Cartels aka Killing Salazar (2016)

This is one I watched a while back on I think Epix, and then it was taken down or we lost the Epix free trial or something like that, so I waited for it to become available, and when it didn't, I got images from the trailer so I could review it, only for it to be added to Tubi. It was also available as Killing Salazar with a different cover on Xfinity, so after watching it on Epix, I went to watch Killing Salazar, only to discover they were the same movie. In addition to us, our friend Mitch from the Video Vacuum has covered this. 

Cartels has Luke Goss as a special forces soldier who's been called in by the US Marshals to join their team, who are then called in by the DEA to do a job for them? The "job" is transporting crime boss Florin Piersic, who everyone thinks is dead after DEA agent Steven Seagal kills him. These transport things never go as planned, and another DEA agent, Howard Dell, tells the marshals (who are maybe more military than marshals?) they need to "sit" Piersic in a fancy hotel in Romania before can be transported back to the States, where he's going to rat out other criminals. Once things go bad, will Goss be able to make it out alive?

This is roughly what the story is, and to be honest, does it matter that much? This thing has the feel of a project that was made because Seagal's people came to line producer Ben Sacks and asked if he could get him another movie because Seagal needed the money. (I also have this sense because Sacks was interviewed on "I Must Break This Podcast" with Sean Malloy, and he talked about this kind of thing with Seagal.) Looking at it in that vein, this is one of three films like this made at the same time and released in 2016, the others being Contract to Kill and End of a Gun (the latter of which I haven't seen yet), and while this isn't the greatest, as I watched it I wondered if it had someone other than Seagal if it would've been a lot better. I tried my best to see how many scenes Seagal did with the other stars, and it's possible it was none, and that any time we see Seagal with another star that he was edited in using Lucas-style alchemy--one that stands out in particular, when Seagal and Goss are in the interrogation room, and they bring in someone from Goss's unit who attacks Goss, and then Seagal gets the guy in some wrist locks to stop him. After that, Seagal and Goss sit back at the table, and it's possible it's the one scene they did together, but it's also possible Goss was added in after. There's also a fight Seagal has with UFC champ George St-Pierre, where I think neither actually fought the other, that they were shot at separate times and fought doubles. The Seagal double thing was so bad, that they gave his double a credit among the cast (which is not where he's listed on the IMDb credits). On that score, maybe the take isn't that this film is pretty unremarkable among the rest of Seagal's DTV filmography, but rather that it's amazing how remarkable this is at all considering how Waxman, Sacks, et al were able to Frankenstein this together with all the Seagal constraints involved.

We're now at 37 films for Seagal on the site, with I think three left: Gutshot Straight, which I've watched and just need to review; End of a Gun, which I'm waiting to be available on one of the streaming services, but may have to rent to see; and Clementine, which I haven't been able to find in English. Those together should get us to 40 for him, plus he has a couple new projects in development. According to the IMDb trivia, this was the last of his Waxman films, but on his filmography, they list it in between Contract to Kill and End of a Gun. Either way, after he does these three with Waxman that come out in 2016, his output slows down, only doing China Salesman in 2017, Attrition in 2018, and then seems like he gets back to his old self with General Commander and Beyond the Law in 2019, before the pandemic hits in 2020. This one feels like the worst of the bad Seagal, where it's obvious he's not in a lot of scenes with his costars, to the point that he may not even be doing the fights. Most of it is Seagal behind a desk in a leather jacket with his Chia Pet goatee saying things to Goss while he interrogates him like "I wasn't born on the fucking turnip truck, man!" and "I wasn't born at night, it was a bright, beautiful, fucking day," whatever that means. By this film, it's all almost become a parody of itself, but the results are there, as this is on Tubi with him front and center on the cover, set up perfectly for anyone browsing thinking this might be a fun Saturday night watch, and now Lionsgate gets another stream and a cut of the Tubi ad revenue.

 

It would be interesting to know if Luke Goss did a single scene with Seagal, or if that one time they're in the shot together he was CGI'd in Lucas-style. That's one advantage to having the younger guy doing the heavy lifting being a bald guy, he's easier to double in post if you need. Also, one of the advantages to being the heavy lifting guy in a Seagal film is you never know when Keoni Waxman's going to stop making Seagal films and will need someone to act in a new project, like he did when he tapped Goss to be in The Hard Way with Michael Jai White. This film had a lot of Bro Energy, with guys grimacing, pointing weapons, yelling military jargon at each other, etc., and that's where Goss's American accent makes him the Super Bro, like the rest of the cast were pulled from the decent clubs in Vegas on a weekend, but Goss was from a slightly more upscale one. He smokes cigarettes better than everyone else, he grimaces better, he holds guns better. The problem was, I don't think this needed more Bro Energy, it needed Brit Goss with his natural accent, maybe tossing out some British slang, or calling an eggplant an aubergine. One thing I hope is, with the current rise of the British actioner, people will want Goss to be an American less, because the films where he gets to be a Brit tend have a bit more flavor to them, and a movie like this that had a lot going against it due to the constraints that come when Seagal's involved needed all the help it could get.

This is now 11 films for Keoni Waxman on the site, of which 9 are Seagal films. The two of them did 10 total, the one I'm missing being End of a Gun, so the question will be after that one how many more we do. While he has a few that fit what we go for on the site, he has others like The Anna Nicole Smith Story that we probably won't cover. That number sounds low, but for directors on the DTVC, other than Pyun who has over 40, no one else has more than 15, so Waxman is right in there with some of the greats; on the other hand, as we do more from those guys, he may get left behind if he's moving on to projects that don't fit what we do here on the DTVC. I think that's okay though, his work as the Seagal Whisperer will go down in DTVC history as one of the great feats, and this film could potentially be his best work if this was made the way I think it was made. I literally could count on one hand the scenes Seagal had where he was in the same shot as his costars--and even those were suspect. The use of doubles, overdubs, creative angles, possibly even CGI to make it look like Seagal was interrogating Goss, or even better, fighting George St-Pierre if they weren't really fighting, is like Godfrey Ho level stuff; plus his action scenes were really well done, especially in spite of his constraints. I'd say he's cemented his legacy with us, but I'm still curious to see what he has in store next for us, or to explore some of his earlier work.

Finally, as someone who was a huge fan of the UFC in the mid-to-late 2000s, George St-Pierre was one of my favorites, so it was fun to see him here. Right before this he did Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which I haven't seen yet, and then played that role again in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier TV series, which I also haven't seen yet. He has a couple things in post-production right now, so it'll be cool to see how his career progresses. This is his fourth film on the site, the first two being Hector Echavarria TapOut films, and the third Kickboxer: Vengeance, so it looks like he's getting better parts. I think a buddy picture with Adkins directed by Jesse V. Johnson would be the best, maybe something where Adkins is sent to Canada to take down a criminal, and he has to team up with St-Pierre who's already working on taking him down. And what would be great is it could be shot in Canada, and actually take place in Canada, instead of Canada pretending to be America. How nice would that be?

