Area of Conflict

AREA OF CONFLICT is a cheap and senseless straight-to-streaming action flick with very little to recommend it. While I applaud it for being a female-driven revenge saga, that's about all it has going for it. A young woman is the sole survivor of a deadly incident at the hands of human traffickers, so she teams up with a mercenary to get revenge. What follows is cheap and cheesy but not very cheerful, with badly-acting ex-wrestlers the order of the day and Jake Busey in the smallest of cameos. A bar-room scene early on has to be one of the worst I can remember. Later, it's repetitive shooting and nothing much more. No thanks!

Some pro wrestlers were casted into a film. We start with some T & A, which quickly turns to a sausage hang of gravely voiced beeves. Ten minutes in, and I began to fast forward. Twenty minutes in, and I skipped ahead. I could not finish this. Seen on Tubi, the free streaming service, which shows some abysmally low-budget junk; and some gems. This film is the former, and not the latter.

The conspicuously low budget, stupefyingly schlocky, sub-Seagalian shoot 'em up, 'Area of Conflict' proves itself to be a wearily noisome, cliche-clotted clusterfunk of meat-headed mediocrity, that only infrequently stumbles guilelessly into the bemusingly trashy no man's land of (very) Bad Movie excellence!!! The penurious 'plot' finds our singularly unlikeable, hypertensive squad of dimwitted, steroid-stuffed 'soldiers' being tasked to seek and destroy some shadowy paramilitary skells deep in darkest Eastern Europe, only to discover that they have rapidly become the slow-moving prey to some ferociously fleet-footed, fearlessly forest-flitting assassin!

Thematically tawdry, dramatically redundant, and stylistically prosaic, this inept action travesty is, perhaps, wholly 'expendable' to most viewers, yet the hackneyed dialogue, and polystyrene performances occasionally take on a dorky, Ed Wood Jnr. Savour, and, happily, the actioner's sole beacon of lissome luminosity is the strikingly sinuous, fabulously fiesty, kill 'em all intensity of pleasingly perky, pistol packing Amazon, Annika Pampel as the beautifully blood-thirsty, one woman army Sdanka. Another major demerit is the irksome lack of Jake Busey, the colourful actor is woefully underused here, as Busey has more charisma in one of his outsized bicuspids than the cookie cutter hero's ceaselessly tepid theatrics. With decent dialogue, considerably less CGI, and casting, Luke Goss in the lead it would certainly have been better, but not quite so hilarious! And if they ever start handing out awards for asinine references to 'Predator' than 'Area of Conflict' 'aint going home empty handed, mayte!