The place: a PLO fuel and ammo
depot near the Syrian border. The time:
Saturday, 3:27 AM. Two faceless soldiers
cut through a chain link fence, plant-what feels like-about a hundred bombs,
and cause a bit of mayhem. Lieutenant
Colonel Steel (the outstandingly named Bo
Gritz) gets recalled mid-flight to deal with the (unseen) aftermath of this
sabotage, which includes the kidnapping of a “special attaché” and the bombing
of an embassy in Tel Aviv. Enter Agent
“Striker,” a very Lino-Ventura-esque agent who teams up with
bombshells Kiki (Keiri Smith) and
Angel (Cynthia Thompson) to take down some more bad guys. And then an ambassador and his daughter get
kidnapped. Send in Rescue Force!
Charles Nizet’s Rescue Force
(aka Rescue Team) is a film that
deals, at great, great length, with the bureaucracy of action. Every character in the film spends a minimum
of half their screen time talking on the phone with one another and/or chatting
with their superiors/handlers. They talk
about what happened. They talk about
what’s going to happen. They talk about
what they want to happen. They talk
about their vacations (Angel, in particular, excels at this). As with Ian
Mackintosh’s The Sandbaggers and
things like it, there is a deconstruction of the typically gung ho, shoot-first-ask-questions-later
type of action/secret agent film going on here.
Something happens (granted, by all indications it’s our side who
instigated this whole affair, even though I was never totally sure of this),
and the “good guys” have to react, but said reaction is in steps. There’s a protocol that must be followed. These aren’t characters that can just leap
into action and take out the bad guys without gathering information and
formulating a plan first. It’s quite a
realistic approach to stories of this ilk.
The primary problem with it is that this tack can backfire if the
constant barrage of information is either unnecessary for the audience to know
and/or is completely devoid of any sort of progression of the ostensible
plot. And that’s much of what we get in Rescue Force.
Clearly, this is the result of a
budget that (judging by what’s onscreen) I’m going to estimate at probably
about ten bucks (maybe thirty, if you include the food Nizet bought for the cast and crew). I’ll give credit where it’s due; it takes a
set of balls to attempt a story like this one with almost no money. Further, what they do get onscreen works to a
very limited degree. The endless
labyrinth of phonecall scenes is necessary to cover over action that couldn’t
be (or maybe just wasn’t) shot. So, we
don’t get to see the embassy being assailed or the agent being abducted or the
ambassador and his daughter being kidnapped.
Instead, we get a character named FMD (Michael St. Charles) going back and forth with his (unseen) assistant/secretary
trying multiple times to get a hold of Striker (I’m not kidding). We get a character talking about how he
infiltrated the good guys’ group and got paid twenty-five-thousand dollars to
boot, and these points are neither set up previously nor paid off later (I’m
not kidding). We get a character
threatening that he’s going to “order you up a hot fudge enema” for one of his
subordinates (easily one of the two most interesting/funny bits of dialogue in
the movie; the other involves an incongruously Russian character stating that,
“I don’t pay for anything. I don’t carry money, or VISA, or American Express,”
after being told they’ll pay for the evil they’re doing; I’m not kidding). Here’s the thing: because the filmmakers
either didn’t know what the characters would be saying or did know but also
knew that they were going to be post-dubbing the dialogue afterward, almost all
of the characters chatting on their phones, CBs, walkie talkies, et cetera, do
so with their hands over their mouths. I
tend to lean toward the former hypothesis, due to the fact that characters
throughout the film who don’t have a single line of dialogue are shot talking
into some device while covering their mouths.
Even background characters do this.
As stated, the action in Rescue Force, is passable. In fact, the more I think of it, the
multitudinous phonecall scenes would have been passable too (but just barely),
except for one major issue: the editing (or lack thereof). To say that the editing in this film is
choppy is like saying the universe is big.
For example, the action scenes consist of about four types of shot:
medium long shots of Palestinians firing mortars at the good guys, extreme long
shots of the good guys in their vehicles driving casually past the explosions
all around them (said explosions consist solely of dirt, which may be more
realistic for all I know, but it is less visually dynamic, unless said dirt
plumes are swiftly followed by Graboids bursting out of the earth; they don’t),
regular long shots of the good guys driving casually past the explosions all
around them, and medium long shots of good guys firing rifles at the
Palestinians. There’s the possibility
that a good editor may be able to make these limited options work, but the
editing here simply puts them together in an order (correct or not, cogent or
not) and bides its time until it’s time for the action to be done. Otherwise, the film simply cuts between
shots, barely linking one to another (and sometimes not linking them at all). We’ll get things like a car pulling up somewhere
and immediately jump to characters (who have not been introduced singly in this
setting) already talking. I think you
get the idea.
As I’ve said many times in the
past, I admire anyone who can get a film actually completed, let alone
distributed, so kudos to Nizet and
company in that regard. The filmmakers
were clearly forthright in their approach, because everyone in this movie plays
it totally straight, in so much as they can play it at all. Hell, they even got Richard Harrison to appear in this for a hot minute, so there was
some attempt at legitimacy going on. But
the technical deficiencies, the illogical (to the point that it’s just
confusing rather than droll) script, and the threadbare budget severely hamper
the proceedings. Consequently, the
runtime is a slog rather than a journey (despite getting to leer a bit at the
beauteous Thompson’s assets). I’m sure junk cinema fans can and will find
things to love in Rescue Force. I could even point out what those things are
in more detail than I already have, but it’s getting late, and I have a few
phonecalls I need to make.
MVT: The meager action in
the film is okay (and there’s a hint that there was supposed to be an
all-female commando unit featured [they do kind of appear, but there’s almost
no significance or development to them]; where the hell was that movie?!). Damning with faint praise, to be sure, but
what can I say? That’s the truth.
Make or Break: By the time
the tenth (or it sure as shit felt like the tenth) phone conversation scene
happens within less than ten minutes of screentime, I knew the film was in
trouble.
Score: 3/10
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