Laser Mission

They ride the horse into the nearest town, wherever that might be. If you figure their target destination of the desert stronghold was four hundred miles away, and on foot they maybe covered thirty miles, then I'd say the town is probably only two hundred, two hundred fifty miles away, tops, which is about as far as two people can ride a horse without getting nasty cramps. They check into a hotel, where they pose as a husband and wife for absolutely no reason. It's a pretty stupid ruse, honestly, since they have no rings or any sort of documentation that would prove they're together, but hey, this is Namibia. It's full of morons. They should be safe. They retire to their room, where they recover from a full day of travel and fighting for their lives by a nice five-hour block of sex. What's amazing is that it was daytime when they fought the last hitman, it was still light when they got to the town, and five hours later it was actually still bright out. Man, some parts of the world have some longass days.

This is Alissa's "crafty" face.

While Gold is sleeping, Alissa peers out the window and notices Kalishnakov and a lackey pull up outside the hotel. She puts her favorite blue dress back on, sneaks outside, and hotwires Kalishnakov's car. Kalishnakov and his companion steal another car and chase after her, but she's far too good of a driver for them to catch. Gold wakes up some time later and finds a note on the pillow next to him that informs him that Alissa has merely gone shopping. I don't know exactly when she wrote that note, considering we saw her leave, but at this point I'm not going to nitpick over a tiny little distortion of the laws of reality like that. 

That night, Gold gets a phone call from Alissa in the hotel room. She says that she has killed Kalishnakov, then hangs up. The shot switches to Alissa, where we see that she didn't so much kill him as he did capture her. Oops. Gold decides that now would be a good time to take Eckhardt's fortress by force, so he heads out there, shoves a lone black guard into an electric fence, and breaks inside. Sadly, he falls into a trap shortly after and is captured. He then finds himself bound to a chair, face to face with Professor Braun. They start to talk, but BJ Davis apparently feels that the previous scene was so good that it's worth seeing all over again, so the film skips right back to the beginning of the phone conversation between Gold and Alissa. I'm not kidding. I've seen some movies where a single shot repeats due to some choppy editing, but we're talking about a solid three minutes of film, here. Way to go, "Laser Mission."

Once we finally work our way back up to Gold waking up and finding himself face to face with Braun again, the two of them discuss their unfortunate situation. Braun claims that Eckhardt can force him to use his laser technology and the giant diamond to create a nuclear weapon. My question is, uh... how? I mean, I'm no physicist or anything, but that doesn't sound even remotely plausible. Now if he said that he could create a really freaking powerful laser weapon or something, that would be one thing, but a nuclear bomb? I tend to doubt it. And if Eckhardt and Kalishnakov wanted a nuke so badly, why did they go about getting one by stealing the only diamond in the world big enough and the only scientist in the world smart enough to make one with a laser? If they're that good at stealing stuff and kidnapping people, why not just steal a freaking bomb? Or at the very least kidnap some people who could build one. That seems like it would be a lot easier. Well, too late now, I guess. Eckhardt and Kalishnakov enter and reveal that they have captured Braun's daughter. Kalishnakov takes the diamond and leaves for their diamond mine (which they have now) to finalize some evil plans of some sort.

Shoot him! Pull the trigger and shoot him!

Eckhardt releases Gold from his chains and takes him at gunpoint into the next room. The walls of the next room, as it so happens, are absolutely covered with weapons. Guns, rifles, knives, swords, it's all there for the taking. It seems to me that if you've got the secret agent who has singlehandedly killed like half the military of the continent of Africa in your custody and you want to kill him, the one thing you shouldn't do is take off his chains and bring him into a room full of readily available weapons. And then Eckhardt puts his own gun on the wall, too! This is like an instructional video for prospective supervillains everywhere. After all that, Eckhardt is still surprised when Gold punches him. Even with all those weapons around, the two of them resort to hand-to-hand combat. The battle each other up a flight of stair and onto the roof. After a short, remarkably lame battle, they both topple off the roof. Gold lands on the grass, but Eckhardt is impaled on some spikes. I think there's something in Brandon Lee's contract that states "At least one main villain must fall from a roof and get impaled on something." Then again, it's probably also in his contract that "No live weaponry shall be used anywhere on the set during the filming of this movie," so you can see how strictly people stick to their contracts in this business.

Well now. I do believe that's a ninja, that is.

Gold gets to his feet and sees that Eckhardt is dead. He starts to walk away, but instead he's attacked by a ninja! That's right, a completely random ninja just leaps out of nowhere and starts fighting him. There is absolutely nothing in this movie that could in any way be viewed as precedent for a ninja, but there you go, there's a ninja. Not a particularly good ninja, either. Gold gives the ninja a good old fashioned backbreaker over his knee, and that's that. Okay then. Uh... wow. Let's all take a moment to reflect on what just happened.

