Capital Punishment (1991)

I got this on accident, not that I wasn't going to review it eventually, I just wasn't expecting to have it as soon as I did. It was near the top of my Netflix queue, but not in first place, and the films above it weren't available like they were listed as being, and the next thing I knew I had an e-mail in my inbox telling me to expect Capital Punishment on Monday. Well, here it is.

Capital Punishment has DTVC Hall of Famer Gary Daniels as an underground kickboxer who draws the attention of the DEA when his old sensei starts dealing Kick, some Taiwanese designer drug that is very addictive, and causes birth defects. The DEA is being controlled by another HOFer, agent David Carradine, who is in cahoots with the sensei to distribute the drugs in the country. As things unravel, Daniels finds himself increasingly tangled in a web of intrigue and deceit. Can he roundhouse his way out of it?



I have a feeling I'm going to take a hit on this one, but I liked Capital Punishment. I don't know, it just had this surreal quality, like one of those dreams that seems real, until elements occur here or there that don't fit. The scenes were put together in this way that made them almost like non sequiturs. There were no bumpers, no transitions, things just seemed to happen. One moment Daniels is being interrogated, the next he's in a hallway fighting thugs, then he's shot with a tranquilizer dart, and wakes up in his bed. People use words like "immune" as verbs, middle-aged businessmen know martial arts, Daniels kills some people and leaves some alive with no rhyme or reason, and some of the stuntmen wear clothes or recite lines that make absolutely no sense whatsoever-- like this one dude in a bright purple polo and red pajama pants among a gang of thugs that are all wearing black. The best way to describe it is, if Andy Kaufman made a 1990s bad action film, this is what it would look like. And I don't know, I loved it. It was tons of fun. Maybe I'm just getting soft in my old age.

I don't know though, because if you go to my last however many Daniels posts, I haven't been too nice to them. At the very least here, they used him for his martial arts prowess, and didn't inundate us with bad dramatic sequences where Daniels' fighting was foregone for the sake of some misguided plot exposition. This was great because, even though the scenes seemed like maybe they didn't go together or came out of nowhere, he was getting into fights quite regularly, and his fights were tons of fun. In one he empties out a pay phone, puts the quarters in a sock, beats a dude with it, then spills the quarters out of the sock onto the dude, telling him "keep the change". Later, that guy comes back and throws some quarters at him, saying "I think you dropped these". Daniels thanks him by shoving a pool cue through his throat. This might not be Rage or Bloodmoon, but for my money it's pretty close, and for fans of old Daniels, you can't do much worse.



As for our other Hall of Famer in the film, David Carradine looks like he was in another movie, because he has two scenes with one of the other actors, Daniels' helper Linda Lightfoot, and the rest are of him by himself either on the phone, or behind the wheel of a truck. If you go back to the Martial Law II post, in the comments section Mr. Kenner from Movies in the Attic and I had a conversation about Billy Drago being grafted in like John Saxon in a bad Italian movie. I disagreed with him on that case, but in the case of Capital Punishment, I think we have a better example. If not for those two scenes with Linda Lightfoot, you'd say it was like Bela Lugosi in Plan Nine from Outer Space. I have to admit again, I actually liked that though. It just added to that fascinating surreal quality for me.

Daniels' sensei was played by Tadashi Yamashita. He's not quite the ninja star Sho Kosugi is, but he does all right. You may have remembered him as the Black Star Ninja in American Ninja. In Capital Punishment he was great. His scenes made almost no sense, not because his English was bad-- his English was the most coherent element!-- but because of what happened in them. He'd be in a business meeting with two prospective drug dealer/investors, and the thing would devolve into a fight with guys coming at him with martial arts moves, and him taking them down and breaking their necks. Part of me wonders what he thought of shooting on this movie. I mean, it must've helped that he didn't speak English that well, so as not to be too confused by what he was supposed to be doing.



I was trying to think of what to do for the seventh paragraph, and I decided on a second one devoted to Gary Daniels. This will be his 21st tag, which puts him in fourth all-time among actors, behind Dolph Lundgren, Lorenzo Lamas, and Michael Dudikoff. That number isn't as important as the number 50+ (okay, not really number, but you get the idea), because that's what Daniels could ultimately end up with when all is said and done. We like to call Dolph the Babe Ruth of DTV, well, that would make Daniels the Hank Aaron or Ken Griffey Jr. Right now he has six films in production, plus some others that will be out soon, like Tekken and Game of Death (which stars Wesley Snipes), so it's not like he's going to stop anytime soon either. The one argument one could make against him is that a lot of his tags come from really small roles, as opposed to Dolph, who is almost always the star of his films; but a tag is a tag, and Daniels is on pace to have the most.

I'm not sure if I can recommend this one. I loved it, yes, but in some sense it was from a weird fascination. I don't know, it felt like a Crispin Glover movie, the way things went together. But it was an action film, and a lot of fun. I guess you gotta ask yourself, what kind of action movie do I like? If you like them so bad they're good-- so weird they're fun-- this is your kind of movie.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101541/