4Got10 (2015)

This is it, Dolph Lundgren's 70th film reviewed on the site, and on the weekend that we're celebrating his 66th birthday. This is also kind of the last of his DTV actioners that we have to cover of his, and it's been sitting for a while because Dolph has been putting out so much new stuff that I've prioritized those over this; but we're caught up on those ones, so figured it was time to finally make this one happen. In addition to us, Mitch from the Video Vacuum has covered this as well.

4Got10 has Johnny Messner as a guy who wakes up in the aftermath of a shootout with no memory (get it, 4-GOT-10?) and a large wound in his side. After a run in with corrupt sheriff Michael Pare, he's on the run with a van full of money, trying to figure out who he is and why he has all this cash and a large bullet wound. On his trail are Pare, drug lord Danny Trejo, and DEA agent Dolph, whose boss Vivica A. Fox wants this sorted sooner rather than later. But as we can imagine, from the cutesy off-beat Southwestern music score, no one is who they seem. Get the eye protection out when the loose ends fly together in the last 10 minutes!

This is the kind of thing that would've been semi-interesting if it had been made in the late 90s, with people like James Spader and Eric Stoltz and maybe Linda Fiorentino, but it was made in 2015 on a mid-2010s DTV budget with a mid-2010s DTV feel, which in that case, even with the prodigious cast, renders it kind of unremarkable, and no level of cutesy off-beat Southwestern music and cutesy title cards whooshing in when a new character enters the film will make it any less unremarkable--in fact, those things make it even more paint-by-numbers. Also the way the "guy with amnesia trying to solve the mystery of who he is" story unfolded, we were left with a lot of unanswered questions with about ten minutes left, which meant we had to put on those safety goggles and hunker down as all the loose ends started flying together, which they did in rapid fashion. By the same token, we get Dolph doing his best Michael Douglas in Falling Down look--which led to Mitch in his review saying he'd love to see Dolph in a sequel to Falling Down. (I also need to credit Mitch with pointing out in his review what "4Got10" meant, that it was a clever way to write "forgotten." I kept pronouncing it as "four-got-TEN," which explains why I missed it the whole time.) A DTV Falling Down sequel with Dolph in his outfit from this movie would be great; but instead we got most paintiest paint-by-numbers "who's got the money?" yarn. For free on Tubi or something, it's a good way to kill 90 minutes, and which may not be the worst thing in the world though.

The 70 Club. He was the only member of the 60 Club, let alone now owning the 70 Club before anyone even joined him in the 60 Club. And while this film was centered around Johnny Messner's character, Dolph's in it enough to make this good enough for this post. Earlier this year he talked about his battle with cancer, which I think affected his performance in Expend4bles, but it also sounds like he's doing better now, which is great to hear. The other thing about this post is 4Got10 is the last of Dolph's DTV actioners for us to review. It's been quite a ride with him, as I've said before, no one on the DTVC moves the needle like he does, and I don't know if another movie typifies that like this one. I mean, look at that image above, with the glasses, haircut, and tie--and what you can't see is that shirt is a short-sleeved shirt. Who else can wear that outfit and pull it off the way he does and look so cool and commanding doing it? In a way, when we get the twist at the end and find out his character's motives, they betray how fantastic he is here. Like that look in the picture is for a girl who works at a convenience store recording him on her phone as he goes through some bloody trash that Messner left behind. He asks the girl "do you have a good proctologist? Because if you don't stop recording me, I'm going to shove that thing so far up your ass you'll taste it and know why the company is called 'Apple.' " It's the kind of line that, if anyone else said it, we'd roll our eyes, but Dolph makes it work. Here's to you Mr. Lundgren, you're the greatest.

The cutesy title screen. Does anyone actually like them? Do the directors choose to add these in, or do the distributors tack them on after the fact? It's like "ooh, look at how we're introducing you to the players! It's going to be that kind of off-beat who's got the money?/who can you trust? kind of thing, right?" The reality is, all it does is disrupt the flow of the story, and gives us the viewer the impression that what we're about to watch is going to be as paint-by-numbers as it gets. And these "roles" don't always seem to matter either. Like when Vivica A. Fox gets the title screen saying "The Boss," what does she ever do that's really boss-y beyond sitting behind a desk and giving orders. Nothing she does impacts the plot in any kind of meaningful way. If we're going to use a title on her, she needs to play a big part--it's like Chekhov's cliche title screens, if you're going to go through the trouble to use these cliche title cards, the characters you bother to use on them need to play an integral part of the story at some point. The young lady working at the convenience store had more of an impact on the story that Vivica A. Fox did, maybe they should've freezed it and whooshed in "The Young Lady Working Behind the Counter." My advice: just don't use them at all.

As a writer myself, I'm always coming up with my own versions of copyrighted brands. In my case, I'm not so much worried that Google will come to me with a complaint, but rather creating my own thing allows me to really make it my own. Like I created my own version of McDonald's, "Von Dieter's," and while it doesn't have the turnkey understanding that something as prominent in the zeitgeist as McDonald's does, I can create more stories around my Von Dieter's because it's not tied to the idea of McDonald's as much either. Another was I created my own comic book company in my books, Aries Comics, so I can have characters outside of Marvel or DC that are my own. So with that in mind, I understand coming up with an alternative to "Google," but was "Poodle" the right option? Like "let me Poodle that," doesn't sound right, does it? And then extending it out to all the other Google products, "Poodle Maps," "Poodle Docs," "PMail"? I guess that begs the question, Mr. Writer, what would you come up with as an alternative to Google if you needed one for a story? I don't know, "Bugle"? Or maybe you go supermarket generic cereal and call it "Internet Search Engine," complete with a random cartoon animal or animals to accompany it. And then also maybe you have the character be self-aware of it, like "always prefer the generic knock-off to the name brand."

Finally, as we've been doing, Dolph gets two paragraphs in our posts. With 70 films, the question is, where do we go next? We could do the Expendables 3 and Expend4bles to complete that series. We could also do more obscure ones like Small Apartments or his cameo in Sharknado 5, or his voice work in Seal Team. He also has more movies coming, like Wanted Man and Malevolence, plus an indie flick called Showdown at the Grand that's in limited theatrical release right now, but hopefully will be on streaming soon. To be honest, I think we may take a bit of a break with Dolph until his newer stuff comes out. With 70 films, he'll be the undisputed king on the DTVC, perhaps forever, as the second highest total for an actor, Gary Daniels, is 12 behind him, and after that the only other actor with 40 is Cynthia Rothrock with 42. And by taking a break on Dolph, we can let some others, like a Fred Williamson, get more reviews on the site. So this might be it for Dolph for a while here, but I think as we take a break on his reviews, we're left with a huge number for people to go to. Essentially if you're looking up a Dolph DTV actioner on a streaming site, you can come here and see what we thought of it. I think that's really cool.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This is on all the free streamers here in the States. I think for Dolph completists or people looking for a 90-minute time killer, this will do the trick. Beyond that, I don't know that this is worth it--which is fine, you can click on the Dolph tag and see which of the other 70 films of his we've reviewed look good to you.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4510398

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

Bad Ass (2012)

As we continue our October Hall of Fame inductions, and knowing that Danny Trejo was on 29 movies, I wanted his HOF induction and entry into the 30 Club to be a film that really represented him, and this was one that's been kicking around for a while, waiting for me to cover it, so it seemed too perfect not to do it. In addition to us, Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and RobotGEEK's Cult Cinema have looked at this as well.

