Now, through the combined magic of blu-ray technology, boredom and Christian forgiveness, I have given Tony Scott another shot with the Denzel Washington-Chris Pine-speeding train motion picture UNSTOPPABLE. The bad news: I didn’t like the movie enough to justify ending my boycott. The good news: at least he’s curbed his instincts to mark his territory by stylistically peeing all over every frame of film.

I’m not saying its clean, crisp filmatism. It’s kind of Bourne-esque, lots of handheld shots zooming in and out to look like a documentary. But hey, you can basically see most of what’s happening, there aren’t any cuts quick enough to cause seizures in most people, and there aren’t, like, subtitles that move around or anything ridiculous like that. Just a normal shaky sort of thriller. Baby steps back to being a real director.

Now, I know people always say if you’re gonna do a remake it should be a remake of a bad movie. That’s why you shouldn’t remake THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE. But I don’t care how weak it is, why would you remake UNSTOPPABLE, a movie that’s only six years old? Why replace the great Wesley Snipes with his MO’ BETTER BLUES co-star Denzel? And why change the plot so that instead of being about Wesley being a CIA agent who gets  injected with a drug that makes him lose a grip on reality and think he’s back in Bosnia it’s about some guys trying to stop a train with no brakes? I mean, I get it. The train is a metaphor for Wesley. But still, is this necessary?

Otherwise it’s not a bad idea for a studio disaster thriller type deal. It’s kind of an APOLLO 13 type of “let’s all figure out a bunch of different things to try to solve this problem” type of movie. You got Rosario Dawson in charge, Kevin Corrigan at her side as a safety consultant, a corporate VP guy in another office making other plans, a redneck pickup truck driver on the ground chasing after the train, various local police forces waiting to help out when the train gets to them, and then our heroes are forcibly-retiring Denzel and despised-new-guy-on-the-job-also-going-through-marital-difficulties Chris Tiberius Pine. They’re on a train stuck playing chicken with the runaway one. They’re the rogue engineer and conductor who play by their own rules, and stick it to the man and what not by not believing other people’s theories and refusing a direct order to not be stupid and risk their lives to try their own plan for stopping the train. All these characters come up with different ideas of how to stop the train or derail it before it blows chemicals into some town in Pennsylvania. And they disagree with each other’s ideas or didn’t foresee what would go wrong or whatever and keep trying until they (SPOILER) stop the train.

Which is bullshit. If it’s called UNSTOPPABLE the train shouldn’t be so stoppable. To earn that title the movie would have to end with a time lapse of thousands of years of human progress, futuristic cities building up and breaking down and going to seed and being grown over with rain forest and the whole time the train keeps looping around the world, unable to stop. Or it should be like HALLOWEEN, the train seemingly is stopped but then it disappears and you hear its rumble echoing through mountains and valleys and dark territory all around the country. It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere and nowhere, it thinks it can it thinks it can, it’s unstoppable. I could’ve definitely done with some creepy music and long shots of the front of the train as if it’s alive and evil, like CHRISTINE or something.

It’s a good cast. It even has Jeff Wincott (MISSION OF JUSTICE) in it. And Washington and Pine have a pretty good anti-chemistry as dudes who don’t really like each other having to work together. Denzel does his usual asshole routine and Pine is kind of like Captain Kirk but a little darker when you find out why his wife has a restraining order against him. Of course they work things out by him almost dying on a train (SPOILER). She’s waiting for him at the end of the line, I was hoping her having the restraining order against him would force the train to stop once it got close to her. Or that after he saves the day the cops would arrest him.

I mean seriously, both of these look like DTV covers. Just throw Cuba Gooding Jr. on there I guess.

I wonder if it’s common for a train master to be a good looking gal like Rosario Dawson? I gotta admit I don’t know a damn thing about the world of train operation, she might be a fair representation of most of them. I thought it was funny when the redneck guy was trying to explain to some cops who he was and mentioned who he works for, and one of the cops says “You work for Connie?” Everybody knows Connie. She’s the people’s train master.

