No Exit aka Fatal Combat (1997)

Tagline:

It's illegal. It's immoral. And it's always deadly.

Back of DVD:

Professor John Stoneman teaches at the local university. John's philosophy is non-violence and he tries to handle every situation without hurting anyone. His way of life changes when he kills the punks who attacked his wife, causing her to lose their baby. The incident comes to the attention of Houston Armstrong, a reclusive billionaire who illegally broadcasts fights where opponents have to kill or be killed. John is kidnapped by Armstrong's men and imprisoned at his place high above the Artic Circle where the fights take place. There is no chance for escape, no mercy and No Exit. In John's first bouts he refuses to kill his opponents, but will he change his mind when his wife's life is on the line again?

Movie Review:

No Exit is another tournament fighting movie. There sure seems to be a lot of these; I guess the plot is tried and trusted. I don't think it's had a DVD release outside of Australia so I guess this is fairly unknown, but I will say on the outset that there is not a great deal to say about it. Jeff Wincott is unintentionally amusing throughout but otherwise this is very standard stuff.

As the Back of DVD paragraph above states, Jeff Wincott plays a professor at a university. A young student, Jason Samuels, arrives in a darkened room looking to sign up to a course. Wincott appears from the shadows and starts calling him filthy names and generally losing his shit at Jason for no reason. The whole time Jason just repeats that he is a third level black belt in tae-kwon-do and threatens to fight back, but doesn't. Then the house lights come on and reveal an audience of students. Wincott explains that this was a demonstration of violence and hatred, if that wasn't fucking obvious, and how violence is a bad thing. I never knew universities took thirty week courses with the result being a Masters degree in essentially anger management, but Wincott teaches said course.

Wincott's pregnant wife arrives to take him home, but first they check in at the hospital to check on the baby's progress. As they leave for the car park Wincott realises he has left his credit card inside and goes in to retrieve it, leaving his wife at the car. This of course is when a gang of five thugs show up and attack Wincott's wife. When he returns he tries his "violence is not the answer" routine but with that not working, kickboxes four of the guys to the ground. The fifth holding his wife hostage with a knife won't be bargained with and stabs her in the stomach. Wincott unleashes the fury and knocks the guy dead to the ground, but it is too late for the baby.

Jason shows up to give his support to Wincott and the missus during this trying time but they are both accosted by guys in suits who beat them unconscious and take them in a car to an unknown facility. Here we meet Houston Armstrong, the owner of an underground TV show called "No Exit", a show where combatants fight to the death in various arenas for the amusement of wealthy Japanese businessmen. Wincott like Ghandi tries to use non-violent resistance but this just gets his arse kicked at every available opportunity. The first lunch in the mess hall turns into violence when the reigning No Exit champion, Darcona, takes both a dislike to Wincott and a liking (if you catch my drift) to Jason. Lunch trays are thrown, bodies are beaten, etc.

In his prison style cell, Wincott meets another combatant, Doc, who patches up his wounds. He tells him that you have to fight to win and you have to kill, or you will be killed. Ever the buddhist, Wincott says he will not kill. Wincott is taken to see Houston to explain himself and the guy is just sitting there meditating surrounded by candles and really hamming up his performance. He's not a bad evil villain, but he's pretty much just a fat sack of crap.

We get to see a couple of fights early on, with the first being Doc and a random we don't know hitting on each other in a cage to the tunes of a guitar power ballad. Doc manages to beat the guy and runs to the end of the course, breaks a glass window and retrieves a keycard. He slides the keycard over an arm band he is wearing, says "I'm sorry" to the other guy who then explodes for the viewers at home!

Wincott also teaches Doc some breathing techniques through a pretty lame display of tai-chi in their wrestling costumes. It's all a bit... fruity. Wincott gets his own fight with a guy in an electrified cage, fighting with electrified poles. He beats the guy by pushing him into the electric fence, but still refuses to finish him off. This refusal to play by the rules causes rifts within the No Exit management and Wincott has to be taught a lesson, so the obvious thing to do is give his friend Jason to Darcona to be used and abused as a sexual plaything. Wincott annoyingly still refuses to kill so the Houston has to find other weaknesses of Wincott's to exploit.

