Tag: die hard

Run Hide Fight

  By

★★★
“School’s out… forever“

My rule of thumb here is, I generally don’t get into politics, beyond what a film itself does. By which I mean, if a movie consciously injects a political theme or agenda, then that’s fair game. But otherwise, I try to review a movie as a movie, rather than seeing it through the lens of any political belief. However, in this case, I can’t ignore the elephant in the room, with Run Hide Fight having acquired an explicitly political subtext, over and about its content, through distribution by right-wing website, The Daily Wire. Yet, just as The Hunt was not calling for the murder of Trump supporters some suggested, neither is this the relentless pro-gun propaganda, you’d think from a few of the more vitriolic reviews. Once again, reality is more moderate than online opinions would have you believe. Who knew?

Director Rankin said (in an interview that’s thoughtful, and definitely worth the read), he wanted the film “to be so that two friends on opposite sides of the political spectrum could go watch this and both feel like it honored them, and they could go out for coffee or a beer, and talk about it.” I’d say he managed to do so, though I’m not certain such equivocation is the best approach, especially when it comes to such a controversial topis as school shootings. I might have had more respect if the film had taken a stance and gone for it. Though that would have taken more bravery – or stupidity! – given some of the reactions to what is a mild, even-handed take. It doesn’t really get more controversial than daring to suggest that sometimes, to stop a bad guy with a gun you need a good guy teenage girl with a gun.

From a moral point of view, my sole qualm was probably that too much time was spent on the chief perpetrator. It plays down the same line as previous entries in the school shooter genre – spending too much time on the killers rather than their victims, which almost regardless of execution, exacerbates the problem. This is something the script does address towards the end, when the heroine says to the ring-leader, “Isn’t it ironic, that after all your goddamn hard work, people aren’t gonna remember you? They are gonna remember me.” This might ring truer, if I wasn’t fairly sure he gets more lines than she does. I don’t care about your motivation. You’re insane. Now, move on.

Otherwise, it is basically Die Hard in a school, and as such, is no more worthy of complaint than any of the many other Die Hard knock-offs we’ve seen. Certainly, saying that educational facilities should be sacrosanct, inviolate and not used as the location for this kind of thing makes no logical sense. To quote Rankin, “There’s an easy answer to, ‘How could you?’ which is also, ‘How could you not?’ This is a major problem in America, so why not make a movie about it?” I would argue it’s in reality perceived as a major problem, largely due to the media hysteria around it. For in 2019, a grand total of just eight people were killed across the whole country on school grounds or during school-sponsored events. [Or, as Chicago calls it, “a quiet weekend.”] For context: lawnmowers kill more than ten times that number annually.

Anyway, let’s move on and discuss the movie, as a movie – because that’s what matters.

It’s almost the last day of the year, Jennifer Hull (May) is in her school cafeteria bathroom, when Tristan Voy (Brown) and his cohort of Columbine Mafia wannabes crash a van in through the window and take the students hostage. The authorities are slow to react, in part due to diversionary tactics, in part due to bureaucracy and in part… because it’s necessary to the plot, allowing Jennifer to scurry into the air-ducts and discover what being a TV dinner feels like. Having escaped the initial onslaught, her first instinct is to flee the scene, but fortunately for the movie, she decides to go back into the building, alert others to the reality of the situation and, eventually, face down the perpetrators.

You can largely pencil in the obvious plot points as they unfold, and the script offers very little in the way of surprises. Probably the biggest is that, as a Die Hard copy, it’s very restrained, with Jennifer responsible for the demise of only two (2) of the attackers. To put it into oughties video-game terms, it’s considerably more Metal Gear Solid than Goldeneye, with stealth being the order of the day, rather than rushing in with all guns blazing. It helps her that the attackers are streaming their act live on the Internet, which allows her to keep an eye on where they are. There are also some nice  moments where she make use of the school environment to assist her; I’d like to have seen more of that.

