Witness to a Kill aka Diamond Cut Diamond (2001)

I've had this one on Watch Instantly for a while, and since I didn't do a great job organizing my DVD queue, this was my best option for a Gary Daniels film to celebrate his Hall of Fame induction week. Let's hope it's better than GOD was for Olivier Gruner.

Witness to a Kill has Daniels as the Queen's Messenger going to South Africa on a mission to take out a diamond smuggler who's threatening the stability of a neighboring fictitious African nation. He goes with a German woman, who just so happens to be the sister of a UN soldier the smuggler killed, so he kidnaps her, and a reporter that's been covering the situation, and Daniels has to save them. With all spy thrillers, people on the inside aren't who we think they are, and it's up to Daniels to sort out the players, save the girls, and take out the smuggler.



I liked this. It was kind of dumb, and some of the dialog was soap opera-y, but Daniels brings it, and this is a pretty solid showcase of what he does. It makes me wish they had cast him for the role of James Bond. He just makes a more believable spy than Daniel Craig. The action in this wasn't his best, but it was solid, and enough to make me happy, plus his martial arts skills weren't wasted. A great effort.

I feel better about this film than I did about GOD. Daniels is such an excellent talent, and he often doesn't get the recognition he deserves, due to his status as the poor man's Dolph Lundgren. It's really not a fair label. Dolph really is more of a Bronson type, while Daniels is more of a Caucasian Bruce Lee, which makes sense, because he credits Lee as one of his idols. I think I speak for everyone when I say I can't wait to see him as Bryan Fury in Tekken.



Eva Habermann plays the German girl. You may remember her from Lexx, the old Sci-Fi (Sy-Fy?) show. Most of her work was done in Germany. Speaking of Daniels being the poor man's Dolph, I wonder why she hasn't been cast in a Lundgr-flick. She'd be the perfect lead woman. I was going back through all the women who have been in Dolph movies, and I didn't remember that many blonds. Kylie Bax in Storm Catcher is the only one off the top of my head. Now that I think of it, there aren't a lot of blond women cast in DTV action films period. Are there? Does Jillian McWhirter count? Shannon Tweed and Cynthia Rothrock, but they're stars, not the female lead.

This film wasn't all roses, mind you. It had one glaring issue that I just couldn't look past: the main baddie looked like Jake Busey. Are you kidding me? Why the hell didn't you just cast Jake Busey? I don't care if he's busy, you suspend production until he can do the job. I looked up his imdb bio, and Tomcats was the same year as this, so it may have been a stretch. Maybe the people making this tried, and he said no, because Tomcats looked like the better project. If so, that was a mistake on your part, Busey.



In one scene, Daniels says to his superior, after the guy sees Habermann with him, "For Queen and Country." It made me kind of jealous. I generally don't wish I was from somewhere else, but that's a such a cool phrase. I was trying to think what we have that's equivalent. There are all the Southern racist ones evoking the Civil War, like "The South Will Rise Again" and referring to the flag as the "Star and Bars." Those don't work for the North though. Hmm... maybe we should've thought that whole Revolutionary War out better in advance, but back then, they had a king, and it's not as cool saying "for King and Country", so I guess I'll give them a break with the whole Declaration of Independence. (And to all my Republican readers and readers from the state of Ohio, how do you feel knowing that John Boehner didn't know the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? Wow, didn't we learn that in 8^th grade?)

If you've seen some of the other Daniels greats, and are looking to sink your teeth into more, look no further than right here. Great martial arts, solid action, and the classic line "for Queen and Country". What more do you want?

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275611/

Guaranteed Overnight Delivery aka GOD (2001)

This is one I've been wanting to do for a long time. In part because it's a Gruner flick, and in part because it's got Jalal Mehri in an actual action role. Sure, he was in the two Circuit films, but he just sat behind a desk. Now we got him on his feet and kicking ass.

