William Kaufman makes movies like someone who saw the centerpiece bank shootout in Michael Mann’s Heat and internalized every beat of it, determined to bring new heights of tactical realism to the action genre. He’s spent his career filming some of the best gun fights in recent memory, never mind that he often has a fraction of the budget of even the most modest Hollywood product. His newest film, Man of War, probably cost less than the catering on a Mann film, but that’s not a problem when you have Kaufman’s keen eye and innate sense of rhythm driving blistering action sequences. While the DTV world often centers around martial arts specialists like Scott Adkins and Marko Zaror, (as well as the filmmakers like Jesse V. Johnson, John Hyams, & Isaac Florentine, who best know how to showcase those talents), Kaufman stands alone in his commitment to carefully calibrated shootouts. He finds true artistry in the cacophony.
Man of War wastes no time setting its wheels in motion. We meet Michael Connor (LaMonica Garrett) in the midst of a drunken stupor. He’s wandering his apartment with a bottle of whiskey, liquor dribbling down his chin. His phone rings, and he gets a facetime call from Riley (Rosmary Yaneva), his niece. She is running an orphanage in Ukraine, and the Russian army has just invaded. Her building is being overrun and they have nowhere to go. Michael sobers up in a flash, gets on the horn with an old friend, Charlie (Jason Patric), and demands an entry strategy to get himself into the warzone. Charlie protests for a moment, but quickly realizes Michael’s resolve and starts making some calls. Within minutes, Michael is hitching a ride with a mercenary group run by Bunny (Linds Edwards), who are themselves using the invasion as cover to go after an elusive oligarch worth big money. Bunny’s jocular, motormouth personality stands in stark contrast to Michael’s stoic determination, but the men strike a deal: if their paths cross again, they’ll help each other with their respective missions. Soon enough, Michael is boots on the ground and making contact with his Ukrainian guide, Dany (ace character actor Andrew Howard). While Michael has been travelling, Riley and her people have been captured and moved behind enemy lines, requiring Michael and Dany to make a dangerous journey to complete their rescue operation.
It’s a simple set up, and Kaufman, along with longtime producer and co-writer Paul Reichelt, don’t waste any time getting to the meat of their story: this is a men-on-a-mission picture, our operators determined to get from point A to point B and encountering various skirmishes along the way. Their biggest roadblock is the sadistic Konlev (DTV and 87Eleven stalwart Daniel Bernhardt), a mustache-twirling villain who tortures his victims while pontificating on the nature of God. He also has Riley hostage. The bulk of the film, then, quite simply consists of Michael and Dany traversing dangerous territory, occasionally conversing about their histories and the soul-crushing warfare they’ve encountered, while evading enemy combatants and engaging in shootouts when necessary. Garrett and Howard are both very good in their respective roles, the former a PTSD-damaged man who prefers few words and the latter an energized freedom fighter who wants to protect not only his family but his country. Some have objected to using a real-life, ongoing conflict as the backdrop for a gung-ho action movie, but Kaufman is reasonably respectful of the geopolitical realities of the scenario (even going so far as to briefly suggest Russia had legitimate grievances with the U.N.’s stoking of an already volatile situation and the United States directly funding enemy states).
But we’re not here for the news, we’re here for the action, and Man of War delivers it in spades. Plenty of movies feature copious amounts of gunplay, but Kaufman’s gift is constructing his shootout set pieces into laser-focused precision. In a recent interview with Brandon Streussnig, Kaufman is quick to lavish praise on his technical advisors and assistant directors — as well he should — but it’s the director who assembles all these disparate parts and puts them together, and Kaufman conceives his action scenes as a kind of holistic unified whole. Bodies are arranged within the frame for maximum compositional clarity, and editing is used for impact and crispness, not for ginning up freneticism. The law of narrative economy dictates that Michael, Dany, and Bunny’s group of merry mercenaries will team up by the end, and Man of War climaxes with a 20-minute action sequence that finds the group infiltrating a building, locating the quarries, fighting their way out of the building, and then evading a roaming horde of enemy combatants out on the street. It’s thrilling stuff, relentless and inventive. This entire climax was reportedly shot in only four days, a testament to low-budget DTV inventiveness that blows any mainstream blockbuster out of the water (no CGI digital sludge here). For fans of a certain kind of cinema, Man of War is one of the year’s very best.
DIRECTOR: William Kaufman; CAST: LaMonica Garrett, Andrew Howard, Linds Edwards, Rosmary Yaneva, Jason Patric; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; STREAMING: July 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 51 min.
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