Exit Protocol (2025)

This is one that came out last year, I think, and there was a time in the early days of the site that a new Dolph would be big news, and I'd put everything aside to watch and review it once I got it from Netflix. We aren't in those times anymore, but when I saw we had a $1 rental deal with Xfinity, and my wife didn't use it for anything, I figured we'd take advantage and get this one in the can. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof has covered this--and gave a shoutout to our review of The Best Man in the process, so thanks for that!

Exit Protocol has Scott Martin (featured prominently on the tin) as an assassin who's all about two things: voiceovers and killing assassins who try to retire. I guess you can't have assassins retiring because they could tell on themselves and bring down the operation? But couldn't they do that when they're not retired? Anyway, Martin goes to kill Dolph, who has a pregnant girlfriend 35 years his junior, and after they each let each other live, they decide to team up against the guy who hired them (JB Yowell), but in the meantime, they have another great assassin, Michael Jai White, who needs to take them down too. Will our heroes make it out alive?

What do we do with this one? I think it has two major things working against it. One, the lead character isn't all that likeable. It's mostly the voiceovers, where he's giving these pithy monologues that either get us up to speed on various backstory elements, or gives us his opinion on the industry he decided to work in, but all just end up being indulgent jackassery--and to be fair, I don't know how you make those voiceovers come off in any way other than indulgent jackassery. So now I don't like the hero, but at least if there's some action that would be good, and while we do get some, there's also a lot of padding. We have opening credits padding, with this long, overdrawn out sequence of a bullet coming from far away to kill a mark, and on it's journey it travels through big block letters telling us everyone involved in the film. We have religious talk padding. We have twist ending padding. And perhaps worst of all, we have assassins making cute conversation padding, something that brings us back to the late 90s/early 2000s when everyone was trying to mimic Tarentino with their quirky loquacious hitmen. We do get more Dolph here, especially compared to his 2010s bait-and-switch jobs, and the addition of Michael Jai White is nice, and maybe all in all this isn't horrible for 2020s DTV Dolph, so maybe we should take what we can get and run; but on the other hand, so many of his better ones are on free streamers, so this is maybe more for completists like me, and only if you can get a deal, otherwise wait for it to be on a free streamer or part of a streamer you already subscribe to.

This is number 76 for Dolph at the DTVC. That's right, we're almost at 80 for him, and we should be able to get there, as we have three DTV films left to review, Fat Slags (which I've been warned against repeatedly), Sharknado V (which he's barely in, but it still counts), and Hellfire, the new one directed by Isaac Florentine (which was Michael Jai White's character name in this) that I may watch with the next $1 coupon I get; and then he has a David AR White movie and the third One Shot movie in the can, both of which should be out this year. When we started the site in 2007, he wasn't even 50 yet, and now he'll be 69 (hey-oh!) this fall. (That also means when we turn 20 next year, he'll turn 70, so if we starred in one of his movies he'd date us! (Hey-oh! again)) As I said above though, for a late era Dolph bait-and-switch, we've seen a lot worse in terms of his screen time. Yes, Scott Martin has the most screen time, so it's not like this is a Dolph lead role--and we may never see that again, these take what you can get kinds of deals may be all we get at this stage in his career, and I guess for a take what you can get, we've done a lot worse.

Back when Dolph was only in his early 50s, I created what I called the Bronson Death Wish V standard for an action lead's shelf live. Bronson was 73 when that came out (71 when it filmed in 1993), and the idea was, unless you're Bronson, you probably should consider donning that sombrero, hopping on that mule, and riding off into the sunset before that--at least when it comes to doing action films. And the thing is, it wasn't only Dolph in his early 50s then, Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Cynthia Rothrock, Michael Dudikoff, Christopher Lambert, and Lorenzo Lamas were all in that age group, plus Seagal was a little older, and Van Damme and Gary Daniels were a little younger--what I'm trying to say is, in the late 2000s there was a sense that we were a long ways from the Bronson Death Wish V standard for all of these names, but now we're here. Hell, even this film's other Hall of Famer, Michael Jai White, will be 60 next year himself, and we thought of him as one of the young guys! The question then is, do we need a new standard? If anyone could create one, it's Dolph. We had the Death Wish remake in 2018, could we skip ahead to a Death Wish V remake in 2030 with Dolph at the helm? He already has his Lesley-Anne Down in Charlotte Kirk, they're roughly the same age gap. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Fred Williamson before I wrapped this paragraph, who is still kind of pumping things out in his 80s, but doesn't really have his Death Wish V I don't think.

