So much average

Sick Product of a Sick System

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The movie has a very cheap vibe, the action is shot in a very trashy way, the movie is clearly on a tight budget but all this is to be expected from an Albert Pyun movie. This isn't as good as Cyborg with JCVD which is glorious schlock but it is up there with Pyun's best. Christopher Lambert shot his scenes in two days and it shows, I am curious as to how long this whole movie took to shoot, it couldn't have taken much longer as Lambert appears in half the movie at least, of course in some scenes where action is meant to take place around his it can be seen that his scene was shot separately from the others. Despite all this it's very entertaining and the promise is pretty clever and fun, makes you think how much better the movie could have been if it had a bigger budget. The only downsides are that it could have been 10 minutes shorter as well as the ending which I won't spoil which was disappointing although well set up.

One hundred hit men are locked in a prison with a thousand guns and the last three left alive gets ten million dollars. Sounds a bit to me like a recipe for disaster. Sounds also like a pathetic excuse for some pointless violence. The violence on one hand may seem pointless, but I feel that there is a lot more to this movie than simple pointless movie, and those who simply argue about the shamelessness of the violence in this movie will have missed the point.My friend compared it to the Italian movies where in the end everybody is dead. We must remember that everybody (except for two people) who are in this prison are all there for one reason, and that is because they upset the syndicate. Instead of just killing them, they told them that they must earn their freedom, but none can. Even Moon (Ice T), the syndicate boss who organised this little event, does not escape. The only people who escape are a little girl and an accountant that was dragged in there because she took too many photos.My friends commented that the dialogue in this movie was quite bad, but I feel that some of the dialogue extracts the theme to the movie. At the beginning, some of the hit men are sitting in a Cadalac and are swearing, and another does not appreciate this. The comment that comes out is the more that something is said, the less meaning that it has. This is the theme of the movie: the more you do something the less meaning that this deed has. These people are all killers, and as they have killed so much, the act of killing has simply lost all meaning. Moon says that the money is there because there is nothing else to entice them to do anything, but the mere existence of the money is not going to stop them from killing each other, it just encourages it. The whole idea of only having three people left is also very interesting, as it comes out as to who these three people are and they consider whether those that they are associating with are the three, or if Moon must be one of the three as well.The violence in this movie is not explicit, rather there is simply a lot of killing, and this emphasises the attitudes of these characters: they will kill another human without another thought. As such, none of them can be redeemable. It is interesting to notice that the accountant is the only one to survive (excluding the little girl who spent most of the movie in the car) and she was the only one who was not a killer, nor did she have any connection with the syndicate. The only reason that she was here was because she had evidence to convict the syndicate of many crimes, yet she escaped. Evil is so ingrained in society, that a few pictures could simply tear it apart. This prison, the symbol of justice in society, was built and is controlled by the syndicate, the symbol of crime in society. This paradox is the paradox of society - is there such as thing as an incorruptible judge? This movie is not a movie about pointless violence, but rather about the darkness of the human soul, corruption in society and they way that we become desensitised to the wrongs that we do. It is actually quite a good movie, and Moon is the type of character that Ice-T plays very well.