Bad Ass (or "Bad Buttocks" if you want to work less blue) has Trejo as Vega, an aging Vietnam Vet who encounters a couple skinheads bothering an old man on the bus. He stands up for the old man, the skinheads attack him, and he takes them down. The whole thing was captured on video, so he becomes a viral sensation. Later, his best friend is murdered, and the police seem not to care, so he takes the law into his own hands. As he digs deeper, looking for his friend's killers, he starts to uncover a plot that goes all the way to the top, which includes local crime boss Charles S. Dutton and mayor Ron Perlman. Can our hero Bad Ass take all of these people down and get justice for his friend?

Overall I really enjoyed this one. Trejo is great, it's a role that you feel like only he can play, and he delivers exactly what you'd want from that. The interesting thing is this is inspired by a real life incident--which I'd seen before and thought might have had some similarities to this, but I wasn't sure--but in that original incident, you had an old white man who beats up a younger black man who's giving him a hard time. I think the decision to make it a man of Mexican descent who beats up two skinheads harassing an old black man instead of an older white man beating up a younger black man was a great one, as it gets us out of that stereotype of black and brown young men being the scourge of the community, and what it then does is allows the film to use whoever they want for baddies without treading on those tropes. There were some moments that didn't work for me, like when Trejo wants information out of one of the guys who killed his friend, so he shoves his hand in a garbage disposal and runs--it something I think we could've done without--but that was a minor issue, and as I said above, I think this was great overall.

30 films and a Hall of Fame induction for Mr. Trejo. Not bad at all, and while the volume of his films has jumped up quite a bit, we don't often get to see him in the lead like this, which was why I wanted to cover it for this post. He gives you everything you want in a role of this caliber, there's the endearing quality of his age, his outfits, his fanny pack--more on that in a bit--while at the same time, there's the authentic Trejo bad ass-ery that we look for and love to see. With the number of films he's done now, and how many of those overlap with other big names on the site, his tag count will only go up from here, but I think with him officially being a Hall of Famer now, we can go to more of the smaller number of movies like these where he's the lead. Truly one of the all-time greats, this probably should've happened before, but we're making it happen now, and giving him his due on our site.

How bad ass is Trejo's character? He reads a map while on the bus. This is known as one of the biggest no-nos when visiting a city, police and other travel advisors will tell you over and over, don't read a map out in public. It shows you don't know where you are, that you're not from the area, and probably naive and too trusting, which makes you easy pickens for any baddies out there looking to do you harm. I think the idea wasn't to show how bad ass he was by looking at the transit map though, it was more to show how most younger people would look these things up on their phone, but for me it reinforced his bad ass-ery, because he's flaunting his lack of concern that anyone would do him harm by seeing him look at the map on the bus like this. "Yeah, I don't know where I'm going, but if you think you're going to victimize me, go ahead." My advice if you're coming here to Philly is don't do what Trejo's doing, but rather buy a busted up Phillies cap to make yourself look more local. Also, later in the film, they use the bus chase from Red Heat with Charles S. Dutton stealing a bus bound for Las Vegas, and Trejo giving chase in one bound for San Diego. As someone who uses buses and trains for inter-city travel, the idea of having to wait out that delay while they find another bus sounds dreadful, and I feel for all those poor passengers stuck at the bus station while these two characters smash their way around LA in the buses they were supposed to be taking.

In our Cyborg Cop and Cyborg Cop 2 posts, we discussed David Bradley's fanny pack. In the first film it totally betrayed how cool his hero was supposed to be; and then in the second film, they were just making fun of the fanny pack from the first film the whole time. This movie reinforces why the fanny pack idea was so bad in Cyborg Cop. It's being used here to make Trejo's character more endearing and unassuming, but it's also ironic that an older fella who keeps his stuff in a fanny pack could kick people's asses so much. As Kathy Griffin said in the late 90s when she was a judge for the MTV lip sync show during Spring Break, "fanny packs aren't outdated, they were never in," and then she proceeded to give the wearer of said fanny pack, a bushy, be-goateed contestant, a zero for his performance. But if anyone could make a fanny pack work, it's Trejo under the right scenario, and he pulls it off.

Finally, I've only been to LA a couple times, so I haven't seen a lot of it, including the shot above from the opening credits with all the establishing shots of LA accompanying it. It's a Felix the Cat car dealership, something I hadn't seen in anything about LA before and didn't know existed. What you may not know about me is I don't drive, so I have no need to buy a car, but if I did, and I lived out in LA, I'd definitely buy from a Felix the Cat car dealership. The IMDb trivia had more info on it, saying that when the dealership opened in the early 20s, the owner, also named Felix, was friends with Felix the Cat creator Pat Sullivan, and they decided to promote each other's brands. Now the dealership is the longest running in LA, and both it and Felix the Cat over 100 years old. I mean, how do you not love Felix the Cat? One of the best cartoon characters ever. I need to go back to LA to catch a Dodgers game at some point anyway, but now I feel like I'll have to find my way over to check this out as well.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Here in the States you can get this on most free streamers, including Tubi. With the tight, 90-minute runtime, fun story and fun Trejo performance, streaming it free is a great deal, and worth checking out. And here's to Danny Trejo, one of the all time greats, finally joining two exclusive DTVC clubs, the Hall of Fame and the 30 Club.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1928330

Looking for more action? Check out my new novella, Bainbridge, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

Guns (1990)

As I'm continuing my work to get all of the Andy Sidaris LETHAL Ladies films here on the site, it was time for this gem from 1990. Beyond the usual suspects, the film also featured Erik Estrada as the baddie, and Danny Trejo as his main henchman. How does it get better than that? In addition to us, our friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum has covered this as well, so you can go to his site to see what he thought.

