"You really are as stupid as you look."
"I have a doctorate in physics!"
"Oh, I didn't know that."
'Prepare to die' has serviceable, amusing and both beautifully tough, merciless action scenes and slightly silly ones. Overall, the action part of the movie is consistently entertaining, which for me is the most important thing in an action movie.
The weak points are unfortunately plentiful and can be found everywhere else, such as in the passive direction, the weak script - which has too much unnecessary stuff in multiples, such as the overarching theme of the carebears-like stick-together-and-everything-is-possible idea and the explaining and apologising of own actions - the post-production cutting (a decent cutter would probably have cut out at least half of the non-action scenes, as they neither advance character development nor do the plot and pacing any favors) and, above all, the often terrible dialogs. There is simply far too much talking. Talk where action is needed. Talk where silence would make more sense. Redundancy and talking just for the sake of talking. Repetition and chatter at the wrong moments. It also doesn't help that the dialogs seem to come straight from writer's hell.
