In Theaters: CRIMINAL (2016)

CRIMINAL
(US - 2016)

Directed by Ariel Vroman. Written by Douglas Cook and David Weisberg. Cast: Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Alice Eve, Gal Gadot, Ryan Reynolds, Michael Pitt, Jordi Molla, Antje Troue, Scott Adkins, Amaury Nolasco, Colin Salmon, Natalie Burn, Lara Decaro. (R, 113 mins)

Your tolerance for the high-concept sci-fi espionage actioner CRIMINAL is dependent upon a number of things: how much you can suspend your disbelief, how much you can stomach graphically brutal and gleefully over-the-top violence, and how perversely fascinating you find serious, award-caliber actors slumming it in a trashy genre offering from Cannon cover band Millennium (I'd recommend running the Cannon intro on your own as the movie starts to get the maximum effect). To Millennium's credit, they brought their A-game to this, opting to actually shoot a London-set story in London instead of their usual unconvincing Bulgarian backlot. Even their go-to CGI clown crew at Worldwide FX seems to have admirably stepped up to the challenge and produced possibly the best splatter and explosions they've ever done. At a cursory glance, CRIMINAL has "straight-to-VOD" written all over it, but with a wild script by the late Douglas Cook (he died in July 2015) and David Weisberg, the same duo who wrote THE ROCK (Michael Bay's one legitimately awesome movie), assured direction by the promising Ariel Vroman (the little-seen 2013 mob movie THE ICEMAN), and an absurdly overqualified cast, CRIMINAL ultimately transcends its dubious first impression and if you're approaching it in the right mood, ends up a hell of a lot more enjoyable than it has any business being.

When London-based CIA agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds, who's all over the trailers but not in the print ads or the poster) is tortured and killed by international terrorist Xavier Heimdahl (Jordi Molla--was Rade Serbedzija busy?), his London CIA bureau chief Quaker Wells (a ranting Gary Oldman) needs vital info Pope had but has no way of obtaining it. Enter Dr. Micah Franks (Tommy Lee Jones), who's spent 18 years working on the transplanting of memories but is still five years away from human trials. Wells decides that time is now when the dead Pope's brain is kept alive and Franks--short for Frankenstein?--springs Jerico Stewart (Kevin Costner) from a maximum security hellhole to be their guinea pig. Stewart, a psychotic, sociopathic, zero-remorse killing machine who feels no emotion and no pain thanks to a broken home and a childhood abuse incident where he suffered a traumatic brain injury at the hands of his enraged dad that caused his frontal lobe to stop forming at the age of ten, is flown to London and has Pope's memories injected into his brain. The experiment doesn't initially take, and despite the sympathetic Franks insisting Stewart needs more recovery time, an impatient Wells orders him terminated. Of course, Stewart ends up escaping custody and heading on a rampage across London when Pope's memories start materializing in his head. Stewart is alarmed to find that he can suddenly speak French (though he thinks it's Spanish) and has tastes for the finer things in life like lattes, but he's still Jerico Stewart and can't stop himself from killing innocent people in cold blood or beating the shit out of a pompous asshole in a coffee shop ("Who punches someone in a patisserie?" the outraged victim yells, in one of the many intentionally funny bits). With Wells and the CIA as well as Heimdahl's ruthless hit woman Elsa Mueller (Antje Troue) in hot pursuit for the information that is becoming clearer by the minute, Stewart eventually hides out with Pope's widow Jill (Gal Gadot), and feels genuine emotion for the first time when Pope's perceptive and impossibly cute daughter Emma (Lara Decaro) is nice to him. Stewart finally grows a conscience and decides to act on Pope's memories, which involved negotiating a CIA deal with hacker Jan Strook, aka "The Dutchman" (Michael Pitt), who has the ability to override all US military launch codes and intends to sell that info to the megalomaniacal Heimdahl, a crazed anarchist hell-bent on bringing down all of the world's governments.

Costner, introduced in chains with long hair and a madman beard like Sean Connery in THE ROCK and speaking in a guttural, Nick Nolte grumble, has never cut this loose onscreen before, whether he's hamming it up as the insane Stewart or bopping his head Roxbury-style as he steals a van and cruises around London looking for trouble. But when Stewart grows more human thanks to the gradual clarification of Pope's memories that trigger actual feeling within him, Costner gives Liam Neeson some serious competition in the "60-and-over asskicker" club by demonstrating acting chops that a Van Damme or a Dolph Lundgren wouldn't had this been a typical Millennium/NuImage offering. Jones remains low-key and somber and doesn't have much to do after the initial surgical procedure, and the same goes for Alice Eve, prominently billed in a thankless supporting role that gives her nothing to do. Likewise for DTV action hero Scott Adkins, who's in the whole movie as one of Wells' flunkies but is tragically underused, only getting a few "Yes, sir, whatever you say!"s to Oldman and no action scenes of his own (speaking of Adkins--while Vroman does a fine job, here's another larger-scale Millennium/NuImage project that would've been perfect for Isaac Florentine). With his hair flopping all over the place and froth forming in the corners of his mouth, Oldman works at two speeds here: irritable and apoplectic. He paces around what looks like a vacant BOURNE crisis suite as everyone watches monitors, waiting for just the right time to bellow "Find Jerico Stewart!" and "It's him! Let's go!" or, in his more introspective moments, "FUCK!" like a bloviating jackass who seems blithely unaware that he's got a ridiculous name like "Quaker Wells" (Adkins' character is listed as "Pete Greensleeves" in the credits, but I don't recall any of the agents working under Wells ever being referred to by name). CRIMINAL is total empty calorie junk food, but it's junk food of the highest caliber. Like sweets and snacks that really do nothing good for you, you just need them once in a while, and CRIMINAL scratches that '80s/'90s throwback itch not just with its ridiculous premise and hooky electronic score by Brian Tyler and Keith Power (yes, like nearly everything else these days, it's "Carpenter-esque"), but with the casting of real actors--I wonder if Costner, Oldman, and Jones did any JFK reminiscing between takes--to seal the deal.