Guns has our crew at it again, this time we start in Hawai'i, where baddie Erik Estrada hires two assassins to kill Dona Speir's DEA partner, this time played by Roberta Vasquez. A case of mistaken identity leads them to kill the wrong person, but now Speir and Vasquez are on the case, along with Bruce Penhall and Michael Shane (back again as our Abilene who can't shoot straight). They track the killers to Las Vegas, where they suspect Estrada may be in on it. Not a job they can handle alone, so they team up with other old friends, including Edy (Cynthia Brimhall), who sold her restaurant in Hawai'i and now sings while working undercover there. The thing is though, could this be exactly what Estrada wants? Turns out, if they all aren't in Hawai'i, they can't stop his arms shipment coming through there.

This is an interesting entry in the series for sure. It has a fantastic cast, but in some ways that spreads us thin because we have a lot of moving parts. In later entries Sidaris does a better job of using a bigger cast like this so we feel like we don't lose anyone along the way. This one also has less nudity, which is interesting, because a big reason why Hope Marie Carlton was removed from the series after Savage Beach was she refused to do nude scenes, so had she stuck it out she may have only had to do one or two. The action was pretty solid though, as we had ninjas (one of whom was played by James Lew), exploding planes, and exploding Estradas. There were some bittersweet moments as well, as we lost Lisa London's Rocky early on, killed in the line of duty; and this is also bodybuilder John Brown's last entry in the series. The other thing was, with Estrada as the main baddie, our great Sidaris mainstay Rodrigo Obregon only has one scene, which is enough to get him a tag here, but not enough of him in a Sidaris film for my liking. Overall though, this gives you what you came for, and like all of Sidaris's LETHAL Ladies films, it's a fun watch.

With that larger cast, we don't see as much of Speir as the action lead, but the film makes no mistake that she's it. William Bumiller plays a DEA higher-up on the case with them, and there's some sense that he kind of calls the shots, but ultimately when things need doin', it's Speir that gets 'em done. She has three great scenes in particular, first being that one I took the screen of above, where she downs an airplane with her rocket launcher. Later, when ninjas invade her workout session with Shane and John Brown, she comes in and saves the day, shooting Lew with a large gun. And then finally, her end showdown with Estrada, where she brings her rocket launcher back and makes sure to use all four rockets on him. Even with her role being smaller in screen time due to the size of the cast, she reminds us why she's one of the all-time queens of action with each scene she's in. Beyond her, we have Cynthia Brimhall returning to play Edy, and Roberta Vasquez returning too, but to play a new character as Speir's partner. Same thing with both women in this, characters with a lot of agency who can take care of business and don't need their men to bail them out. The three of them should've been the real Charlie's Angels, I would've loved to have seen what they and Sidaris could've done with that movie adaptation. I've been on the fence about Speir's addition to the Hall of Fame, but I think, despite the low number of tags she'll have when all is said and done, the place she has as one of the all-time action queens is too hard to pass up.

Speaking of tags to get into the Hall of Fame, Danny Trejo is now at 29, and as we discovered with the Asylum, 30 Club is automatic entry. Whether we do another Trejo film before the fall '23 inductions, I think we should get him in anyway, because with that many tags and his volume of DTV work, he deserves it--but I think he will get at least one more tag before then, because he was in 4Got10, one of the last Dolph DTV films we have to review on the site. To get to this film on his IMDb bio, you need to page down a lot, but even in 1990 he was working a lot, as that same year he also had Marked for Death and Maniac Cop 2 come out. Here he plays Estrada's main henchman, so he's in the film a fair amount. This is unfortunately his only Sidaris film, but the fact that he was in it among his many other acting credits is really fun, and he does a great job with it. Truly one of the greats who will finally be getting his due with the DTVC this fall.

On the other end of the tag spectrum, this is only Erik Estrada's fourth, and first since we did Caged Fury in 2012. There are a couple of his I should've done by now, including the 80s classic Light Blast, and the PM flick Night of the Wilding. His performance here was a reminder of why I shouldn't have taken so long to get more of his stuff on here. It's not like he has a ton of DTV work, with more TV appearances and TV movies to his credit, but there's enough that he shouldn't have gone 11 years between posts. At the very least, we'll see him again soon when we do Do or Die, the next film we have to cover in Sidaris's LETHAL Ladies series.

Finally, a chunk of this film took place at The Rio hotel and resort in Vegas, which is a place I've actually been to. When I visited my friends in Vegas in 2013, they had a suite comped due to their poker play that we stayed in. I feel like this entrance was exactly as it looked then, over 20 years later. Last fall I had to go to San Francisco for work, and my initial flight to Oakland was cancelled, so I had to get another that involved an 8-hour layover in Vegas, but other than that, I haven't been back to Vegas since then. Seeing the Rio though brings back memories to that trip ten years ago. I was there for a week, but after about three days I'd exhausted everything I could do, and everything else cost money, and consistent streams of money. One thing that's interesting about the way Sidaris uses Vegas, is he doesn't focus on gambling. No one is playing the slots, or betting on NFL games, or belly-up to the blackjack table. We see the Rio because that advertising is helping to keep down costs and allows Sidaris to make his movie the way he wants to make it, but the Rio we're sold is less about gambling and more about luxury suites with maybe a Chuck McGann magic show or a Cynthia Brimhall musical performance thrown in. For people who have never been before, I think Vegas is worth it once, but a week is probably too long. Mix in a trip to see the Grand Canyon too.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, all of Sidaris's LETHAL Ladies films are free to stream on Tubi and Plex here in the States. There's also a Mill Creek Blu-ray set. While this isn't my favorite of them, I don't know that there's a bad one of this series, and with that in mind Guns is definitely a great time.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099720

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Renegades (2022)

I'd been waiting on this one since I reviewed Nemesis (2021), but unfortunately ended up waiting a bit too long, as the screener screenwriter Tom Jolliffe had Shogun Films send me unfortunately ended up in my spam folder. Luckily I decided to check there two weeks later, found it, and am now able to make this review happen. 

Renegades has the great Lee Majors as a former Green Beret who's murdered by a gang run by Louis Mandylor, after Majors tries to get them to leave his daughter, Patsy Kensit, alone. This is right after he helps Nick Moran, a down on his luck former special forces soldier whose father served with Majors, and when Moran hears of the murder, he goes to Majors's former fellow soldiers, Billy Murray, Ian Ogilvy, and Paul Barber, so they can exact their revenge on Mandylor. At the same time, Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott is a police detective who's been trying to take Mandylor down, and when she discovers that Moran and crew are going after Mandylor, she has a decision to make: stop them so she can do her job and let the law handle it, or stand back and see if these older former soldiers can do what the law can't. Will they prevail?