What the film does best is likely the set-up of Jennifer’s character. We first see her deer-hunting with her father (Jane), demonstrating a familiarity with and respect for firearms. It’s also established early that she’s still grieving after the loss of her mother, giving her some darkness. But generally, Jennifer is very much a normal girl, somewhat on the fringes of school life, but by no means an outsider. Mom’s ghost pops up now and again during events, a narrative conceit which I didn’t mind, yet can’t say I felt particularly enhanced things either. Still, she’s a heroine for whom I found it very easy to root.

It does feel like the script doesn’t quite know what to do with her after her first hand-to-hand fight, a messily close-combat affair. She turns her hand to a variety of different things, such as alerting other classes to the fact that leaving the premises is the best option, which feels like a diversion from the main plot. Eventually, of course, Tristan realizes there’s a fly in the ointment, and we get the face-off we’ve been expecting, which harks back to the early deer-hunting. It’s a good job too, as the penultimate climax had felt like a cop-out, with Jennifer teetering perilously close to damsel in distress mode. Fortunately, the real finale proved a good deal more satisfactory.

Much as with the political posturing, the film’s quality lies in the middle. It’s neither a new classic, nor the appalling piece of hackwork – both opinions I’ve seen put forward. It is considerably tamer than I expected, certainly not the outrage to common decency some have suggested (not that I’d have necessarily minded!). It is entirely competent and does a reasonable, rather than exceptional, job both as entertainment and in provoking thought. Not worth the hype, to be sure – yet certainly not worth the vitriol either.

Dir: Kyle Rankin
Star: Isabel May, Eli Brown, Thomas Jane, Thomas Jane

Vixen

  By

★★
“Die Hardly”

This is a painfully lazy knock-off of a certain, well-known action film, in which terrorists take hostages in a multi-storey building over the festive season. This action is as cover for their actual goal, which is the robbery of a well-secured vault. But one of the inhabitants evades the initial surge, and begins to run interference. They get help and moral support over the airwaves by someone on the outside, and use the air-ducts in the building to avoid detection. Yeah. It’s like that, and you’ll probably understand why my eyes were rolling when we get the line, “Ho-ho-ho, motherfucker.” Now, there’s no doubt the makers openly acknowledge their inspiration. But pleading guilty doesn’t get you out of the crime. At least other, similarly inspired movies, e.g. No Contest  – hell, even Skyscraper – took the idea and added some of their own thoughts. This? Make the central character a woman who knows martial arts. That’s it.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course. But if you’re going to get away with such glaringly obvious plagiarism, you need to be top-notch in other areas. Because this inevitably invites comparison with that certain, well-known action movie, and to put it mildly, Vixen comes out behind, in virtually every aspect. The paucity of the resources is the most obvious one. This supposedly takes place at a top-tier security conference, yet is apparently attended by a total of eight people, and takes place in a corner of a hotel ballroom, screened off by drapes. Do not expect giant fireballs, folks. Or destruction of any significant kind, since they needed their security deposit back. While Chen does her best, she is not Bruce Willis, as she goes from attendee to ass-kicker. And Bendza is certainly not Alan Rickman as the leader of the terrorists. It doesn’t help that there seems to be far too much acting in a second language going on here, particularly obvious when Chen has to use her English. Imagine Willis trying to speak Mandarin, and you’ll be in the right area.

She’s on stronger dramatic ground when speaking on the phone to her ex-boyfriend (Yang), who is her liaison on the outside, and tries unsuccessfully to convince the cops there’s a problem, and he’s not pranking them [As depicted here, Chinese police are, apparently really lazy: the investigation consists of calling up the location and asking if there’s a hostage situation. “No,” says the terrorist manning the switchboard, unsurprisingly] I also quite enjoyed Larkin as the acerbic Scottish organizer of the conference: he comes over as a low-rent version of Gerard Butler. He’s about the only person here who seems to be having fun with his role, embracing the necessary larger-than-life spirit. Otherwise, with fights that are merely okay, and take too long to show up, this feels like a poor imitation of little or no point – something even The Asylum might be a bit embarrassed to have their name on.

