With a load of medical propaganda coming from news reporters in the opening scenes, this movie couldn’t have got off to much of a worse start, so far as anyone with a brain and a heart is concerned. The action movie itself really begins around 3 minutes in.
By 15 minutes in it’s clear the movie is going hard down the pandemic route, even promoting the concept of military martial law with housebound lockdowns, military endorced quarantines with separation of family members, ritual hand sanitising upon entering rooms, and of course plenty of needles in arms — including experimental cures.
Before the end of the first half hour, it swings firmly into the horror genre. Fast forward for 5 minutes if you’re not into that kind of thing — and who in their right mind would be.
Before the end of the first hour, there’s another 5 minute horror episode to enjoy. Maybe this kind of shock & scare tactic is all part of the “don’t question the medicine” hypnosis.
Before the 90 minute mark we get yet another episode of horror, and this time it lasts pretty much till the end. As such, I’m going to rate this movie Barely Watchable overall, even though it has some high quality patches.
Kicking off with technocratic anti-nature sentiment — a theme that only grows — on top of fearmongering around apocalyptic contagions, systematic kidnappings, and freedom fighters aka terrorists — not the best start, but this is probably what got the movie sponsored.
The genre is good and the plot twists are plenty in the first half hour or so. Supporting case is not bad either. If it were to continue at this level it would be set for a Decent rating.
The second half hour sees a change in genre, from slick action to moody mystery, and the last half hour is a weird combination of these two genres. Nevertheless, I’m going to uphold the rating of Decent, on the basis of its merit, not giving too much credence to its downsides, because it’s hard to find a movie that doesn’t have similar such downsides, so on the balance of things, Decent is probably a relatively fair rating — all ratings are relative of course.
Marton Csokas, the special forces trained baddie from The Equalizer, plays the chief baddie in this movie until his younger brother, played by Jonny Lee Miller, star of Hackers, turns out to be the real baddie. Charlize Theron plays the lead role as the tomboyish femme fatale with more tactical skills than anyone else.
If you can look past the way this movie is clearly trying to paint dissenders as hypocritical manipulative wordy nutjobs, attention-seeking childish pranksters, and deceitful thieving violent hateful terrorists — while also leading them down a beans-spilling chauvinistic avenue — and if you can also look past its manipulative military, medical and LGBT narratives — then you may be able to appreciate this movie.
To its advantage, this unexpectedly DC Comics affiliated movie, has some decent actors, including a forever-masked Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith from The Matrix) as the lead male who loves the sound of his own voice, and Natalie Portman (from Léon, Star Wars and Thor) as the lead female. And when you get past a slow boring patch early on, and another in the middle, you may find it also has a mostly engaging script which is some achievement for such a slow movie.
You may also recognise British TV personality Stephen Fry playing a supporting role here.
While people who particularly like this mystery-drama genre may find this to be an excellent movie, for the smooth action hero movie connoisseur like myself I rate this movie only So-So.
This movie kicks off with the usual sick satanic vibe dressed up in a comicbook style for kids. Patience is needed early on.
Before 15 minutes in, there’s talk of “viral shedding” — clearly pushing an official alt narrative relating to the events of the last few years. A few MAGA hat wearers will buy into it, no doubt.
The first half hour continues, with a lot of eccentric semi-juvenile action. Vibes of the Deadpool genre — true junk cinema.
By the half way mark, despite its less than ideal demeanour, it’s remained quite consistently engaging and has some decent action scenes and some decent actors so it’s looking set for a Bang Average rating. Certainly not one for frequent rewatching, but the first watch holds attention quite well despite its hit & miss genre reminiscent of an average watchable show on terrestrial TV back in the days when there were only a very small set of options what to watch. Having said that, things like the extended musical scenes are highly skippable unless you’re into lame pop chanting.
It’s not pleasant to see the promotion of telling lies to kids as some kind of great parenting approach, nor the jumpy gimme gimme attitude towards high sugar chocolate as some kind of cool thing carefree youths should aspire to.
This is primarily a historical / sci-fi thriller movie, with good action, but it also verges on borderline horror, with zombies etc — similar to Blade in this regard; and like Blade, it just about qualifies for listing on this site due to its good action content and being not so unbearably horror.
The action and general production here is of a good standard, but the horror factor is a bit unpleasant to say the least. In a way it’s barely watchable, but I’m going to rate it Above Average in the end.
Tom, Annabelle, Sofia and Russell all deliver strong performances in this movie, as expected.
Several annoying modern trash culture pop songs in the first 10 minutes set this movie off to a bad start for my liking. Not helped by awkward British soap opera style dialogues either.
This movie also seems conveniently timed to push contagion theory, ready for global lockdown events that kicked off just 1 or 2 years later. This nastiness puts the final nail in the coffin to fix it Below Average which is a couple of levels down from both of Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider movies.
Marks down for promoting contagion theory from the outset, and pharmaceutical remedies to general aches & pains in the first half hour.
The recurring tranny theme doesn’t help either. Glorifying the genetic engineering of humans isn’t a good look either.
Add to this how much boring action-drama there is — although there are also many good bits, the second half is pretty much all skippable — so I rate this movie So-So for an action hero movie. Certainly below par for a modern Jackie Chan movie, but not by much.