On DVD/Blu-ray: FRANKENSTEIN (2016) and DIABLO (2016)

FRANKENSTEIN
(Germany/US - 2016)

Bernard Rose's ongoing freefall into absolute irrelevance continues with this aggressively awful, straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray modern updating of Mary Shelley's classic novel, co-produced by Avi Lerner and Cannon cover band NuImage. Rose, who established his horror bona fides with 1989's PAPERHOUSE and 1992's CANDYMAN, hasn't made a good film since the late '90s (his most recent efforts include the found-footage SX_TAPE and the atrocious Paganini biopic THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST) and for a while, his take on FRANKENSTEIN is promising enough that it starts looking very much like a comeback. Accordingly, since everything Rose has touched for nearly the last 20 years turns to shit, so goes FRANKENSTEIN. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the film finds Victor Frankenstein (Danny Huston) and his wife Elizabeth (Carrie-Anne Moss) conducting top-secret experiments at a high-tech research facility. Using digital technology, they've created "Adam" (Xavier Samuel), who's essentially a baby in the body of an adult. Elizabeth bottle-feeds him and Adam learns to say "Mama," but the experiment is deemed a failure when boils start developing all over his body. An attempt at euthanizing him fails when the presumed-dead Adam jerks awake as his skull is being sawed open. He escapes from the facility and creates havoc all over Los Angeles, with the strength of ten men and seemingly impervious to bullets. When he's arrested and the cops find Elizabeth's work ID in Adam's possession, they call her in but Adam goes berserk when she claims to have never seen him before. Rejected by his "mother," the increasingly monstrous-looking Adam escapes police custody and is befriended by homeless, guitar-strumming blind man Eddie (Rose's CANDYMAN star Tony Todd), who dubs him "Monster" and hooks him up with Wanda (Maya Erskine), an area streetwalker-with-a-heart-of-gold who takes him to a fleabag motel and doesn't seem to mind that he's starting to resemble The Toxic Avenger.

Until Adam escapes from Frankenstein's research lab, FRANKENSTEIN is actually OK. Samuel's performance was credible and there seemed to be enough clever ideas that this was shaping up to be a promising reinterpretation and Rose's best film in a long time (particularly memorable is a ghoulishly macabre bit where Adam gets the upper hand on the Frankenstein associate--named Dr. Pretorius, of course--conducting his autopsy). But once Adam is out of the lab and on the streets, FRANKENSTEIN just crashes and burns on an almost LEGION level. It's not really conveyed in a proper time element how Adam goes from having the cognitive and motor skills of an infant to learning how to shower, being coordinated enough to take on a couple of gang members, and eventually programming a GPS on a dead hooker's smart phone to find out where the Frankensteins live, possibly the dumbest tech-based plot development in a horror movie since Simon Callow faxed his own ejaculate in 2009's unwatchable CROWLEY. Approaching FRANKENSTEIN with the apparent goal of turning it into MARY SHELLEY'S TIME OUT OF MIND, the second half of the film focuses on the friendship between Adam and Eddie, in a tired and obvious revamping of the blind hermit segment in James Whale's THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, moved to the mean streets of L.A.  Rose throws in embarrassingly ham-fisted commentary on bad L.A. cops (one is played an overacting Jeff Hilliard in the world's worst tribute to Bill Paxton-as-Hudson-in-ALIENS), and even resorts to a philosophical Eddie invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "Free at last!" in reference to Adam. Rest assured, Rose is taking this completely seriously, but you may be distracted when your mind wanders off to questions like "Who thought this was a good idea?" and "Does this take place in a world where Frankenstein movies have never existed?" and "At what point do Rose's loved ones stage an intervention?"  He tweaks elements of both the novel and the early FRANKENSTEIN films that starred Boris Karloff, and yes, there's even a climactic funeral pyre, where CGI flames engulf both the monster and what's left of Rose's credibility as a filmmaker. (R, 90 mins)



DIABLO
(US - 2016)

Scott Eastwood looks and sounds a lot like his legendary dad Clint, and that was probably all the makers of DIABLO felt they needed to make it work. It also borrows core ideas from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and UNFORGIVEN and enough of a particular 1973 western that one could sarcastically dub this HIGH PLAINS POSEUR. The setting is Colorado in 1872, and Eastwood is Jackson, a Civil War vet whose farm is set ablaze by a gang of Mexicans who take off with his new bride Alexsandra (Camilla Belle). Following the trail south to Mexico, Jackson sets off on a vigilante mission to rescue his wife and kill her abductors. He's hindered in his efforts by the mysterious Ezra (THE HATEFUL EIGHT's Walton Goggins), an overtly Mephistophelian figure who keeps appearing on the trail saying things like "Your soul is the toll," and "You're on my road, you pay my price." It's some pretty obvious soul-sellling, "Road to Hell" symbolism that probably seems like deep stuff to screenwriter Carlos De Los Rios, whose credits include several Asylum mockbusters like THE DA VINCI TREASURE and PIRATES OF TREASURE ISLAND. Unfortunately, De Los Rios and director Lawrence Roeck (who has a tenuous connection to Clint; he was a camera operator on THE EASTWOOD FACTOR, one of former Time film critic and full-time Clint BFF Richard Schickel's shamelessly slurping documentaries on the iconic actor) aren't done yet, as DIABLO goes along on an unspectacular but inoffensive path until about 50 minutes in, with a total bullshit plot twist that's the hoariest cliche this side of waking up and finding that it was all a dream. You can't even hint at what it involves without completely giving it away, but let's say the twist is similar to a certain beloved 1999 film with an unreliable narrator. The twist completely derails Eastwood's performance which, while not great, was decent enough to that point to carry a small, low-key western that inexplicably feels the need to switch gears and become a horror movie midway though. There's some really beautiful cinematography by the veteran Dean Cundey and brief appearances by jobbing pros like Danny Glover, Adam Beach, and Joaquim de Almeida, but by the time the asinine finale rolls around, DIABLO only succeeds in shooting itself in the foot. (R, 83 mins)

In Theaters/On VOD: SURVIVOR (2015)

SURVIVOR
(US/Italy/UK - 2015)

Directed by James McTeigue. Written by Philip Shelby. Cast: Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, James D'Arcy, Roger Rees, Benno Furmann, Frances de la Tour, Genevieve O'Reilly, Sonya Cassidy, Alex Beckett. (PG-13, 96 mins)

Ten years ago, SURVIVOR would've opened nationwide--probably in January, April, or early September--and likely been the #1 movie in America, at least for a week. Now, it's in "select theaters" (meaning, maybe ten) and on VOD, with US distributor Alchemy not even bothering to prepare a domestic trailer. Even with the relatively low budget of $20 million, SURVIVOR should look better than it does (obviously, the money went to the cast and little else). It's a brainless but fast-moving B-movie that Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage didn't feel had the potential to be their next OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, despite corralling three of its cast members--Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, and Robert Forster--in supporting roles, which also begs the question "How is Morgan Freeman not in this?" Set mostly in London but primarily filmed in Bulgaria, SURVIVOR stars Milla Jovovich as Kate Abbott, a top-level security expert at the US Embassy (this is the kind of film that feels the need to accompany a shot of the Thames and the London Eye ferris wheel with the caption "London"). Driven in her job and haunted by memories of being in one of the WTC towers on 9/11, Kate has an almost Spidey Sense when it comes to terror threats and something seems off with Dr. Emil Balan (Roger Rees), who's trying to get a visa to visit the US to attend a pediatrics convention. Balan is really in the employ of wealthy and generically Eastern European terrorist Zafer Pavlou (Benno Furmann), who has a half-assed plot to launch an attack in Times Square on New Year's Eve in order to manipulate the global economy in his favor. Pavlou's found the perfect patsy in Balan, a grieving, vengeful man who blames the death of his ill wife on US customs' hemming and hawing about allowing her a visa to travel to the US for treatment. When Kate's persistent questioning of Balan threatens to derail the operation, Pavlou dispatches The Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan), one of the world's deadliest and most elusive assassins ("He's had so much reconstructive surgery, nobody knows what he looks like anymore!" says one US Embassy official) to take her out.

