Soldier Boyz

The American Ninja, Michael Dudikoff, is back, although not as a ninja in this weak made-for-TV action film. Instead, he plays an ex-Marine hired by a wealthy businessman to rescue his kidnapped daughter from Vietnamese bandits. Vietnam films were pretty played out by the time this films was made, so I'm not quite sure why this was a story that needed to be told, especially since essentially same story was told much better in the 1983 John Milius produced "Uncommon Valor" (which incidentally Dudikoff had a brief non-speaking role). Dudikoff assembles his own Dirty Dozen out of a bunch of criminals and reprobates to carry out their predictable and dull mission. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, an actor too good for this tripe, does as much as he can with his ridiculous villain role as the bandit leader. Overall, this is a pretty low rent Vietnam themed action film that's about 10 years too late.

This movie was quite OK, not bad or good. It's about a billionaires daughter (Nicole Hansen) that are kidnapped in Vietnam by a terrorist grup led by Vinh Moc (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). A former major (Michael Dudikoff) are asked to being sent down there to find her, he does it if he are allowed to bring six prisoners and that they will be free after the operation (if they survive). One thing that is bad is that they choice following prisoners. A nazi-guy (Channon Roe), a female murderer (Jacqueline Obradors), a black mass murderer called the Monster (Cedrik Terrell), an innocent murderer that can fight (David Barry Gray), and one black man and one latino that wants to kill each other (Tyrin Turner and Demetrius Navarro). The movie makers choosed this because making the movie characters so tough as possible. But no one in the world would choose murderers and revenging people and put them together for a rescue mission and then release them if they survived.

And why do they have to have a women in the team. I'm not against women in movies or in tougher character roles, but I don't think you need a women in every war-movie just because you wants to show that you are not against women in war.

But the movie works because it has action. But that this kind of movie tries to put in some message about women being discriminated and humiliated by man is awful. If a movie can't handle the basic story and get some descent actors then no one cares about the message.

But as an action-flick its OK.

I saw this movie late night on HBO or something like that several years ago. The sheer stupidity of the concept just hit me several days ago.

A group of misfits from school get taken to vietnam for a covert operation? Huh?

I can just see the ads for the operation, study cooking hard or otherwise we will plant you on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The story is typical old Hollywood formula, a group of ragtag misfits who hate each other, come together, bond and save each other's lives. Ho hum.

What amazes me is that someone wrote this script, someone looked at this script, and said you know this could be a good movie to make. So, they went to the production company and studio and they said, you know this is such a great idea, let's give you several million dollars to make it. And wa la, we have a movie.

Michael Dudikoff is as wooden as ever and the rest of the cast is just creepy. To give this 3 stars is a crime.

To be generous, I would give it 0.5 stars out of 10.

What we have here is yet another version of the formula that became popular with the making of "The Dirty Dozen" (though we have fewer soldiers in this movie, probably due to the low budget.) It could have been an entertaining version of the formula, but "Solider Boyz" utterly fails. To begin with, the setup is ludicrous - would a millionaire whose daughter was kidnapped allow the lead soldier he hires to have a bunch of TEENAGERS who have almost no combat experience? (Why not hire professional mercenaries?) And there are other silly things like the fact the teenagers only get about ONE DAY of training! Plus, there are plenty of clichés, such as when one solider steps on a land mine and needs to be saved from it exploding.

The movie might have been made tolerable with some good action sequences, but the action sequences in this movie are horrible. All they are basically is shots of people firing guns towards the camera, over and over. It looks lazy and cheap, and so is much of the rest of the movie. The jungle locations look skimpy, and some scenes seem to be hastily shot, like when the millionaire's daughter is captured. As you can see, "Soldier Boyz" has problems going far beyond bad spelling.

Michael Dudikoff (In a not so appealing haircut)stars as a prison warden named Tolliver who lets out six prisoners to do a dirty dozen style rescue, mainly a V.I.P's daughter who has been abducted by communist Vietnamese soldiers (Ah, isn't the cold war over, guess not.) along the way Dudikoff a former soldier trains the prisoners and leads the attack on Vinh Moc (Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa) in this lively actioner which although stupid at least offers the action with a good amount of flair. Indeed when compared to Dudikoff's duds like Crash Drive and Moving Target this comes off as a vast improvement. Still the story is undeniably silly and Dolph Lundgren's "Men Of War" did this type of story much better. Although sadly the 60's song "Soldier Boy" doesn't play once during the movie.

2.5/5 Matt Bronson