A disgraced S.W.A.T. team on disciplinary training maneuvers ends up in the middle of a gangster shootout over a hidden item with nothing but training rounds and their wits.
An unintentional addition to my "Wrestlers in the movies" marathon, I stumbled across this on Netflix while in the mood for an action film, and thought "What the heck?". Considering how close all the main actors are (with the exception of Austin) in a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" way, I did not have very high hopes for this film. I was pleasantly surprised.
After saving several hostages in a grocery store holdup by using unconventional and dangerous methods and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, Austin's S.W.A.T. team is put into disciplinary re-training, which they do not take very seriously. Sent out to an abandoned military hangar to practice proper tactical procedure, they end up running into Italian and Russian mobsters squabbling over an item (which is annoyingly kept unidentified for the audience, much like the briefcase contents in Pulp Fiction). They end up besieged in an abandoned building, cut off from outside communication and with no functional armaments.
This could have been incredibly cheesy. In fact Shanks' slippery Russian accent (a holdover "skill" from his SG1 days), and the thin-thin-thin explanation of a black man as the head Italian mobster ("I was born in Rome... ROME, motherfucker!"), nearly blew the whole thing. Somehow, it all still pulled together and worked pretty well. I would give this a quality rating of somewhere close to Under Siege, which I also enjoyed. It's a gunfighting, hand-to-hand, blow-em-up kind of film that knows when to back off and throw in a little humor.
As a knitter's movie, it's okay... you're going to be dropping your needles to watch the action sequences frequently, but it's great for mindless stretches of garter or stockinette stitch where you don't have to think or count a lot. Four laugh out loud moments, one eyeroll for a particularly crude comment about weaponry named after someone's gramma, and a holy crap moment at an unexpectedly violent and bloody death. I gave this four out of five stars... probably closer to four and a half, but not quite there. Its flaws really do detract from it quite a bit, but fortunately you're only reminded of them briefly and infrequently.
If I had the room in my action film collection, the $10 price point on Amazon would certainly make this a tempting buy, since my husband found the humor of it endlessly entertaining, and I'd put it right next to the Steven Segal section. Austin is certainly a more believable action hero and decent actor in this role... if only they'd stop throwing in the hand-to-hand combat that's so clearly based on wrestling moves against an opponent with cauliflower ear, I'd take him more seriously.
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