The Watchmaker is introduced completing a complicated repair on an expensive watch to show how methodical and precise he is, but of course, he repeatedly fails at killing Kate or there wouldn't be a movie. His initial actions--which include pointlessly blowing up an entire city block where Kate and some co-workers are having dinner, when all he really had to do was sneak up on her and put a bullet in her head--end up inadvertently making Kate the prime suspect in the eyes of the US Ambassador (Bassett) and the angry M.I.5 official on the case (James D'Arcy), but her boss and vague love interest Sam Parker (McDermott) is the only person who believes that she's being set up. Directed by Wachowski protege James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA, NINJA ASSASSIN), SURVIVOR is a watchable if unspectacular actioner that seems ready-made for Netflix Instant. It wants to have that sort-of globetrotting BOURNE momentum to its cat-and-mouse, race-against-time plot, but it doesn't have the cash flow to pull it off.  Or, perhaps more accurately, it doesn't have the cash flowing to the right departments. Working with a significantly lower budget than he did in his days on the Wachowski payroll, McTeigue can't do much when he's saddled with the likes of the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX, whose cartoonish CGI histrionics here continue to make one appreciate the relative care and craft of the folks at The Asylum. On top of that, McTeigue and screenwriter Philip Shelby really dumb it down, not trusting their audience with anything. Needless captions are one thing ("Times Square," shown over a stock footage shot of the iconic Coca-Cola sign), but when Kate reflects on losing her friends in the World Trade Center on 9/11, was it necessary for McTeigue to cut to cable news stock footage of the second plane hitting the tower just in case anyone in the audience was unaware of what "9/11" means?

A classic case of "It is what it is," SURVIVOR is chintzy and aggressively dumb, but at least it's never boring. Jovovich is fine, but Brosnan doesn't really do much with the opportunity to dig in and play a ruthless, unstoppable killer. The Watchmaker almost seems like a distant relative to his KGB assassin in John Mackenzie's underrated and little-remembered 1987 espionage thriller THE FOURTH PROTOCOL. Granted an opportunity to play a bad guy right on the heels of his Liam Neeson "aging action guy" bid with last year's minor hit THE NOVEMBER MAN, a slumming Brosnan just looks annoyed. It doesn't help that Shelby's script introduces him as one of the most lethal assassins on the planet but has him continually presented as an incompetent fuck-up. There's some attempt at topical ISIS metaphors--almost certainly accidental--in the way that the US, in their efforts at thwarting terror, only succeeded in creating a terrorist, however hapless, in Dr. Balan. By the climax, which has The Watchmaker and Balan in Times Square trying to detonate a bomb set to go off in the ball as it drops at the stroke of midnight, all that's really left to do is marvel at SURVIVOR's almost adorable attempt to recreate New Year's Eve in Times Square on a Bulgarian backlot, with some stock footage shots inserted into the mix with maximum obviousness. And it gets better, as Kate encounters The Watchmaker on the roof of a nearby building, against a backdrop of what's supposed to be the NYC skyline. Instead, it looks like Jovovich and Brosnan fighting it out on a set against a large screen with the Troma intro on pause. Originally set to star Katharine Heigl and Clive Owen, SURVIVOR doesn't make the best use of its stars, all of whom seem above the Redbox-ready material that feels like a dusted-off and slightly updated script that executive producer Avi Lerner had sitting around from the days when Frank Zagarino was the biggest name he could afford. Even VOD seems too gala a premiere for something like this, and I recommend waiting until the right time and watching it the way it was really meant to be seen: when nothing else is on and you remember you grabbed it months earlier as an impulse buy in the $5 dump bin while waiting in a slow checkout line at Wal-Mart.

On DVD/Blu-ray: NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR (2013); SWEETWATER (2013); and LAST LOVE (2013)

NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR
(US - 2013)

After the release of 2010's NINJA, a formulaic throwback to the likes of ENTER THE NINJA and AMERICAN NINJA, director and DTV action auteur Isaac Florentine and star Scott Adkins both expressed disappointment at the outcome, with Florentine saying the film relied too much on CGI and wirework.  For the sequel, both he and Adkins wanted to make a back-to-basics martial-arts movie, essentially crafting it as a do-over to function as both a sequel and a reboot.  Well, they got it right this time.  NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR is maybe the best movie Golan & Globus never made.  The CGI is very conservatively used, mainly on greenscreen work and background visuals, and even the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX seems to have brought their A-game for this one.  Adkins, who starred in Florentine's two excellent sequels to Walter Hill's UNDISPUTED, has been slowly making a name for himself in the cult action scene, with increasing visibility in films like THE EXPENDABLES 2 (as Jean-Claude Van Damme's chief henchman) and John Hyams' amazing UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING, as well as a brief supporting role in the Oscar-nominated ZERO DARK THIRTY.  And Florentine really needed to get back on the horse after the disappointment of NINJA and the disastrous ASSASSIN'S BULLET, easily his worst film.  NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR is a ninja film in the classic tradition, and looks much more expensive than it really is.  It's a shame that it, and Florentine for that matter, are confined to the world of DTV. 30 years ago, this would've been released in theaters and it would've been a hit.

