L'arme suprême

A cheap but workable B-movie thriller with Traci Lords playing a renegade cop on the trail of a drug kingpin wreaking havoc in the city. This one is packed full of violent shoot-outs and assorted mayhem, so it breezes past, and if you don't mind your films low budget then you'll find yourself enjoying it a fair bit like I did. Watch out for Yaphet Kotto's cameo and a bad guy impersonating Tony Montana.

Why do the cops only have handguns? They knew exactly what they were doing, they set up a huge undercover operation. Why did they go out of their way to hit parked cars not anywhere near them?

Yahphet Kotto is the only person here who can act, and he's phoning it in. Right after this he'd join Homicide Life On The Street and do basically the same character but massively better. Traci's stuntwork is so bad she looks like she's drunk or stoned, and they had to do a lot of editing to make her appear mobile.

Almost all of the dialogue sounds ADR'd, and very poorly. Almost all of the action sequences are done in slo-mo, but so poorly I wonder if the director was crazy or lazy or just had to fill the run time and was desperate. Plot feels like it was written by a 6 year old who spent a summer watching really bad action flicks. Hero says this, boss says that, nothing ever gets resolved. Actually the script feels like it was written by an angry 6 year old. Like he got bullied at school. His parents didn't believe him, and now he's bitter. There's a ton of utterly pointless scenes which is weird given they only had to fill 90 minutes of screen time. Traci actually disappears for about half an hour and I wonder if its cuz she was so messed up on drugs they had to shoot more scenes without her. At no point is it clear exactly how the villains relate to the heroes. All we know is there's cops and there's gangsters. The final action sequence is incredibly lazy and looks like it was shot on the same night on the same street as the opening action sequence. BUT we do get the overused cliche of our hero walking away from a fiery explosion and looking disinterested.

Its a horrible mess from start to finish and the worst part is its not so cheesy you can laugh at it. Its just bad. Also I keep hearing this was rated NC-17 because of the violence and I think everybody including the MPAA ratings board must have been high on peyote. There's no violence here which would justify an NC-17. I have seen loads of R movies with considerably more violence.

Despite the endless violence, I nearly fell asleep.

Traci does her best playing a feminist hero here. And to be fair, the whole cast gave their all. But the director REALLY goofed.

Piling car chase after fistfight after senseless killing on top of each other will not guarantee a thriller. It seemed that they just decided to kill several cops when they couldn't think of anything better to film.

Angelo Tiffe made a great villain here. You did want to see him die. But early, so you wouldn't have to watch this heap of celluloid.

And whose idea was it to put classical music on the sound track? It did not help.

Violent and boring. Bad combo people.

This is a 1993 straight-to-video stereotypical female-cop-has-to-show-her-stuff-to make-it-to-the-top movie. The action is written into the script AND it is executed...kind of. Traci Lords isn't my idea of an action star. Yes, she has done plenty of action parts, and even does a decent job as Anna in Len Wiseman's Underworld and also contributes a fair performance as Chameleon in Black Mask 2, but I never could wholly buy her as an action star. She doesn't fit the bill, and for me, her presence lessened what enjoyment there COULD be had in this endeavor. Not her performance; that is as good as she gets, but her presence.

But this is typical of the 90's. It is overdone, the performances are over the top dramatically, the dialog is trite and contrived, and the action is choreographed so that no one actually touches ANYone in the hand-to-hand scenes.

The mafia, gang, and cop stereotypical elements are too prolific to enumerate and really drag down the story, such as the story was.

There IS some enjoyment to be had, if you're into late 80's, early 90's M4TV or Str82Video Movies. Directed by Chameleon, whose last "real" movie was...wait. Oops. I can't say he has made anything worth mention. But if you like this, he also directed A Time To Die (1991), also starring Traci Lords, and not any better than this one.

This one rates a 5.6/10 on the TV/Video Scale from...

the Fiend :.

Traci Lords fits pretty well into the action genre - her pouting expression shows believable contempt for her enemies - but she is better suited to "bad girl" rather than heroine parts, IMO. In two mid-90s PM Entertainment productions, she played a cop in "Intent To Kill" and a professional thief in "Ice", and "Ice" was the better vehicle for her. But not only because of her role - she also got to kick much more ass in that one, while the script of "Intent To Kill" is poorly written. It has all sorts of separate threads that never really come together, and although the film opens with a bang (car chase, shootout, multiple explosions), then it slows to a crawl as we spent too much time with Traci's relationship problems with her unfaithful long-time (also cop) boyfriend. The result is a film that doesn't seem sure of itself and of the story it wants to tell. Another problem is the mediocre supporting cast, with the obvious exception of Yaphet Kotto as Traci's boss. *1/2 out of 4.