This disaster is not Connie’s fault, she’s just here to clean up. The trouble was started by Ethan Suppley, the fat sidekick from that show I used to hate, My Name Is Earl. He’s supposed to be kind of a lazy dipshit of an engineer, he screws up by setting the controls of the train incorrectly, then getting off to manually flip a switch on the tracks and then failing to get back on the train. I guess this is what really caused the incident that the movie is loosely inspired by, but the movie also implies that if he just wasn’t so fat he could’ve caught up with the train. And then it makes a joke out of him, you’re supposed to laugh at him at the end. Ha ha, that slacker almost blew up a town. Ha ha. Luckily only one person was killed. The only thing missing is a subplot where he demands that Denzel recover half a bag of Doritos that he left on the train.

By the way, in a PG-13 movie you can mouth the word “FUCK!” twice if a train is drowning your voice out. It’s the yippee-ky-yay-gunshot principle. But you have to say “jag off” instead of “jack off.”

UNSTOPPABLE almost worked for me as just kind of a generic thriller. What killed it for me might not bother you guys, it might just be a weird pet peeve of mine. I didn’t have a problem with the action and peril being exaggerated and kind of ridiculous. I was willing to believe in these characters and what they were doing. My problem was with the two audiences within the movie, the people observing the main action: the media, and the people at home (and along the train tracks) watching. The way the incident is covered by the media and the way the people watching react both felt so blatantly false that it completely took me out of the movie and ruined it for me.

It’s a common problem in movies that I hate, the news reports that don’t sound like real news reports. It’s just like the fakey computers that are in so many movies, you wonder how these people who made the movie expect their audience to be made up of people who are not very familiar with computer screens or TV news. Are they making movies mainly for the Amish?

As far as I can tell this was not intended as any sort of satirical attack on the media, but the train disaster is constantly being covered by the newscopters and camera crews. They know what happened, they know the names of the people involved and they have good photos of them. They have logos and animated diagrams. They  are able to fly down close to the action, show it, and always be completely aware of exactly who is involved and what they are trying to do and they’re able to explain it as it happens. So you get that double-whammy of not being believable as news coverage and being insulting of your intelligence as an audience member who already understands that he’s trying to climb down and push the pin down so that the trains can lock together, or whatever. And if Chris Pine’s character is annoyed that a loud helicopter is flying maybe ten feet away from him blasting air on him while he tenuously hangs from a high speed vehicle with a very high likelihood of falling to his death then he was very polite and never mentioned it at all.

At the same time they’re pretty pessimistic, at one point naming our two heroes as about to become the first victims of Pennsylvania’s deadliest train crash. Seems a little presumptuous.

Last week I watched CNN covering this speech by Egyptian president Mubarak. It had been leaked that he was gonna make a resignation speech, but when he finally got up there he made a long, rambling speech about how he was not gonna step down. It was in desperate need of an Oscar orchestra to play him off. The huge crowds of protesters who were gathered in the square were of course upset, and chanting (according to the text on CNN’s screen) for him to get out. Meanwhile Wolf Blitzer was very confused and kept asking, both rhetorically and to various other people appearing on the broadcast, why the crowd was so excited when it seemed like they should be upset about the speech. If it took Wolf Blitzer 5 minutes to figure out that the crowd was angry when it was written on the bottom of the damn screen I really do not believe that this reporter would be able to spontaneously interpret and correctly explain all of Chris Pine’s actions as he jumps across and tries to couple the two trains.

I just find it very hard to believe that it would be covered this way. And hey, whaddya know, I can prove that it wouldn’t be, because the real incident was not covered this way. I looked it up. When it really happened everything was kept secret. It was months before the company admitted what caused the accident, and they never released the name of the engineer involved or said what happened to him (or her). The stopping of the train was shown on live TV, but it wasn’t so dangerous because in real life the idea of coupling the train worked much better than in the movie, so they didn’t have to jump from a moving vehicle FAST AND THE FURIOUS style. They actually slowed it down enough that a guy just ran alongside and jumped on.

