Radical Jack

If not for RiffTrax, I'd never attempt to see a film like this. Their commentary truly gets one through it, but also repeatedly reminds me that trusting my instincts on films has always been a good idea.

To put it perspective this is a year AFTER The Matrix and the same year as Gladiator and Snatch. The worst film I intentionally saw in 2000 was Charlie's Angels. I rated that a 5 for the same reason someone here rated this a 7. As vapid as Charlie's Angels and its storyline was, at least it had big name actors and hot actresses, and actual ACTION.

My goodness, in the year 2000 this film could not have picked a worse bunch of lead actors for bad guys. BRC was bad enough yet he was quite decent and appealing compared to most of the remaining cast. It was like they wanted to make sure the star looked good by picking worse-acting bad guys and a completely unimaginative film location. Wow!

The production quality, filming style, acting, directing and story content were all at the level of a late 80s, early 90s made-for-TV movie - but in the year 2000! I gave it a 2 because it did have a couple decent actors and the storyline was at least mildly plausible and stayed on track. I've seen worse films. Like, maybe 5 or 6. :-/

I thought the "action movie" genre had its lowest level set at Van Dammit and Steven Seagull movies. I was mistaken. Wow, I'm impressed that Billy Ray Cyrus took the bold move of making an action movie almost totally devoid of action. That takes guts. Too bad it doesn't work any better than you think it would.

They throw a few gallons of flaming gasoline around, toss a car off a cliff, give a standard gun fight, and have some of the most horribly choreographed fight scenes ever put to film, but that about wraps it up for the action. There is a point where a guy takes a swing at Billy in a bar, and the punch is so far off target that it looks like the guy aimed it at the next county, but Billy goes flying anyway. They didn't cut the scene and shoot it again. They just left it in the movie. Too funny.

The rest is all a cliché-fest, right down to the corrupt sheriff and fired bullets throwing sparks when they hit anything besides flesh. (When will movie makers figure out that lead and copper are soft metals and don't ever throw sparks when they hit something? This little movie lie always pisses me off.) Other than that it's just Billy Ray Goodguy vs Bobby Jo Badguy, who proves how bad he is by hitting women and driving a black Hummer. And we know Billy is a good guy because he has a dream catcher hanging from his rear view mirror.

Add some grade Z actors working for free (and worth every penny), and there you have it; a straight to video movie made for those gals that think Billy Ray and his mullet are two of the cutest things ever.

Not sure whose bright idea it was to make this film, but it is a bad one. Wait, I do know whose idea this was! It was made by the same studio that brought us Time Chasers, Arachnia and various other films set in Rutledge Vermont! So getting Billy Ray Cyrus and Michelle Pfeiffer's sister was like getting A-list star for them. Okay, B-list star as they once got Bruce Campbell and Sean Astin for a movie that was like Die Hard at a ski resort so that tandem definitely upstages a country music star and a famous actress' sister.

The story, well a dude with a past gets sent in to stop some small arms weapons dealers or something. His code name, Radical Jack! So you know that he is going to be a total badass that takes no prisoners! Well, he does okay against two guys, more than that and he is trounced; however, he makes up for it by barely being able to walk one day and able to pull off the final climatic battle the next. He also gets a job at a bar where he tries to do his best Patrick Swayze from Roadhouse, but with very poor fighting skills. His best move is throwing people on cars...

Billy Ray is not a good actor, that being said, the rest of the cast is so awful he acts circles around them. Dee Dee is attractive, but not in her sister's leagues as far as looks or acting ability and the main bad guy is over the top. George 'Buck' Flower is also in this, best known for bit roles in John Carpenter films like The Fog and They Live.

The film is just not good and the fight scenes are a joke. I never get the sense that Radical Jack is all that tough or someone that can take down arms dealers and the whole using a table saw and having flashback scenes was eye rolling. The last part of the film kept featuring betrayals to the point I was waiting for someone else to enter the warehouse and tell them how they were responsible. Just laughably bad and the type of film only a woman who wears a mullet could love as that type of woman is the one who would dance to Achy Breaky Heart back in the day and fantasize about Billy Ray.

Even watching it via MST3K / Rifftrax is an incredibly painful experience. Radical Jack is basically Road House and an episode Walker Texas Ranger mixed together and filtered of ANYTHING that could be possibly considered watchable. It doesn't even work on the "so bad it's good level." It's so bad, it's just bad, Billy Ray Cyrus plays a former Navy SEAL who has hazy flashbacks of fighting in a war that occurred outside an abandoned rural motel. He's our protagonist I guess, despite being imminently unlikable. Buck Flower shows up as the bad guy. His off the rack Ill fitting suit jacket and the prom limousine the producers rented for an afternoon makes it clear he's very rich. I can only assume Buck had a late alimony payment and needed a couple hundred bucks. I could go into plot but who cares? Bar fights that look like they were staged by an Amish person. A town sheriff that drives a station wagon. Country music so bad that could be used as psychological warfare against Vietcong guerillas. Billy Ray's upsetting mullet. Radical Jack is offensively and aggressively bad. It makes Future War look like Citizen Kane. To watch it is to risk eye cancer. The only practical application of this movie would be to air drop copies of it on ISIS training camps in Syria.

He's a two-fisted, slow-talking drifter who's just blown into town and taken a job as a bartender at the local roadhouse. But he's really a lone government agent under deep cover (don't worry; this is established in the opening scene) who's out to bust a small-town arms dealer. I think the idea behind "Radical Jack" was to make Billy Ray Cyrus an action hero, like "Road House" did for Patrick Swayze, or "Stone Cold" did for Brian Bosworth. If you're thinking, "But Swayze and Bosworth are not exactly the guys at the top of my list of action heroes," well, draw your own conclusions about Cyrus' action-hero future.

"Radical Jack" isn't a bad movie. It's an adequate straight-to-video flick, with good-looking actors, atrocious dialogue, cheesy action, and attractive scenery. I just wish it didn't seem as if everyone were taking it so seriously. The movie's set in Vermont, but the script contains references to "rednecks"...c'mon, how seriously can you take that? Lighten up, everyone. This isn't a Steven Seagal movie!

Here's an example. A character has been savagely kicked and beaten, and was nearly killed. He's being nursed back to health by an attractive woman. One thing leads to another, and suddenly she's on top of him, kissing his chest. "I...I can't," he says. "Why," she asks. And he goes off on some long tale about his tragic past. A more clever screenplay would have had him reply, "Because I have a few miles of bandages around my broken ribs, and you're sitting on my chest, that's why!"

But the movie's worth a rental, I think, as long as you're in the right mood. If you think you're getting a high-quality action thriller, you'll be miserable. But if you're the type to talk back to your TV, a la "Mystery Science Theater 3000," "Radical Jack" will have you howling.