Since I'm done talking about the current movie and pitching a new one, it's probably time to wrap this up. You can catch this on Tubi here in the States. Personally I think this is only for Seagal completists, or St-Pierre or Goss fans. Outside of that, it's better to skip it, but I appreciate the work done here to get this film over the finish line in as good a shape as it was.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4949290

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

Paydirt (2020)

Back in February I had Francis Rizzo III from KilmerKast on to discuss this film, as it was the place where our two podcast worlds intersect: Val Kilmer and DTV movies. Also it was free on Tubi, so easy for both of us to get at. In addition to us, our friend Todd Gaines at Bulletproof action has covered this.

Paydirt has DTV mainstay Luke Goss as the head of a gang of people who stole a bunch of money from a Mexican cartel and hid it away from them. To throw them off the scent, Goss goes down for a petty drug trafficking charge and gets 5 years in the can--put there by Val Kilmer, who ends up leaving his job on the force in disgrace when the bust only turns up the small amount of weed and Goss's arrest. Now Goss is out and the cartel wants their money, Kilmer wants his revenge, and Goss wants to get the gang back together to get the money too. As all these moving parts come together, will Goss and his crew prevail, or will the cartel take them down, or will Kilmer get his revenge? With all of these movies there's a twist, and this one may involve... an Oscar winner?

If you want to watch this without spoilers, don't read any further, because I can't discuss this without giving away what happens. Essentially, the movie tells us that the idea of the MacGuffin--in this case the bag of money Goss buried--is a fun plot device, but not realistic, so instead they never hid the money, they laundered it in a casino run by a character named Leo Cap, played by Oscar winner Nick Vallelonga. What that means is, all the trouble they went through to break into places to get information on the whereabouts of the money, and drawing out the cartels, and stringing Val Kilmer along, was all useless. What that means is, the movie should have ended in the first five minutes when Luke Goss got out of jail, because he had no reason to not just get on a plane with his gang and flee the country. What that means is the jokes on you movie makers, because you think you're so smart pooh poohing the MacGuffin, when in fact you have no movie without it. I feel like this has to be a first at the DTVC: a movie that obviates itself at the end; the only problem is, though it obviates itself, the 90 minutes I lost in watching it can't be brought back. I guess I got a podcast episode and a blog post out of it, so that's something.

Val Kilmer isn't in this much, and there's a sense that the cancer he was dealing with was preventing him from fully being there in the scenes he was in; but we also had a couple scenes with him and his daughter, which were really nice. If anything, the film giving us those nice moments, and allowing Kilmer to have those moments with his daughter, might make the plot twist that obviates the need to have the movie in the first place worth it. Right now Kilmer is kind of blowing up as part of the new Top Gun movie--which as of this writing I haven't seen--and I think seeing him in something like Paydirt makes me want a win like that for him more. I don't want to say he's been largely forgotten, but he's one of the greatest actors of his generation, and while it's fun to see him in DTV stuff--and cool to see him have an opportunity to act opposite his daughter--big screen success is what he's due for his level of talent.

Luke Goss on the other hand exists more in the DTV realm, but here with his native English accent, he's much better. The character he's playing has the potential to go full bro-y, but the English accent pulls us back from the brink and makes him endearing, which we desperately needed. This is his 11th film on the DTVC, but I think other than Tekken this is the only one where he speaks with his English accent. In a way it's a funny coincidence that I say his American accent makes him sound "bro-y," because he was in a band with his brother called Bros. Anyway, the question is, how high can his tag count get here at the DTVC, considering how many films he's done? The problem is, I generally don't do a Goss film unless someone else who's bigger is in it too. Kilmer, Michael Jai White, Gary Daniels have all featured in Goss films. One I may check out is Hollow Point, which was directed by Daniel Zirilli, who's someone whose work I like to support.

The heist movie has become easy money in the DTV world of the last 20 years or so. Get a group together, throw in a baddie to manage and a police officer to evade, give us quirky characters, and let them have at it. In a way, this film demonstrates the desperation in the attempts by people making these to try something, anything, to make them less run of the mill. I mean, they did have an interracial lesbian couple, so that's not so run of the mill; but the story is something we've seen so many times, guy who knows where the money is finally gets out of jail and all the players start scrambling to get their hands on it. In that sense, the plot twist that obviates the whole thing, shows us how mundane the whole thing has become, the problem is, this was no meta criticism on the genre, it was almost one that wrote itself into a corner and got stuck with the plot twist it went with. The question is, is this any worse than how one-note Hollywood has gotten? If they're not making reboots or sequels, they're making origin stories with one-name titles. Film in America has gotten safer everywhere, and this is the result. 

Finally, we had another Oscar winner in a DTVC film, and I had no idea until Francis let me know when we were doing the podcast. Nick Vallelonga won two Oscars for Green Book, and yet had this small part as a casino owner in this DTV film. I was trying to think how many Oscar winners we've had on here now. De Niro, Stallone, and Cage first come to mind. We also had Jack Palance and Angelina Jolie in Cyborg III. Ernest Borgnine's been on a couple times as well; plus we did an old Humphrey Bogart film--that wasn't exactly DTV. And then with The Irishman, in addition to De Niro we had Scorsese, Pacino, and Pesce. Out of all the Oscar winners we've had on the site though, the most tagged is Cuba Gooding Jr. with 11.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi. I think it's only for Kilmer completists, because it has that added element of him acting with his daughter. Beyond that, the movie is telling you not to bother--movies about MacGuffins are childish fantasy, right? One you should bother with though is KilmerKast, which is a really fun podcast Francis does that covers the career of Val Kilmer.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11176322

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

War Pigs (2015)

This is one that's been in the can for a long time, so long that I had to rewatch it for this review. I think the reason for this is two-fold: the film isn't all that remarkable as far as Dolph's filmography, and it's been available on Tubi seemingly in perpetuity, so there hasn't been a lot of urgency to make it happen. At this point though we don't have a lot of Dolph left before we're delving into things like Fat Slags and Sharnado 5. In addition to us, our friends at Bulletproof Action and Mitch at The Video Vacuum have covered this, so you can see what they thought as well. Now, without any further ado.

War Pigs has Luke Goss as a Captain for the US Army in WWII who has been demoted after a mission goes FUBAR due to bad orders from the top. That's when cowboy colonel Mickey Rourke swoops in with a proposition: work with French Foreign Legion Captain Dolph, and lead a ragtag group of soldiers known as the War Pigs across enemy lines to get intel on a potential super weapon the Nazis are creating. After a lot of training to get them ship-shape, Dolph and Goss take their men on the mission, and things start to turn FUBAR again. Now it's time for Goss's moment of redemption.

After watching this, I thought, there was enough material here for a 43-minute episode of a syndicated TV series--and when I looked at Bulletproof's review, they said something similar. I know that's a common take I give on these films, but this really had that vibe. A good chunk of the film was getting the guys into shape--like I think the mission was only the last 30 minutes. With the film's slim budget, I wonder if that was by necessity as opposed to by design. Either way, we're left with something that isn't quite there. We've seen the Dirty Dozen paradigm before, and while this wasn't quite that, it was in that vein. "Let's whip the guys into shape!" "Look at them struggling up those hills!" "Oh no, the tough one to crack is crackin' foxy again, now it's going to be tougher on everyone!" And on that score, some of the more fun elements we could have had with a period piece were missing. There were no 40s slang terms like "crackin' foxy," these were just 2010s bros dressed in military fatigues that could've been WWII, combined with Dolph as a Legionnaire, Rourke as a cowboy colonel, and Goss looking cool smoking cigarettes. All the same, the end was kind of fun, and on that score I would've loved watching this as part of the War Pigs 90s syndicated TV series at 3am on a Saturday night while I'm eating cold burritos and trying to get the room to stop spinning after a night of drinking. As a 90-minute movie on Tubi, maybe notsomuch.