Maybe even less excusable than the phony news coverage is the phony reactions from the people watching the news, or watching live from alongside the train tracks. This is one of those movies that has a whole damn lot of shots of crowds standing around looking nervous, scared, happy, triumphant, or whatever while watching all the action on TV. People reacting to the TV footage in control rooms, offices, living rooms and a Hooters restaurant (seriously – Denzel’s character’s daughters both work there. Apparently their bosses don’t send them home even though their dad is in extreme danger. And it’s even one of ‘em’s birthday. What the hell? But at least they get to watch the TV, they’re not taking people’s orders or anything).

But like the news media the people watching all seem to have omniscient powers and understand everything that’s going on, as if they’re actually watching the movie themselves. For example, when one of our heroes has to jump from a truck onto the train or vice versa as soon as he transfers from one vehicle to the other all of the crowds smile and cheer. Why? He has not gotten himself to safety. He has moved from one out of control vehicle to another of the same speed. He is just as likely to die horribly right before our eyes now as he was a few moments ago. But somehow his wife instantly knows what we know, that movie conventions dictate that he will now survive. And that’s a good thing, because for some reason she has brought his very young son and is holding him up for a good view of his father’s almost-certain-but-apparently-now-just-barely-avoided horrible tragic live on TV heroic death.

I mean, how am I supposed to believe in the danger if the characters clearly don’t? Rosario calls the redneck guy on his cell phone while watching him drive 70mph next to the train, and the fucking guy answers! And she didn’t even have anything important to say, such as “Don’t answer your phone while you’re driving! Keep both hands on the steering wheel!”

So, sorry to say but UNSTOPPABLE is easily toppable. Not very good, and not Tony Scott’s best. But very, very far from his worst. Way to improve, I guess?

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER III: UNFINISHED BUSINESS continues from part 2, clearly shot back-to-back and even including a “previously on Universal Soldier” type montage. Burt Reynolds is the sleazy CIA director trying to stop Luc Deveraux (Matt Battaglia, not Van Damme) and the reporter from revealing the UniSol program. I’m sure he wouldn’t get in trouble, but Congressional hearings are probly a pain the ass, you gotta go to bed early the night before, get your suit cleaned, send your lawyer a thank you note, all that shit. Easier to just stay out of the headlines.

Reporter Lady is still a fugitive, blamed for crimes she didn’t commit. They go to Canada to find her ex-boyfriend, a reporter on the financial beat she thinks could help. He’s covering “The Cyber Wealth Summit” where “the Cyber Community” of millionaires are all congregated, so she sneaks in disguised as a waiter while Luc waits outside. But some terrorists take everybody hostage – holy shit, it’s a DIE HARD ripoff within a UNIVERSAL SOLDIER sequel! You don’t see that every day. Luc saves the day and kills the bad guys, then it’s back to regular UNIVERSAL SOLDIER except the scientists turn the dead hostage takers into their next batch of UniSols.

More interestingly, the evil scientist is working on a new super soldier clone that starts out as a fetus and rapidly grows into a kid. He teaches the clone to call him father. I was hoping Luc would get to fight a little kid UniSol, but unfortunately it grows into his brother (still Jeff Wincott). The clone is brainwashed to not remember him, and to really fuck with his mind it has a bomb in its chest. Surprisingly, when the bomb goes off it seems to be an M-80. Interesting choice.

The ex-boyfriend’s in-movie lifespan is reminiscent of the car-bombed love interest in DEATH WISH III, and Reynolds’s so-bad-at-first-you-don’t-realize-it’s-supposed-to-be-an-accent accent is the weirdest since Dennis Hopper’s in TICKER.

