User: Stuart Baket
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The Bad Pack (1998)
First up, I just gotta tell you: The user comment showing on this movie at the IMDb is a jaw-dropper. I'm pretty sure that the IMDb makes a practice of using the most extreme user comment, good or bad, on the main page, but this one takes the cake: Bolle Barnevits of Denmark makes assertions such as "I am surprised that it even has a director" and "This is in my list of the bottom ten movies!"
Now, I'm not one to begrudge others their opinions, even Danes. But damn. You and I, we know what a bad movie (you can order the best movie review or film essays in our essay writing service ) truly is. We have stared slack-jawed into the deepest pits of Movie Hell and emerged so nearly unscathed that we appear completely sane to all but the most penetrating examination. I have seen movies that qualify for the bottom ten, Bolle ol' boy, and this ain't one of them. And quite frankly, anyone who thinks this movie is that bad honestly hasn't been exposed to enough cinema to have an informed opinion.
Not that this is by any stretch a good movie; we'll be cataloguing its flaws in detail anon. But it does go down fairly painlessly. For comparion I can only offer Terminal Rush, which I watched in the same sitting. Now there's a movie I'd love to FedEx to dear old Bolle, just so he can start to figure out the difference. (And that ain't even Bottom Ten tripe, fella.)
Our opening heralds the simplistic premise of the plot: Under the credits, we see intercut scenes of a) white guys in paramilitary gear going through obstacle courses with live ammunition, and b) idyllic Hispanic farmers, working their land by hand. (Sidenote: Those are damned big fields to hoe by hand.) In case you missed it, the former are the Bad Guys; the latter the Good Guys. All clear?
And because that's how these things work, the Bad Guys are in the habit of harassing the Good Guys -- in this instance, they come into the little Mexican-style town (we're just over the border into Texas, by the way) on their motorcycles and shoot the one guy with the balls to stand up to them. Then off they go, laughing their evil militia laughs.
What's a town of gentle milksops to do? What, haven't you ever seen The Magnificent Seven (or A Bug's Life, for that matter)? At a town meeting, it is decided that two brothers, Hector and Jose Chavez ( Daniel Zacapa and Bert Rosario) will take all the money the townspeople can scrape together -- about $14,000 -- and journey to L.A., to meet someone who advertises in the back of Soldier of Fortune.
Aha! A plan! Unfortunately, the "retired Green Beret" who can supposedly handle anything turns out to be an old fat alcoholic, who turns them down. But then his daughter gives them a lead: Look for a guy named McQue, who runs a custom bike shop and hangs out at the such-and-so diner.
They get there, and only have to spend about 30 seconds wondering how to figure out which one is McQue, before two hooded goons try to rob the place. Then it's easy to tell: McQue is the one who calmly finishes his lunch and then kicks both their asses. (He's also the one played by Robert Davi.)
As soon as the altercation is over, McQue jogs off, with the Chavez brothers following at a respectful distance. Also following along is Jeremy (Larry B. Scott) a young black man who was also in the diner. He's a high-tech hustler, with his laptop and the cell phone that he didn't remove from his ear even during the holdup, and he sees opportunity knocking here.
At first McQue isn't interested in their problems back in Texas -- certainly not for $14,000 -- but then the Chavez brothers pass on the rumor that the leader of the Sons of Texas, Lamont Sperry (Marshall R. Teague), has millions of dollars in a safe, a rumor which Jeremy quickly corroborates by hooking his computer to CIA records (yeah, like you can just bookmark that). McQue promises to arrive in the village in twelve days, giving him time to assemble his team.
And what a team they are. They each get their own introductory scene, but we'll go through the Reader's Digest version here:
Dash Simms (Roddy Piper), a race-car driver until a leg injury retired him;
Kurt Mayer (Ralph Moeller, TV's Conan), who makes ends meet in illegal Ultimate Fighting bouts;
Latrell Hoffman (Patrick Donaghan), the crazy man -- no really; they actually rescue him from an asylum, straitjacket and all;
Remy Sykes (Shawn Huff), a blonde bombshell who's doing that whole La Femme Nikita thing. (The idea that Remy is from the same generation as the others is laughable; hell, I'm not even sure she occupies the same universe.)
Let's see: The leader, the charmer (that's Roddy, in case you didn't know), the bruiser, the wacko, and the female. (Plus Jeremy, the "Can-Do Man.") By now, it's looking less like The Magnificent Seven and more like The A-Team.
