best movie i've ever seen.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Take a good, funny, self deprecating script, better than the Hollywood drivel they gave the boys in the Expendables. Take away the production budgets and experience, but DO give it too some good leading Action ladies, and you still get a better film than it's alternate boys club back pocket vehicle.Let's face the truth, an AK-47 round will not reach high enough to hit the glass ceiling, maybe a rocket might- or "an Asian woman driving- (the plane) watch out!"It's fast, raw, funny and doesn't try to be more than it is. It didn't ask the viewer to do anything but forgive it's little flaws and have a good time. All five leading ladies are capable and put in some quality work, Fong's comic styling being most memorable.The only complaint would be the early scene which nearly lost me was Christopher Ray's direction of Cynthia Rothrock. But once over that hump the film opens to it's better performance's. Even the completely predictable bag of cheese cubes in the final battle, where I was on the edge of my seat for one of our heroines. The rules of action comedy respected and it all came out as it should.I'm looking forward to the sequel, wondering if The Asylum have been able to pick from their years of television zombie action, to stand beside Zoe, Kristanna and Fong.

The Three Acts:The initial tableaux: Ulrika kidnaps the President's daughter. The ransom is the overthrow of Ganzar, a fictional country that Ulrika wants to rule. Great. Ulrika has a pathological hatred of men, and a deep disdain of women. Even better. The President is in a funk, so trusted aid Mona runs the op to recover the daughter.Mona goes to prison to recruit female tough cases to make the extraction.Delineation of conflicts: Ulrika wants the ransom; the US does not wish to pay it. Mona wants the prisoners to do the extraction; the prisoners are hardly interested. Mona hopes to make the prisoners offers that they cannot refuse. Ulrika wishes the extraction to fail; the prisoners would like to get their individual pay offs.Cassandra was a captain in Delta Forces; she will be tactical command. Raven was CIA, like Mona, and will handle the close in wetworks. Mei-Lin specializes in explosives. Kat is a talented sniper, who will be sniping. The egos are as big as the talents here. What are the chances that they will not kill each other instead of the enemy?The local teenager Lexi wishes to help the team in return for passage to America. Resolution: This ends pretty much the way I expected it to.

When the President's daughter travels to Kazakhstan and then gets kidnapped by the evil Ulrika (Nielsen) and her henchman Gregori (Abell), a government agent named Mona (Rothrock) does the only logical thing - she assembles a team of female prisoners (with pasts appropriate to this task, of course). Led by Cassandra Clay (Bell), the other team members include Raven (Fox), Kat (Loken), and Mei-Lin (Bilderback). Armed to the teeth and with nothing to lose, the ladies embark on the deadly mission, facing everything from sexism to RPG's along the way. Will they come out victorious? Will they rescue the President's daughter? What will happen to the baddies when they face the MERCENARIES? In the grand tradition of Hell Squad (1986), Sweet Justice (1992), and Mankillers (1987), Mercenaries is the latest in the lineage of low-budget DTV "assemble a female team" movies. While the brief seems to have been "create a DTV, all-female Expendables", the end result is more in line with the three films mentioned above. Not that that's such a bad thing, of course. But Mercenaries is just a bit too silly for its own good. If they could have dialed down some of the more inane and/or sophomoric elements just a tad, and taken the whole project slightly more seriously, we might have more of a winner here.Top marks go to our new hero Zoe Bell, arguably the best part of the movie. While the other Mercenaries were off experiencing the time-honored Prerequisite Torture, Bell goes off on her own, and we appreciated that. We hope to see more of her in front of the camera (for those who don't know, she's an experienced stuntwoman). Overall, though, it seems the filmmakers were going for a bit of a lark - a reasonably pleasant piece of entertainment you don't have to think about too hard (or at all). But where's the line between that and something that's just really dumb? Mercenaries certainly defines that line.Sure, it has some of those needless, modern-day editing tricks, and the production values are very cheap-looking (as befitting of The Asylum production company), and the green screen/CGI quotient is unhealthy, but on the brighter side it has some classic 80's/90's style clichés - the wacky transportation driver, "It's an election year", and some un-PC dialogue (mostly centered around Mei-Lin). The comic-booky vibe is sledgehammered in with some interstitial cuts to comic book frames, an editing device pretty much universally frowned-upon when it came to that new cut of The Warriors (1979). Why Mercenaries chose to do it remains an open question.There is plenty of groan-inducing dialogue as well, and top fan favorite Cynthia Rothrock has only one, all-too-brief fight scene. All the ladies, generally speaking, acquit themselves well, which is why we wished the overall product had more weight and heft to it, instead of being the aforementioned lark. It's easy viewing, to be sure, and we like the tradition it falls in, so we're willing to cut it some slack. But the silliness/dumbness factor reaches ??? proportions, so it's kind of a wash.In the end, Mercenaries is a well-meaning trifle, buoyed by Zoe Bell and her cohorts. We personally would have liked some more grit, however.

The presidents daughter is kidnapped and 4 tough as nails women go after her kidnappers. Yes it isn't the best quality but it is just a fun movie about some kick-ass women. For a low-budget, straight-forward film it gets the job done. A movie with a lot of female characters that are all empowered. This was clearly not meant to be a complicated film, it is about bad ass women who aren't over-sexualized for the male viewers. I doubt critics would condemn it in the same way if it were a movie about men. I believe they would love its faults if the heroines were heroes instead. A fun and empowering movie for everyone with an open mind. A good movie to watch on a night in with friends. PS it's streaming on Netflix right now.