I know there were a couple funny lines and weird touches, but I can’t find where I wrote them down and don’t remember very well. I think the clone kid killed a cat or something, and the scientist said he was proud of him. Something like that. At the end we learn that there are sleeper UniSols all over the country and they’re activated. The last one we learn about is then-President Bill Clinton. Stupid Republicans going after the blowjobs and the real estate deals, they had no idea this was right under their noses the whole time.

Director Jeff Woolnough went on to direct a whole bunch of TV episodes and a TV movie about Celine Dion. Writer Peter Lenkov got a story credit on DEMOLITION MAN and co-producer on BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SEVER.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN, which returned Emmerich and Devlin’s thrilling saga to the big screen, is about the time that the Universal Soldier returned, I guess. Jean-Claude Van Damme returns to the role of Luc Deveraux, the Vietnam K.I.A. who was revived into a zombie super soldier and then went rogue and learned a few human emotions (a story that started in part 1 and continued with Matt Battaglia as Deveraux in parts 2 and 3). But this time he’s not a terminator, he’s an ordinary single father like any other Van Damme character. He’s in charge of training the UniSols for non-sinister computer genius Xander Berkeley (seriously, he’s a good guy in this, I’m not lying) while a super computer called SETH (voice of Michael Jai White!) tutors his daughter. But when government cutbacks force the cancellation of the UniSol program, SETH protects his interests by doing brain surgery on the soldiers and controlling them to do his bidding. And only Deveraux can stop them, because… because he’s the main character. And for some reason there’s a new pretty lady reporter there when the shit hits, so she becomes the female lead instead of Van Damme’s asskicking colleague, who has to go take car of his daughter.

I don’t really understand why they brought back Van Damme only to be unrecognizable as the same character. It seems like somebody told them it was the reporter lady that people liked about the first one, not the undead super soldier hero. So they team him up with a reporter again, but make him not an undead super soldier. Just an ordinary revived dead guy good at kickboxing (he just explains that they “reversed the process” so he’s alive and regular now).

The character SETH is pretty funny. I got a kick out of a super computer talking in a gruff Michael Jai White voice instead of the usual eerily calm HAL 9000 types. I bet if you wanted to you could go into the preferences and switch it to a Kris Kristofferson voice too. Later SETH puts himself into a bionic MJW body so he can fight Van Damme. In case you haven’t figured it out yet I really like MJW’s screen fighting style. Impressive kicks, heavy on poses, and he even does that move I’m a sucker for where you kick a chair so it slides across the floor. And he does it more than once. So obviously this isn’t a worthless movie.

SETH is supposed to be more enhanced than the other UniSol’s, so if Deveraux was dead it would still be an underdog story. But since he has no super powers it’s really unclear why he’s so evenly matched with SETH’s super strength. I guess just because he loves his daughter so much. My favorite part is a completely nonsensical move where he runs across the type of a bunch of lawn chairs and then up a wall. As far as I can tell it accomplishes nothing at all in the fight other than to look cool. I love it.

The producers I guess didn’t think Van Damme and White were big enough names, so they threw in WWE wrestler Goldberg as the lead henchman UniSol named Romeo. Not Whoopi Goldberg, I’m talking about the big bald meathead who starred in HALF PAST DEAD 2. He growls alot and gets alot of the funniest stupid lines, like when he’s on fire and says “I’m just getting warmed up!” You get it, because of he’s on fire, that’s why he says that. Warmed up, see.

The opening action scene (water ski chase through swamp) is pretty cool, but like many of the other action scenes it hobbles itself by using rock songs with crunchy guitars and troll voices. They keep using that as shorthand for “this part is awesome,” but I never buy it. I don’t know if maybe young headbanger kids who like that kind of music get pumped up for an action scene when they hear that, but to me it completely deflates it and seems desperate. “Hey kids, I know you are confused by this old Belgian man, but what about the rocknrollers? You like this stuff? They wear scary masks I bet! Let’s go download some MP3s together!”

