Kill James Bond! - S4E48: Point Blank

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

"I bet you're a big Lee Marvin fan, aren't ya?" - Mr Blonde, Reservoir Dogs Betraying one of your co-conspirators mid-heist is a time honoured technique to increase your own payout- but if you're going to pull it on Lee Marvin's Walker, you'd better make sure he's dead. ---- HANDS OFF LEBANON Here are some fundraisers to support collective rebuilding and survival efforts on the ground in Lebanon. -Beit El-Baraka started out as a food bank, but has grown to help people afford rent, cover their essentials, and live with dignity.  https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-directly/ or donate in general https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-now/ -LiveLove was a charity for a number of other matters, but since 2024 has been solely comitted to helping people displaced by Israeli attacks. https://livelove.org/donate -Lebanese Food Bank supports displaced and impoverished people https://lebanesefoodbank.org/take-action/donate/ Solar Powered Lebanon is an initiative to restore people's power using solar panels, since larger infrastructure is at constant risk of attack. https://fundahope.com/en/campaigns/solar-powered-lebanon ----- FREE PALESTINE My friend Ahmed still needs to feed his family and afford medicine. Anything you can kick in would be hugely appreciated. https://chuffed.org/project/150817-please-help-ahmed-and-his-family-get-food-drink-and-medicine And these are some more general links you can support collective efforts with! -The Palestinian Communist Youth Union is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

Wow. That was really exciting. I bet you're a big Lee Marvin fan, aren't you? Me too. I love that game. Hello and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorn and Devon. Hello, gentle listener. Cowabunga, dear listener. And do you want a movie that rules?

because this is a movie that rules. This movie rules. I was inspired by the little Lee Marvin reference from Reservoir Dogs, and I was like, you know who does a movie that rules is Lee Marvin? And so on that basis, I thought that I would show us point blank, which is a 1967 John Borman movie, right? John Borman. Welcome back to the podcast. Yes.

Right? What else is John Borman done? Ah! And of course, deliverance. And Prince Arthur thing that I might make us watch. This movie, very different from Zardos. Yes. Very different from Zardos.

But contains seeds of the same kind of hippie avant-garde sensibility in places? I think so. I think it's, this movie is functionally, what if you got the guy who did Zados to do a gangster movie, right? Yeah. Yeah, and it rocks. I love the editing in this movie. It's edited so well. And I think it has some of the best transitions since the three of us.

Like, it's just so, like, between scenes, it's just like really fucking cool and efficient. It's really good. It's like a tight 90 minutes too and like super fucking tight. Like the bolts up fucking, I love it. This is the thing. This could have been slot. This could so, so easily. Yes.

Oh, God, yes. Any other director, any other editor. And this could have been a really forgettable. kind of Lee Marvin vehicle that you go to see because you want to see Lee Marvin shoot a guy and sort of get tough and like, you know, slap guys around. And instead of that, it's something really different and something that I think has an enduring appeal and an enduring deconstruction of masculinity that I think makes it really, really good for us.

Yeah, it rocks. Absolutely. But we open on a dude getting fucking kirked out, bang, bang, dude shot, man, man, harm. in a prison cell and we get a kind of like a freeze frame narration like, yeah, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got it this crazy situation.

No, not quite. We get a guy gets shot in a prison cell and we hear his thoughts, he's like, prison cell, how do I get here? I've been hurt, right? And this guy's name is Walker. And this scene is so efficient. We flash back a lot

back and forward in time, which makes it difficult to summarize. But Walker is, At a drunken party and this guy, Reese, his best mate, comes to him and it's like, I need your help. I'm in deep trouble. I owe some money, some bad people. This party is very much like the horrible gangsters from sexy beast, right? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I have a bit here where I look at Walker who is being sort of almost like physically sort of like groped, basically being manhandled by all of these kind of like drunkenly insensible men in suits. And I just kind of write down, this is how male social. socialization in air quotes feels as a trans woman. Yeah, it does. It's so affronting. It's like this sea of just men like fucking bright red male faces all doing for like like ha ha ha ha ha type like deals laugh in the background. You are you are in a whole human being in a Ralph Stedman cartoon, right?

It's terrifying. You're in the burly brawl from the matrix if they all just came in and partied. Yeah. And we're like cutting forward. in a really jagged way as he's sort of remembering and putting it back together of this guy, Mal, his best friend, sort of like, get, like, taking him to the floor and almost sort of like, like grabbing him by the face and almost sort of like banging his face off of the floor and shouting into his face.

You're my friend, Walker, right? It's, you know, trust me. This is, it's, it's immediately, it's like painful, it's inexplicable, it's weirdly gay. It's just- Because again, when you take them to the ground, again, it's a sea, but it's all just legs. It's just this great sea of men's shoes, men shoes and like black leg, black suited legs, like, scream at his face. You trust me, don't you?

I need your help. Yeah. And it's, it's, you have this kind of dual recollection, right? We have a, a very calm, very stoic Lee Marvin recollection of like, oh, he asked me to trust him. And then you cut to him sort of like grabbing him and shouting in his face. Yeah. really good. But Mal owes money to some bad dudes. So they've got to commit a crime to get the money

back basically. And we see this helicopter land and these two guys with bags of cash, get out the helicopter, some kind of criminal things going on. And Mal says, we hit him over the head and that's it. We just take the cash, right? But Mal fucking guns them down. He uses lethal violence. And Walker protests because he's like, this is going to affect my mission rating. I'm locked into a dark side Skill tree. Hold on. I'm doing a pacifist run. This is the tutorial level and I'm already locked into, I didn't want to do this.

Like, it's going to be wasting was time, right? But it's so many more rats. Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't matter, right? They're counting the money. And we see that there's three of them, in fact. There's Mal, there's Walker, and there's Walker's wife, Lynn.

Lynn. And we see that Walker now is sort of like he's upset. He doesn't trust him. And so Mal tells Lynn, you better handle your husband, right? Yeah. And so she goes off there in, this is Alcatraz, right? Three years after it closed and was abandoned. So it's just empty cell blocks with the doors all locked open.

And so he's sort of like cooling his heels in an empty jail cell and we get this really abrupt cut forward to her lying on his chest, you know, her head on his chest, doing the kind of like, how did we end up this way thing? what we get is one of the betrayals of all time for me. Yeah, so good. Where Mal comes to the door, he calls Lin away, and he just guns him down. And it's like... Immediately. There's nothing. No beat.

Yeah, he got you in on this robbery. He betrayed you on how to get there. And he stole your fucking wife, dog. Yes. That's your girl. Your share of the money and your goal. That's your goal showing feet and racial chat. rooms. Yeah.

That's... In the club, party rock, looking for your girl? She on my jock! Oh! The economy of this as a betrayal. It's so efficient. It's like, oh, you're like, this is the lowest guy can be immediately. Like, you just drop him to the floor.

