Special Forces (2003)

In my attempt to get a more respectable percentage on Will's Films that Have an Exploding Helicopter Letterboxd list, here is one from Isaac Florentine that we hadn't covered that also had an exploding helicopter, so we kill two bird with one stone--which sounds horrible, I'm not killing any birds. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Simon at Explosive Action, and Mitch at The Video Vacuum have all covered this, so this is a Superfecta movie and then some.

Special Forces has Marshall Teague as the head of a special forces group that's called into a former Soviet Republic to pick up a young woman (Daniella Deutscher) who got in over her head there and is being held prisoner. So he gets his team (which includes DTVC favorite Tim Abell and Nitro from American Gladiators), they get in, go through some issues, then wait for the chopper to get them out. With 30 minutes left in the movie, it ain't so easy though. Said helicopter is blown up, most of Teague's team is killed, and he's captured. Will he and his remaining crew make it out alive?

This was a tale of two movies. The first hour was a cinematic version of that urban legend chain letter email your uncle sent you after 9/11, you know, the one about a Muslim convenience store owner laughing at the 9/11 news reports while watching CNN in his store, and the Pepsi/Coke distributor seeing it and pulling all his beverages out, something of course that never happened, but the first hour of this movie felt like it was made in the spirit of that jingoistic, racist urban legend chain email--and I'm probably not going too far to say that uncle that sent the email signed up for Facebook ten years later and made your life hell, only to be felled by the Delta Variant ten years after that because he wasn't vaccinated--RIP that uncle. Anyway, in that spirit, this movie hits all the tropes, yet does manage to eke out a few nice moments, like Teague and Abell's chemistry, or Scott Adkins popping in and having a few fun fights; but ultimately it is that movie, from the moment it starts, instead of American cowboys and Italian actors playing bad Native American stereotypes, we have American special forces and Lithuanians playing bad Arab stereotypes--which I guess they thought was too on the nose, so they moved the proceedings after that to a fictitious former Soviet Republic to soften the racism a bit while keeping all the jingoism. At that hour mark, when they get the girl and wait for the helicopter to bring them home, I'm thinking "what the hell are they going to do for another thirty minutes?" And that's when it gets ridiculous. We have Nitro from American Gladiators (Danny Lee Clark) running at enemy soldiers with a pair of grenades to take them out as some kind of valiant last stand, and if you asked me how I'd want Nitro to exit a film like this, you couldn't do it any better. Then we have a fantastic fight scene between Adkins and the baddie's second-in-command (Vladislav Jacukevic), which is the next level kind of stuff we want from Adkins and Florentine. And then the topper, the beautiful way Teague dispatches the baddie, the best baddie killing this side of Richard Lynch in Invasion USA. So where does that leave us? An hour of mediocre jingoistic retread material we've seen myriad times before with a few inspired moments, then a half-hour of fantastic ridiculousness. At least it's free on Prime, but I think if you're an action fan, you need to see those last 30 minutes.

That was a massive "what do I think" paragraph, so we'll tighten it up a bit as we discuss our two Hall of Famers, Scott Adkins and Isaac Florentine. This was early on in Adkins's career, but you can see where he was headed. It's as electric as you want from him, which, in that first hour, is just punching it up from the usual fare; but when the film turns for that last half-hour, he's there to deliver in this new over the top (Stallone style) world. For fans of his work, I don't know that it hits the heights of his best stuff, but it's still stuff you've gotta see. As far as Florentine, this is now 14 directed films for him on the site (15 depending on how you count Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon), and while I don't know if I'd put this as a whole above any of those other ones I've seen (Assassin's Bullet has the great cast that I think edges this out), that last half-hour is as good as almost everything else he's done for my money. It looks like we have three more of his films, and then we'll have all of his DTV feature directed covered, so I imagine we'll get that done sometime next year, which'll be great to see.

We get the great Marshall Teague as a hero for a change, and as I mentioned above, I really liked the chemistry he and Tim Abell had, someone we're also used to playing more baddies. It was like buddy cop mixed with two career servicemen who have been through a lot together. I get too that as two former servicemen themselves, after 9/11 they'd have wanted to play characters like these as opposed to their usual baddies, but the thing I realized in watching them here, is it's their baddies that elevate the movies they're in to another level. Look at Teague in A Dangerous Place, something that should've just been PM Entertainment's Karate Kid, but Teague's baddie is so sinister it makes the movie more than that; and we've talked about Abell's killer in Instinct to Kill, one of the most chilling performances we've seen on the site. As much as I liked them here, they're showing us the old adage that anyone can be the hero, but to bring it as a baddie like they have is something else. The other thing is, when the movie turns at the hour mark, Abell's character is killed off, which was a shock, but when you get to Teague's end fight with the main baddie (Eli Danker), it couldn't be as ridiculous as it needed to be if Abell was there.

Fans of the site are probably used to seeing Malibu from American Gladiators on here, but this is our first time seeing Nitro, aka Danny Lee Clark. The role he's playing in this is almost like Ian Jacklin without the Ian Jacklin, if that makes sense. Like you like the idea of Ian Jacklin in this part, but you don't want all the Ian Jacklin that comes with casting him. For example, Nitro's beautiful death scene probably doesn't work as well if you have Ian Jacklin doing it, he would've given you too much Jacklin, and I don't think that scene needed more Jacklin, it needed to straddle that razor-thin line between full-on earnestness and parody of itself. I was looking up Clark's bio, and while he doesn't have much, he has this interesting vanity project called Looking for Bruce that co-starred Paige Rowland from PM's Christmas classic Riot, and the recently departed Gil Gerard. Unlike Nitro, who doesn't have a lot of credits, it looks like Gerard had more than a few DTV films, including one called Nuclear Hurricane that he did with his Buck Rogers co-star Erin Gray, and was directed by Fred Olen Ray. Here's to you Mr. Gerard, you were one of the great ones.

Finally, as I mentioned above, the second-in-command baddie looks like the lead singer of Incubus. We also had a member of Teague's team that looked like Bryan from the Backstreet Boys. I could spend this whole paragraph saying how crazy it is that all of that is 25 years ago now, and that it's like classic rock or something, and how old I think I am at 46--and to be fair, my back does a better job of telling me that than music from 2000 being 25 years old. I went back and watched some Incubus videos just to get a better sense of them before I wrote this paragraph, and found a video Rick Beato did from seven years ago breaking down why "Pardon Me" is a great song, and maybe he's right, but all I hear is the New Metal wall of sound guitar rifts, mixed with record scratching because adding a DJ to your band was a thing then. It's not that I don't like that song, but is it something that makes me want to fire up YouTube just to hear it? Or sing along when I hear "Drive" in the drug store. What we didn't realize we were seeing with the New Metal and the Boy Band stuff is the beginning of the end of music as we knew it. Throw in the I Have More Money Than You rap songs, which begat the auto-tuned I Have More Money Than You rap songs, and the death knell was there, like a toxic fungus destroying the banana crop, and the spread of this fungus was hastened by the consolidation of radio stations after the Telecommunications Act was passed under Clinton. Forget "Drive" being a drug store song, now we have bands who only make drug store songs. So while Adkins wins the battle against the figurative corporate music industry in this film, we ultimately lost the war.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this free on Prime and a few other streamers in the US. While that first hour is a bunch of well-worn stuff you've seen myriad times before, that last half-hour is the stuff that dreams are made of, so as a free streamer it's worth checking out. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324038

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

 

211 (2018)

This was originally covered on episode 192 of the podcast, "Nepo Babies," which we did with Will from Exploding Helicopter, and I figured it was time to get it up on the site, especially since we want to get more Cage on here. In addition to us, Mitch from the Video Vacuum has covered this as well.

