McBain

My review was written in September 1991 after a Greenwich Village screening.

Boasting excellent production values, "McBain" is a silly action film geared mainly toward overseas audiences. It represents a strong video title for the Shaprio Glickenhaus banner after its theatrical exposure.

James Glickenhaus, in his first writing-directing assignment since "Shakedown" three years earlier, has assembled the elements of an A-grade picture but failed to create an engrossing or believable narrative. Pic becomes a spoof of itself an the genre early on and never recovers.

Prolog has Chick Vennera and fellow soldiers rescuing POW Christoper Walkenon the day the Vietnam War ended in 1975, so Walken owes him one. When Vennera is killed in an abortive coup of the Colombian government 18 years later, Walken agrees to help Vennera's sister, Maria Conchita Alonso, overthrow the drug cartel-run dictatorship there and let the common people come to power.

This timely theme of revolution is treat4ed with a flippancy reminiscent of Sergio Leone's "Duck, You Sucker" and other Italian political Westerns, but Glickenhaus makes it far too easy for Walken and his group of Vietnam vets to reach their objective. Cartoonish action is amusing but never gripping.

Walken, no stranger to uch roles ("The Deer Hunter", "The Dogs of War") appears awkward and bored with a stiff-upper-lip assignment more suited to Glickenhaus' 1980 "Exterminator" leading man Robert Ginty. The extreme earnestness of Alonso as the freedom fighter is overdone. There is no romance in the picture and zero chemistry between the two leads, a glaring deficiency.

Supporting cast of reliable thesps such as Michael Ironside and Steve James mainly provides comic relief. Best acting is by Luis Guzman, who brings panache to his role as a philosophical major domo of a New York crack den. Filming in the Philippines instead of South meria results in Filipino extras who definitely don't look authentic.

Dominating the humans is topnotch special effects and stunt work that lift "McBain" above the norm in the action genre. This technical accomplishment is the pic's raison d'etre and will help it cross national and language barriers.

When I first heard about the title, I thought of 'The Simpsons', just like so many other reviewers, but when I saw the cast, I was completely stunned, that so many great character-actors would actually be in this! First of all, we have Christopher Walken (Deer Hunter, Pulp Fiction), who plays the title character, McBain. He is rescued from a Vietnam POW-camp by some of his buddies, one of which is Santos (Chick Vennera, Yanks, The Milagro Beanfield War), who splits a HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL with McBain (Vietnam soldiers are loaded with cash apparently), and tells him that he can re-do the favor to him, if he ever gets into trouble.

Then, 18 years later, Santos and his sister Christina (Maria Conchita Alonso, The Running Man, Predator 2) join the rebels in Colombia trying to get rid of their evil dictator, El Presidente (Victor Argo, Taxi Driver, King of New York), and when Santos fails the mission, Christina goes to McBain for help.

McBain then asks his good ol' Vietnam buddies to help him. First there's the token tough black guy, Eastland, played by "American Ninja"'s Steve James, who was also in director James Glickenhaus' previous movie, "The Exterminator", where the exterminator's real name also was Eastland, coincidence? I think not. There is also a lot of other references to The Exterminator, among other things, the most notable one being that McBain himself wears a welders-mask when Christina sees him for the first time, when he is working on a welding-job on top of a bridge!

The other guys in the Vietnam-pack are: The rich guy who can afford all sorts of equipment for the team, Frank Bruce (Michael Ironside, Total Recall, Starship Troopers), and then there's the doc, Dalton, (Jay Patterson, TMN Turtles), and last but not least, there's the cop, Gill, who has had enough of his unsatisfying job, he's played by Thomas G. Waites, who some of us might remember from The Warriors and The Thing.

And in other big roles, we find Luis Guzmán (Boogie Nights, Carlito's Way), as a small-time drug-dealer who can't get a decent job. Also, there is Dick Boccelli as the drug-dealing kingpin who gets hung up in a crane on top of a roof by the McBain-gang, almost Exactly in the same way he got hung up over a meat-grinder by John Eastland in the EXTERMINATOR-movie! Now, I haven't seen Glickenhaus' "Shakedown/Blue Jean Cop" yet, but I'm almost ready to bet half a hundred-dollar bill that Boccelli gets hung up in that movie too!

Well, back to the plot of this movie.. they go off to Colombia and saves the day, yay! But who cares about the plot anyway, the cast is great, and the action-scenes are very well done, and you're never bored while watching this movie! Highly recommended to all action-lovers!

