There are not enough adjectives in the English language for
me to convey just how terrible this movie was. I know, I should have known that
when I saw Eric Roberts name in the credits, but I watched it anyway. Where
Roberts once had the potential to become a dynamite actor he squandered any
chance when he decided to take on any role in any movie just to be working.
That's led to so many turkeys that his nickname could now be Butterball. Please
Eric, stop making drek and start making real movies. Actually act instead of
phoning in performances.
Worse yet is who is responsible for this terrible waste of
film. There was a time when Olivier Gruner had the potential to become a top of
the line martial arts star. His role in the low budget classic NEMESIS was
fantastic. But he's never followed that up with a starring role that showed he
could act let alone write or direct. Now he's done both of those as well as
star in this load of crap.
So here's the story. A covert ops team of mercenaries is
hired by the CIA via Roberts to take out a
middle eastern bad guy. Unfortunately the military isn't aware of this
operation and bombs the base where the bad guy is hiding at the same time the
assassination is going down. This results in the mercs being captured with the
exception of Gruner. He returns home and asks for help retrieving his men but
no go. Now we get to spend time watching him train and workout while he plans
to go back. SPOILER ALERT. He eventually does so and while he and his men
combined couldn't take out the bad guys during an air strike, this time around
he does so alone for the most part until he gets them free. They return home
and he tells Roberts he's out. End of film.
There is so much down time in this film between action
sequences that it is perhaps the most boring film ever made with the exception
of Andy Warhol's EMPIRE, a movie that was a steady shot of the Empire State
Building. Then again that movie might have proved more interesting. Perhaps if
you have a fetish for watching someone working out this movie might prove worth
your while. For most it is tedious at best and unwatchable at most.
If the story telling weren't bad enough there was so much
else to hate here. When it comes to villains it's as if someone placed an ad
that read "If you have a swarthy complexion and a beard we want you".
Sets look like they were made for a high school stage production. For a movie
taking place in a desert country everything looked so fresh and newly painted.
I think at times even the dirt looked clean. Uniforms of captured prisoners
months after they'd been held captive even looked good. At least the evil bad
guys were kind enough to send prisoners clothes out to be dry cleaned. The
lighting on scenes that were day for night looked fake and for some reasons
with no light source seen the inside of buildings had spots shooting in various
areas instead of lamps.
I could go on but I already feel like I've wasted far too
much of my time talking about the movie. To type on about this movie is to take
even more than the 91 minutes of my life that was wasted just watching it. The
most aggravating thing when watching something like this is knowing that there
are so many other movies that deserve a chance to be made sitting on shelves
and collecting dust. Shame on anyone who thought this deserved to be made
instead of one of those.
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