probably haven't seen it and if you have it was too long ago. If you own First Blood on DVD, then you and I are probably friends and I bet you want to see Rambo already if you haven't yet. Second, after watching First Blood, you're going to your local movie theater, buy a ticket to Rambo (and then you might buy some popcorn or some M&M's and maybe a Coke), then you're gonna sit down and watch Sylvester Stallone fucking own the action genre for the next decade.

Why? Because you owe it to yourself. When was the last time you sat in a theater and watched an R-rated movie that really seemed like it was for fucking grown-ups and not some sissy shit that's just a PG-13 movie with a few drops of extra blood and one or two F-bombs? Rambo takes the fucking R rating to the limit. It's so R-rated that if you took out all the R-rated parts you'd have a fifteen minute movie of Sylvester Stallone driving a boat up a river. Everything else is just gore and carnage.

Like, seriously, I walked out of Rambo and I was almost speechless. I felt like someone had been slapping me in the face for an hour. If this is the last action movie Sylvester Stallone ever makes, he leaves the genre having crowned himself the modern king.


Pictured: John Rambo and an Asian guy, seconds before John Rambo decapitates the Asian guy with a homemade machete and murders 250 people in 15 minutes

I could give you a plot synopsis, but really here's all you need to know - Rambo goes to Burma and cuts their country's population in half. Maybe that's inaccurate, because I don't know how many people live in Burma, but after John fucking Rambo shows up there's a whole lot less of them. You can't even tell how much less, because they're not even whole people anymore. They've been cut in half by machine gun fire, decapitated and/or disemboweled by machetes, impaled by arrows, blown in to wet chunks by landmines, impaled by arrows and then blown in to wet chunks by landmines, or just had their fucking throats torn out by John Rambo's bare hands.

People don't just get shot in Rambo, they get shredded by bullets. The last 20 minutes of the goddamn movie is almost nothing but soldiers getting torn to bloody shreds by John Rambo. Heads pop open, chests explode, limbs fly off. I'm not even doing it justice by telling you what happens, because it's so visceral and constant and amazingly graphic that if someone told me this was a documentary about Sylvester Stallone murdering the entire army of Burma with a Jeep-mounted .60 caliber machine gun, at that point I would probably believe them. It's the kind of shit that makes your jaw hit the floor. It's like all the violence from every awesome action movie Stallone hasn't made since 1988 has just been building up inside the man for the last twenty years and Rambo is his catharsis. Rambo probably has enough insane violence in the last scene alone to spread across three or four other, more shitty movies.

When Rambo ends, you'll want to cry. First of all because the ending is fucking cool as hell and is a perfect way for Stallone to retire the John Rambo character, but you'll also want to cry because Rambo just made you its fucking bitch and you liked it. It's something close to a perfect movie, because it does not try to be anything it isn't, only revel in what it is. There is no forced romantic interest, no clunky comic relief, no attempts to sensitize or soften up the character.

Also I saw Cloverfield this weekend and even though it had a giant monster it didn't have Stallone turning an entire truck full of soldiers into goo with a giant machine gun so I don't feel like talking about it right now.