Dir: Ross W. Clarkson
Star: Lie-ri Chen, Luc Bendza, Byran Larkin, Yang Yang

Atone

  By

★★
“atone: make amends or reparation.”

I mention the above for two reasons. Firstly, because Chris wondered why the film was called “At One”. Secondly, because when it finished, I turned to her and said those four little words which mean so much: “I can only apologize…” Yes, to use it in a sentence, I’ll be atoning for picking to watch this low-rent “Die Hard in a church” offering, for some time to come. [Though the following night, I had to sit through her choice of Justice League: paid back in full, I’d say…] There were a couple of aspects here that weren’t terrible; unfortunately, the overall execution was painfully close to… well, god awful seems the appropriate term here.

Laura Bishop (Fleming) is a former soldier, struggling to adapt back to civilian life. Through her father, she gets a job as a security guard in a local megachurch which is about to open. And what are the odds, she hasn’t even been able to complete new employee orientation before a group of terrorists, led by White (Short) storm into the building and take the employees, in particular Reverend Mark Shaw (Rusler), hostage. Worse still, Laura’s little daughter is also in the building, so she has to find and take care of the moppet, as well as fending off the terrorists.

This seems to be teetering on the edge of being a faith-based action-heroine pic, which is a rate, although not quite unique entity – The Trail comes to mind. These aspects are not too badly-handled: despite the setting, they’re mostly played fairly light, and I actually found the motivation of the chief villain quite refreshing. I say this to make it clear that I’m not slagging this off for its beliefs. Especially not when there are plenty of other, perfectly credible reasons to slag it off. The entire subplot involving her daughter, for example, makes no sense, and she just kinda wanders out of an emergency exit, largely forgotten thereafter. There’s also the bizarre “street fight club” of which Laura is a member, which forms the opening scene, and is never mentioned again.

It feels as if, for every step forward this takes, there are two back. Farrelly, better known as WWE’s Sheamus, shows up as one of the bad guys, and crosses himself every time he kills someone, which is the kind of endearing quirk that works. He and the heroine have a decent bathroom brawl. But then there are amateur digital effects, poor continuity and no sense at all of escalation, as well as villains who fall astonishingly short of even basic competence. The explanation about why Lauren has her PTSD, is held back until the very end, far too late for the viewer to care one whit. It’s all a jumbled, and worse, largely boring mess. They say the devil has all the best tunes. On the basis of this, he can likely also lay claim to the best girls-with-guns films as well.

Dir: Wes Miller
Star: Jaqueline Fleming, Robert Rusler, Columbus Short, Stephen Farrelly

Sweet Home

  By

★★★½
“Hogar, dulce hogar…”

sweethomeA straightforward yet effective cross between a slasher film and Die Hard, sees Alicia (Garcia-Jonsson) plan a birthday dinner for her boyfriend, Simon (Sevilla) in an almost deserted apartment building. However, she stumbles into a plot to evict the last remaining tenant… in a body-bag. Trapped inside the locked tenement, the young couple become the target, first for the evictors, and then their boss, the Liquidator (Tarrida), as they seek to cover the tracks of their murderous work.

Three sentences, and that’s basically the entirety of the plot covered, since most of the film is an extended stalk ‘n’ slash, with Alicia, in particular, seeking a way out. It’s absolutely her story, because Simon is wounded relatively early in proceedings, and ends up close to a non-factor in proceedings – for one reason or another. Even though there’s a sense of Garcia-Jonsson acting mostly in her third language (she was born in Sweden, most of her career has been in Spain, yet her dialogue here is mainly English), it doesn’t harm the film, because Martinez is a firm believer in showing, rather than telling. That’s just what something like this needs, with gratifyingly few pauses for exposition after things kick-off. In particular, things are ramped up with the arrival of the Liquidator, who disposes of bodies with the aid of liquid nitrogen and a hammer. This is about as wince-inducing as it sounds.