There's a couple of fighting and training montages to more power ballads - one is actually called No Exit - and the movie ends exactly how you think it will end. It's doesn't really excite and barely manages to raise a smile out of me. This isn't really worth your time, though if it's on late at night or you see a DVD or VHS for $2 like I did, I guess you could do worse. It's not particularly cringe-worthy (except for Wincott's tai-chi faces) but neither is it particularly memorable. I made it to the end with only checking the time twice so I guess that's something. I will give Wincott the benefit of the doubt however as he showed a bit of skill, and some of his other flicks like Martial Outlaw, The Killing Machine and Deadly Bet look like more fun.

And watch out for that trailer below, it basically shows the entire movie including the finale.

The Video:

Standard affair here. Soft but generally pleasing full screen picture, clear stereo audio. Nothing outstanding at all but it's not an outstanding movie. The trailer below is widescreen so I'm wondering if we're missing out on a correct aspect ratio DVD. Runtime 92 minutes.

Sourced From:

Dick Smith for $2.

Trailer:

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Connors' War (2006)

Tagline:

It's Personal. It's War.

Back of DVD:

After losing his eyesight during a botched CIA operation, Special Agent Connors agrees to be injected with a highly-experimental serum that promised to cure his blindness. Armed with extraordinary new vision, Connors successfully completes one last mission - only to discover he's been tricked into helping terrorists steal a chemical weapon. Now, he must turn his first defeat into his final victory and bring down a madman hell-bent on catastrophic destruction.

Movie Review:

I took a gamble on this when I saw it in the video shop. I needed five movies to get one free when picking up some ex-rentals and was out of options until I saw this - a Sony Pictures, obviously direct-to-dvd actioner with the guy who starred along side Steven Seagal in Today You Die - Anthony 'Treach' Criss - and the girl who starred along Steven Seagal in Half Past Dead - Nia Peeples. If they are good enough for ol' ponytail, they are good enough for me. I didn't know it at the time but the director of Connor's War, Nick Castle, was also responsible for The Last Starfighter! Score.

The movie starts in a hotel opposite the White House. Some terrorists are holding the First Lady hostage in the dining room and have said they have also killed some waiting staff and armed the doors with explosives. Enter Darryl Greene (Garwin Sanford, from lot's of TV like Stargate, Eureka, Supernatural) with his SWAT team ready to kick arse, but are subdued by Brooks (Blu Mankuma, similar filmography) who says he has a man in action ready to go. Greene is still eager but gives Brooks' guy ten minutes to get the job done, and that guy is Connors (Treach).

Treach, hiding in the kitchen's dumbwaiter, sneaks out dressed as a waiter. One of the terrorists give him shit so Connor's stabs him with a kitchen knife and throws him into the quick-freezer. Connors' delivers champagne to the lead terrorist who is busy telling his life story to the First Lady, but Connors' is mentally taking note of all the players in the room. When the timing is right, he snatches the lead terrorists' two guns and lays out all the other terrorists quickly and cleanly. He radio's that he's complete his mission but Greene's SWAT guys are already knocking the door down which is armed with explosives. He yells for them to stop but the door explodes and the flash of the explosion permanently blinds Connors.

Three years later, Connors' has become a drunk who wakes from his hangover in the afternoon and just starts drinking again. He may be blind but his sense of hearing makes up for it, and he can tell when his old boss Brooks shows up. After a bit of jibber-jabber, Brooks offers Connors' a deal - do one last job for him and with a revolutionary new technique his eyesight will be restored. Brooks says that he knows he is about to be replaced by some sort of satellite technology that can do his job (I thought that was strange, too) and wants to steal the laptop that controls the thing away from Greene. Connors' agrees for the sake of his eyes and goes with Brooks to a safehouse where doctors are waiting, one of them the hot-for-45 Nia Peeples. They say that they are going to inject his eyes with a serum that will restore his sight so he sits in front of a machine and gets needles shot straight into his eyeballs.