Scott Martin joins a list of actors who starred in movies where Dolph was featured prominently on the tin, but not in the film. The best comp here might be Riot, where Dolph and Chuck Liddell are on the cover, but Matthew Reese was the star. At least here though, Scott Martin's name is on the cover too. The most notorious is Ambushed with Daniel Bonjour (hello!), and I think you can also draw a comp to that and this with Martin's voiceover jackassery making him an unlikeable character, even if Bonjour's character was even worse--Martin's character has a bit of a redemption arc in the last 30 minutes that Bonjour's never approached. Looking at Dolph's IMDb bio, I'd say he's had maybe 15 or 16 of these kinds of movies since 2010, and the two movies that buck the trend the most are Castle Falls and Wanted Man, two films he directed. We also had Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and One in the Chamber in 2012 that I enjoyed, but they're at the early end of this trend. There are factors that contributed to this, like his age, which we talked about earlier; or his personal life, he got divorced in 2011, and movies like this mean quick cash. I don't know if we count Altitude among these, because unlike these others, it made pretty clear from the cover that Denise Richards was the lead, but that seems to be the key, get another name lead we recognize to do most of the work--and cut out the voiceovers!--and you may have something that works well enough.

Finally, technically we hit a milestone here for our film's other Hall of Famer, Michael Jai White, but because he's in this even less than Dolph, I figured I'd do a better film for him for his official 30 Club entry. I did consider holding off on reviewing this until we got that better White film reviewed first, but I think that might be overdoing it with these tags and clubs, if his milestone post is movie 31 or 32, we're still celebrating him. By my count he's the 12th actor to make 30 films on the site, which makes it pretty exclusive and worth celebrating when the time comes--which will be soon, there are a couple on Starz that I need to do, so we can grab one of those. In the meantime, before we do the full celebration, here's to you Mr. White, you're truly one of the greats.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing this, rent VOD is the only way to go. If you're a Dolph completist like me, I'd still only do it if you get a coupon for a free rental somewhere, otherwise wait until it's on a free streamer or one you subscribe to. If you're not a Dolph completist, tread at your own risk--again, he has a ton of stuff on Tubi and other free streamers that are more fun.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32421438/

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Under Fire (2025)

This is one Ty and I did on the podcast, back in February on episode 250, and we both had a good time with it, so I figured I'd review it here and give it some more love. Considering it only has six critic reviews on IMDb, it looks like it could use all the love it can get.

Under Fire has Mason Gooding as an under cover DEA agent working with border patrol agent Odette Annable--whom he's also dating--to take down a big Mexican drug kingpin. He's deep undercover, and thinks Dylan Sprouse is a mid-level dealer that's his in with the kingpin. What he doesn't know is Sprouse is also undercover, only he's an FBI agent, and he thinks Gooding is his in with the kingpin. It all comes to a head when they're about to make a big deal, and as they go for the bust, they each reveal who they are. That's probably enough to open a buddy cop series, which would've been a fun time, but a sniper hiding in the hills has other plans. He's taking people out left and right, leaving our heroes pinned down behind a couple parked cars. Now they have to leave their animosity behind and work together to get out of this. But the question is, who sold them out to the sniper in the first place?

As I said above, this was a pretty good time. Gooding and Sprouse have great chemistry, and they work well in this kind of dynamic. From there, I think the film does a good enough job of keeping a plot like this from becoming stale, which is something another film with a similar paradigm, Take Cover, struggled with. Part of that was Sprouse and Gooding, but it was also the creative ways the story led our characters to try new things to get out of their situation, and either succeed, or fail but at least advance the proceedings so we didn't feel like we were spinning our wheels. Then at the end we get some great Dylan Sprouse Fu when he confronts the baddie. If you're looking for some fun newer action, and you have Hulu, this is a good way to spend 90 minutes.

