The Doorman
                                   
Director: Ryûhei Kitamura
Year: 2020
Rating: 6.0
Be sure you tip your doorman or doorwoman come the holidays. You never know when you will need their help to carry in the groceries, hold open the door or kill a bunch of intruders. These days in NYC, doormen come with combat training it seems. This film has more bad ratings than a defective Tesla and I have to admit I don't really understand why. Are we so jaded now from Die Hard Wannabees? Sure, there must be hundreds of them by now - you could easily put together a one-week film festival of them - but that is because there is something about one person taking it upon themselves to save the day and kill the bad guys that fulfils our desires. I personally never tire of that theme - whether in Die Hard films or Taken films. They are the flavor of the day.



What matters to me in films like this isn't so much the circumstances, but the individual kills. Is the choreography well-done, is it satisfying cinematically - and in those respects I think this film passes the test. I mean hell, the director is Ryûhei Kitamura. Admittedly, I have lost touch with Kitamura's films over the past fifteen years and was surprised when I saw his name pop up in the credits, but in the first part of this century he directed some of the best action films in Japan. Films like Versus, Aragami and Azumi were terrific hard hitting action films.  Godzilla: Final Wars was in there as well. Not sure what brought him to this film, but I noticed that it isn't his first non-Japanese film - he made Western films about a serial killer, a sniper picking off random people, a horror segment and two robbers hiding out. This may be his most conventional film of them. Just a woman killing a bunch of psychos. One at a time. To protect her family.



Ali (Ruby Rose - John Wick 2) has just left the military with a case of PTSD. Short-haired, messed up, she takes a job as a door woman thanks to her uncle. The residential building is like the one in Only Murders in the Building - an old once proud structure on the east side of Manhattan with lots of secret rooms and hidden passageways. The building is undergoing renovations and nearly all the tenants have temporarily moved out. Just an old man with a stroke and his wife remain behind as well as a father and his two children up on the tenth floor. A cushy job for Ali. She has Easter weekend off but it turns out the family on the tenth floor is the family of her dead sister's. She is invited to dinner. Goes down to the old couple for a seasoning - finds them shot to death and the shit hits the fan.



The great Jean Reno and his gang have taken over the building looking for some old hidden artwork and taken her family hostage.  In one well done encounter after another, she whittles them down. Ruby Rose is great. I am trying to remember her from JW2. There is too much family reunion, family bitterness going on for the first 30-minutes and you want to whack the older boy at times - but still once it gets going, I thought it was very solid. Apparently, the only person to think so, but it has been well-established that these are my kind of films.