This was fantastic. When I reviewed Nemesis earlier this year, both Jonathan Sothcott and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott told me if I enjoyed that, I'd love this, and they were right. Simple concept: evil, ruthless baddie, against a fun, ragtag group of underdog heroes that you can't help rooting for, and I think this would've been great on its own if that's all this was; but from there, the performances were great, even from the cameos like Danny Trejo and Michael Pare; plus the way the story grew organically, allowing for the nuance to develop in certain aspects, like what Nick Moran's character was going through as a former soldier trying to make it in civilian life. It's the kind of thing a churn-and-burn DTV actioner wouldn't have the bandwidth to pull off, but here it's handled with a level of depth and allowed to flourish in a way I didn't come in expecting. There were other aspects I appreciated as well, like how we get the scene of Mandylor beating up a rival gang member he captured cut with and juxtaposed with the scene of Moran's character talking to the other guys about what he's been going through, trying to move onto civilian life after the war. It was like we had two distinct forms of intensity, one that's more common in an action film, and one that we might see more in an indie drama, and we're shuttling back and forth between both. As a device I liked it, because it allowed those more dramatic elements to flourish without weighing the film down in what is ultimately an action film. This might not be the best film for Christmas, but considering we all get the 26th off this year, I can't think of a better way for us Yanks to celebrate Boxing Day than to fire this one up.

When I reviewed Nemesis I was really big on Nick Moran's performance, and he came back in this and was even better. The opening of the film is anchored by him, and he really leans into who that character is, so it was great to see him hit that out of the park. As I mentioned above, I also liked the way the story moved organically, it allowed Moran's character's past to take on a depth that we wouldn't see in most DTV flicks, and I think that's important. My wife and I were watching an old episode of Emergency! recently, and it had the trope of the crazed Vietnam vet who's violent and seeing ghosts, and while we've come a long way in our depiction of veterans in popular media, the idea of the combat vet suffering from PTSD is one that's often handled in films in a way that's too reductive, which then often leads it to being exploitative. The fact that this film didn't do that with Moran's character was refreshing, but I also think a sign of how the people working at Shogun Films not taking the churn-and-burn approach to film making can give us something like this more nuanced, three-dimensional hero, so I'm looking at it and saying "this isn't the usual bearded, grimacing, white guy former special forces dude I'm used to seeing, this guy has me pulled in and invested, and I'm ready to see him and everyone else through the rest of this film." When I talked with screenwriter Tom Jolliffe about his previous film When Darkness Falls, and the previous Shogun film Nemesis, he mentioned the slow burn aspect both of those films had. I think Tom's screenplay here does a great job of drawing on that slow burn aspect enough to let things grow organically, even if the action kicks in sooner than it does in those others; but for the slow burn to work, even in the more limited capacity in which it's used here, it needs a performance like Moran's, plus the directing and editing that trusts it'll all work, and we definitely get all of it.

Speaking of the directing, Daniel Zirilli is a name that's popped up on our site quite a bit, so when I found out he was working with Shogun Films and Jonathan Sothcott on this, I was excited to see what would come of that collaboration. The last Zirilli-directed film we looked at on the site was the Dolph flick Acceleration, and while I enjoyed that, I didn't enjoy it as much as this because it had too many other elements that weighed the film down when it didn't need to, while this had a simple premise that I think they were able to add elements to--like Moran's character's development--in ways that didn't impede the fun and the action, which ended up enhancing the film overall. Like I've been doing with Shogun Films, I've also been following Zirilli on Instgram, and it's fun to see what projects he's working on and who he's working on them with. In that sense, like Sothcott, Jolliffe, and the rest of Shogun, Zirilli's a fellow fan who's making these movies for fans like us, and it's great to see it all come together like it did here.

Also from Nemesis we have Billy Murray and Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, with Murray as a part of the crew of retired soldiers, and Nerissa Sothcott as the Scotland Yard Detective trying to take Mandylor's crime syndicate down. Having Murray with Paul Barber and Ian Ogilvy really made that gang extra fun, which not only made it easy for us to root for them and be invested in their success, but also worked as a good juxtaposition from Moran's more serious character. I could see Murray in anything really, so to see him turning in such a fun performance is even better. With Nerissa Sothcott's character, I think because the only other main female character was Patsy Kensit's, and she was more set up as the damsel in distress at the end, we needed Sothcott's to make the film less boys club-ish. I also really liked how they used her character as the bridge to get Michael Pare's cameo in the film, because it both got us Pare in a way that worked, but also set up her character less as someone passively letting Moran and company take care of her Mandylor problem for her, but rather strategically weighing her options on whether or not this is a good play. Finally, with the human trafficking element to Mandylor's crime syndicate, Nerissa Sothcott's character also prevents the film from being too "women are helpless and need their White Knight male heroes to come and save them," and we especially get this kind of mitigation when Mandlyor's character makes a crack about Sothcott potentially dancing for him at his club, and she shuts him down. This is another area where Shogun gets it right. Most DTV flicks would take her role, whittle it down to a day's worth of shooting, and get a big name like Pare to play it so they can stick him on the tin. Instead, Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott takes the part and invests more in it, and the result is something we didn't know we needed, but helps to give the film more depth and make it more enjoyable--plus we still get our fun Pare cameo too.

Finally, two last points. First, I liked the way the film used London as a character by giving us these beautiful establishing shots of the city, the images we in the rest of the world think of when we hear "London;" and then jumping down into the grittier underbelly of gangs and organized crime that me on my 1997 class trip there was oblivious to--though I did see a man speeding the wrong way up a street in a stolen car, so there was that. The other piece was the use of Mandylor's character as an outsider by being an Aussie. Too often in the States films use African American or Latin American gangs as a way to depict this concept of the outsider "invading" a neighborhood, from which the overtones and dog whistles are obvious. Having the character be from a Commonwealth country though, we could have the outsider "invading" London aspect without the racism that usually comes with that approach. To further divorce it, we have Danny Trejo's character playing someone who's an adopted Londoner further depicting Mandylor and his gang as the outsiders. I don't know that this was a conscious decision, or more like "we have Louis Mandylor as the baddie, what can we do with that?" but I appreciated the way it worked out.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, you can get this through VOD in the States, and I think it's also available on Blu-ray in Germany. For the UK, January 30th it'll be available as well. This is well worth checking out. You can support indie filmmakers and enjoy a fun actioner while you do it. What's better than that?

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11696276

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Pups Alone (2021)

I watched this recently for a podcast episode that I did with Mitch Lovell from the Video Vacuum, and figured I'd break from my documentary review on Christmas tradition to get this posted, because I couldn't think of a better time to do it later. In addition to Mitch on his site, our friend Sean Malloy at I Must Break This Podcast did an episode on this too, plus last year he interviewed director Alex Merkin, which is also worth checking out.

Pups Alone is about a widower inventor and his daughter and dog who gets a new job with a pet tech company, which moves him out to a gated community. When they get there, one of their neighbors, Dolph, discovers that the widower has an invention that translates a dog's thoughts into words, so he hatches a plan: while everyone who works for the company is at the Christmas retreat in Big Bear, he'll hire two bumbling crooks, one of whom is Nicholas Turturro, to steal the invention. At the same time, the widower's dog is staying behind, and when he gets wise to the bumbling thieves' intentions, he gathers up the rest of the neighborhood dogs to use the widower's Rube Goldberg contraptions to stop them.