We last saw both Gooding and Sprouse in Aftermath, which also wasn't bad, but it felt like this allowed them to bring more personality to their roles, which they were more than able to do. The problem unfortunately is we have the current DTV ecosystem that's all about loading the movie with older actors that once had a big name so they can be splashed on the tin, and there isn't as much room for younger names like theirs to have opportunities like this; or they get their opportunity, but because it doesn't have one of those older names attached with a 5-page sit-down role, it doesn't get the eyes on it it should, and something that's a lot of fun like this ends up with only six critic reviews. My solution to this is a buddy cop movie starring Sprouse and Gooding, with Robert De Niro, Alec Baldwin, John Malkovich, and Morgan Freeman as baddies that our heroes have to overcome. Then you can splash those guys on the cover, give them each their five pages of script with only one filming location, but then the movie gets 20 or 30 critic reviews and the world gets to see what Gooding and Sprouse can do. It could even be called Geezer Teaser as a play on the trend. It looks like they both have other stuff in the can, which is good, but hopefully soon they'll be teamed up again, maybe in a sequel to this.

This employs another recent DTV trend, the one location movie. It's like DTV producers and studios are looking for scripts that either mostly take place in one location, or can be turned into that. I get it, from a cost standpoint it makes sense, but from a movie standpoint it usually requires a lot of padding, often in the form of flashbacks or non-linear storytelling to mitigate the fact that the bulk of the film is only happening in one place. While this isn't a new thing, in the past I think it was more commonly done by reusing sets, so at least the film felt like we weren't in the same location the whole time, but the budget was saved by not needing to recreate these places from scratch, they could just reuse sets that were used in another bigger budget film--or maybe a few different DTV films. This new trend feels more cynical, similar to the other modern DTV movie trends, so it's nice to have a film like this that mitigates the challenges of shooting in one location in a more creative, organic way, which removes a lot of that cynicism. I don't know that we'll see more like this, but I hope we do, because I can't imagine the one location trend is going away anytime soon.

The first major plot point of this movie reveals an issue with federal policing in the US, and that is that we have too many agencies that overlap, wasting taxpayer money. Why do we have an FBI, DEA, ATF, and DHS? Why not make them all departments under the FBI? I think we know the answer: they're all created to have their own budgets, so they can all use taxpayer money to buy back military surplus and engage in their own no-bid contracts with companies that pay off or are invested in by various politicians. Also Trump was able to break ICE off and make them his own secret police much more easily due to the fact that they were already under DHS, itself a broken off government entity. And we see here, we'd have no movie if they all worked under one organization, Gooding and Sprouse would have one boss to report to that would handle drug trafficking and they'd know each other--like how if we had universal healthcare in the US, all the former thieves who need to do one last job to pay for a relative's surgery wouldn't have that reason anymore. The dysfunctionality baked into our government which is there to enrich the lives of billionaires and the politicians they pay off has been giving screenwriters material for decades. Would you call that making lemonade out of lemons? And why do we need to make lemonade out of lemons? Lemons are great in beverages, great to squeeze onto salads, I have a great recipe for linguine and asparagus that involves lemons--so many great things you can do with lemons besides making lemonade, why is that an expression?

Finally, getting back to the lack of critic reviews on IMDb, when you look at the page, there are also only 11 photos, of which 10 are various cover images, so no one really put any effort into marketing this. I want to say, what are you doing Voltage Pictures, or whoever else are producing and distributing these films, why aren't you reaching out to us in the movie blogging world and having us review your new releases, but then I think of the volume of screener emails I get, and how much time I have to do them, and realize maybe this still would've sat until now even if someone reached out to me directly to review it. Maybe, but maybe not, and I can think of five or six other sites off the top of my head that also would've covered this too, and with its availability on Hulu, we would've given this a more robust presence on there and IMDb. We can be here to champion these movies for you, otherwise you're left to the whims of the IMDb user reviews, of which you'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Yes, some of my older reviews aren't the nicest either, but over time I think I've been fairer and more understanding of the time and work that goes into making any movie. All it takes is a simple email, and we're happy to help. We love these movies and want to see them succeed.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this as part of your Hulu subscription, which I think is a good deal. It's a fun time, one of the better movies Ty and I have covered in our two-movie episodes of the podcast. Speaking of which, the episode we covered this on was number 250 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32212611

