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In which Dolph Lundgren learns the perils of skinny-fit pants. ---------------------------  Dolph Lundgren is Aiden Hakkanson, Marco Mazzoli is Antonio Graziani, the new cop in the Italian town where DL's wife and daughter died in 2008.The movie opens with a flashback to 10-yr-old Aiden Hakkanson being taken hunting for the first time, on his birthday, by his father, with emphasis on tracking, respecting nature, and how to be a man. Then there's a second flashback, this time to 2008 Italy, where his wife and daughter are kidnapped and sort-of-accidentally killed despite DL trying to pay the ransom. It never says what he does for a living. In a great professional triumph, Dolph manages to look really sad when he is informed that their bodies have been found! (I love the man and would marry him in a heartbeat, but even he knows he's not much of an actor.) Finally, present day Italy, when DL has been called back to Italy to meet the cop who did the investigation, who has new info that must be delivered in person. Unfortunately, the cop "committed suicide" a few hours after making the phone call, managing the rather difficult feat of cutting his own throat in bed. For some reason, the costume department decided that half of the men in the film should wear extremely tight "skinny fit" pants, instead of the special "action hero" pants that let them do splits without splitting a seam. As a result, several mafia henchmen look ridiculous instead of menacing in their ski masks, black coats, machine guns, and . . . scrawny chicken legs. The few, limited fight scenes had to resort to shaky-cam to disguise the fact that DL couldn't lift his knees high enough to knee people in the stomach. He managed to walk realistically on flat surfaces, but the scenes involving stairs made him look crippled and ailing, and they could only show him going up, never down. (Yes, I know he got his hips replaced in 2017, but he can afford good surgeons and physical therapists. This was excessively tight pants. He had to skip leg day just to get them on.) Sorry, back to the plot. Mazzoli-as-Graziani finds it suspicious that the old cop died a few hours after calling DL, too. Fortunately, the cop's upstairs neighbor and good friend is a British retiree, so he can fill us in in English and lead people to the dead cop's corkboard-&-red-yarn display about the kidnapping, and everyone can start looking for the mafia guys, Albanian smugglers, and crooked cops. The mafia guy used kidnappings to finance his drug-smuggling and cop-bribing. He wants to retire after one last deal to tie up loose ends, one of which is one of the crooked cops. He kidnaps the cop's teen daughter, giving a nice plot-device to get everyone to the final fight location , a cool stone building with lots of rooms, levels, narrow stairways, and flat roofs to play hide & seek on. DL never gets to change clothes, so he is limited to punching and shooting and trying to sound slightly out of breath, which he has never mastered. (  ) Mazzoli gets to drop a grenade on the stack of unspecified-drug powder, which is fun. Bad guys are shot, girl is rescued, Mazzoli gets notice his wife had twins while he was shooting bad guys, and there is a scene where he gives DL back his passport and says that everything is straightened out. Final flashback to 10-yr-old boy and dad shot from the beginning with comment that the tracker, the hunter, and the prey "are all in me." The end.------------- Minus one star for immovable pants, plus one for DL and one for DL managing facial emotion, so a solid 4 stars because I can't math any more.
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Nov 4, 2019 22:12
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 10:47 |
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