Connors' sight eventually comes to when he and Brooks have made it to their destination, the military facility that holds the laptop. His eye sight, he says, is better than ever before, though we as the viewer see a mess of bright lights in tunnel-vision. With his old security pass still active, Connors' gains entrance easily to the building and both knocks the power out and steals the briefcase containing the laptop. His super-sight allows him to see in the dark so he easily escapes to his car, but soldiers catch up with him and fire on the car as he drives off. Unfortunately his eyes fail and he crashes into a river, although somehow he manages to blindly get back to the Brooks' car who takes him to the safehouse doctors where they remove the serum from his eyes, and Brooks collects his briefcase.

The next day he awakes to Nia Peeples cooking him lunch. When Connors' tells her about the job last night she says that from what she saw the briefcase didn't contain a laptop but a thermos (of green shit). Connors' knows exactly what this is (apparently a nerve gas bomb) and that people will be after him for stealing it, and at that moment Peeples notices two guys in suits approaching the house...

I thought Treach did a good job in this. Apparently acting is his night job, and by day his is a rapper for the group Naughty by Nature. Now I'm an advocate for death metal so know not of such activities, but as far as the lead in an action-thriller goes he did well, and thankfully kept the jive-talk that Seagal favours so much to a minimum. There was a couple of more action-driven scenes where Treach wrestles with a guy and breaks his neck, and jumps in the air shooting three guys before he hits the ground on his side, but he does far more sneaking around and threatening people than kicking guys arses.

That being said though, unlike other thrillers-posing-as-action movies I was not bored by this; not at all. I only checked the clock once and was surprised I was over an hour into it, so that speaks worlds about Connors' War as far as I'm concerned. Nia Peeples is fine as the companion doctor Amanda who has never fired a gun, but manages to take out a guy by unloading a full clip into him, and with Connors, try to stop the nerve gas bomb from being used by Brooks as a revenge bargaining chip with Greene.

Aside from the blind man regaining his sight concept, Connors' War isn't hugely original or anything and there aren't enough explosions (though I do say that a lot) and it even has a bomb-defusal finale, but it's a lean ride at 86 minutes and not overly complicated, which is something I really DO like in my action movies. Convoluted plots suck when you just want to see cars blow up, and although we didn't get any of that here, this simple stop-the-bad-guys story works well enough without them. Recommended.

The Video:

Again a typical, modern DTV film presentation - a crisp 16:9 enhanced video with strong colours and a thumping DD 5.1 soundtrack. Very sharp, very pleasing. Runtime 86 minutes.

Sourced From:

Ex-rental disc for $5.

Trailer:

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The Contractor (2007)

Tagline:

The world's greatest marksman is now a marked man.

Back of DVD:

When retired marksman James Jackson Dial (Snipes) is given the chance to finish the one assignment the never completed, it's an opportunity he can't resist. Agreeing to fly to London and exterminate a deadly terrorist held in police custody, Dial soon finds this routine assignment quickly dissolves in to a nightmare...when he discovers he's been double-crossed and set up by his former employer. With the British police closing in and the Agency wanting to tie up any 'loose ends', Dial's only hope is a 12 year-old girl whom he reluctantly befriends as he desperately searches for a way out and the truth behind his betrayal.

Movie Review:

It's high time I got some Snipes action onto this blog so why not start with a more recent DTV effort, The Contractor. Poor Wesley hasn't had a great deal of luck lately what with his well known tax issues, so he has had to make do with a whole stack of DTV actioners since 2004's Blade Trinity - some good (Chaos), some not so good (7 Seconds was pretty silly). The Contractor falls somewhere in between.

In Montana, Snipes is taking care of his horses on his ranch while he wears the full cowboy getup. Two black cars approach and Snipes goes inside to talk business. It seems Snipes once was a tops marksman for the CIA and has retired, but is now being offered 'one last mission' by his old boss Collins to assassinate a terrorist as he is being transported to jail in the UK. This mission is obviously off the radar so he has to get in and get out as quick as possible. Snipes has had a run in with this terrorist before so gladly accepts the chance to off him.