This is now 62 Dolph movies, extending his record for the most on the site; but this is his first since November, so it's been over seven months. From the time I started the blog 15 years ago, this is the longest non-hiatus break in Dolph posts ever. I don't know how this has happened, except that I had a lot of podcast episodes that I wanted to do accompanying posts for, plus I was trying to get some other names up, and next thing I knew it was 7 months. The other thing is we don't have a lot of Dolph left. We have 4Got10 and Kindergarten Cop 2 from this mid-2010s period; and then recent ones like Castle Falls and Pups Alone; but from there it's Small Apartments, Fat Slags, Seal Team, things like that. Do we even bother with those? And part of me's like do I even bother with this one when I'm just getting it up here to have them all? But then there's the Dolph factor, where every scene with him is better for having him in it. It's the Dolph Effect, the reason why he's the Babe Ruth of DTV films, and in that sense, this is worth it for him. He's going to be 65 in November, so hopefully by then we'll have 65 movies up for him, making him the only actor on the site to have that distinction--the closest is the only other member of the 50 Club, Gary Daniels, who has 54 films and just turned 59.

S

Mickey Rourke is back. This is now his third film on the site. Of all the Hollywood stars who have gone the DTV route, Rourke is the most fascinating for me, because he's almost indicative of how that world changed in the mid-2010s. In 2008, after a career drought, he reemerges and is nominated for an Oscar for The Wrestler, which he was amazing in; and that same year he's great in The Informers; then two years later he's a villain in a Marvel movie, Iron Man 2. The thing is though, the film ecosystem was starting to shrink at the same time, and the DTV stuff was there for him to make a quick buck. Between the three films of his we've reviewed, The Expendables, Skin Traffik, and now this, he's had barely any screentime, but like his friend Eric Roberts, his small scenes enhance the film. It begs the question: is it more worth it to spend the budget on a day of shooting with Mickey Rourke, or spend it on more realistic effects--as this movie used CGIs for the bullets and shots hitting people. I kind of lean more toward the former, I know the bullets and blood are fake either way, but the Rourke is always real.

Somehow Luke Goss hadn't had a tag until now. I'm not sure why I was avoiding that for so long, but with this post we're fixing that. This is now 10 movies on the site, which is a pretty prodigious number, so he should've been tagged before this. He plays an American again, and like most of the film's anachronisms, he's the most modern American bro-y, yet at the same time he does a great job smoking cigarettes and looking cool. Like other Brits, like Scott Adkins and Bruce Payne, he's much better with his natural accent, but also because he's affecting an American accent, he affects a modern one in this. I wish he had watched some 40s movies and tried to do that American accent instead. A good Bogey would've been perfect. Anyway, I don't know what it is about Goss more than someone like Adkins that makes his American accent turn him into a total American bro guy, but maybe it has to do with the fact that his brother Matt has a residency in Las Vegas. Maybe he's only studied American males there in that environment, so all he knows are the dudes who swoop in for a weekend, dump a bunch on bottle service, destroy a hotel suite, maybe get lucky with a lady, then drive back to LA and their fiancées and pretend none of it happened despite the fact the pictures are all over Instagram. He's reflecting our worse back at us.

Finally, when the War Pigs have finished their training and are ready to go on their mission, they're given new patches. This might have been the most authentic WWII moment of the film for me. I remember my grandfather, who passed away last November just shy of his 97th birthday, never really talked about his time in WWII, but one day I was visiting him in Florida, and we were watching a History Channel show about when Mt. Vesuvius erupted during the war, and he was like "I was there for that." He told me about how he'd injured his eye--an injury that made him blind in that eye--and was recovering at a military hospital in that area, and then had to go help evacuate residents. He then took me into his room, where he pulled out a container that had all of the stuff he still had from the war, and among that he showed me his patches. They looked very similar to that one in the way they were constructed, especially one he got for all the patrols he'd been on. Before he passed, he moved back up to New England, and I'm not sure what happened to that container, but either way it was a cool moment with him.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is currently on Tubi, and my hunch is it will always be on Tubi. If you've seen a lot of other Dolph and are closing in on the end of the road like I am, give this one a watch. It's not his worst, and it's not his best, it just is.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3779300

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

The Hard Way (2019)

One of the things I said earlier this year was I would make an effort to get more Michael Jai White on the site, and this is another in that effort. I wanted to get it in because it looked like Netflix was dumping some of its films, but I've since learned that, while this isn't a Netflix original, it is one they picked up the distribution rights to, so it'll probably there for a long time--if it ever gets taken down. Either way, we've watched it, so let's wee how it went.

The Hard Way has Michael Jai White as a former special forces guy whose brother is killed in Eastern Europe, so he goes there to find out what happened to him. As he starts to unravel the truth, things don't look good--for the people who were involved in his brother's killing that is, because White is on the revenge warpath. There to help him out is Luke Goss, playing that guy with the five o'clock shadow and knit cap who wears a leather jacket over a hoodie. As White's brother's former partner, he wants revenge too. Looking at that cover, I wonder who the revenge will be targeted at? Who's that third actor there?...

For a 2019 DTV actioner, this wasn't horrible. A big part of that is White carries it, and director Keoni Waxman let's him carry it, which really helps. I liked Luke Goss in support, I just don't get why he has to have an American accent all the time. All that being said, like these modern DTV actioners tend to do, this one got dark. We see one guy getting tortured, we see a family get executed by masked gunmen in their home, and White and Goss's love interests get killed, seemingly for no reason--it's not like White needed more of a reason for revenge. Still, the fights were good, as was the action, and sometimes with these modern DTV flicks, if you can at least get that, you should walk away happy.

Michael Jai White proves once again that he's a bad, bad man. One of the things he does which I really love, is he keeps the "art" in martial arts, making his fights theatrical and entertaining to watch while he's taking out baddies. This is now his 16th film on the DTVC, which begs the question: is the Hall of Fame on the horizon? Tags aren't the only thing, age is another, and while White would be the youngest Hall of Famer, he also would be older than Van Damme, Dolph, Lorenzo Lamas, and Gary Daniels were when they became Hall of Famers. So then we look at contributions to the world of DTV, and I think he has that too, especially with Black Dynamite, one of those seminal DTV flicks that has gone down as one of the best ever. Probably the closest comp to him is Mark Dacascos, and he's not in yet, but maybe both need stronger consideration as we get into our induction process this October.

I keep banging this drum about Luke Goss, but I think this movie more than any highlights my issue with him having an American accent. It's not that it's a bad American accent--on the contrary, it's really good, which I guess is why when he's cast he uses it so much--but I just feel like as an American he's not really set apart from the other myriad American DTV actors out there, but with his natural English accent that would set him apart. In this film it made zero sense, because it took place in Eastern Europe. It's just as believable that he'd be a Brit as he'd be an American, so why not just be a Brit? I think we've maybe seen him in 5 or 6 films here at the DTVC, and the only film he did where he used his natural accent was Tekken, and it was great! Hopefully he'll do more of that in future roles, but two others I have in the can, War Pigs and Cartels, both feature him with an American accent, so it may never happen again.

