NO CONTEST
A film review by Zeke M. Towson
Copyright 1995 Zeke M. Towson
Directed by: Peter Lynch
Starring: Shannon Tweed as Sharon Bell
Andrew Dice Clay as Oz (Raymond Allen Bryce)
Robert Davi as "Sarge" Crane
Roddy Piper as Ice (1st name below the credits)
Rating: Five Stars!
Did you ever see "Die Hard?" Imagine Shannon Tweed as Bruce Willis, Andrew Dice Clay as Alan Rickman, Robert Davi as Reginald velJohnson, and Roddy Piper as Alexander Godunov. Make Tweed a former Ms. Galaxy/Tae Kwon Do expert/movie star. Make the hostages beauty queens instead of business people. Make the loot $10 million in diamonds. Instead of the company vault, have the loot come from the senator/father of one of the beauty queens. Change the office building into a hotel. Change L.A. into Toronto. Keep the computer geek. It's all there. DIE HARD at the Ms. Galaxy contest. C-4 rigged to blow the building, inept cops trying to rescue the hostages. Davi giving instructions to Tweed on a cellular phone. Tweed running roughshod all over the terrorists. Snappy one-liners. Certainly not an HBO "original" if you know what I mean (and I think you do).
For what it's worth, the movie is very, very disjointed. I found myself wondering time and again how a character made it from one place to another, or how they picked up object A or item B. The director seems to have a fetish filming Shannon Tweed running up and down stairwells. I can think of maybe six or seven "stairwell" scenes, none of which are in the artistic vein of Luc Besson. Character development is nearly non-existent. Character interaction is pretty much the standard bad guy/good guy fare, with a little twist that doesn't really lead anywhere. The main purposes of this film seem to be:
1) To see how many people can get killed
2) To see how much blood can be spilled
3) To see how many "four letter words" can be said by each character
I'm not exaggerating, almost every character is a potty-mouth. The dialogue leaves much to be desired as well. Aside from maybe one or two scenes this movie really is DIE HARD re-worked.
ZMT
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