As well as a fairly monstrous villain, who is quite prepared to dispatch his supposed allies if they prove more trouble than they are worth, the main appeal is seeing Alicia use her wits to survive, clambering in, around and through the maze of corridors and service passages in the building, as she tries to stay one step ahead of those hunting her down. The claustrophobic setting, enhanced by a thunderous deluge coming down outside, which has cleared the streets of everyone else, generally work for the movie too. Reading other reviews, seems I’m not the only person to detect notes of John Carpenter, with this in particular evoking feelings of Assault on Precinct 13 crossed with Halloween. Though it has been a very long while since Carpenter has directed anything as shallowly entertaining as Sweet Home.

On the other hand. the floor-plan of the house, an important factor in proceedings, seems more than a little inconsistent. This may be less an apartment building, and more a Klein bottle, for there were times when I was thought Alicia was on an upper level, only for her to open a door and suddenly be back at ground level. However, if you’re prepared to let that aspect slide, along with the occasional moments of less-than-sensible behaviour (almost inevitable, given the genre), this is an energetic and enthusiastic romp, which will likely have you quoting various John McClane-isms over the course of proceedings. But it’s safe to say that Die Hard did not end in a climax which had Bruce Willis in the basement, unconscious, dotted lines drawn on his limbs, in preparation for easy separation by Alan Rickman and his hacksaw. More’s the pity, perhaps.

Dir: Rafa Martínez
Star: Ingrid Garcia-Jonsson, Bruno Sevilla, Oriol Tarrida, Jose Maria Blanco

Tiger House

  By

★★½
“It’s Die Hard… In an English suburb.”

Kelly (Scodelario) sneaks into her boyfriend’s bedroom, only to find herself stuck there, when a group of criminals invade the home, intending to use his father as part of a robbery. Before being captured, the boyfriend does manage to injure the gang’s leader, Shane (Scott), who is then laid out on the bed to recuperate, while the gang regroup and adjust their plans. Unfortunately, it’s the same bed under which Kelly – who was a promising gymnast, up until an unfortunate accident with a crossbow(!) – has hidden herself. With no apparent way out, can she save the rest of the family and escape her perilous situation?

tigerhouse

An attempt to cross the ever-popular “Die Hard in a ____” and home invasion genres, the performances here deserve a significantly better script, than the largely sorry procession of coincidences and implausibilities we get here. Oh, look! There’s a crossbow in the attic! And, wouldn’t you know it, Kelly still carries around in her handbag, the bolt which ended her sporting aspirations! What are the odds against that? Some of the crooks’ behaviour also falls into the category of idiocy necessary to the plot as well; they seem strangely oblivious to their surrounding for career criminals, even when Kelly is literally hanging off the banisters above their head.

Counterbalancing these problematic aspects, both Scodelario and Scott deliver well-rounded performances – all the more impressive for the latter, since 90% of his screen time is spent lying on his back. Kelly is shown early on to be a strong-minded and independent girl, not reliant on anyone, least of all her boyfriend, who all but vanished from the movie after he leaves the bedroom to investigate a middle of the night noise. Assistance is provided by Callum, the psycho henchman – standard for both the genres – played by Skrein who appears to have gone on to greater things, starring in the recent reboot of The Transporter. The same goes for Scodelario, who is now the female lead in the Maze Runner series.

Notably not yet going on to Hollywood fame is writer Simon Lewis. You can increasingly see why that’s the case, the further this goes on, with Shane inexplicably switching sides and other plot points requiring so much suspension of disbelief, you could use it to build a small bridge. While the idea of interbreeding these two types of action-thriller is not a bad one, and the suburban setting adds a claustrophobic element, the storyline is in desperate need of several stiff rewrites, on its way to an ending that does deliver a satisfactory amount of heroiney goodness – albeit still with a deficiency on the logic front. You’ll have to go through more contortions than the gymnastic lead, for your mind to swallow this one.