Lost everything, right? Like speed run of dishonor. And the other thing is, right, because this is a tight 90, right? Because it really like focuses on time. You're cutting all of this out in order to spend more time on these strange dreamlike kind of impressionistic shots. Like there's a full like five second shot of a songbird like sitting on barbed wire outside Alcatrol. Would you have time for that if you had more like dialogue, more sort of character between them?

No, of course not. And it's a really distinct choice and it works. So fucking wow. He survives and he hangs around Alcatraz over the opening titles as his health regenerates. And then he swims off the island. Yeah, the red veins are still like retreating from his vision. Yeah. And like young old Sean Connery or Sean Connery in The Rock, he escapes Alcatraz by swimming

almost incidentally. It's just, it's not a major plot point that this guy got shot twice and then just swam to freedom. Just swam those miles, just swam like the three miles across the bay in the current. What? Like it's hard? Yeah, because we're cutting back to him in his natural habitat of in a suit, forminating with rage, right?

Yeah. And now his hair is gray. Like, this is years later. Or maybe he's just gone gray in a shrew. You can, you can turn a hundred in a second. Very stressed. And he's taking a boat to around Alcatraz. And actually, even like two or three minutes, you know, you can't even, you can turn a hundred in a second.

before we cut to the present day and we see him on the boat too. We're hearing the audio of the boat tube and like nobody ever escaped Alcatraz Island like the shark invested waters and like you would do that normally you do like a J cut where your audio from the next scene comes in a little early

but it's like a really really long J cut actually which is really cool. Yeah, it's like repeating. He's on the boat. Yeah, it's really cool. He's on the boat. He's approached by this guy, this cop, right? Who introduces himself as Yost?

Yeah, he doesn't tell us he's a cop. We assume he's a cop. Walker says fuzz, right? Like, again, all of the dialogue here is like, you never use three words where one would do. It's extremely laconic, right? There are sort of whole sentences that are one word here. And in the midst of their conversation, the tour guide is now talking about the Battle of Alcatraz, right? Where the, you know, cop shot three people.

And Yoss tells him that he's not after him. He's after the organization. Right? Specter. Yeah, it is Spector, right? It is Spector. It's so purposefully vague. Like, we'll never really get a clear idea of what the organization is.

He explains it sort of, again, by vibe, by impression, you know, suits, penthouses. It's like, you know, islands, maybe. Peter Mandelson was there, Prince Andrew, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the organization more often used to refer to the mob, but this is, you know, This is not a mafia movie. None of these guys are Italian, none of them are eating Linguini at all. There's no sort of like ghost dog way of the samurai sort of cultural shit happening here, right?

It's just the organization. And that's not by accident, right? Nothing in a movie is by accident. These are the guys that Mal owed money to. Yes. And now that he's paid them back by stealing your share of the money, he's now, you know, pretty big cheese in the organization. But I will give you his and Lynn's address in LA.

And he doesn't even write it down. He just looks at it and then we cut to one of my favorite seams and shots in any film noir. It's this Dutch angle, right, film from below of it's literally just Lee Marvin walks down an underpass. Yeah. But he's like, he's wearing this like Oxford shoes and the footsteps are. They're so loud, bam, bam, bang, bang, bang, and it becomes like a ticking clock and it just keeps going and going and going. And it gives you this impression of like, he's coming for vengeance, he's inevitable.

It's like the inevitability of time. He's the revenge machine. And the thing that takes it from being good to being genius to me is you take the footsteps and you hold on this shot of him walking and Lee Marvin is a very intimidating man and And he's got a very intimidating walk. And then you cut away to her in Los Angeles and the footsteps are still coming. Yeah, as she's doing her makeup, she's getting up in the morning moving around the house and you're still hearing that bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. No, he's coming.

And then they end when he just like bursts through her front door. Yeah. And because he's this kind of force of nature, right? He has one plan, which is to burst through the door. This is so. Yeah. Sort of like grab her and like muscle her. out of the way, she sort of like swoons unconscious brackets conveniently. He bursts into the

bedroom and empties a revolver into the bed, which is empty. Mm-hmm. The fucking bullet holes that the effects are so good. They're like smoldering on the very incidental shot in this movie is just beautiful. It's so, yeah. There's like this shot that is completely meaningless. It's just like a woman who's in a hairdresser, right? But there's the mirror and she's in one of the like big chairs and you just see her like reflected off to infinity. It's like, why?

Misan-A-Mis. The thing from fucking V-Savi and from, from Citizen-Kane. Citizen-Kane. Nice. But so, yeah, because he had the sort of like one plan, because he's like a sort of projectile that's been fired, right? When it doesn't work, he just sort of runs out of energy and he just sort of like, sits on the couch in the living room holding his revolver lesbienly, you know, like two fingers through the

frame. And what you would expect here, right, is if you put this against Get Carter, probably a future episode, right? Much more nihilistic treatment of kind of this same thing. You would expect this to be an interrogation. You would expect him to be slapping her, like shouting her face. I was so worried that that was what was going to happen. It's what should in the genre. happen next. And what happens instead is he just sits there on the couch and you have again this sort of like very impassive Lee Marvin face that's kind of very stoic and giving nothing away. It's like, is he incandescently furious? Is he anything? We kind of don't know because she's doing his half of the dialogue in her head, right? Yeah. He doesn't even say any. He doesn't even

look at her. But she sits down next to him and she's she's guilt ridden. She's a wreck. She's not sleeping. she's longing for death. Mal left three months ago. He disappeared. The organization sends her a guy every month and lets her live in his house, sends her a guy every month with $1,000 and that's what she lives on. Mine, I'd say, in L.A., that's incredible.

And she's saying all of this to him, even though he's not moving. She's not doing anything. This is such a, like, drama school exercise, for one thing, but it's also, it's very dreamlike. It's, if you want a film, studies version of this, it's the way that they teach the Kulashov effect, right? Yeah.

You sort of, you know, as a theory of montage, you show an actor who's not really expressing anything but a neutral expression, and you put that, you know, you put something before that or after that, and people re contextualize it in their own heads, right? So this is, yeah. It's really good. It's fantastic. And she says, in this sort of fam, you know, so a fan fatale way, but in a sort of ruined way, I just couldn't make it with you, Walker.

With him it was kind of fun. I just kind of drifted into it. And this is a major theme of the movie as kind of passivity, right? Inertia, entropy. And the sort of tragedy there is, as she says, that night on Alcatraz, I knew it was you I really wanted,

and I found out too late, right? Brutal. Really good. We get a little flashback too of the meeting his younger, people and falling in love and then her kind of falling for Mal as well. What's interesting to me is their first meeting, he's surrounded by his boys, basically. The socialization, from socialization is that.

Yeah, the socialization team, they're there. He's got friends. It's hanging out. Good enough. And then they both met Mal. Is it hack for the guy who betrays him to be called Mal? I mean, I guess no more than it is for the guy in the Odyssey to be called Antinos.

But that's, you know. Or Odysseus, you know, that's crazy. Yeah. A journey on our hero's name? Journey, on our hero's name, journey, then. Explicit, explicit polydrama to me. Yeah, yeah. This is polydrama.

