Hardwired (2009)

Welcome to a cyberpunky, corporate-owned future, where even the Pyramids have an ad banner stuck on them. Former special forces badass Luke Gibson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) has relaxed quite nicely into civilian life. His wife and he are clearly happy, and a child’s going to pop any day now. Alas, their car is hit by a truck, killing his wife and child. Because his insurance very suddenly expires, things wouldn’t look terribly great for Luke’s survival either, but a couple of corporate goons working for tech company high-up Virgil (Val “Doesn’t give a shit” Kilmer) convince his surgeon to save our hero by hardwiring an illegal experimental chip into his brain, as per the film’s title.

The procedure does indeed save Luke’s life, but he also loses large parts of his memory and starts to see things that suggest the chip is beaming ads right into his brain, a prospect that would most probably convince ad executives in our world to break a few laws, too. Worse, there’s also a kill switch installed that’ll blow up his head when he gets too uppity.

Fortunately, the mandatory semi-heroic group of hackers – tough yet avuncular Hal (Michael Ironside!), his paraplegic hacker son Keyboard (Chad Krowchuk), and the adorably named Punk Red (a pre-Orphan Black Tatiana Maslany) and Punk Blue (Juan Riedinger) – hack into Luke’s brain to for some well-needed ad-blocking and recruit him to their cause by showing him rage-inducing pictures of the family he lost. Turns out a multinational corporation is no match for badass Cuba Gooding Jr. and a couple of hackers with idiotic names.

Fun fact: I just love the direct to home video action movie phase of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career much more than most of what he did in his Oscar-baiting time. As I have mentioned before, the wonderful thing about Gooding in this context is that he doesn’t act like a guy who is slumming at all, but applies his not inconsiderable talents fully to whatever bizarre crap the film at hand asks of him. Consequently, Gooding plays the silly bits, the trite bits, and the parts where he interacts with the horror of the ads beamed into his brain totally serious, with admirable professionalism, really making much of what we see doubly enjoyable. His performance – and those of the cast of fresh young actors and low budget veteran aces like the always great Ironside – stand in extreme contrast to Val Kilmer’s usual pay check grab. One could have put his absurd wig onto a life-sized doll and put his dialogue through a computer and have gotten the same performance for considerable less money. Fortunately, Kilmer isn’t actually doing much, so his lazy diva crap isn’t doing too much damage beyond adding one more embarrassment to a career that could have been great.

Anyway, while the plot is obviously silly, there’s quite a bit more to enjoy here than bashing Kilmer and watching Gooding and co. Director Ernie Barbarash is certainly one of the more talented people working in the direct to your couch action space, here as usual demonstrating a sense of pacing that’s good enough to convince a viewer there’s more action happening in the movie than there actually is. The action sequences that are there are indeed fine, mind you.

What’s most fun about the film – at least to me – is its somewhat early 80s Corman-esque sense of sledgehammer satire. Luke’s brain ads are truly hilarious, as are the branded landmarks in the intro and many another idea of the sort. Plus, who doesn’t like a movie that’s so down on ads?


There’s also something to be said for the somewhat thrown together look of Hardwired’s near future that mixes the mildly science fictional with the grubbily contemporary as of its making, and a handful of dubious aesthetic ideas, and probably ends up on a more realistic look for its future than the completely designed one of a film with a budget would have been. After all, whose outer reality consists exclusively out of objects made during the last two or three years?

In short: Linewatch (2008)

Michael Dixon (Cuba Gooding Jr.) has been working for the US Border Patrol at the US/Mexican border for too long, it seems. He doesn’t seem completely cynical but he’s certainly not happy with a world where desperately poor people trying to make their way to a mildly less horrible life are preyed upon by human traffickers who don’t care about their lives as well as by right wing militias/future Trump voters who sound as if they believe shooting brown people is some kind of sport. His mood and his week certainly don’t improve when what looks like a minor drug raid leads to a shoot-out (during which his partner is shot but surprisingly enough not killed). Worse still, one of the drug runners is a guy Michael knows.

You see, a few decades ago, Michael was a gang member known as Mad Mike, and the guy is one of his former buddies. And he’s not the last one of them Michael will meet, either. Our protagonist is soon visited by half a dozen of them, lead by his old frenemie Kimo (Omari Hardwick). Turns out Michael’s little shootout got in the way of a meet-up between Kimo’s people and their drug suppliers from south of the border. They want Michael to help them set up a new meeting where nobody will disturb them. If he isn’t amenable, why, he has a nice little family now, wouldn’t it be horrible if something happened to them?

Of course, things won’t go too well for anyone involved in the end.