Picking up where NINJA left off, Casey Bowman (Adkins) is living in Japan with his pregnant wife Namiko (Mika Hijii), the daughter of his late sensei.  When Namiko is brutally killed, an enraged, grieving Casey goes to Thailand to visit the dojo of her family friend Nakabara (Kane Kosugi, son of ninja genre legend Sho Kosugi).  Unable to contain his anger and prone to violent outbursts that bring shame to Nakabara's dojo, Casey decides to avenge Namiko's death after Nakabara tells him of a longstanding grudge held against his and Namiko's family by Myanmar drug cartel lord Goro (Shun Sugata).  Of course, Casey journeys to Myanmar and proceeds to ninja the living shit out Goro's organization and anyone who gets in his way.  David White's script won't win any awards for originality and, based on the fact that a prominently billed genre figure has very little to do, you'll probably figure out the twist long before Casey does, but with its jaw-dropping fight choreography, NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR is one of the top action films of 2013, and further proof that Florentine and Adkins are ready for bigger and better things.  There's absolutely no reason--other than the big-name actors' inability to keep up with his requirements--that Florentine shouldn't be helming something like THE EXPENDABLES 3.  There's always the possibility that he enjoys the relative autonomy he's granted working for Avi Lerner's Millennium/NuImage and is happy with the niche he's carved for himself.  After all, his experiences away from the company were unpleasant for him (I liked Florentine's 2008 Van Damme film THE SHEPHERD, though Stage 6 Films took it away from him in post-production) and/or his fans (the less said about ASSASSIN'S BULLET, the better), but even with a fervent cult following, Florentine is the best-kept secret in action filmmaking, and NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR is the real deal.  (R, 95 mins, also streaming on Netflix)


SWEETWATER
(US/UK/Germany/Canada - 2013)

With the ever-changing world of film distribution, good films inevitably get lost in the shuffle, often getting dumped in a just a few theaters and quietly turning up on DVD or on streaming services. The $7 million-budgeted SWEETWATER, which grossed a paltry $6000 during its very limited US theatrical release, isn't necessarily a "good" movie by the classic definition, but it's entertaining to an almost absurd degree, a frequently audacious and gleefully nasty little gem that comes very close to being the PUNISHER: WAR ZONE of westerns.  The Prophet Josiah (Jason Isaacs) is an insane minister/cult leader in the small, middle-of-nowhere Sweetwater, New Mexico.  After a property dispute involving his sheep grazing on the land of struggling--and unwelcome--immigrant farmer Miguel Ramirez (Eduardo Noriega) escalates, Josiah brutally kills Ramirez and has his underling Daniel (country music star Jason Aldean) bury the body.  Ramirez's pregnant, ex-prostitute wife Sarah (January Jones) awaits his return, miscarries, and is then abducted and raped by Josiah (who calls the vile act "purification"), who already has two wives and a daughter he intends to make his third (at one point, regarding his young daughter, he suggests the experienced Sarah "teach her how to fuck"), in addition to his fanatically-devoted flock, which seems to constitute the entire racist population of Sweetwater.  Meanwhile, eccentric lawman Cornelius Jackson (Ed Harris) arrives in town and immediately declares himself sheriff.  He ends up in Sweetwater while on the trail of two missing brothers (played by director/co-writer Logan Miller and his twin brother, co-writer Noah) who never turned up at their sister's ranch.  They were killed by Josiah for trespassing on the outskirts of his property, where they built a camp after a series of unfortunate travel mishaps, like a busted wagon wheel and a dead horse. With Sweetwater being the place directly in the middle of where they came from and where they were headed, it doesn't take long for Jackson to zero in on Josiah.

SWEETWATER actually has enough space to accommodate two thoroughly demented performances:  Isaacs is great in a fire-and-brimstone way as the homicidal Prophet Josiah, while Harris, who's never cut this loose onscreen before, enthusiastically hams it up as the not-quite-all-there Jackson.  Introduced screaming into a canyon, Harris just gets crazier from there, dancing his way into Sweetwater as he beats the shit out of the useless sheriff, exhumes the corpses of the two brothers and leaves them in Josiah's dining room, and later recites Lord Byron as Josiah crucifies him upside-down.  Jones underplays it as Sarah, which is fitting since the Millers basically turn her into a frontier Terminator once she escapes from Josiah's stronghold and goes on a vengeance-fueled killing spree throughout Sweetwater.  Let's just say SWEETWATER is the kind of movie where a masturbating, pantsless Peeping Tom gets a gun shoved up his ass and the trigger pulled.  It's the kind of movie where Harris' Jackson is attending a formal dinner at Josiah's and asks "You ever fuck a sheep?" before taking a knife and carving a map into the Prophet's cherished oak table.  Mean, misanthropic, hilarious, and often in questionable taste, the tragically under-the-radar, hard-R SWEETWATER is a film that should be embraced with open arms by connoisseurs of Batshit Cinema.  You know who you are.  (R, 94 mins)


LAST LOVE
(Germany/Belgium/US/France - 2013)

It's easy to imagine the meeting where the producers of LAST LOVE approached Michael Caine and told him something along the lines of "It's like VENUS with Peter O'Toole, but with you!"  The film ultimately goes in a bit of a different direction, but the comparison is still appropriate.  Caine is Matthew Morgan, a retired American philosophy professor living in Paris, still coping with the death of his wife Joan (Jane Alexander) three years earlier.  He still sees her and talks to her, and more or less goes about his days detached and biding his time until it's his turn to go.  Matthew befriends Pauline (Clemence Poesy), a young dance instructor he repeatedly sees on the bus.  The two become close friends, with Matthew being a father figure for her.  Matthew may or may not develop romantic feelings for her, but whatever he feels prompts him to (perhaps half-heartedly) attempt suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills.  Enter Matthew's estranged children, Miles (Justin Kirk) and Karen (Gillian Anderson), who come over from the States to convince him to move back home.  He refuses to leave Paris, where he's stayed since Joan's cancer diagnosis, at which time she decided to live out her last days there.  They're also suspicious of what's going on with "the French bimbo" who's entered their father's life.  When the self-absorbed Karen heads home, Miles, whose own wife just left him, decides to stick around as Pauline attempts to heal the rift between father and son.

This is one of those films where there's inevitable Big Revelations and the expected airing of long-dormant grievances.  Working from Francoise Dorner's novel La Douceur Assassine (translated: "Murderous Sweetness"), writer/director Sandra Nettelbeck (MOSTLY MARTHA) goes into areas that a mainstream American film wouldn't, chiefly that Matthew is kind of a prick to his kids.  And not in an amusing curmudgeonly way, either.  He tells Pauline that he never really wanted to have children but only did so to make Joan happy, and despite his expectations that he would, he never warmed up to the idea.  Once Joan passed on, it seems both Matthew and his children realized they had nothing more holding them together.  What Pauline provides for Matthew is that fatherly bond that he never felt with his own children.  In that sense, it's almost a European art film take on GRAN TORINO if you consider the way Clint Eastwood feels a kinship with his Hmong neighbors that he never felt with his own family, in similar tatters after the matriarch's passing.  LAST LOVE provides a nice showcase for 80-year-old Caine, though his attempt at an American accent is inconsistent, to put it mildly.  He slips into his usual Michael Caine voice a lot, but his idea of sounding American is mainly to talk deeper and slower. You wouldn't even know he's supposed to be playing an American if it wasn't mentioned in every other scene.  But, living legend that he is, he still maintains the screen presence.  His scenes with Poesy are sensitively and believably conveyed by the actors.  US distributor Image Entertainment didn't even try to do anything with this, dropping half of the title (it was released overseas as MR. MORGAN'S LAST LOVE) and giving it a one-screen US release a few weeks before its DVD/Blu-ray debut.  The film and its star deserved a little more effort than that.  By no means a great film, but it's a nice, low-key one that Caine fans will want to seek out.  (Unrated, 116 mins)