This is shared house, chore wheel shit. Because, as she says, then it was the three of us. And we get a shot of the three of them in the front of a car with her in the middle, right? This is a menagerie. It's these, these motherfuckers gay or bye. Good for them. Perhaps a folly at a time. But then, in the evening, he's been aura farming in her house all day.

He has. Full of emotions. And then he goes to her bedroom. Yeah. He goes to her bedroom. He wants to kiss her and doesn't. She's asleep. And then discovers, ah, in fact, she's not asleep.

She's gotten her dick sucked with sleeping pills. To a permanent end. He is so completely passive here, right? Because she's told. him, you should kill me. Again, this is like genre rules, right? He's there for his revenge. We've set this up. We as the audience are expecting this. She has done wrong in the sort of frame of the genre. He should kill her. He doesn't. And so she does, right? Yeah. She commits to a slide. She unalives.

Yeah, she unalives. And he doesn't say anything. His face doesn't move. He puts his wedding ring on her finger and just leaves the room. This is, you know, yes, it's saying something about inertia that we'll get to, but in the moment, you're just like, this is a million times scarier than any of the ways we have of hyping up an action hero now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you think about John Wick, right? Okay, there he is.

I wasn't going to be the first one to say it. It's not a knock on the movies, right, to say that the way that they hype up John Wick is to have, uh... Oh, fuck, it's John Wick. Yeah, that's John Wick from John Wick. Get out of that. So it's not a knock on the John Wick movies to say that one of the ways that they establish him is to have a character go, yeah, John Wick makes me shit my pants because he's so scary, right?

This is something very different, I think, which is much more effective where it's, it's, you're showing instead of telling, and what you're showing is this motherfucker is the machine, you know? Yeah. great machine from castration movie one. Turns out, yeah. Yeah, crazy. We get this incredible sequence. This is so fucking brave as a filmmaking choice.

Where he's hanging out in the house. He hears his dead wife singing and then suddenly all the furniture is gone and he's just in an empty room. And it's like, it's not clear whether this is real if time has passed or if he's losing his mind. And then the guy who gives her a thousand dollars every month comes in and all the furniture is back. So we established that that was just like a representative.

of his desolation and the emptiness in his soul. It's just avant-garde. How do you film that? How do you show it? Take all the furniture out of the room and film him standing in the room. And it's like, let us notice it. Yeah, you put the sort of French New Wave.

You put the avant-garde in the American crime movie. We see Yost outside the window beforehand, right? Yeah. We get this incredible shot that's like a very slowly pulling focus on him through the window screen. And yeah, you do think for a moment, like, oh, like the cops, I guess, right, have just disappeared the body and all the phone. furniture, you know, and he's just been waiting in an empty room. And we know this is once a month. They could have been for, you know, weeks, just waiting in an empty apartment for the guy. And

the way that he does this is so brutally inventive, right? What he's done is he's got a board and he's like nailed the door shut, right, where he's kicked it in. Yeah. And when the guy knocks on the door, he opens the door by like pulling the board back and just slams the nails through into the guy's shoulder and then pulls it back, grabs them indoors, slams it closed again. It's so economical again.

Yeah, yeah. The interrogates this guy, and this guy says, I work for Big John, and might not say, Bosh! Big John is a used car salesman. He's the next level in the organization.

You've got to go to next location, which is a used car lot. With Big John in massive letters on the wall, and then Big John steps into the shot and you're like, that's Big John. That's Big John. This interrogation, again, it's the same thing where it's like, yeah, Walker doesn't display emotion, right?

He's like someone reading for him, you know? He doesn't even hurt the guy further than the thing with the door. So, like, we're just, it's so efficient. We're so passive. We don't need to see him torture the guy. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, next. But so we see that Big John is kind of a sleaze, and we show this by,

one of his employees is purving on a woman who's comfortable by, car, he's trying to sort of like muscle in on this. And the whole time Walker is sort of like trying and almost failing to sort of get his attention, you know? Yeah. Yeah. She's like trying to ask him about the car and Big John is just staring at the woman and being like a beautiful car.

It's a beautiful car. Yeah. It's interesting, Walker's sort of stealth or if not stealth is sort of ability to go unobserved, even when he wants to here. I'm gonna sort of tip my hand a little bit here. You can think of this in a, sort of sixth sense way, you know? Not to be like, oh, what's really happened is he's dead, right?

And he just, you know, is sort of ghost. But it's definitely intended to sort of evoke that possibility and that air of unreality and uncertainty, right? Maybe the human part of him died when he was betrayed. And now he's just the kind of, as you say, he's the vengeance machine. He's like the fucking Terminator in this movie. Yeah, people tell him he's changed. Yeah, there's a moment later on where a woman like tries to beat him up and he just

completely no cells all of it for five minutes. He is like the Terminator in this. It's crazy. Yeah. He's like a dead man walking, you know? The only real emotion we see is in that flashback we get with him, like, meaning then we see that there once he had boys. Now he's just, now he's just stood next to his car trying to get this guy's attention.

Yeah. Yeah. Can we go for a fucking test drive maybe? Yeah. And we don't sort of linger on that. All right. They go for a test drive and Walker drives like an insane homicide. little maniac, but because it's LA, nobody actually notices.

He's actually one of the safest drivers on the road. Yeah, this is a surprise that I got for you both, which is to reveal that the drive crazy to scare this guy and fill up his scared guy meter mission in every video game is stolen from this movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, oh. Because he gets in the thing. And the guy tells him, oh, you don't really need this seatbelt, because we used to be a real country.

Yeah. He drives crazy to fill up his scared guy, Me, sir. He, like, just kind of wiggles him back and forth. Yeah, he puts him in the wiggler. Yeah. Really good. While he's waiting for him to get in the car, he's, like, closing the sunroof as well. It's like, it's a convertible.

He's like, bring in the roof over. Yeah, yeah. I need to get this guy in a location. He, like, slams him back and forth under a light into the pillars under a highway overpass. Incidentally, this reveals the kind of paint undercoat, which I guess suggests that it's a stolen car, which is nice. That's fun. It's kind of funny how much Lee Marvin looks like Seymour Skinner. He does a little bit, yeah.

Especially in this where he's wearing a suit the whole time. He's like the one where Bart plays truant, you know? Like he's sort of doing the fugitive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's doing some Simpsons hit and run shit right here. But eventually Big John is like, okay, Bosch, your, Mal is with your wife's sister, Chris. Yeah, he's like cuck holding you doubly.

almost, because he's also fucking your sister-in-more. That's crazy. She runs a nightclub called The Movie House. It's right next to a bar called laundromat and a laundromat called Bar. That's good. Never changed, Los Angeles. Yeah. So, we see him at Lynn's Great, right?

Again, stoic, right? And it's really taking the time to linger on this kind of stoicism, this kind of masculine violence is almost indistinguishable from not being alive, right? It also really lingers on the indignity of having your grave dug by a machine, by a sort of mechanical excavator. Yeah, because on his way out, there's another grave, a fresh one being dugged by, being dugged, being dugged, being dugged. That's what they'll be saying these days, yeah.

