To Be the Best (1993)

In 2026 I've decided to start something that I started last month without realizing I was starting it, and that's reviewing one PM for the first post of every month. That means we'll have at least 12 PM flicks reviewed this year. Not a bad deal, and I figured for our first one I'd do one I'd been meaning to do forever, which also has an exploding helicopter, so I can tick that off the list too. In addition to us, the PM Podcast covered this, plus Toyman at Bulletproof, and Karl Brezdin at First of the B-List.

To Be the Best is about a kickboxing/martial arts tournament, where the US team is one of many entrants, and their biggest competitor is the Thai team, composed of residents from the Bangkok Chinatown. The coach of the US team is former disgraced fighter Rick Kulhane (Martin Kove) and his two sons Sam (Phillip Troy Linger--and no, he didn't have to let it) and Eric (Michael Worth), who is the team's best fighter. The problem is the evil Alex Cord is hanging around, and he has $500,000 on the Thai team's best fighter Hong Do (Steven Vincent Leigh), and to make sure his bet comes in, he's threatening Eric's girlfriend (Brittney Powell). Will Eric throw the big fight?

This does exactly what you want PM to do, except the middle is a bit draggy, which we'll get to in a second. It starts with some underground fighting, where a man who's a cross between a poor man's Nick Vallelonga and a poor man's Johnny Roast Beef tries to get Worth to throw the fight, and when he doesn't, to show Worth he means business, he has his helicopter pilot take Worth for a ride, hanging him from a cord while he flies him around Vegas. The pilot gets a little too into it though, and crashes into one of the hotels, causing Worth to go flying into one of the suites. It's as amazing as it gets, only to be followed up in the next scene by another underground fight in LA that gets broken up by the police, leading to a two-pronged chase with one set of cops chasing some guys in a white car, and another chasing Linger (which he didn't have to let it) on a dirt bike. The problem was, the movie couldn't keep that kind of energy up, and things bog down a bit with some sparring montages, broken up by a nice bowling alley fight, and then it's just a tournament film, until the end, which is another fantastic group of great action set pieces to finish things off. I think where that leaves us, is this is a great time, and while it's maybe only a top 30 PM flick for me, that's still going to be a fun way to spend your 90 minutes.

We're now at 54 PM films, and this is one of those ones where you'd think it would've been done sooner, but for some reason it kept getting pushed back, and I think the only reason I bumped it up to now is the fact that it has an exploding helicopter, so I can chip away at my paltry number on Exploding Helicopter's Letterboxd list. And what a thing of beauty that helicopter explosion is, and while the movie isn't able to maintain that energy throughout, the fact that had it at all is why we come to PM films. This is also number 58 for Art Camacho, who's not only fight coordinator, but he plays one of the US team as a character named "Runt"--which at no point is that expounded upon, that's just the name they gave him. Definitely in 2026 he'll be our fourth member of the 60 Club. We're also seeing Martin Kove again for the first time since VFW in 2024. He's at 19 now, so we'll see if we get him past 20 this year. And then for our stunt coordinators, this film features the duo of Red Horton and "Broadway" Joe Murphy, with the former as second-unit director, and the latter stunt coordinator. They're at 17 and 16 films respectively, which I think are numbers we'll see get bigger as we do more PM flicks.

Two names that are finally getting tags are Michael Worth and Vince Murdocco. Neither have big numbers--five for Worth, 11 for Murdocco--but they both were such a big part of 90s DTV action, especially these PM flicks, that the tagging was overdue--especially if Ian Jacklin's been tagged, because they inhabit a similar space, though to Jacklin's credit, he has more tags than either of them with 13. Worth is the star in this one, and I think there's a sense that maybe PM was positioning him to do more stuff like this, but this ended up being his last film with them, I think due to him making Fists of Iron, which I believe no one that worked on that other than Art Camacho did another film for PM--Matthias Hues hadn't worked with them before, and Richard Munchkin only did some LA Heat and Hollywood Safari episodes. Murdocco is something else. Just saying "it also has Murdocco" evokes a sense of a certain kind of low-budget 90s actioner, and while that movie is often also a PM film, after 1994's Magic Kid II, he doesn't do any other films for them either, but he also wasn't a part of Fists of Iron, so I don't know if it was due to any kind of issues with PM. They may just not have had a place for him as they moved into different movies and got bigger names. I guess I get it, but how could you not have a place for Murdocco?