Dir: Thomas Daley
Star: Kaya Scodelario, Dougray Scott, Ed Skrein, Langley Kirkwood

Free Fall

  By

★½
“It’s like Die Hard! Except, in a skyscraper!” Wait, what?

free fallI’ve no problem with Die Hard clones, because the original is a brilliant concept, beautifully executed: it’s one of my all-time top movies, of any genre. This certainly isn’t the first effort to try and port this into the action heroine genre, but it may well be the worst. And that’s quite some effort, considering previous attempts include one starring Anna Nicole Smith. It’s less star Butler’s fault, than a script which staggers from cliché to idiocy, and sloppily amateur execution, apparent in captions that spell “allegations” with one L and refer to something called the “Securities Exchange Commission.” Jane Porter (Butler) is an up and coming executive with Gault Capital, whose world is shattered when her manager apparently jumps to his death from the top of their building. I say, “apparently,” because it’s entirely unsurprising when Jane finds a USB stick and, in blatant violation of every security protocol, slaps it into the side of her work PC [the company I work for, just had a training course on precisely why this is a Very Bad Idea]. Ooh, look: her manager had found evidence of financial irregularity! Who can Jane turn to? And why not wait until she’s the only person in the building?

Which I could have forgiven had this been the springboard to some Die Hard-esque action, and the film certainly foreshadows this, with the first time we see Jane, she’s pounding away on a punch-bag. Except the script then has her spend the meat of the movie’s running-time stuck in an elevator, while the hitman (Sweeney) sent to to “tidy up” the mess, tries to figure out how to get at her. If there’s one thing duller than being stuck in an elevator, it’s watching someone else be stuck in an elevator. I’m surprised I have to state this, but the makers of this are apparently under the impression that it’s actually the height of tension. Boy, are they mistaken there. The potential inherent in the office location and a battle of wits between a smart heroine and a lethal adversary is instead frittered away in scenes spent, for example, watching the latter looking for a key to open the elevator door. I kid you not, and stand corrected: there seem to be a number of things duller than being stuck in an elevator, and this film is intent on showing them all to me.

Even the makers seem to realize this was a misstep suddenly generating another character out of thin air, an elevator repair man, about whom we are given no reason to care beyond a painfully obvious scene establishing his family. He then gets to fight the bad guy for a bit, while the supposed heroine stands around inside the elevator. While she does eventually get to go toe-to-toe with him – and isn’t a bad little battle – it’s far too late, and comes well after the point where doctors would have given up on this patient and turned its body over to the family. Both the title and tagline are good summaries of viewer interest.

Dir: Malek Akkad
Star: Sarah Butler, D.B. Sweeney, Ian Gomez, Malcolm McDowell

No Contest II: Access Denied

  By

★★½
“Second time’s the not-so charming.”

In many ways, this is a shameless rip-off of a shameless rip-off, trying to recapture the success of the original. It’s not quite as successful, lacking the gleeful sense of energy which help its predecessor overcome its (obvious) limitations. Once more, Tweed plays action actress Sharon Bell, this time filming her latest work in Eastern Europe. She arranges for the film to do some location work in a gallery owned by sister, Bobbi (Heitmeyer), which is just about to open an exhibition, showcasing artefacts that were looted by the Nazis in World War II. The gallery is taken over by Eric Dane (Henriksen) and his crew, who seal the place off from the outside world, intent in stealing a lethal German nerve agent hidden in the base of one of the sculptures. Unfortunately, inside at the time are both sisters, along with the movie director Jack Terry (Payne), who is scouting the place out.

To be honest, the plot makes little sense. Why does Dane – who has apparently had access to the statue for quite some time – wait until it is installed in the gallery, behind a hefty security system, before going after the nerve-gas? And when he does, his subsequent actions and plan seem to be designed more to artificially generate tension for the movie plot, than any practical purpose: for example, his decision to leave one of the canisters, attached to an unstoppable time, in an air-duct, while he is still present in the sealed building. Meanwhile, the heroes prove adept at fashioning tear-gas and lethal blow-darts from everyday materials (or, at least, everyday materials for an art gallery).

