Hostile Force

HOSTILE FORCE

Aspect ratio: 1.33:1

Sound format: Ultra-Stereo

Employees of a security agency are forced to combat a gang of professional thieves who invade the premises with a view to stealing cash from the company's heavily fortified safe.

The very definition of DTV fodder, Michael Kennedy's blah programmer is an OK time-waster, nothing more. Top-billed Andrew McCarthy plays the villain, an ambiguous character who's not above killing those who get in the way of his criminal ambitions, but who keeps a tight rein on his psychopathic subordinate (popular German actor Hannes Jaenicke), whose wild behaviour threatens the entire operation. Wolf Larson (TV's "Tarzan") is a former cop who stumbles onto the heist and makes an effort to rescue the hostages, including Cynthia Geary, another ex-cop who switched careers when her boyfriend was shot and killed during a violent confrontation with armed robbers several years earlier. Unfortunately, hunky Larson is sidelined in favour of mousy-looking Geary, whose transformation into a gun-toting action hero during the film's climactic shoot-out stretches credibility to the limits.

Much of the film unfolds in the agency's control room where Geary and her co-workers are held hostage, and the banter between captors and captives isn't particularly compelling, which stifles tension and slows the pace to a crawl. When the narrative DOES move beyond these limited confines, the half-hearted action scenes are compromised by a lack of decent coverage, which further cheapens the production. There's plenty of talent on both sides of the camera (I'll refrain from making the usual comments about McCarthy's painful slide into obscurity), but the movie wears its lack of ambition like a badge of honour. Why do people waste their time making such bland, faceless tripe? Also known as ALARM FÜR SECURITY 13 and THE HEIST.

One of the worst screenplays ever. How's that for bad?! I guess what kept me watching it was the same reason people would watch a train crash. Too many things to specify, other than saying the whole third act was a joke. Things not making sense, in there for no reason, or a bad one, just overall terrible. Don't waste your time; even accidents this bad aren't worth it. Obviously the filmmakers have posted a lot of ratings here!

Lucy and Tony are cops that try to stop what turns out to be a very violent convenience store robbery. Two years later, Lucy is an operator for Alert Guard Security who sends service people out to check alarms or other problems. Tony, who wants to date Lucy, ends up working for the same company. Ronald, the guard at the gate, flirts with Lucy, but he's not as serious. Still, despite all this attention, Lucy feels the need to dress like a hooker and go to a bar hoping to be picked up.

'The Heist' (the title of this movie when I saw it) refers to what happens on Easter Sunday when millions of dollars are being stored by Riggs Armored Transport in a vault on the company's premises. A group of robbers includes a man with a rabbit mask, a man with a pig mask, and a former Alert Guard employee. The room where Lucy and the other operators work has a broken thermostat, and the door has to be kept open even though that's not the usual procedure.

My main incentive for watching was Cynthia Geary, who was so cute on 'Northern Exposure'. She didn't disappoint here. Lucy could be quite pleasant under normal conditions, and she handled herself very well in a crisis, even making sarcastic comments and using her feminine charm. Andrew McCarthy alternated polite and nasty as the ringleader of the gang. Peter Hanlon gave an interesting performance as Lucy's apparently gay boss. Other than Geary, though, there wasn't anything really special here. The movie was not excessively violent, but it was violent enough. The ending was quite exciting. And if you like watching things blown up, there were a few really big and unnecessary explosions.

I've said it before, but when Channel 5 in the UK show straight to video/TV movies, why do they always have to show absolute worst ones? I caught this on TV earlier this month and instantly recognised it as a terrible movie I'd seen many years earlier on you've guessed it, CHANNEL 5! You're probably wondering why I watched it again if it was awful. Well, it's been at least 4 years since I last saw it and I barely remembered anything about it other than it being bad. I decided to watch it again to see if it was as bad as I remembered it. Occasionally, things do improve on second viewing. Not this.

Quite possibly one of the most dreary and boring "action" movies of all time. In every angle it's cheap and tacky. Much of it is set around one dingy room where the incompetent robbers don't do much other than argue with each other, and while not doing that they're either terrorising or again arguing with one of the hostages. Everything is incompetently handled. The pacing for one, is dreadful. What relevance did Lucy James's fiance being killed in an earlier robbery have to do with the main plot? The performances are largely awful, with nobody really getting into the material except for the ever talentless Hannes Jaenicke who I recognised from Jim Wynorski's classically bad Extreme Limits, who puts in one of his usual hammy performances and at no point comes off as convincing or scary. Only positive thing I can give it is that the climax isn't as bad as it could have been, but that's hardly a compliment. This scene is mediocre at best, and comes after so much dross that even if it was great, it still couldn't make up for the rest. It includes 1 car exploding, a small gunfight and a fight on top of a moving van. This ends up providing unintentional hilarity, as the moving van is a mid 90's Ford Econoline and the van that ends up rolling over looks like a late 70's van, with circular headlamps. The difference is obvious and this is probably the only thing that made laugh in this rubbish. And the whole dreary feel is carried through to here as well, as this is set among wastegrounds under cloudy skies.

This has to be one of the shortest reviews I've ever written but everything to be said has been said. I just advise you to stay well away. It's not even "so bad it's good", it's just pitiful, dreary, forgettable rubbish that will do nothing but give you a headache and put you in a bad mood.

Hostile Force is a bland, generic title for a bland, generic film. You've seen the same premise and the same characters a hundred times before. It's not bad or unwatchable but it simply has nothing to distinguish it from countless other DTV movies. A robbery gone bad leaves a female cop without a husband. Two years later she is working as a coordinator for a security company. One of their sites - an armoured car base - gets hit by robbers with a simultaneous assault on the security centre.The majority of the film focuses on the ex-cop's attempts to sneak a message to the jobbing security maintenance man, who by a stunning coincidence is also an ex-cop who quit after the same robbery that her old man was offed in.