In short: Mars (1997)

In the near future of Elon Musk’s wet dreams, Mars has been colonized and is controlled by a single Company whose miners are tasked with acquiring a new, totally, completely, nay, absolutely healthy fossil fuel for Earth.

When a member of the Company’s private police force is killed under dubious circumstances, the delightfully named Caution Templer (Olivier Gruner), also one of the Company’s so-called “Keepers”, as well as brother of the victim arrives to kick some heads in.

Because there’s no subtlety on Mars, the bad guys responsible for the death of Caution’s brother try to kill our protagonist as soon as he arrives on the planet, making it pretty easy even for him to stumble upon the conspiracy in which the Company is of course and obviously involved. On the way, Caution acquires the help of local grumpy physician Doc Halliday (Shari Belafonte) and a local street rat named, adorably, Buckskin Greenberg (Gabriel Dell Jr.).

As you can see, character names in Jon Hess’s science fiction action piece Mars are a pretty painful affair, unless one is a big fan of awkward attempts at “subtly” hinting at the Western genre, as I am, as it turns out. Its very own special naming conventions are pretty much Mars’s only independent ideas, for otherwise, this is a cheap knock-off of Peter Hyams’s Outland, without the brains, the quiet cleverness of the writing, the Connery, or Hyams’s brilliant direction, mixed with just as badly copied bits of Total Recall. Turns out you can’t really make Outland on a DTV budget, or at least, Hess can’t.

So expect a Mars colony that looks suspiciously as if it were build from bits and pieces of the usual warehouses and industrial buildings where all action movies of this type are shot, some choice bad CGI, the usual nightclubs that look nothing like nightclubs apart from the naked women with awkward boob jobs, and a script that just screams for some proper scenery chewing none of the villain actors is really bothered to provide, even though the writing does offer them the opportunity.

All of this, apart from the lame villains, is to be expected. Why the film doesn’t seem to be able to stage a proper fight, despite having a perfectly competent screen fighter as its load, and does the kind of choppy editing nonsense you typically encounter whenever nobody in front of the camera can be trusted to execute any fighting move properly, is anybody’s guess however. It’s not as if you’d hire Gruner for his acting chops, so why not make use of the skills the guy – within limits – can actually offer?

In short: Excessive Force (1993)

Generic cop on the edge Terry McCain (Thomas Ian Griffith) and his partners Frankie (Tony Todd), and guy who dies too early for me to actually write down his name (Mister X) follow Terry’s vendetta against mob boss Sal DiMarco (Burt Young) into a drug deal between some of DiMarco’s men and members of the Irish mob, provoking the devolution from deal into shoot-out. Thanks to McCain’s use of torture on a suspect afterwards, DiMarco escapes another court indictment, leaving Terry quite angry and without shouldering any of the responsibility for something that is absolutely his fault all the way, of course. What only DiMarco and his men know is that three million dollars went missing during the bust, and DiMarco quickly pegs the cops as the responsible party.

Soon, the quite three-million-dollar-less Terry is the only of the three cops alive, and finds himself framed for murder and hunted by cops and gangsters alike. Why, you could think there’s some sort of conspiracy is going on.

Excessive Force’s excessively generic action movie title actually hides a generic cop movie featuring and written by lead Thomas Ian Griffith himself. The script for the whole affair is so bland, obvious and been-there, done-that clichéd even an actor could write it, so excitement, interesting ideas or even just somewhat involving execution of tired old ideas is right out. If anyone goes into this looking for even the tiniest bit of interesting characterization, she’ll be quite out of look, and neither Griffith’s script nor Jon Hess’s competent yet bland direction have much to add to the experience, particularly since neither the action scenes nor the dialogue are delivered with any sort of flair.

The latter is particularly sad in a film with such a fine cast of character actors that doesn’t just include Todd and Young but also features James Earl Jones and house favourite Lance Henriksen. Unfortunately, that’s Jones and and Henriksen phoning it in, Young biting the bullet very early on, and Todd only featuring in a few scenes, so we spend most of our time with Thomas Ian Griffith being as boring and obvious as his script, and Charlotte Lewis being pretty. Even though I do approve of Mother Nature’s work on Miss Lewis, that’s really not enough to keep me awake during a film.

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