McQue explains the whole thing to them, and they take the plane that Jeremy has "procured" to our Mexican near-Utopia. And here's where one of the largest flaws in the proceedings manifests itself: If you look at that little clock on the VCR, you'll see that a full 40 minutes have already passed, and we're just now getting down to business.
I'm going to digress here to talk some about story structure. Conventionally, a movie is described as having three acts. Act One is roughly the first twenty minutes, with a notable event at the end thereof; Act Three is the last twenty or so minutes, everything that builds up steam directly to the climax; and the Second Act is the 40-60 minutes in the middle -- the Everything Else of the movie, usually with some sort of major event right in the middle of that. (Of course, if there's a Special Something happening that midpoint, why don't we call what happens next the Third Act, and the last twenty minutes the Fourth Act? Probably because the Three-Act structure simply relates well to the parts of a story that we all recognize: Beginning, Middle, End.) Even if you've never studied scriptwriting, this is the structure that you already know from having watched movies before; you unconsciously expect it. Ever watch a movie that seemed significantly longer or shorter than its running time? (I'm not talking about movies so bad that each minute seems interminable.) Usually it's because they've got the act breaks in the wrong proportions; things don't happen when you expect them to, and it conflicts with your internal timer.
In this case, I'm sure that in the script meetings before shooting, the Chavez brothers' first meeting with McQue was pegged as the end of the First Act, and the arrival of the mercenaries as the midpoint of the Second, but it just doesn't work that way. The Chavez brothers aren't the main characters; they fade to a supporting role right after they hire McQue. And you can't just barely meet your main character at the break between First and Second Acts. So what does this mean?
It means that the touchdown of the plane in Texas feels like the end of the First Act -- and that means that the rest of the story's going to be crammed into the next fifty minutes. (If you think I'm being way too academic and analytical here, all I can say is: See the movie yourself. You'll see what I mean.)
So -- what do we need to do before we start the big-ass finale? Well, Hoffman and Simms drive off in a rickety truck to an arms depot that Hoffman secreted years ago. Naturally, these two are the two that get along the least, but Hoffman knows where the weapons are, and Simms is the best driver (a necessary trait when you're going to be bringing back nitro), so we get a goodly amount of their banter. We also have McQue and Jeremy trying to whip up some enthusiasm among the townspeople to help defend themselves -- alas, it proves a lost cause; they're as helpless as declawed kittens.
Oh yeah, and meanwhile, Sperry beats up and throws out a member of the Sons of Texas that he suspects of being a plant; naturally, our mercenaries pick him up, and he provides the entire layout of the compound. (He just happens to be played by Brent Huff, the director. And yes, I fully suspect that Shawn Huff, playing Remy, is his wife.)
(There's also an abortive attempt to build some sort of attraction between Kurt and Remy -- but it then disappears completely off the radar.)
Naturally, hearing of the mercs, Sperry sends out a little welcoming committee, who are instantly cowed by McQue's unwillingness to run and hide when he sees them; Sperry later pays a visit to McQue personally, giving him an ultimatum to get out of town by tomorrow afternoon.
Gee, I guess that means we're attacking the compound tonight, right?
Yup. McQue & Co. (plus the Chavez brothers, who tag along late) break into the compound and set multitudinous explosives with a fifteen-minute fuse -- just long enough for someone to raise the alarm, and a whole bunch of militia goons to get shot. Blam blam blam, bang bang bang, the good guys get away, the bad guys blow up, and McQue and friends leave with the money.
The end.
Now, I've got a soft spot in my heart for White Supremacists getting their asses kicked; thus, one of my biggest complaints here is that the militia is just shown to be garden-variety evil. Hector and Jose make reference to their racism and claims "They hate us because we're not white," but we never get to see that evil in action; it's practically an Informed Attribute. Compare this, say, to Best of the Best 3 (a movie I'll get around to reviewing sooner or later); the racist goons in that movie are effectively portrayed as such, giving viewers a good basis for despising them and hoping for their eventual defeat, rather than the "they're bad guys, accept it" attitude shown here.
Nevertheless, despite the noted shortcomings, this "bad movie" doesn't go down painfully, which is one of a movie's worst crimes. At worst, it's painless, brainless, ambitionless entertainment; the ninety minutes spent watching it won't leave the viewer a changed person, but it also won't leave him/her with the sense of having had said ninety minutes stolen from him.
And given some of the stinkers I've been watching lately, that's commendation enough.
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