And that's it... or is it? No that's like a fraction of it, there are also endless minutes of padding, endless scenes where the dialog goes on too long, and endless bad jokes like dogs farting in people's faces and blind elderly women getting robbed. They even used this cartoon story board device to advance the plot, and it was still too weighed down. "But Matt," you say, "this is a kids movie, of course you're going to be bored!" I hear you, so I went to a site called Parent Movie Review, which was listed on the critic reviews for this, to get a different perspective. Here is what the reviewer, Savannah Lee, had to say about her 5-year-old son's reaction to this: "my 5-year-old spent the whole run time jumping on the couch, leaving the room to find toys to play with, and just generally being uninterested. For a film to not even be able to hold his attention is a feat unto itself." And there you have it. I think even as a Dolph completists, the novelty of seeing him in Christmas sweaters or dressed like Santa--or playing, as Mitch put it, the Richard Kind scheming character--is tough for the kind of slog this movie is, and maybe that sums it up best.

Dolph Lundgren is 65 years old, and now has 65 films reviewed on this site. No one else has their age number of films reviewed, Gary Daniels is closest with 56 films at 59 years old. Since I started the site, we've called Dolph the Babe Ruth of DTV action, but with the numbers he's amassed, maybe the Wayne Gretzky of DTV is more apt. Either way, with the volume of Dolph we already have here, there was no way I couldn't do this film, so whether it was good or bad I was stuck with it. That being said, Dolph playing against type was on its own a fun thing to see. Mitch's Richard Kind comparison was the most apt, only he played him as a kind of hyped-up jock type, slapping the widower on the back and generally being rough with him like William Zabka in an 80s teen movie. During this DTVC journey we've seen Dolph fighting with foam sharks, wearing a toga in a Christian movie, playing the drums in a rock band, and even acting opposite TV talk show hosts Montel Williams and Jerry Springer in separate non-related films. Christmas movie was one of the few feathers he didn't have in his cap yet, so now he has it. I guess "you're welcome"?

The thing about the modern Christmas movie, is most are made assembly-line style for companies like Hallmark that need to pump out a bunch. We'll grab some former stars from the Island of Misfit Actors, find a nice, quaint, Canadian town to pass as an American one, then use any of three or four paradigms to create a nice 80-minute story that fits the beats of the constant commercial breaks modern TV has here in the States. While it sounds crass, one side benefit is no matter how rough the movie is, it'll always get us out on time. I think that's why my wife and I enjoy them. Here's Brandon Routh, former Superman, playing a kind, cooky fireman who needs to find homes for 9 kittens that were abandoned at the fire station. Oh wait, his former love interest is a vet who just happens to be home for the holidays? Sure, it's contrived, but Brandon Routh is fun, and again, the film gets us in and out on time. Because this move was DTV instead of made-for-TV, it had no such constraints; but couldn't there have been someone saying "this is too much?" One thing I know I get from the Hallmark Christmas movie is a modicum of restraint. Usually I'd like to see Nicholas Turturro mentally calling his agent while doing a scene where he has to pretend to react to having a dog farting in his face, but when the scene goes on forever, it becomes too much. 

The other piece of this is the talking dog aspect, which is usually an easy element to make work and anchor a movie like this around. The problem is, it too was kind of all over the place. First off, as Mitch pointed out, the dogs were kind of nondescript. I mean, I really liked Charlie, the star dog, but even he had a pulled-off-the-street quality to him. Pulled-off-the-street is good if I'm out and see someone walking their dog, at that point any dog who's jaunting around and sniffing things is great. But in a movie it takes on an early 90s shot on video with the director's friends kind of movie quality. Beyond that, the actual dog action was weird. There was this construct where Danny Trejo's bulldog character was the leader, or "Dogfather," and he had the other dogs harassing Charlie. It was an odd construct that weighed the film down in ways it didn't need. Then they tried to do the "dog hates the mailman" thing, but it was Charlie attacking the mailman, which I wasn't sure if in that case it was supposed to be an applause scene? Who likes to see mail workers attacked by dogs? And how does that endear me to our star dog any more? Animals should be an easy win for a movie, but here they ended up being another misstep.

Finally, as we've been doing lately, I want to get back to Dolph for a second paragraph to look at where we stand with his career. At 65, the next stop on the Dolph Train is the 70 Club. With that in mind, I have Section 8, Operation Seawolf, and 4Got10 all watched and ready to review. We also have Expendables 3 which I still have only done on a podcast episode, and then Sharknado 5, which only has him in a cameo, but he's in it. But would we want to review that for his 70th film? I checked, and for his 60th we did Female Fight Club, and that was a milestone as well because it was the last Dolph DTV flick I needed to watch--and depending on how you count Seal Team, I'm still caught up ahead of his 2023 releases. Looking at our past with him, we've also done some of his big screen releases, like The Expendables and Rocky IV, so Expendables 4 is probably in play as well. As I said above, it's been a great journey, and based on his upcoming projects, not one that's going to end anytime soon on his side, so it feels like it's on us to keep the site going so we can continue to catalog them.

And with that, let's wrap this up. This will unfortunately go down as one of the more difficult entries in our need to catalog all of Dolph's films here on the site. As of this writing, you can get this free on the Roku Channel here in the States. If you feel the need to dive in, I suggest planning multiple sits, maybe three or four. And to hear us discuss the film in more detail, you can check out our episode in the podcast archives. It was another fun episode, and great to have Mitch on as always!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6344584

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Fury of the Fist and the Golden Fleece (2018)

In furthering our celebration of Cynthia Rothrock joining the 40 Club, I figured I'd finally give this one a look. Not only does it have her, but two other 30 Club actors, Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Michael Dudikoff. On the other hand, for a film with all these names, it seemed suspicious that none of the other usual suspects had covered this, and it only had two critic reviews and 10 user reviews. Let's see if the suspicions were warranted.

Fury of the Fist and the Golden Fleece is, beyond being a difficult title to type, an attempted send-up of old grindhouse movies about a guy named the Fist who hilariously is both a martial arts fighter and a former porn star--trust me, I'm laughing on the inside. Stuff happens though, and he finds he has to fight people, along with a couple friends, and eventually that leads him to the head baddie, played by Michael Dudikoff. Other stuff happens, including a lot of dick jokes, fights, and all kinds of computer generated video effects, for roughly an hour and 40 minutes, and then for 7 minutes more stuff happens as the credits roll. But it does have a lot of names that make cameos, so there's that.

