Total Force (1996)

Back in March I had Rich Hawes from the DTV Digest podcast on our pod to discuss this film and its sequel, Absolute Force. He and Mike and Steve had just covered it for their throwback segment on their pod, and when I asked him about coming on, he liked the idea of discussing this and its sequel in more detail than the segment on their podcast allowed; and I, having seen that these were on Tubi, was definitely intrigued. In addition to us, our friends at Comeuppance have covered this as well.

Total Force is about Richard Lynch, a defense contractor who developed a device called the Neurolator--not to be confused with the delightful candy Now and Later, which I used to mix in with my other penny candy when we went to the Goldenrod on York Beach in Maine when I was growing up. No, the Neurolator uses a laser from a satellite to turn opposing soldiers' brains into mush, but not before they become violent zombies who attack their own troops. The problem is, the turn to mush part doesn't kick in, and now Lynch needs to call in the Total Force team, led by Timothy Bottoms, to clean up the mess. Then, after he frames them for dealing drugs (?), Lynch is then taken off the project himself, which causes him to call in mercenary Frank Stallone to break into the facility it's being housed in. Sounds like we need to call our Total Force guys back in, huh?

This movie was awarded zero stars by the guys at Comeuppance. That's right, "we award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul;" and Rich's compatriots on DTV Digest couldn't believe how horrible this was--and if you listen to their show at all (which you should be if you're not), they are almost never this hard on a film. Is this really that bad? Quite possibly, but it's an intriguing bad, which is why I think Rich wanted to discuss it. Writer/director Steven Kaman, who has worked with "rah-rah military beats bad guys" schlock auteur J. Christian, Engvordsen, looks like he's trying to go less black and white with this effort, but he's also trying for this MTV 90s TV show thing that feels all over the place. One scene in a hotel room or something where Frank Stallone and his team are getting their marching orders is a great example, cameras are whipping around all over the place, with all kinds of odd angles, while Stallone is slouched on a couch laughing at this creeper fixer guy getting fresh with Calista Carradine and her twisting the creeper's arm back as a result. We get these random in-cuts of stock footage like we're watching M/A/R/R/S's "Pump Up the Volume," which makes sense in a music video, but why here? When the thing becomes more straight-ahead actioner toward the end though, it's kind of a fun dynamic, especially with Bottoms, Stallone, and Lynch, but that's near the end of the movie, and by then you've been through a lot of kookiness. This is a unique entry in the 90s DTV action catalog, and that alone may make this worth it, or totally not.

Kaman also goes by the name "Sven Nuvo," and he got his start in the early 80s doing cinematography for X-rated movies. In 1987 he teams with the aforementioned Engvordsen for the latter's directorial debut, Hangmen, starring Sandra Bullock in her debut as well. From there he works with Engvordsen a lot, though it seems like as the 90s go on, and Engvordsen shifts into things like Airboss, which are more obvious rah-rah panderers, Kaman no longer works with him, and does this film instead, followed by two others of his own after--one of which is the sequel to this, Absolute Force. In that sense, this movie almost feels like a response to the films Engvordsen would do in the late 90s/early 2000s, like the Airboss series. The problem is, it's as if Kaman had too many things he wanted to say about foreign policy and the military-industrial complex--which he also demonstrates in this film that he may not fully understand, because it seems like he thinks there's an actual complex that exists. While the execution may not be there, I like that he tried to do something other than the rah-rah fest we see so often. Does that award him a star in a five star rating system? Good question, and I don't have an answer for you...

We last saw the great Richard Lynch here in 2013, and at that time we said it was a travesty he wasn't in the Hall of Fame. Now it's 2022, and he still isn't in there, so what does that make it? The thing about him is he's like a baddie in a can: you just open him up and throw him in a pot, and he's ready to eat. The problem is though, do you let him do his thing, or do you disrupt his flow with a bunch of other stuff? There's a scene where he's talking to Bottoms through a video phone, and it's all kinds of edits and different kinds of film all put together, which is meant to give us a sense of the technology. Again, I get what Kaman was going for, but the result was Lynch looked sillier than he looked sinister. Just the same, it's good to see Lynch back, and with all the credits he has out there that we haven't covered, I have no excuse to not get the next film of his up sooner than 9 years from now. (Scary to think about that isn't it, what the world will be like in 2031!)

Another issue with the film was that Frank Stallone and his crew--Calista Carradine, Oleg Taktarov, and Tom Bresnahan--were cooler than Bottoms's Total Force. Kaman at least mitigated this by having them kill innocent people, but then he further mitigated by having Stallone and Bottoms team up after Lynch turns a bunch of lab workers into zombies with the Neurolator and has them attack everyone while he tries to escape in a helicopter. From a Destro Effect standpoint, Kaman has committed a major error: he made is cooler baddies sufficiently bad, but then didn't give them their comeuppance. You can't use those two Destro Effect mitigating factors together, if you're using one you have to abandon the other. But as we saw with other decisions Kaman made, he just didn't care--or he was trying to make the point that one man's terrorist group is another man's government wet works clean-up crew team? Unfortunately if that was the case, I don't think it worked, and we were left with baddies who killed innocent people and got away with it at the end.

 

Finally, going back to Kaman potentially not understanding what the military-industrial complex is--or at least making it look like he didn't understand it--I guess it might be good to remember that in 1996 this kind of information wasn't as readily available. I myself didn't learn about it until a few years later, when I was in college and it came up in my Sociology 101 class. Nowadays you can look it and anything else up on Wikipedia, so not understanding a concept like this fully is less forgivable. Also, if you go on Twitter, you'll see a deeper understanding of how the military-industrial complex works, with people tweeting about how a fraction of our military budget would fund public college for everyone who wants it, or how PBS and infrastructure costs make up such a small percentage of the overall budget compared to military spending. We also talk about the trickle-down effects, like how the military-industrial complex begets the police-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex. These were all concepts that were beyond the scope of what Kaman wanted to do with his movie, but it's interesting how he was trying them out in 1996, while his former directorial comrade Engvordsen was selling us on how great the military-industrial complex was in his late 90s and early 2000s films.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Tubi in the States, but I think Rich said in the UK you had to settle for YouTube. Whichever it is, free-to-stream is the way to go if you want to check this out. For Ty and Brett at Comeuppance to give this zero stars, and for Mike and Steve on DTV Digest to dislike it so vehemently, it has to be a unique brand of bad, which I think it is. For more info on it before you jump in, you can listen to episode 95 of the podcast where Rich and I discuss it. It was a great conversation and worth checking out!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145534

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