It's Saturday night, and I'm standing in the longest line I've been in for a movie. All I want to do is buy my ticket to go see The Men Who Stare At Goats, and here I am standing out in the cold while a breeze manages to make me feel like my winter jacket is made of cheesecloth.
After an agonizing fifteen minutes of waiting, I get to the little window where you buy your tickets.
“I'm sorry, that showing is sold out,” the girl behind the fiberglass divider says. Her voice has the nasally quality of a seagull. I ask what else is playing that would be comparable to TMWSaG.
“The Face Punch showing at 9 has some seats left.”
What.
“You know, Face Punch, some crazy action flick that just came out of nowhere.”
A movie with a name like Face Punch could only be one of two things: A bad rip-off of Fight Club,or a musical montage of someone punching various people in the face.
“Their tagline is 'Face punch: let's do this!' My boyfriend saw it last night and he is just absolutely raving about it.”
I bought the ticket and ran to theater room four. The only available seat I could find with the dim lighting of a preview for another zombie movie was in the front row. I settled myself just as the movie began.
An hour and fifty minutes later, I emerged from the theater a changed person. Face Punch was like nothing I'd ever seen before in an action flick. The plot starts off a little cliché, the first five minutes are devoted to flashbacks, but that doesn't last long. I think the best way to describe it is that Face Punch is the opposite of Dragon Ball Z in the way that a DBZ episode is about ten minutes of talking for every two minutes of fighting. After my first viewing of Face Punch, I went back a second time with a stopwatch. There is exactly an hour and thirty-two minutes of fighting in Face Punch. That means only eighteen minutes of everything else, five of which are flashbacks.
It was surprisingly well-executed and extremely well paced for this kind of movie. The main character, who managed to remain nameless the whole film, went from fight to fight just punching people in the face and knocking them out in one solid hit. The fight scenes themselves were choreographed beautifully. The Face Punch fighting style relied on a lot of punching in the face, as one might guess, but they kept it fresh from scene to scene. The main character's fighting style was quite fluid for a man that just goes around punching people in the face. It was like a combination of Muhammad Ali boxing and Jackie Chan kung fu.
I don't want to give too much away, seeing as Face Punch hasn't been out longer than a week, but let me just tell you, someone named
Arnold makes the best cameo I have ever seen in my years of watching movies. He and the narrator have one of the most amazing fights I have ever seen, and never will you ever be so conflicted as to who you want to win that fight. The best thing is, there are no special effects in this movie. Everything they do, they are actually doing themselves.
The music that the Face Punch team included in the movie was incredible. Just listening to the soundtrack makes you want to go out into the street and start punching people in the face, it's so good. I was actually amazed that there wasn't an all-out brawl in the theater, but I think that's because everyone was in awe over how great the movie was.
I cannot urge you all enough to go see Face Punch. It's possibly one of the best movies of all time, and I would have to list off every emotion in my vocabulary to tell you how I feel about it. Face Punch's powerful themes of destruction juxtaposed against a society that doesn't quite understand how to deal with destruction creates the perfect stage for the issues the protagonist must face or punch during his journey from boy to man. The ending is nothing but perfect,and it leaves you wondering about yourself, and whether if you had to, would you punch someone in the face for what you believed in.
Now, I know I would.
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Emmy,