Between my 4th and 5th years of college--yes, I took five years to get my BA--I dated a girl who had two kids, one that wae three, and the other not quite two. One of the times I was over there, the mother was changing the not quite two-year-old, and while she was getting the diaper, he got away and started peeing. He was so fascinated that urine was coming out of his penis, that he ran over to show me, and I was like "yeah, it does that, isn't that crazy?" Beyond the fact that it's hard to think that that almost two-year-old is old enough to drink now, this movie smacked of a couple guys who just learned what their penis can do, and watching it, I felt like the adult saying "yes, it does that, isn't that crazy?" It wasn't just that the film was full of dick jokes, but they were like "penises are so great, I can't believe I'm just learning about mine!" Whether they were dick jokes or other kinds of jokes, they often didn't quite come off like they should have, and when they did hit, they didn't know when to stop. It was like if you've ever been at a party and told a joke everyone thought was funny, and another guy there thinks he's funny too, so he follows you around and tells you a bunch of jokes that for the most part don't work, but when one lands he goes back to that well over and over, and you're just trying to get away. There were some fun moments though. I think had it been shorter, had a comedic writer helped with the jokes, and if the two stars--one of whom was director and co-writer, the other of whom was the other writer--had not been in it and they left the film to the stars they cast, it might have worked. Unfortunately for me it was a miss, and I guess that's why it doesn't have more buzz considering those names.

Because I'm including this as part of the celebration for Rothrock joining the 40 Club, I'll start with her, even though she's barely in the movie. She has one quick fight scene, which was good, but we could've had more. For example, we had Jean-Claude Van Damme's daughter Bianca Brigitte, why didn't we have a fight scene between those two? That would've been more compelling than a lot of what we ended up with. Also, the big plot device was that our Fist character eats meatballs that have estrogen in them, and he loses his mojo. So too much estrogen means someone can't kick ass? Beyond the fact that that kind of joke was more appropriate in the 90s, how can you have kickass women like Rothrock and Bianca Van Damme and say that our hero ingesting estrogen makes him weak? I'll take the Pepsi challenge with Rothrock's stuff over this any day.

 

Close on Rothrock's heels for his own inclusion in the 40 Club, we're now at 38 for Don "The Dragon" Wilson--though it seems like two films we tagged him in, Saigon Commandos and The Siege of Firebase Gloria, have been removed from his IMDb bio, so he may only be at 36. In this he has a bigger part than Rothrock, which is nice. He played a fun send-up to the 70s Hong Kong martial arts master. I'd be interested to see how he did with more of these roles, like maybe something done by Michael Jai White who has a good mix of a keen sense of humor and fantastic martial arts skills. In Black Dynamite he had some send-ups to the old martial arts movie that came off really well, and the way Wilson carried his part off here, it would be fun to see what they could do together. As far as the 40 Club for him, he has three movies on Tubi that I can do, so that'll be easy to get one more--Scorpion King 4 is one I've seen, but didn't get any images before it was removed from Tubi, so I'm waiting for it to come around again. The question then is, where could he go from there? He's making more stuff, so we could potentially get another 10 movies from there, it's just a matter I guess of how many more older ones get dropped from IMDb for technically not having him in them.

We last saw Michael Dudikoff here back in January of 2020, and that was the first time since we'd done In Her Defense in 2011. This is now 33 films for him--he has 34 tags because we did American Ninja 2 twice--and I don't see us getting that many more unless he has a greater outburst of films, but that may be okay for him, he's already given us a lot of greats. His role here as the main baddie was one of the few real standouts in this to me. The Joker make-up combined with the maniacal nature, I'd love to see him do more crazy baddies in DTV flicks. Like if they ever made a DTV Expendables, where maybe you have Rothrock, Wilson, and Daniels as the heroes, they could have Fred Williamson as the Machine Gun Joe type, and Dudikoff as the baddie, and maybe Matthias Hues as his hatchet man. Oh, maybe add in Dacascos with that trio of heroes too. Should we tack on Gruner too? Anyway, let's get this DTV Expendables made, and load up all those names in a film all us DTV action fans can enjoy.

Finally, making a movie a comedy sometimes has the effect of insulating it from criticism. "Of course that was bad, you just don't get the joke, we made it bad on purpose!" I get that, and the point could be made that I just didn't get the humor here, or it wasn't my style. It just seemed like overall there wasn't a lot of cohesion, people just show up, there's a bunch of close-ups and sound effects, then they fight and CGI blood appears, and then we go to more things happening that make no sense, close-ups and sound effects, and more fights and CGI blood splatters. In once scene, there's this fight at the bagel burger place the hero and his friends work at, and he does this back kick thing to the baddies over and over. I get repeating the scene if you only have 60 minutes of footage and need to stretch things, but the movie was an hour and 47 minutes! It needed to cut things, not extend the joke. Another scene, the director's character kicks a baddie holding a gun, which causes the baddie to shoot another baddie. It was funny, but then they repeat it. Again. And again. Like over ten times. And it's like "it's hilarious, the guy keeps getting shot with CGI blood splatters and he's yelling in pain!" Going back to Black Dynamite or Machete and why those worked, I think a big part of it was the people making those lived in the 70s and 80s during the Grindhouse era, so they got the vibe better, whereas the guys making this were younger, more my age, and there was almost a sense that they were trying to remake Machete or Black Dynamite more. For me, this would've worked at 80 minutes, played a little bit straighter, but still as a comedy, with Don Frye's character as the hero. Just get rid of the characters played by the director and his co-writer, maybe do 30% of the dick jokes--which may still be more dick jokes than any other movie--and let the guest stars, of which there were many, do their things.

But ultimately we didn't get that, and what we did get didn't work for me. As of this writing you can get this on Tubi here in the States. Maybe if you're a completist of the stars like me, you make it happen, otherwise beware the siren song of all these names calling you in. It seems this was ignored by the usual suspects for a reason.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2490148

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Acceleration (2019)

This is the second of three films Dolph had come out in 2019, coming just a month before Hard Night Falling, and about three or four months after The Tracker. If either of those two are any guide, we can't expect much Dolph from this. That being said, the fact that it was leaning heavily on Natalie Burn, which was something I said Hard Night Falling should have done, gave me hope. In addition to us, our friend Cam Sully at Action Elite has covered this, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Acceleration has Natalie Burn as an underground enforcer who has the special skills needed to handle tough situations for shady characters. When underground boss Dolph Lundgren kidnaps her son and makes her carry out 5 tasks, she now has to not only do these tasks, but find out where her son is so she can rescue him. The issue is, why does Dolph want these tasks carried out, and what does he have to do with Sean Patrick Flannery, the local kingpin and guy whose name is top billed on the tin? Can she figure it out before her son dies?

