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.
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