There are some nice aspects to the plot of this movie, but it’s generally executed in a messy way. Most of the action scenes are chaos at best, lacking composure. The terrible music qualifies as barely more than noise. Google & Wikipedia are calling this an action comedy but I struggle to find the comedy in it – it’s got a few sarcastic one liners that aren’t remotely funny. It’s watchable if you’re incredibly bored and lack something better to watch but I wouldn’t watch it again until a good decade later by which time I should have completely forgotten how bad it is. Any worse and I wouldn’t have bothered to leave a review. I almost didn’t do one, but I had to consider the other 6/10 rated movies in this list and in fairness this one is probably on a par with them.
Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t terrible in his role here, and his partner policeman (played by Jim Belushi) is decent value too. We’re even graced with a supporting role by a young Laurence Fishburne, 11 years before he played Morpheus in The Matrix. Other supporting actors had quality to offer too, but it wasn’t well tapped into.
This movie is so messy and all over the place, the directors probably should have been sacked and replaced by someone who can feel the atmosphere and nurture the mood inline with what an exciting action movie should feel like. This is barely better than a microbudget B movie. Such a shame because it appeared to have all the resources required to make a really good movie – it had a $29 million budget. Arnie alone was paid an $8 million salary. The core idea of the plot isn’t a terrible one but it’s simple enough to sum up in less than 10 words and the script writer seems to have stopped there. Or maybe someone accidentally put the script through a paper shredder and then directed the movie based on what came out the other side.
I ended up fast forwarding the last 10 minutes as if I’d seen it a million times before – didn’t miss anything, and kind of knew that would be the case.