Death Before Dishonor (1987)

There is no way in Hell I can talk about Terry Leonard’s Death Before Dishonor without discussing the greatness that is Stephen J Cannell’s Hunter (I know, so jejune, right?).  Back when cop/private dick shows were fun, more than a little exploitive, and downright formulaic, Hunter hit an eleven-year-old me right in the kisser.  The true beauty of the show (outside of Cannell’s stylistic thumbprints) was the dual charm of its leads.  Stepfanie (I still can’t get used to that spelling of her name) Kramer was fiery brunette Dee Dee McCall who launched a thousand pubescent you-know-whats.  She was equal parts feminine and steely, sexy and flinty.  To this day, she is one of my all-time favorite female cop leads, and not simply because of her sex appeal (Mitzi Kapture, I’m also looking at you).  Of course, as befits this specific review, the other half of this dynamic duo was Fred Dryer as Detective Rick Hunter.  The character is a total Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry pastiche, but Hunter had a bigger heart and even, perish the thought, just a bit more charisma than Callahan.  Dryer, a former defensive end in the NFL, had a gruff but endearing (apologies for the cliché) magnetism that translated well to the screen.  I watched this show religiously, something I couldn’t say about Cannell programs like Riptide or Hardcastle & McCormick (though I definitely could for Stingray, 21 Jump Street, and Wiseguy).  Hunter had some harsh storylines, and the characters got put through their paces.  The episode I loved the most was “Dead or Alive,” which starred Wings Hauser as a cowboy-outfitted bounty hunter with a nasty streak wider than Hunter and McCall’s combined.  I recall it distinctly because it may very well have been the first time I saw a “good guy” kill a villain on a television show (I may be misremembering this, but I don’t believe so, otherwise it may not have been as impactful).  I’m truly surprised that Dryer’s acting career never really took off like some of his contemporaries (maybe he came into the action genre just a little too late, who knows?), though films like this one give plenty of evidence that even an actor as likable as Dryer can only raise some material up to a certain level.

Dryer plays the gruff but endearing (I am going to run this motherfucker into the ground now) Gunnery Sergeant Burns, an old Devil Dog trying to teach his young pups some new tricks.  Burns is picked by his mentor Colonel Halloran (Brian Keith) to lead his security detail in the (fictitious) Middle Eastern country of Jemal, where they run afoul of “Freedom Fighter” Abu Jihad (Rockne Tarkington, Black Samson himself) and his army of terrorists.

These types of action setups can be tricky to pull off.  Burns is a career SNCO (Staff Non-Commissioned Officer), and this doesn’t naturally lend itself to a film that needs to be cartoonish for the sake of the genre’s fans.  What this means is that Burns will have to go rogue at some point, all the more to satisfy the audience, but the script seems to not want to let him go full Rambo/Braddock/etcetera.  The filmmakers eventually let him cut loose, but he is, always and forever, a starched shirt (one could argue that this is an example of how “We” are superior to “They”).  The sort of antagonist in the picture also needs some distinction, because terrorists tend to be faceless masses until they distinguish themselves individually.  While the caricature-esque Jihad (literally “Holy War”) provides a nice physical threat for the towering Dryer, the true villains of the piece, the spotlight hogs, are the Teutonic Maude Winter (Kasey Walker) and Gavril (Mohammad Bakri).  Both are icy in demeanor, reptilian in their methods, and as hand-wringingly arch as Snidely Whiplash ever was.  Nothing that comes out of their mouths isn’t laced with menace.  They have a purpose.  They believe in what they do.  But they are also totally mercenary about it.  Of the two, the real attractant (sort of like Dee Dee McCall, minus any nuance) is Winter, with her pixie haircut, leather jacket, and oh-so-suggestively holstered pack of smokes.  The instant she shows up in the film, you want to know more about her.  Needless to say, we’re not given much more than superficial flourishes, but, I will admit, that was enough for me here.  I would strenuously argue that the characters of Simon Gruber and Katya in John McTiernan’s Die Hard with a Vengeance are taken directly from Death Before Dishonor’s contemptible couple but given far more shading.  Regardless, in juxtaposition to Gavril and Winter, how could our True-Blue heroes possibly measure up?