There are a couple of clever action moments: whatsername riding Goldberg down a stairway like a sled, Van Damme watching the x-ray of his UniSol opponent so he can punch the face at the right angle to dislodge a faulty chip. But after that most of the fights are guys at some generic warehouse firing machine guns and huge explosions going off. Not much to it. It does have a few funny lines though, like when a strip club bouncer that Van Damme headbutted earlier comes after him with a bunch of friends and Van Damme pleads, “Please, no violence.”

This is a dumb movie, but adequate enough to hold your attention, and it has a few bright spots, like having JCVD fight MJW (but why does that come before fighting Goldberg?) Still, you only got so many days to live on this earth, and there are alot of other Van Damme movies.

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I’m talking of course about UNIVERSAL SOLDIER 3, the new one which is gonna reunite Dolph Lundgren with Jean-Claude Van Damme. I will be seeing it shortly and let you know what I think, but first I had to straighten out a few things about this series. You see, there are four UNIVERSAL SOLDIER movies that have come out previously to part 3. Do you see where I’m going with this? I’m not a mathematical genius – or a mathematical average, for that matter – but by my calculations part 5 cannot be part 3. Or at least the odds are against it.

So I decided to investigate, renting the sequels to the 1992 original that still to this day remains Roland Emmerich’s, uh, best movie. Hahem. Not to get too hyperbolic on you, I don’t want to raise your expecations too high.

Parts 2 and 3 are on VHS only, and don’t have Van Damme in them. And the very first credit answers the numbering conundrum: “The Movie Channel Presents…” See, these were made for cable, and in the grand scheme of things “made for cable” ranks lower than “made for video,” therefore these sequels can be disregarded and erased in the event that the original star returns. Which makes me see THE SUBSTITUTE series in a different light, come to think of it. I’m not sure what this means for SNIPER 3 though since it was made for cable but still starred Tom Berenger.

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER II almost seems like a TV series – it even has the subtitle, “Brothers In Arms,” written in quotes at the beginning like an episode title. Gary Busey and Jeff Wincott are listed as guest stars or special appearances or something.

It starts with a fight between two similar looking musclemen which ends with one muscleman having his hand impaled and being crunched up in a threshing machine, and that’s when you realize Van Damme and Lundgren’s characters have been recast. Matt Battaglia plays Van Damme’s character Luc Devreaux, still with the fugitive TV reporter Veronica Roberts (now played by Chandra West [PUPPET MASTER 4-5]), hiding out as his parents’ house, learning things that robotic zombie soldiers don’t know about, like kissing and knock knock jokes.

But a corrupt mercenary (Gary Busey) is taking over the Unisol program, and they come after Luc and take him back. There’s a boring section of the movie where Veronica is driving around looking for him, but it pickes up once she sneaks into a military compound and unfreezes Luc’s older brother Eric, who was blown up in Vietnam. He’s played by Jeff Wincott (MISSION OF JUSTICE‚ and he’s just resurrected, not super soldiered, so he acts like regular Jeff Wincott, except a little confused because he’s from the ’60s and doesn’t know about twist off caps.

I can’t really recommend this exactly, but it winds up being more watchable than most DTV. It seems like they’re actually trying, putting in some energetic cuts and camera moves and using alot of different typs of music, from pop to classical. There’s one great moment of crazy and it’s set to the overused but never gets old “Spirit In the Sky.” Busey arrives to meet with a group of soldiers, who are surprised to see him alive. He tells them they’ve been chosen because they’re the best , and they should be very proud. Then he pulls out a machine gun and mows them all down. Then it shows a tear coming out of his eye. Beautiful.

Despite his guest star credit, Busey gets plenty of screen time and he’s in the much preferred post-accident Crazy Busey mode. He has some funny tought guy lingo and metaphors, like when he’s demonstrating the Unisols to a terrorist, the guy pulls out an empty briefcase and pours a pouch of diamonds into it, and BUsey says, I take it we’re engaged.”