Derailed is train hijacking movie a twist – the twist being there’s also a contagion released on the train. It’s a bit like Under Siege 2 in how there’s an elusive good guy (Van Damme instead of Seagal) taking out all the hijackers one by one. And it’s a bit like Transporter 2 in how it pushes contagion theory with all the usual trappings.
It gets off to a low budget but attention sustaining beginning, then it gets extremely one dimensional in the second half when the contagion is released. Still, with decent acting and interesting cast members, I rate this movie somewhere between So-So and OK. On a par with other semi-weak Van Damme movies like Cyborg, Death Warrant and Double Team, all of which have a similar balance of entertainment and unpleasantry in their own unique ways.
This movie also features Van Damme’s real life son, Kris, who plays Van Damme’s character’s son in this movie, and shows off some of his own high kicks early on.
Cyborg is a Mad Max style post-apocalyptic action drama starring a young Jean-Claude Van Damme just one year after his breakout movie Bloodsport.
Due to the amount of pain & suffering depicted, including plenty of murder & torture, this movie could qualify as borderline horror. The most gruesome shots are omitted but there’s still enough unpleasantry to warrant a bit of fast-forwarding.
Van Damme plays a ‘slinger’ called Gibson who helps get people out of a ruined New York City. He stumbles across a female cyborg (a robotics-enhanced human, like Robocop without the strength & weaponry) played adequately by Dayle Haddon. She needs help getting to Atlanta to deliver vital information to doctors so they can make a cure for the plague that’s ravaged the world.
He also stumbles across another female, played terribly callously & nonchalently by Deborah Richter, with an outwardly-confident nervous twitch, not dissimilar to the demeanour of an adult industry worker – no surprise therefore that she has multiple scenes of nudity here. She tags along with Van Damme’s character because she’s otherwise quite helpless in this scary wasted world, plus she’s trying to convince him to help the cyborg deliver the cure to Atlanta.
Along the way, Van Damme’s character Gibson faces a ruthless gang of pirates led by a guy called Fender (played very convincingly by Vincent Klyn) who rejoices in misery and wants to own the cure for himself. The same guy also murdered Gibson’s family, so Gibson has a vendetta to fulfil.
Due to its originality and its frequent action, with a fair bit of quality, while being let down by plenty of slow scenes with empty filler content that ought to have been condensed out, and due to the overwhelming amount of horror genre infesting this movie, I rate it So-So / Lower-OK from a smooth action hero movie fan’s perspective. It’s more than Watchable, but only just.
Fun fact: this movie was put together using the sets & costumes of the abandoned Masters Of The Universe 2 plus an abandoned Spider-Man movie. Due to budget issues, those movies were scrapped even though a lot of money had already been spent on them, so they made this movie Cyborg to put those sets & costumes to good use and it turned out to be quite a hit – well played Cannon!
The Patriot starts off seeming like a B movie in terms of cinematography, script detail and acting quality – seemingly worse than his worst early movie (Marked For Death). But it picks up and becomes a watchable movie with a mildly engaging plot, some decent scenes and a fair quality of work from the main man, Steven Seagal.
Within the first few minutes, it reeks of him not being challenged in the slightest way as he runs rampant with his own style of acting and storytelling. While there are advantages to this, in how he can unabatedly bring his visions and persona to life in the fullest form, there are of course downsides to such lack of critical feedback.
It starts to get a bit spicy within the first 10 minutes, then it deflates, then we get a bit of a plot twist as the core concept unravels.
Camilla Belle plays Steven Seagal’s androgynous-looking child in this movie. I honestly couldn’t tell if they were playing his son or his daughter until I looked it up.
Seagal drops a truth bomb or two in this movie, for example on the topic of western medicine vs alternative ways – at first I wondered how he got away with that, but it soon became apparent that it was little more than a bait & switch, as it proceeded to push modern western contagion theory, military enforced quarantine culture, and urgent blind acceptance of injectable cures. Add to that, how this movie also encourages its audience mistake patriotism for terrorism, then what we ultimately have, is 90 minutes of typical Hollywood filth, on a B movie budget!
We’ve already Steven Seagal go from skinny in his first few movies, to a stronger build in Under Siege, to getting chubby after that. Now he’s clearly gained weight on another level for this movie since his last one (Fire Down Below). He tried to hide his belly under a long trench coat in the opening scene here, but he’s not fooling anyone with that. He also took a break for a few years after this stinker, before coming back strong with Exit Wounds in 2001, so I guess he was going through a difficult time in his personal life around about when this movie was made and for some years after. Or maybe he just felt guilty about the shameful aspects of this movie, and entered a bout of depression?
Seagal divorced Kelly LeBrock in 1996 – the same year as he got written out of Executive Decision after a dispute behind the scenes – then he had mild success with The Glimmer Man (1996) and a little less success with Fire Down Below (1997) before making The Patriot (1998) under the wing of his own production company in partnership with some others. Then he took 3 years off, and came back strong with Exit Wounds co-starring DMX, Anthony Anderson, Michael Jai White and Eva Mendes.
Honestly, The Patriot is watchable – it’s a shame about its malevolent intent, but if you can overlook that and try to enjoy the movie, it’s not too bad if you’re bored and haven’t seen it before or recently enough to remember much about it. I won’t be in any hurry to rewatch it, but several years down the line I might forget almost everything about The Patriot and then be simultaneously mildly entertained and disgusted by it all over again – who knows.
Action Hero Movies