They do be dugging graves, yeah. Oh, because he fill up graves. Nah, but why does the grave loki be dugged? Oh, they call him that in Call of Duty because he fill up graves. Shut of fuck up He does. He don't feel graves

They do Yo Yeah it's just like Square stamps of turf Basically over the Yeah Yeah I see you've seen me

Tamping down the dry earth Just say Tweets of me Well the ancient author Of the proverb About revenge Failed to anticipate How easy it would be

To dig two graves Yeah Using an estimate Today's modern technology Yeah Exactly Yeah Before you embark on a journey

Of revenge Dig two graves For both your enemies Great Should be pretty easy Exactly. Yeah. I'm gonna kill a way about.

We then get a sort of rarity of the genre. Again, we're sort of subverting expectations here because Mao goes to see Big John and we get the only time a you didn't tell him anything, right, meeting doesn't end in the underling getting murdered. Yeah. Yeah. Because Big John's like, no. And I was like, okay, great, good.

That's good. I was glad to hear that. I was hoping you'd say that. Now it's your job to find him. Yeah. So he goes, he goes to the client. Right? They go to the movie house, which is a nightclub, not a movie class.

Yeah. And the stage act at this nightclub is kind of weird and a bit racist. It is a little bit, yeah. It's this kind of James Brown parody almost that I think is intended to convey that Walker is a man out of place and time, and also that the organization is not running this club very well. But it's kind of just the only thing. just the only black person in the movie doing James Brown noises.

Yeah, he's just yelling, yeah, over and over again, basically. He's getting the audience to join in yelling, yeah. He's like, it's back on a full-flexed. It's meant to be really abrasive, but it fully just hits the boomer, like, can't music just be good thing? Which is crazy to do about like James Brown as well. Yeah. Whole scene, they should have just been blasting Pink Pony Club or something. Basically, yeah.

Trying to talk. But so he grabs a waitress who he knows and who he has a kind of like easy rapport with, right? Who remembers him fondly, which I like as a detail. He used to be someone who could talk to women. And he gets Chris Lynn's sister's address from her, but he's seen, you know, by Big John's men. And he gets in a fight with them in which he just full force obliterates a guy's dick and balls. Yeah, he does. Crazy work.

Just unpooled punch, like, straight down from it. I mean... He hits someone with like a glass bottle, like in the face, not on the back of the head, in the front of the face. Yeah, his opening move is to glass a dude's face. Yeah, it's insane. And they have a very, like, heavy, very realistic fight. It's awesome.

So he goes to, you know, having left these guys ruined. We're not shying away from the violence here as well. Like, we cover a lot of it with, you know, sort of like sound and with darkness, but the intention here is, you know, Walker is, Walker is a terrifying man, right? But he goes to wake up, Chris, right? And she's a sleep in bed. She's got some, like, sleeping pills by her. And he tells her that her sister is dead. And again, we get this very, very, like, laconic dialogue where she, all she says is you.

And he says, no, her, those. meaning the films, right? It's so sparse. It's really nice. He says, do you want Mal? She says, he makes my flesh crawl. And then he says, I want him. Gay.

I'm sure if that's what you're into, man. It is gay. It's absolutely. It's like this is his sort of design. This is his desire. And she sort of says somewhat brutally of the things that he wants, Lynn and money, you know? Yeah.

He wants his 93 grand back. He wants 93K. Yeah, he does. She's unhappy with being a specter wag, even if she does get to run a nightclub called movie house and a movie house called Car Wash and a Car Wash called Night Club. So she agrees to help him a little bit. And then Walker stays with her in her very ugly yellow house

where all their clothes are also yellow? Not sure why that is. The 1960s. Also, we know that she had a boyfriend, right, who wouldn't sell control of the club to the organization. So they killed him, and now they run the club. and she's sort of in a sort of, you know, she's being controlled by them, right? Yeah.

So meanwhile, Mal goes to meet Carter, who is kind of his like specter line manager. Yeah, Carter. He's a big skyscraper. He wears a suit. I love this establishing shots of this office building. Completely unremarkable, but it's from street level looking up. Yeah. It's not subtle, but it's like, oh, fuck, institutional, like corporate power, you know?

It's the same as, you know, there's inherent vice. as a kind of take on this with a big tooth building, right? Yeah. Or conversely, three days of the Condor did a lot of this with sort of like smoked glass and stuff. 60s, 70s, very concerned with sort of corporate architectural power. Yeah. And Carter's like, you're a tit, Mao.

You're an idiot. You're a fool. But okay, we're going to use you as bait. Am I going to have this guy brought in and we're going to have him killed? We'll sort it out. We also see really nicely as Mal is going to see this guy. He goes through all the layers of security in the building. Like, he has to go past the secretary.

He has to go past another guy. He has to get patted down. So we are establishing, if you were to try and invade this building later on in a movie with a gun, how would you have to do it? It's really good. And the guy who pats him down, like it sort of pats his like paunch and laughs a bit, you know? He is not respected in this organization. This organization, which is the cover identity is a multiplex product, which is kind of a nothing.

Yeah. And Carter is kind of waspy, right? It's like fucking madmen in here. Yeah. You know? It's important that this is kind of miscellaneous white boy time, you know? This is, it's not about like the mob. It's about organized crime becoming corporatized.

It is white boy day, for sure. It is white boy day. It's white boy day all throughout this movie, actually, I think too much in many ways. But they're going to put Mal in a big posh hotel in the penthouse, and they're going to put goons and mini bosses on. on every level so that Walker's gonna have to fight his way all the way. It's very, very secure, right? Yeah.

We know one thing, he's walking towards you at a walking pace right now, so we just put you somewhere known, and then we'll know where he's gonna be. They call him Walker because he fill up graves. Yeah. Yes. Yes. They do. Oh, okay.

Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. It's because he's ranging all over Texas. Yeah. I get it. It makes sense. Nice, nice, nice, nice.

Yeah, I should be clear, Walker is an adaptation where they had to change the name of a series of books about a guy called Parker who was called that because he was really good of backing his car into things. Hmm. Yeah, I really love those books and something. They're great thrillers. Yeah, I love Spider-Man too. They circle the block, right?

Because he's bringing Chris with him for revenge, right? Yeah. And they see that there's goons all over the place. She says memorably, you're going to have a lot of trouble getting in, but you're never getting out, right? Yeah. But so he does some reconnaissance by taking, like, one of those, what do you call it, like a scenic viewer, like the telescopes that you use to look at. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just stretching it.

Rushmore and stuff. Yeah, 180 degrees, so it's pointing at the building. And we get a beautiful shot of him against the sea that looks like an Alex Colville painting. It's crazy good. And he just kind of uses her in a way that she agrees to. Because he figures out that Mal is down bad enough for her that she could probably get past security. So he's like, what if I disguised myself as you by wearing your...

No, that's never going to wear. I'll send you into the building. What if I could walk right behind you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, just really cool. What if I was in your purse, you know? No. Just put me in her inventory. I'm getting that.