The guest star billing should actually go to Burt Reynolds as the shadowy puppetmaster seen mostly just at the end, like David Carradine at the end of KILL BILL VOLUME 1.

The action isn’t anything memorable, and there’s not any significant gore or anything. There’s a funny part where she finds a drawer full of eyeballs. Also it shows the dude’s ass at the beginning, maybe as a tribute to Van Damme. That’s the different between network TV and The Movie Channel: ass. Well, unless you count NYPD BLUE, that’s network TV that shows ass. But most shows don’t.

Battaglia I guess was a football player, and he makes Howie Long look like Jeremy Irons. I really can’t tell how much of his monotonous performance is playing a zombie soldier and how much is limited range. Either way it works – uncharismatic, but funny. And having Jeff Wincott to bounce off of makes it more bearable.

“Highly anticipated! UNIVERSAL SOLDIER II [is] bearable!” says Vern of outlawvern.com

I’ll have more reviews coming your way including UNIVERSAL SOLDIER III: UNFINISHED BUSINESS, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN, AVATAR, UNIVERSAL SOLDIER 3: A NEW BEGINNING, etc.

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They’re really into Van Damme and mixed martial arts and stuff like that. They make fun of Seagal a little, but you can tell that’s one of their favorite types of movies. “JD” was the guy who contacted me, but his co-host “Thunder” keeps mentioning this DTV kickboxer guy called Jeff Wincott, and in the latest episode they actually scored an interview with him. I really wasn’t familiar with this guy and of course I’m always trying to expand my horizons and enjoy the vast spectrum of everything available, all the way from Van Damme to Jeff Wincott. The movie they talked about most in the interview is called MISSION OF JUSTICE, so I decided that would be a good one to start with.

Man, how did I miss this one before? I mean I’m not sure it’s rocketing to the top of my list, but it’s probaly gonna be scribbled somewhere in the margins of the list at the very least. It’s kind of like a really good Dudikoff movie that occasionally reaches for STONE COLD level awesome. It’s got quite a collection of the great action movie tropes: stumbling across a liquor store robbery, cop who gives up his badge, partner who risks her job to help him continue his investigation, undercover infiltration of a mysterious organization, evil person pretending to be good to run for mayor (Brigitte Nielsen!), best friend murdered, chop shop, nice grandma who you just know is gonna get murdered, incriminating video tape…

Wincott plays a cop named Kurt Harris who gets disillusioned due the red tape, etc. and because of no justice or whatever. First thing he does after quitting is go to the gym and hang out with his old friend, the former heavyweight champion boxer Cedric Williams, who’s played by Tony Burton (Apollo Creed’s trainer and then Rocky’s corner man, he appeared in all six ROCKY movies and in the last one got to say “Let’s start building some hurt bombs!”)

Of course, that night Cedric gets murdered by the evil politician and her henchmen (a bunch of burly dudes in suits with hair down past their shoulders) so Kurt goes to join her Guardian-Angels-meets-martial-arts-clan-meets-self-help cult, the Mission of Justice, to investigate from the inside. That’s a great moment because at first you assume MISSION OF JUSTICE is just a rejected Seagal title, it’s gonna be about a guy who’s out for justice or out for a kill, that’s his mission. But then you see MISSION OF JUSTICE written on a sign outside a gate and you realize that no, it’s about a certain institution called the Mission of Justice. The members are called “Peacekeepers,” they wear white t-shirts, rings and belt buckles with yin-yangs on them. So Harris works his way up the ladder and tries to get to the bottom of who killed his friend.

But let’s back up a little bit, because the killing of his friend is one of the great parts of the movie. Brigitte and her boys come into the gym and start threatening the champ, so he challenges her brother Titus to a fight to settle their dispute. Unfortunately, the champ is the best at punching but doesn’t realize he’s fighting a kickboxer, and that whole leg thing fucks him up. And he doesn’t have a guy to train his legs like Michael Jai White did in UNDISPUTED II. So Titus breaks his hands, defeats him, and then actually takes his championship belt! But it’s Brigitte herself that pulls out two big knives and slashes his throat ninja style.