Among the recent Dolph efforts, I think I liked this one best, but it still had its flaws, including a very convoluted twist at the end that we didn't need. The biggest thing is that, unlike Hard Night Falling, this film focuses on Natalie Burn, and doesn't even sell itself as a Dolph flick so much as a flick that also stars Dolph. That helps, because you don't go in with any expectations, and then are allowed to be excited by what Burn brings to the table. The thing I wonder is, why not trim it further? Why not get the kid aspect out of it, and just have her doing jobs for Dolph because she wants to get paid? She's a hired gun with no past who just does the job. "I have five jobs for you, if you get them done by sunrise, you get this bonus." Then we can root for Dolph and we don't need a plot twist at the end to redeem him. Just a thought, but overall this is pretty good.

Dolph continues to add to his already record number of reviews on the DTVC, and with all the films of his I watched for the Dolph List on Letterboxd, I have a bunch more in the can that I need to write reviews on--and considering this movie was one I watched after I made the list, it doesn't even put a dent in that backlog. One of the ways we've been seeing Dolph lately is in this role, where he's taking a backseat to let someone else shine, and it really happens here with Burn. It's very similar to another one-word A title he did, Altitude, where he sat in a cockpit and let Denise Richards have the lead, now he's in a control center letting Natalie Burn do it, and it works both times. It looks like Dolph doesn't have anything slated for release in 2020, but that's okay, we have a long way to go before he's finished here with that backlog.

As I mentioned above, Natalie Burn really has a chance to shine here, and she does, which is great to see. Again, I don't think we needed the son construct, and I wonder if there's a sense that, because Burn is a woman, we wouldn't feel it as organic if there isn't a Lifetime Movie mama bear/Taken aspect to underpin it, which is too bad. I think she's plenty badass enough to not need that, and she showed that in this movie. In a way, all of that other stuff about her needing to find her son and her feelings surrounding that padded out the movie and dragged it down, which you don't want in a movie called "Acceleration". Drag works against acceleration, which is bad.

The other big drag on this movie was the whole other plot with Sean Patrick Flannery as the big boss trying to track down junkie Jason London about a deal he screwed him on. That whole thing was as paint-by-numbers DTV as I've seen, so much so they may as well have just went up to Michigan and filmed it with a Bruce Willis without his reverse shots. For me, I think that's one of the big issues with modern DTV, is they don't really do anything new, and when they do, they can't commit to it all the way. We've been seeing that former big screen actor now playing a crime boss paradigm for so long now, complete with their quirky Pulp Fiction wannabe philosophies. And you get the juxtaposition here when Flannery's character is sitting across from Burn's, and he's waxing philosophical about the lemon meringue pie--we're seeing the tired, well-worn territory getting recycled again, while right in front of us is the new and exciting next step that DTV needs to take, but they're just not comfortable enough diving in. I get it, the Michigan/Louisiana-filmed Bruce Willis not doing his reverse shots crime thing gets streams, but it's the kind of thing I'm pretty much done reviewing on this site.

Finally, among the many names in this--and there are many--the one that really stood out in a supporting capacity was Quentin "Rampage" Jackson. I think as far as former UFC fighters in movies go, he's got the most natural talent onscreen, which is a huge advantage for him. It'll be interesting to see if he can get some actual leading roles, and what he can do with them. Other names, Danny Trejo is great as usual. He's developing an Eric Roberts ability to make a lot out of a tiny appearance. Chuck Liddell is another former UFC star in this. I believe this is four films he's done with Dolph, in addition to Riot, Altitude, and War Pigs. He's not the natural Jackson is, and I feel like out of those four, Altitude did the best job of putting him in situations where he can succeed. Maybe what he needs is a turn as one of the good guys in a supporting role.

And with that, I think it's time to wrap this up. I saw this initially on Hoopla, but since then it's been made available on Prime as well. I think it is very much something you shouldn't shell out extra for, but if it's already part of your streaming package, or you can get it on Hoopla, it's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9534808

Machete Kills (2013)

This is one I've been meaning to do for a while, and on some levels wished I'd seen in the theater, because I enjoyed Machete so much. Alas, I often don't get to the theater at all for any movies, so why would this film be an exception. When I mentioned it to Jamie, her response was a little tepid, and I found out after it was because many people didn't like this at all. I had no idea there was this kind of vitriol targeted at the film--I guess I've been living under a rock for too long. Two guys that haven't been living under a rock and who have also looked at this are Fred from Full Moon Reviews and Mitch from The Video Vacuum, so you can go there and see what they both thought. They're both great friends of the blog and former guests on the podcast.

Machete Kills picks up where the first one left off. Jessica Alba is killed, which leaves our eponymous hero, played again by Danny Trejo, upset and ready to take it out on some people. Our President, played by Charlie Sheen(Estevez), allows Mr. Trejo that chance, by having him take out a Mexican separatist who has a nuclear bomb aimed at the White House. But things aren't as they seem--as they never are--and Mel Gibson is involved, which makes things worse.

I really enjoyed this movie, as did Jamie. I'm not sure why this was so vituperated against then; I don't know if it was the inclusion of Lady Gaga as an assassin, or Sophia Vergara as a screaming woman, or maybe the fact that Robert Rodriguez stuck it to the fan boys by distorting the image when Amber Heard had her love scene with Trejo, thus preventing them from seeing anything good. For me, this was a great action-fest with all the fun of the previous one. Maybe that's it, people were like "I've seen this before" or, "I liked it better when it was called Machete." Either way, it worked for us.

Let's start with Mr. Trejo. He gets this part and gets what he's supposed to do with it. That's why it works so well. He never overdoes it, yet he's never not believable. We've done over 20 Trejo films here at the DTVC, and the vast majority of them are him playing small parts or even just one scene cameos--the best small part of which by far is when he gave Jean-Claude Van Damme a foot massage in Desert Heat--but when he gets a good look at the lead with a good story and a lot of fun action, he nails it, which is great to see.

I wanted to go next to Mr. Sheen aka Mr. Estevez, as he takes on the role his father once held so well in The West Wing. Again, he gets what's required of him here and he plays the part perfectly. I was trying to think, of all the Presidents we've seen here, who is the best. We have Jerry Springer in the Dolph film The Defender. We also had DTVC Hall of Famer Rutger Hauer in the film Scorcher. One thing that's great about both of those is that neither man was born in the US. I think Sheen should go right in there with them as some of the best we've seen here at the DTVC. Also, special mention needs to go to the late Roy Scheider, who has played the president here a couple times, including another Dolph film, The Peacekeeper.

