Film Reviews by GC

This film is worth watching for its novelty value, as Gerald Thomas misguidedly attempted to ride a wave of nostalgia at the time for the Carry On films of the 1960's and create a film using his previously successful formula. Unfortunately the result is pretty awful, sharing too much in common with the low budget, poorly made, crude & unfunny Carry On films of the early 1970s, rather than recreating the cheeky charm of the earlier movies from the 1960s.

The quality of the supplied DVD copy is however, horrendous. I agree with the other reviewers that it has all the hallmarks of a bootleg copy. There is no printed info on the physical disc apart from title. The film itself looks like it has been mastered from a VHS recording. You can see the "sparkles" at the top of the image created by a worn video playback head and the video is presented in a poorly cropped, interlaced 4:3 format. Cinema Paradiso should be a more discerning about the discs they send out.

The games that inspired this abomination at least had exciting action, and an inspired graphic art visual style, even if the stories were a little weak.

The only thing this movie shares with those attributes is the weak story.

There are some great actors involved, but they are embarrassingly miss-cast in an action movie. Several of the lead characters are actually old enough to be the parents of the characters in the source material. Just wrong.

Anyone with even a little discerning judgement would have been able to predict that this would be a flop. It is hard to imagine the Hollywood studio idiocy that allowed this movie to end up the way it did. The emperors new clothes spring to mind.

The movie is good, but at the time of writing it is only available as a 4:3 letterboxed (not anamorphic) DVD. This makes for a ridiculously low pixel resolution which would be less than ideal on an SD screen and (for me anyway) is painful to watch on a HD or higher screen even with AI upscaling.

Unfortunately I can't recommend watching this movie in this format.

This is an enjoyable action flick. The plot, script, and acting are all way better than average for the genre. It's not particularly original, but it has an impressive cast and is very well made. It has a strong female lead who looks genuinely believable in the action scenes. Gina Carano looks the part, and is impressively physically capable.

Soderberg and his DOP manage to bring an entirely appropriate sense of bleakness to the visuals, adding to the a sense of gritty reality that makes the action scenes all the more effective.

You'll see some awful reviews for this film, not sure why, the film I saw definitely doesn't deserve them (probably best not to waste your time watching action movies if you don't like them). This film is actually quite good, so definitely worth a watch if you have an open mind on the genre and aren't expecting anything too creatively worthy.