Can the premise even be articulated?
Easily. Dolph Lundgren is a maverick air force pilot who is shitcanned by the military for the heinous crime of bombing Iraq with rice and winds up guarding President Chief Brody’s personal belongings. However, even this most simple of assignments is beyond Lundgren’s meager capabilities as he manages to lose the briefcase containing the doodah that sets of World War III sometimes within the first five minutes of being chained to it. The thief is a stroppy, one-eyed CIA assassin who in turn wishes to nuke America for roughly the same vague reason that Tommy Lee Jones did in Under Siege. All of this takes place on the set of Moonraker. Just as well there’s a valid excuse really, as it’s all too easy to imagine a shamefaced Dolph dolefully explaining to a nonplussed Prez that he’d only gone and left his Lordships suitcases on the airport bus. Again.
C List Co-stars
The late Roy Scheider quite understandably looks a sad and broken man throughout this movie, but sterling work in all time classics like Jaws and the French Connection means he could never be considered a true second tier celebrity. Not even in porno. Fortunately, we have TV’s own Montell Williams at hand. Seeing as he ranks somewhere below Ricki Lake in the daytime chat show pecking order, the C-List baton is his to pick up and run with.
Any similarities to Showdown in Little Tokyo?
No.
Boo!
There’s nary a hint of a well-oiled Swedish pec in this. Dolph ends up in his T Shirt by the end but that’s not the sort of thing that’d have your average red-blooded male questioning on which side their bread was buttered. Instead of buying more awesome missiles with which to keep Boris at bay, the Americans are intent on dismantling their precious nuclear arsenal thereby robbing hardworking American citizens such as Falling Downs’ Derek Fens of useful purpose. To make things worse, all this whiny liberalism is seen by all, as a “good thing”. No wonder Clinton was impeached. On this evidence, Congress was right to do it.
Redeeming Qualities.
To my mind this is the third best Dolph Lundgren film ever made.
Vestiges of Glory
There’s an atomic blast!!! Mount Rushmore is blown to smithereens, which according to the movie adds around 3000 South Dakotans to the corpse count. Sadly, the on screen corpse-ing is far more restrained and only two of those would count as memorable.
And they are?
A waiter taking a fire axe to the gut and the moronic death of a white Samurai who figured that fighting Dolph Lundgren underneath the blast radius of an ignited rocket at take-off was preferable to running away down a corridor.
Bargain Bin Quality
Make sure you check that bin thoroughly for a Seagal you’ve yet to see before settling on this rum old toot for your evening’s entertainment. The fight scenes are glacial, and Dolph’s post mortem one liners are too incomprehensible to bother remembering for the purposes of this review. Reagan must be spinning in his grave.