He sends her in. He goes into the penthouse opposite. In like total fucking silence, he watches her ascend to the building in the exterior elevator. It's so good. Yeah. And as you see his face first and then if she's going further up in the elevator, you see from her perspective that there's two guys looking terrified behind him.

Yeah. Right. And as she's being walked in, right, we cut back to them. This is a gay couple, right? I love that we make that as basically as explicit. it as we could do for the 60s as well. Yeah. Yeah. And Walker is, he is not homophobic, right? And that cuts both ways.

On the one hand, he is not homophobic. This is good. On the other, he doesn't even have the, he's sort of not present enough to be homophobic. You know, it's one of the things that would maybe be expected of your kind of hero in this situation. But instead, he's actually quite courteous to them. Yeah. They're very obliging. He asks them to tie themselves up and they're like, okay, yeah, sure. He calls the cops on himself and then just leaves. Yeah, he gets them to call the cops saying they've been attacked. And it's really quite a sweet comic detail.

They're like, was that all right? And he's like, that's great, thank you. Then leaves. Fantastic. It's nice. Look, he uses violence when he has to. But he's very happy to just use aura. We didn't even see him threaten them.

Yeah. But the cops being called to their building is enough of a distraction that all the goons in the building opposite, at where Mal is, are like, oh shit, they're on edge, and they leave their usual patrol routes. Yeah, just for a second, one of them is to lure away from his patrol route, like, by a thrown coin, and he just walks in. That's why they call him Walker, because he fill up graves. Mm-hmm. Ah. We get a really, like, heart in your mouth moment where he takes the lift up, and, like, the two guys

and the lobby are talking and looking out at the cops across the way. One of them pushes the elevator and turns back just in time for the doors to open and then not to see him and the doors to close again before they look back. It's perfectly timed. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's really good. But Chris is about to shag Mal and she leaves the door to the penthouse unlocked. Walker actually, interestingly, there's two goons on the roof. Walker beats them up and ties them up off screen, which I thought was an interesting choice. That just happens off screen.

He's like a ghost. Also, he can't stop tying up other men. Like, no, he can't. Crazy. It's got one desire. Yeah. To walk places and tie men up. Speaking of desire, right? Because he puts Mal at gunpoint, Mel who is, you know, being interrupted sort of like, before

having sex and is naked, and drags him out of bed, sort of wrapped in the sheet. He asks him if you can put it on clothes and he says, I want you this way, right? This is so intimate and sexual. We're really making the revengeous sort of sexual desire here. It's the thruple. This is the polyth thing, you know? Yeah, it's polyamorous revenge. He says, I want my $90,000, who do you work for?

And Mal gives him a few names. He says, okay, Carter, Brewster, and Fairfax. And it says, Carter is in the multiplex company and the big skyscraper from the earlier scene. I can get you in there. Do you trust me? He's like, do I fucking trust you? and then it's not, I'm not entirely clear on what happens here.

Is it an accident or not? Yeah, I think it is. He just lets, well, he falls from, like, the roof where he's been sort of threatening him to the ground below where he is killed, right? Incidentally, when he's sort of threatening him, when he's trying to get these names out of him, he's like, who do I talk to, right? And when Mal tells him, there's no one man, right? He's some back and forth about this.

He's like, no, you go high enough, there's always one man. There's always one man. And it's like, no, it's not like that, you know? Yeah. It's like we, it's, it's corporate now. It's been corporat. Yeah. It's like the NHS.

Like, nobody's ultimately responsible. There's no blowfeld. Yeah, it's an interesting. I know you've got a CEO of crime and it seems like reading the unaccountability machine and be like, oh, fuck. You don't have a CEO of crap. It turns out it was easier not to have one of those because they could arrest that guy. Yeah, it's a criminogenic organization.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They just got sin eaters. Well, Mal is lying dead and naked on the street. There's a big crowd that forms around. And one of the pedestrians, the extras, just has a perfect, that's crazy. I very nearly clip that, yeah.

Yeah, it's really, really fun. Yeah. Hell, hey, baby, it's raining naked man. Does it all the time, I hear. You go down to WeHo. Yeah, only in L.A. Yost is there looking like LBJ at the Kennedy assassination, like. Just like, damn, that's crazy.

I don't know what happened. As Walker is leaving, right, one of the goons sees him, shoots at him, and in another sort of very ghostly move that is also ice fucking cold. He just steps back into the shadows and the cops roll up and they'd like shoot that guy. Yeah, they arrest him. Who are you shooting at?

And the guy doesn't say anything. Yeah. Johnny tight lips. Who are you shooting? Yeah. I mean, granted. I will say Johnny Tyler's hits perfect Roger Moore shooting stance when he shoots.

He does like the full one arm out thing. And the cops do just leave. He's trying to get the cross. But he fails. And I'm like, oh, sorry. He doesn't get him. Sorry. The cops do just leave.

I mean, you'd think who were you shooting at would be a more pressing question, but 70's cop situational awareness was mostly about being drunk on the job. So like, yeah. So he talks to Chris again, who has done, she's gotten her revenge, I guess. Yeah. But basically accidentally. And when she tells him, like, you let him fall, you should have killed him. You owed it to yourself.

She calls him a dead man at this point. Yeah. Yeah, she says you died at Alcatraz all right. Because you're not the same guy. Yeah. But Yost helps him run into Carter. He arranges a meeting between them. Carter's in public at some kind of, I want to say, fundraiser or a party. It's not entirely clear.

Yeah, it's political. Cool. Says, hey, buddy, give me my $93,000 back. And Carter's like, no, that's not how this works. Reese is dead, okay? You got what you wanted. You got your revenge. He's like, no.

He's dead. that you inherit his debt. Give me $93,000 or I'll fucking kill you. Like, you've got 12 hours. Yeah. You have this exchange, right, of sort of, you know, primitive modes of accumulation, if you like, where Carter tries to tell him, no business corporation in the world would accept a debt like that. And he says, if you don't pay me, I'll kill you, you know? Yeah. It's just, this is, like, I think about ghost dog a lot lately, because it's like, you know, this, this, this ain't no honor culture. Well, sometimes it is, you know? He's, he's like a different guy from that.

And, you know, I mean, the other thing here is, right, is Chris was the sort of Trojan horse, as Big John says in Carter's office, as he's sort of like fuming about this, how did he get to me, right? Which means that Walker has violated Zeus's law, right? Yes, he has. And as such, you know, will ultimately end their age of bronze. It's kind of that movie, too, you know? So we see that Carter sets him up.

He sent Big John to meet him with the money in the LA River next to a storm drain. Yeah. But Walker's fucking onto it. Walker goes to the Multiflex building past all the levels of security. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, no, I'm not doing it. He enters Carter's office by going past all the security and takes him a fucking hostage. He's like, yeah, I know it's a setup.

