This Review Reveals Some Details About the Plot.
Bro Sun & Sis Moon Get Lost in the Woods
Plot Overview
Brutal assassin Joe Flood (Dave Bautista)
sparks a panic during a backstage hit at a Bolshoi ballet
performance in Budapest, Hungary. As he leaves he picks
up a tablet dropped by the star Maize (Sofia Boutella.) His control
Smeed tells him to relax more on account of his persistent
headaches & vision problems, so he returns the tablet to
the star and gets invited to dinner in appreciation. They date
and fall in love.
His Dr. Kagan misdiagnoses him with CJD, a rare brain disorder under which he will quickly slide into a vegetative state and then oblivion. He wants to take the easy way out, but the life insurance won't cover suicide, so he uses an underworld contact to take out a hit on himself (“I need a nice clean job.”) When he finds out he's not fatally ill, it's too late to lift the contract, but its takers find him most hard to kill.
They take his girlfriend hostage, and he lures them to Schatzberger Castle for the exchange. It's an elaborate trap, but they show up with an army, and he's unable to eliminate them all. He and the girl flee for their lives.
Ideology
They stumble upon a dilapidated church
in the woods, and Joe asks Maize to marry him, as in “for better
or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
She consents. The Padre there fixing up the place asks if they have
a marriage license, witnesses, and a ring? The zinger is, has he been
to confession? The Padre starts with that.
After hearing it he says he better check with the Vatican as he doesn't know if he has the authority to forgive so much sin. But God can forgive big sins as well as little. Nevertheless, the Padre doesn't want Joe doing any more murders, not even in self-defense. Seems he's part of a pacifist order or something. Whatever.
For a definition of marriage, I'll quote Dr. Ide: “The Contemporary Christian standard was defined not by the bible but generated by Roman law as defined by the jurist Modestinus who argued that marriage was ‘consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani iuris communicatio: a life-long partnership, and a sharing of civil and religious rights’” (83–5). The civil part is covered by the state and its marriage license. Without it Maize could have trouble collecting death benefits if Joe's heirs contest his policy. But people had been getting wed long before the state ever got involved. The religious part is the province of the church who consider sex sanctified within the bounds of matrimony. Saint Augustine considered marriage the start of a domestic church. The civil part in itself would be a domestic partnership. According to Prof. Tamara Metz:
State control of marriage is not a universal arrangement. In many European and North American jurisdictions, religious authorities wielded final control over the institution until well into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. … Among people who live in traditional societies at the fringes of the modern nation-state, marital status and practices proceed apace without the involvement of the state. (5)
This church is on the fringes, and God isn't overly concerned with legal status but with their souls. The problem was with witnesses: there weren't any save for the Padre. While confession is a private affair between a sinner and his priest, a wedding is supposed to be witnessed. In the movie “Born a Champion” a couple got married without witnesses and heaven ignored them.
The ring was a Roman custom who thought there
was a direct connection between the ring finger and the heart. It
has widely caught on. Joe gave Maize a “tactical ring.”
The vows are the place where consent is given. In primitive societies where marriage was well understood by all, its conditions were not needed to be spelled out; everybody knew them. Joe and Maize knew at least part of it, which they went over before they even saw the Padre. He started off by asking Joe if he took Maize for his wife “to love, honor and obey.” He do. They already knew they love each other. Okay. The Christian Bible would have, (1Peter 3:7) “ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel.” Joe honored Maize by giving up his sordid occupation that he figured she couldn't handle. Joe's mentor told him he should honor her further by telling her up front what he did for a living.
The Padre then turns to Maize and asks the same. She also do but says she may have trouble with the “obey” part. That's why these vows are spelled out in our progressive society. In the KJV, a wife's obedience to her husband is enjoined by the verse, (Eph. 5:22) “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” My Criswell Study Bible lists the Greek term for submit (verse 22) as “hupotassō a military term which means ‘to place under’ or ‘to subordinate’.” Traditionally, a woman is to be with her husband where his job takes him. Conflicts often arise when a man needs to recuperate in his man cave after work, but the wifey has other ideas. Bestselling author John Gray, Ph.D. tells us:
When a man is recuperating from the demands of his workday, it is counterproductive to make more demands on him. Until he becomes proficient in the art of listening, trying to converse when he first comes home feels to him like more work, which he will tend to resist. Even if he is eager, his mind will wander to something less demanding like the TV or a magazine. To fight this innate tendency is useless. (68)
Joe has one awesome man cave built like a bank vault. For her part Maize may be cast more sympathetic than a lot of women. In Randall Miller's book on how Hollywood views ethnic groups, he writes that Slavs—“Russians, Poles, or what not”—are in the public's ignorance perceived as coarse and oversexed. “The most popular Slavik image,” he says, “was that of the ‘peasant’ … and, like animals, [they] were super-fecund, with ‘a rather gross attitude towards sexual morality’ (136–139).” She might compromise with Joe in a semi-retirement.
On the heels of Joe and Maize completing their vows, the witnesses arrive. They are assassins out to kill Joe. With such a rotten church experience, they might have been better off in America with a Justice of the Peace. There at least the 14th amendment would guarantee them the right to life. True, but a couple must still bring their own witnesses, as using officers of the court would violate the Constitution's non-establishment clause of the 1st amendment, which prohibits the state from establishing a (domestic) church, although they could do it for a domestic partnership, call it what they may.
Production Values
“” (2024) was directed by J.J. Perry. It was written by Simon Kinberg and James Coyne, based on the book, The Killer's Game by Jay Bonansinga. It stars Sofia Boutella, Dave Bautista and Pom Klementieff who did a superb job. The ensemble supporting cast, however, was lackluster.
MPA rated it R for strong bloody violence throughout, language, some sexual material, brief drug use and nudity. The martial arts moves were more flamboyant than practical. The fight scenes were balletic and so was a love-making pose. Superior editing had action scenes seamlessly turning into love scenes. The music seemed appropriate. The scenic backdrops were enough to make one drool. The kitsch was unavoidable. Runtime is 1¾hours.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
Catholicism plays well in the motion pictures. Here was no exception while both the priest and the church were unassuming enough to escape undue notice. Only bad guys were killed and that quickly.
This one can round out an action stable with humor and original plotting. If you think you'd like it, you probably will.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Edge of your seat action-packed fun. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Well done special effects. Video Occasion: Good Date Movie. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture taken from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
The Criswell Study Bible. Authorized King James Version. Nashville | Camden: Thomas Nelson Pub., 1979. Print.
Gray, John, Ph.D. Mars and Venus In Touch. New York: HarperCollins, 1st ed. Print.
Ide, Arthur Frederick. Noah & the Ark: The Influence of Sex, Homophobia and Heterosexism in the Flood Story and its Writing. Las Colinas: Monument Press, 1992. Print.
Metz, Tamara. Untying the Knot: Marriage, the State, and the Case for Their Divorce. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Print.
Miller, Randall M. The Kaleidoscopic Lens: how Hollywood views ethnic groups. Englewood, NJ: Ozer. © 1980. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org