Double Trouble

A brawny suited burglar and his equally muscular twin, a upstanding police officer, are forced to team up to bring down some diamond criminals.

With the fashion, music, hairdos and Rambo III poster on display you'd swear director John Paragon's Double Trouble was made in the eighties (even though it was 1992). The cast feature plenty of familiar acting faces, surprisingly this B film has some good talent on display. This forgotten film features David Carrdine, James Doohan, Roddy McDowell and those two muscle bound twins from the Conan wannabe film Barbarians, I kid you not. McDowell has lot of fun shooting people and Doohan gets to Scotty rant while the twins get to wink at fine women, fight and shoot a lot. It's all as outlandish and retro un-PC as it sounds.

To the twins David and Peter Paul's credit they are great fun throughout and thanks to some writing flukes including Jessie Venture impressions, sibling rivalry along with Paragon's clumsy setups and reverse fridge logic it's more enjoyable than it should be.

If you love the 1980s cheese, this 90s film is a great example, think a second rate Twins mixed with Stop or My Mum will Shoot and let your mullet and crop top do the thinking, you should enjoy.

Some say may say I have poor taste, but to me I just like to accept movies for what they are. Within the very first 10 minutes you can immediately tell this is a B movie affair. The production values are sub par and the acting is uh...basic. However with most B or perhaps C level movies you can find a whole lot of character if you sit on their level. And there is a whole lot of character here. On the whole this movie is charming and plenty entertaining on both a comedic and action level. Probably more so comedy wise than anything else. This movie undoubtedly suffers from the unintentional funnies. Total sober you can hear me giggling away every 3 minutes on the most irrelevant things from the way these muscle bound beasts run to how slightly more fat one is than the other. Not to say there aren't any legitimate laughs in this movie. The writing is decent, nothing too fancy. Plenty will say the Paul/Barbarian Brothers lack of talent. However, I believe there's enough there. They don't look stupid delivering the core content and they deliver the laughs by the truckload even on small liens. You kinda get that brotherly chemistry that I guess could only be gotten from some twins. Plus thanks to their frame they can handle some decent action scenes that appear to cater to what they do best (lift stuff). However, I will admit all hand to hand action was absolutely dreadful. But what do you expect for a B-flick?

This movie is an anachronism. Based on the clothes, music, hairdos, and so forth, it seems like this should be an eighties film.

Horkheimer, Adorno, and others of the Frankfurt School of thinkers argued in the 1940s that mass media was used to control the people and ultimately resulted in sameness. Double Trouble certainly proves the latter. The plot and the villains are all plucked willy nilly from various 1980s films. One of the barbarian brothers accidentally steals a card that gives access to a vault of diamonds just above the subway in downtown LA. The other barbarian brother is a cop forced by the chief to partner with his larcenous brother. Oh, the other barbarian brother...

How could anyone wear what this guy wears? The Raiders sweatshirt/half shirt with high-waisted, acid-washed jeans? But all of that pales compared with the mullets sported by each brother. Paging Billy-Ray Cyrus. The guy can't run either. He has a worse gait than Keanu Reeves.

Whoever thought that wrestlers could act anyway?

This film is about as fragmented and nonsensical as this review of it. In the right company this could be part of a beer-fueled evening with friends, or consumed alone. Regardless, mouths will be agape. The horror, the horror.

Just how bad off were such talents as Roddy MacDowall, Troy Donahue, Bill Mumy, Lewis Arquette, and David Carradine that they decided that Double Trouble was the movie to be in? Were all the parts taken up in a Munster's tv movie?

This disgraceful film I caught one night while flipping around on television. After the revelation came that David Paul was not wearing a weight lifters belt but a midriff, my skin turned a color of green that Martha Stewart is sampling for her new paint collection. With such winning quotes as, "Where it IS!", I don't believe even James "Scotty" Doohan is putting this on his repitoire.

A true testament that if you try hard enough in Hollywood, you too can have your own movie...the Barbarian Brothers had three or four. Hope springs eternal.

Other reviewers are correct about the technical elements of the movie. The story is generic. The performances are decent, but not exceptional. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to review it because although it's not a great movie, it's a competent genre exercise, elevated by the impish charm of the Barbarian Brothers and the gravitas of Roddy McDowell and David Carradine. My only complaints: not enough A J. Johnson or Timothy Stack. If you can tolerate those straight-to-video action flicks from the late 80s and early 90s, you'll have a good time with this.

My score: 5/10

1-3: don't waste your time 4-6: good 7-9: great 10: outstanding.