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I Luv employee Marc geeks out about Dolf Lundgren and his new film Command Performance.
____________________________________________________________________________________________ Command Performance (2009) Directed by: Dolph Lundgren
Let it be known, I am a Dolph Lundgren fan. Of his 37 released films on IMDb, I have seen all but an obscure German-language film, Sunny Side Up, and it's not for lack of trying. When I heard about a movie written by, directed by, and starring Dolph as a rock star drummer who also kills people, my anus immediately reversed itself. Command Performance was going to make up for the disappointing Michael Paré showdown in Direct Contact.
After I righted my body parts, I sat down for the greatest treat of my life, and, as I'm sure all of you are predicting, it was a bit of a let-down. Not that it was “bad”, but it was a truly wasted premise. Though the first act is all about Dolph hittin' the skins and mackin' it with pop stars, all the while adorned with shitty fake tribal tattoos and shit, after the half-hour mark, he never plays the drums again. Instead of making some sweet plot where Dolph is on tour killing suckas in every city, so that we can take a pause from the murdering action with more rock and roll, it's a standard Die-Hard plot. Some terrorist jacks up an event and Dolph has to navigate endless halls and corridors, poppin' terrorists until he navigates to the Head-honcho boss dude.
I think there should be a new action sub-genre called “Halls and Corridors”. It'll encapsulate all those movies where terrorists take over an event and the hero uses their awesome skills of lurking to somehow take out a whole fundamentalist organization one by one – like Sudden Death, or Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Not that these are terrible films, but they use their setting as just that – a setting. You don't watch Under Siege 2 because you like trains. And sadly, this is the case for Command Performance. I was hoping that music would be a large part of the plot, but instead, it's just background. A song or two is performed in the first 20 minutes, and then all we get are some stray musician jokes in between cappin' baddies. Sad-face emoticon.
There's a lot to like here – some violent, merciless deaths and some terrible, terrible acting – and Dolph is getting much more competent as a director, but overall, I wouldn't rent this over his greatest hits like Showdown in Little Tokyo, I Come in Peace, or, my personal favorite, Army of One. There's a magic I was hoping to find inside Dolph's lethery shell, but that magic evaporated years ago. |
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