Tactical Force

After resolving a supermarket hold up in violent fashion, a Los Angeles S.W.A.T. team - leader Tate (Steve Austin), Hunt (Michael Jai White), Jannard (Lexa Doig), and Blanco (Steve Bacic) - are assigned to do training at a remote facility (with only themselves on the site...huh, no trainers?). This is bad news as two mob factions (including Michael Shanks doing one of cinema's worst Russian accents) have descended up on the warehouse looking for a mysterious briefcase. Walter Hill's TRESPASS, much? This is really bottom of the barrel stuff and I feel bad for the big names who actually signed up to be in this. Particularly the very talented Jai White, who deserves so much better. Director Adamo Paolo Cultraro, he of the many Os, just makes an ugly, ugly film with flat digital photography and horrible editing during the fights. For example, any time a person gets punched, they do a visual effect of the image rocking/blurring. Austin still has little personality (his attempts at comedy are almost unbearable) and I'm surprised he still gets these lead roles. The final fight is WWE vs. UFC as he takes on veteran MMA fighter Keith "The Dean of Mean" Jardine. I'll let you guess who wins.

Hard to know what to expect with the mix of reviews, however I thought the movie was much better then the IMDb rating. It had enough action to keep me watching, enough comedy to keep me laughing and an overall engaging plot. The acting was good enough for a'B' movie- it's not like it had Meryl Streep in it. The quality of the video in both visual and sound was 'A' to me. I wouldn't go as far in saying I'd watch it again and again- but feel that it's still worth the rental or DVD purchase. What do people except for a 'cop comedy/action' ??? It was just as good as 'red' or the 'expendables' for story/ plot/ writing/ visual with a bit worse acting quality. ( B or unknown actors) Ignore the critics and form an opinion of your own.

TACTICAL FORCE is another vehicle for bald, hulking, ex-wrestler turned actor Steve Austin, who seems to have become the new Seagal ever since he starred as a villain in Stallone's THE EXPENDABLES. So far, I've seen Austin in a passable variant of Van Damme's A.W.O.L. (called DAMAGE), but this is a straightforward shoot-em-up. It's as much fun as DAMAGE, proving that Austin is an adequate star for fans of light action.

The premise and setting for this movie couldn't have been much cheaper: a small SWAT team are on a training exercise in an abandoned warehouse, but they soon find themselves assailed by various gangster types. Cue lots of drawn-out fight scenes and sequences of characters firing heavy weaponry at each other. It's a workable premise - Tarantino revealed the brilliance of utilising such a setting and a small cast twenty years ago in RESERVOIR DOGS - and the decent pacing makes it a painless viewing experience.

The production values are a little weak if you look at them too closely, and it's fair to say that the cast are well-suited to B-movies; Austin is on particularly dodgy ground here, and would do better to just keep his mouth shut and hit people as that's what he does best. There are some heavyweights (physically rather than acting) in support, like Michael Jai White (just in case you wondered what happened to him after UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN) and the arresting Darren Shahlavi and Keith Jardine, but this looks and feels like a B-movie through and through.

The action isn't bad, but I would have liked a little more of it. The requisite shoot-outs and fist-fights are fun, although the van chase is ridiculously stupid and some of the explosions are a little on the fake side. The ending is also a tad disappointing, getting too mixed up between the bad-bad characters and the good-bad characters. But I went into TACTICAL FORCE expecting nothing, and I got a mildly entertaining movie instead, so I can't complain too much.

A really good example where larger than live characters work is Stallone's "The Expendables". Here they tried but the characters just sound dumb. As do all dialogs in "Tactical Force". Throughout the movie I had the feeling that the cast wrote the script themselves while having a few drinks too many and now they made it into a movie with the sole goal of having some fun themselves, no matter the outcome. But while it looks like they really had fun doing it the only reason I watched through the whole thing was to see all martial arts scenes with Michal Jai White because those few were the only half good thing about the flick.

I'm pretty sure if any SWAT member ever sees this movie he'll face-palm himself black and blue because kids playing cowboys and Indians in the garden show better tactics and skills then the SWAT team in this movie.

Then there is the endless talking of the bad guys in every moment they are in control. It's like they were thinking "how long can we stretch the cliché of the bad guys talking too much until they get overpowered until someone switches off the movie or starts taking vodka intraveinously to find some fun in it?".

The movie also had two female characters but they don't do much except getting one over the head at some point and more or less looking pretty. Lexa Doig in SWAT gear is the "less" and Candace Elaine in leather the "more".

It seems they tried to give the dialog this cult movie style of humor, the one that's pretty well executed in "Mean Guns", but all I could do here was roll my eyes. As I said before, it just sounds dumb.

I think you really have to be a fanboy/fangirl of one of the actors to find anything enjoyable about this movie. For me that was Michael Jai White, without him I'd switched it off after 10 minutes.

"You want to do this the easy way or the hard way?" After a S.W.A.T. team led by Tate (Austin) get suspended they are assigned to undergo a re-training exercise. During the training they hear something and are left to stop an actual crime, with no real weapons. This will be a hard movie to review. The movie itself is not all the bad. The action is good and it moves pretty quick. The biggest problem with the movie is the dialog. Being an action movie starring a wrestler I can usually overlook stuff like this, but the words were distractingly bad. Lines like "Eat my grandma" shouted before firing a gun really take away from the action and makes you laugh throughout the movie instead of wondering what is happening. This will be the worst comparison ever but the action to dialog problems are "Star Wars" quality. The dialog is that bad, not so much the acting, just the dialog. Overall, a pretty entertaining movie that is made worse by the talking. Action is a B, dialog is a D. Taken together, I give it a B-

Would I watch again? - I don't think I will.