In Theaters/On VOD: KILLING SEASON (2013)

KILLING SEASON
(US/Belgium - 2013)

Directed by Mark Steven Johnson.  Written by Evan Daugherty.  Cast: John Travolta, Robert De Niro, Milo Ventimiglia, Elizabeth Olin.  (R, 87 mins)

It's hard to believe Robert De Niro and John Travolta have never worked together until now.  It's even harder to believe that they chose KILLING SEASON to be their long-overdue first collaboration.  There have been many serious films made about the Bosnian War and its aftermath, but this isn't one of them.  Oh, it tries to be, and it thinks it succeeds, but KILLING SEASON is a film divided against itself.  Evan Daugherty's script, originally titled SHRAPNEL, set in the 1970s, and involving the aftermath of Vietnam, drifted around Hollywood for the last decade, and was initially a project planned for FACE/OFF stars Travolta and Nicolas Cage with the now-incarcerated John McTiernan (DIE HARD) set to direct.  It never came together in that incarnation, and now the resulting film, directed by Mark Steven Johnson (DAREDEVIL, GHOST RIDER)--who knows how much, if any, of Daugherty's original script is on the screen?--wants to be a realistic, meditative examination of war and what it does to soldiers, but is torn between that and being a graphically gory revenge saga.  So on one hand, KILLING SEASON is a terrible serious movie, but the sight of two iconic legends trying to kill each other in a wilderness splatter flick that's been dumped by its distributor on just 12 screens nationwide and VOD is probably the 2013 equivalent of prestige actors inexplicably turning up in a trashy grindhouse movie in the '70s.  In other words, KILLING SEASON isn't good, but it's frequently entertaining for the wrong reasons, and you won't be bored.

In Bosnia in 1995, Emil Kovac (Travolta), a member of the Serbian paramilitary group the Scorpions, is shot in the head by American Col. Benjamin Ford (De Niro), the leader of a unit that's taken it upon themselves to execute a group of Serbian officers for their heinous crimes against the Bosnians.  18 years later, a recovered Kovac says he's "going hunting," and heads to a secluded area of Tennessee where a reclusive Ford lives in a cabin in the middle of Appalachian nowhere.  Ford, who's cut himself off from family and friends and lives with the daily pain of shrapnel still embedded in his leg and the psychological torment of both the Serbian war crimes he observed and the ones he and his soldiers committed, leads a solitary existence and doesn't recognize Kovac when he finds the Serbian--claiming to be Bosnian--hiking through the woods.  Kovac helps Ford with some engine trouble and Ford invites him to the cabin for dinner as the men bond over Bosnia, Jagermeister, and Johnny Cash.  Out hunting the next day, Kovac reveals his true intent when he shoots an arrow through Ford's leg, forces him to run a line through the hole, and strings him up.  Ford gets loose, and the men spend much of the remainder of the film pursuing one another, with the upper hand changing several times, mostly through stupidity and plot convenience.  Let's just say it's not every day that you see a movie with Robert De Niro digging shrapnel out of his own thigh or firing an arrow through John Travolta's face, then waterboarding him with a seemingly bottomless pitcher of lemon juice seasoned with an entire container of salt.

Who is the intended audience for this movie?  From scene to scene, it doesn't even feel like it's being made by the same filmmakers, nor does it seem like the stars are aware that they're still acting in the same movie.  Say what you want about Travolta's hilarious accent (and I haven't even touched upon his ludicrous glued-on beard), but at least he's consistent.  De Niro sounds like De Niro in half of his scenes, and in the other half, he's using a Southern accent.  KILLING SEASON feels like a film where no one involved was ever on the same page at the same time.  There's no way Daugherty's script could've possibly been as all-over-the-place as the resulting film turned out to be.  But like I said, it's never dull.  It's just hard to reconcile a serious, regular-sounding De Niro trying to express the pain of what he's seen and done with him resurrecting his Max Cady-from-CAPE FEAR drawl to gleefully taunt Travolta with "When life hands you lemons..." as a prelude to his lemonade vengeance.  That's something Freddy Krueger would say.  Why is it in this movie?  And why is De Niro saying it?

Between the ridiculous facial hair, the graphic gore, the nonsensical plot elements (after Ford bails on his grandson's baptism party, why would his son, played in a few scenes by Milo Ventimiglia, and daughter-in-law drive three hours with their baby to surprise him?  Did they just leave everyone at their party?  No...the plot needs them to show up at his door so they can be threatened by Kovac), and De Niro and Travolta singing along to Johnny Cash in dueling bad accents, I can't figure out if KILLING SEASON is one of the year's worst dramas or best comedies.  It tries to have it too many ways and succeeds at none. It does work best when it's in action mode and reminiscent of Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro battling in William Friedkin's THE HUNTED (2003) and even Roy Scheider and Jurgen Prochnow duking it out in John Frankenheimer's underappreciated THE FOURTH WAR (1990), even though 69-year-old De Niro is obviously doubled in some of the more strenuous scenes.  And, being that it's from Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage, it's mostly shot in Bulgaria and has the requisite unconvincing CGI from Bulgaria's Worldwide FX, though to their credit, the blood looks pretty wet here and not nearly as cartoonish as their work usually appears (but fear not...Worldwide's CGI fire is still the least convincing in the business).  True to its feeling like a modern-day exploitation throwback, KILLING SEASON is unusually short, with the closing credits rolling at the 77-minute mark, and poking along for an absurd ten minutes just to pad the running time.  The film is a waste of its stars, who almost certainly could've found a more worthy project to do together, though I can't help but think there's more to the story.  There's just an abundance of tell-tale signs of too many cooks in the kitchen.  But I gotta say, for everything that's working against him--the accent, the beard, his scalp looking like it's been smeared with Chia seeds--Travolta really commits to this thing.