What the hell is going on in that image below? Are we looking at a potential 10.0 Mulletude mullet? Sure, the business on top is a little more manager at a hardware store business than you'd want, but the party in the back is almost Sunset Strip hair band rager--probably more like backstage afterparty at a Midwestern tour stop for a hair band, and maybe not the headliner like Poison, but an opening band like Trixter or Hurricane--but I'm quibbling on something that at least has to be a 9.8 on the Mulletude scale, and spending way too much time explaining why I'm deducting two tenths of a point, instead of basking the beauty that is that fantastic ape drape. And the thing is, it comes at a time when I'm not sure what's happening with this movie because it's mired in a bunch of fights and intrigue around Alex Cord being a dick, but then I finally get my shot of the Vegas Strip McDonald's so I can tag that, and then boom, I'm hit in the face that with Hall of Fame caliber mullet, and it's just all Tiger Woods on the 18th hole birdie fist pumps from there. I went back through our old posts, and saw that I gave the Barbarian Brothers a 9.8 for their mullets in Double Trouble, and I guess that's because they're more workman-like and added to the overall Barbarian Brothers charm, but that means I either need to go back and drop that rating, or bring this one up a tad. 9.9 sounds too high for this mullet, even as amazing as it is, so maybe the Barbarians need to go down to 9.5 or so.

Finally, one of the elements running through the film is Martin Kove's character's love of the LA Raiders. I'm sure it was just tossed in, but based on his character's age and when the team moved from Oakland, it wouldn't make a lot of sense that he'd root for them, unless there was some kind of quirk in his character or special unique reason for it, neither of which was mentioned. Being born in the late 40s, if he's from LA he'd have grown up with the LA Rams as his team, because the Oakland Raiders didn't move to LA until 1980, when he would've been in his 30s. To give you a history of NFL football in LA would give you a popsicle headache, but if you're not familiar with the league, you could look the NFL up on Wikipedia and find there are no Raiders in LA, the two LA teams are the Rams and the Chargers, but there is a Las Vegas Raiders. Two years after this film was released, the Raiders went back to Oakland, one year after the Rams moved to St. Louis, leaving the second largest city in the US without an NFL team, until the Rams moved back to LA in 2016, and the San Diego Chargers moved to LA one year later; and then in 2020 the Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas. (I'm sorry, I said I wasn't going to get into it, and I did anyway, so hopefully the popsicle headache wasn't too horrible.) My point is, Kove's character should've been a Rams fan, but it's kind of more PM-ish that he rooted for the Raiders instead.

And with that, let's wrap this up. The Roku Channel has this, but when I watched it the audio wasn't synched, so I watched it on YouTube instead, which was fine. However you watch it, it's a solid addition to your PM experience, and one you should definitely check out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108346

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

Wanted Man (2024)

This is one we did on a podcast with Mitch from the Video Vacuum--who has also since reviewed it on his site--so it was only a matter of time before it made its way here for a review. In addition to us and Mitch, Chris from Bulletproof Action has covered this as well.

Wanted Man has Dolph--who also co-wrote, directed, and produced--as a cop in Southern California who beat up a Latin American man during a routine traffic stop and said some racist things about him not being in the US legally. Naturally he's been put on suspension--and naturally he hasn't lost his job either, because that takes a lot to have happen if you're a cop--but his boss gets the crazy Grinchy idea to have Dolph go south of the border to bring back two ladies of the night who also happen to be witnesses to a botched drug deal that led to two DEA agents being murdered. Naturally again he goes down and things aren't what they seem, so he find himself shot and being nursed back to help by one of the ladies. Once he's feeling better, the two of them try to make their way back to the US so she can stand trial. But just who was behind those DEA agent killings? And what will they do to not be found out?

For a new Dolph flick, this isn't horrible. It does suffer a bit from the current ceiling for DTV films that affects so many productions, but working within those constraints I think Dolph and company do a pretty good job here. We also have the supporting cast of Kelsey Grammer and Michael Pare, which helps get us to the church on time. The message regarding hatred toward immigrant populations, that if people just got to know people outside their bubble, they might be more sympathetic once they realized we're all human, is nice enough, but also kind of lets Dolph's character off the hook for being a racist shithead earlier in the film. It's like the idea of a guy saying "I have daughters myself" when someone is accused of violence against women, as if you can't understand why violence against women is bad if you don't have a daughter? It's the same here, Dolph's character shouldn't need to get to know people from Central American countries that are moving to the US to not be a racist shithead toward them. But hey, the trope is the trope, and at least Dolph's character learns the error of his racist shithead ways, and becomes the hero of the film.