The prestigious American Film Institute will probably never recognize Hawaiian movie director Albert Pyun for his cinematic achievements. Pyun has helmed over 40 films since 1982, including titles such as "Adrenalin" (1996), "Kickboxer 4" (1994), "Omega Doom" (1996), "Nemesis" (1993), "Captain America" (1992), "Bloodmatch" (1991), "Dollman" (1991), "Cyborg" (1989), and "The Sword and the Sorcerer" (1982). Moreover, Pyun has written 14 of his own feature films, many of those mentioned above as well as "Radioactive Dreams" (1986), "Heatseeker" (1995), and "Nemesis 2" (1995). Pyun's action-adventure sagas belong to either the science fiction or martial arts genres. Typically, Pyun's virile heroes find themselves entangled in suicidal situations against villains who appear in greater numbers or who have special mutant features that give them a deadly edge. The women in his movies are not slacker by any sense of the imagination. They are sometimes as strong, if not stronger, than his brawny indestructible male protagonists.All the "Mean Guns" characters are indisputably unsavory. You wouldn't have lunch with any of them. Christopher Lambert's Lou emerges as an extremely dangerous dude with a puff-adder smile who revels in killing bad guys. As revealed in the film's expository dialogue, Lou's cute daughter has been raped. This incident turned Lou into a rabidly unstable killer who the syndicate feels is better off dead. Michael Halsey gives the sinister Marcus the full benefit of his hypnotic Mick Jagger personality, his stern features, and his gravel voice."Mean Guns" delivers everything its generic title promises. Toplining "Highlander" star Christopher Lambert and rapper Ice-T, Andrew Witham's brawling screenplay focuses on an army of vicious mobsters who have betrayed a crime syndicate by snitching, stealing, seeing too much, plotting disloyal acts, or failing to do enough. Instead of hiring hit squads to cap these cretins, gangster Vincent Moon (Ice-T) has devised a more interesting alternative. The crime syndicate has financed the construction of a modern prison with pay-offs, so Vincent sees this as the ideal arena to obtain redemption. The day before this state-of-the-art correctional facility opens; Vincent schedules a no-holds-barred shoot'em-up on the premises. What makes this prison so perfect for Vincent's macabre scheme is its vast network of video cameras. During his tirade to the hundred or so hit men that he has assembled for this bedlam, Vincent proclaims that the syndicate can enjoy the playback of their massacre. "It's better than pay-TV," Vincent screams with maniacal glee.Vincent's rules are few but simple. Only three hooligans will emerge from this baptism by gunfire. Everybody else must die! These miscreants have six hours to rub each other out, before Vincent Wipes them out himself. Anybody who tries to escape will be 'disqualified' permanently. Sharp-shooting snipers prow the prison walls. As an incentive, Moon offers a $10-thousand reward to the three surviving killers to divide up among themselves, at $3.3 million per person. Vincent's henchmen disarmed these cutthroats before they entered the hoosegow, so that everybody gets a fresh start. After Moon's speech, his men dump an arsenal of guns, ammo, and Louisville sluggers at their feet.Happily, little is predictable in freshman scenarist Andrew Witham's bullet-blasting screenplay. The story vaguely resembles novelist Richard Connell's oft-filmed classic "The Most Dangerous Game," where an innocent man battles for his life against a homicidal madman on a remote island. The island in "Mean Guns" is the prison. Witham and Pyun confine the bedlam to the prison where Lou (Christopher Lambert), Marcus (Michael Halsey), Dee (Kimberly Warren), and Con (Deborah Van Valkenbugh) must dispatch hordes of gun-toting, bat-wielding bruisers with extreme prejudice. Witham's script makes reference also to Agatha Christie's timeless yarn "Ten Little Indians." Other cinematic allusions are made to "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." In one scene that recalls Eli Wallach's gunfight in a bubble-bath with a loquacious killer, Ice-T repeatedly warns a knife-wielding hood that he should throw his knife instead of wag his tongue. When the evildoer ignores Ice-T's advice, the criminal mastermind kills him. The final outcome is nothing that you'd expect from a straight-to-tape actioneer, and elements of the Leone classic appear here, too. Some of the dialogue pays homage to other famous Hollywood movies. When Lou threatens to kill Con, Marcus borrows a line about solidarity from Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" about sticking together.Albert Pyun choreographs his multiple, high-body count shoot-outs with the comparable acrobatic aplomb of the late Sergio Leone, the maestro of the spaghetti western, or John Woo, today's popular Asian filmmaker. At one point, two-gun packing Christopher Lambert cavorts from table to table in a dining hall blasting away at scores of bad guys without missing a single shot! Talk about fantasy! Nevertheless, Pyun avoids lingering on the aftermath of the violence. He depicts the shootings, stabbings, and slugging with clinical, antiseptic care. Indeed, "Mean Guns" is a bloodbath, but there's comparatively little blood. Instead, Pyun displays greater concern in charging up the adrenalin content in his action scenes, none of which are as brutal as his previous effort, the hugely underrated "Adrenalin." Obviously, the squeamish will loathe "Mean Guns" with it s dark, subversive humor and its nihilist sentiments about a world warped, according to one character, by television. At the oddest moments, something silly occurs that catches you off guard. For example, as an elevator carrying the gunmen to the prison ascends for the staging area, the sounds of mambo music fill the air. Two tough guys abruptly break into an improvised dance. In another instance, when the killers scramble to arm themselves as an arsenal of hardware showers down on them, they start firing at each other. The humor here is that their weapons are empty, and the comedic effect comes from the way that Pyun films their frenzied efforts to kill as many of their opponents as possible. Overall, Pyun achieves a surreal effect with his over-the-t0p, bloodless, wall-to-wall violence where only the featured celebrities survive and the anonymous extras drop like flies.

Filmed almost exclusively inside a 20 story building, this movie focuses exclusively on the end result of 100 gangster screw jobs done to the wrong man played wonderfully by Ice-T. If you are a fan of wrestling's battle royal or Royal Rumble, or are a fan of end-of-the-world genre's this movie will whet your appetite, as it a microcosm of end of the world movies, with the last man standing being Victorious and able to do as he pleases (that is, leave the gang world, or become head honcho) This movie is excellent if you view it without a critic's mind and watch it to free your suppressed anger and impulsive violence towards the world. -Al