Complot terroriste

The movie itself sucks donkey balls. Boring. Poorly acted.

Action thriller. A CIA agent aborts his mission but serves life for murder anyway. He is sprung from the prison to do one more job... Don Mogavero is excellent. Everything is good about this film except the wife's acting. Thankfully, she is not there long enough to spoil this film. Not terribly original but all the familiar bits are nicely put together, the result is highly entertaining.

You've got a wannabe James Bond lead character who's instead balding (with a clown afro wig stuck on the back of his head), paunchy, and with all the sexual and action movie appeal of your average family dentist. Who runs with the grace and speed of a toddler and escapes from a max security prison (which was apparently built over... an industrial... power plant?) in a jumpsuit sized for Andre the Giant. Hilarious, true, but action packed and heart pounding? No. The rest of the movie is just a mass of cliches and action movie tropes stitched together, making it utterly forgettable. Steve Railsbeck is wasted and Mr. Paws the stuffed bear deserves more screen time. I applaud the Rifftrax team (Mike, Bill, and Kevin) for being able to stay awake long enough to riff this movie so hilariously.

With modest budgets, Edgewood Entertainment's action films do manage to entertain. They're paced well, by and large. The action is what they can afford. Something blows up in every movie, and sometimes three or four somethings blow up. That's why people watch action films, and there's plenty of action in this one. There's generally a one-dimensional bad guy (JK Roberts, Rolland, the wonderfully bald Bruce Campbell terrorist), and this one has the cliche gang of small town thugs (none of these films are exactly advertisements for moving to Vermont, but Edgewood is not the Tourist Board, after all) and one more complicated and subtle bad guy.

There's always a B-plot romance, and the one in here is quite tepid, more a mild flirtation. I like the female character and actress, but if you're hoping for an R-rated sex scene, nope. Not in this one.

These films get skewered by the MST/Rifftrax guys, whom I'm a fan of, but these films are far and away above what they usually skewer. If you can't see that, it's because you are judging not the film, but the insults in riffing, like being a bully laughing along while a smarter kid makes fun of the kid in class who might just grow up to become Bill Gates. Quit doing that.

While it's true that this is a bit of a dorky-looking action hero, he's a good actor. And I just watched 2 years worth of Jack Ryan Amazon TV shows with the dorkiest looking Jack Ryan I've ever seen (and dorkier than I could have imagined), so that's hardly specific to Edgewood. In fact, I think that makes viewer identification with the hero easier. Hey, look, it's an average looking Joe, that's me, says the male viewer. I think it's a smart choice.

I could rate this higher to bring up the average rating, but I honestly think 4-5 stars is about right. You're never bored. It's interesting enough to keep me from playing video games while I'm watching the movies. The mystery in this one is pretty well done. Crap blows up. You spent 90 minutes being entertained. Isn't that the whole point?

I've seen many Edgewood studio movies, mainly due to MST3K and Rifftrax. Time Chasers was my introduction to the studio and I have also seen Radical Jack, Ice Breakers, some spider film I can't remember t he title to and this one, there may have been one more...Anyways, the movies are usually kind of bad, but they are not too horrible, seems they are getting better as they go as the spider one was a pretty good bad film. This one was not really good, but it was interesting as I was wondering where it was going after the hero got caught.

The story, a man leads a double life, his wife thinks he is a normal tech and who could blame her as the guy looks like he would have trouble mowing the lawn without injuring himself; however, he is a spy! A bad one as he keeps goofing up, still not sure how a guy can just walk in and make a cake for an ambassador. Well he fails the assassination attempt, gets arrested, loses wife and escapes prison wearing an overly large jumpsuit and while trying to expose an attempt to blow up the congressional building he wears a overly large crisp sweater. Seriously, who was in charge of the wardrobe!

As I said, I was interested to see where it was going because at first I thought it was going to be a very cheap True Lies, but the former wife and child have nothing to do with most of the film. The lead looks horrible and it does not help that he is wearing comically burnt clothes during most of the action scenes. The lady cop seems tacked on and the ending really did not have a good resolution, but it did grab my attention I guess...