Friday 27 February 2015

Day of the Warrior (1996)



For his second last film, Andy Sidaris brings in professional wrestler Marcus "Buff" Bagwell to play the villain.  It says something about Sidaris's usual casting priorities that Bagwell - playing secret agent turned pro wrestler turned international criminal mastermind "The Warrior" - is easily the most convincing performer in every scene he's in.

Sidaris has by now abandoned the wacky credit sequences of his early films and goes to the obvious well to kick off this movie: naked ladies.  One of the agents, you see, is in "deep cover" as an exotic dancer.

There are four undercover agents in fact, all of them attempting to infiltrate the Warrior's operations, and as the movie begins we discover that their covers are in jeopardy.  Someone inside the agency has sold their data to Warrior.  It'll take the bad guys some time to crack the encryption on the information, but once they do, those agents are dead.  The agency must therefore find and warn their agents before that happens, and without exposing them to Warrior in the process.

Exciting stuff eh?  Well, not really, since Sidaris is much more interested in lame jokes and boobies.  The boobies I expected, but the lame jokes are something new.  Or at least their frequency is.  You'd expect the odd "witty" one-liner in an early Sidaris film, but here we have characters stiltedly flirting via jokes.

"It's not like this back home.  Back home it's real flat."
"How flat is it?"
"It's so flat, that when your dog runs away, you can still see him three days later."

I mean, it got a laugh, but I was laughing at the movie, not with it.

So basically there's lots of running around, frequent breaks for the women to get naked, and then a climactic shoot-out rages while Warrior tries to kill two of the agents in hand to hand combat.  I've seen Bagwell in worse wrestling matches, frankly.

Anyway, apart from the amusement factor of seeing this sort of nonsense --


-- this is all par for the course Andy Sidaris stuff.  Either you're one of the wacky few who find his nonsense strangely entertaining, or you're one of the far larger group who are not.

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