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Point Blank - starring a sleepwalking Mickey Rourke
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Holy Guacamole. This one is awful on an epic scale. The plot is simple to the point of cliche: a group of bad guys storm a shopping mall and take the people inside hostage, and the paycheck-collecting Mickey Rourke plays some ex-Merc who is "the only person who can stop them. " Basically, it's Die Hard in a mall, but instead of being directed by the guy who made Predator, it's directed by a guy who spent the following decade directing episodes of some of my favorite TV shows ever, including CSI: NY & Miami, LOST, Prison Break, Knight Rider 2008 and Cashmere Mafia. It would appear that "hack" is spelled M-A-T-T-E-A-R-L-B-E-E-S-L-E-Y. Just about everything in this movie is bad, but fortunately enough, some of it is so bad that it is kind of funny and entertaining to watch.
The biggest problem is the bare bones story itself, which barely attempts to set up the characters before getting the action going. There's something with one of the bad guys in the mall being Mickey Rourke'sbroheim , but otherwise there really is no explanation as to why Rourke is the only person for this job. When his character is first introduced, he's just working on some dirt farm with his pops. So why they come get him I have no idea. Maybe underneath the dirt farm was an intense mercenary training facility. They didn't show it though. So the mall with the hostages is surrounded by Police and then two ineffective FBI agents show up, and the only one doing anything is Rourke, who sneaks into the mall and starts killing bad guys one at a time. The movie is loaded with shots of Rourke huddling against a wall or in a corner, either thinking, contemplating or trying not to poo his pants. Not sure which, since Rourke is, for the most part, sleepwalking through this one. Just about everyone is sleepwalking through this thing, including Kevin Gage (Heat's Waingro), extremely reliable character actor Paul Ben-Victor, and craggly-voiced James Gammon (he's the pops). And hilariously, as the movie wears on, several characters get overwrought emotional moments that are completely unearned. An inmate we don't care about gets a ridiculously elaborate death scene, and by the end of the movie, we're supposed to feel empathy for one of the bad guys, a young kid who was just at the end of his rope and make a simple mistake, but I really didn't give a crap about him, no matter how much the movie wanted me to.
Now, Danny Trejo gets a decent sized character, in that not only is his shown to be a criminal, but we also know he loves cocaine and his balls have cobwebs on 'em from lack of use in prison. So first we get a very uncomfortable scene ofTrejo harassing a hot female hostage. But that gets stopped by another bad guy with a bit of a conscious, which pisses Trejo off. So to make him feel better, he is given a brick of cocaine (taken from some safe in the mail, which store I have no idea) which he immediately starts doing bumps off of. While he does that, another female hostage, who is covered in blood splatter from another hostage being shotgunned (long story), asks for a bump of her own, andTrejo gladly gives her some, and then pulls her off to the side to have a lil party, which we get to see. And the whole thing is just a trip and a half. Trejo sits down shirtless with his gun in his lap doing blow, while the chick strips down to her panties and does a pole dance for him, both of them completely yakked up on the ya-yo. And she doesn't bother cleaning the blood off, so she's got these crazy coke eyes, and blood soaked legs and she's dancing forTrejo , who is just sitting there and looking crazed, and the music is some bad 90's dance music and it's all so very bad. And before he screws her, he takes her to a window where the cops can see him and he shoots her in front of the cops as a warning, and dumps her body over the rail. What a waste. I have no idea what the purpose of any of this was. Maybe a sort of Hostage Takers Gone Wild sort of scene, I dunno.
But the Trejo-weirdness doesn't stop there! Later he has an epic fight with Rourke, in which he somehow becomes covered in different colored paints, so he's running around, coked up, shot multiple times but still alive, and he's multi-colored. And during this epic, rock-em sock-em battle, the music playing is some sort of 80-90's style power rock ballad, all uptempo and definitely not apropos for the scene. Actually, the whole movie is full of odd or just plain awful musical choices. Lots of 80/90's action movie bluesy guitar stuff, mixed with the aforementioned power ballad, as well as a hilarious rip off of an Eddie Van Halen-style guitar solo during an action scene, and it all sucks, but in a pretty funny way. I watched this movie cause I wanted to see Rourke in something, and this was certainly something, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that is not a Mickey Rourke or Danny Trejo completist. I mean, if you are with some friends and have a few beers laying around, and you want to laugh at someone's failed attempt at a Die Hard type of film, in that case, yes, I recommend this film. But otherwise, I dunno. Enter at your own risk.
You can at least watch this video, which is basically all the best Rourke stuff in the movie (culled from an Italian dubbed version of the movie, which just makes it all so much more surreal).
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