Alright then. We transition to the diamond mine, where our old buddies Manuel and Roberta are now being used as slaves. They have a short conversation which basically cements the fact that they have no idea what they're saying! Dear sweet Jesus in heaven, get them out of this movie! Their discussion is cut off when some soldier or somebody calls them away for no reason at all. Kalishnakov, meanwhile, has Alissa tied to a chair inside. He amuses himself by tossing diamonds down her cleavage. She moans like a slut when one makes it down, which amazes me. He tries to get physical with her - and you realize I'm speaking sexually, here - but she somehow resists his robotic Soviet charm. Back outside, the soldiers round up a group of the slaves and execute them. Just then, Gold and Braun arrive on the scene.. Gold forms a plan while Braun decides that now would be as good a time as any to change accents altogether.

She couldn't be any more into this.

Manuel and Roberta escape and start a slave revolt against the soldiers. The ensuing semi-chaos gets Kalishnakov's attention, and he leaves Alissa alone in the room with a box cutter a few feet away from her. This one wouldn't be a tough escape for anyone. I don't know why he expects a freaking secret agent to stay put. I guess he works on the honor system. So, yeah, she escapes and finds a pistol. She then kills two guards outside by gesturing at them vaguely with the pistol, which they take as cues to fall down. Kalishnakov actually manages to shoot Gold in the back. However, unlike every other person in this entire movie, getting shot doesn't kill Gold instantly. In fact, it doesn't even slow him down. To the movie's credit, he does get a little dirty, though. As Kalishnakov closes in to finish him off, Alissa comes up from behind and presses her gun against his head. Gold rushes off into the mines to try to disable a bomb that has been planted there. One would think he would have learned by now that he has to do all the important stuff on his own, and that he wouldn't then leave Alissa alone with the bad guy. But he does, and surprise surprise, he gets free and ends up actually taking her hostage in return. Kalishnakov takes her into the mine, where he yaps at Gold about how in the movies, the hero would kill him with a well aimed shot, even though it would mean risking the girl's life. He is cut off, however, when Gold shoots him. Six times.

Alissa and Braun finally meet face to face, and would you believe it, she's not really his daughter! And she's not really a civilian! She's with the CIA! That's right, the CIA sent her in to keep an eye on Gold. So now instead of a KGB agent who can't fight, she's a CIA agent who can't fight. That's much better. The whole KGB thing is never explained. I think we are just supposed to pretend it was never said. But what's this? Kalishnakov isn't dead! As he rises off the ground, the single worst example of creepy violin plucking plays. He shoots at Gold from the entrance to the mine, but misses horribly. Oh, and Gold never actually got around to deactivating that bomb, so it, you know, blows the hell out of the mine and out of Kalishnakov. So that's that.

Yeah, that's the diamond, alright.

A helicopter lands and the two CIA guys from earlier get out, accompanied for no particular reason by Braun's actual daughter. It's nice how they managed to time their flight so that they could bring a civilian woman into the area the moment the danger was gone. That was especially well-planned on their part. The CIA guys explain Alissa's allegiances again and say that Gold will get his money, but he'll have to split it with Alissa. That's when Kalishnakov attacks again. Sure, he's been shot and blown up, but he's a trooper. Gold climbs into a jeep, runs him over, and rams him into a brick wall. This time, the bastard finally dies. By "bastard" I mean Kalishnakov, not Gold. Manuel and Roberta steal the CIA helicopter and everybody enjoys a good hearty laugh as the two Cubans slowly get away in a hundred million dollar piece of U.S. government property. So that just leaves one loose end. I could tell you what happens, but there's no way to make it and funnier than it actually is, so here is the real dialogue:

Alissa: "Do you have the diamond?"
Gold: "That depends who's asking."
Braun: "Well whoever has it will have a strong bargaining position." (He grins like an idiot)
Gold: (Holding up the diamond) "I got it."
Alissa: "But who's the rightful owner?"
Gold: "You're looking at him!"

That's right, Michael Gold, the big hero, ends the movie by declaring that he is going to take possession of the most valuable diamond on the face of the planet. He's not going to give it back to the museum or whatever that place was in the first scene, he's not going to give it to the government for safekeeping, he's just going to take it. What a rolemodel. What a movie. The credits start to roll, underscored by -yep, you guessed it - the mercenary song.

Well, this movie bites. I think that much is pretty clear at this point. The camera shots are all pretty steady, I have to give it that. And it's isn't on some crappy digital camera found at a yard sale. There is definitely money behind "Laser Mission." But that's just about all I can say in its favor. The overall story arc makes sense, as long as you never question anyone's motivation, but once you get into the slightest level of detail, this movie just falls apart. The dialogue is overly cheesy ninety percent of the time, but it's almost easy to ignore that, since most of the acting is so freakishly horrible anyway. It's not clumsy, it's not over the top (except for Brandon Lee), it's just severely retarded. There are language barriers at work in this movie that I don't even begin to understand. Most of the cast seems to have no idea what they're saying or doing, and seeing Ernest Borgnine fumble with an array of laughably phony Germanesque accents is just painful. The fact that basically the only music in the entire movie is that mercenary song doesn't help matters too much, either. But then, there is a ninja. No one can say this movie doesn't have a ninja.

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

– Ben "Greasnin" Platt