Guaranteed Overnight Delivery is about a bank security guard, Jalal Mehri, who is unhappy about his job because he used to be a police sergeant in his native India. Anyway, there's a bank heist, and he loses his job for it-- not for the shootout he set off by trying to be the hero, but because he didn't guard the bank (how can you not love the twisted logic of action movies?) Anyway, his wife died in the shootout while bringing him his lunch, so now Mehri is down and out and living out of his franchised delivery truck. Things change, though, when some white slavers decide it would be a great idea to have him deliver a woman in a trunk to a buyer. Sure, I can't imagine she'd make any noise and Mehri would find out. He did, but he can't go to the cops because he needs the money, so they have to confront her kidnappers.



This could've been a little better. Gruner could've fought more. I would've liked more Darren Shahlavi, considering how great he was in Bloodmoon. They would've elevated the level of the fight scenes. The plot was beyond ridiculous, but that may have been to its benefit. Why wouldn't a trained police officer initiate a shootout with crooks on a crowded street? Though if Mehri's character was supposed to be from India, that would make more sense. The cops are probably trained to "accidentally" shoot the untouchables. Then the premise of sending a kidnapped woman to her white slaver in a trunk via a delivery service just seems like a perfect idea. I mean, I'm not in the business of kidnapping, but I have to figure as few people involved the better, right?

Olivier Gruner has about 12 movies between when this came out and now, and only about half of them are available to Americans right now. One of them, Blizhiny Boy: The Ultimate Fighter, has Busey, Bolo Yeung, Eric Roberts, David Carradine, and Cary Tagawa. How do we not get a film like that? Who is in charge of releasing films in the US? According to someone posting on imdb, the production ran out of money and couldn't afford to pay the extras, and that's that. Awesome. As far as GOD goes, Gruner doesn't fight much at all, which is a waste of him. Even his final fight with Mehri was kind of lackluster. He should've been paired up with Darren Shahlavi-- that would've been a sweet fight scene. Perhaps this wasn't the best film to cover for Gruner's induction week. My bad.



I haven't done much with Jalal Mehri, which I know is an oversight on my part. Unfortunately, a lot of what he's done isn't on DVD. He's more of a director and producer than actor, with a lot of his credits coming in small roles, so a film like this where he's the hero is a rarity. I really want to get into his collaborations with Billy Blanks, someone else I should be including on here more, huh?

Anyone who's seen Bloodmoon knows how good Darren Shahlavi is, and for the one scene he had here with Mehri he was good too. Why then does he have all these bit parts, like he did in GOD, instead of more starring roles, like Bloodmoon. I have a film he did with Mark Dacascos in it called Alien Agent in my queue. Might be a good next place to go to see if there's more Shahlavi out there.



While on the run from Gruner's men, Mehri goes to a B&B owned by an old friend, and that old friend is the awesomest guy ever. I've never seen anything like it. This fat, obnoxious bad guy shoots him in the stomach, obviously because he couldn't handle the guy's amazing awesomeness. I just wish there were more guys like this in movies. I mean, look at that picture above. Is that not awesome personified. By the way, I don't know how many of my readers saw the Patriots/Dolphins game last Sunday, but Dan Dierdorf called every player [insert character trait here] personified. "He is [toughness] personified." "When you see [resilience] in the dictionary, his picture's there." "The quintessential [football] player." I know you got three hours (an hour and a half minus commercials) to fill, but there's a point when the hyperbole becomes stale. Sorry Dan, but you're bad announcer personified... Oh Snap!

Check this one out, it's pretty funny. The action could've been better, especially with the talent involved, but it was good enough. Throw in a ludicrous plot concept, and you're well on your way to a laugh fest. Oh yeah, and there's also the awesomest man of all time.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0225828/

American Ninja 2: The Confrontation (1987) (Revisited)

I rented American Ninja 3 from Netflix, and it came packaged with American Ninja 2. I realized then that it had been almost 15 years since I last saw it, so I watched it again. I came to the conclusion that my original post, on May 6, 2007, though a good one, should be revisited. I hate the idea of Lucasing the older ones with new information, so I'm letting that one stand, unaltered, and just adding this one to the archive.

