When his career began, Lou Diamond Phillips promised so much as an actor, that I have continued to see his films hoping that this promise would be fulfilled. But, while Phillips' acting is as good as ever, he has just made one bad film after another, so, until he or his agent learn what to look for in a script, I'm afraid "Striking Range" is the last time I'll be seeing Phillips for a while.
This is an action film, and the actions scenes are OK. But the script really reeks. line by line the dialog is OK, but the story is a real mess. The idea of tossing a psycho-killer into the mix of a conflict between two mercenary groups might have seemed good on paper, but it's a bad strategy: psycho-killers have to be explained at some point in a film, because otherwise their motivations come off as silly. I know that sounds bizarre, but what I mean is that the explanation helps the audience suspend their disbelief in why anybody would want to kill people simply because they work at some office or attend some school or stopped at the wrong restaurant for dinner. This disbelief is essential to our sense of morality - it is why the violence of real psycho-killers, like the Columbine boys, is so horrifying and why we take such strong measures to counter it: we simply cannot believe anyone could be that vile.
Since the writer of this film has left himself little time to develop the psycho-killer aspect of the plot, he has to resort to cheap tricks, stereotypes, and cliché to make the whole thing work somehow. The psycho-killer comes across as a parody.
Meanwhile a plot twist seems to resolve the mercenary conflict - except that it doesn't, it's so wholly unprepared and obviously artificial. We want clues to this sort of thing, so we can look back on the film to say "I should have seen that coming," but we can't do this here, no one could have seen it coming, it doesn't make sense.
And what is the thematic connection between the mercenary conflicts and the psycho-killer's? Even Sigmund Freud couldn't tell you; I don't think there is any.
the writer here needs psychoanalysis for coming up with this hodgepodge, and Phillips needs it to try to figure out how he could throw away his mature career on such hooey.
Four stars for the action scenes, the rest gets - blah!