If you don’t look too hard, this is still passably entertaining, with the art gallery providing an interesting location for some battles (the cat-fight between Sharon and Dane’s henchwoman comes to mind, ending on a piece of unfortunately-pointy artwork). Henriksen us good value as ever in the psycho role, e.g. shooting people because they can’t deliver Shakespeare to his liking and, while Payne is better known as a villain, he does decent work here in a more sympathetic role. However, the film doesn’t use them as effectively as before, and the film needs to be less obviously stage-managed towards its conclusion, which is obvious well before it happens. The flaws are likely not much worse here – just a little more obvious.

Dir: Paul Lynch
Star: Shannon Tweed, Lance Henriksen, Bruce Payne, Jayne Heitmeyer
a.k.a. Face the Evil

No Contest

  By

★★★
“No originality, no budget… But no disaster, either.”

An almost-entirely shameless Die Hard rip-off, this stars Tweed as Shannon Bell, the host of a beauty-pageant, which is interrupted by Oz (Clay) and his gang, who take a half-dozen of the beauty-queens and Bell hostage, up in the penthouse, and demand $10 million in diamonds for their release. Bell manages to slip away and, fortunately, her character is an actress, famous for playing action heroines [yeah, it’s all a bit ‘meta’ – except, it came out in 1992, largely before ‘meta’ became popular…]. So she gets to go all John McClane on their asses, crawling round air-ducts and assisting ex-federal agent Crane (Davi), who was bodyguarding one of the participants, who is a politician’s daughter, but popped outside the building for a fortunately-timed smoke.

The script is hackneyed, certainly, but it’s a stellar B-movie cast, that works well, and largely keeps things entertaining. This is where the thought has gone in. While Oz is undeniably brutal, he is as far from Hans Gruber as can be imagined, a foulmouth sleazeball rather than a suave sophisticat, and Bell, similarly, is the opposite of McClane, despite her action pedigree (one character describes the roles she plays as, “Bruce Lee with boobs”). Endearingly, she bursts into tears after she has to kill someone. Davi, of course, was in the original, playing Special Agent Johnson [“No – the other one…”], and we’ll watch anything with Piper in it, after They Live. It’s clear Tweed is not exactly in the realm of Lee, but does credibly enough to paper over the cracks, action-wise, and perhaps surprisingly, keeps her clothes entirely on.

Things do fall apart at the finale, which is convoluted and strained, to say the least: the film is much better when sticking to its basic premise – or, more accurately, someone else’s basic premise. But, having sat through much the same film with Anna Nicole Smith in the lead, this is an enormous improvement. Certainly, it’s cheap and cheerful, the kind of thing you can imagine seeing in an early 90’s videostore, with an appropriately lurid cover. But it is entertaining, and given the sights of the makers were clearly aimed no higher than that, has to be judged a success.

Dir: Paul Lynch
Star: Shannon Tweed, Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay, Roberto Davi, Roddy Piper

Hard to Die

  By

★★★
“I just want to get my clothes on and get out of here.”

This slice of cheese couldn’t be any riper. Five employees of the Acme Lingerie Company are called in to work on a Saturday to do inventory, despite the presence of creepy janitor Ketchum. A misdelivered package arrives, intended for Dr. Newton, an investigator of witchcraft, and when the ladies open it, they unleash the soul of a serial killer (allowing the use of flashback footage from a previous Wynorski flick. Sorority House Massacre). Meanwhile, the workers, having got all dusty gathering up boxes in the basement, make the logical decision: to take showers and try on the latest Acme line of skimpy products. Which they then wear for the rest of the film. As the unleashed killer picks off them, and everyone else in the building, one by one. Fortunate that there’s an arms dealer who has also set up shop on another floor, and who has left large quantities of merchandise and ammo around…