American Ninja 2 takes place a few years after the first one. Marines working for the US Embassy on a small Caribbean island are disappearing, and the Pentagon suspects foul play, but instead of sending more Marines, they send two Army Rangers: Dudikoff and Steve James. What they find is a small neighboring island that is cloning a new race of super ninjas, and Dudikoff and James are the only ones who can stop them.



Is it possible that the 30 year-old me appreciates this more than the 16-year-old me? Also, there were many reasons why I dug this back then that I had forgotten about over all this time. Steve James yelling "I want fresh meat!" at a group of thugs chasing after them. We rewound that scene over and over at the time, and I have no idea how I didn't remember that when I wrote the first blog. The tongue and cheek factor was completely lost on me then. As far as I could tell, they were dead serious about everything they were doing, and now I see that that's impossible. They had to be kidding about a lot of it, especially James' scenes. My overall opinion hasn't changed though, this is must watch material.

In May of 2007, I had just started this blog, and I wanted to get as many reviews up as possible. Then, more so than now, my goal at the DTVC was to have an archive of as many DTV films as I could get my hands on. I didn't have the structure I have now of 8 paragraphs and three pictures, and I didn't have any software to capture images from the movies, so I was often at the mercy of the Internet. I didn't even have a Netflix account. Just the same, in looking at some of these old posts, I see some ways in which they were better. They were often funnier than they are now, because I was pulling them from memory, so there was always some funny anecdote that made me want to cover them. I do think I did myself a disservice, though, by posting reviews about films I hadn't seen, in some cases, in more than a decade, so no matter how funny they might have been, my new policy of watching a movie right before I review it is probably the best improvement I've made over the last two and a half years.



I'm going to announce my new Hall of Fame inductees next week. Michael Dudikoff is part of the inaugural class, and when I wrote the original post, there was some concern about his inclusion. I can see it in my conclusion when I say he's a bona fide Hall of Famer. I think now, with 14 films reviewed, and so many more to go before we're done, any questions surrounding him are answered. And having explored (and in some cases re-explored) his filmography over the past two-plus years, I'm still convinced that the three American Ninja films that he's starred in are his best, and the perfect starting place for anyone wanting to delve into his oeuvre.

Maybe the biggest difference between 1995 and 2009 is my appreciation for Steve James. He's amazing here, and I'd say less Dudikoff's sidekick, and more his partner. He's not mailing it in like he did in American Ninja 3, he's actually in full glory. He has some of the best fight scenes in the film, and I can't imagine anyone not enjoying watching him. There was a reason why we replayed the "I want fresh meat!" over and over again: because it was so awesome!



Another big thing I forgot over fourteen years was the use of Guns N' Roses' "Move to the City", off the Lies EP. We seldom see songs we recognize, let alone bought the CD (tape) for at the time. 1987 was a different time for Guns. They were ushering in a new movement in rock, pushing out the old guard of hairbands, and had it not been for Nirvana and grunge, the rest of the hairbands may have had an opportunity to evolve. Instead, Guns were able to survive the post grunge purge, only to be felled by the megalomania of their lead singer. I bet Axel looks back on their song being in American Ninja 2 as being a bad thing, but the bad thing was how thoroughly he killed something so good.

Next week we'll go back to the box office bomb segment of the blog, but it was cool to return and look at a film I covered a while ago and hadn't seen in some time. If I learned anything, it's that these films, no matter how silly, deserve a rewatch, especially when they were so awesome! If you haven't seen American Ninja 2 in a while, I urge to to give it another look. You'll be happy.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092548/

Hardwired (2009)

This was released on Tuesday, the same day as Command Performance, and my plan was to review them one after the other (obviously the Dolph film had first priority-- obviously). Problem was, Netflix didn't have enough copies of it, and I was stuck with the dreaded Very Long Wait, which turned into "For Fri: Hardwired" after I returned three films on Wednesday. That Netflix, what are we gonna do with them?