This is now 73 films for Dolph on the site. Not only that, but 8th as a director, meaning he's closing in on joining Fred Williamson in the 20-10 Club--20+ tags as an actor, and 10+ as a director. Unlike the acting piece, where he has some other things in development, it looks like this might be it for him as a director for now, with the one we were expecting, Malevolence, seemingly off the table, since it's no longer listed on IMDb. That would be too bad if he doesn't direct anything else, because the DTV actioners he directs tend to be better quality. Even if this one is treading well-worn territory, his performance, and the action sequences, are still better quality than a lot of stuff that's out there now. He has a film coming with Isaac Florentine that looks pretty good, so I can't wait for that to be released. Even as he's closing in on his 67th birthday, he's still getting after it with no signs of slowing down.

We've also got some Frasier Crane here, that's right, Kelsey "Country" Grammer--I added the "country" myself. Just seeing him in anything immediately gets the Frasier theme song stuck in my head. For over 200 episodes on Cheers and then another 260+ on Frasier, he was Dr. Frasier Crane, sophisticated-yet-goofy psychiatrist, first Diane's love interest, then sticking around the bar after she left to be with Lilith, who then leaves him, but we stay with him, all the way across the country to Seattle for another TV series. It was fascinating--if not out of place--to see him in Expendables 3, and perhaps even more so in a Dolph Lundgren actioner. His character here is definitely not Frasier, which is fine, though I kind of wish he had been--or even Frasier-like. This character was racist, sexist, embodying everything we think of in a crooked cop, but the problem for me is we've seen that character played by myriad actors in myriad DTV actioners before. "Frasier" as a retired detective in Southern California we haven't, and as much as I'm sure he doesn't want to be typecast, it was something this movie could've used to make it less typical and trope-filled.

Maybe the biggest trope in movie blogging is movie bloggers using the term "trope," but it is apt here. That trope of "a character is a racist until he meets people from the group he's racist against and now he's not" is a common one, and as I said above, lets the hero off the hook for being a racist shithead earlier in the film. I grew up in Maine, one of the whitest states in the US, and now live in a very diverse city in Philadelphia. Does that mean it would've been okay for me to be a racist in Maine because I didn't encounter as much diversity? Of course not, and it was even worse in this film considering Dolph's character was a police officer, sworn to protect everyone, not just people who share his ethnicity, and through that bias physically attacked someone. It doesn't mean someone like Dolph's character in this can't redeem themselves from being a racist shithead, but what if he just wasn't a racist shithead to begin with? Or what if he didn't have to meet someone he's racist against to gain a sense of empathy and not be a shithead anymore? Maybe the better route is, it's a partner who's beating up the Latin American guy, and Dolph intervenes, and because he intervenes against a fellow officer, the department wants him out of the way and they give him the shitty assignment?

Finally, as we've been doing since Dolph entered the 50 Club, we're giving him a second paragraph. On our side, it looks like we have one more DTV to do, Showdown at the Grand, and then there's others we could add in, like Small Apartments, Sharnado 5, and Fat Slags--if I can ever find it--plus Expendables 3 and Expend4bles, which weren't DTV, but since I did the first two, they're on the table. All that said, while we could push toward 80 films for him, I think once we do Showdown at the Grand in November, that might be it for him for a bit, as I try to give other names a chance to have more posts on the site. For myself, according to Letterboxd I've seen 83 of his films, which I believe is more than any other actor. To some extent my need to continue to watch his stuff is perpetuated by the sheer inertia of the goal started almost two decades ago to watch everything he's ever done, but also a performance in a film like this reminds me of why I enjoyed watching his stuff to begin with. He gives a fun performance, even as a racist shithead who's redeeming himself; and he's still larger-than-life, even now as he approaches his 67th birthday. So even if we may be taking a break from his stuff after we review Showdown at the Grand, my hunch is it won't be for that long.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this for free on Hulu here in the States. We've seen this kind of movie before, but Dolph brings something a bit different, and Grammer is a fascinating addition. For the podcast with Mitch, you can find that in the archives, episode number 168.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15791574

Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/

Final Impact (1992)

I had always thought I'd reviewed this one before, but when I was putting together my Gary Daniels list on Letterboxd, I realized that that not only wasn't the case, but I hadn't even seen it. It was something I needed to rectify as soon as possible, which I'm doing now. In addition to me, this has also been covered by Comeuppance Reviews, Movies in the Attic, the Video Vacuum, and Fist of the B-List, so you can check out their sites to see what they all think. Also, if you haven't already, check us out on Letterbox. We have lists on movies we want to see, ones we have queued up to review, and lists like the Gary Daniels and Dolph Lundgren lists.

