Total Reality

In one of his last movies released as of this writing, lesser-known action hero David Bradley teamed with sci-fi aficionado Philip Roth to create an ultimately disappointing time travel adventure. TOTAL REALITY is highlighted by occasional flair in the effects and drama departments, but this far from compensates for its bland characters and mediocre action content.

The story: A soldier from the future (Bradley) leads a team of convicts in a suicide mission to 1998 to stop a deadly separatist (Thomas Kretschmann) from changing history.

The movie begins and ends with a bang, showcasing some exciting CG-driven space scenes with graphics that are pretty impressive for a low-budget film from the mid-90s. However, this seems to demonstrate where the majority of the budget has gone: while the contemporary-set scenes do well, the sets for spaceship interiors and the like are far from convincing. I also don't buy the placement of the dramatic scenes: there are a couple of genuinely well-acted exchanges late in the movie, but they arrive too late to generate much interest in the largely mundane personas, and would have been better placed earlier in the production. David Bradley gives one of the better performances of his career and Thomas Kretschmann is the closest thing the film has to genuine dramatic clout, but for the most part, they are not doing or saying much of genuine interest.

Action-wise, shootouts are the name of the game, but to be honest, there definitely aren't enough adrenaline scenes for a movie like this. David the martial artist gets one fight scene, but otherwise, he and the remaining cast engage in a handful of slow-motioned unexciting gunfights wherein taking cover is completely optional. There really is not much in the way of excitement with this one.

Almost twenty years after the release of TOTAL REALITY, I'm still disappointed that David Bradley's film career ended, but if this is what directly precluded it, I cannot blame whoever made the final decision. No one ought use this film to introduce themselves to either the actor or the director, and would do well to avoid it in general.

Loved this b-grade movie...

I never laughed so hard at a time travel sci-fi flick...from the moment the bald-headed baddie hopped in the back of a Ford pick-up and yelled "Hey, it's a Turk!" and his lead henchman sneered at him and said "Truck. It's a *truck*."

Funny stuff all the way through what would otherwise be a standard fare time travel flick.

As I mentioned in other comments, I became a real big fan of David Bradley ever since I saw him in "American Ninja 3". The guy is great doing martial arts, has some kind of charisma and is a cool looking dude on screen. Sadfully, he went to the DTV department ever since his debut and has remained as one of the king of TV movies until 2001 where he apparently stopped making movies. Now, one thing is watching Cyborg Cop or Hard Justice which are crappy clichéd movies but real fun to watch (coz they're entertainingly bad if that has any sort of meaning) but another thing is watching a tasteless piece of boredom like Total Reality. I mean, this and Crisis are the two biggest pieces of horse-dung this guy ever did. I wouldn't recommend this not even to the biggest Bradly hardcore fans. If I had known this and Crisis were going to be so f*****g crap, I wouldn't have spent the 3 or 4 euros they cost me. Total Reality is just as boring as Crisis although funnily, it starts promising. A group of military prisoners in the future are given a chance to stop some kind of disaster in the past (I'm sorry, I didn't really pay much attention to this atrociousness) and they only have 24 hours to get back or something like that. If they don't, they're stranded there forever. The poor director who oversaw this, "tries" some humorous (?) clichés like the convicts arriving on Earth and not knowing what a truck is for example (wow, hilarious...). The movie follows up with David Bradley teaming up with some Earth girl for the rest of the flick. This bored me so much that I had to force myself to watch it in like 3 or 4 installments to at least make use of the 4 or 5 euros it cost me. That's coz every time I tried, I fell asleep. And if you get a movie with David Bradley with just one crappy 10-second fight scene in it, then that's the final touch which would contribute to you throwing it off a hundred foot cliff so as never to see it again. I wish I could meet the "director" of this pile of poo on the street and I swear to God I'd ask him back for mi 5 euros. I'd also love to meet David Bradley to ask him why in God's name did he choose to star in this poor excuse for a movie. Don't even bother with this film, I mean it from the bottom of my heart, not renting borrowing it and specially not buying it.

Well, I have just seen the movie on TV and I was a little bit curious to read what other has written about it.

First of all, Total Reality is of course no good movie.

It has stupid dialogues, some really dumb figures (e.g. the feds), awful sci-fi interior design, the story has holes you can send one of the spaceships through it, the photography is boring and some details are annoying (e.g. the future handguns are simple 20th century weapons like Calico or FAMAS)

But, on the other hand: the space CGI are nice animated, it has no romantic happy end, Misa Koprova is indeed very beautiful (Sic Coyote is right!), the plot has some really interesting parts (the idea of a proto-fascist book becomes the bringer of world/solar war).

The reason, why I have watched the movie was Thomas Kretschmann, a not so famous german actors as the antagonist. His character (and his buddy) is the point I don`t understand. Why is he shown as the bad guy, although he wanted to save the future from the war?

An interesting B-movie. Sometimes nice, sometimes stupid. If you are bored at 1am you can watch it. Or you can go to sleep. ;-)

TOTAL REALITY is a very low budget science fiction flick that marked one of the last screen performances for the short-lived martial artist David Bradley, who started out by appearing in AMERICAN NINJA 3. This one involves a totalitarian future where a couple of bad guys travel back in time to the present day to change history and are pursued by a ragtag team of prisoners who have to stop them. Bradley stars as the chief prisoner and is adequate enough in the role, playing against screen favourite Thomas Kretschmann as the villain of the hour. The sci-fi elements are acceptable and the present day storyline works well to a degree, although it's never quite as interesting or indeed suspenseful as it perhaps should be.