Chain of Command is not the Dudikoff film from the mid-90s, but rather a modern tale with White as a special forces vet who has come home, only to find his brother murdered. Not only that, but the brother was into some stuff. Now White has to play detective and track down who did this, but as he digs, the people involved push back. When those people discover that White isn't your average war vet brother, they send in their own big guns, Stone Cold Steve Austin, who plays a military assassin. What exactly could be worth all this trouble to kill in order to cover it up? Who knows, but the reality is they picked the wrong man to push back against.
This has a very low-budget feel to it, which I wasn't expecting. When you look at that cover, there's an expectation of a certain level of DTV quality. It begs the question then of how White and Austin got involved, because I imagine that got the film's budget up, and got it a distribution deal with Lionsgate--and then with Lionsgate, that's probably where that nice cover came from. It does have its moments, especially with White's martial arts, but also Austin has a great presence, and the third face on the cover, Max Ryan, is good in this as well. It was just hard to get past the limitations of what I was seeing onscreen.
I think one reason why we hadn't put Michael Jai White in the Hall of Fame sooner, is he kind of gets lumped in with Scott Adkins and some of the younger stars as part of the new wave, so there's a sense that there are older stars who need to get in first. The reality is, White is closer in age to Mark Dacascos than he is Adkins, and White is older than Van Damme or Daniels were when they were inducted. Thinking of it like that, this is more overdue than it is that we have others who need to get in first. The one thing I love about White is how he merges the technical aspects of fighting with the theatrical. He knows how to put on a show, but do it in a way that lets us in the audience know that he's also an expert practitioner. He is one of the best to do it, and its good that we can take this first step to honor his great work. This is his 17th film on the site, so the next step for him is getting him into the 30 Club.
The other name underpinning this film is Stone Cold Steve Austin, and unfortunately this is another one where we don't get so much Stone Cold. I liked his character in this, he's very menacing and dangerous, but we still haven't had that real Stone Cold character, the one that really allows Austin's natural charisma that won over WWE audiences to shine through. They could have used that to take his baddie up a notch, and made the showdown with White next level. That may have also mitigated the film's other issues more, and maybe then you don't see as many bad IMDb reviews killing it for the budget.
From a Lionsgate or other distributor standpoint, the key is to get people to stream the movie, and the cover they created is very effective at doing that. How am I to know it's not something of the quality of The Hard Way with White and Luke Goss, and directed by Keoni Waxman? It could almost be like "I just watched The Hard Way, what else is out there? Oh, let me check this out..." and then the opening scene tells you you aren't there anymore. The thing is, we seldom see action done on this lower scale anymore because it is so expensive, and this has the look of a low-budget indie horror film. So then if you're Michael Jai White or Stone Cold Steve Austin, you look at this after and think "this is forever on my CV. What do I do with this?"
The director is Kevin Carraway, who doesn't have a lot of credits, but one he does have is one we've done here, 7 Below, with Ving Rhames and Val Kilmer. That movie doesn't look anything like this in terms of quality and production, so my hunch is, his name was able to get names like White and Austin, which in turn got Lionsgate in on the distribution side, and then something--or maybe a bunch of somethings--went wrong, and here we are. I don't know what you do with that if you're anyone involved. Maybe you get an IMDb account and place your own user review to let us in on what happened.
And with that, it's time to wrap this one up. The film itself is a bit of a Siren song, especially with that cover; but the main thrust of this post, the induction of Michael Jai White into the Hall of Fame, is the most important thing here, and shouldn't be overshadowed by how good or bad this movie is. If you're looking to get into Michael Jai White's films, you can click on his tag and see what else we've got here. My favorite is Black Dynamite.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4340720/
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