Movies of this ilk can be seen as jingoistic, or they can be seen as simply a sign of their time and enjoyed on their generic merits.  Or both.  The protagonists and antagonists are depicted as zealots on both sides.  The difference lies in their cause.  Burns and his men are about brotherhood, even more than they are about a love of their country.  During training for the newest recruits, the young men are hazed by chugging helmets full of beer.  They are then inducted as Brothers of the Golden Wing.  Dryer takes a golden pair of Force Recon wings and jams the pins directly into the newbies’ chests.  Then each soldier in the platoon takes a turn punching the wings until crimson blots their tee shirts.  These men are now united as brothers-in-arms, baptized in blood.  They stand up for each other, and their deaths mean something to their fellow Marines.  They have earned respect.  Jihad and company are religious fanatics, and this is easily comparable to patriotism.  However, the filmmakers clearly place the former over the latter in terms of nobility.  The terrorists also haze their recruits.  Young jihadi Amin (Daniel Chodos) is held in a headlock during a bomb training exercise, watching in terror as the lit fuse burns down.  Unlike the Americans’ hazing, this is no fun.  The contradistinction is further illumined in a couple of interrogation scenes.  In the first, Amin is intimidated (dare I say terrorized?) by Burns.  You can see he has been roughed up a little, but he’s far from crippled.  There is no music in this sequence.  In the second, Sergeant Ramirez (Joseph Gian) has had the living crap kicked out of him by the terrorists.  He is bloody, brutalized, and the score looms ominously.  We’re meant to give a shit about Ramirez.  Amin is just a gormless youth.  Further to this is the idea of sacrifice, again shown by these two characters.  Both give their lives for their beliefs, but Amin’s is senseless, destructive, and the boy has been manipulated through his convictions into this fate.  Ramirez’s sacrifice is in service of his superior officer, his country, and his brothers.  It is honorable, and it is his choice, made with eyes wide open.  It is obvious which of these has the moral high ground in the film.  

Leonard, being primarily a stunt man (this is his only directing credit), naturally handles the action in the film very well.  The big car chase, admittedly, is standard, but just about everything else is gratifying enough.  The script by John Gatliff (this is his only screenwriting credit) puts forth a nice amount of effort, and there are a couple of reveals that twist nicely.  But the film’s biggest detriment is the general banality of its protagonists.  Granted, they are meant to identify to a certain segment, but they are dry, even when they strain halfheartedly to be colorful.  While hardly a standout of the action genre from any decade, Death Before Dishonor certainly can’t be called dishonorable.  More like undistinguished.

MVT:  As much as I like Dryer, I have to give it to Leonard and his able-bodied handling of a mostly solid action film.

Make or Break:  The finale cuts loose just enough and finishes with a moment that almost lives up to the promise of its premise.

Score:  6.75/10   

Rescue Force (1989)

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    

Wild Team (1985)

**SPOILERS AHEAD, BUT C’MON**

On the fictitious island of Manioca (incidentally, Manioca is a starch used in Tapioca), Tiquito, the son of deposed President Cordura (Franco Fantasia) is kidnapped by minions of the tyrannical (and very European-looking) General Gomez.  A mining company with interests on Manioca hire super nice mercenary Martin Cuomo (Antonio Sabato) and his team to rescue the boy.  Explosions and double crosses ensue.

Umberto Lenzi’s Wild Team (aka Thunder Squad aka I Cinque Del Condor) is a Men on a Mission film with a slightly different angle.  Rather than being hired by a crooked government agency, the team are hired by a crooked corporation.  The basic idea is that it’s money, not government, that truly controls the countries of the world.  Cordura is a freedom-loving idealist, but he has to make a deal with this devil in order to save not only his son but also his country (the former takes precedence over the latter).  Martin only cares about the money he’ll get for this job, but of course he and his crew become more personally invested as events unfold (or at least that’s the idea; I never felt that anyone in this film gave much of a shit about anything other than being a warm body in a movie).  The corporation, headed by fat cat Harker (Geoffrey Copleston), cares only for their bottom line.  Consequently, they have no qualms about betraying Martin and his team and the people of Manioca as soon as there’s the faintest whiff that the winds of change are going to blow.  The corporation starts off working with Gomez, switches to Cordura, then back to Gomez.  It’s baffling, since they had projected a fifteen percent increase in profits under a more democratic government, but I’m not enough of a global economist to parse out the reasoning.  This is a theme running though many Action films of this bent: The people holding the purse strings and/or the leash are never trustworthy.  No matter how many guarantees they give, they’ll screw over their operatives if it suits their needs (and many times, they are never forthright in their goals and motives in the first place).  So, pro-tip: If you’re a mercenary with a high price tag, get paid up front, and always cover your own ass.