Hardwired takes place "a few years" into the future, where the economy is even worse than it is now, and huge corporations had to bail out the government when it couldn't bail out the huge corporations. If that doesn't make enough sense, Hope Industries has decided that we've saturated all our advertising space, and we need to put a computer chip in our brains that makes us hallucinate pitchmen and women until we buy their product. If people don't like the chip, it explodes, simple as that. 660 people were chosen for inclusion in the test process: 659 loners, and one family man, Cuba Gooding jr., who just happened to piss off one of the people who chose the people to get the chip. That was a mistake, because an underground group has been trying to take down Hope, and now they have their man in Gooding. Turns out to be a good choice.



This is one of those big brother cautionary tales of what happens when we let corporations have too much control and too much influence in our government. Makes sense, though you could've spent a lot less money by just documenting the current healthcare crisis, no? What's even funnier is, by its very nature, this film stands to give corporations what they want: a new avenue for exposure. Maybe having the Golden Arches on the Hoover Dam is supposed to tell us how bad things could get, but it also reminds me that I could use a Big Mac, no? Also, any originality this film could've claimed was already taken by the Bruce Payne film Paranoia 1.0, which did the same thing in a much cooler and more stylistic manner-- and without all the product placement too. So what are we left with: a semi-remarkable sci-fi actioner with Cuba Gooding jr., Michael Ironside, and a Val Kilmer with a horrible hairdo.

It's true that maybe I'm being a little hard on this, because, after all, it is just a DTV movie. But so was Streets of Blood, and that film was great. Not only that, it would've been better with Cuba Gooding jr. and Michael Ironside accompanying Kilmer and Sharon Stone. The other point is Command Performance, with just Dolph in it, was a lot more fun to watch. Cuba Gooding jr. and Val Kilmer are great actors, but giving Kilmer bad hair and even worse dialog, and then making Gooding jr. have these silly scowling expressions on his face and even worse responses to Kilmer's bad dialog, just makes us wonder what happened to them as actors, and think they've fallen so far. Why not just cast Lorenzo Lamas and John Rhys-Davies? At least we have more to make fun of, and Kilmer and Gooding jr. can be Kilmer and Gooding jr. somewhere more respectable.



This is the first of probably many Cuba Gooding jr. films that we'll have here, because he's amassed quite a DTV oeuvre over the past few years. Oh, what fun we'll have, you and me. You the Oscar winner, and me the guy who's about to review American Ninja 2-- for the second time! Of course, I make fun of you for this, but Hardwired was better than Pearl Harbor, Radio, and Men of Honor, just to name three. Maybe you're making out better in this deal. We'll keep in touch.

This is the second Val Kilmer film we've done this week, and let me tell you, though Columbus Day was about as good of a movie as Hardwired, Kilmer's part was way worse in this one. The biggest offender was the hair. When you see the cover in stores or on Netflix, you'll see a Kilmer with a slick cut, low and tight. Not so in the actual film. He looks like either a reject from a failed 80s New Wave band, or one of the crew members on the warehouse ship in Space Mutiny. The only explanation was that he didn't want us to recognize him in this film. No such luck. Hey, didn't you used to act in Oliver Stone movies?



I hate commercials. More than anything, I hate the lowest common denominator view they have of the world. Take the MasterCard Priceless thing. Their main goal was to create a catch phrase that seeped into popular culture, and once people bit and started using the phrase on signs at sporting events so they could look clever and get on TV, we were stuck with that smug voice telling us "...Priceless...". Their whole raison d'etre is to stick their product into our brains in whatever way imaginable, and pat themselves on the back for it afterwards. That makes this movie all the more pointless, because no company would consent to something like this, when they can do it much cheaper the old fashioned way. Or, they could just agree to have their logo plastered all over a movie, like they did here.