Final Impact is a PM Entertainment flick with Lamas as an old fighter who loses a big match and opens a strip club/fighting ring after. When the Ohio State Champ, Michael Worth, shows up and wants him to train him, Lamas thinks this kid has what it takes to beat Jake, the guy that took him down years ago.

This is what I'm talking about right here. Maybe it could have used more fighting, but beyond that it's just a fun PM Entertainment flick. Lamas is great in the lead, Worth does his part as the young upstart, and Kinmont holds the whole thing together. At the same time, there's plenty of stuff you can get a kick out of, like Lamas's fight with Jake at the Neon Graveyard in Las Vegas; or even the idea of the oil wrestling/strip club/karate club that Lamas runs, which, to be honest would actually be kind of a cool idea if it weren't for the state boxing commissions and the fact that people could die if they got a bad concussion in one of the fights. Now I'm meandering and it's only the third paragraph.

We haven't seen DTVC Hall of Famer Lorenzo Lamas since 2012, and I don't know about you, but I've missed him. I was going through some of the old posts, and at one time he was second to Dolph with the most. While he's still one of only 6 actors in the 30 Club, he's now only tied with Rothrock for the fifth most. I think for an indication of why, we can go back to the last film of his we'd done, Mexican Gold aka Return of the Outlaws. He's all over the cover and barely in the film. And we were finding that a lot. Couple that with the fact that there were movies like this out there of his that I'd thought I'd already done--The Swordsman and its sequel Gladiator Cop also come to mind--and you can see how he stalled while someone like his co-star in this, Gary Daniels, blew past him and into the 40 Club with Dolph. Recently I was on the Jacked Up Review Show podcast with Cam Sully, and I put Lamas 10th on my list of top DTV stars, behind Adkins at 9. It's possible I need to rethink that, that I may have been hasty in having Adkins jump him so soon.

Speaking of Gary Daniels, he only has a small role in this, but when you combine it with smaller fighter roles by another Hall of Famer, Art Camacho, and PM Mainstay Ian Jacklin, the three together work as a kind of PM fighter showcase that was really fun to see. While this is going to go down as a tag for Daniels and Camacho, like I did with Rothrock in the Saber Raine review, it won't count as a film for them, so I won't push any films they've done with bigger parts down my queue. I was going to say that in the past that kept me from doing more films with Daniels in the lead, because I didn't want to do too much Daniels all at once, but the truth is he has the second most tags after Dolph, and Camacho has the third most, so it doesn't really matter. As long as I can find the films, I can do the reviews.

As I mentioned above, Kathleen Kinmont's part was the emotional glue that held things together, especially with Worth and Lamas. Nowadays we applaud someone who can take a low-budget script shot on the quick and do more with it--look at Vivica A. Fox's success with David DeCoteau's "Wrong" movies. I think when we look back at Kinmont's PM career, we find she was just as professional and maybe even endured more--her lovemaking scene with Wings Hauser in Art of Dying comes to mind, and I can see Fox or another actress saying "that's not happening." Coming back to her PM Entertainment films after my hiatus, I think she's one of their unsung heroes, and hopefully as more of these films become available to the various streaming services out there, her contributions will be better recognized.

Finally, with this movie, PM will have 35 reviewed on here, putting them only a few away from Cannon as a movie house--Millennium has even more at 61, but I'm not sure where to put them. For PM to pass Cannon in tags would be a huge feat though. It may also mean I need to consider adding in Pepin and Merhi to the Hall of Fame, considering I already have Golan-Globus and Roger Corman in there. It's a testament to what PM meant to the DTV action world in the late 80s/early-to-mid 90s, and how a site like this wouldn't have been possible without them.