Linewatch by Kevin Bray is a film I’ve mostly seen critically slaughtered on the Net. Perhaps at that stage of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career, quite a few people were still expecting Oscar-baiting films from him, when clearly that kind of role either didn’t come to him anymore or wasn’t of interest? This certainly isn’t the kind of film that will win anyone any Academy Awards, nor is it one many professional critics looking for one will love.

After all, apart from its surprising compassion for the people trying to make it over the border, this is very much your typical film about a man haunted by his criminal past who will only get rid of it by killing a lot of people he once saw as family, and now can see rather more clearly as dysfunctional and abusive.

Me, as a man with simple tastes, do enjoy a competent stew of battered old tropes like this quite a bit, particularly since Bray knows how to set up an action sequence properly, and never falls into the action movie automatism of having to include one shoot-out every seven point five minutes. That would be a waste of a perfectly good Cuba Gooding Jr., and a whole handful of decent to good (mostly black) character actors, after all, so we also get quite a few moments of the characters acting like old friends who probably never liked each other all that much. There’s even a pretty clearsighted portrayal of the way a gang might work as a (dysfunctional) family unit included, and while that wasn’t exactly news in 2008 either, it certainly adds to the film’s feeling of veracity.


Which isn’t too bad of an achievement for a film hardly anybody seems to respect.

The Hitlist (2011)

Corporate engineer Alan Campbell (Cole Hauser) has a very bad day: the gangster he has debts with is getting violently impatient; at his job, the promotion he thought was his is going to a guy who may or may not have stolen his ideas (and who most certainly is an asshat of the highest degree); and when he gets home, he finds his wife (Ginny Weirick) sleeping with his best friend. I’m happy he doesn’t have any pets, or that’d have been a dead doggie, too, I suppose.

Obviously, Alan’s next step after that particular day is to find the next bar and get dead drunk. Alas, at the bar he meets a guy calling himself Jonas (Cuba Gooding Jr.). After giving Alan the cold shoulder for a bit, Jonas offers himself up as just the guy to cry to, which is exactly what Alan does while getting even drunker. At one point in the conversation, Jonas starts berating Alan for being a wet blanket but also offering help. Well, a very particular kind of help.

Jonas explains to Alan he’s a professional killer, and because he’s such a nice guy, he’s going to kill the five people Alan wants to see die the most for free. Alan, drunk, stupid, and believing he’s just venting in a particularly original manner, makes the list. Shortly after that, Jonas disappears.

Alan does think nothing of it – you don’t meet professional killers who give freebies randomly in bars after all – until he goes to work the next day and finds out his boss, the first man on his hit list, has been murdered. And Jonas certainly isn’t going to stop there.

While I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the best time for the actor himself, I’ve turned into a bit of a fan of the phase in Cuba Gooding Jr.’s career when he couldn’t find proper Oscar winning actor roles anymore but just kept on working in direct-to-DVD, or so cheap they might as well have been, action films and thrillers. I’m especially fond of these phase because Gooding never seems to approach his work there as if he is doing the films he is in a favour with his presence or as if he is slumming (though he surely is). Instead his performances in these films generally have the dignity of true professionalism, and more often than not, it feels as if Gooding’s contributions push everyone else involve to do better work than they usually do.

The Hitlist’s director William Kaufman doesn’t really need a push. While he has to follow the rules of direct-to-DVD action and so can’t quite ever reach the heights of his fantastic debut feature The Prodigy, at the very least his body of work suggests another dedicated professional in a part of the movie realm that has a few too many guys operating in it who don’t exactly seem to care to make a decent movie as long as they can put the names of Lundgren or Van Damme on a DVD cover, even when these hardly feature in the respective films.

While the budget clearly can’t provide too much actual action in this action movie, the handful of sequences that are there have more than decent stunt work and demonstrate a certain dry flair without Kaufman falling back at whoosh cuts, jump cuts or wildly wavering camera; the stunt crew really doesn’t need this sort of distraction because they, too, are dedicated professionals. The action is generally short and punchy, with a nice climax during which Gooding gets to shoot up a police station, Terminator-style.