Fuck you. You're coming with me. Yeah. It's kind of this masterclass on getting through these kind of layers of security of just sort of rushing them. Carter calls him crazy, right? People keep calling Walker crazy, which in a sense, right? Little companion piece to Fitzcaraldo, I guess, in that he's kind of not able to play by, or choosing not to play by a very stupid set of rules, which are being used to exploit him, you know?

We see Carter has kind of set Big John out on this mission of delivering him the money, and he's, you know, we know it's a set up because Walker knows it's a set up, but he's telling Big John this story of like, well, it doesn't make sense economically not to pay him, right? And we're not doing a kind of stupid principled stand against this. We're just going to pay him. As soon as it becomes less trouble, we just do that. It's something that shows up in future episode layer cake as well. It's money.

Just go, yeah, get out there, just go. Just go. Yeah, just pay him. Off you go. And it has to be you because he's seen you. He's going to know your face. All right. And the guy goes, oh, Big John's like, okay.

Bush, head on. No worries. Obviously Carter immediately. immediately. Because obviously, like, it's a most clear thing in the world. And he just, he bursts his way in and goes, we are going to go and get the money. Yeah. You and I.

And then he sends Carter out there into the Yellow River. He's like, yeah, there's your money. He's like, all right, cool. You go get it then. And obviously. The whole time Carter is still just being like, it's right there. Just go get it. Like he's taking him the whole way to the pickup point.

And they're like just in the shadows. And Carter's going like, there it is. Go get it. And he eventually goes, you get it. Yeah. Things aren't done this way anymore, you know, be reasonable. And what he does is he feeds him into his own trap, right? Yeah.

Because the second he steps out, he's immediately both hands are up and he's like, it's Carter, it's okay, don't shoot. And it's like, yeah, obviously. The sniper shoots him. Oh, this sniper, by the way. I love the sniper. This guy's work a day. My boy.

He's silent. He loves it. He shoots Carter dead and he shoots Big John, a solemn Bosch. and then his job complete he packs up his he packs up his rifle and he's like ah that's a good day's way for me time to go to a movie theater called bar at a bar called movie theater

and once he's left Walker walks out and he like searches the bodies and he finds that the money's fake and it's a fucking setup it's like yeah sure Carter's dead male's dead who's next Brewster yeah the end of Get Carter has happened so he gets

Carter got yeah he goes he goes back to Chris who has had her apartment tossed by these goons, right? All of the shit is broken and he like takes her with him and he takes her to a diner

and you get a kind of version of the diner scene from Thief where it's just this couple who are much older than everyone else there, the teens are sort of baffled by them and they're sort of strange and a little ridiculous and deeply sort of lonely and alienated and may be in love

with each other. It's only just for this is saying, I thought you'd be safer with me than by yourself, which we don't know if that's really true. It's again, it's kind of inertia, basically. And then it's Yost who shows him where Brewster lives. There's a house that the organization has and uses for meetings. And then they're like, okay, Bruce is out of town. He's going to be back tomorrow. So they go to Bruce's house.

I'm not sure why Chris starts trying to hit him, but she does. She starts trying to beat him up and it doesn't work. Well, she's sort of figured that what he's there for is a revenge that now really doesn't have anything to do with her or Lynn. And there's this kind of compulsive aspect to it, right? She asks him what he's going to do when Brewster gets back. And she says, you'll ask him for the money. He will say no and you'll kill him.

To which he says, yeah, something like that. It'll go like that, yeah. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. This is madness, right? Like, obviously, and where will this stop? Where will this end? This is sort of fundamentally uncaring and mechanical. And so she tries, I think, to get any kind of reaction from him, and she tries to fight

him. And again, within the genre, you expect maybe sort of man's job here is to absorb punches of woman, right? And then maybe hit her back, depending on how evil you want to draw the man as an anti-hero. Instead, he's not just absorbs it, he's like, he's like a wall, you know? Yeah, he just totally knows how it sells it. Yeah, it's all absent, you know, it's all inertia. And ultimately she exhausts herself trying to, trying to like, sort of fight him, to attack him.

And he just, he just goes and sits and watches TV and you get a real sort of like, you know, oh yeah, 50s gender roles or whatever. Because he's, he's trying to, you know, watch TV not even really exist. she's trying to get his attention by having a sort of BPD crash out, like, turning on the music and, like, every appliance in the kitchen at the same time. It kind of turns into, like, a marriage, almost. It's... Yeah. It's very odd.

We get a strange sequence where she hits him with a pool cue. They wind up on the floor, smash cut to them having sex, which is also intercut to him having sex with his wife, and Mal having sex with his wife. Yeah. And Mal and Chris having sex, which I don't think ever happened. It's just a very odd sequence. I don't really understand why that's there. Yeah, it's just this kind of strange little avant-garde detail of like everything is becoming kind of surreal.

You know, at one point she, before she hits him with the pool queue, she gets on the house intercom, right? And she hits him with the showdown, you know? And she asks him. Yeah, I know, crazy to have a house intercom. She goes, what would you even do with the money if you got it? it wasn't yours in the first place, right? Like, you were stealing this. You were taking this money.

You were doing this crime. Yeah. Why do you feel entitled to this? Why do you care? This is sick what you're doing, you know? Just walk away, I guess. Yeah. We see that Brewster lands at a little airport,

and he meets the sniper who's like, hey, can I get paid? And then Bruce is like, I don't care that Carter's dead. Fairfax will be next, probably. And like, yeah, cool, nice work. And the sniper's like, Walker's going to get you, man. He's talking about a sniper.

He's like, this is funny. Like, this is amusing what's happened. I love the sniper here, right? Because he understands his own role as a consultant, right? Because he tells him, Carter's dead. And then he just goes, you don't care, which of course he knows he doesn't. But then this is where we do get the kind of equivalent of the John Wick killed 50 guys or the pencil thing, right?

Where the sniper goes, yeah, you know you're not going to kill him, right? Like, he's a professional. He says he calls him beautiful. He's beautiful. Again, you have this kind of professional fraternity between killers, but it's also, it's very homo erotic as well. Yeah, definitely. It's not making the sniper kind of sinisterly gay like a Bond movie might.

It's just like, oh, yeah, these are the guys who like do the sort of like actual tasks. These are the kind of operational stuff, you know, and they like each other in that way. I really like that. Game, nice game. Yeah, it's fun. When Bruce gets back to the house, Walker attacks, and he says, I want my $9,000 a few thousand and Bruce is like, well, no, I'm not gonna give it to you. Before we get to the attack, right, he wakes up in bed with Chris, and we finally get this kind

of mutual recognition that what they're doing is a sort of like, you know, them sleeping together overnight. It's sort of like this holiday from reality, right? Because she tries to confront him on this, and, you know, that he does. doesn't care, that he only cares about his revenge, if he cares about anything at all, by asking, uh, hey, what's my last name, right? To which he says, what's my first name, right? And you have this kind of mutual recognition.

It's super film noir. I love this, you know? Yeah, it's really fun. She goes, I think it's Philip. Yeah. Because you fill up grave. Because of walking. And then then Brewster comes back and we get this.