This is the seventh Keoni Waxman film we've done at the DTVC, but only the third that doesn't have Seagal in it, the others being Hunt to Kill and Sweepers. We always joke that he's the Seagal Whisperer, because he seems to get the best out of him when he works with him; but seeing him here in working with White, he does the same job in accentuating what White does best. I think out of the 7 Waxman films we've done to this point, this is my favorite, and maybe the biggest reason why is how he sets White up as a bad, bad man, and then lets White have at it, and we as a viewer get to enjoy it. Hopefully we'll see more White/Waxman collaborations in the future.

Finding out that this was distributed by Netflix, I decided to see if it was available anywhere else, and it doesn't look like it. As I've discussed when looking at other Netflix films, it's an odd thing, that when Netflix makes it--or distributes it in this case--that's it, you can stream it on Netflix with your monthly subscription, and when they decide to up the fee, you need to pay, or you don't get the movie. No blu-ray, no prime, no Tubi. From a filmmaker's standpoint I wonder how they feel about that. Is it better to have it constantly turning up on people's suggestions when they log into Netflix, or have it in as many places as possible so people have many choices? I personally prefer the latter, and I'm not even saying it has to be on blu-ray, but Prime, Tubi, Vudu, whatever in addition to Netflix would be nice.

But people have heard me make that rant before, so with that we wrap this up. I think if you're looking for more Michael Jai White, this one is pretty good. If you're already paying for Netflix anyway, you might as well give it shot.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9815714

7 Below aka Seven Below (2012)

I saw this was on Instant, and it had Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames in it.  That's it, oh, and it was 90 minutes long.  That helps too.  As an aside, did you know that Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames were born about seven months apart?  Both in 1959, Rhames on May 12, Kilmer on December 31.  imdb is a wonderful time waster, isn't it?

7 Below is about a house in which the family's adopted son kills them all in the early 1900s.  When a group of people in the present time, including Val Kilm and Luke Goss, take a bus trip into the Minnesota wilderness, and the bus crashes, local man Ving Rhames takes them back to his place to wait out a storm.  That place is, you guessed it, the house where the kid offed his family.



I know Val, it hurts.  I don't know what we're doing here.  Too much nothing happening.  Too much almost happening but not happening.  So many loose ends flying together near the end that I needed a pair of safety goggles.  Maybe most egregious: our heroes do nothing to figure out their own plight or how they can fix it.  They stumble around aimlessly in the dark, though we're supposed to believe they know what they're doing, but they never get close to what's happening to them, and need it revealed in the last 10 minutes.  That's lazy in my book.  There was an attempt to affect a Stephen King style secluded location creepiness, but the characters don't buy in, which means we lose it; and the Vincent Price haunted mansion style film falls flat too when, despite Rhames's best efforts, his Price-like character is written too flatly to keep us intrigued.  By the time we see a ghost in a sheet attack the hero (I'm not kidding, it was almost bad Halloween costume ghost in the sheet), I was done.  This is a pass for me.

Val honey, I know, what is your agent doing?  How did you end up in this?  Yes, if you close your eyes enough maybe it'll all be a dream and you'll be back playing Jim Morrison.  His role in this isn't as big as you'd like, and while I'm giving some of the plot away, I think it's better to warn you going in that, while he's good, he barely makes it through the first third of the film.  A surprising development?  A plot twist keeping us on our toes?  Or a Kilmer bait-and-switch?  You decide.  (Oh, and I will not make any jokes about how former Batman Kilmer looks primed to play the Penguin in the next film.)  (Didn't you just say you weren't going to make that joke?)



I don't know if this movie was trying to be original or hit us with an original concept, but it was pretty paint-by-numbers, right down to the classic White Man Will Save You trope.  Latina?  White Man will save you.  What reason do you have not to trust me?  There is not 500 years of history telling you you're making a mistake, this is a movie, and White Man is good, very good.  Yes, statistically speaking, if a woman is stranded on the side of the road with car trouble and a straight White Man pulls over to help her, things are more likely to end badly for her than good for her-- but not in Movieworld, where White Man is good and he will hug you and love and protect you from Bad Men.  Save us White Man!

Ving Rhames does his best to pull what he can from his character.  He tries to make it a cross between his own aesthetic and that old Vincent Price haunted mansion character, but there isn't much there for him to work with.  Man it was fun watching him try though.  Maybe that's why he took this role, for the challenge of pulling that off.  If you really want to think outside the box though, have the blond-haired blue-eyed hero play the Vincent Price character, and Ving Rhames be the guy that picks up the hot Latina who's having car trouble.  Now that's a plot twist for an American movie.



Among the other stars, we had Matt Barr as our hero, Bonnie Somerville as Kilmer's wife, and Rebecca Da Costa as the woman Barr picks up by the side of the road.  They all do the roles you expect them to, though Somerville as Kilmer's wife was fun when she and Kilmer were arguing early on, and it was too bad she couldn't play off him more.  Then there was Luke Goss and Barr's brother.  We've seen him in a fair amount of DTV roles, and he seems to have carved out this niche for himself playing the early-thirtysomething all-American jackass.  He has it all down, the mannerisms, the speech (though his accent does peek out from time to time) the boot-cut designer jeans with rips in all the right places, the gaudy belt buckle, the knit cap, and the four-button muscle-fit henley.  The thing is, in real life he's a fortysomething man from London.  I guess if his twin brother Matty can carve out a niche playing gigs at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, Luke can carve out a niche as the all-American jackass, and I think he being removed from it like he is, he can bring a sense of self-awareness to his rendition of the character that a real all-American jackass wouldn't have.  In that sense, Goss may have been the most consistent character, in that like the others it was so one-dimensional, but he's going for that and nailed it.

Obviously this is a pass for me.  My girlfriend told me that when she looked it up on Netflix after I told her I was reviewing it, that one of the reviewers on there asked for the ol' temporal refund-- you know, "I want my 90 minutes back."  I never demand the temporal refund, because good or bad I get a review out of it, but you might, so I'd avoid it, because we all know no one has ever been made whole on that temporal refund in the history of movies.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988781/

Death Race 3: Inferno aka Death Race: Inferno (2012)

When last we visited the Death Race series, we were on prequel 1, Death Race 2.  That one I thought would've been good had it not been for the nausea inducing split-second MTV edits that gave me a migraine.  Part of me went into this one, the sequel to the prequel, even more apprehensive.  That 105-minute running time didn't help.  Also, our buddy at Explosive Action did this one too, so you can go there to see what he says about it.

Death Race 3 takes place after part 2.  Luke Goss is back as Frankenstein, and he's one Death Race win away from his freedom.  Problem is, owner Ving Rhames sells the rights to tycoon Dougray Scott, which should be an awesome thing for Rhames because he's cashing in, but I guess he feels like he lost to Scott,or something, which makes no sense to me either.  Anyway, Scott isn't down with this whole let Frankenstein go thing, so he tells him he'll kill him or something if he wins the next Death Race, which is a three-day affair in South Africa, across the desert, even though the racers return back to the prison at the end of each leg, so it's not really across the desert, just three out and backs.  Now Goss needs some help from his friends if he's going to take the evil Dougray Scott down.



