Operation Seawolf has Dolph as a WWI sub commander who now, in the closing days of WWII, is sent on a mission to attack America's homeland. He gets a new sub, which is under another command, and now that he's taking over, they're not so sure they want to follow him. At the same time, Frank Grillo is giving orders from a chair in an office in the US, and he's telling Hiram A. Murray's anti-sub ship to find and take this submarine out. Will our man Dolph prevail? And should we be rooting for him since he's a Nazi?
This was actually good. More a drama than an actioner, but also a lot more Dolph than you'd expect from the cover--again, perhaps the fact that he's a Nazi may have meant we couldn't have him front and center on the cover. And they do attempt to mitigate the Nazi thing by having Dolph be someone who's against Nazis but wants to do his duty for his country, plus by having Hiram Murray's all-black unit being the one hunting them down. I think they do a better job with the former, but unfortunately they don't develop Murray's character and his crew enough to make them enough of a factor. What makes this all the way through is Dolph's performance. It's fully invested, and involves a lot of screentime, the latter of which is something we haven't from him in a long time--maybe since 2016's Don't Kill It as far as his DTV work. The Dolph performance combined with the ability to screen it free on Tubi makes this a definite watch.
We're now at 67 films for Dolph, with one more left in the can, 4Got10. Unlike Seagal though, who we finished up recently, Dolph has other ones coming up that will keep us busy before we need to dive into ones like Small Apartments or Seal Team or even Sharknado 5. The thing is, most of his new stuff involves him taking on smaller roles, which makes sense at this stage in his career, but something like this where he plays a mature character whose story is anchoring the film is a nice change of pace. Yes, the screens I took show him looking haggard or falling asleep, which might make you think this is more silly than serious, but it works, and it works because of Dolph's performance. As we make our way to getting him into the 70 Club, we'll probably see more smaller good roles, so when we get something more robust like this, we need to hold onto them like grim death.
We're firing up the Grillo again for the second time on our site. This is no Boss Level, what we have here is primarily a sit down role, where from time to time he stands up and uses a pencil to mark things on a map. He's supposed to be a WWII Commander, but he has a 2020s haircut and nicely sculpted modern five o'clock shadow. That's okay though, I'd rather have Grillo doing this role than anyone else, and the haircut and five o'clock shadow aren't as bad as Mickey Rourke's cowboy hat in War Pigs. We do have some more Grillo in the can, so this won't be the last time we fire up the Grillo, but it'll be interesting to see how much of his stuff we get on the site with all the other names we need to get to. He's a lot of fun, even in a small role like this, so even if we only see him every six months or so, it's better than nothing at all.
Ty and I remarked that perhaps the most surprising thing about this after the size and quality of Dolph's role, was the fact that we had an interesting sub movie! Most of the time DTV sub movies turn into the dreaded sub slog--you know the type, "excitement" by repetition with multiple scenes of commanders looking off somewhere with grim expressions on their faces saying "fire," while young male supporting characters push some buttons and look into some periscopes, while footage of torpedoes cruising through the water head toward a target as we're supposed to be watching with bated breath for something to happen. Where this works is the story is more compelling, and Dolph's performance makes it even more so. Then when we get action, more of it is above ground than below, which also helped. When you've been doing this as long as we have, eventually you see everything, and a sub movie that's not a slog is now one we've finally seen.
Finally, as we've been doing, we'll give Dolph another paragraph due to the volume of films of his we've covered on the site. Unlike Seagal who has a couple films in development, but no idea when they're coming out, Dolph has two films slated for release this year, plus what looks like three more DTV flicks and three big screen flicks coming after that. I don't know that he'll continue that pace, but we know he'll hit 70 this year, and if he keeps pumping out a few films a year, he could hit 80 in 2026--if we're still writing the site then. The thing is, his influence and ability to move the needle hasn't slowed much, meaning when he has something new come out, we need to prioritize it over other stuff we might have in the can. So not only does he have more then ten films between him and the person with the second-most films, Gary Daniels, but there's no way for him or anyone else to catch up when I'm a position where I need to review Dolph's new films before anyone else's. It's a massive legacy, one that will probably never be surpassed.
And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, you can stream this free on Tubi. Between the story and Dolph's performance, that's more than worth it. And if you haven't yet, check out the podcast episode where Ty and I discussed this, episode 120 in the archives, "A Dolph and Hotch UnSub with Grillo Cheese."
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13429928
And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!
No comments:
Post a Comment