Now a few years removed from Andromeda and Hercules, Sorbo is embarking on that DTV acting career we all looked forward to. He has Walking Tall 2 under his belt, which was a fair effort, and very funny with how little the film makers cared about whether he had a Texas accent or belonged in the South. Now that he's done a sequel, I'm a little skeptical to see how anyone's going to be able to mine territory that seems to have been stripped bare.
Walking Tall: Lone Justice picks up where the last movie left off, with Sorb-doggy heading into Dallas to see the chick he hooked up with last film and her persnickety daughter. Unfortunately, the chick's targeted for a hit by a big time drug dealer looking to get off the hook for some murders and whatnot. Sorbs takes matters into his own hands when it seems the Dallas cops and the FBI can't protect her, and brings her to his ranch, where he holes up with some other cats from the town to take on these bad drug dealers. Wake me when it's over.
This is worse than only being boring. If it was just boring, I could handle that. In an attempt to breathe new life into dead concept, the film makers used some tricky yet lame editing and music. They then tried to make the film seem dark by cutting off a federal agent's thumbs. It was disgusting and superfluous: the only reason they cut the thumbs off was to artificially make what was a fairly light bad action movie into a dark bad action movie. I guess I could've withstood the bad tricky editing and silly music if it wasn't for the random thumb chopping. It was just weird and disgusting.
I think Sorbo was talked into playing this somewhat darker to remove himself from the shadow of his great work on Hercules. What that does is alienate his Herc fan base, which are probably the only people that'll want to see him in the stuff he does. In the beginning there was a great scene where he goes to get ice cream at a convenience store that's held up. His dispatching of the baddies is straight out of Herc. The he gets arrested for his antics, and I'm assuming the film makers used that as a way of telling us this ain't our regular Sorbo fare. Let the thumb amputation begin. Too bad, because the scene in the store was the best one in the film.
When this movie wasn't trying too hard to be dark, it was boring. There's a scene where Sorbo and another guy transport his girl's comatose body through a hospital to keep it away from the baddies. This goes on forever with no real tension. Eventually Sorbo has it out with them, and we knew this was going to happen anyway, so why not just cut to the chase? They're also long scenes of cars driving. Not being chased or flipping over, just driving. And not with dialog like in Driving Miss Daisy either. I'm talking just a car and a dusty country road, and bad music in the background. Who thought this played well when it was screened?
There was this stupid part where Sorbo's mom won't allow pizza to be eaten in her house, because I guess it's not country enough. Who comes up with this shit? Especially when the baddies find Sorbo's ranch using a menu for a local pizza shop found in the thumbless agent's car. If pizza's not country, then how does a pizza place make money there? I can totally see eating pizza all the time being a bad thing, but once in a while, say when your mom's been shot like the kid in this film's was, isn't the end of the world. It's like it's what Hollywood's idea of small town life in Texas is. It's just more stupidity as far as I can tell, and indicative of the crap that's thrown together in this to make a DTV DVD.
In my review of Walking Tall: The Payback, I said that if that was the kind of stuff we had to look forward to, Sorbo would be in for a great DTV career like those in the DTVC Hall of Fame. Even in that one, though, I had a problem with a gang rape that had the same effect as the thumb amputation in this. Part 2 was fun enough to get past the attempt at forced darkness. This one, on the other hand, was too boring for me to ignore the sudden removal of digits. Avoid Walking Tall: Lone Justice, your brain will thank you.
For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804551/
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