Wow, where do we begin?  The shaky-cam MTV edits thing from the last one is worse in this one.  Man, can I just say, I love watching a movie I can't see.  I love not being able to focus on anything for more than half a second.  From an action standpoint, we had a few good chases with some sweet crashes, and in those moments, I wanted to temper my bad review; but then we had three fight scenes that I couldn't focus on either, which was really frustrating-- again, I love being frustrated by my movies.  Story-wise, I don't what we're doing here.  We had too many racers-- actually, too many for the movie too, because they had this battle royale between the women navigators, where 14 (or 16, I don't remember, and it doesn't matter) fought to the death for 10 spots with ten racers, only to have 11 racers race-- but it was hard to keep track, and with the constant jump cuts, and all the characters and cars being similar and unremarkable, I couldn't make sense of anything.  Then Rhames sells the rights to Death Race to Dougray Scott, makes money on the deal, but now wants revenge on him?  Will the guy who sold Tumblr to Yahoo want revenge on Yahoo now after he personally made $250 million on the deal?  I don't know, this was a hot mess with a few nice crash scenes in it.

I watched the original Death Race 2000 for comparison to this one.  First off, I love the idea that an improvement on the original was making it so we can't see it.  "You know what I didn't like about that old one that I really want to improve?  The fact that it didn't involve rapid jumpcuts.  Seriously, you're not making a movie unless you're giving your audience a headache."  The original also had compelling characters.  Not only Frankenstein, but Stallone as the main heel was great, as was David Carradine's navigator.  Here, for the heel we had a guy that looked like a cross between Colin Hay and Danny Bonaduce, who had like three lines and did barely anything heelish, unlike Stallone; for the navigator we had Tanit Phoenix who, outside of a brief moment where she wields a flamethrower, does nothing but show off her cleavage and have silly romantic moments with Goss that were grafted in, all of it a total waste of her character.  Also, the original was almost 30 minutes shorter, yet covered much more ground from a story standpoint.  That one had the whole dystopian future, the rebels, and then the mysterious Frankenstein character.  We had none of that here, the best they could do was the Dougray hostile takeover that didn't make any sense.  This is not mere nostalgia factor rearing its head again, the original really did do a better job at making their movie than this one did.



In the last film Ving Rhames made up for a lot of that film's shortcomings, but unfortunately here he wasn't in it enough to do that.  As always, he's splashed across the cover, making it a sweet Rhames bait-and-switch. I understand maybe you couldn't get Rhames to shoot for the whole thing, and maybe you didn't want to wait for him to be more available, but that's when you show some integrity and put Dougray Scott on the cover instead.  I guess that's too much to ask though from a movie that's apparently so bad the people making it don't want us to actually see it, instead inundating us with rapid jumpcuts.  I wonder if the whole film is just cardboard boxes and tarps and the jumpcuts make it so we couldn't see that.  If so, I hope they recycled all that after.

Danny Trejo had a little more screentime than Rhames, which was good, and I think his character was a little better than the last time, but it wasn't a great Trejo style character anyway.  I've noticed that for Trejo to work, he really needs a bigger part, even as a supporting character, it can't be a few lines here or there.  Like in Recoil he was the main baddie, or in Machete he was the hero, he had a lot of room to work, and we got the full effect of what Trejo can do.  I think that's because he's kind of a reductive actor, he's said himself that he likes to say his lines in as few words as possible.  If he has a lot of screentime, he can make up for that in his presence, but in a few jumpcuts, we lose him and he might as well be anyone else-- though I guess not for him, because he gets a paycheck when he's in the movie.  Anyway, co-star Fred Koehler gets a hug from Trejo at the end of the film, and I was thinking that had to be a career highlight for him.  I would love to get an on-screen hug from Danny Trejo.



Here we have Tanit Phoenix as a total badass wielding a flamethrower (I noticed Explosive Action liked the same scene and captured the same image).  That's pretty much it for female badassery though, which was a disappointment.  With Phoenix, it's pretty much her cleavage and waiting to see what Goss will do next, not at all like the great navigator Frankenstein gets in Death Race 2000 who is trying to undermine Frankenstein as he drives because she works with the rebels.  Why not have her do something more, especially if you're going to hit us with that flamethrower scene to start.  We also had the producer of the show, who was played by Hlubi Mboya.  She was really good too, but she's really just playing second fiddle to Scott and Rhames; better though than the way the strong woman in the last film was dealt with, with her getting run over and Rhames saying "dumb bitch", which was not a good look.  They tried to include Olga Braun as a tribute to the original, but even that fell flat, with her just making a rookie mistake and getting killed as a result.  It's funny how this has worked out, that the original was made 37 years before this one, yet we've seen the imagery regarding women grow less progressive, not more.  That's not a good sign.  Maybe the next one will make up for all of that and have Michelle Rodriguez as Frankenstein.  How kickass would that be?

So that's it, outside of a few nice car crashes and explosions, this is pretty much a blah fest.  Probably a good 30 minutes too long, and in 105 minutes, the average shot was probably only a half a second long.  What a mess.  Is this what the action movie had become?  I need to sit through 100 minutes of bad jumpcuts and crap to see five minutes of good car chases in a movie about a car race?  

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988591/

Tekken (2010)

This is one we've been waiting for for a long time. First off, I absolutely love the game. My buddies and I used to play Tekken Tag all the time in my dorm, and I would clean up with the Kings (not knowing until later that the game was unfairly weighted in their favor-- though I prefer to look at it as me being so awesome...); second, and almost as important, DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels plays Bryan Fury, which was something I needed to see. Finally, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was cast as Heihachi, which just seems like a perfect casting choice.

Tekken follows the young Jin Kazama, who works as a high risk courier in a slum outside of Tekken City known as the Anvil. After he transports some vital Tekken technology to an insurgent group, Heihachi's son Kazuya sends troops in to get Jin, killing his mother Jun instead. Jin swears revenge on Heihachi, and to get that revenge, enters the Iron Fist fighting tournament. Kazuya smells something fishy about this new kid, and while wanting to take over his father's empire, he wants to stop this Jin kid at all costs.



The hard part here is parsing out the Me as a Tekken fan and the Me as (wannabe) movie reviewer. The latter Me thinks this wasn't too bad. The fights were good, the plot wasn't too bad, and the cast was pretty sweet. As a tournament flick, I dug this one all right. As a fan of the video game though, this left quite a bit to be desired. First was the choice of characters. No King and no Paul, two of the franchise's biggest names. Hey, I understand if you don't want pandas and boxing kangaroos-- though I would've loved to have seen those-- but you can't leave out some of the heavier hitters too. On top of that, there were some, like Tiger, who would've made great inclusions to give this movie more umph-- in Tiger's case as a way to bring in some Jim Kelly style flair. With some of those characters that they could've gone with instead of the ones they did, I can see from the movie reviewer Me how this could've been a much better movie than it was, so while I liked it, I wanted to like it more.