Don't kid yourself: you're here because you want McBain to be an hour and a half of Christopher Walken flooding the screen with bullets and blood, swaggering through the gloriously gratuitous action movie carnage while spewing one-liners like everyone's favourite Arnold Schwarzenegger parody from The Simpsons. And if he chose to adopt a half-baked Schwarzenegger impression, melded with his legenDAry eNUNciation? Well, the screen might just crack under the ecstatic deluge of cinematic gold, the viewer whisked away by choirs of cigar-toting angels dressed like periwinkle goats, offering them margaritas in glasses covered in googly eyes.

Alas - the movie gods do not always deliver, and we can only wonder how writer/director/schlockmeister James Glickenhaus sleeps at night for deluding us (if you answer "on a pile of money, surrounded by beautiful girls", you're a-okay with me). What we get with McBain is a movie that's in many ways just as silly, though less willing to make peace with it. It's probably one of the better B-movie Rambo knock- offs lumbering around the $0.99 DVD bin, if only because it's so earnest about its serious political aspirations in its tale of jingoistic, macho, white saviour interventionism it's kind of adorable. For those turning the film into a drinking game (and, again, why else would you be here), look for each moment Walken is framed heroically by some piece of American iconography - welding on the Brooklyn bridge, or crabbing next to Lady Liberty - or, later, posturing in front of the Colombian flag. You won't be disappointed. Or sober.

To his credit, Glickenhaus crafts a mighty impressive action sequence. As Walken and his war buddies stage a military coup in Colombia (though amusingly apparent as the Philippines, right down to the distinctly non-Colombian extras), with explosions, bullets, tank and plane chases galore, their blowouts are so fun that we even temporarily transcend the evident cheapness that permeates the rest of the film, from its wobbly dialogue to its grainy, washed-out cinematography. There's even the occasional striking image - a shark-painted helicopter soaring over the gorgeous cough-Vietnam(?)-cough scenery, and the opening sequence, where a group of discharged GIs rescue Walken from a bamboo cage POW camp because America, it's actually fairly thrilling, thanks largely to some stylish cross-cutting and Christopher Franke's pounding musical score.

But, thankfully, before things slide into being too respectable and/or dull, Glickenhaus grants us enough bits of wonderful weirdness to make it worth our while. Here, Luis Guzmán cameos as a self-righteous drug dealer, who indignantly protests why McBain's crew didn't rob a richer fat cat to finance their revolution than him (so they do, dangling him from a crane), and the United States president orders the printing of red, white, and blue currency as a galvanizing stand against drug cartels. This is the sort of excellent nonsense which makes the world go 'round.

As an additional layer of disappointment, Walken doesn't even get to play outrageously campy action star here; instead he's a sun hat and sunglasses-wearing Hannibal Smith type, leading his A-Team of buds (including the famously grumbly Michael Ironside, who has fun as a multi-millionaire who sheepishly jettisons his life of opulence to go romp around Colombia) with quiet authority as they blow up most of the countryside. Walken's clearly too bored to be as flamboyantly weird as he is at his best, but, lack of grandstanding aside, he can still do no wrong. He's charm personified in a clumsily shoehorned-in love subplot with Maria Conchita Alonso's revolutionary widow, and his nonchalant delivery makes even his most unassuming lines brim with hilarious banality (the best: "she's gonna clear the runway. Or she might be dead. More that that, I don't know"). And, mercifully, he comes away with at least one iconic Walken moment: a patented monologue comparing the corrupt, repressive regime murdering dissenters and getting children addicted to drugs to his time at Woodstock, which is in such hysterically poor taste it's genuinely spectacular - though his taking a camcorder 'revolution selfie' with his mini-A-Team is pretty excellent as well.

This might not be the McBain you or The Simpsons want, but the inherent pleasure of 'Christopher Walken does Rambo meets The A-Team' still provides its share of dispensable, wacky, gloriously overkill macho silliness to ween yourself off your disappointment with. Just imagine Walken bellowing "MENDOZAAAAAA!!!!" as he explodes through the ceiling to confront 'El Presidente, and the world is immediately a better place. Ice to see you, too.

-5/10

Christopher Walken leads a batch of Army buddies against Colombia to avenge the death of his friend at the hands of the military regime. Since their Army days, Walken and his merry men have become successful and/or affluent, and seeing them take off as a group on a dubious military adventure requires some pretty heavy suspension of disbelief. But that's just the beginning. You'll see middle-aged men out-fighting hardened government troops. Pistols and Bic pens find uses their inventors never dreamed of, and desperate field surgeries are performed under the worst conditions, with 100% success. All of it done in an appallingly casual way, that is deader than the deadest deadpan humor. You'll truly laugh your butt off - nonstop yuck-yucks from the guy who brought us Shakedown and The Soldier. See McBain as a double feature with Taking of Beverly Hills if you want to see how durable your spleen really is.

