I could’ve sworn I had mentioned Michael Paré when I briefly spoke about Bad Moon, but apparently that didn’t happen. A shame, really, as Paré is a solid actor with a resume spanning nearly four decades, including previous appearances in AoG films like Gone, The Virgin Suicides, and The Lincoln Lawyer, and those are just the ones from the top of his IMDb page. As it turns out, a couple of recent films I watched happened to feature him (and he’s got more coming this year, including *shudder* the next Puppet Master entry), so I figured I’d bind the two together based on this link. Why not, right?
The first, Global Meltdown, is a made-for-Canadian-TV movie from last year. Kinda like a different take on Roland Emmerich’s abysmal 2012, the film follows a group of survivors as they try to find safety after a major tectonic cataclysm. Paré is easily the standout here, playing a survivalist whose self-serving attitude bristles against the more idealistic group members and whose particular set of skills makes him eminently useful to them. He’s taking things just seriously enough to make the character work, while simultaneously keeping himself from both overdoing it (it would have been insanely easy for him to deliver a ridiculously over-the-top performance here, misanthropy and backwoods accent and all) and merely phoning it in.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the people involved here fall into the latter category. The acting, as a whole, is weak, wooden, and sometimes barely existent, and that’s when it’s good. The usual post-apocalyptic character archetypes are here, from the lone wolf enforcers to the utopian cooperators and all the flocks of followers in between. Plus, we’ve got a capable scientist who gets painfully ignored, so we’re keeping most of the Emmerich bases covered. The direction is standard for the medium, the cameras are on the cheaper side, and the visual effects vary from pretty good-looking (like massive columns of smoke ominously billowing behind an abandoned suburban setting) to awful-even-for-TV (including many effects that look to have been integrated without the animators looking at the footage itself), most leaning toward the latter.
It’s not very good, but it’s a serviceable-enough bit of apocalyptic chaos for those deeply into the genre.
From spacious Canada, Paré treks to Romania for Battle Drone.
Also known as Battle of the Drones or Hunted: Battles of the Drones, depending on where or when you come across it, the film centers on a team of paramilitary mercenaries doing dirty work for the US government. Little do they know, though, their newest mission (honestly, I can’t remember if it’s actually set in Romania, but it’s somewhere in the general eastern-European area, and the movie was filmed in Romania, so…) is really a testing ground for the government’s newest bit of tech: humanoid drones.
Not gonna lie, I went into this fairly intrigued by the plot summary, ’cause who doesn’t wanna see some badassery involving robot soldiers duking it out with mercs? As it turns out, I was only partially disappointed. See, the director (a stuntman with credits ranging from V.R. Troopers to Twilight) adds some neat camera tricks, like having the camera dart through bullet-time scenes of action, to keep our attention, and the acting is actually mostly solid, led by Paré, Louis Mandylor, and my boy Oleg Taktarov (you may remember him as one of the best things about Predators). Sadly, though, some of the other actors, in particular Natassia Malthe (formerly the pretty awesome Ayane from DOA) and Dominique Swain (who I’m likely to only remember for playing the title role in the remake of Lolita), woefully underperform, and the plot and overall presentation land fairly dully. This seems like an idea that could have worked, but the writers just settled into an extremely familiar rut, seemingly not wanting to push any envelopes. As such, the action is rote, the characters barely matter, and the audience is left severely wanting. Still, it’s not a total lost cause, so if you just need a quick dose of action, give it a go.
It’d be pretty great if Michael Paré’s career continues to bloom, ’cause he’s just too damn talented and charismatic not to have around for a rainy day. Show him some love, kids.
Allusions of Grandeur 