 

 

In Theaters: OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN (2013)

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN
(US - 2013)

Directed by Antoine Fuqua.  Written by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt.  Cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Rick Yune, Melissa Leo, Dylan McDermott, Radha Mitchell, Ashley Judd, Cole Hauser, Finley Jacobsen, Keong Sim, Malana Lea, Phil Austin, Sean O'Bryan. (R, 120 mins)

When the trailer for OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN started making the rounds a couple of months ago, with its seemingly intentionally bad visual effects and dialogue like "I'm the best hope you've got!," "America does not negotiate with terrorists!" and "They've opened the gates of Hell!," one could be forgiven for assuming that a bunch of big-name actors agreed to take part in a fake trailer mocking big-budget, overblown, jingoistic, flag-waving, "America! Fuck Yeah!", porn-for-red-states action explosion epics.  But no...OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is a real movie with real actors.  And what's most surprising, other than it's not nearly as terrible as that trailer made it look, is that the actors lured by fat paychecks actually seem to be taking it seriously, as if this is the first film of its kind and they're really doing something groundbreaking.  The outrageously overqualified cast is pretty much all this has going for it.  They're the reason this thing cost $80 million and still looks like a shot-in-South Africa, straight-to-video Frank Zagarino flick directed by Sam Firstenberg in 1996.  Avi Lerner and his Cannon cover band Millennium/Nu Image may be able to somehow pull $80 million out of their asses several times a year despite most of their films going straight-to-DVD and the two EXPENDABLES films being their only recent hits, but true to their Golan-Globus heritage, they haven't been able to shed their B-movie skin despite Herculean efforts to do so.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in their continued employment of the Bulgarian visual effects outfit Worldwide FX, whose trademark digital splatter and SyFy Channel-level CGI is showcased here in all its chintzy, D-grade glory.  Rushed into production in true Cannon fashion to beat Roland Emmerich's upcoming and very similar WHITE HOUSE DOWN into theaters, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN is fast-moving and brainlessly entertaining, but the extended CGI destruction of Washington, D.C. (itself CGI'd even before the mayhem, as the film was shot in Louisiana) that's displayed here would've looked subpar in the mid-1990s.  No matter how many A-listers they manage to reel in, Millennium/Nu Image will never be a major player with these kinds of shit-ass visual effects and shoddy, blurry greenscreen work.

Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, who also co-produced) has been wallowing in guilt at his desk job at the Treasury office. 18 months earlier, he was the chief agent on the security detail of President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart), when a car accident during a snowstorm on a bridge along the icy road to Camp David resulted in Banning saving the President's life but not that of the First Lady (Ashley Judd), whose seatbelt was jammed as the limo plummeted into the cold waters below.  The widower Commander-in-Chief removed Banning from his detail, not because he blamed him, but because his presence would be a constant reminder of the First Lady's tragic death to himself and his young son Connor (Finley Jacobsen).  While staring at the computer monitor at his desk after another day of feeling sorry for himself, Banning gets a shot at redemption when North Korean terrorists attack D.C. from the air, killing hundreds of citizens and toppling the Washington Monument in a sequence that would be a stunner were the visuals not so cheap and tacky.  The President is hosting a South Korean delegation, allowing them into the underground PEOC bunker when he and his staff are moved there. Of course, the delegation has been infiltrated by the same group of terrorists, led by the nefarious Kang (Rick Yung).  Kang wants the US military to pull out of the DMZ between North and South Korea and he's prepared to kill President Asher, Vice-President Charlie Rodriguez (Phil Austin), and Secretary of Defense Ruth McMillan (Melissa Leo) before turning America into a post-nuke wasteland if his demands aren't met.

Kang's army overtakes the half-destroyed White House, wiping out the entire security detail, led by Banning's buddy Roma (Cole Hauser), a character who was doomed to die, as he's played by Cole Hauser.  Banning takes out a number of Kang's men before infiltrating what's left of the White House, which apparently doesn't change any passwords or security codes over an 18-month period since Banning still has full access to everything in the Oval Office.  He gets in contact with the Pentagon, where House Speaker Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) is the acting President, providing intel to him and his advisors, Secret Service chief Jacobs (Angela Bassett) and General Clegg (Robert Forster).  Once he locates Connor--codename "Sparkplug"--and gets him to safety through an air vent (Banning sure knows a lot of easy, unsecured ways in and out of the White House), he goes to work eliminating Kang and his cohorts--including former Secret Service agent-turned-hired gun traitor Forbes (Dylan McDermott), who helped coordinate the infiltration--and rescuing the President.

If you think this sounds a lot like DIE HARD, well, you're right.  Several scenes are restaged almost in their entirety, including a botched chopper rescue attempt that's shot in such a similar fashion that you almost expect Robert Davi and Grand L. Bush to show up as Agents Johnson and Johnson.  And of course, even though he's "the best hope you've got," someone--in this case, Clegg--has to be the requisite "Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson" of the film and doubt Banning and his intentions at every turn, if only to have someone else pipe up about what a dedicated badass he is.  And there's also the tough guy wisecrackery, but when Banning tells Kang "Let's play a few rounds of Fuck Off...you're it!," it doesn't quite have the same iconic punch as "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!"  Butler is OK in Hollywood's latest attempt to make Gerard Butler happen, though he isn't really exerting himself here in what amounts to a two-hour Bruce Willis impression.  He does have a nice rapport in his scenes with young Jacobsen.  Eckhart mainly clenches his teeth and yells "Fuck you!" a lot, while the hammy overacting is left to Leo, who gets kicked and beaten to a pulp not once but twice (after the first, she asks President Asher, with blood dripping from her mouth, "How's my hair?"), and in the film's most unintentionally hilarious moment, is dragged down a hallway by her hands to her presumed execution while kicking and shrieking "I pledge allegiance to the flag!  Of the United States of aaaaagggghhh!"

Freeman brings surprising humanity and gravitas to the Speaker of the House, a man who disagrees with the President but puts politics aside and demonstates humility and nervousness over the role he wasn't expecting to be playing when he woke up that morning.  Considering the stock, one-dimensional characters in Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt's script, I'm sure this level of complexity was brought to the table by Freeman himself, and his scenes have some unexpected credibility to them.  I particularly liked his initial anxiety when confronted with the situation and how he's stammering and indecisive and rapidly losing the confidence of everyone in the room when he dodges questions and instead asks someone for a cup of coffee, "with double cream and three Sweet & Lows...and put it in a real cup, not one of those styrofoam things," then closes his eyes, and something snaps in him and he's ready to take charge.  It's just a little moment of real, human feeling in an otherwise dumb movie, and Freeman, pro that he is, totally sells it when all he really needed to do was show up.

