The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2003
A martial artist hunts a killer in a plague-infested urban dump of the future.
Albert Pyun
Gibson Rickenbacker
Fender Tremolo
Nady Simmons
Brick Bardo
Marshall Strat
Pearl Prophet
7/18/2024
5/10
Nope, this is not good and we might as well get that out of the way first. Jean-Claude Van Damme does, however, manage to show off his rippled torso quite frequently whilst everyone else just shows off the fact that they can't act and that even if they could, the dialogue is so pathetic that they'd decided not to bother learning their lines. He's "Gibson", a retired fighter who has to come to terms with an apocalyptic scenario that has reduced these United States to rubble ruled on the basis of survival of the fittest by the "Pirates". Scientists in Atlanta might be onto to a cure for this pestilence, but for that to work then cyborg/human combo "Pearl" (Dayle Haddon) has to get some information to them. Meantime, the well informed gang leader "Tremolo" (Vincent Klyn) wants the cure for his people instead and so rather easily captures her. With the pieces all in place "Gibson" and his feisty new friend "Nady" (Deborah Richter) have to fight the ostensibly un-winnable fight against overwhelming odds to try and rescue "Pearl". There's not the merest hint of jeopardy here and the action scenes are so badly choreographed and edited together that it makes "Conan" (1982) look like Fellini. The repetition in the storyline really becomes irritating after the seventh scene when our hero is slashed to ribbons only to recuperate into an even more deadly ninja - and he's not even the robot. Auteur Albert Pyun clearly had too much time and money on his hands to waste on developing characters or story and what we are left with is unlikely to be on Van Damme's audition tape.
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