Friday 23 January 2015

Do Or Die (1991)



I'm not sure how Pat Morita got suckered into this movie, but he manages to make Andy Sidaris's dialogue sound more natural than anyone before (or probably since), so I'm glad that he really needed to make those payments on his mortgage, or whatever.

Morita plays "Kane", a mob boss who hires six pairs of supposedly-expert assassins to take out a pair of federal agents.  Being a sporting sort of chap though, he warns the agents that the assassins are coming.

The agents swing into action ... which since they are women and this is an Andy Sidaris movie, means that they do some topless hot tubbing.  But they also find time to fill in their superior over the satellite phone.  Their boss immediately begins assembling a team to help them, but they're going to be up against the odds: Kane's men secretly planted a tracker on one of the women while he was delivering his oh-so-sporting warning.

The team assembled to help the agents includes Erik Estrada.  Estrada was a villain in the previous Sidaris film, and got blasted apart by multiple rockets, but he's back in this as a new, heroic character.  That's a pretty common thing in Sidaris films; in fact Estrada is one of three such cast members in this film.  (Pat Morita, alas, will not return, though his character does).

Anyway, there's a reason I put the word "supposedly" in "supposedly-expert assassins", as most of the attempts to kill the agents are farcically inept, and all seem to ignore the fact that the assassins work in pairs and are going up against a team of eight agents, thanks to Kane's "oh bee tee dubs I'm gonna have you whacked" warning.  So effectively although there are twelve assassins in all, they're outnumbered four to one during most of the actual encounters.

All Sidaris's usual tics - lots of nudity, clumsy exposition delivered as terrible dialogue, vehicles both real and model - are on show here.  Heck, the culmination of the film involves a model helicopter launching real rockets to take out the world's dumbest ninjas.

And really, your reaction to that last sentence is all you need to know about whether this is a film you'd enjoy.

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