This one was better than I remembered.
Mind you, like a lot of genre films, you still have to accept it for what it is, which in this case is a somewhat absurd Nineties buddy-cop revenge drug war science fiction action film with horror elements.
Yep. One of those.
Actually, there’s a fairly clever idea here, that human endorphins would be the ultimate drug if one could find a way to harvest them – and a way to actually use them. So we get an alien drug dealer injecting people with stolen heroin to cause a massive endorphin rush, and then sucking the “goodies” out of their brains.
There’s also an alien cop after him, blazing away with his super gun: while that might be enough for some movies (like Peacemaker), we also get a drug gang, bad cops, alien weapons, government conspiracy, an Odd Couple partner, a medical examiner girlfriend who is almost as creepy as Linda Fiorentino in Men In Black, mullets from outer space, and, of course, all the usual explosions, fights, and people crashing through windows of an early-Nineties action film.
Dolph Lundgren is in fine form here, in an impressively physical performance. And he gets to dive through windows more than once. He seems to be in a confident, jokey, Arnold Schwarzenegger sort of place in this one, something he rarely achieved in his films. If he’d made a few more like this one, Ahnold’s domination of the Action film market might not have been quite so secure.
And in fact, that is what this one seems like more than anything else, the sort of film that Arnie made in the Eighties and Nineties, complete with one-liners and over-the-top (but non-CGI) action. And it is one of the better brainless action thrillers out there. Let’s face it: the action movie hasn’t been the same since they started using computers to cheat those impossible stunts. We still know they are fake, but it’s a more real fake, and still makes a few concessions to the laws of physics. A few. Enough, really, to make it all almost plausible.
And you can’t say that about the latest Die Hard.
This is one of those movies that go well with lots of popcorn and lots of friends, complete with commentary and warnings shouted at the screen.
And won’t even hate yourself that much afterwards.
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rivets on the poster 
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