Gary Daniels as Bryan Fury was another area that was good, but could've been better. When I think of the great tournament film heavies, Bolo Yeung foremost among them, we see them do more sinister things than just squat thrusts and busting cinder blocks-- which is all Daniels did here, and before his fight with Jin, he has only one other. Something that would've been great is to draw from Bolo Yeung's fight with Donald Gibb in Bloodsport and have Daniels beat up either Kelly Overton's Christie Monteiro or Luke Goss, and give our hero Jin that added incentive to take Fury down-- even better in the former's case, because her character devolves into a damsel in distress role. It would've been a way to both build Daniels's character, and keep Overton's consistent as a hardened fighter recouping in the hospital instead of a worried damsel in distress hoping Jin saves her.



I thought I'd devote an entire paragraph to Luke Goss, even with all of the other actors that were in this film, because in the Blood Out review I made some comments about the way he was sold to us as a tough guy and hero. This movie did everything right that Blood Out did wrong. First, they kept his English accent. Much cooler calling guys "wankers" than using American Jackass speak. Second, he was never handcuffed to a bathroom sink while dressed in a Mayberry sheriff's deputy uniform. Third, because he wasn't already starting in the hole as far as coolness points go, he had a solid base from which to build his character and make him believable as Jin's corner man and mentor. This is the Luke Goss I've been looking for, and I hope I see more of it.

Tagawa as Heihachi is an obvious choice-- few do lead baddie like he does-- but then Ian Anthony Dale as Kazuya, and John Foo as Jin and Tamlyn Tomita as Jun were equally stellar. I don't even care that Dale was playing Foo's father, and he's only 4 years older. There were hints at the end of a sequel in the works, and I hope they really bring it with those characters that much more: for instance, I'd love to see Dale playing both Kazuya and the Devil. No matter what, though, they gotta get those Kings in next go around too. I need to see me some Giant Swings.



You might not be able to see exactly what's going on in this picture, but what we have here is Butt Cleavage. Kelly Overton's leather pants don't quite fit, and are laced up in the back, revealing the top of her buttcrack, pushed together so it looks like a miniature version of chest cleavage-- or just cleavage until the advent of Butt Cleavage. I wonder if this was a wardrobe malfunction, like "oh my God, the leather pants aren't fitting on Kelly! I thought you took her measurements!" "Calm down, I'll take care of this. They don't call me the MacGyver of Wardrobe for nothing." "Who's 'they'?" Well, he or she lived up to their reputation, because this was a great save, worthy of an Oscar nod.

Did we really just do a paragraph on "Butt Cleavage"? I guess it's time to call it a post then. Overall, this is a decent tournament fighting flick, with solid and well choreographed fights, a good cast, and a nice plot. Could it have been better? Yes, definitely. But do I think you'll enjoy it? Probably, and I think that's good enough for a recommendation.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411951/

Blood Out (2011)

I don't know what happened with this one. I had it on my radar, then totally forgot about it, then our buddy from down under, Simon at Explosive Action, reviewed it, but that was like a full three months ago. It's funny how a movie can get lost in the shuffle like that. Let's see if it was worth the wait.

Blood Out is your classic Hellcats Stone Cold style scenario, with Luke Goss's brother killed by a drug cartel, and Goss goes out and gets him a couple sleeves of tats and infiltrates them to get his revenge. 50 Cent, Vinnie Jones, and Val Kilmer also appear.



This was a not-so-much for me. The action was pretty solid, and until the end fight with some odd looking gladiator guy, looked good and wasn't overly MTV edited. The big thing that got me was how bad the dialog was, and how much of it we had to slog through. One scene with Goss and Tamer Hassan was mindnumbingly atrocious, and the whole time I'm expecting a payoff, like maybe Hassan finds out what Goss is up to. Nope, it was just a "we think we write quality dialog and we're going to inundate you with it until IQ drops ten points." Come on man. The other thing was Goss as the hero. It wasn't just that I'm trying to believe a former boy bander can rock a sleeve of tats and a cigarette without any irony, but earlier on we're treated to a scene where, dressed in his Mayberry sheriff's deputy outfit, gets his ass kicked and tased by 50 Cent, then is handcuffed to a men's room sink. You can't cut that many cool points off your hero and expect him to recover-- especially not when he's already starting behind the 8-ball.

This is bait-and-switch city. 50 Cent: 1 and 1/2 scenes. Vinnie Jones: one scene at the beginning, a little more screen time near the very end. Val Kilmer: half scene near the middle, then shares a bunch of screen time with Jones, also at the very end. Instead we're treated to a guy from a national vodka commercial, sold to us as equally hardcore as Goss, and a bunch of extras from the sets of P.O.D. videos. Now, there are two variants of the cover-- or maybe one is a poster and the other is the cover-- and I included the version (the one I think is just a poster) that features Goss, and as such is more honest and less shady to us the consumer; and then there's the one that you see here, which is what most American renters will see, which has 50 cent, Kilmer, and Vinnie Jones out in front, and Goss buried in the back. I mean, how am I supposed to take Luke Goss seriously as the lead if the people distributing the movie can't even do it?



To be fair to Goss, when rocking the sleeve of tats and smoking, he wasn't so bad as the hero. I don't know, the whole squinting like he smells something funny all the time, the designer jeans and Abercrombie Gay Chic form fitting three-button henleys, the fashionable five-o'clock shadow and shaved head, it's all very "Dude in Vegas with his buddies checking out the UFC PPV." And again, if the people making the movie don't think he's worthy of selling it to us, why should we? So he starts the movie with that many strikes against him, and then the film has him weakly standby as 50 Cent beats him up, tases him, and then handcuffs him to a bathroom sink, all while he's wearing a cute little sheriff's deputy outfit-- also formfitting, like he's a stripper heading to a bachelorette party. What this movie needs-- and all other Luke Goss films for that matter-- is to infuse some of that natural English charisma that us Americans love. A thick cockney accent, lots of smoking and lots of tats (which this movie got right), and then crank up the soccer hooligan-ness to ten. I don't want an American jackass as my hero, so why try to make Luke Goss into one?

When last we saw 50 cent and Val Kilmer, they were in the excellent Streets of Blood. This is obviously nothing like that. No gritty crime drama, just re-tread of well worn territory, and lacking heavily on the Kilmer and the 50 Cent. But what Streets of Blood shows is that it is capable to make good DTV; and even when we're working on well worn territory like this was, it's still possible to make it good-- the action in this is testament to that. But again, I can't help going back to this: how seriously can you expect us to take your movie, if you're featuring on your cover two actors that have a combined 10 minutes of screen time? You can't think it's very good yourself, otherwise you wouldn't stoop so low to trick us.



I want to go back to Val Kilmer, because I really liked him as the bad guy here, even if he's barely in the film at all. He needed to be the head baddie and the focal point of the film, and Goss needed to be trying to take him down. Those bad dialog scenes would've been much better with Kilmer making the best of them, and a lot of the other weirdness of the film, like the grafted in S&M stuff, would've been handled much better by him too. Here's the thing, if you're going to have a person of Kilmer's talent in the film, you gotta use him, otherwise his scant screen time will be enough to make the actors you're giving bigger parts to look amateurish by comparison.

This had the action down-- for the most part-- but there wasn't enough, and the bait-and-switches combined with a lack of faith in Luke Goss and/or a script that emasculated him early on spelled a recipe for movie sautéed in wrong sauce. Too bad, because it looked like they had the raw materials to make something fun, just not the quality of execution.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1477675/

Death Race 2 (2010)

I didn't know what to expect with this movie going in. It had some great names, including DTVC favorites Danny Trejo and Ving Rhames, but you just never know nowadays. A great idea for a film can be snatched from you, right before your very eyes, with a series of blinding jumpcuts, bad camera effects, and a droning cookie-cutter modern rock soundtrack. I'm just sayin'...