211 is a collision course to wackiness type affair, where a gang of mercenaries who want money that's being held in a bank in a small Boston suburb--err Sophia backlot--happen to rob it at the same time that two local police officers, Nicolas Cage and his son-in-law Dwayne Cameron, are in the area with their teenage ride-along, Michael Rainey Jr., who is stuck doing this ride-along because he committed the offense of "going to a rich private school while black." All hell breaks loose, and it doesn't get any better when we have a secondary thread following an Interpol agent played by Adrian Mutu's ex-wife, Alexandra Dinu. Can Cage save the day, and the movie?

He was able to save the day at least, and as Meatloaf once said "one out of two ain't bad." This movie hits all the spots of bad 2010s DTV featuring a big, one-time Hollywood star. Convoluted plot? Check. Eastern European location doubling for a US town? Check. The one-time Hollywood star playing a grizzled something or other? Check. The daughter of said one-time Hollywood's star's character played by a thin young woman with long hair, who wears jeans and flannel shirts, and has a difficult relationship with said one-time Hollywood's star's character? Check. Younger son-like character along for the ride? Check. Baddies who look like they were pulled from a Vegas night club on the weekend of a UFC event? Check. After we tick off all of those boxes, what are we left with? One moment where Cage goes off, and one fun moment where his actual son, Weston Cage, who's one of the baddies, has his dad in his sniper scope, but unfortunately they don't do more with it. The only realistic element of the movie is the fact that a young black male would be caught up in the system in a predominantly white Massachusetts suburb because he was trying to defend himself from white bullies in his school, and that the police officers he's doing the ride-along with wouldn't bother to ask about it and just treat him like a felon--and to that point, the moment where Cage does ask Rainey Jr. what happened was probably less realistic, I can't see real police officers caring either way. The other thing is, there are a lot of threads that never go anywhere. We meet the bank manager (Millennium mainstay Velizar Binev), and find out it's his anniversary. Very touching, only he gets a bullet to the dome by one of the baddies, and that's it. Why are we meeting him then? And while it's fun to reminisce about early 2000s European football, why is Alexandra Dinu's character in this, except as an Adrian Mutu conversation starter--and I must confess, I didn't know she was his ex-wife, Will told us on the podcast, but it opens up all kinds of doors for conversation, all of them more interesting than this movie. So maybe that's the best bet here, watch this with some friends who like DTV movies and European football, and let the tangents fly once Dinu appears on-screen.

This is now seven Cage films on the site, which doesn't seem like a lot considering how much he has out there for DTV stuff. The reason for this is he doesn't really get into the DTV world in earnest until about 2014, and that was about when I started my unplanned hiatus. If you look in the archives, in 2013 I had 96 reviews, and then in 2014 it's all the way down to 9, and in 2015 7, and then nothing until I came back in 2019. In 2014 he starts pumping these things out, doing like 2 or 3 a year, and this film here is right in the middle of that. By my count, there are over 30 DTV movies of his we haven't done yet, which would make him an automatic Hall of Famer if we did them all. It's an intriguing thought, and had I not gone on that unplanned hiatus, he'd probably already be in, because I would've been reviewing films like this that whole time. The other interesting thing I noticed, when you look at review counts on IMDb, they've been going down over time for most DTV flicks. For example, Bruce Willis had Acts of Violence come out the same year, and it had 38 critic review, compared to this film's 46. Then fast forward to 2023, where Willis's last film, Assassin, only had 23 critic reviews, while two films for Cage that year, Butcher's Crossing and The Old Way, had 55 and 63 critic reviews respectively, and some of his newer ones have even more. The Cage appeal and fascination never quite dimmed like it did for Willis and others like him--take 2022's Savage Salvation, which only has 19 critic reviews, despite having Robert De Niro in it--and now that we're seeing a Cage resurgence, it'll be interesting to see how many more of these DTV flicks he does, or if this will be a career capsule of 10 years and 30+ films, of which we had some real stinkers like this one, and some real gems like Pig.

As I mentioned above, the theme of the podcast episode I did with Will was "Nepo Babies," and the one in question here was Weston Cage, though Nicolas Cage is a nepo baby himself, being Francis Ford Coppola's nephew. (The other film we did was Dangerous, with Clint Eastwood's son Scott, a film I'm not sure if we'll review on here.) I think part of the draw for Nicolas Cage with this movie was that he could work with his son, even if they don't have any scenes together, and I can't fault him with that. And to Weston's credit, he does well enough as one of the baddies--though I think the scene of him smoking should've been cut, he didn't look natural smoking at all. Why not have him eat a sandwich instead? It's interesting that I'm writing this as the world has chosen a new pope--and you may think that as an American I'm excited by the first American pope, but he was part of the priest abuse cover-up, and I feel like we all missed out on not having a pope named Pizzaballa, which is a sign to me that the Catholic church is still behind the times--but anyway, the term "nepotism" came from the practice of popes in medieval Italy promoting their nephews--and "nephews," aka kids they fathered when they were supposed to be celibate--to high positions, so they could then be popes themselves. We see it in a lot of society, but in the acting world it's more glaring I think. I mean, would Weston Cage be in this film if he wasn't his father's son? And while Nicolas Cage has proven to be one of his generation's best actors, even if he changed his name so it wouldn't look like he was riding his famous uncle's coattails, none of it hurt, and probably at least greased the skids a bit so he could meet and network with the right people. On top of that, Will brought up the fact that as a nepo baby, these young actors have a safety net other people breaking into the business don't have the luxury of. They're not waiting tables or taking parts in ads for IBS meds to get work. If you factor that element in with the unforgiving economy we have, we'll probably see more nepo babies as the years go on, and they may take over the industry, the way upper-middle class children have taken over journalism in the US, because they're the only ones whose parents could support them through the unpaid internships that are part of the early stages of a journalist's career.