I want to say you shouldn't watch this, that you're just in for some pain, but after my whole review, I have a different take. Hardwired is a unique opportunity to see how the mighty have fallen. Look at Kilmer's hair and Gooding jr.'s scowl, and not only laugh, but know that we all are only a couple Radios, Daddy Daycares, Island of Dr. Moreaus, and The Saints away from the same fate. If there's any cautionary tale in this film, it's that one. Also of note, the end sets us up for a sequel with who else as the owner of Hope Industries: Lance Henriksen.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1405412/

American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt (1989)

I probably would've reviewed this sooner, but David Bradley's been in my dog house since the fanny pack incident in Cyborg Cop. It still just boggles my mind that a so-called action hero would allow himself to be made to wear a fanny pack. If it hadn't been for Hard Justice, he night have been banned from the DTVC for life.

American Ninja 3 takes place after the first two, but DTVC Hall of Famer Michael Dudikoff is conspicuously absent. Very conspicuously. Anyway, Bradley, Steve James as Curtis Jackson, and some other dudes come to this island for a martial arts tournament, unbeknownst to them so a pharmaceutical mogul can find the strongest one so he can carry a biological weapon in his system. For whatever reason, they ignore the obviously stronger Jackson, and go for Bradley instead, and Jackson and another competitor, whom Jackson affectionately refers to as "Junior", must go in and rescue him. Oh yeah, and an Asian chick who was working for the mogul is actually a ninja too, and she wants to help save Bradley too.



The first, and most important question here is: why? Why was this made? Cash grab, maybe. This was too much to put on Bradley right away. For his first major role, he had no chance of filling Dudikoff's impressive shoes. I know I shouldn't throw terms like racism around lightly, but what other explanation was there to cast Bradley as the main hero over James, who obviously fit the part better. And you could tell James didn't like playing second fiddle to Bradley, and it only made the film that much worse.

One thing you notice about the first, second, and fourth films, is there's a sense of tongue in cheekness that adds to the entertainment value. This film tried that too, but fell on its face. It really was an MST3K quality film, and on that score, it was plenty worthy of making fun of. It was like a YouTube high school project video, where you almost expected the actors to look at their friend behind the camera for the signal that he pushed the stop button to end the scene.



I was asked a couple weeks ago what my top ten films of the 1990s are, and it made me think what a DTV top 10 of the 1990s would be, and somewhere around 7 or 8, I would have to have Hard Justice. Now, to be fair, Bradley had nine films between that one and American Ninja 3, which was his first, so I can't be too hard on him here. The fanny pack is still more unforgivable. In that case, he had four films under his belt (no pun intended), though three of those were American Ninja films, so maybe he didn't know what he was doing by rocking the fanny pack, but I don't know. I haven't made any movies, and I know I wouldn't rock a fanny pack unless I wanted to look ridiculous.

Someone who never looked ridiculous was the late Steve James. Though imdb didn't say it explicitly, I have to believe he was the inspiration for Jax in Mortal Kombat. He did kind of mail it in here, which may have been as much lack of interest as it was his illness. Like Swayze and Ron O'neal, James was killed by pancreatic cancer four years later. I don't want to get too somber here, though. He wasn't as good as he was in American Ninja 2, but he was still good enough to be one of the film's few bright spots. Just check out the too sweet "Shalom, y'all" T-shirt.



There was a dude in here who looked a lot like Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, which was pretty cool. My three-year-old nephew watches a show called Yo Gabba Gabba!, and Mark Mothersbaugh has a segment on there where he draws a picture on the board and it comes to life, a la Bill Cosby's Picture Pages. I wonder if they really wanted Mark Mothersbaugh, and he was like "What, no Dudikoff? Then no Mothersbaugh either."

There are two reasons to see this: if you're an American Ninja completist, or if you need a really bad movie to make fun of. You probably should see it for the latter instead of the former. What's great is it usually comes packaged with part 2, so it's like you're buying part 2, and you get part 3 for free, so you don't have to feel like you're ripped off when it sucks.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096804/

Columbus Day (2008)

My plan this week was to review Val Kilmer's new film, Hardwired, which was released the same day as Command Performance, but unfortunately Netflix didn't have enough copies of it, so I have to wait. Maybe by Friday. Anyway, since I had this other Val Kilmer film in the can, I figured I'd review it now, and if I get Hardwired soon, I'll just review that too.

