Only a director like Albert Pyun could handle material like this. The director of many B sci-fi/martial Arts projects (the "Nemesis" series, "Cyborg"), a teen video game adventure, and a post-apocalyptic musical, Mr. Pyun loves to combine genre tropes into stimulating, unique experiences. Pyun asked what many B-filmmakers did in the Tarrantino administration: why bother with new material when it has all been done so well before?
The 90s direct-to-video market thrived simultaneously with this era of genre hybrids; those movies that recycled old genre tropes, archetypes, and approaches into new material. In "Dollman" Pyun makes a tasty salad out of various conventions from "Dirty Harry", "Honey I shrunk the Kids", "Suburban Commando", "Time Cop", various gang films, and the action and sci-fi conventionality of its era.
Tim Thomerson plays recurring Pyun character Brick Bardo who, in this incarnation, is a futuristic bad-cop who is inter-dimensionally displaced via space ship into the Bronx with his his WMD-packing floating head nemesis Armbruiser. During their trip, the two are shrunken into action figure proportions. After Bardo's spaceship is abducted by a young boy, he must struggle against various domestic terrors (the family dog, a cockroach) while Armbruiser shops his WMD to a dangerous local gang headed by the dangerous Braxton Red (Jackie Earle Hayley in a hammy, vicious performance).
Fortunately "Dollman" delivers in every way you want it to. The shrunken person tropes are satisfying and realized; the action scenes are intense; and its science fiction backbone is always present. Pyun juggles these elements well and has fun with the formulas at play.
Although it suffers from Pyun's tendency toward awkward pacing, "Dollman" is one of his strongest and most controlled films.