We have a new tag, and a new almost 40 Club member! Dian Hristov is the stunt coordinator, and I recognized his name as a Seagal stunt double in Belly of the Beast, so I thought I'd dig into his IMDb bio. Turns out he's done stunt work on almost 40 films we've reviewed here on the site! This is in large part due to the fact that he works with Millennium Films, and we've reviewed tons of their movies. And it's not just Seagal films. A lot of Dolph and a lot of Van Damme too, plus Isaac Florentine--who also produced this film, which is why he's tagged here. When you look at our October line up, we have a packed Hall of Fame class already, and while with him almost in the 40 Club, we can't not include him, we're already inducting Cole S. McKay, so he may have to wait until 2026. This begs another question: why isn't Millennial Films in the Hall of Fame? They have over 60 tags, plus a bunch more that I haven't tagged because I stopped keeping track. The short answer is, I don't know, but at least we'll get Hristov in eventually. Unlike Camacho, McKay, and Razatos, who worked in the 80s and 90s, and made the 90s the greatest DTV decade ever, Hristov is part of the DTV world's shift in the 2000s, but he helped make that a fun decade, and seems to have done his darndest to make the 2010s a little better too, despite where the market was going at that time. Here's to you Mr. Hristov, you're one of the greats.

Finally, you know if I teased Adrian Mutu in the opening paragraph, I was going to dedicate our penultimate paragraph to him, so here we are. In the early 2000s when I first had my own apartment out of college, I added the Fox Soccer Channel to my cable package, which meant every weekend I could watch my Arsenal and however many other Premier League teams every weekend. That was when I was introduced to Mutu, who was playing with Chelsea in the early 2000s, though what I remember more wasn't him playing for Chelsea, but the Sky Sports simulcasts on Mondays on Fox Soccer, where they updated us on his various scandals. He then went to Juventus, was part of two scudetto winning clubs, and then had those titles subsequently revoked as part of the Calciopoli scandal. The thing was, Serie A wasn't broadcast on Fox Soccer until later in the 2000s, when he was with Fiorentina, which was when I remembered him more. It's a name I hadn't thought of in maybe 15 years, so to have a 2018 DTV movie I'm discussing on the podcast be the thing that brings him back up is fantastic--and the fact that it wasn't on an episode with Scott Murphy from All 90s Action, All the Time, where we're known for having tangents on European football--and in fact have discussed Mutu's countryman, Gheorghe Hagi on a couple of occasions--is even more astounding. And this wasn't a tangent Will and I were on either, he brought it up as a notable fact about the film, which is even crazier. You just never know where these DTV films will take you.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently this is on a variety of streamers here in the States, including Plex, Fawesome, and the Roku Channel, so if you're interested, you can check this out in one of those places. I don't know that it's worth it though. What is worth it is checking out the pod episode Will and I did on this, number 192 in the archives, titled "Nepo Babies."

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4976192

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Acts of Vengeance (2017)

I say this a lot, but this is one I'd been meaning to do for some time now. It's directed by Isaac Florentine, and he's one I want to do all the films of. The problem was, it was on Netflix, then dropped; then it was on Prime, then dropped. Finally, it was on Tubi, but this time, when I saw the 5-day warning before it was removed, I made it happen. Out of the 40+ critic reviews, this has also been covered by Chad Cruise at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Tom Jolliffe at Flickering Myth, and Mitch at the Video Vacuum.

Acts of Vengeance has Antonio Banderas as a defense attorney whose wife and daughter are killed. In his misery, first he puts himself through getting his ass kicked in underground fights, and then actually learns to fight for real. He also takes a vow of silence and reads Marcus Aurelius's Meditation, and strikes out to find out who killed his family. Could it be the Russian mob? Maybe a case of wrong place at the wrong time? But would that make for a good movie? Well, at that point the only other two named actors we have are Paz Vega and Karl Urban, which one do you think did it?

Look at the font on that title screen! Is this a DTV actioner released on Netflix in 2017, or a 1992 TV movie of the week? "This week on the CBS Movie of the Week: Acts of Vengeance: A Perry Mason Mystery." Now granted, Isaac Florentine is bringing it from an action standpoint, especially when we have Tim Man as the fight choreographer--obviously you're not getting that in a 1992 Perry Mason TV movie, though William R. Moses could mix it up a bit if you need him. The other thing is we start out of the gate with a fight, but then we get the dreaded freeze frame with narration that tells us it's time for flashback mode. I don't need my Isaac Florentine actioner told in flashback mode. It's fascinating in something like Tough Guys Don't Dance, which is like this mess of a thing that all works in spite of itself, but an Isaac Florentine actioner starring Antonio Banderas doesn't want to work in that kind of energy, it's supposed to be a 90-minute action fest that I can relax and watch with a bag of Doritos and a Dr. Pepper on a Saturday night. And ultimately this has enough of those moments, especially with the Florentine-Man combination on the fight scenes, that it does what I need it to do, even if other aspects didn't work for me.

With his 13th directed film on the site, Florentine is in a five-way tie for third most all time for directors. Also, once I watch Hounds of War, his latest film, I'll have seen each of his last 10 directed movies (11 if you count Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon, which he had a part in directing with Albert Pyun), and I'll only have three more of his directed films to watch after that, at which point I'll have done them all. As a DTV action fan, he's the kind of director that you want to have seen everything by, and this movie, despite its flaws, is a great example of why. Yes, I could've done without the flashback-narration style of storytelling that this employs, as it does get in the way of the action; but the action is another level. I don't care that I'm on a Bulgarian back lot posing as Pittsburgh when the fights look nice. This might not be one of his best films, but Florentine's movies have a higher floor than most other filmmakers in the DTV world, which is what you want when you're watching a film from a director of his caliber--don't let that title screen fool you!

This is our third Antonio Banderas film here at the DTVC, the others being Machete Kills and The Big Bang, which, if you're wondering, is now joint-most on the site among Antonios with Antonio Fargas, and one ahead of Antonio Margheriti's two. Anyway, he does enough of what you want from a lead in a movie like this, he's sufficiently Antonio Banderas, so when you see him on the tin, you're not disappointed. It looks like he's been doing more DTV stuff recently, especially with a director I haven't explored yet, Jon Keeyes, but that means we can expected to see more of him on here, which I'll be excited for. My favorite stuff of his is his Almodovar, especially the films from the late 80s/early 90s. What a career arc for him, from Almodovar, to one of the biggest names in Hollywood, to DTV flicks with Isaac Florentine, imagine the film fests you could do with his work. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Desperado, and Acts of Vengeance would make for an interesting night one, right?

Among the other names in this, we have Karl Urban and Robert Forster who we've seen on the site before. Urban plays the cop who helps Banderas out when he's getting over his wife, and then we find out he also dabbles in underground fighting. Can't see him doing a heel turn, can you? Then Forster has one scene as Banderas's father in-law, and he gives him a hard time at the funeral. While it was fun to see Forster, if I were Banderas's character I wouldn't have taken any shit from him the way he did, but that's just me. Someone we haven't seen here yet--and another Almodovar alum--is Paz Vega, though we did cover Rambo: Last Blood for the DTVC Extra podcast, and she was in that. She's really good here, and with Banderas gave this an elevated feeling--which was betrayed by that opening title screen, but what can ya do?