Oh. We get this very like static shot where you see like it's centered around light on the butt of a revolver that's being held by the frame and you know that these guys are going to walk around the frame and one of them's going to get pistol whipped by Lee Marvin and you just see it happens. And you go, yeah. Magical. Magical.

Yes, yes. Yes. But so he holds Brewster at gunpoint and Brewster laughs it off. It's really good. Bruster is in front of the guy who gets pistol whipped. He's got his boy with him and his boy gets pistol whipped. And from the sound of him getting pistol whipped, we get a flashback to Walker hitting other people throughout the movie.

Yeah. Other men, he's hit. Walker. No one hits a guy on the head quite like Walker. He's like, I want my doctor's appointment. I want hormone replacement therapy. If you can't give it to me, call someone who can. And Bruce is like, there is, like, what are you talking about?

There is nobody you could call. He's like, fine. Call Fairfax. So he calls Fairfax and he puts Fairfax on speaker and he says, hey, Fairfax, quick thing, Walker's here, he's got me at gunpoint. Can he have $93,000 and Fairfax on the other end of the phone just goes, no? And then Walker just shoots the phone. Yeah. It's so good. He's like, what are you talking about $93,000? You know, we work in terms of millions? I don't have more of an $11 cash on me at any one time, dude. At first, he doesn't even believe him. He says, like, you'd threaten a financial strike. like this for $93,000? What do you really want? Right? Yeah, and he's like, no, $93,000. The GIC analogy is a great one, but it's also like, and this has been said a million

times about this movie, this is like a guy trying to get a refund from the phone company, you know? It's, you're coming up against an institution whose customer-facing thing doesn't do that, you know? And it's like having beef with the phone company, you know? That's always going to be kind of one-sided, you know? Phone company doesn't even know you exist. Yeah, oh, you're pissed off at NHS England? They do not care because they can't. There are sort of like organization that's not capable of doing that, you know?

There's a structure that exists to diffuse all of this sentiments out of it, you know? You simply aren't going to get 93,000 pounds. No, you're not. No. Well, there might be one place you could because there's one place that we should. We still deal in cash. Do you remember the old thing that you did right at the start of the movie where you robbed the guys from Alcatraz? Well, we still send helicopters full of cash in and out of Alcatraz occasionally.

We could go there together. And so they do. He's like, you're going to rob the same guys that you robbed at the start. They go to Alcatraz. Full circle. Yeah, and it's kind of, it's a huge vindication, right? Ultimately, you go high enough. It is one guy.

There is a person making these decisions, right? You can fight City Hall if you hold the right person. at gunpoint, right? And that's not, I wouldn't generalize that lesson to anything that we've been talking about because that would be illegal. But the point of this movie or the thing that it's suggesting is, yeah, it might be ridiculous, it might not even work, but it is, there are sort of levers that you can pull, right? But the very least to get a good movie out of it.

Yeah, yeah. So what they go to the drop point and Walker just kind of like aura farms in the shadows, as Brewster stands in the middle, the chopper descends. He's just an aura farmer at the show. He is. Yeah. He's just stood in the shelves with like a beam of light

across his like eyes and he's just watching. Yeah. He doesn't, nothing happens on his face throughout the rest of the movie. No, yeah, yeah. Literally. Almost any of it. Yeah.

Yeah. The chopper descends and Brewster gets the cash. The chopper leaves again. And then Bruce is like, Hey, Walker, I got the cash. Bang, the sniper shoots him dead. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Well, not quite dead, not just yet. Not dead. Just dying. Yost emerges from the shadows and Bruce is like, Fairfax, you bastard. Because this was all a poy for Fairfax to take over the organization. Yeah, it's good. You were being used the whole time. Everyone's being used.

Yeah, it's really, really good. It's so good, and he just backs away. Yeah, and so Fairfax, you know, is like, all right, come out and get your money. Walker does not emerge, right? He keeps trying. Eventually, even the sniper gets bored and comes down. the sniper who is presumably going to kill Walker once he gets the money, right? And the sniper's just like, oh, he's good, you know?

The sniper's having fun of this. Yeah. Meanwhile, Walker is just doing the sort of learn to sit back. Not everything needs a reaction thing. It's like, damn. He doesn't even have any lines. I'll just wait. No, he doesn't.

And he just leaves, we imagine. Well, actually, so it's, it's Yost and the sniper just leave, And they leave the package behind, which might contain real money or might not. We don't know. Maybe. Maybe. And the final shot of the movie is just a shot of Alcatraz. And it's like, what do they do? Who knows?

Who knows? He might have made it. He might have outwitted them. He might just have fucking left. He might not have been like really meaningfully alive the whole time. Yeah. If he took the money, would have done him any good anyway? Like, I don't know.

What did he even want it for? And like Chris was right to say as much, you know? So maybe that landed with him. We don't know. And fuck, what does that say about masculinity? It says that this is a kind of spiritual death, you know, to be the action hero, you know? Well, I love an ambiguous ending because it turns the question around on the audience. And I guess like, the question we're left at the end here is like, what is the value of Walker's revenge?

And it's like, I don't know, like listeners, what is the value of your revenge? Like, what will you ultimately get from it, if anything? Yeah. How many graves did you have to fill up to do that, you know? Yeah. How many did you take? You dug them really fast because you used that excavator, but how many graves did you fill? Yeah. And we don't know.

It's not clear. Not that many even. I think it really suggests that this is a kind of existential poverty to the point of non-existence. You know? Yeah, it's really good. It really enjoys, I think, playing the trick on you of going, oh, you're in trouble now. Lee Marvin is walking towards you saying that he's going to goon your ass, right? It's, this is sort of like terrifying, he's so cool, he's John Wick, you know? And movies like that love to have, love to put that in the mouth of A Scarsguard, whichever

of Stellan's kids, they're throwing at Keanu, going, hey, John, does this make you feel better, you know, about your dead wife from the first movie, or did you do all of this just to kind of forget about it? And then the movie kind of forgets that internal criticism and John Wick punches the Scars guard to death. Yes. Oh, we'll get to... I happen to think that the John Wreck movies are really, really good and are made by

very, very talented people. They're not bad. That's why we're taking a long walk to get to them. They're not bad. They're not bad. But my point is that they're not trying to do what this movie is, right? Yes. This movie is trying to, like, really follow that criticism all the way through, right?

And it doesn't have an answer because it kind of can't, you know? And so, yeah, it turns out that this guy, he's kind of like a philosophical zombie from philosophy, you know? Damn, that's crazy. Yeah, he's maybe not even conscious, you know? So, you know, that's cool. He's the guy's from blind sight. He's like... Damn, he's a Chinese room for kicking ass.

Yeah. He is the guy from blind sight. One of the cooler ways you can be a Chinese room, I have to say, but... You go into the Chinese room and you get beaten up by a guy who's like got a perfect Kung Fu manual but doesn't know what any of the moves mean? That's so cool. You know it's how to counter every move. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know what they are. Yeah. I know kung fu, but do you really? Yeah. An interesting dimension for the Matrix to explore, maybe. Anyway. Yeah. Just total passivity, total entropy.

