Stephen Norrington’s (he of the inaugural Blade film) Death Machine
opens in the “Near Future.” The camera
dollies past smoking wreckage and dead bodies.
Inside a diner, several armored soldiers led by John Carpenter (William Hootkins) come upon a crazed
cyborg (Stuart St. Paul), part of
the “Hardman” project, punching a bathroom wall repeatedly and terrorizing a
waitress (Jackie Sawiris) until he
overloads and shuts down (a known design flaw).
Back at the Chaank Corporation, new CEO Hayden Cale (Ely Pouget) finds out the hard way that
the public doesn’t like weapons manufacturers, and she hasn’t got many friends
inside management either, with slimeballs like Scott Ridley (Richard Brake) actively working against
her. But down in his workshop, weirdo wunderkind
Jack Dante (Brad Dourif) is working
on something that will surprise them all (but really, probably shouldn’t). Oh, and there are domestic terrorists Sam
Raimi, Weyland, and Yutani (John Sharian,
Andreas Wisniewski, and Martin MacDougall, respectively, and I
hope you’re noticing the trend here), to boot.
In case you missed it, this film
is as much homage as it is blatant ripoff.
You have the cyborg elements of the Robocop and Universal Soldier films. You have the unstoppable, maniac robot
elements of Chopping Mall, Terminator,
and Hardware. The Warbeast’s (our titular machine) head
closely resembles that of the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise with bigger teeth.
The rest of the movie’s generic facets are as expected. The settings are appropriately industrialized
and dystopian. The Chaank Corporation is
evil, its officers self-serving and power-hungry. The mad scientist is unhinged in the sort of
way you honestly have to wonder who the hell thought it was a good idea to hire
this guy no matter how smart he is. On
the other hand, the naming of characters shows a clear adoration for Norrington’s (who is also credited as
screenwriter) idols that doesn’t feel simply like name dropping. For as many influences and components thrown
in here, though, that’s also the amount of directions in which the film tries
to pull. Rather smartly, it doles these
sections out in small enough bites that, even though it doesn’t completely cohere,
the film is entertaining and fast paced enough that each piece satisfies like a
handful of “fun size” Snickers bars (or insert your favorite candy bar
here). By the time the credits roll, I
could think of worse ways to have spent my time.
One of the more interesting
aspects of this film is in its depiction of the future. Yes, it is dystopian, as all cinematic
futures seemingly are. But everyone and
everything in this one is unhinged in some way or another, and not in the sort
of satiric way we saw in the world of the Robocop
films. You get the feeling that this
world and its occupants are very much on the cusp of falling over the
edge. Violent demonstrators flock around
the corporate headquarters (but they conveniently disband after normal business
hours), and one even socks the unsuspecting Cale right in the nose. Every character, with the exception of Cale,
screams many of their lines in bug-eyed histrionics, including a police officer
(Alex Brooks), who flies off the
handle so fast, you have to wonder if he’s been smoking bath salts. The terrorists toke huge, odd-shaped joints,
and they all behave like sleazy villains from an Eighties Action film, sneering
and leering at everything.
Which brings us to Dante. He dresses like a member of a Nineties grunge
band (jeans with multiple slits down the legs, black shirt, black leather
jacket, long lanky hair, finger rings, including several I assume are knives,
though I can’t say I noticed any plaid flannel). His workshop is littered with technological
bits and pieces, pages torn from porn mags, and toys. The fact that the filmmakers cast everybody’s
favorite onscreen nutjob Dourif is
evidence enough of what the filmmakers were envisioning. Mission accomplished. Dante is pure id, his main drives being
aggression and sex. Meanwhile, he’s
developmentally arrested, a child entertaining childish wish fulfillment
fantasies, though he has the resources to make his nightmares reality. He lives in a sub-basement of the company,
locked in a world (read: vault) of his own creation. The only input he gets from the outside
world, aside from the computer hacking in which he specializes, is endless
scenes of violence and porn on his monitors.
The real world is nothing to him but base stimuli, so he interacts with
it in that way. There is the strong indication
that he was this way to begin with, and his isolation from reality only helped
widen the gap in his twisted brain. That
said, Norrington also decided to
give Dante a sense of humor, I suppose with the intention of either taking some
of the edge off him or enhancing his menace through his morbid world view (or a
combination of both in the vein of Freddy Krueger, Chucky, et cetera). Unfortunately, the jokes largely fall flat,
and our villain winds up just looking foolish.
I think, had they cast someone much younger than the
then-forty-four-year-old Dourif, the
character may have worked better as the petulant man-child he is supposed to
be. As it is, though, it feels off, and
not in a good way (though Dourif, as
always, is certainly one of the standouts of the film).
Dante posits himself as an agent
of chaos, a bringer of entropy. To his
eyes, the breakdown of order into chaos is “the way of the world.” Like the Joker both before and after him, he
is presumably anarchist by design.
Inside a building full of precise, industrial environments and governed
by strict corporate structure, he sits inside a cave with no seeming rhyme or
reason to where anything is. The outside
of his workshop is covered in bright, messy graffiti, marking it off from the
rest of the building as a danger zone portending the unexpected. Nevertheless, for as “organic” as Dante’s
world and character is put forth, he is merely the flip side of the assumedly
cold business people above him. Neither
care about the value of human life. They
are both, in fact, in the business of ending them as efficiently as
possible. Cale is the only person
associated with Chaank who actually cares about the ethical and moral
implications of her job (which really doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense,
considering where she works). Yet for
all his crowing about the ineffable decline of societal systems, Dante’s
machinations require planning, and thus negate their intended outcome (or at
least his core philosophy). His Warbeast
required planning to design and build.
The technology he relies on so heavily for his ends is borne of order,
not chaos. Dante is the one controlling
the Warbeast, his finger on the trigger.
If he actually believed in the randomness of chaos, he would make of
himself a target equal to those he hates.
Although, the film is enjoyable as it stands, I think this would have
been a nice little twist and would have added an interesting layer to Death Machine. But backseat driving doesn’t get you to your
destination any faster, does it?
MVT: The Warbeast is a wonderfully
designed piece of machinery. Norrington and company also did a solid
job shooting and editing around it, so you get a concrete feel for the size and
power of the thing and what it’s capable of without having to show it all
onscreen. Low Budget Filmmaking 101:
Leave as much to the viewer’s imagination as possible, and show just enough to
leave them wanting more.
Make Or Break: The Make is
the scene inside the elevator. It’s
tense and gory, and it serves a purpose in the plot. Nuff said.
Score: 6.75/10
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