THE STORY: Christopher Walken, action hero! Actually I've wondered if the character of McBain on the Simpson's was inspired by this movie. This McBain and the one on the Simpson's are quite different...the Simpson's version is clearly a poke at Arnold Schwarzenegger. At least they both have one thing in common. Silly action movies.

During the end of the Veitnam war, Lt. Robert McBain is in a VC prison camp being tortured. Actually he's being beaten to death by a rather large VC brute. But not for long....he's rescued by a squad of soldiers led by Captain Santos. Grateful for his rescue, McBain tells Santos he owes him his life. Santos responds by ripping a $100.00 bill in half. He gives one half to McBain and tells him that if he ever receives the other half its time to pay him back.

18 years later, Santos is in his native Colombia leading a revolution against the crooked El Presidente. If El Presidente has a name I sure didn't catch it. He's referred to as El Presidente all of the few scant scenes he's in. Suffice it to say that El Presidente is the standard evil, corrupt drug dealing dictator we expect him to be. Santos revolution fails, mostly because he expects the US to step in and aid the rebels. (boy, they should have shown the Iraqi Kurds this flick) He's killed by El Presidente, which causes his sister Christine to travel (by Donkey! At least part of the way!) to New York City to seek out McBain. McBain then gets his old unit together and they make plans to go to Colombia and avenge their old friend.

There's plenty of gunplay and action in this movie but its lacking still. The heroes are all bland. None of them seem to have a personality. Especially McBain...and you'd think he'd be at least fleshed out a little. McBain is just there...he doesn't even do a lot. I find it hard to accept that he can engineer a revolution in a foreign country when the only war time experience we see him having is being a prisoner. Christopher Walken is great as creepy villain or a psycho type in movies, but as a tough as nails action hero he just doesn't work. The absence of any real suspense doesn't help either. At least in the extremely ridiculous (but moronically entertaining) Annihilators one of the good guys gets whacked. Not so in McBain. The heroes mow down plenty of bad guys and the only one to get killed is an expendable extra-guy character thrown in near the end of the movie...and he kills himself!

Michael Ironsides is in this movie too, as a rich guy that joins McBain and his crew and has the money to get them the weapons they need.  I can't be too disappointed though. The script doesn't do Walken any favors as far as character development go, and this just isn't his type of movie. But believe me, I'd feel the same way if Eastwood or De Niro were playing McBain.

BEST LINES :  "McBain to Base, McBain to base...under attack by Commie-Nazis." - Okay, that's from the Simpson's, not this movie. It just cracks me up.

1.)  Santos must have a lot of cash saved up. I mean, if I rescue some guy and he says I owe you, I'd give him a business card or a phone number to remember me by...not a hundred dollar bill ripped in half! Maybe a dollar...most likely a quarter...but 100 smackers? Hey, Army captains don't make THAT much to be giving it away!

2.)  McBain and his boys attack and kill a nest of drug dealers in order to get the money they need for weapons. But the lowlife drug dealer says he doesn't have the kinda money they need and asks why don't they rob some big time Mafia guy instead. So they do. But then that means that McBain and his friends killed all of those drug dealers for nothing. Granted, they were scum, but that makes the heroes murderers for no good reason. I wonder what kind of intelligence they did before this heist...didn't it occur to McBain that a scummy lower echelon drug dealer wouldn't have ten million bucks lying around?

3.)  I don't know how realistic it is, but maybe someone out there can enlighten me...McBain shoots a pilot in an F-5 from the cockpit of another plane. With a pistol, while in flight. Anyone?

4.)  Even though it was mildly interesting to see the pilot guy wince at the sight of blood when Dalton performs field surgery to save a little girl, the scene was anticlimactic. Dalton worries that the surgery will kill the child but he does it in twenty seconds or less successfully. (It was interesting when the pilot winced because he just blew up two other planes in a dogfight. I guess he's an effective killer when he doesn't have to actually see blood and guts.)

NUDITY AND SEX:  none

HUH? :  Santos plan was whacko in the first place. Why believe that the CIA was going to help him overthrow the Colombian government?

At least in the movie the Annihilators the Vietnam vet buddies didn't live near each other a decade or so after the war. It seems that all of McBain's former cohorts live in New York City. 18 years after the war! I haven't seen any of my old Desert Storm buddies in the last nine years! These guys must be close!

What's the point in shooting up a peasant village? Do the villains have evidence that the village is harboring the rebel army? It doesn't seem like it to me. The idea was to enforce rule through fear, but it seems like such tactics would only inflame further rebellion.

So, the pilot guy blows himself up in a selfless act to help the rebels. Is he nuts? Yeah, it was a brave thing to do, but he's not technically a soldier and this is a battle for independence in a country he doesn't belong to. Really, he has no motivation to sacrifice himself for this cause.

How does McBain crash through the ceiling to kill El Presidente at the end? I could accept it in any other action movie but the scene here is done without any passion at all.

I guess Christine is the de facto ruler of Colombia after McBain kills El Presidente.

THE FINAL JUDGMENT:  Completely by the numbers. There are no suprises and this movie does something that doesn't happen in real life military actions...everything goes off without a hitch. Rent this only if you're really bored or you're a real Christopher Walken fan.