Columbus Day has Kilmer as a con man who pulls off a huge heist of drugs, and is now waiting to find someone he can sell them to. The only catch, it's Columbus Day, and all the banks are closed, meaning the only guy with enough cash to buy the drugs is the guy from whom he stole them. So he spends the day in the city park, talking to a boy whose mom is at work while he has the day off from school. He's also trying to patch things up with his estranged wife and daughter, and the plan is to take this drug money down to Florida so he can be with both of them. The question is, will he survive?



I don't know what to say about this one. If it didn't have the cast it did, with Kilmer, Marg Helgenberger, and Bobb'e J. Thompson (who played Ronnie in Role Models), I can't see myself liking it. But it did have those people, and that gave it a flavor it otherwise wouldn't have had. All three of them were better actors than the material, which, in the end, was your run-of-the-mill heist/scam/twist suspense yarn with a not-so-nice protagonist seeking redemption for the mess he's made of his life. There wasn't much to make fun of in it either, so really, you're only going into this for its quality, and on that score it was only mediocre.

My friend at Movies in the Attic (whose site is temporarily down after the recent dismantling of Geocities) is of the opinion that Kilmer deserves better than the fate he's currently been given as a DTV actor. I agree with him so far as one can tell from the beginning that he is well beyond the quality of the material he's working with here; but where does one see Kilmer fitting in in mainstream Hollywood? Certainly not a leading man. He was great in The Doors, but playing Jim Morrison requires a unique set of talents that very few other leading roles ask for. I personally didn't like The Saint or Batman Forever, but thought he was amazing in Wonderland. I guess what I'm saying is, in order for him to be a leading man, he may need to go the DTV route for the most part, and take his Jim Morrisons and John Holmeses when they come.



I liked Role Models, and a big reason why was Bobb'e J. Thompson. Sure, the name doesn't make much sense (do you need the apostrophe? I hope that's just a SAG thing), but the kid was probably the best actor in that whole movie, and here was third to Marg Helgenberger and Val Kilmer. I imagine after Role Models, we won't see him again in DTV films for a while, unless he goes the Todd Bridges path. Let's hope for his sake he doesn't.

This film also featured Wilmer Valderama. If Bobb'e is a silly name, Wilmer is even worse. I guess they can both feel better knowing their name isn't D'Brickishaw or Knowshawn, right? Anyway, like Dustin Diamond and Jaleel White, Valderama is cursed with the reputation of playing a geeky gross guy on a teen sitcom. Unlike Diamond and White, he's done better for himself after by owning popular LA restaurants and dating starlets like Lindsey Lohan. Even though I still thought of him as Fez when I watched this movie, and I don't know if Fez or Wilmer is the better name, I definitely believed him here as the guy trying to link Kilmer with a buyer. If anything, he learned from the mistakes of Diamond and White, et al, and he's gotten right out in front of this TV reputation thing.



I used to write freewrite blogs on MySpace to get my creative juices flowing while I worked on my novel, and one of the blogs was about a fictitious movie trilogy called the Columbus Day Blowout. I did it in response to a commercial for the Santa Clause movies calling them the "greatest holiday trilogy of all time." In hindsight, The Labor Day Blowout would've been a more apt film, because the weather in Vermont in Rocktober can be a little chilly. Anyway, I didn't actually think that anyone would make a movie based on Columbus Day, and though this one is about something entirely different from the one I came up with, it's still kind of a cool concept to base a film on a holiday that we don't usually think of. Maybe the next one will be The Grandparents Day Massacre.

You're not going to be hurting yourself by skipping this. Maybe if you're a huge Kilmer fan you'll want to give it a try, and he's good here, but otherwise it's not so hot. Also, there's very little action, and very little to make fun of, so on that score it's not worth it either. I'm not saying it's a horrible movie, and if it's on TV you could do a lot worse by watching it, I just thought it was pretty unremarkable, and am not sure it's worth a spot on your Netflix queue.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1015976/

Command Performance (2009)

Considering today is Dolph's 52^nd, what more fitting way to celebrate than to review his new film, Command Performance, on the day it was released. I feel bad, because my friends and I celebrated Van Damme's birthday a couple weeks ago when it happened, but I was away and didn't get an announcement up. Would I ever make that mistake about Dolph's birthday? Well, I did almost forget it because of the big election here in Maine today-- almost.