Which of course leaves many a minute of running time to fill. That’s the point where quite a few direct-to-DVD action films truly falter, for filling the space between acts of violence seems to overtax quite a few imaginations. The Hit List, fortunately, has an actual plot – even one that makes sense if you are willing to buy into the basic set-up - and while the characters’ psychology isn’t exactly deeply insightful, people here usually have a motivation for what they do, and tend to act in ways that’s appropriate to the situation. Now, this doesn’t exactly sound like a glowing compliment to make for any movie, but in direct-to-DVD action movie land, this demonstrates an uncommon degree of care. It’s also, dare I say it, entertaining to watch, often even thrilling. Additionally, having an actual script doesn’t just give Gooding the opportunity to elegantly underplay (at least for this sort of environment) what could be an annoying scenery chewing maniac but also brings out the best of Cole Hauser. The less semi-famous Hauser, it turns out, is really good at playing our sad sack protagonist, believably going from helpless anger at his life to a very specific kind of courage in the end.

This all adds up to a fine bit of low budget action filmmaking.

One in the Chamber (2012)

Welcome to beautiful Prague (at least in part played by beautiful Romania)! Ray Carver (Cuba Gooding Jr.) uses the city as base for his work as a professional killer. When Ray is not killing people, he's soliloquizing about his sinfulness, reading the bible, and stalking Janice Knowles (Claudia Bassols), the now grown daughter of one of his earlier victims, driven by a mixture of guilt and plain obsession he sells to himself as his wish to protect her from harm.

Right now, Ray's even doing his work in Prague, because he was hired by the resident Suverov crime family to wipe out the heads of the resident Tavanian crime family in one go. Unfortunately, Ray's strict "no innocent bystanders come to harm" policy gets in the way of his job, leaving the Tavanians with a not completely incompetent underboss in charge, and Prague in the grip of a gang war. Understandably, the Suverov's aren't at all happy with Ray's performance, so they fly in the near mythical hitman Aleksey Andreev aka "The Wolf" (Dolph Lundgren). Aleksey is a rather different kind of killer than Ray, clearly not driven by a guilty conscience, proclaiming his generally violently chipper mood by wearing loud Hawaii shirts, and given to a much more direct approach than Ray, though he does share Ray's ideas about killing civilians.

When Ray and his handler (Billy Murray) hear of the new man in town, they decide to change sides and work for the Tavanians now. Not surprisingly, Ray and Aleksey are headed for a collision course, and Janice just might get right in the middle of it.

One of the more peculiar developments in movies in the last few years is surely Cuba Gooding Jr.'s new career as a direct-to-DVD action hero; perhaps even more peculiar is how good Gooding is good at his new career, showing enough physicality to be basically believable as a man of violence, and obviously bringing more acting chops than he'd strictly need for the job, which pushes the scripts of the films he's in into slightly more complex directions than you find in something starring someone who wasn't even a decent enough actor for professional wrestling. That tends to make the characters Gooding plays more sympathetic than is the rule in direct-to-DVD action outside the body of work of Jean Claude Van Damme, too. It applies even to a character as much as a self-pitying fool as Ray is, the kind of guy who loves to moan about the guilt being a professional killer brings with it, yet never does anything about it, like stopping to murder people for money, for example.

Additionally, Gooding actually stars in the films he's supposed to star in, and doesn't go the slightly prolonged cameo route as Jean Claude Van Damme or his partner in this outing, Dolph Lundgren, often do. Consequently, there's much more Cuba than Dolph in One in the Chamber but the film's script handles the situation appropriately. In fact, it would make little sense if the two leads had more scenes together. When Lundgren is on screen, he takes on the violent and crazy yet likeable persona that he fills in many films at this point in his career. He's grown rather good at it by now, and is one of the few actors in action movies who can make the wholesale slaughter of a dozen other people somehow look good-natured. If that's always a good thing, I'm not always sure about.

It is a bit disappointing that One in the Chamber's script doesn't make as much out of the strange juxtaposition of its two main characters as I would have wished, but then, Cuba and Dolph (sounds like a sitcom title if ever I saw one) would need to interact more for it to work, which clearly was right out for the production. I'm also not really happy about the (non-)solution to the plotline between Ray and Janice, or rather, about the much too easy and straightforward way the film ends it, taking what should be emotionally heavy, and not a little creepy, stuff and trying to just wink it away.

On the positive side, there is enough complexity here to keep the very basic gang war plot lively, and what the script lacks in dramatic unity, it makes up for with a love for small and colourful details that don't exactly make the world it takes place in believable but protects it from feeling like the series of clichés it actually is. Which is more than I ask of this kind of film, and more than enough to keep me entertained throughout.

It helps that director William Kaufman aims for filming the kind of action scenes the human eye can actually comprehend, which also just happens to be the kind of action scene I find actually fun to watch. As a visual extra, Kaufman also doesn't dive too deeply into the colourless colour film rabbit hole, leaving my eyes delighted by the existence of other colours than yellow and blue, or, in the case of Lundgren's shirts, nearly blinded by them.

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