Finally, you'd think with the song "All I Have to Do Is Dream" by the Everly Brothers featured that that would be the focus of this penultimate paragraph, as I'm a big fan--and who wouldn't be, they were the greatest rock duo ever, even Rolling Stone agreed (though that list is pretty dubious beyond them at the top. Like no Hall and Oates at all, the duo that broke all the records the Everly Brothers set, or Steely Dan all the way down at 15? Classic Rolling Stone, I guess we should just be happy they didn't put Outcast and the White Stripes above the Everly Brothers too!). At this stage you could say I've already done the paragraph on the Everlys, but I needed to also mention that Urban's character was named "Strode," which is similar to "Stroad," a term in Urbanist circles that refers to a thoroughfare that tries to be both a multi-access street and a limited-access high-speed road, and ultimately fails at both. America is teaming with them, and as someone who doesn't drive, they're a menace. Four, sometimes six lanes of traffic, flanked by massive strip malls, fast food drive-thrus, and big box stores, all with massive parking footprints, none of which is intended for someone like me on foot. The stroad is American car dependency at it's most bonkers, and while you'd think living in a city like Philadelphia I can avoid them, unfortunately not quite, as Roosevelt Boulevard is the most dangerous stroad in the country, and even Oregon Avenue here in South Philly turns into one on both it's east and west termini, and while it's not as bad as the stroad of the suburban sprawl, if we have a housing emergency after the local hardware stores have closed, I need to navigate that mess of cars and parking and dangerous intersections to get what we need at Home Depot, and then navigate it all home. Every time Banderas said Urban's character's name, "Strode," I just thought of massive intersections with short, or maybe busted walk signals, and cars coming in and out of entrances that I need to dodge. It made my pulse elevate.

And with that, we leave my treatise on the stroad and American car dependency, and I'll wrap this up. It looks like no sooner than this was dumped from Tubi that Prime, Plex, and the Roku Channel picked it up, so you can catch it there. It probably fits better in an Isaac Florentine movie night than an Antonio Banderas one, but who knows, maybe pair it with Matador or Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and it may work.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6288694

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Close Range (2015)

As we wrap up the month of October, our last 2022 Hall of Fame inductee is our director pick, Isaac Florentine. This film is one I've had in the can to review for a long time, but had been putting it off because there were so many newer Adkins films I wanted to review; but with this being Florentine's induction post, I figured this was the chance to do it, as I thought this film really spotlights what Florentine does best. In addition to us, Comeuppance, Bulletproof, and Cool Target have all covered this as well.

Close Range has Adkins as a former special forces guy who is wanted by the military after he refused to carry out an order. On the run, he's like a samurai without a master, a ronin, a gun for hire. That changes when his sister (Caitlin Keats) needs him to rescue his niece from some drug cartel guys her horrible new husband has run afoul of. He does, but in the process erroneously steals a flash drive they have that contains all their cartel admin information, and they want it back--how can they do payroll without those spreadsheets? So they lay siege to the sister's ranch in Arizona, helped by local sheriff Nick Chinlund in his most Chinlund-iest. Can Adkins take all these guys down and protect his family?

Spoiler alert: yes. This is the high-octane action Florentine and Adkins are known for. Great stunts, great action sequences, well-shot, well-performed. The film clocks in at about 80 minutes, and within that 80 minutes there aren't many down moments, we go from action sequence to action sequence. On the other hand, there isn't a lot of plot here, and what plot we do have is well-worn territory, so there might be a question of "this movie had all this great stuff, but what are we left with?" I get that, and even further, we have an Adkins with an American accent, shaved head, and goatee over top of five o'clock shadow, making him pretty one-note despite the great action scenes. So in answer to that question, what we're left with is a straight-ahead actioner that doesn't let the plot, as paint-by-numbers as it is, get in the way of the action, with a hero who, while he may be pretty one-note, is still Adkins bringing it. I'll take this over a lot of DTV action films from the 2010s, and while it may not make any best of lists, it also doesn't do anything too egregious to upset us, which is important. For an evening time killer as a free streamer, this does the trick for me.

Usually we start with Adkins in this paragraph, but since this is Florentine's induction post, we should start with him. In an age where DTV is moving in more of a Bourne/Taken-Damon/Neeson quick edits approach to make the non-action lead look like an action lead, Florentine is one of the few out there who still looks to make solid, well-shot, well-performed, actioners. The knock on his earlier stuff is that he was too wedded to his sound effects--looking at you Bridge of Dragons--but he's always been true to the genres he came up in, notably martial arts, Japanese samurai, and Westerns, and this film has all of that. We generally think of him as one of two main directors who's doing great stuff with Adkins, along with Jesse V. Johnson, but Florentine has actually worked with almost every big name, from Dolph, to Van Damme, to Gary Daniels, even guys like Michael Jai White and Olivier Gruner. This is now 15 tags for him, but one was for his stunt work on American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, and another was him as producer on Boyka: Undisputed, which he couldn't direct due to the tragic passing of his wife. 13 director tags is third all-time, behind Albert Pyun and Fred Olen Ray. While he doesn't have the output to keep up with a Ray, or to probably ever catch Pyun, there are a few in the back catalog that I can still get to, plus it looks like he's made some stuff recently that's in various stages of post-production. His ultimate legacy to me is taking what we loved about 90s action, and staying true to it into the 2000s, 2010s, and now 2020s, at a time when the industry has been moving in another direction. Hopefully the industry will follow his lead and swing the pendulum back toward what he's doing.

Now to Mr. Adkins. I think when I had this listed for our Hall of Fame induction posts, people probably expected that it would be him getting this honor, but I was thinking he's not quite there yet. In looking at his IMDb bio though, he probably is, and I was just looking at his overall tags and not his overall body of work. We're now at 23 tags for him, but on top of that, I have five others I've watched and haven't reviewed, plus he has some others on free streaming sites that I haven't seen yet, so we could potentially get him to 30 next year. It sounds aggressive, but as we near having all of Dolph and Seagal's stuff up, there are going to be more openings for posts, and with his output, he'd be poised to take more of those openings. This film typifies what he brings to the table, solid martial arts and action sequences, and a strong leading man presence that makes him one of the best in modern DTV action. The one problem this has, and that many he does with Florentine have, is him speaking in an American accent. It's not that he doesn't have a good one, it's more that I'd rather he play a Brit, like he does in Jesse V. Johnson's movies. Maybe Florentine will see the light on that. One can only hope.

Chinlund. It doesn't get more Chinlund-y than Chinlund, and this film brings the Chinlund-iness. It's maybe not Chronicles of Riddick level Chinlund-iness, but it's pretty Chinlund-y. It's one of those things where a filmmaker says "my move needs a certain Chinlund element," they see if he's available, and if he is, it's an ingredient that's hard to approximate with anyone else. What it does here is gives us instant bad, corrupt sheriff with little-to-no backstory, perfect for an 80-minute actioner that wants to spend more time on the action than the plot. As an ingredient, I don't think he'd be MSG, probably more like Lowry's Season Salt, where you can sprinkle him in and add a flavor to the film without a lot of effort. We don't see him often here at the DTVC--I think the only other time was Felon--in part because bigger productions also want to add the Chinlund flavor to their films, so for Florentine to get him here was a nice change of pace, and again, that flavor we got by adding him really helped in an 80-minute actioner with minimal plot development.