And what does that say about masculinity? It says fucking don't. Don't do it. It sucks. It says it's not worth it. Christ. Yeah. Yeah, it's good to like have the love and the romance in your heart, but once that's gone,

you're kind of not a person anymore. Yeah, before you embark on a journey of revenge, you know, get an excavator and dig a lot of graves. That's right. That's right. However, we don't have to judge this film subjectively. No, because we have a science-based system. It's called the scum system. It stands for smart, cultural and sensitivity, unnecessary violence and misogyny, honest.

scale of zero to seven, how smear me is point blank? It's like zero, right? Like it's like fucking nothing. It's like minus seven. Like, oh my God, yeah, no. Yeah, I wanna say it's really low because there's just, there's hardly any movie ass lines. There's not that many lines in at all. Yeah.

It's like, what if a guy was a robot, you know? Yeah, it's like a script is like a zine. Yeah, it's, I think it, I think it's just zero. I think, I don't even think it can be a one. I think it has to be. This is the opposite of SMOM, you know? Yeah, nil, silence. Nothing.

Culture and sensitivity, there's one character of color who's unnamed, and it's just a kind of like entertainment person. Yeah. Kind of like, Corbyn Dallas. I'm like, yeah, I don't like that. I find the music bit racist. There's one's shot of his mouth in, you know, that's used during the fight scene that I think is just racist.

So, I, it's gotta be like, Like a three or a four. Yeah, I would go four personally. I think it's... Yeah, for that bit with the fight scene, I think I agree with you, yeah. Mean-spirited. Unpre... Well, unnecessary violence, I mean, this has got to be high, because it's...

I mean, it's... The movie's about the fact that all the violence is unnecessary and unproductive, right? And it's a huge indictment of that. At the same time, a lot of the violence actually happens off-screen. Like, a lot of the themes get beaten up, and we don't even see it happen. Yeah, and it... To a point. It's a trick on the viewer who is expecting to see a Lee Marvin movie where he does violence.

And then the violence makes you feel bad, right? Like, your big sort of showy fight sequence in the club is underscored with all of this really jarring music and you can't see half of it. And if you wanted to be like, damn, I can't wait to see Lee Marvin, like, you know, kick the shit out of somebody. What you're seeing is fighting that's dirtier than you want. And then you can't really see it. So, and it's doing that in a way that's, I think, really distinct from your kind of, I can't see the violence in, like, say, adjacent. Born movie, you know? Yeah, or even like a stylish Daniel Craig Bond way it's like all silhouetted and stuff.

It's not like fast editing or anything like that. It's just dark in that. Like it's usually quite a steady camera. So, I mean, we could just go, we could go really low here, potentially. Like, I don't know. He's not indulgent with the violence. Even the violence that he does meet out is he stops when it gets to the point of getting what he wants, which is eventually 9,000 to £3,000.

I think also the film is inviting us to critique it in a way that I quite, quite like. It's inviting us to question whether it is necessary. Yeah, I think, put it love. It could be, it could be a zero again. It could be, it turns out that the key to getting a good grade in the scum system is to not be a person. Yes.

That's what we're trying to do. And in this way, the listeners were enlightened. And then, and then misogynia. The misogyny, I mean, yeah, it's, Walker is like, he uses Chris and her, revenge, right? And yes, to an extent she gets to choose it, but it is using her sexual peril, right? That's not a good thing. It's not depicted as being a good thing. And she kind of calls him out for it as well. Yeah. The critique is in the text. It's kind of brutal and mechanical of him. I mean, meanwhile, we're sort of busily normalizing,

you know, basically an explicit menagerie, which, I like. If I ask myself what I want to play, either of the main female roles in this, I'd say, yes, I would because they're both like pretty well, they get good characters, like they both get good monologues, both have some good moments. Yeah, absolutely. And I think Lynn in particular makes a really interesting counterpoint to Walker in that she's, you know, also kind of a ghost of a person, right?

They've both been killed by this betrayal, right? And I really like that. Yeah, okay. There's some minor stuff where it's like, there's, you know, any of these other roles could have been a woman, sure. But for 67, like... It doesn't seem desperately interested in women's perspectives, but at the same time, it doesn't spend a lot of time dehumanizing us either. So I would say maybe two, three? Yeah, I would happily give this a two, I think, just on the basis that it's mostly interested in kind of a man dehumanizing himself or having been dehumanized.

So... Yeah. Yeah. Fuck, it's really good. It's a good movie. Fuck, write it down. Point blank. God damn.

That gives it a total score of six. Oh. Which makes it definitely, I don't have the full scum system in front of us, but that definitely makes it one of the best we've seen so far. I'm trying to look up now and see if anyone has been keeping a track. I've just pulled it up. The best movie we ever done, oh, great fucking son-and-s out of that one,

is the Quilla Memorandum, which got five. Ooh. This six is tied with sexy beasts. Anthemort Identity. That kind of tracks in that I think it's quite a similar movie to sex movies. Or the born identity for that matter. So, yeah, we like a movie like this. Make a movie like this.

Oh, and Top Carpe also got five. We also get that five. Bicycle Thieves actually is still the gold medal winner on three. Oh, shit. I forgot about that. Yeah, you're so right. I think this is now on our bronze medal podium, tying with quite a few others. Wow.

But yeah, this is phenomenal. Petty point blank. It's, I've saving that one for an hour. I don't get it. Because gross point blank is a movie with John Kusack. Okay. Not important. Future episode.

But yeah, this was a movie that I think was really good to have done after something like Palin 1-2-3, you know? Yeah, this rocked. I think it was worthwhile putting in context of like, yeah, what, just deconstructed these guys? And yeah, it's good. It's good. I do have a pitch for our next mainline episode. If you would hear it, please.

I think that it would behoove us to just go right back to Quentin Tarantino and do Jackie Brown. I remember absolutely despising Jackie Brown. So I look forward to the, the, yeah. I had a reasonably okay time first time I saw it. So I'm excited to have the discussion. Oh, well, wonderful. The whole spectrum of opinion is here. Call it.

Great. Fantastic. So join us for that. The most recent bonus episode, because we have a Patreon feed, it was Fitzcaraldo. Our next bonus episode. Whose pick is it? Shit, it's my pick. It's a Devon pick?

Oh, okay. I've completely blanked on it. That's fine. They'll certainly hear it in the jazz outro in a couple of seconds. Yes. Our next bonus episode is a Devon pick. So join us for that, and we will see you next time. Bye everyone.

Bye. Thank you for listening to yet another episode. of Kill James Bond. Our next episode in two weeks time right back here on the free feed, as stated, is Jackie Brown. But if that is simply a too long few to wait, then you can head on over to our Patreon. patreon.com slash kill James Bond, all one word, and sign up today for as little as five pounds a month to get access to. Next week's episode, which is mannequin, a movie about a man who is so good at making department store window displays, but they let him stay there at night and fuck the mannequins. They don't even know that the mannequin comes to life.

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