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

The Driver (2019)

In our goal of getting Mark Dacascos into the 30 Club by the end of the year, and in my attempt to take advantage of the cheap Starz subscription I've got right now, and considering I'd been meaning to do this one for a while anyway, I figured it was time to finally make it happen. Also, the screenplay was written by a fellow Pear Tree, so I have to support that. 

The Driver has DTVC Hall of Famer Mark Dacascos as "The Driver," also known as "Dad," a guy with a certain set of skills who works as the driver and head of security for a small community of people who have barricaded themselves against the zombie apocalypse. When things go sideways, The Driver has to escape with his daughter Bree (Noelani Dacascos). His plan is to take her to a place called "Haven," a possible myth, but also a possible safe zone where more humans are living away from the zombies. The thing working against him: he's been bitten, and only has so much time before he turns. This means he needs to take as much advantage of the time he has left to show his daughter how to take care of herself after he's no longer there.

This is Wych Kaos at his most Kaos-ian, which I think contributes to the low IMDb user rating despite me enjoying it. It's got action elements, it's got zombie elements, but then it has this human drama element that Kaosayananda really wants the movie to be about, and I don't even know that he wants to package the human element inside a zombie actioner, I think this is how he wants the movie to be. And the thing is, it all worked for me, but I think that's because I'd been seeing more of his work, not only as a director but a cinematographer, where I think he really earns his money, and I think because of that I have a better sense of how he wants to make a movie. The thing is though, how do you package that? You have Mark Dacascos in a great performance, but he's known for his next-level martial arts ability, not for acting opposite his real life daughter and playing a father who knows he's going to die soon and is teaching her how to shoot a gun. I think if people know going in that there's some of the Mark Dacascos action star, but overall it's more a dramatic role, at the very least fans of his would watch this and appreciate what he, Kaos, and everyone else were trying to do, and even if that's a slim audience, sometimes it's about making the movie you want to make and letting the audience come to it instead of thinking about the audience ahead of time. (Easy for me to say though, I'm not dealing with the savage reviews on IMDb after putting myself out there.)

We're now at 27 films for Mr. Dacascos, and out of those, this doesn't reach the highs of a Drive or Crying Freeman, and I'd probably put something like Sabotage above it too--though we get a callback to that movie when Dacascos is showing his daughter how to shoot with a scope, and he tells her to keep it away from her to avoid the "idiot cut"--but I thought his performance was a better realization of what he and Kaos were going for in One Night in Bangkok. Kaos really leans on Dacascos to make this movie work, and the sense I got in watching him was that Dacascos relished the opportunity to be leaned on like that. The other thing I thought he did a good job of was divorcing himself from his character, even though he was acting opposite his real life wife and daughter. There were moments where he had to pull from that reservoir to get the emotion he needed out, but this character is not exactly a good guy, and as the movie unfolds his humanity is revealed, which wins us over, but it's a strange alchemy that we don't generally get in a movie like this, and Dacascos had to work to walk that tightrope to make it a success. As I said above, if you're a fan of Dacascos you need to see this, and while it may not be a favorite, you'll at least appreciate the performance.

This is the fourth film Wych Kaosayananda's directed that we've reviewed on the site, with another three films of his that he was cinematographer as well, and I think it's that acumen as a cinematographer that makes his films so interesting. There are moments where he's literally telling the story through his cinematography, which is something I picked up on more here than in the other films of his I've watched, and like One Night in Bangkok, Dacascos is good at performing in these scenes where there isn't any dialog, and Kaos is using his cinematography to advance the plot. I went back to my reviews of the other three directed films of his we've covered, which in addition to One Night in Bangkok are Tekken 2 and Zero Tolerance, and I found that I wasn't as hard on them, especially the latter two, as I'd thought, so maybe by this fourth one I was primed to watch his movies and understand better his unique perspective to filmmaking. 