There are a couple of touches in the film that come out of left field, though they make sense in an Italian genre film sort of way.  The first is the use of psychics (yes, really).  Three people with ESP are hired by the mining company to help locate Tiquito.  They are strapped into a computer, and as they describe the “hits” they get on the boy, the computer “interprets” what they say and pukes out unhelpful data.  This scene is, number one, just plain odd.  I mean, why would you hire psychics, who are unreliable at best and charlatans at worst, when you can fly surveillance planes over the area to find what you’re looking for (and to be clear, it’s not as if Gomez’s camp is all that well-hidden)?  They certainly have the resources for it.  Number two, this sequence is way longer than it should be (always a sign that there’s simply not enough material to make one decent film).  This section of the film stands out because of the focus on it.  Yet, there are no parapsychological or fantastic elements in the entire rest of the film (I’ll admit, I got my hopes up for a fight with a giant snake toward the end, but naturally, they were dashed).

The storming of Gomez’s camp takes up a large part of the film’s middle portion, but it leads off with our heroes hang gliding down into the valley.  As with the psychic scene, this sequence is entirely too long, and it stops the film dead (this in a film without much life to begin with).  More than this, it’s bewildering because the hang gliders they use are the most brightly colored things they could possibly find.  Obviously, being covert is not a big priority on this covert mission.  Maybe Martin got a great deal on the hang gliders that he couldn’t pass up?

This leads into another interestingly flubbed facet of the film.  One of the team members is Sybil Slater (Julia Kent), and she is their explosives expert.  Apparently, her brother was meant to be in on the mission, but he’s in jail (let’s assume for blowing things up), and Sybil needs money for an attorney.  In order to prove herself, she blows up a ramshackle hut while she’s inside it (she gets a couple of black smudges on her face).  Sybil is also very aggressive.  As soon as the men pull up and commence drooling over her, she warns that she’ll “blow [their] balls off.”  For as tough as she’s supposed to be, however, she’s just a girl in a man’s world.  She’s scared by a snake in the jungle, and all the guys get a good laugh over this.  She lands her hang glider in a tree and can’t get down by herself, and all the guys get a good laugh over this.  In her defense, Sybil does blow stuff up real good, but she’s not going to win any awards for being a strong female role model.     

I’m going to be honest with you.  I’m not the world’s biggest Lenzi fan.  I know a lot of folks go apeshit over films of his (especially Nightmare City, which is decent fun in an incoherently incompetent way), but for me, they tend to be middle of the road at best, and Wild Team is no exception (in fact, it’s maybe more middle of the road than other films of his).  Granted, it was made with a tiny budget, but I’ve seen films with less money behind them made by people with less experience than Lenzi (who was used to low budget filmmaking) that were more cogent than this one.  Even Sabato, who normally provides some magnetism in his films (funny enough, his and Lenzi’s Gang War In Milan is a film I do enjoy), is as plastically charmless as the toy guns the actors use.  If you like seeing things explode, you’ll find something to like here, but this isn’t essential as an Umberto Lenzi film, an Antonio Sabato film (or an Ivan Rassimov film, take your pick), or an action film in general.

MVT:  For as blandly slapdash as it’s shot and edited, the action in the film is the only thing holding this film together, like a cheap brand of duct tape.

Make or Break:  We are introduced to Martin and his team during a training exercise for soldiers.  After beating the soldiers quite handily, Martin’s crew still come out of the site in handcuffs (and if they didn’t, it sure looked like they did from where I was sitting)!  There’s absolutely no logical explanation for this, and it lets you know just how dumb this whole thing is going to be.

Score:  5/10