Command Performance takes place in Moscow, and has Dolph as Joe, the drummer in a band that's looking to tour with US pop sensation Venus. She's performing in Moscow for a special show on behalf of the Russian President and his two daughters. If that smells like the perfect place for a terrorist takeover in a Dolph film, you couldn't be more right, and, as luck would have it, our hero just happened to be in the bathroom smoking a joint when the terrorists attacked, leaving him the freedom to save the day Die Hard style.



This wasn't bad. To be frank, I probably wouldn't like it if it wasn't a Dolph picture. But it was, so we can't deal in what ifs here. The plot was essentially the same as the movie No Contest with Andrew Dice Clay, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and Shannon Tweed. I have to admit, if it was a Miss Universe contest and Dolph was hosting it it would've been way cooler. The action was pretty good, but it seemed to be more terrorists shooting innocent people than anything else, which gets old after a while. Dolph's character's hand-to-hand skills are explained by him being in a biker gang, which is no fun either. He should've been a former Navy SEAL or US Special Forces who left in disgrace and ended up in Moscow as a drummer.

This is Dolph's fifth turn as director. If I would say there's any hallmark in his style, it's that his films are getting more and more violent. The Defender and The Russian Specialist weren't too bad, then Diamond Dogs, which he pinch hit in to direct, was a little more so, and then Missionary Man was very bloody, with the explicit shotgun blast to the head baddie's dome. This one was a step further, with things like a drumstick shoved from under a dude's chin up to his eyes, various gratuitous throat slashes, and Dolph stabbing a dude in the top of the head. I don't have a problem with it, just pointing out.



In fact, it kind of fits with his image as our generation's Bronson. Think about it: Bronson always played these roles where he was once a proud hero, but now he's an alcoholic or something, wasting away somewhere, until he's called into action and saves the day as a one-man army. What other action star could you see smoking weed in a bathroom? What didn't wash in this was how the pop singer and a reporter were talking about how cute Dolph is. That's Van Damme stuff. He needs to be told every five minutes how many chicks dig him, not Dolph. I'm not saying Dolph doesn't get the female lead in all his movies, I'm saying he usually earns it: he wins the girl over with his confidence and ability to take charge of dangerous situations. I hope this is the exception, and not the start of a pattern, because the last thing we need are Dolph's bare buttcheeks in movies too.

The girl in this is played by someone from Diddy's hit TV show Making the Band. If you're curious, she tried and failed to make the band. Casting her makes sense, though, because she, like the other fifteen or so girls that competed, may not be able to make Diddy's band, but they were pretty enough and talented enough to play a pop star in a Dolph movie. As an aside, I think Diddy is absolutely hilarious, and my friends think I'm crazy for that. I know he's not intentionally funny-- that he thinks he's cool when he acts ridiculous-- but it's still entertaining. I generally don't watch the shows because he's not in them enough, but if I'm flipping through the channels and I see him, I'll stop and watch, and my friends will shake their heads and get angry. I don't know, am I wrong?



This film combines two things Sweden does best: Dolph Lundgren and Music. According to Wikipedia, Sweden is the third biggest world exporter of music. Think about it: ABBA, Roxette, The Cardigans, Ace of Base, The Hives, and now Dolph. After the US and the UK, who else can you see even coming close? When I was at a wine and cheese shop in Massachusetts recently, I found this Swedish cheese called Herrgårdsost that was just amazing. Should I have been surprised since the Swedish did it? I'd like to know what they can't do.

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, it's time to wrap this up. Out of the two Dolph films to come out this year, I'd put Direct Contact slightly higher Command Performance, but only slightly, and by no means is this not a fun Dolph film. Out of all the imports Sweden has sent us, and there are many, Dolph will always rank up as the best. Sorry Bergman. Both Bergmans.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210801/