Another interesting element to this film is it was supposed to be the third film of a planned trilogy, of which the first film, Paradise Z, came out a year later, and the second film, The Rider, hasn't been shot yet, and isn't even listed as an in development credit for him on IMDb. What that means is, at the end when he's tying the three films together, because we're watching this out of order, it creates a deus ex machina moment as the characters from the other movies step in to help out the current characters when all hope appears to be lost, because we've never seen them before. I almost think it's more Kaos that they're out of order than if they'd been filmed and released in the order they were supposed to be. Eventually I'll see Paradise Z, and hopefully someday The Rider will be produced as well, because this first one was compelling, and I'd like to see how the rest of it plays out.

Finally, I mentioned in the first paragraph that a fellow Pear Tree wrote the screenplay for this, that's because my last name, Poirier, is French for Pear Tree, and the screenwriter for this was Steven Poirier. According to IMDb the only two films he's written are this and Paradise Z. In his IMDb bio, he said he's descended from Acadian French who came to Nova Scotia from France in the 17th century, and I had recently done some research on my lineage and discovered I too was descended from Acadian French who came here in the 17th century, only my line moved to Quebec in the 18th century. Wonders never cease, but it's great to see a Poirier making it happen.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is currently in Starz Purgatory, but hopefully it'll be back on Tubi soon. I think if you're a Dacascos fan, this is worth checking out, you'll appreciate it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9272568

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

The Big Fall (1997)

For this month's PM post, I figured I'd do the third of three films C. Thomas Howell did with them, having already done the first two. When you look at all the names included too, you can see why a review was needed. In addition to us, Matt Spector at Bulletproof, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, and David Wain at The Schlock Pit have covered this as well.

The Big Fall has Howell as Blaise Rybeck, a private investigator with a big heart who's having trouble making ends meet, despite having a nice big office, an office assistant (Kathy Griffin), and an intern (Sam Seder). All that changes when beautiful possible femme fatale Emma (Sophie Ward) comes to Rybeck asking her to find her brother, who disappeared while flying a light plane. Turns out he was involved with some rough characters, including Jeff Kober and Titus Welliver, but as Howell gets in deeper, he starts to realize maybe Emma isn't who she said she is, and maybe she's more involved with them than he thought. Then, as if we didn't have enough players, a young FBI agent who has a past with Howell is now assigned to take them down too. Will Howell solve the crime and get out alive?

This is an interesting one compared to the other two Howell did for PM. It flows back and forth between what we expect to be a PM Entertainment film, with explosions and people crashing through glass windows, but they feel shoehorned into Howell's attempt at a neo-Noir that leans heavily on more classic Film Noir themes. Like in the first ten minutes, we get these well-shot, stylized scenes of Howell smoking a cigar at an exclusive club while flirting with Kelly Rutherford, which then bleeds into a fight scene, car crashes, and Howell falling off a roof and crashing through a window. But then we don't see as much action for longer stretches than we're used to in a PM flick, and in the struggle between PM elements and neo-Noir, the latter wins out mostly. Also some of the PM elements don't feel as great, like the car chase later in the film where the cinematography wasn't what we usually get on PM action scenes, and was shot to make the thing feel a bit claustrophobic. There are some things for this to hang its hat on though. Howell actually bungee jumps. He also has a fight scene with Titus Welliver, which is something I feel like I'd want if I see their two names on the tin. And then we get these other names, like Kathy Griffin, Sam Seder, and Jeff Kober, who, along with Welliver, add a little more flavor, as did the one-off scene with Rutherford, and Sophie Ward as our Film Noir femme fatale. This is probably more for PM completists, but because I consider myself one, I think this is worth checking out on a free streamer.

