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Falcon rising1/7/2023 Like so many canonized fighters before him, he’s brutal and balletic in equal measure. In the film’s most striking fight sequences, he owns his bone-crunching choreography like a musclebound Fred Astaire. He’s a perfectly adequate actor, but a gifted ass-kicker. White doles out chilling stares that barely contain a seething violence, the kind of stares Stanley Kubrick would’ve loved to frame with a camera. While he stumbles with some critical line-readings-though it’d take a ’roided-out Laurence Olivier to pull off clunkers like “In my experience, all God’s good for is giving people a reason to kill each other”-he leaves a fine impression onscreen. Miraculously, however, White exudes enough screen presence to minimize the inconsistencies in his own character. On the sliding spectrum between the Ice-Veined Motherfucker and Wisecracking Rascal, Chapman resides uncomfortably in the middle. Chapman’s propensity for zingy one-liners clashes with the brooding persona the film assigns him. In the first act or so, he seems like an antihero plumbing new depths of darkness, but the film quickly loses sight of that idea. Within the first 10 minutes, he bests himself at a game of Russian roulette, taunts a bodega robber to blow his brains out, and pulverizes a wall in his own home until it resembles a Whac-A-Mole panel. Parazi lay out Chapman’s traumatizing experiences in an unspecified war, which left him a self-destructive shell of a man. Through increasingly obvious flashbacks, director Ernie Barbarash and screenwriter Y.T. White plays John “Falcon” Chapman, a proud graduate of the Jason Bourne School For Action Heroes Plagued By Their Dark Pasts. White is more than ready for a higher profile, and if this has to be the way he receives it, that’s just the cost of doing business. When the film’s final scene shamelessly positions itself as the pilot episode in what executives hope will be a long, fruitful franchise, its blatant money-mindedness feels a little less mercenary than usual. Though Falcon Rising occasionally #fails to distinguish itself from the glut of similar globe-trotting action potboilers, it #succeeds on the merits of White’s winning performance. An armchair psychoanalyst might suggest the actor is bracing himself for a critical smackdown, preempting harsh words for his new beat-’em-up thriller. The above tweet, recently posted by Falcon Rising star Michael Jai White, comes from a man at peace with his own shortcomings. “U will never #learn if U don’t make #mistakes & U will never be #successful if U don’t encounter #failure.
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