"If you're gonna dine with the devil... You better bring a long spoon." Jack Palance's incomprehensibly silly, but off the chain, line is the only really good thing about this garbage; well, other than Angelina Jolie at her total hottest ever as a jailbait cyborg.
I remember this coming out back in the day, but I never got around to renting it. Upon viewing it recently, I can only say: "gross."
The movie opens with some raspy Jack Palance narration, as he explains that cyborgs have replaced humans in almost every way in the service industry: from garbage men to sex workers. There are two corporations, a Japanese one and another one called Pinwheel, Only, the Pinwheel dudes are the baddies, and they're creating a beautiful cyborg that looks like Angelina Jolie to go to Tokyo, infiltrate the rival corporation, and blow herself (and it) up. The problem is, she falls in love with Elias Koteas, and the two run off together. As you can imagine, the pair are subsequently hunted down from all sides.
'Cyborg 2' is easily one of the worst movies I've seen in awhile. It was reeeealllllly hard to sit through all at once, and that's saying a lot, considering I watched crap like 'Film Geek' and 'G.I. Executioner' in one sitting. I think this just goes to show that less is really more where these types of movies are concerned. Albert Pyun's original masterpiece dismissed all pretentions to being a cerebral character study of what it means to be human through the locus of an android/cyborg, and gave us 88 minutes of drive in B movie fun: lots of ass kicking, corny dialog, cheesy 80s synth score, and Van Damme splits. 'Cyborg 2' seems to have a more thought-out plot, but just bores the viewer to tears. I felt like the makers decided to throw in some stock footage from the first one and just call this a sequel, because it has nothing else to do with it plotwise.
I've already mentioned how Angelina Jolie is a total jailbait hottie here; her co-stars didn't fare too well, aside from Koteas. I'm a big fan of Elias Koteas, perhaps best known as Casey Jones from the TMNT franchise- but who I loved best in the first 'Prophecy film.' He was pretty solid, as always. He didn't have too much to work with, his role essentially being a human martial arts instructor who falls for Jolie and helps her escape from the Pinwheel corporation. To his credit, Koteas took a role which was, more or less, a poor man's Van Damme, and made it somewhat interesting. But just barely.
The rest of the cast was non-existent, The Pinwheel pin-heads didn't do shit most of the pic- the only interesting thing they did was at the beginning, when they're watching one of their female cyborgs have sex, and they detonate the bomb they put inside of her: "cyborg stew," one of 'em quips. Jack Palance- who was pretty much cashing a paycheck or doing a favor for his key grip nephew- was just some lips on a monitor screen until the last five minutes, when he shows up ready to dine with the devil with a looonnng spoon as the cyborg Mercy. Billy Drago didn't help matters by looking so disgusting and doing his best Skeletor/Joker/over-the-top generic villain impression. Drago was supposed to be the main villain, and he even has a couple of badly directed fight scenes with Koteas. The problem is, no matter how gross and "scary" Drago tries to be by peeling off his skin or throwing bad punches and kicks, he's no Fender.
Truly a waste of celluloid. This ultimately comes off as a messy cross between wannabe Wiilliam Gibson cyberpunk and late night Skinemax soft porn. Save yourself the rental price and just thow Albert Pyun's 'Nemesis' or the classic original into the DVD player again. If the filmmakers really had the intention of boring us to death this bad, they could've at least taken a play out of Albert Pyun's book and given us some cheesy synthetic cyborg cock; they didn't even include this common courtesy.
No comments:
Post a Comment