Death Race 2 is a prequel to the original. Ving Rhames runs a corporation that owns prisons and TV channels, and a woman working for the latter decides he can make money by combining the latter with the former in the form of Death Matches. They do all right to start, but not good enough, so the lady ups the ante to Death Races. Meanwhile, Luke Goss is a wheelman who kills a cop in a bank robbery, and is sent to Ving's prison. Sean Bean wants him killed for fear he'll testify against him, but the lady wants him to Death Race for her first. Quite the dilemma.



So, what I could see of the film, I thought wasn't bad. Yes, it had the inane modern rock soundtrack-- they couldn't even use the Ram Jam's version of "Black Betty", they had to modern rock cover that too-- but Ving Rhames was great, and Danny Trejo, though playing kind of a cornball character, wasn't bad either. I even didn't mind Luke Goss. What killed me, and ruined the film, was the camera effects. I think Lee over at Straight-to-DVD-Heaven coined the term "avid farts", and this movie did it to death. One millisecond I'm seeing a guy go to throw a punch, then I see his back, then I see a chainlink fence, then I see stock footage of a guy being shot in the stomach with a cannon ball, then I see Max Headroom. Dude, seriously, lay off the Red Bull. Then there were the 360 crane shots. Who are you, Ernest Haller, trying to win an Oscar for cinematography? Cut the shit, you're making me dizzy. Then there was the constant slo-mo, acting as if this was the first movie to ever have a car chase, or the first movie to ever blow up a car. It was beyond excessive, it was almost insulting, as if we viewers are so dumb that we can only appreciate an exploding car if it's done in super slo-mo.

The director, Roel Reiné, has directed two films that I've seen, one, Pistol Whipped, which I enjoyed, and another, The Marine 2, which I didn't like. In neither case, though, did he go the MTV/avid farts route. Pistol Whipped was an especially great film, so to see this one turn out like Death Race 2: The Punchfighting was a disappointment. This was such a bad punchfighting film, in fact, that I was wondering where Tony Schiena and Hector Echevarria were. I don't know what this movie was, but had it been a little more straightforward and less gimmicky, I think I would've enjoyed it. I couldn't help thinking, while watching it, about a PM Entertainment film called The Sweeper with C. Thomas Howell, which I reviewed about 18 months ago. Just a good bad action movie. The people making this have a lot to learn from something like that. Stop thinking you're cooler than the 90s, because you're not-- not even close.



Luke Goss always has this squinty scowl on his face, like he's smelling something funny. The way the film handled his character finally getting scarred was interesting for a few reasons. First, he's badly burned while trapped in a flaming car. Before that, every car exploded on impact, but this one, for some reason (plot convenience theater), slowly immolated. Second, I thought in the previous film, his face was scarred from so many accidents, and I almost think it would've been cooler that way, say if he ends the film and has a big gash on his cheek, like it's just the start of things to come; though I do like doing it the way they did it too, especially so they could bring the mask into it. Finally, I don't know why they showed his face at all. By showing his face all burned and scarred, it ruined the impact of his putting the mask on. I know us Americans have to see everything, but sometimes less is more. What's the point of putting the mask on if you already have us used to seeing his burned face? That'd be like deciding three movies in to give Freddy a mask in Nightmare on Elm Street. Give us some mystery, leave something to our imagination.

I did like Ving Rhames, as I mentioned above. He has a great line, when he's telling Luke Goss that this his prison is like Ancient Rome. Goss asks him "then who are you?" "I'm Caesar." Yes you are. His character was betrayed by the bad script in something I'll be getting into next, when the woman who sets up Death Race is killed by Goss, he sees it on TV and says "That's a dumb bitch." It was crass and ignorant and totally not what Rhames's character had been throughout the movie. I guess it just showed that the people involved with this movie didn't have the capacity to understand how cool Rhames is.



This was supposed to be an applause scene, where Goss runs over the woman who started the Death Race, but it was a very dangerous message. Violence against women is never a good look, and I know she wasn't a nice person, but really all she did was jump in with the corporate sharks and become one of them too. No one else had a problem with using the prisoners for these twisted games, yet it's only the "dumb bitch", as Rhames so eloquently put it, who gets it? There were also messages about her using her body and having sex with powerful men to get by in life, as if the only way a woman can make it in the business world is on her back. The whole thing was just really chauvinistic, ignorant, and in poor taste. I know I shouldn't expect women's lib from a DTV action film, but maybe something a little less irresponsible. More 2010, and less 1950, is that too much to ask?

This had some potential, and there was some good action, it's just more often than not, that action was overly edited into something that was hard to focus on. I'm worried that this is the future of the action film, that I'll be doomed to gimmicky camera affects and cinematography that makes me sea sick, all set to a soundtrack of a bunch of Disturbed and Linkin Park wannabes. Lord help me!

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1500491/

Across the Line:The Exodus of Charlie Wright (2010)

I put this in my queue, first and foremost, because it lists DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels in its cast, a cast which is very star-studded, including Mario Van Peebles, Bokeem Woodbine, Corbin Bernsen, Andy Garcia, Gena Gershon, and Aiden Quinn. I had a feeling Daniels wouldn't be in it much, but I figured I'd give it a look anyway.

Across the Line has Aiden Quinn as very successful investment broker whose enterprise has been revealed to be a Ponzi scheme, ripping off investors to the tune of $11 billion give or take. Before FBI agent Van Peebles can get a warrant, Quinn escapes, meaning he could be anywhere. Turns out anywhere is Tijuana, where a lot of people want him and his money. Andy Garcia runs a crime family on the border that is into some scary characters in Mexico City for some big cash, and he sees Quinn as his gift from God. Back in LA, a couple retired Russian mob bosses that Quinn ripped off for $100 million want their pound of flesh, and they hire Luke Goss to hire Gary Daniels's mercenary team to get him. As all of this is going on, Quinn is looking to make amends for a major regret in his past, which is the reason he's in TJ to begin with.



This looked like it was going to be a pretty decent film. It was moving along pretty well with few dead spots, and I actually cared enough about Quinn's character to see what happened. But then it just ends with nothing really happening, and I'm like "what's the point?" I mean, you gather all this talent, give them pretty solid characters, and that's it, the movie just kind of gives us "as you were". Seldom do I go in for the whole temporal refund deal-- you know, that's 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back-- but I'm feeling it here. Why waste my time?

Daniels had a rather small part, as leader of a three-man mercenary team that included him and Bokeem Woodbine. I'll get into later how confused I was that he wasn't playing Luke Goss's character, or something a little better. Of the three films Daniels did this year, this one, The Expendables, and Hunt to Kill, he only had a small supporting part in each of them. Is this a disturbing trend in Daniels's career? Is he foregoing smaller budget actioners that cast him in the lead, for these smaller roles in slightly bigger movies where he gets to rub shoulders with bigger names? It's a tad disconcerting to say the least, though if he's doing it to make a better name for himself so he can get back to those leading roles, only on a level with guys like Dolph and Seagal, it could be a great move. I guess it's a reality check that a guy that we dig so much isn't as big a deal to everyone else. Hopefully he will be.