This is a rather nonsensical action drama, with plenty of (entirely unintentional) comedy to go round. To start with, the film itself is called 'McBain.' Anyone who saw that famous Arnold spoof in 'The Simpsons' could be forgiving for looking twice at this title, which essentially features the same cut-and-paste plot, cheesy acting, and incoherent developments that Wolfcastle parodied. It's really nothing great but worth watching for the belly laughs at all the countless errors and overbearing cheesiness!

The 'plot' involves a Vietnam Vet Bobby McBain (Walken)whose friend Santos, a Colombian revolutionary, is killed by the evil dictator on live TV, whose sister comes to McBain to help organize a revolution in that country. For no real reason, other than to alleviate his self-confessed boredom and to avenge his Columbian ex-colleague from Nam, he and his gang of overtly gay middle aged nerds get into a little prop plane and fly off to Colombia to do this.

I started writing a review for this, but deleted it because it ended up totally incoherent. No wonder really, as the madness I was trying to chart is so messed up it's really hard to know where to start. So instead of indignantly providing analogies of McBain's sheer crappiness, I'll just list a few examples from the film which sum it up suitably:

• several people are murdered by people who we have seen die themselves moments earlier

• the special effects, especially some mid-air explosions, look like they were done by a small child with a chemistry set

• at one point, McBain is sitting in the co-pilot seat of a small prop plane. Flying next to them is a jet whose pilot is trying to force them to land. McBain pulls out this stupidly small pistol, and shoots the jet pilot, who crashes, despite the noticeable non-smashing of either windscreen!

• Some rebels attempt to infiltrate the presidential palace using a stretched limo. The driver opens the boot and four men jump out. Four! • Near the end of the film, a government soldier was asking an old man at a café if he has seen Christina, the rebel leader. He beats the man who doesn't tell him anything. This is great because at the next table are a load of American mercenaries in sunglasses, Hawaiian shirts, and fedora hats!

• In a similar vein, during all the battle scenes the good guys can generally just stand around without so much as a bullet touching them, where the bad guys get routinely mowed, and in many cases clearly fail to even notice the machinegun-toting middle aged mercenaries!

• The doctor of the group has to perform emergency surgery on a little girl after a battle. He says she would die without proper facilities, but McBain tells him to go ahead as she would die anyway. After briefly slicing her with a little knife (the girl has had her rib cage severely crushed), she sits there for a second, and smiles! The stupidest survival from mortal wounding since Marie in Biggles: Adventures in Time.

• A tall, Germanic looking drug dealer is really running Colombia. Predictably, he is called Hans.

• A typical example of the nonsense value of the plot: the group doctor declares he is going to stay with the wounded to help them. Then, in the next scene, he is back doing soldiering!

• And another: at the start, the guys are told the Vietnam War is over, and they get into their helicopter to fly home. All of a sudden they see one VC on the ground, and decide to launch a full scale covert assault on a POW camp they hadn't even seen. Yeah, that's exactly what you do right after getting discharged.

• You know a movie is in trouble when even the extras don't look convincing. I blame the director.

Normally I like mercenary movies. They make great viewing and the body count is typically high enough to make up for the lack of plot. Skeleton Coast and Wild Geese were both enjoyable. But McBain, thanks to a total lack of plot development, realistic effects, bearable acting, and tongue in cheek humour, comes across merely as a convoluted, confused mess. In honesty it looked like a load of set pieces had been brought in from a variety of scripts, banged together any which way, and then tagged together with the formulaic 'South American dictator/drug baron revolution' shtick.

Don't get me wrong I sat through it fine, it was never boring, because I was splitting my sides most of the time at the hilariously bad production values and situations. There are some pretty good moments, such as when McBain's gang kidnap a gangster called John Cambotti and dangle him off a skyscraper pretending to be Israeli agents. That part was cool. But the set-up for it, where they killed everyone in a crack house without either taking the money or destroying the drugs, and getting a lecture from the drug chief, was so artificial I just didn't understand why it was put in. Needless to say, mindless killing and slaughter is only entertaining if its well done on a technical level, unlike this ham-fest, where someone is dragged out of a window after a ceiling fan and hundreds of extras overtly mis-time their exaggerated death throes

There is lots of violence but some of it is so poorly done that it actually looks funny, which is not always a good thing. I bought this DVD for £1.49, which in retrospect seems like a bit of a rip-off. I'll hang onto it though, for any occasion in which I want to either play drinking games for number of dead etc, or as a showcase for some truly shoddy film-making.