Directed by the underrated Antoine Fuqua, who fares much better with more grounded and gritty films like TRAINING DAY and the criminally underappreciated BROOKLYN'S FINEST, the shockingly cheap-looking OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN isn't quite the laugh-riot you'd expect from the trailer, and if it weren't for the horrible CGI and the fact that the President's high-tech bunker looks like it was quickly thrown together in Avi Lerner's basement, it would almost certainly play better.  As it is, it's the kind of movie where an aerial shot featuring the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument includes a caption that reads "Washington, D.C."  It's a forgettable but stupidly entertaining enough way to kill two hours, and for what it's worth, it's miles ahead of the abysmal A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD.  But really, it's long past the time for Worldwide FX to install a software update or close up shop because their work just isn't cutting it anymore.  Say what you will about Roland Emmerich, but he's a guy who knows how to convincingly destroy Washington D.C., and his WHITE HOUSE DOWN (with President Jamie Foxx's life in the hands of Secret Service agent Channing Tatum.  No, really) will undoubtedly make OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN look even more amateurish than it already does.

In Theaters: THE EXPENDABLES 2 (2012)

THE EXPENDABLES 2
(US - 2012)

Directed by Simon West.  Written by Richard Wenk and Sylvester Stallone.  Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Liam Hemsworth, Scott Adkins, Yu Nan, Charisma Carpenter.  (R, 102 mins)

When Sylvester Stallone's THE EXPENDABLES was released in 2010, it was hyped as a summit of action stars old and new.  That was kinda sorta true, with Stallone and Dolph Lundgren teaming up with relatively younger action heroes like Jason Statham and Jet Li, and other brawny dudes like Randy Couture, Terry Crews, and Stone Cold Steve Austin.  There were even unbilled cameos by Bruce Willis and then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  But while it's always nice to see Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts on the big screen, they really didn't gel with the "action hero" angle, and we should still be thankful that 50 Cent had the decency to drop out shortly before filming began.  THE EXPENDABLES was an enjoyable throwback to big, dumb '80s action movies, but it needed more aging icons of that decade to really accomplish its goal.  Bigger and better in every way, THE EXPENDABLES 2 corrects those errors and for any fan of the aforementioned Big Dumb '80s Action, it's one of the best times you'll have at a movie this year.

Stallone, who co-wrote the script with Richard Wenk (16 BLOCKS and the Statham remake of the Charles Bronson classic THE MECHANIC), just stays in front of the camera for this one, opting to leave directing chores to Simon West, who commandeered 1997's CON AIR, one of the all-time great Big Dumb Action epics.  As a director, Stallone did a good job with the boxing bouts in ROCKY's II-IV, but West is much more adept at staging huge action sequences, and THE EXPENDABLES 2 opens with a truly impressive 15-minute prologue of the titular mercenary heroes on a rescue mission in Nepal.  Back for action are Expendables leaders Barney Ross (Stallone) and Lee Christmas (Statham), along with Gunner (Lundgren), Hale Caesar (Crews), Toll Road (Couture), and new recruit Billy the Kid (Liam "Not his brother Chris" Hemsworth).  They get a new job from shady government operative Church (Willis):  retrieve a small case from the safe of a crashed airplane, and in the case are the blueprints to a secret stash of plutonium, left in a hidden mine that's been abandoned since the end of the Cold War.  They're joined by Maggie (Yu Nan), who has the safe combo, and the job goes off without a hitch.  That is, until they're ambushed by villain Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and his army of generic Eurotrash goons.  Vilain steals the blueprints, and plans to sell the plutonium to the highest bidder.  The Expendables get some additional help not just from Church, but from Ross' longtime rival Trench (Schwarzenegger), and self-described "lone wolf" Booker (Chuck Norris).

Look, the story and the acting aren't going to win any awards, and the film does drag a bit in the middle when it has to focus on plot.  But when West sets up the action sequences, and when Church, Trench, and Booker join in for the last third, THE EXPENDABLES 2 really starts firing on all cylinders.  It's completely ridiculous and over-the-top, with totally cartoonish splatter effects and an endless supply of cheesy and/or self-deprecating one-liners and winking homages:  Norris' Booker is introduced telling a Chuck Norris joke,  Stallone and Schwarzenegger make constant references to their age and past quips, and after four Expendables machine gun a bad guy into a pile of raw flesh, Stallone yells "Rest in peaces!"  Van Damme, who's very quietly made some better-than-average action films during his DTV years, is a solid bad guy and confirms my suspicions that he would make a formidable Bond villain if given the chance, and DTV action star Scott Adkins (UNDISPUTED II and III) has some good moments as Vilain's chief henchman.  But really, the big reason this works so well is the opportunity to see some old-school ass-kicking by Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis, and Norris.  The latter three don't get a lot of screen time (not as much as Stallone and Statham, and it's also worth mentioning that Li splits after the opening sequence), but it's more than mere cameos, and the film really hits its stride once they burst into action.  If you're a fan of these flicks from back in the day or grew up watching these guys in endless cable and TV airings, you'd have to be a real cynic to not just sit there with a big goofy grin when they start mowing down the bad guys.  I mean, really...how does this shot not put a smile on your face?

YES!

Or this! 

YESSSS!!!!!

THE EXPENDABLES seems to have given rise to this sort-of nostalgia trip for aging action stars on the big screen.  Sure, we've got Van Damme, Adkins, and Steven Seagal (if there's an EXPENDABLES 3, he and AMERICAN NINJA's Michael Dudikoff need to be in it) doing their thing in DTV work, but these kinds of movies rarely get wide theatrical releases anymore. In addition to this, in the coming months, we've got Stallone in Walter Hill's BULLET TO THE HEAD, Schwarzenegger in THE LAST STAND, and the two team up again in the prison thriller THE TOMB, due out in spring 2013.  The torch appears to have been passed to Statham, who may indeed be the Last Action Hero, but neither Stallone nor Schwarzenegger seem to be ready to call it a career.  And yeah, we can make jokes about their age and their facelifts (a lot of Stallone's close-ups here seem to be shot through ABC's Barbara Walters/Diane Sawyer lens filter), and sure, they've made their share of crappy movies, but you know what?  They're damn good at what they do, they've still got it, and we're gonna miss them when they're gone.  THE EXPENDABLES 2 is a blast.







Cult Classics Revisited: U.S. SEALS II (2001)

U.S. SEALS II: THE ULTIMATE FORCE
(US, 2001)

Directed by Isaac Florentine.  Written by Michael Weiss.  Cast: Michael Worth, Damian Chapa, Karen Kim, Marshall Teague, Kate Connor, Sophia Crawford, Andy Cheng, Hakim Alston, Plamen Zahov, Daniel Southworth, George Cheung, Burnell Tucker, Velizar Binev. (R, 95 mins)

...(whoosh)...