Can someone explain this to me? I'm talking about this guy, Luke Goss. Does he make any sense to you? Does he make any sense as somehow above or better than Daniels to you? What, he's bald? Is that it? He looks like a grown up Ben Seaver. Just because you're selling him to me as cooler or better than Daniels or Bokeem Woodbine, doesn't mean I have to buy it. According to imdb, he was in a boy band in the UK called Bros, which sold out Wembley Stadium. I guess they also played at MSG here in the States. That's hot. He should've been Mario Van Peeble's FBI partner, and Daniels should've been given a bigger part, representing his own mercenary team to the Russian mobsters.

At first blush, the idea of casting Andy Garcia as a sophisticated Mexican mob boss sounds good, right? It doesn't work though. Garcia is too good for a part like that, he's too good for the cheesy, poorly written philosophy that these characters spout out, the dime-store novel existentialism, it's all somehow beneath him. The other thing is, he's very American, and didn't work as a native Mexican. In reality, he would've been perfect for Aiden Quinn's part. One side note about Andy Garcia: I loved his work in The Godfather III, a movie that I otherwise thought was a total disappointment.



One of my regrets in life was, on a visit with a friend to San Diego to see his mother, I didn't make it across the border to Tijuana, and this film was a constant reminder of that regret. It's funny, growing up in Maine, four hours or so from Montreal, I've never been to Canada either. I know, that's crazy. My only foray outside the country was to England and Scotland in 1997-- a trip I remember very little of, spending most of the time either drunk or hungover-- I was 18. I actually was going to go to Montreal two years ago, while in Burlington, VT to see some friends, but we didn't make it because there was a huge snowstorm.

Way more information about me than you probably needed, so let's wrap this up. It wasn't a bad movie to begin with, but at the end I was left with this "what's the point?" feeling, and that's never a good thing. Also, there isn't much Gary Daniels here, which seems to be a trend with his new work. Overall, a lot of great talent chewing up scenery, but that's all they're doing.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1663193/

Mercenary for Justice (2006)

I first caught this on Spike or something. They've been pretty good about showing some bad action like this. The Seagals and Van Dammes they usually show during the day on weekends, while the lower quality films like the Bloodfists they show at 2am on Friday and Saturday mornings (Thursday and Friday nights if you're like me and the next day doesn't officially begin until 6am.)

Mercenary for Justice has Steven Seagal as a mercenary for justice who has to mitigate between his bad employer, who has kidnapped a friend's wife and young son, and avoiding doing a job that involves breaking a major arms dealer's son out of a high security South African prison. Somehow a bank robbery is involved, along with a CIA agent. The plot is so muddled I have no idea how we get from point A to point B, but we do, and Seagal is victorious.



I wasn't sure if I wanted to review this film or not, considering Seagal is part of a poll asking for attitudes on his worthiness for inclusion in the DTVC Hall of Fame. The reality is that it's films like this that have kept him out so far. Essentially, Seagal is omnipotent. Whatever he wants to do, he does. What makes this omnipotence all the more absurd is how the plot is centered around his boss having him over a barrel by kidnapping the wife and son. The next hour or so of film makes us wonder why, if he's able to pull off all this other stuff just by being Seagal, why didn't he just go and save the two right away, and save us the trouble? This was as poorly conceived as an episode of the old syndicated action series Nightman.

I'm also surprised Seagal took this role, because it makes him as a hero look exceedingly unheroic. In one scene, he and his hot partner rob some huge bank, and in escaping, he shoots and kills plenty innocent police officers. Right on! Later, instead of confronting his adversaries head on, he sneaks around and picks them off with a silenced handgun. To finish off his employer, he goes the very dignified route of putting a bomb in his car and detonating it while the guy drives away. Why am I rooting for him?



Usually in a bad action film I can forgive a ludicrously muddled plot if the bad action is good. But here the bad action is so bad, that the muddled plot gave me a huge headache. I'm not sure what the CIA was doing. I'm not sure what Seagal was doing. The bank thing made no sense. I was clueless when the baddies invaded the prison, then were shot up by I don't know who. I think they just tried to get too smart with it, and as in many cases, when they try to get too smart, they just end up looking stupid.

I was trying to think of something good or memorable that makes this film worthwhile, and I just drew a blank. I haven't even had a chance to see all of the Seagal direct to video stuff out there, but I have to assume this is the worst one. Maybe that's just wishful thinking, but a guy can dream, right? Avoid this bad boy at all costs. Even if you and your friends hate Seagal, and you want to watch something to lambaste him with, watch something else. This one hurts.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427528/

Silver Hawk aka Fei Yang (2004)

I first caught this film late at night on Encore Action. I had some friends over, and they were ready to leave, but watched the first five minutes with me. It was way too silly for them, but they knew full well that I would be watching it, and the next day I told them how it was.

Silver Hawk is an interesting take on Batman, set in a futuristic Asian metropolis called Polaris City. Michelle Yeoh plays a rich socialite by day who dons the costume of Silver Hawk to fight crime by night. A childhood friend from her martial arts school is the police detective charged with stopping her vigilante justice. At the same time, this Evil Baddie has usurped this technology that reads people's minds and can control them, and has inserted it into this extremely popular cell phone ear piece. He plans to take over the world like this, and Silver Hawk and her new boy toy/police detective must stop him.



I couldn't in good conscious call this simply a Batman rip-off because it does some really interesting things with the paradigm. It would be like calling Apocalypse Now a rip-off of The Heart of Darkness; only Apocalypse Now was good, and this was a fun, yet bad action movie. It was definitely infinitely better than that atrocious Catwoman movie Halley Barry did.

Speaking of Halley Barry, Michelle Yeoh is ten kinds of hot in this. According to imdb, she's over forty (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000706/), but the character she was playing was about fifteen years younger. Just the same, she kicked tons of ass too. I don't remember exactly, but I don't think she was ever in the position of the preening damsel in distress in this either. The whole thing worked for me.

There were a lot of things that didn't work, though. One of them was the student of the guy who invented the mind control chip. He kept tagging along behind the cop friend, and was a member of the Silver Hawk fan club, a la Buckeroo Bonzai. He was always in the way and whining and annoying the cop, which annoyed me the viewer too. He was like Dane Cook to Dennis Rodman in Simon Sez. He was a hard pill to swallow.

The martial arts was two parts solid and exciting and one part silly Crouching Tiger FX. I think it was meant to be fun, but it looked ridiculous. I'm tired of all this flying around and shit. It worked in Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" video, and that's about it.



The bad guy was weird. He had bionic arms. As a take Batman, the bad guys have got to be better. I'd say maybe a female Joker or a Catwoman was needed instead. That's one of the problems in making a good use of the Batman paradigm: the original had the best villain's gallery ever. Ask Moon Knight and it's lack of consistent success for Marvel if you don't believe me. In fact, all successful comics have great villain's galleries: Spiderman, X-Men, Batman, even Lex Luthor in Superman. If they make another Silver Hawk, I hope they rectify this.

This film is worth a rental. If you're into Asian chicks, it's worth buying, because Michelle Yeoh is amazing looking in it. Her martial arts are great too. I liked it as a bad, yet fun action movie. For me TiVoing it when it's on Encore Action again is the best bet.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0357894/