Feu à volonté

Yes, like everyone said, its a Die Hard clone like many action films of the 90's. While sifting through my VHS collection for something dumb to watch, I found one and dumb I got. But the funny sort of dumb that when watching with a group of friends, becomes a fun experience that creates a communal taunting of this... not horrendous... but silly film. My friends and I personally enjoyed it, out of morbid curiosity, but I have a feeling that watching it alone would make you want to put your head through a wall.

It was not an outright clone of Die Hard, same basic plot with some specific/almost exact copies that are admittedly out order. Group of "mercenaries" take over building, take hostages, ulterior motive for doing so, blah blah blah, you know the plot of Die Hard so just replace an office building with a chemical plant. What is funny though is they seem to cram in as many visually similar events to Die Hard in the first 20 minutes as they could. Shooting a rocket at police vehicle, attacking a police car to get the entire force on the scene, black officer who communicates with the inside, a quasi are shaft scene, references to John Wayne, the main villains' name even rhymes with Hans Gruber (from Die Hard).

The whole movie is just hilarious, if you look at it from the perspective. The acting is all over the place, which is truly a thing to behold. Upon discovering the dead bodies of their fellow "mercenaries", they react with an "oh jeez" with the literal inflection of an 8 year old who dropped their sandwich in the playground sand (everyone watching audibly laughed the first time). The main villains' acting is that over the top, absurd acting of John Malkovich performance as Cyrus the Virus in Con Air (you know if you know). Its all just so laughable combined with the stiff and emotionless car wreck that is Jeff Wincott.

Combine all of this with laugh out loud filmmaking misfires such as every set other than the factory looking like a student's film project, to blatantly obvious ragdoll dummies being thrown over ledges, to smaller things like Jeff killing the first merc and not taking the mercs gun and continuing the film unarmed because.... yeah we get it you can do martial arts. The dialog? Lets not go there, I'm no Hemmingway but I can spot writing so amateurish I could have done it better myself.

So in summation, if you are looking for an explosive action film to watch; don't. But if you're THAT bored and got some possibly not sober friends, its a funny watch.

OPEN FIRE is another one of these "DIE HARD" film. I know it because I've seen it 4 times already..

Basically it stars JEFF WINCOTT as ALEX McNEIL. A former FBI agent who comes back on the job when his father gets held hostage by a group of terrorists led by KRUGER (PATRICK KILPATRICK).

In an event to save him, ALEX breaks free from the cops and slides himself into the chemical plant as he takes out the terrorists one by one..

This film is alright, but I don't know why I saw it four times.. Maybe it's because of all the action scenes it had in there..

PATRICK KILPATRICK was a very good villain in this one even though this guy had played a villain in almost every single movie he's done..

Well, see it if you can on a rainy day.. I did!

The 1990s brought forward a lot of action movies aping the basic plot of DIE HARD. Most of those movies were not very good, and this particular effort is no exception. The heart of the movie - the action sequences - is particularly badly botched. While Jeff Wincott manages to show here that he is talented in martial arts, director Kurt Anderson doesn't manage to give the fight sequences much of a spark. They instead come across as tired and routine. Anderson also doesn't do very well with other parts of the movie. To be fair, he was obviously working with an very low budget, so the cheapness of the entire affair (except for some good photography) couldn't be his fault. But he can certainly be blamed for a slow-moving story that is totally drained of energy and tension, as well as being unable to coax a lively performance out of Wincott. The movie also shows signs it was a troubled production, with some possible post-production tinkering done to try and save things. It didn't work.

Patrick Kilpatrick's (Death Warrant) antagonist Kruger (a released convict) and his goons take over a power plant and hold hostages so they can orchestrate a plan to make off with some diamonds and live happily ever after. The only problem for them is one of the hostages happens to be McNeil's (Jeff Wincott) father, and McNeil is a former FBI agent who is haunted by his partner's death, which he feels responsible for. When he hears that his father has been taken hostage this is his chance for redemption so he heads into the power plant to save the day.

And the usual mayhem ensues with the bad guys taken out, after a lengthy trade in of roundhouse kicks. The action is quite good, the plot has enough things happening, though Wincott's infiltration of the plant could've been more suspenseful. It's a Die Hard style film, but its setting in a chemical plant is inspiring. Plus it's entertaining enough. You got a diabolical villain in Robert Kilpatrick.

Pretty good time waster, but of course not exciting, just agreeable, especially for the body count game. You count the number of terrorists at the start, then calculate the number of terrorists smashed by the John McLane clone, surrogate, and check if it matches. That's the only interest in this kind of scheme. It is action packed, lousy, involuntarily funny and that's all. You don't have those kind of films released now in 2022, or in a very confidential way, on streaming only, not even DVDs. In the nineties, in France, they could even be seen in movie theaters. But it is history now. Try to enjoy, just try.