BUY FROM AMAZON: Click Here!
MSRP: $27.99
RATED: Unrated
STUDIO: RLJ/Image Entertainment
RUNNING TIME: 88 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES: It ends, eventually
THE PITCH
“Let’s drive Gary Daniels down to Tijuana and refuse to take him home until he agrees to star in our movie.”
THE HUMANS
Gary Daniels and no one else you’ve ever heard of (see: Gary Daniels)
THE NUTSHELL
A DEA agent tries to rescue his ex-wife from a drug cartel.
THE LOWDOWN
There are a lot of Mexicans that don’t know they’re in Misfire. This is so obviously shot without a permit on the streets of Tijuana that a background extra stares directly into the camera before turning away, completely disinterested. This happens in the middle of the film’s climactic gun fight. Yeah…
Gary Daniels’ Cole is probably the most incompetent character I’ve seen in the last five years. Forget that he’s supposed to be an elite DEA agent with friends in high places, the guy takes three on-screen naps in an 88 minute movie (83 without credits). In the opening foot chase (not the film’s last), Daniels trots after the bad guy as they both gradually make their way to a camera that someone left lying at the other end of a hallway. When he’s not chasing pudgy Mexicans, Daniels looks like he’s struggling to breathe. Not because he’s out of breath, mind you, but because if he doesn’t remind himself to do it (through a serious of ponderous squints), he’ll stop. And die.
But it’s not just that he looks stupid, Cole gets suspended before the story even begins. Devoid of any government ties, he manages to get a fellow agent wounded during an illegal, botched raid of a drug compound. Less then 24-hours later, he coaxes an informant to help him by promising to keep his mother safe (“If I can find her, anyone can,” he humbly submits), only to get them both killed about twenty minutes later. Any promise of a one-man army cleaning up the drug-filled streets of Mexico is shot down with that poor man and his mother. All of this precedes a shoot-out where Cole’s single hero moment consists of a wide-angle push in on our man before he almost gets shot in the head for sticking it near a window. He’s a man without a plan. The kind of hero who’ll impulsively throw a semi-automatic machine gun onto the passenger seat of his car and rush headlong into a situation that’ll get himself and the person he’s supposed to save killed. He’s a meathead.
Duh…
This is a film entirely comprised of long takes and slow motion shots of people having consensual make-out sessions. People casually walk from one end of a hallway to the other, sometimes with guns drawn, sometimes not. There’s a scene where Cole waits as the reporter-girl he’s working with walks all the way to one end of a baseball diamond and then walks aaaaalllll the way back. Neither he, nor the editor had anything better to do, I guess. And I watched it, so neither did I. Hmm. During Cole’s third nap (this time in the back seat of a car), the reporter girl decides that she wants to fuck and they share a 90 second kiss that isn’t afraid to answer all the questions you never knew you had about the inside of Gary Daniels’ mouth.
This is the kind of film where one of the henchmen speaks to his boss with all the friendly customer service of a McDonalds manager. The boss ends up strangling his underling to death, but you get the feeling the guy was so stupid and so polite, he might have done it himself. As sad as Cole may be, the bad guys look like they got dressed in a bowling alley and cart themselves to undisclosed locations in the backs of flatbed trucks. It’s no shock when, at the end of the film, they basically just give up. There’s a shot of the drug kingpin sitting dejected in his chair. At a time when he should be seeking revenge, he decides he’s just totally spent and decides to let a lumpy, old white dude get away with very literal murder.
To be fair to Gary Daniels, he pulls off some pretty excellent spin-kicks. I’m still in my 20s and I can’t do that shit. That’s about as close to anything nice I can say about this movie.
THE PACKAGE
Yeah, the package is a plastic of some kind. There’s also artwork and a synopsis. Pretty nice package there, guy.