But the site is here, so it's time to wrap up. Right now this is on Tubi and Prime. It looks like a full-screen transfer, which isn't the worst thing in the world--you get to remember what it was like before widescreen TVs. If you want, I still have an old 13" TV kicking around if you really want to have the full experience.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104267

U.S. Seals II (2001)

I'm not sure if there's another movie that I've had more requests for than this one. And I'm not sure why I haven't gotten to it until now. It's probably the fact that, outside of the director, Isaac Florentine, the only name in this is Marshall Teague, whose only claim to fame is getting his throat ripped out by Patrick Swayze in Road House. Whatever the reason, we're here now, so let's see if it lived up to the hype.

US Seals II is about two Navy SEALs, one of whom decides to be a total douche and rape and kill their sensei's hot daughter. Now it's however many years later, and the douche SEAL has teamed up with some mercenaries to kidnap a hot nuclear physicist and make a nuclear bomb. That's enough for the non-douche SEAL to be recruited by the US Army to gather a team-- including the sensei's hot daughter's twin sister-- to go in and take this douche down. Can they make it happen?



This really does deliver in a lot of areas. Florentine gives us this great mix of high octane martial arts from modern Hong Kong cinema, the camp and nostalgia from 60s and 70s Hong Kong cinema, and the over the top explosions and whatnot from the American action genre. What more could you want? The fight scenes are amazing. Florentine lines up some top notch talent and lets them get after it. I also liked the idea that the island the baddies are holed up on has massive amounts of methane gas on it, so no one can use guns; and I liked even better that the main baddie still smokes his cigar and doesn't blow himself up. This is definitely the fun bad action flick you came for.

My one main gripe is the lack of a big name star for either the lead hero or the main baddie. The hero's name even leaves a little to be desired: Casey Sheppard. It sounds more like he's a contestant on The Bachelorette than a kick ass action dude. I'm not saying he (Michael Worth is his name) couldn't bring it fight-wise, but martial arts skills aren't all that's needed to lead an action film. This movie was calling out for a Mark Dacascos or Gary Daniels. Same with the baddie role (played by Damian Chapa). The guy was hatchetman material at best. They should've moved Marshall Teague over into the head baddie role and had this guy under him.



One thing Isaac Florentine does well is direct action and martial arts sequences. There are no MTV edits, no overly done split-second cuts. He also gets tons of quality talent, martial artists and stuntmen and women that really know what they're doing. There are no oversized dudes with shaved heads and sleeves of tats pounding each other to the music of Disturbed wannabes. Florentine knows what we want and he knows how to deliver. Some might think he's a little too over the top-- the Foley sounds on every little movement the actors make, down to a simple head nod, for instance-- but I think for us who really like B action and old Hong Kong cinema, it makes the whole thing that much more fun.

One area of action in this that didn't work though was the underwater fight between scuba divers. The underwater fight seldom works, and the only way it ever can is if it's done quickly, and it's done with only a couple people. The reason why you need the first criteria, is that there is only so much you can do underwater before it becomes excitement by repetition. This one didn't follow that, it was very long, and as such, very repetitive. The reason why you need the second part, is that because it's underwater, and the characters are in scuba gear, it's hard to tell who's who. When there are too many, as there were in this one, it becomes confusing, as it did here. It was an idea sautéed in wrong sauce, and while I like that Florentine tried it, being the great action director that he is, he should've known better.



For much of the history of movies and television, the world of the hot scientist was confined only to men. Actors like Robert Graves portraying etymologists in atomic bug movies or classic characters like The Professor in Gilligan's Island were the norm, while women were relegated to looking pretty as secretaries or housewives. Fortunately now, us guys can enjoy the hot scientist too, and this movie had a real looker in Kate Connor as the physicist. Hair pinned back against her head, glasses, short skirt-- be still my heart! To think that her character wouldn't have existed forty years before. Florentine also did a great job by casting two great female martial artists, Karen Kim and Sophia Crawford, because they really brought it.

This is currently on Watch Instantly, so I'd check it out. This is for B action fans only, because it is bad action to the max, and if you have trouble with how unabashedly and unironically bad action this is, you probably won't enjoy it. Otherwise buckle up and have a good time.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283652/

Lethal (2005)

Based on the Netflix description of this one, I thought I was going to get some sweet Frank Zagarino versus Lorenzo Lamas action. Maybe not that sweet, but sweet enough. Zagarino and Lamas can really mix it up if given a chance, right?