 

Because Florentine tends to focus on the action in his movies, if his plots are thinner they tend to be trope-filled as a result, but I noticed he tried to mitigate one in particular: "the white man dispatching the faceless brown hoard." Here we had Adkins as your American hero, fighting a gang of Mexican cartel baddies. Only one year after this came out Donald Trump became president primarily by race-baiting white Americans on the prospect of the "brown hoard" coming across the border to take their jobs and commit crimes. Florentine must've been cognizant of that vibe, so he tried to mitigate it by individually introducing us to each of the Mexican cartel baddies as they were driving out to Adkins's sister's ranch. The problem was, it was a clunky device, and I don't know that slapping that on was enough to get past what is so embedded in the rest of the film, especially since this is a trope that's been established in American movies since those Westerns Florentine was influenced by were being made decades ago. The reality is, Mr. Florentine, they all ruined it for you, if you make a movie like this, you can't divorce it from that tradition. The better mitigation technique would have been to have Mexican characters who weren't cartel baddies, but that could've weighed down his film in ways no one wanted. Despite the fact that it may not have worked though, I think Florentine needs to be given credit for at least recognizing it was an issue, and trying to mitigate it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this on most free streaming sites in the US, and I think that's the best way to go. I was trying to think where I rank this for Adkins films, and while it may not be a top one, it's also not anywhere near his worst either. For Florentine, this is another solid actioner at a good runtime with not a lot getting in the way of his well-shot and well-performed stunt work, and in 2022 when you're looking for something fun to stream on a Saturday night, maybe that's all you need. Congratulations to Florentine for getting into the Hall of Fame this year, you're truly one of the greats, and we look forward to what you have in store for us next.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3511596

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Seized (2020)

I was doing a search of Scott Adkins on my cable box to see if anything new was available, and sure enough, it was this bad boy, now streaming on Netflix after only being available to rent for the past year here in the States. It looked like it could be good, but with all the Adkins streaming for free that I still had to watch, I couldn't justify paying to rent it until I'd exhausted those first. In addition to us, our friend Todd Gaines at Bulletproof Action has covered this, so you can go there to see what he thought. Now, without any further ado.

Seized has Adkins as a former special forces guy trying to live a quiet life in Mexico, which just never seems to work for these former special forces guys, and sure enough, a big drug cartel head, Mario Van Peebles, kidnaps his son and forces him to take out Van Peebles's competition. The question is, can this paint-by-numbers plot that we've all seen plenty of times before be elevated above it's paint-by-numbers-ness by Adkins, Van Peebles, Isaac Florentine's direction, and DTVC 40 Club member Art Camacho's fight choreography?

 

And really that was the only intrigue in the film once we understood what the plot was going to be, and I think I can give this a yes... kinda. The action sequences are everything you'd want with Adkins in the lead, Florentine directing, and Camacho choreographing. There's one near the end where Adkins has his hands taped behind him that's particularly inspired. By the same token, we've seen this film plenty of times before--I mean just the same year Adkins had Legacy of Lies, where he was ex-special forces being forced to work for the baddies, only it was is daughter that was kidnapped; and then Debt Collectors he wasn't ex-special forces, but we had the same construct, this time with he and Louis Mandylor's boss as the one kidnapped. Yes, this movie may have done better to mitigate the issues that come with this construct, but I think we still have "the son was kidnapped at the 13-minute mark, what are we going to do for plot for the next 75 minutes beyond 'give me my son back!' 'I will if you do this job for me!'?" I guess a few sweet Adkins action scenes isn't a bad way to pass the time though.

This is twenty for Adkins here on the DTVC, and I think if anything, this one solidifies him as the man right now. I also really loved that Florentine decided to allow Adkins to be a Brit, which he seldom does. Hopefully in future collaborations Florentine sees how much better that is, and, other than the Boyka movies, he goes with it. Out of his 2020 films, as of this writing I still haven't seen Dead Reckoning, but I've heard bad things, so I feel safe in saying I think this was my favorite of those. In fact, I think if I put all of his films from 2018-2020 together, this might be third for me after Avengement and Accident Man. On the one hand, that's great that this is third among 13 or so films for me; but on the other, this had its flaws, and there is a sense in looking at all the others from those three years that there is an issue of quantity above quality. I went back through some similar stars, like Dolph and Seagal, and really, other than Ron L. Marchini's unmatched run of 7 fun movies in a row, no one can put out a bunch of films and not have duds mixed in, so I think in Adkins's case, maybe the fact that he's able to pump out as many as he can and not have as many duds as other stars is the thing to hang his hat on? That and his too sweet actions scenes in this film.

 

Before I saw that this was available on Netflix, my next Mario Van Peebles film was going to be The Exterminator 2, which I watched some time ago for the Robert Ginty episode of the podcast I did with Ty and Brett from Comeuppance Reviews, so that's still coming, but I decided to bump this up in the review queue. What I appreciated here is, this is exactly the kind of baddie an actor of Mario Van Peebles's stature could have mailed in, because we've seen it myriad times here from other people--Bruce Willis?...--but because he didn't it added a level of quality to the film beyond your standard DTV yarn about a former special forces guy whose child is kidnapped and the guy is forced to do bad things. I think that, along with the other factors I mentioned above made this a fun time; it does feel weird though, doesn't it, to be applauding someone for doing their job and not mailing it in? I guess that's where we're at in the modern DTV world, but I think it's also testament to who Van Peebles is as a consummate professional.

We're already at paragraph six, and I'm finally getting to the film's one Hall of Famer and 40 Club Member, Art Camacho. This is film 47 here, so he's closing in on the hallowed territory of the 50 Club, which currently only has two members in Dolph and Gary Daniels. As I mentioned above, here he's involved in the film as fight choreographer, and the work is exemplary--again another element that elevates this beyond a plot we've seen so many times before. The question then is, is the 50 Club on the table for him? If you follow his Instagram page, he posts a lot of great behind the scenes stuff from what he's working on, including some R. Ellis Frazier joints; plus we have some PM Entertainment flicks that he worked on that we still have to review, so I imagine 50 is around the corner for him, it's just a matter of when we're able to make it all happen.