This film is rife with cameos and guest spots. Of course, we had Michelle Rodriguez reprising her role from the first one, which was great to see. Amber Heard, who we have seen here before in And Soon the Darkness. Antonio Banderas was also here, and we've seen him before in The Big Bang. Finally, from last week's film The Frozen Ground, we had Vanessa Hudgens, an actress I thought we'd never see here who's been great in both films. A lot of DTVC alums. One who wasn't an alum, and someone who had the distinction of being the most problematic member of the cast, was Mel Gibson as the baddie. It was a weird thing, because on the one hand I'm seeing everything we loved about him as one of the top leading men in the 80s and 90s, and part of me was enjoying that; but on the other hand, it's just Mel Gibson with all his anti-Semitic grossness on full display, and the problem with him being a baddie is he gets to retain that grossness, which doesn't help. I guess I'm torn on which way to go on that.

For my third picture on the post I had a lot of places I could go. With only three pictures on the main review page per post and the others relegated to the image page; and a film like this with so many names, it's hard to narrow it down. We knew Trejo would be one; and then I liked the idea of doing a paragraph on Presidents in DTVC films, so that was 2; but for three, it could have been anyone. I decided to go with Cuba Gooding Jr., because this is a guy we've been seeing here at the DTVC for some time getting after it in the DTV world because he can't get the parts he wants in Hollywood anymore despite being an Oscar winning actor. It would have been a crime to not recognize him here. The crime might have been that he had such a small part, as I would have liked to have seen him do more; but overall it was good to see him in this flick.

So that wraps things up. This is a yes for Jamie and me. Fun, all the action of the original, and a slew of cameos. Sign me up for number three--just not in the theater, I'll wait till it's on Netflix Instant. You can always check out the pod by going to the sidebar and clicking the link to the podcatcher you prefer.

For more information: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2002718/

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Force of Execution (2013)

I looked at this film back in February or March before I moved down to DelCo, PA, with the idea in mind that I would use it to get back to doing more posts again after a hiatus. Instead, it sat on the shelf until June, when, after telling Moe at Drunk on VHS and Jon at the After Movie Diner that I would do a podcast on their night of programming, I was stuck without a movie and a guest for my second show. So I decided to do an hour, solo, on this film and Steven Seagal in general. It wasn't pretty, which is why you won't find that episode on our archive page. What did happen in that episode though, was my guest from the first episode (Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark), Jamie, was commenting in the chat, helping me out, and from that episode on she was our regular cohost on the DTVC Podcast up through the 2015 episodes.

Force of Execution has Mr. Seagal as a crime boss in New Mexico or something, who sends his number one guy, Bren Foster, in to take out a snitch in the local prison. Problem is, Ving Rhames tells him to kill the wrong guy, and the people who wanted the snitch dead are pissed at Seagal's guy. This leads to the guy getting his hands smashed and Seagal retiring him for awhile, living in a studio above Danny Trejo's restaurant, which is owned by Seagal and is where Seagal's daughter works. Long story short, Rhames gets out of prison, tries to start a turf war to take over from Seagal, Trejo uses scorpions to fix Foster's hands, and after the daughter is kidnapped they save her and live happily ever after.

I don't know what happened with this film. It was okay in the early going, the Bren Foster going into the prison to take care of business was awesome, and I thought, "hey, I can live with this." Then it was left turnsville all over the place. We got Foster with crippled hands, then Trejo uses scorpions later in the film to fix them. What? Was there any point in the film that it looked like Rhames would beat Seagal? No. Then we have the damsel in distress trope mixed with the gross, "protect our blond white women from degenerate black men" trope that those espousing a so-called "post-racial" US will tell you shouldn't exist anymore, but there it was in all it grossness. Ultimately I'm left wondering "where was that film I used to know when Bren Foster was kicking ass?"

Let's start with Seagal. When I was writing this and also preparing for that ill-fated podcast, I went into it after watching this film with the idea that all of Seagal's recent DTV stuff was crap. That's not really true, in fact he's had some good ones. For example, 2009's Driven to Kill. Okay, I guess that was 5 years ago now, so who knows. The biggest problem here was that the film was setting up as a Bren Foster vehicle with Seagal perhaps passing the torch, or maybe being the number one but giving Foster the bulk of the fights. Either one would have worked, instead of this muddled thing we had here. Is it possible that Seagal isn't able to pass the torch? That he can't let a potential talent like Foster really take the film and run with it? I can understand that, but if that's the case, don't set it up like Foster is the main guy, or the one the story is centered on. This film started in one direction, a direction that worked, and then went in an entirely different direction that didn't work, and that was the biggest disappointment. Seagal still has some more films coming down the pike. We'll see what they look like.

I want to get back to Bren Foster and his character. He had a sweet scene in the beginning, proving beyond anything that he can get after it. Also, the having his hands crippled I don't think was a deal breaker, that has happened before--Yojimbo for example. What would've been cool is if he could've gone all Yojimbo to get his revenge on both Seagal and Rhames, like he starts a turf war between the two and they kill each other and he comes out on top. Again, Seagal couldn't let that happen, he had to be the omnipotent leader, he had to be a good guy despite being a crime boss, and he couldn't let anyone, especially not Bren Foster, get over on him, even if he was playing a baddie. And then we have the scorpion thing, which made no sense. We had a good fight where Foster took out some guys with no hands. Why couldn't we do that? Have a guru train him to fight without his hands, and then he gets his revenge, fooling people by playing the part of the helpless crippled man. Instead we got a mess.

Ving Rhames plays the baddie. Unlike Seagal, he doesn't mind being the bad guy who ultimately loses. He was awesome in this role, making sure he played a baddie that was entertaining but sufficiently bad enough that we want him to be taken down. In my mind though, while he can play a great villain, his best DTV turn was as the hero in The Tournament, and hopefully we'll get more of that in the future. Danny Trejo had a smaller role as, I don't know, The Noble Savage? As I mentioned above, this film did not do well with the way it injected race into it, and while Trejo with the whole scorpion thing wasn't as bad as the black degenerate gangsters and the need to protect the blond white woman from them, it was still a little off. I think Trejo as Foster's landlord as an independent character, apart from Seagal, would've worked much better--and get rid of the scorpions too.

This was what Seagal looked like in the final scene, SWAT gear, special ops, seemingly out of nowhere. "Oh, by the way, crime boss knows special ops too. What? What's wrong with that?" Maybe this is the future of Seagal though? No more slap-chop covered up by shaky cam attempt at a solid fight scene, maybe special ops is how he furthers his action career. We did have it in Maximum Conviction, and while it didn't necessarily work, I'm willing to withhold judgement. Let's see what happens, but if we get a Pistol Whipped with good shootouts based on this Seagal, I'll take it.

So this is a pass for me, it's just a muddled mess that seems to be more indicative of Seagal's recent DTV output. That's too bad, because if Seagal took a step back and let a Bren Foster take him down, we might have had the film we wanted. As he saw in Machete, it's okay to be the baddie, and for some movies, it works better. This film is one where it would have, and because he didn't play the baddie, the whole thing suffered.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2611626/

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