He arrives in the UK and meets his driver who takes him on a cab ride to his hotel, briefly stopping to take photos of a clock tower (presumably going to be used for the assassination). After reviewing the plans with his associate, the next morning Snipes dons a priest outfit and takes his place in the tower with a sniper rifle, his associate on the ground on a walkie-talkie back to him. The prisoner exchange takes place and Snipes is ready to fire, but with all the cops around he misses his opportunity and the prisoner is taken into a building. Luckily he stands clear in the path of a window and Snipes pulls off his shot, knocking the guy dead. Snipes packs up and flees to the awaiting cab and driver but the cops are on to them and pursue. The cops get a lucky shot in and shoot the driver in the back of the head, the car loses control and flies into a flower stand. Snipes manages to free himself and plant a bomb, detonating the car behind him as he vanishes to the safe-house, an injured man.

The police investigate the scene of the crash, and the chick from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Lena Headey) and her father the Superintendent are among them. Now I only knew her from T:TSCC and little horror movie Broken so I was surprised to hear her with an English accent. I thought she was hamming it up but I was wrong, she was in fact putting on an American accent in Terminator. Her Superintendent father is Charles Dance who has been in every British movie and show ever made but you might know him as Dr. Clemence from Alien 3.

As Snipes sleeps off his injury in the safe-house, a little girl about 14, Emily, sneaks in through the window. She sees the injured Snipes who refuses help, but she comes back again and again providing food and clothes. The two form a sweet bond; really she forms one with him, and he just doesn't tell her to get out louder than he should have. She sees a news report on TV that features Snipes and his dead accomplice, who she also knew as a neighbour. Meanwhile the Superintendent has a meeting with a member of the US Department of Justice who, via a dick-swinging competition, demands to be the lead on this case. What the Super doesn't know however is that the guy from the DOJ is the same guy that assigned Snipes the hit in the first place; Collins. OOH THE PLOT THICKENS.

Wesley Snipes has played the fugitive role before in movies like Murder at 1600 and U.S. Marshals. I swear he never smiles once in this movie either, even when humouring Emily. He gets his sorely underused martial arts out a couple of times towards the end, but don't think that this movie is in any way Explosive Action. It's an action thriller, just like the aforementioned movies, but it's not a bad one. It does suffer from the same editing techniques that a lot of modern DTV action movies do; the programmed, quick-snap motions, intentionally out of focus shots, wobbly cameras and flashing bright white lights. These are referred to as Avid Farts by Vern and I couldn't agree more. They are little blurts of filming that are meant to hasten the pace of the movie but really just get on your nerves after a while.

Lena Headey plays her role well as the pursuer of Snipes. It gets personal for her when her father is killed, presumed to be by Snipes as he is caught by him, but this is in fact incorrect and only leads to Snipes being made public enemy number one. There's a lot of near-catches throughout the movie that Snipes manages to get away from, sometimes by the help of his new teenage friend who is simply looking for a father figure. He tries to buy an illegal passport so he can get home but even that guy cannot be trusted and dobs him in for a reward, yet still Snipes squirms away. It goes on like this for a while until finally ending in a three way shootout between Snipes, the 'good' cop Lena Headey and the 'bad' cop Collins. The most action is in this scene and one of the subsequent scenes where Snipes has a smackdown with one of Collins' associates and breaks his neck.

All in all not a bad little thriller (though it's nothing new), and all players act very well, even the girl who plays Emily wasn't as precocious as many other young actors. But it wouldn't have killed them to blow up a building or two. And I really think Snipes needs to do a movie like a sequel to Black Dynamite or something, where he can smile a bit and pull out some jive talk. He was offered Terry Crews' role on The Expendables but had to drop out due to some conflict with the tax office. The lesson here kids: always pay your tax!

The Video:

Typical modern DTV movie; excellent sharpness and colours, though bright scenes are too bright and dark scenes are too dark. I am not sure why being shot on video generally results in this but it's common among most films of this variety. Sound is clear and solid. Runtime 94 minutes.

Sourced From:

eBay for a buck or two.

Trailer:

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