 

Speaking of R. Ellis Frazier--who was executive producer of this--I decided to spotlight one of Frazier's mainstays, Luis Gatica, who played one of the rival cartel heads. I generally watch an R. Ellis Frazier film for whoever the main lead is, like Dolph or Gary Daniels, but Gatica always turns in a solid, professional performance that brings a depth to whatever role he's playing that helps overcome any shortcomings the production he's on might have in terms of budget and resources. Had this not been directed by Isaac Florentine or starring Adkins and Van Peebles, Gatica probably would have been Van Peebles's part in an R. Ellis Frazier-directed version of the movie, so seeing him as a smaller baddie role in a way felt like we were wasting his talents; at the same time though, that skill of providing depth to whatever role he's playing took this small part and made it something more than "Cartel Leader no. 4." I'm sure as long as R. Ellis Frazier is making movies, Gatica will be working in them, so I know this won't be the last time we see him. Here's to you Mr. Gatica, you're one of the great ones.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing this, Seized is available on Netflix, but who knows how long they'll keep it up for, so get in while the gettin's good. If you remember last week, Larceny has gone MIA since Netflix decided to take it down, so you never know with them. And also if you remember last week, I was contemplating dumping my Netflix subscription because of how they dump movies. They must've been listening. "We can't lose Matt as a subscriber! Let's put Seized up and see if that keeps him for another month." All right guys, you've got another month out of me...

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7221772

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

American Cyborg: Steel Warrior aka Steel American Cyborg Warrior (1993)

Last weekend, my wife saw in a forum that a fundamentalist televangelist who ran a congregation that focused on women being thin for their husbands and for God, died in a plane crash, along with her family members. It turned out, her husband was none other than Joe Lara. I couldn't believe it, and felt I needed to cover one of his films in my next review, so here we are. In addition to us, our friends at Explosive Action, Ninja Dixon, The Video Vacuum, and last but not least, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance have all reviewed this, so you can go to their sites to see what they thought--in addition to Entertainment Weekly, who had some fun things to say about it. Now it's time for us to say our things about it.

American Cyborg: Steel Warrior (or Steel American Cyborg Warrior as the opening title puts it) takes place in a post-apocalyptic future (what other future is there?) where cyborgs rule, humans drool, and since we're all infertile, the cyborgs figure it's better to herd us into cities and let us die out rather than fight a war with us. Then a lady has a fertile egg that results in a test tube baby, who is now a fetus that needs to get to Europe so he can live. The problem is a cyborg is after them, and as the lady escapes, she meets a strapping young man, Joe Lara, who offers to help her get to safety.

 

Had this movie been made today, I'd be killing it for its repetitive wash, rinse, repeat plot: cyborg comes, Lara fights off cyborg, he and the lady, Nicole Hansen, run away, they relax, and the the cyborg shows up and they do it all over again. But this 90s Cannon effort had the look and feel of an Albert Pyun film from five years before--without his added Pyun-ness that made those work more of course, but it was enough of the look and feel to transcend its obvious issues. Lara works as the hero, Hansen was good as the woman toting around a yoga mat and a bank drive-up capsule for the deposit tube with a fetus in it, and John Saint Ryan was good as the Rob Halford-esque leather-clad baddie. Again, it's the kind of thing that, if it were made today, I'd be killing it; but in the 90s, it has enough nostalgia for me to work a bit more.

This is only our sixth Lara post on the site, which doesn't seem like a lot, unless you consider that he didn't do that much, and then it makes a bit more sense. One of the last ones we'd done was Final Equinox, which me, hilarious guy that I am, referred to as "Final Deep Cheek-quinox" after a porn film my buddy and I saw on a porn shop shelf called Deep Cheeks. I was also pretty rough on him when I reviewed that one, saying "I didn't understand the concept of Joe Lara." On the other hand, there's Hologram Man, which I have 4th on my all-time PM list, and it's 4th in large part because of Lara, not in spite of him. I think why Hologram Man and this film work more than Final Deep Cheek-quinox is that they knew how to use Lara properly. He didn't have the rugged good looks of a Dolph, Van Damme, or even Lorenzo Lamas; Lara was dare I say pretty, but in the right roles, he could transcend that and be a real lead. According to IMDb he hadn't really done anything since the early 2000s, but his passing is still a shock and an immense loss. Here's to you Mr. Lara, you were one of the great ones, and you will be missed.

Previously when I did Street Knight I said it was the last Cannon production; and when I did Hellbound I said it was the last Cannon Group film. This film had the distinction of being the last one released theatrically in the US by Cannon--where it grossed just under a half-a-million. It was also the last team-up of Golan and Globus. It definitely doesn't have the quality of those 80s Cannon actioners, as this film bounces from abandoned warehouse to abandoned factory to abandoned tunnel--and may even be reusing sets. We can see the effects of the losses on Masters of the Universe and Superman IV onscreen in front of us. Yet there's also an inimitable Cannon quality that does shine through and makes this more endearing. Put with Street Knight and Hellbound, there's an odd vibe, similar to when you go to a store that's going out of business. Something's ending with these movies, a wave is cresting, and while we had a second wave in PM Entertainment that was building strength behind it, that Cannon wave was something special that we may never get back again. We often lament the state of the current overall DTV market, but maybe what we got with Cannon in the 80s and then PM in the 90s was a beautiful anomaly that we'll just never see again. It was definitely great while it lasted.

In the trivia on IMDb, they quoted an article Nicole Hansen did where she said a revised version of the script had her getting nude and doing love scenes every five minutes. She objected, thinking they'd use a double for the scenes, but instead Cannon agreed and cut them out, which allegedly upset the film's director, the great producer Boaz Davidson. It looked like one way he got back at her was by having as many scenes as possible where she got wet. "Oh, my skin is burning from acid rain, let me dump water all over me!" "Oh, I need to get to the ocean to meet the boat that will take me to Europe, why don't I walk out into the water and let the waves wash over me." These were the days before wet look leggings, so Boaz had to create the effect on his own I guess. To her credit, Hansen does a great job with it all. When I looked her up, I discovered that we'd seen her before, in the Michael Dudikoff Dirty Dozen flick Soldier Boyz. Brophey!

 

Finally, you'll notice we tagged Isaac Florentine. That's because he was the martial arts choreographer. That makes this the second time we've tagged him for something other than director work, the other being Boyka, which he couldn't direct due to the passing of his wife, but did produce. If you look at his filmography, I think this is contiguous with his first feature film as a director, Desert Kickboxer, which I haven't seen yet. When we think of DTV directors who aren't in the Hall of Fame, he may not have the numbers that a guy like Jim Wynorski has, but the action hits really stand out. By my count we have six more movies of his left to do, which will put him at close to 20 tags. Maybe we should see how those six go, but I have a feeling he's on his way.

But this wasn't meant to be an Isaac Florentine post, it was meant to be a Joe Lara post, so let's wrap this up. I think Hologram Man would be a better way to celebrate Lara's life and career, but this one isn't bad either. The other thing is this is only available to rent on streaming, while Hologram Man is free on Tubi. Lara may not have been at that Dolph level, or even Daniels level, of DTV action, but he still made very valuable contributions. I'll say it again, here's to you Mr. Lara, you were one of the greats, and you will be missed.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109098

And if you haven't yet, check out my novel, Chad in Accounting, in paperback or on Kindle!

