Simon West auteurism is not for the faint of heart. Unlike Joseph H. Lewis or Phil Karlsen, his compromised studio work has less of a moral component and much more to do with what he can get away with in a lowdown, agreeably grotesque and decent-looking package. Whereas the journeymen of yesterday were placed in a studio and asked to make miracles out of whatever was handed to them, the hirelings of the ’90s, music video and commercial directors bumped up to the pros for their style and presumed malleability, have come to the international co-production stage of their careers much sooner.
In the late ’50s and ’60s, Hollywood directors like Karlsen, André de Toth, Jacques Tourneur, Sidney Salkow, George Sherman, Robert Aldrich, William Dieterle, Edgar Ulmer and more went to Italy to soak up funding and make largely undistinguished historical films (Lewis never made it that far, but he did film in pre-revolution Havana).
Many years later, West went to China to film for a few years. Like the directors of yore, he’s taken many a detour to survive, and that has placed him in a proud lineage of genre directors who refuse to stop or be pigeonholed. Before his first move, he remade the similarly undistinguished, frankly somnambulant Burt Reynolds movie “Heat” with a staggering A-list cast behind star Jason Statham, which nevertheless has a B-movie edge. “Wild Card” was just one more damned movie when it was new in 2015, but today it’s a wonderfully violent lowlife movie about the sheer love of the game. The game in this case: ruining lives, not least your own.
I’ve been a West fan since “Con Air,” and while I can’t say he’s always made it easy for me to follow him like Carmen Sandiego all over the globe and into projects both ludicrously insubstantial and unfashionably bitter, I hang on because he can still surprise me. Whether it’s the winning misanthropy of “Expendables 2,” the CGI athletics of “Skyfire,” the bisexual palette of “The Old Man,” the zesty theatrics of “Stolen,” or the perfect framing of “When a Stranger Calls,” West zigs when he could as easily zag.
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