Lethal has Heather Marie Marsden as a mercenary who comes into possession of a weapon or the codes to activate a weapon or some such crap. It wasn't all that important to the people making the film, they were too worried about Marsden's past as an FBI trainee, her dad's untimely death on an FBI mission, and how FBI agent Frank Zagarino liked her dad. Also, there's some tool FBI agent that had a romantic past with Marsden that the film tediously inserts into the plot just to twist the knife even more. Oh yeah, and she has a teen sister she's taking care of, and Russian mob boss Lorenzo Lamas kidnaps her to get Marsden to give him the weapon or whatever.



What do I always say is rule number 1 to a good action movie? Don't let the plot get in the way, and this movie breaks that rule in an excruciating way. Too much backstory, too much crap about Marsden's past, too many characters floating around that we really don't need, and in the end, it was all too heavy and weighed down whatever bonuses the film offered. On top of that, the action was often shot with Matrix-wannabe camera effects that caused vertigo in the best instances, and looked trite and gimmicky in the worst. This should've been streamlined: keep Marsden as the heroine, but make her a lone wolf, maybe Yojimbo-style, pitting Zagarino against Lamas, cut out the sister, the love interest, the backstory about the dad in the FBI, and just give us a taut, stylish action thriller. Is that so hard?

Rule 2 would be to avoid what I call The Destro Effect, essentially don't make the villain cooler than the heroes. Yes, Lamas's Russian accent was atrocious, but his baddie was great. This is the second time, after Blood Angels, that we've seen Lamas do a great turn as the bad guy, though in Blood Angels he was much more sinister, which controlled The Destro Effect. Here, he was just having so much fun with it, and with heroes that were either poorly written, too bogged down with baggage, or removed as heroes through plot twists, that a strong Lamas ended up stealing the show.



Do I think Heather Marie Marsden can carry a DTV actioner? Absolutely, but not this one. Lethal made plenty of bad mistakes for any lead character in an action flick, but some were exacerbated because she's a woman. First, the baggage between the kid, the dad, and the love interest weighed her down too much. Second, she had only few decent action scenes, one at the beginning and a couple at the end when she and Lamas and Zags mixed it up, and in between all she did was fire guns-- and often the way she held them looked awkward. Third, her very first scene has her in her underwear as she's helping her sister get ready for school. What this did was create a sense of vulnerability that worked against her as a strong lead-- and the bad writing after prevented her from recovering that lost mojo. I get using her looks and sexuality as a way to disarm guys, but there were no bad guys around-- it was like we were voyeurs or peeping toms, and the whole point of the peeping tom is control and violating a woman's sense of herself, which does not a strong hero make. Not only that, but the one time they had her use her looks to seduce a man to get what she wants, it doesn't work, and she gets past the guard using another tactic, meaning that scene was totally useless and moved the plot nowhere. It wasn't Marsden's fault that she didn't work as the heroine, rather it was disappointing that she was given such poor material to work with. Besides, if they were really sold on Marsden as the lead, she wouldn't be taking a backseat to Lamas on the cover.

Zagarino is almost totally wasted. I don't know whose bright idea it was to give him a lesser part, and throw in some superfluous character as Marsden's romantic love interest. Get rid of that guy, and beef up Zag's part, and most importantly, give him a fight scene with Lamas. I'm telling you, the Yojimbo plot would've made this fantastic, could've provided the vehicle to showcase Marsden as the lead, given Zagarino a better part to showcase his martial arts, and kept Lamas as a great baddie without The Destro Effect.



I shouldn't have been surprised that this movie committed another action movie sin, though one that ranks much further down the list than the couple we've discussed above. This one was the classic "baddie doesn't understand the concept of restraints on a prisoner" or in this case, the much worse "baddie forgets the concept of restraints on a prisoner", which then leads to what we in The Biz call Plot Convenience Theater. When Lamas first kidnaps Marsden's sister, she has her hands cuffed behind her back. Then, for some reason, for the final showdown, he brings her out to meet Marsden, completely unrestrained. Guess what happened next? Yep, the sister has the freedom, now that she's inexplicably unrestrained, to help her sister to defeat Lamas. When a movie is this sautéed in wrong sauce from top to bottom, crap like this is just par for the course.

This is available on DVD from either Netflix or Amazon, but I'm telling you to stay away. Marsden is hot, Lamas is excellent, but everything is just ten kinds of bad. Bad idea for a movie, made worse in the execution.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0366711/