Anyone who's seen the deliriously insane U.S. SEALS II knows the significance of that sound.  Like its predecessor a year earlier, U.S. SEALS II went straight to video and only features two minor supporting characters held over from the first film, so knowing the events of U.S. SEALS is utterly unnecessary.  As the audaciously batshit PUNISHER: WAR ZONE was to the disappointing THE PUNISHER, U.S. SEALS II is a different beast altogether, almost completely abandoning the stale, cliched military plot and instead delivering a cartoonishly balls-out martial-arts orgy that exists on no known level of reality.  This complete shift in tone comes courtesy of director Isaac Florentine, an Israeli-born martial-arts expert who got his start as a stunt coordinator and then a director on the MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS TV series.  Over the last decade or so, Florentine has become a major cult figure in the world of straight-to-DVD action films, based largely on U.S. SEALS II, but also BRIDGE OF DRAGONS (1999), and his two sequels to Walter Hill's 2002 film UNDISPUTED:  UNDISPUTED II: LAST MAN STANDING (2006) and UNDISPUTED III: REDEMPTION (2010).  Florentine's films have a kinetic, unique ferocity all their own, and I'm surprised he hasn't yet graduated to A-list fare.  Usually working with the folks at NuImage, it's possible that he enjoys the relative freedom they give him to do what he wants, especially since he wasn't pleased with the outcome of his one recent film done for others (the 2009 Van Damme actioner THE SHEPHERD: BORDER PATROL).  Sure, a lot of U.S. SEALS II is ridiculous and stupid, but it's so incredibly ridiculous and stupid that surely some of it is meant to be comedic.  Or at the very least, winking.

Michael Worth as Lt. Casey Sheppard

A SEAL raid on a terrorist compound--featuring random backflips and bazookas appearing out of nowhere--goes bad when leader Frank Ratliff (Damian Chapa) disobeys orders and kills the man they needed to keep alive.  Stationed in Okinawa, Ratliff senselessly kills Nikki (Karen Kim), the party-girl daughter of the Sensei (George Cheung) of the dojo where he and best friend Lt. Casey Sheppard (Michael Worth) study martial arts.  Disgraced, the Sensei commits seppuku and his other daughter, Nikki's twin Kimiko (also Kim) turns her back on Casey's attempt to get to the bottom of Nikki's murder.  Three years later, a despondent Casey has left military service and is living in peaceful exile when he's called back into action by Major Donner (Marshall Teague) after Ratliff, also out of the service and now a nefarious arms dealer, and some cohorts (including Sophia Crawford as a lethal femme fatale and second-unit director/stunt coordinator Andy Cheng) kidnap rocket scientist Dr. Jane Burrows (Kate Connor) and take her to an island compound where he needs her to launch two nuclear warheads.  That is, unless the US government pays him $1 billion.  Donner and Admiral Patterson (Burnell Tucker) allow Casey to assemble his own lethal team of ragtag miscreants and ne'er-do-wells (and a vengeful Kimiko) to launch a raid on Ratliff's stronghold (where there's some kind of constant methane leak, preventing the use of guns or anything that ignites), rescue Dr. Burrows, prevent global destruction, and hope we don't see the story elements pilfered from DIE HARD and UNDER SIEGE. They're...THE ULTIMATE FORCE!

Karen Kim in action

If it feels like this has a Cannon vibe to it, it's because NuImage is essentially the staff members of Cannon not named Menahem Golan or Yoram Globus.  Led by such Cannon alumni as Avi Lerner, Boaz Davidson, and John Thompson, who ran Cannon's Italian studio in the early '80s, NuImage emerged as a prolific supplier of often shoddy straight-to-video titles in the wake of Cannon's early '90s implosion.  As time went on, NuImage set up shop in Sofia, Bulgaria, helping pave the way for much US production activity in Eastern Europe that still goes on today.  Later, NuImage vacillated between that name and their "prestige" moniker Millennium Films when they tried to enter the big leagues with major Hollywood figures like Al Pacino (88 MINUTES), Michael Douglas (KING OF CALIFORNIA), and Brian De Palma (THE BLACK DAHLIA) to name just three, but other than their association with Sylvester Stallone (on RAMBO, and the two EXPENDABLES films), they haven't had a lot of success theatrically.  Some good films, to be sure (BROOKLYN'S FINEST, BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, and the barely-released TRUST), but major flops as well (their remake of CONAN THE BARBARIAN bombed).  Despite Lerner & Co.'s attempts to go A-list, it's still video-store perennials like U.S. SEALS II and the SHARK ATTACK films that many people think of when they hear "NuImage."  And U.S. SEALS II (followed the next year by the unrelated, Florentine-less, back-to-basics follow-up U.S. SEALS: DEAD OR ALIVE) has all the hallmarks of vintage NuImage:  the feel of late-period Cannon; cheap sets; most of the over-the-top action taking place in an abandoned Bulgaria factory; ludicrous dialogue ("Just kick some ass!"); terrible dubbing of supporting actors already speaking English in an American production; and really primitive, SyFy-level CGI courtesy of the same Bulgarian VFX team they used throughout most of the decade.

U.S. SEALS II isn't Florentine's best film, but it's probably his most well-known (his two UNDISPUTED sequels are awesome).  It became a word-of-mouth hit among video store employees and bad movie fans with its constant whoosh sound effects whenever someone moves.  I'm not kidding.  Whether someone's aiming a gun, engaged in a martial-arts battle, signaling with their hand, or simply peering around a corner and turning their head, nearly every physical action is accompanied by a whoosh sound.  This fight scene with Kim and Crawford (includes SPOILERS) is a perfect example.  Even flowing hair whooshes. 

(SPOILERS again) But no discussion of U.S. SEALS II would be complete without addressing the unforgettable demise of Chapa's venal, smirking Ratliff.  Johnny LaRue's Crane Shot's Marty McKee has called it one of the top five villain deaths in all of cinema.  That's really not an exaggeration.  The main issue with its presentation is that its ambitions like beyond any budget or VFX capability that NuImage was willing or able to provide.  The CGI is wonky, but as McKee has said, it works based on sheer intent and outrageousness.  The sequence below is part of a larger one, intercut with Kim fighting Crawford and Andy Cheng, but the YouTube user edited it to just focus on Worth and Chapa, which explains why it's choppy.  But the fight choreography and the action are top-notch and often brilliantly inventive in their presentation.  Florentine is one of the best action directors in movies today.  Why isn't he directing THE EXPENDABLES 2?

Yeah!  You just saw that shit!  And did you hear it at the very end?  Go back and listen again. At 4:09 into the clip.  One final, subtle, beautiful...whoosh.

Bravo, Maestro Florentine.  Bravo.