I read The Street Sweeper. And I've got a problem with it,
too. However, that problem isn't that it is too violent or
that it glorifies crime or any of the usual complaints. It's
that it just isn't very good.
First of all, it is a pretty blatant rip-off of John Woo's
The Killer
(Hell, the protagonist even has a poster of Woo's Hardboiled
in his wall): an innocent is accidentally injured because of
Hit Man; he sets out to make it right; he must do one more
hit to pay for an operation. Now that in and of itself is not
really a problem. Any fan of Hong Kong film can't have too
much of a problem with borrowing, no matter how extensive
(and I liked God Is A Bullet even though it owes at least as
much to The Searchers as this does to The Killer, or the
Killer to Le Samourai, for that matter). Unfortunately, Ronin
Ro cops the plot outline, but renders it poorly. Major
characters do things for which there is absolutely no
plausible explanation. Just two: even if the mother of the
kid who got shot does eventually come to believe Usher isn't
really all bad, why would she have gotten romantically
involved with him in the first place; there is never even a
hint about why there a huge open contract of the City
Councilman, or why he's so hard to hit. Ro doesn't even try
to explain major inconsistencies, just offers an extreme take
on the maxim (Chandler's?) that whenever the story lags, send
someone in with a gun, but switches it to whenever something
doesn't make sense, throw bullets.
Perhaps the offerings will get better, both Joel Rose and
Gary Phillips are in line, but this one is not an impressive
debut for a company hoping to be the new Holloway House.
Ronin Ro sure ain't Iceberg Slim or Donald Goines.
Mark
ps -- I did find the positive reference to the movie Blade
(which I also enjoyed) amusing given that its star Wesley
Snipes has money in the book company.
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Nov 2000 EST