In ‘All Day,’ a circular crime drama
Stuntmen are Hollywood’s go-to action directors
JBy Jake Coyle
oe Robert Cole’s “All Day and a Night” is a tough and anguished drama that somberly spirals around the circular tragedies of crime and incarceration.
It’s the directorial debut of Cole, who co-wrote “Black Panther” and penned a pair of episodes to “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” He delivers an inconsistent and disjointed but tersely earnest and raw tale about a young African American man, Jahkor (Ashton Sanders, of “Moonlight”), who grows up with violence and drug addiction all around, and becomes ensnared by it.
Cole, who also wrote the film, doesn’t enter the story from the beginning but loops back to it. Our first picture of 20-year-old Jahkor is as he creeps into an Oakland, California, apartment and, after a few quick words, executes a man and his wife in front of their daughter. It’s not an easy way to engender us to Jahkor’s plight, but “All Day and a Night” dares you to empathize with him.
“Everybody on the outside looks in pretending like they would do better, or worse,” Jah narrates.
From behind bars, Jahkor looks back on the path that led him to that night. “All Day and a Night” is a meditative montage of key incidents from young life - an introspective journey made more tangible by Jahkor’s estranged father (Jeffrey Wright), who has long been imprisoned in the same penitentiary. Jahkor has the feeling, he heavily intones, “of being part of the same story, on repeat.” “All Day and a Night” struggles to cohere these episodes, and its aim often goes astray. Cole sometimes embraces and sometimes deviates from the cliches of the genre, working in the mold of filmmakers like John Singleton (“Boyz n the Hood”) to pursue a gritty, grimly hopeless and explosively violent portrait of inner-city California life.
Sanders’ tender, scarred Chiron in the middle chapter “Moonlight” was arguably the heart of Barry Jenkins’ film. Here, he again suggests depths in a soulful performance, both callous and sensitive. Wright, as usual, brings an expressive gravity to the film, though he’s underused. And Shakira Ja’Nai Paye (“SpiderMan: Into the Spider-Verse”) makes a natural presence as Jahkor’s pregnant girlfriend.
At turns brutal and compassionate, “All Day and a Night” is admirably ambitious even if it remains too scattered and distant to ever come to life. But there are enough flashes of something more here to make you eager for what Cole, and especially Sanders, do next.
“All Day and a Night,” a Netflix release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for strong violence, pervasive language, drug use and some sexual content/nudity. Running time: 121 minutes. Two stars out of four.
Some of today’s top action directors were first doubles for and
Increasingly, filmmakers are coming from the ranks of stuntmen and stunt coordinators, whose years of accomplishing complicated shots, managing the risks of cast and crew and working intimately with stars have given them a foundation for the task of directing — especially in action movies. “Extraction,” the new Netflix film starring
is the directorial debut of Before Hargrave got behind the camera, he doubled for on “Captain America” and
on “Wolverine,” and coordinated stunts on blockbusters like “Avengers: Endgame” and “Hunger Games: Mockingjay.”
Hargrave is the latest in a lineage of stuntmen who have gone from stepping in for actors to directing them. It’s a fairly recent career pathway thanks largely to the success of (“John Wick”) and
(“Atomic Blonde”). A brief history of notable stuntmen turned directors:
A trailblazer for stuntmen-filmmakers, Needham performed stunts on films including “The French Connection” and “How the West Was Won” before he penned the script to “Smokey and the Bandit.” He convinced for whom he had doubled, to let him direct. They remained a regular team, with Needham directing Reynolds in “Hooper,” “The Cannonball Run” and “Stroker Ace.” Needham has been quoted as saying: “Screw the dialogue, let’s wreck some cars.”
The son of stuntman one of the founding members of Stunts Unlimited, Waugh performed stunt work in “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Crow” and “Lethal Weapon 2.” He transitioned to directing in 2001’s “In the Shadows,” and followed that up with “Snitch,” with and last year’s “Angel Has Fallen.”
and A chiseled duo with martial arts skills and stunt expertise, Stahelski and and Leitch have done more than anyone else to raise the profile of stunt coordinators. They’ve been leaders in the field since founding the action design company 87Eleven in 1997. Leitch was Pitt’s stunt double in “Fight Club” and doubled for
in “The Matrix.” Stahelski choreographed fights in “300” and coordinated stunts in “The Expendables.” They stepped into filmmaking with the slickly stylized and hyper-violent “John Wick” franchise (Stahelski directed, Leitch produced). Leitch, himself, helmed “Atomic Blonde,” with and “Deadpool 2.”
The brother of actor Joel Nash has been a longtime stuntman, doubling for Obi-Wan Kenobi, and doing stunt work in “The Thin Red Line,” “Superman Returns” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” But Edgerton also continually made short films, some with his brother, and eventually made his feature directing debut with the 2008 neo-noir “The Square.” In 2018, he directed the comedy “Gringo,” with and Theron. (AP)