We're now at 17 films for C. Thomas Howell, which feels like a good number, plus we have a couple we discussed on the pod that I could review soon, so that number could go higher. A lot of his tags came in the first few years of the site, when he had teamed up with The Asylum and was making War of the Worlds movies with them. It wasn't until later when Kenner from Movies in the Attic told me to watch The Sweeper that I discovered his PM Entertainment oeuvre, and while I didn't like this one as much as that or Pure Danger, I think these three work better than his Asylum output. Even this one is trying things that I don't know if The Asylum would've let him try, and while it may not always fit for PM, I appreciated that he had the room to do it, because when it did work, like the scene with Kelly Rutherford, I thought it worked really well. In my review of Mutant Vampire Zombies from the 'Hood! I said that Howell just didn't click for me, but I think seeing his PM films I have a new perspective, so it'll be interesting to see how he goes from here. Also this is his fifth directed film on the site, which isn't a bad number either. 

Denney Pierce is the action director for this movie. If you're not familiar with him, he does a lot of work with Spiro Razatos, especially stunt driving, and so like Razatos, he's a big part of why a lot of the PM films we love so much are great, but also why so many 2010s big budget action movies were great. I thought he did well as action director here, despite the fact that the film didn't have a lot of scenes for him to work with. Also, Igor Meglic, who is Razatos's action DP, wasn't on this either, instead we had Clive Sacke as second unit DP, and Jürgen Baum, who himself had done a lot of second unit DP work, as cinematographer. I'm not saying they did a bad job, but I think it may have explained why the chase scene near the middle didn't look the way we expect a PM action scene to look. And I think you can also say that about Jürgen Baum as cinematographer, he did a good job, but because he's not Richard Pepin or Ken Blakey, the film didn't have as much of the PM feel we've come to expect, and in that sense this movie feels more like one of the PM films Pepin and Merhi distributed, as opposed to one they produced in house. Probably not a selling point as a film on its own, but almost 60 PM flicks in, seeing some of these unique elements becomes more interesting the more of these we watch.

In the second screenshot you may recognize that young man as Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report YouTube channel, which was originally on Air America (or still is on that too, if that still exists, I'm not sure anymore). While I don't watch The Majority Report, it gets pushed to me a lot, and I do remember its early days when he co-hosted with Janeane Garofalo. The fact that the show has lasted this long, and has navigated all of the changes in the media landscape in that time, is quite a feat, and now it looks like it's thriving on YouTube. It's strange though, when you look at his four box on IMDb, The Big Fall isn't listed among them. To quote Jillian Michaels when he was debating her, "Come on Sam!"--or rather, instead of debating, she was looking things up on ChatGPT and reading off the answers to him as a form of rebuttal. As great as anything is you've done, or are going to do, getting shot by Jeff Kober in a drive-by and crashing through the plate glass window of a café will always be the tops. Even if a stunt man did it, it was your character, and you developed him to the point that we really felt it when you were lying there close to death, and Howell put a hand on your character's mother's shoulder and told her you were going to pull through. Even if you don't appreciate it, The Big Fall will always be part of your four box in my heart.

Finally, Sophie Ward didn't look all that comfortable smoking cigarettes in this movie. It reminded me of when we see younger actors do it today, because they didn't grow up around smoking, so it's not a natural thing for them. It'll be interesting to watch as we get further away from the generations that were comfortable smoking, how we'll be able to make period pictures. It's like the young Millennial women speaking in vocal fry while on dates with Don Draper on Mad Men. At some point though, us who grew up with smoking, during a time when parents smoked while tying their two-year-old's shoes as they sat in their stroller, while their friends came over to chat with them and smoked too, will die off, and the only people left will be people who are unfamiliar with it, kids who grew up with hipster parents that act like they're older than they are, and kind of don't remember a time when smoking was prevalent either, despite saying they do. In 2035 when the newly Netflix-owned HBO Max (after they bought it off Paramount+ when Oracle had to sell it off when ChatGPT couldn't pay to lease the data centers they built for them, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in the process) decides to reboot The Wire, are kids who were born in 2002 going to be able to look like Dominic West when they smoke? (And yes, I'm assuming they'll make it a period piece because Y2K will be so in then.)

This is going off the rails, so I better wrap it now. You can get this free on Amazon, I think even if you don't have Prime. There's also a version on YouTube that's not as great quality, but it'll do in a pinch, and you can find that in my PM playlist on my YouTube channel. 

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115677

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.