Harris is a freshly ex-cop but he’s the kind who does martial arts, so he does well at the Mission of Justice. I’m not sure how they have so many Peacekeepers though, because the initiation seems unnecessarily tough. He has to stickfight his way through a gauntlet of about 50 guys who all have sticks themselves. According to that Stack of Dimes interview Jeff Wincott had never used sticks before, they just trained him for 45 minutes before the scene, but you would never guess that. It looks like he spins them around real good even when they show it in slow motion.

There’s alot of fights with drills, chainsaws, guys flying through the air, etc. One thing I love is that his partner from his police days, Lynn Steele (Karen Sheperd), is a little badass. Early on a guy picks her up like a log and whacks her head against a shelf and you kind of figure that’s the end of that character, but no. She’s real tiny but she does martial arts too and just goes into a rage and beats the hell out of guys. It’s funny when she’s in situations where she ought to pull her gun and arrest somebody but she just keeps punching them in the belly like 25 times and kicking them in the nuts, etc.

Brigitte Nielsen is of course a hatable villain. And I’m pretty sure there’s one scene where she has her trademark flattop, and the rest of the time she has long hair.

I can see why those guys like Jeff Wincott. He’s kind of in the Mickey Rourke or Wesley Snipes school, a guy who is a real actor but also fights. I’m not saying he’s as good as either of those guys, but it’s nice to see a guy in a cheesy movie like this who does a great job of both the martial arts and the acting. He also looks alot like Michael Wincott, the gravelly voiced dude from ALIEN RESURRECTION, THE CROW, DEAD MAN, etc. Maybe because they’re brothers or maybe it’s a coincidence, or a combination of the two.
major spoilers next three paragraphs

At times the movie feels pretty generic, but the climax is so great it takes it to the next level. Brigitte is doing a press conference right on the verge of being elected mayor. Meanwhile Harris is fighting Titus somewhere in the same building. The fight goes on for a while and suddenly Titus tears open his coat and reveals that he’s wearing the championship belt underneath! By that point I had totally forgot about it so it was hilarious to find out he was wearing it around pretending to be the champ. Then Harris kicks him through a window and he lands in the middle of the press conference. Billy (who I never mentioned before but you should watch the movie anyway so I can’t tell you everything) walks in and tells the reporters who killed the champ. Brigitte tries to play it cool but then somebody else puts a security tape on the monitor that shows her standing there torturing Billy and talking about how she murdered the champ.

You know that old cliche: they secretly tape the bad guy revealing the horrible truth and they play it on TV or whatever and that solves everything. I’ve always wanted to see one where they play the incriminating tape and then nothing happens. Because that seems to happen alot. Or how about the incriminating tape works but then during the end credits there’s a fake Fox News show where they talk about how Brigitte was right. I mean, the cops that beat Rodney King got off. Oliver North actually had people supporting him when he ran for Senate. Dick Cheney has a classic rock show on XM satellite radio. (I made that last one up – arguably.)

But Brigitte doesn’t think about that. She’s at that moment where the shit hits the fan and instead of keeping a straight face like Oliver North she panics and pulls out her two big knives and tries to cut her way out. So that probaly comes off pretty bad on the news. I’m not sure if her campaign can recover from that gaffe.

You know, come to think of it the title does mean what you thought it meant initially. The Misson of Justice is not a mission of justice. His mission of justice is actually a mission against the Mission of Justice. It has a double meaning, which is admirable in a genre where many titles don’t even have a single meaning.

The director is Steve Barnett (you know, the post production supervisor of LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD). Wincott went on to do other action movies (he played the brother of the re-cast Van Damme character in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER 2-3) and more recently TV shows including 24, SONS OF ANARCHY and THE WIRE. I’ll have to check out some more of his movies.

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