Boyka: Undisputed aka Boyka: Undisputed IV (2016)

Scott Adkins is back, and back with a character he's become well-known for. It was sitting in my Netflix queue for a long time, and once I got back into doing the site again, I figured I'd make it happen. Of course, now it's no longer on Netflix, because, as we know, that's how Netflix gets down. In addition to us, our friends Ty and Brett at Comeuppance and Mitch at the Video Vacuum have covered this, plus Bulletproof Action, so you can go to their sites to see what they thought as well. Now, without any further ado.

Boyka: Undisputed has Adkins back as the eponymous hero. He's making it happen in Eastern Europe as an MMA fighter, and he's ready to make the big time. That's until he accidentally kills his opponent in the ring. Now, right before his big break, he sneaks back into Russia to make amends with the fighter's wife, Alma. Turns out, her husband was into a local mob boss for a lot, and that debt reverted to her when he died. To pay it off, she's working as a waitress at his club at night--a club that just so happens to host fights as well. Boyka makes a deal with the mob boss to fight for him to pay off Alma's debt. The thing is, mob boss aren't good about keeping their deals.

 

This was really good. In terms of the Adkins films I've seen, I'm not sure where I'd rank it. Definitely after Avengement, probably after Savage Dog, but maybe above Accident Man? Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning? This takes the Boyka character to another level, as Adkins delves into him more and really flexes his acting chops; but by the same token, the action and fighting never suffers. It's like the filmmakers and Adkins know what we want from this movie, but then Adkins and the filmmakers also want to do something a bit more with it, and they're able to do both without sacrificing either. We seldom see that kind of mix in a movie, let alone a DTV production. 

Since I've been back from hiatus, we've seen some great Adkins, and as I mentioned above, this definitely is one of those. The action and fight scenes are the kind of high-octane stuff we love from him; at the same time, he acquits himself well in the dramatic scenes as well. He did an interview with our friend Jon from After Movie Diner for his Booth Talk podcast, and he told Jon that the common knock on action actors is that they can't act, which was something he wanted to prove wrong. I think that's part of how these guys all are, they're very competitive and very driven to succeed, and so even if we don't need them to be great at their dramatic scenes, the idea of not being good at something is such anathema to them that they need to be good at that too. For sure I can say in this one, at least in my opinion, he made it happen.

 

Isaac Florentine didn't direct this outing, but he did produce it, so I gave him the tag. According to the IMDb trivia, Florentine's wife passed away, which is really sad and explains why he was unable to direct. Stepping up for this one is Todor Chapkanov, who has had some second unit director credits on a lot of DTV flicks, including Boa vs. Python, which was the first film we ever reviewed here on the site. I think that second unit director experience works well here, because Todor seems to do this well in the style and feel of a Florentine film, which I really liked. In 2020, Florentine and Adkins put out Seized, which I haven't seen yet, but our friend Todd Gaines at Bulletproof Action reviewed it and said it was great, so I'll have to check it out--I mean, I would have to check it out anyway because I'll have to do all the Adkins DTV films eventually one way or the other.

The final fight in this is with Martyn Ford, and he is a beast of a man. 6'8", 300+ lbs. body builder, looks like Sagat from Street Fighter. The thing is, he has one fight at the beginning, and then we don't see him again until the end. It speaks to what this movie was about, Boyka's redemption, not the standard fight film where Boyka needs to train to overcome this extreme challenge. When you juxtapose that with the paint-by-numbers that was Kickboxer: Retaliation, you can see how this really did something different and made decisions that really were different in trying to pull that off. More movies should look at some of the choices that were made in Boyka and realize that they don't need to stick to the same old tropes when they're making their movies. You can take chances, and as you can see in this, the chances can work too.

 

Let's wrap this up by talking about how big Adkins's career could be in just the DTV action world alone. He's been putting out 4 or 5 movies a year for the last five years or so, and it doesn't look like he's slowing down anytime, as he had five this year alone, when a lot of stars don't have anything coming out. This is going to be his 17th on the site, and by my count, I have 18 more I need to do, some of which I've seen and just need to write the review on. But you can see, if he keeps on his current pace, he'll have another 15-20 in a few years that are eligible to review here too. Other than the backlog of Fred Williamson movies I need to catch up on, no one else has that kind of potential for films on our site. What will be fun, if that is the case, is we'll see the bulk of the progression of his career evolve in front of us throughout the time the site has existed, which is really cool.

And with that, it's time to end this post. You were able to get this through Netflix until they dumped it. I think now you may need to pay to rent it, which isn't horrible, but it would be nice if Tubi or another free streaming site could pick it up. I could say this about a lot of Adkins's 2010s catalog, which is too bad, because his action counterparts like Dolph and Seagal have a ton more of their films from this era available. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3344680

Ninja II aka Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013)

This is a movie that I'd been looking to get to for some time, so when I started doing the DTVC podcast with Jamie, I saw this as a great opportunity to make it happen. On this episode we also had long time friend of the site Karl Brezdin at Fist of the B-List, who has a great site and was a great contributor to the pod. Speaking of friends of the site, our friend Mitch at The Video Vacuum also covered this, so you can go there to see what he thought of this flick.

Ninja II is a sequel to the first Ninja, where Isaac Florentine and Scott Adkins team up again to give us 90 minutes of pure awesome. Adkins's wife, Mika Hijii, is killed by a bad person, and Adkins naturally wants revenge. His revenge leads him to Thailand and the ninja dojo of friend Kane Kosugi. Turns out these killers are linked to a drug ring operating out of Myanmar run by Shun Sugata, which is where our ninja is headed to take care of business so bad that Myanmar is knocked back to being called Burma.

As I said, this is 90 minutes of pure awesome. Jamie loved it so much she watched it twice and put that pic of Adkins from the film beheading the baddie as her Facebook banner. All the complaints I made about the first one were erased. We had no Adkins running away, we had all Adkins as a bad ass performing in great fight scene after great fight scene. There is no shaky cam here, no special effects cheating, just good ol' fashioned well choreographed and well performed martial arts battles. For my money, this is one of the few modern flicks that can take the Pepsi Challenge with any of the greats from the 80s and 90s.

Let's start with Mr. Adkins, because he was perfect in the lead, and perfect as all of our new celebrity crushes. Jamie loved him, and you can see why. He's someone who grew up in the 80s like the rest of us, loving the films we love, and as such he brings that kind of commitment to the role, which comes out in the final project. When talking about who might be the head of the next wave to take over after the old guard retires (or we get sick of them!), Scott Adkins needs to be at the top of the list with Michael Jai White. The one thing I think we do need more of though: Adkins with his natural English accent.

