This week’s episode of Hard Ticket last month was a scathing love letter to the work of renowned artisans Anthony and Joseph Russo. Taking the reins on Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014, the Russo brothers moved the MCU forward in a brave, new direction, which happened to be fundamentally consistent with its original trajectory as well. Their work achieved its first climax with Avengers: Endgame, but is sure to make us cum again with the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. But in the interim, it turns out they’ve been part of other projects. So this week, we’ll be diving into the indie films the Russo brothers did as passion projects before their inevitable return to mainlining Disney cash.
Released in 2019, 21 Bridges was an important stepping stone on the path to October 7th and the escalating genocide which has followed. I will not be explaining why. The late Chadwick Boseman plays an NYPD detective who is known for killing a number of presumed criminals. From playing a hero based on a civil rights organization in Black Panther to playing this villain who is a member of an organization actively suppressing current justice movements, Boseman proves he has incredible range. Following a number of officer-involved shootings, Detective Boseman decides to shut down all 21 bridges in Manhattan and catch these alleged cop-killers. As it turns out, there’s a bunch of corrupt cops who are in no way reflective of the institution of policing as a whole. Some people get shot by the police, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Tristan backed the blue. Life is pain.
2020 was a good year for pandemic and state violence enthusiasts, but Chris Hemsworth was clearly the biggest threat. Extraction, a Netflix original features the auspicious Aussie as a mercenary, who will probably go on to work as one of the many US PMCs in the GHF. Hemsworth is hired to extract a child from a dangerous situation, like a slightly less threatening version of Mar-a-Lago. In doing so, he is brought back to memories of his own dead child, who he unfortunately could not extract from lymphoma. Luckily, the same program which has delayed my review has also taught me how to diagnose such an illness. I could have saved Chris Hemsworth’s sad little dead kid if only someone had let me have a go on their blood. Like a chiseled Rittenhouse, he kills a bunch of people, extracting them from their own mortal coil. These movies are starting to blur together.
I’m a big fan of Tom Holland as Spider-Man. 2021’s Cherry is proof that no matter how sticky he may be, he can’t always stick the landing. I also think it does a good job of raising awareness for the possibility of doing heroin through your foot. Not enough people know about that, and it’s a real failure of the American school system. The titular Cherry is an obnoxious, unlikable fortune teller who, despite his claim of being able to see everything that’s going to happen, thinks that joining the Iraq War is a good idea. Once home, he turns to opioids, America’s pastime, to deal with his PTSD. In order to support this addiction and his child bride, Cherry begins robbing banks in the least entertaining way possible. This continues until he decides to allow himself to be caught and pay for his crimes. Eventually, the movie ends, with the release of both Cherry and the audience from our respective sentences.
The fourth and final movie in our Russo Brothers bar crawl is 2022’s The Gray Man. First of all, “grey” is the correct spelling. Secondly, protagonist Courtland Gentry is lucky he didn’t fall victim to Florida’s storied tradition of execution. In 2003, Gentry is recruited by the CIA, just in time for all the post-9/11 CIA crimes. Following the assassination of the former Sierra Four, Gentry (now known as Sierra Six), discovers the CIA is being led by a corrupt official. For some reason, we’re supposed to care about this, even though every leader in CIA history has been a corrupt monster reporting directly to Jeffrey Boggers. A young girl is kidnapped and taken hostage, which is again super normal for the CIA, and was done at the explicit request of Jeffrey Boggers. A bunch of stuff happens, presumably while the viewer scrolls through the pornographic video site of their choice, and then nothing happens to the CIA. Gentry and the young girl drive off into the sunset, having successfully done some propaganda for the US government.
Jeff and Tristan subjected us listeners to four wildly formulaic movies this episode. In so doing, they have also subjected themselves and my innumerable readers (there’s no one else) to four wildly formulaic synopses. All of these movies make clear that the Russo brothers are not artists, but marketers. I hate to bring up my own filmography, but these fucking smegmoids could never create something like Survachelors. They sell us the illusion of justice, of resolution, but never at the cost of the institutions at the heart of their stories. The rogue cop in 21 Bridges uncovers crimes committed by police officer, but not those crimes. Cherry goes to Iraq to commit war crimes for basically no reason, but the problem is PTSD, not the way that we routinely traumatize generations of mostly impoverished people with violent and ineffective pursuit of empire. The Gray Man uncovers the corruption and wrongdoing in the CIA, so we don’t need to look at the CIA’s actions in China or Albania or East Germany or Iran or Guatemala or Costa Rica or Syria or Egypt or Indonesia or Iraq or Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos or Ecuador or the DRC or Brazil or the Dominican Republic or Cuba or Bolivia or Indonesia again or Ghana or Chile or Greece or Costa Rica again or Bolivia again or Angola or Portugal or Jamaica or Chad or Yemen or Fiji or Nicaragua or Panama or Bulgaria or Albania again or Iraq again or Afghanistan or Somalia or Yugoslavia or Ecuador or Afghanistan again or Venezuela or Iraq again or Haiti or Somalia again or Honduras or Libya or Syria again or Ukraine. In Extraction, we’re left to assume all children want to be extracted and are never to question the extraction-industrial process.
More important than all this talk of regime change and authoritarian power structures, I was introduced to the concept of second screen entertainment. This is when you watch a movie in the background, while watching porn or playing a porn game or managing your porn planner Excel sheet so you can find out what you’re jerkin’ to on the 17th. Let me be clear here—Hard Flickit is not second screen entertainment. If you are reading my blog, then that is the thing you will have to jerk off to. Whether or not it’s on your Excel sheet.
Hard Flickit 