In short: McBain (1991)

I don’t believe James Glickenhaus actually knew about irony, not to speak of anything with the post prefix, so he presents this patently goofy transferral of his typical New York vigilante shtick into a Colombia just waiting to be freed from tyranny by some Vietnam vets under the leadership of Christopher Walken(!) as the titular McBain – also including Michael Ironside as their arms dealer frenemie who really needs to feel alive by shooting a lot of people again as well as Steve James for all your action movie needs - and the worst rebel army ever as sort of spearheaded by a Maria Chonchita Alonso who commits to her role with total earnestness. Every cheesy bit of revolutionary kitsch his script comes up with, every dubious speech about the very real horrors of dictatorship and the domination of one Simon Escobar (cough) is done with total conviction, as if the stuff these people spouted had any actual emotional impact.

For a Glickenhaus film, the whole affair is surprisingly awkwardly paced, partly because the film does want to tell an epic tale of Vietnam flashbacks, the death of a friend and the following revolution but only has 107 minutes time for it all instead of the three hours it would probably need to get serious. More curious, even a couple of the action sequences fall flat, perhaps because so little of the film takes place in the grimy New York of the director’s best films. Instead, most of it was shot in the Philippines which do of course stand in for Colombia as well as take on their more typical role as Vietnam for a low budget production.

However, even though the whole thing doesn’t hang together too well, at least Walken, Ironside, James, Alonso and the merry rest of the cast are usually fun to watch, the film’s freewheeling moments of craziness can be pretty great, and from time to time, Glickenhaus comes up with the sort of thing I have by now learned to love him for. Take the scene where our heroes are in dire need of money to buy guns from Ironside, and shoot through a bunch of drug dealers, only to be taught the class politics of the drug war by the lone survivor (Luis Guzmán!), after which they rather steal from a banker (while pretending to be Mossad agents, because why not, right?). That’s not the sort of thing you’ll encounter in many vigilante and mercenary movies, and it is this kind of curveball that makes slogging through the slow bits perfectly worthwhile.


Do I need mention that Glickenhaus’s politics are certainly rather more complicated than those of the filmmakers of your typical flag-waving US action movie?

Predator 2 (1990)

In the far-flung future of 1997, LA’s early 90s gang wars have taken on apocalyptic dimensions, with a semi-militarized well-equipped police force apparently unable to even win straight shoot-outs against half naked but at least properly armed gang members. Perpetually enraged Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) is still trying, mind you, but really, his only ability as a policeman seems to be shooting people really well, so it’s difficult to be impressed by him, or his bunch of doomed side-kicks (including characters played by Bill Paxton, Rubén Blades and Maria Conchita Alonso).

Things in Los Angeles don’t get better once a very rude alien (Kevin Peter Hall) starts murdering gang members, police, and anyone else who isn’t pregnant. Because this was made in 1990, a shady group of government male models under the less catwalk-ready leadership of Gary Busey and Daniel Baldwin gets in on the action too. Time for Harrigan to get even more angry.

Where John McTiernan’s Predator is one of the central masterpieces of US action cinema with a brain, the second film as directed by Stephen Hopkins is just a damn mess that squashes action movie clichés, violent conservative wish fulfilment, and a terrible looking version of the titular creature into a film that manages to be loud and obnoxious yet still pretty damn boring for most of the time. Hopkins just doesn’t have a hand for flair and pacing, and while his mass shoot-outs are competently shot, they never have the impact they should. Which of course might have something to do with the fact that on paper, the cast may be low budget action movie heaven, full of actors to put a smile on every action movie lovers’ face, but in practice could be any group of guys and one gal getting killed for our entertainment, for all the depth and interest these one-note characters have. Somehow the film manages to make me not care about characters played by Bill Paxton and Danny Glover, for Cthulhu’s sake!

Confusingly enough, the script with its pretty damn racist insistence on comparing the black parts of an American city with a jungle in the worst possible ways and gangs exclusively built on the worst stereotypes is by the same guys who wrote the first film, who apparently haven’t understood what they did there, nor how to use the alien monster they created well. But then, the various attempts at more Predator films following all have demonstrated a surprising inability to understand what works about the Predator and why. Though they, at least, won’t have monster suits that look as crappy as this one here, nor a director who is quite as inept at keeping it out of sight as Hopkins here turns out to be. Though they all seem to agree with this film that what the Predator really needs is to be less mysterious and dangerous, and more like a space prick.


Glover’s Harrigan is a pretty sad excuse for a protagonist too. Sure, the film is obviously trying to present him as a man broken by repeated attempts to change the state of the city he is living in for the better, but it never actually seems to understand itself that he’s failing because he’s the proverbial guy who only has a hammer so everything looks like a nail to him, and so can’t actually come up with another direction for him to go into than to stay perpetually angry, shooting at somebody. Which a cleverer movie (say, Predator) might have realized and used to say something profound (or at least mildly clever), or something nihilistic, or perhaps even something hopeful. Alas, Predator 2 only uses it as an excuse for another (and then another) pointless shoot-out, but then doesn’t even have the ability to make that shoot-out at least actually entertaining to watch.