For the first 70 minutes, you’ll be wondering why this even qualifies for the site. It’s more in the campy horror line, with the emphasis more on the “camp” than the horror: always nice to see genre icon Forrest J. Ackerman in a supporting role. Otherwise, this is basically an excuse to ogle scantily-clad babes, but the tone is kept light – check out the squeaking sounds when they are assiduously soaping their breasts in the shower. Even the deaths are basically off-screen, with a fraction of the gore we get now, more than twenty years on. As a B-movie, it’s fine, but despite the title, Joe-Bob Briggs was about a million miles off when he said, “It’s the female version of Die Hard, full of lighting-hot action.” There’s a reason just about everyone involved uses pseudonyms. And then, fortunately, there’s the final reel, to which no description can do justice. Fortunately, someone posted it on YouTube, so I think I’ll just let the footage speak for itself.

Quite why they waited until the end to unleash this furious assault on the senses, I don’t understand. Is it great art? Not in the slightest. But it crams in more marvellous, lingerie-clad, automatic, dumbness into ten minutes than many better-known GWG entries do in their entire running-time, and should only be respected as such.

Dir: “Arch Stanton” [Jim Wynorski]
Star: Robyn Harris, Lindsay Taylor, Debra Dare, Orville Ketchum

Skyscraper

  By

★½

The obvious point of comparison for Smith would be Pamela Anderson, another Playboy playmate who moved into films of doubtful quality, but any such comparison would be unfair. To Anderson, that is, who given the right role, is not actually too bad. With Smith, you get the feeling she simply has no talent, and any character would be a stretch, let alone the Shakespeare-aware, ace helicopter pilot and crackshot she is supposed to portray in this shameless Die Hard clone.

She is trapped in a tower block by a bunch of criminals who are after a computer chip which…er, well they never actually say what it does, but they clearly want it bad. Just like Brooce, she’s bickering with her other half, a police officer – “I wanna have a baby,” she whines, not long after the immortal line, “Well, excuse me for still believing in Sunday walks in the park and little babies.” It was at this point, that my sympathy for her character made its excuses and left.

Other points of similarity with McTiernan’s classic action film:

  • Hero/ine crashes in through a plate glass window, half-way up the building.
  • Slimy worker tries to cut a deal with the terrorists, only to get a fatal come-uppance.
  • Bad guys are largely European types – though in Skyscraper they look pretty gay, too.

When in motion, the general execution is not so bad, and the first of these probably provides the film’s best sequence, as Smith leaps onto a window-washer’s cradle, and dangles from a cable, trying to avoid gunfire from the rooftop. Not brilliant, I admit, but compared to much of the rest of the movie, it stands out as tense and well-staged.

The script and the acting sink this one early, and it’s damned further any time Smith opens her mouth. The chief villain – associate producer Hubner – quotes Shakespeare badly, mixing in the odd Biblical quote for good measure: his performance is mercilessly skewered in one review which includes a highly amusing parody of his style. Another article, now sadly lost, spent half its time detailing a Saturday night search for a copy of the video. The other supporting characters such as the cowardly security guard are, at best, good ideas badly implemented, and at worst, pointless wastes of space (who are probably also associate producers – there’s a coincidence!).

Smith whips ’em out four times: one shower scene, two consensual sex scenes (one as a flashback, while she’s right in the middle of evading the terrorists!), and one rape – the last of these might actually have some vague relevance to the storyline, but the others certainly don’t. Her attempt at any kind of action are ultra-lame as well, presumably out of fear that any kind of sudden motion could rupture an implant. She might have been better served by trying to smother the terrorists, Double Agent 73 style.

It’s easy to imagine the pitch for this one: “It’ll be Die Hard with tits!” Given the vast number of other clones in that style made before and since, such an endeavour was probably inevitable – and in the right hands, or at least with the right leading lady, might have had some potential. Instead, the main reason to watch this is for some cheap laughs at the most woeful acting performance since the early days of Pia Zadora. Bad movie fans will likely love it; everyone else should stay clear.

Dir: Raymond Martino
Stars: Anna Nicole Smith, Charles M. Huber, Richard Steinmetz, Branko Cikatic