Mission d'élite

I'm always in for a low-budget action movie for a laugh or two. This one didn't fail me. Hulk Hogan gave the word 'non-actor' a new meaning and the low budget oozed from the screen.

However, I found it strangely amusing. It reminded me of those old 80's action movies and tv series I used to watch as a kid. Simple plot, but enough to keep you from changing channels on your tv. The action was, considering the budget, decent. The firefights looked convincing, better than a lot of other low-budget tv movies. Acting was, well, what you'd expect from a movie like this. The only exceptions were Weathers and Goddard who managed to make the best out of the crap lines they were given. Hogan was simply bad. Steven Seagal-like bad.

If you catch this movie on tv sometime, watch it. And if you do, don't forget to check out the recreation of the scene from "The Rock" where the SEALs enter Alcatraz from underwater and Weathers' reunion with Mr Painless from "Predator".

4,5 out of 10.

This movie's not great but passable I guess. Caught in on cable on late night AXN. I saw the trailer & there was a babe in it so I decided to try it & didn't regret it. The action's ok but Shannon Tweed was absolutely hot! The hottest was in the beginning of the movie when she wrapped her legs around a guy & crushed the air out of him. That was even hotter than Famke Jennson in Golden Eye!

When a team of Navy SEALS capture a major drug dealer, Fraker, his lieutenant takes a plane load of American gymnasts hostage for his return. With the Government happy to return Gallindo in order to save the photogenic hostages, the SEALS decide to take things into their own hands and attack the group and attempt to free the hostages.

This is a TVM and feels like it at every stage. The plot is clichéd - SEALS go against orders to take on military force and damn the politicians and the bureaucrats! The characters back this up - Mike is the hard man scared to let people get too close, Andy is the boss who is tied up by politics, Roy is the SEAL who is weeks away from retirement, Hunter Wiley is the feisty woman, Gallindo is the slimy drug dealer - I could go on. This is film making by numbers. The action scenes are OK but even then our heroes manage to never get hit but to take out the baddies with one shot every time - pure A-Team action.

Hulk Hogan gives one of his worst performances yet - at least in other films he appeared to be making fun of his personae - here he embraces it with a straight face. His gruff role is a joke. Shannon Tweed is good as the feisty female - at least she looks like she's having fun. The rest of the cast has plenty of "famous faces" - in fact most of the fun of the film was trying to work out where I'd seen them before, first there's Carl Weathers (Arnie's companion in Predator), Andy (from The Karate Kid movies and Cagney & Lacey), Creagan (Billy Blanks of Tae-Bo fame) and the one that bugged me right up till the end - drug dealer Gallindo - being played by Billy Drago who Kevin Costner threw off the roof in The Untouchables.

Outside of trying to place the actors there's not much else to enjoy. The story and the characters are clichéd, the action daft (our heroes swim past big groups of sharks without any problem - 10 minutes later a bad guy goes into the same water and is immediately attacked!). Avoid this low rent piece of rubbish.

Shannon Tweed spends much of this movie bikini-clad, and if there is a 40-year-old actress out there with a better body than hers (except maybe for Ursula Andress), I can't remember her right now. She also looks spectacular firing two guns simultaneously, and her fighting moves are quick and graceful - you don't expect a woman who made a name for herself by starring in countless soft-core erotic thrillers to be a convincing fighter, but somehow Tweed is. Of course this is first and foremost a Hulk HOGan film, and of course he HOGs the spotlight: his delivery is totally flat, but I have to admit that his climactic fight with Billy Blanks is pretty good. Carl Weathers and Martin Kove are both past their prime, but hell, they can still have a go at the action genre if they really want to. Production values are better than expected and there are lots of explosions, but Tweed is basically the only reason I'm giving this film a ** rating (could have been higher if she fought more).

When I first started watching this film, I pretty much laughed at the absurdity of it. The dialogue was horrid, the acting was bad and Hogan was even worse. But then something strange happened. I became intrigued because Carl Weathers and Billy Blanks and Martin Kove were in this film as well. Now I don't know about Blanks, but the other three are all actors that have done something with Stallone in the past. Weathers and Hogan of course were in Rocky 3 and Kove was in Rambo. So that got me intrigued to actually watch the film, and that was when I realized that there was actually something good about the film.

The direction was good. I know how strange that may sound considering how bad some of the acting was, but maybe the director's strong point isn't his people scenes, but his eye for action. He has some great explosions, interesting aerial shots and some good fighting scenes. I should hope the fighting scenes are strong since you have Hogan, Blanks, Weathers and Kove in the film. And don't forget WCW owner Eric Bischoff was a producer on the film.

It's too bad that Hogan is so bad in here because if some of the acting could have been passable and the script had better dialogue, the film could have been as good as Commando. But it is lacking in so many areas that even some of the great directing is too lame to save the picture. But it was a nice try.