Isaac Florentine has been directing great martial arts actions films for some time now, and seeing this I was reminded of just how important he is in keeping DTV action films the way we want them: good fights, well-choreographed and well-shot, and not a pile of shaky cam where we can't see and which is covering up for substandard fight scenes. Isaac Florentine, like Adkins, is a fan of martial arts films, in particular Hong Kong films from the 70s, and that shows in the way his films are done. We need to show these studios that we need more legit directors like Isaac Florentine, Albert Pyun, and John Hyams making these films; that it's not good enough to just throw a stuntman or set designer in for his or her first ever directorial debut, nor good enough to go in after the director is finished and edit the hell out of it. We need to speak with our wallets and support more Ninja IIs.

I want to go back to the discussion on Adkins being the next guard, and really overall the future of the action genre, not only in the DTV world, but also on the big screen. Since the Bourne Identity, where deft split-second edits were used to turn Matt Damon into an action lead, action films have been following suit, making action stars out of non-action folk, most notably now Liam Neeson; but also has allowed older action stars like Steven Seagal and Sylvester Stallone a longer action film shelf life.  How does a Scott Adkins break into the mainstream in this environment? He gets a part as the baddie's number 1 henchman in Expendables 2, and that's about the extent of it. Is DTV and Isaac Florentine flicks the best we can do? And on some levels, is that maybe better? I don't know, I think we need to get to a point where we're not just rumoring about Scott Adkins as Batman, but it's a reality.

Among the other stars in the film, as I mentioned above Mika Hijii returns to reprise her role from part 1. It's a very small part, and she gets most of her screen time in flashbacks. I have a hunch that if there's a third one, she'll be back, having used some kind of ninja magic to fake her death. You can't keep Mika Hijii away that long. As we mentioned above, Kane Kosugi plays Adkins's buddy. He's fantastic as well, and like many actions fans, we've been rockin' with him for a long time, since he (and we) were very young in the early 80s and he was in his father, Sho Kosugi's, films. When talking about Adkins potentially heading the next class of action stars to take over from the old guard, you need to put Kane Kosugi in there as well. His final scene with Adkins was spectacular. Finally, the great Shun Sugata plays the main baddie, and he's fantastic as well. Among the 100-plus films to his credit, the only other one we've done here is Bunraku, but I'm sure readers will know him for a variety of other things, from The Last Samurai to Kill Bill and Ichi the Killer.

Is there any question about where I'm going on this one? It's a must, especially now while it's on Instant. This is one of the best action films, DTV or otherwise, in the past ten years or so. Go check it out, or if you're like Jamie, you can go see it again, it's that good. I want to thank Karl again for coming on the podcast. Remember, you can check him out at Fist of the B-List. And as far as our podcast goes, subscribe on your favorite podcatcher, of follow the links in the sidebar.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2458106/

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/

Assassin's Bullet (2012)

I saw this was on Netflix, and I was looking to get more of Christian Slater's DTV flicks up here anyway, so I decided to go with it.  I also liked the idea of doing a flick with Donald Sutherland and Timothy Spall in it.  Oh yeah, and it's directed by DTV action great Isaac Florentine.  How could I not review this?

Assassin's Bullet has Christian Slater as a former FBI agent who is now working in Sofia, Bulgaria for the US government's ESL program there.  At the same time, there's a vigilante assassin killing Muslim baddies in the capital city, and after a time US ambassador Donald Sutherland has Slater take the case.  As things unfold, he's finding strange connections between the assassin and a belly dancer he met at a local club, and a female patient his psychiatrist friend Timothy Spall has.  Will he be able to crack the case?



I don't know what to do with this one.  It had some great Florentine-esque action, but this wasn't an action film per se, and a lot of the scenes were action-less; yet, at the same time, Florentine still managed to infuse some levels of action into them.  I enjoyed Slater, Sutherland, Spall, and Elika Portnoy, who was the female lead.  The ultimate issue that fells many films like this, and which felled this one for me, is that it had too many people were involved in the writing (in this case three), which meant things were all over the place, perhaps worst of all at the end, where we really don't even get any resolution, the classic lazy denouement.  I think it had a lot of things it wanted to do, and just didn't know how to do it all in 90 minutes, which unfortunately means the totality of the film suffers.

As I said above, I did enjoy Slater though.  His character seemed to be as much all over the place as other aspects of the film, but at its core it made sense as a former FBI agent dealing with the death of his wife four years before.  He seemed like a genuinely nice guy, which helped.  I remember one scene where he determined where the assassin killed someone from, out on some bank across the river from where they were, and as he was walking past a couple local detectives, he patted one on the arm, out of some sort of camaraderie that I didn't know he had with them; but he's just that kind of a nice guy.  It's been 25 years since Heathers came out, and it's cool to see Slater still getting after it that many years later, whether it's DTV or Big Hollywood.



I remember when we reviewed Recoil, writer Johnny Sullivan (Twitter @johnnyblackout) mentioned that it was directed by Terry Miles, who to that point had worked in more dramatic pictures.  It worked out really well then, to have a big action writer like Sullivan matched up with a dramatic director like Miles, because the two could add things the other didn't offer, creating a more complete movie.  We had a measure of that here, with Isaac Florentine as an action director adding action to scenes that were purely dramatic.  One in particular involved the belly dancer seducing Slater.  There was a lot of quick edits, loud clapping, even sharp movements in what is an otherwise slow, rhythmic kind of a scene.  He also injected his kind of action into the action scenes, one born of great Hong Kong films, which I really liked to see.  I'd rather see him do more action oriented films in the future, but it was cool to see him do something like this too.

It was fun to finally get a Donald Sutherland film on here, another actor I grew up watching.  He's not in this entirely much, but when he's there, he's Sutherland, and he's great.  I was also excited to get a Timothy Spall film up, because, as far as I can tell, I haven't done one of his yet either.  I thought I had, but looking at his imdb page, I guess not.  He was equally Spall the way Sutherland was Sutherland, which makes both cool to see in this film.  Elika Portnoy played the female lead.  There is some mystery behind her character, so the best I can give you is "female lead", and tell you she was good too.  Also, it's her story that was turned into the screenplay.  I wonder how much of her original idea made it into the final project, if all of it.



Finally, we know I often discuss the attire of the actors in these films, especially when I see an abhorrent fanny pack on the hero.  This isn't anything so egregious, but it is noteworthy.  Slater's scarf here is very hipster meme-ish, no?  Like maybe the "Hipster Barista Meme"?  "Why did the Hipster wear the scarf in the summer?  He was cold before it was cool."  I'm not good enough at the Internet to do these things, but wouldn't it be great to have a Christian Slater Hipster Meme?  "Won't talk about Heathers.  Too many GIFs of it on Tumblr."  "Favorite movie he did: Kuff, because no one else likes it."

And with that let's call this one good.  It wasn't totally horrible, but it didn't quite do it enough for me.  Some solid Florentine action, but not enough; and while the story wasn't bad, it also wasn't consistent-- something consistent with having multiple writers--, which ultimately felled it.  Too bad, because we also had some good performances from Slater et. al.  As of this posting, you can still get this on Instant.  Might be the best way to check this out.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1780983/