It’s been a long week but it’s finally Friday, the baby is asleep, my wife is out at the movies with a friend, and I sit here with a glass of Argentinian Cabernet and a freshly purchased rental from Amazon:
I had blogged about wanting to see this a while back, and now it’s a reality. Not only do I get to watch it, I get to see it before it’s in the theatres! As if this will ever make it to any theatre near me!
It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and watched a movie for this blog. The reason for this blog’s existence was to chronicle every inspiration for the shirts at supersweetshirts.com, which is basically tech, bad movies, music, beer, and literature. Lately doing movie reviews has become almost impossible with our schedules. Tonight is the perfect night to watch this movie, and possibly get inspired to come up with a new shirt idea.
Roughly 90 Minutes later…
What a masterpiece. So here’s the deal. From what I’ve read, Dolph was inspired to tell this story because of an article he had read in the paper regarding a cargo container full of girls that died from heat exhaustion and suffocation. He pays tribute to this incident in the film when a shipment of girls arrives at a loading dock. Ron Pearlman plays Viktor Dragovic, the godfather of the sex slave industry. In the scene at the loading docks, they discover the shipment of girls was a disaster, as they were all dead and covered in flies.
This is the scene that makes Dolph’s character, Nick Cassidy, obsessed with shutting down this industry. He has a daughter of his own which further motivates him, as he can’t stand the thought of a young girl getting forced into slavery.
Everyone in this film has a terrible accent. Ron Pearlman’s Serbian accent, is one of the worst I’ve ever heard. Dolph Lundgren speaks in, what appears to be, some sort of regional American accent. It’s so bad, that I wasn’t a 100% sure.
Tony Jaa plays a cop in Thailand that is also obsessed with shutting down the industry. His English in the movie is so terrible that there must have been a discussion as to whether or not his scenes should have subtitles. I’d also argue that Ron Pearlman should have had subtitles as well.
Without getting into spoilers, Dolph ends up getting extremely wrapped up in this game, becoming a pawn in police corruption, and causing Dolph and Jaa to partake in numerous fight scenes before discovering that they share the same goal. The fight scenes are great, well choreographed, and realistic in that Jaa takes some Ivan Drago style blows which do some heavy damage.
Dolph Lundgren continues to write and participate in awesome action movies. While guys like Van Damme and Seagal struggle to make anything worth watching, Dolph remains on the cusp of breaking back into theatres.
A few non-spoiler notes that I took during the movie:
-When Tony Jaa rescues a random sex slave at the beginning of the movie, he tells her that she can go home. He then gives her a tiny stack of bills from a bag full of cash like a total cheapskate.
-When Ron Pearlman first appears in the movie, please be careful not to have liquids in your mouth while he speaks his first set of lines.
-There is a scene in the movie where Dolph is stressed out from his job and comes home to his wife. She ask’s him if he forgot something, hinting that it’s their 13th anniversary, which he missed. He tells her that when they wake up in the morning, he will go out and get her a dozen beautiful roses. She then gives him sex. I’m pretty sure this would never happen for any guy who pulled that one.
-There is a chase scene with Jaa chasing Lundgren, where Jaa is on foot running, and Lundgren is trying to escape him on numerous vehicles. Somehow, throughout the entire chase scene, Jaa remains about 15 feet behind him with no explanation other than: “He must be the fastest guy on earth.”
-There is a great scene where Dolph needs to extract information from a guy who was just shot numerous times in the chest and appeared to be dead. Dolph revives him with compression CPR…
This movie is worth watching if you want to see a fun action movie. Without giving away the ending, it’s definitely not an ending you can guess.
The movie is on Amazon for a $9.99 rental because it’s a “rental before the theatrical release.” It’s well worth it. If you decide to check it out, rent it from the Amazon link below as a small portion of that goes to me and it helps keep my sites up and running!
