Definitely to be filled under “Why the hell am I only seeing this now?”, James Glickenhaus’ noisy and immensely cheesy ode to American’s being awesome, McBain, is a thing to be both ridiculed and embraced in equal measures and usually for the exact same things. Drawing you in with the surreal concept of casting Christopher Walken (yes, that Christopher Walken) as a patriotic action hero, the movie is pretty much the most Cannon movie ever made that wasn’t actually made by the Cannon Group as it’s basically an hour and forty minutes of patriotic flexing as embittered veterans gather to set the world to rights.
The last time Christopher Walken played a POW, we got the majestic brilliance of Michael Cimino’s haunting The Deer Hunter; however, the last time Glickenhaus tackled the subject of POWs, we got impossibly grimy, Namsploitation revenge flick, The Exterminator – so you can see how things might get a little strange. Lock, load, and get those U.S.A. chants ready, because it’s time to hang with McBain.
While shipping out on the last day of the Vietnam war, a group of troops spot a POW camp as they’re getting flown to safety, and after a minimal amount of discussion, the G.I.s land and assault the camp with everything thing they’ve got. Not only do the find a whole bunch of battered prisoners to rescue, but they find Bobby McBain fighting for his life inside a bamboo cage like he was in the fucking Thunderdome. Delivering his gratitude via machine stoicism, McBain tells one of his saviours, Santos, that he owes him his life and will repay him without question if asked.
Eighteen years pass and while McBain has settled down as an iron worker, Santos has become a revolutionary, fighting against the corrupt rule of El Presidente in Columbia (as you do), but when his shocking poorly planned coup goes tits up – never trust the CIA to back you up, kids – his sister, Christina, watches in horror as he’s promptly rendered dead on live TV. However, Christina is fully aware of the pact her brother made with a guy he only met once eighteen years ago, and so she naturally heads to the States to plead with a total stranger to basically invade Colombia.
What with this being a chest beating action flick, McBain naturally agrees with barely a second thought, but even he can’t overthrow the corrupt government of an entire country on his own (nah, you’ll need at least five guys for that) so he tracks down the other members of Santos’ unit – whom he also only met once eighteen years ago – and asks them to risk their lives too.
Thankfully their lives are pretty shit, so head of corporate security, Eastland; burnt out NY cop Gill; even more burnt out surgeon, Dalton and ponytailed arms dealer Frank all agree to help out the downtrodden people of Colombia and avenge their buddy, Santos.
The bad news is that this film has nothing to do with the action spoof McBain that popped up every so often on The Simpsons and featured merciless Schwarzenegger parody, Rainier Wolfcastle (“Mendozaaaaaa!”); however, the good news is that this McBain is just as ludicrous as the yellow, animated one as the smug politics and mountainous amounts of empty patriotism means that every scene is an absolute goldmine for unintentional giggles.
Take the fact that every time McBain feels the need to get deep, he just happens to be somewhere unfeasibly American, like casually welding on top of the Manhattan Bridge, or even have him crab fishing barely fifty feet from the Statue Of Liberty; or that, despite the fact that Walken is unquestionably a fine actor, playing an action who brings the best out of everyone around him is a little out of the reach of his baleful, lizard-like stare or his unconventional speech patterns. In fact, the fact this was made after Abel Ferrara’s unsettling gangster film, King Of New York, and only two years before True Romance blows my fucking mind. Elsewhere, we find that McBain’s gang includes Michael Ironside dressed in the most 90s threads you can imagine and Cannon regular Steve James rises above the American Ninja series, clad in a typically straining muscle shirt and a back-to-front Wrestlemania cap as he bazookas the shit out of a watchtower.
However, as the film rumbles on with all the subtlety of that bolder from Raiders Of The Lost Ark, the plot becomes suspiciously reminiscent of 2010’s The Expendables (naughty, naughty Stallone, you’re gonna get slapped legs), which somehow makes things even funnier, but even that geri-action movie didn’t include scenes where the team try to self-fund by first robbing Luis Guzman’s low level drug dealer, stepping up to con a cool 10 mill out of the mob by pretending to be Mossad and then stealing a plane from Pablo Escobar to get their tooled-up, gung-ho asses over to Colombia.
What happens next is a prime slice of no holds barred, coke dusted action that sees virtually everything blow up, whether its flammable or not and while Glickenhaus may deliver the dialogue and plotting of an excitable teen, the man certainly knows how to blow shit up good. However, even here our overzealous director amusingly drops the ball a little by having the climatic revolution kick off before McBain and co. are even in the country and while they’re all squashed up in their stolen plane, Maria Conchita Alonso has already whipped the people up into a violent frenzy. The downside to this is that it makes our leads somewhat redundant in their own movie and later on, they have to be bailed out again when some random-ass fighter pilot is convinced by McBain to suddenly enter restricted airspace and shoot down enemy jets for them. Sure, the ensuing dogfight is pretty cool, but considering that it involves a character we’ve never met, it’s hardly a gripping affair as our hero convinces other to do the hard work for him.
However, aside from the fact that the movie features some ridiculous, Team America style politics and a hero who has illogical convincing powers equal to David Tennant in Jessica Jones, McBain is actually as super-easy watch and is one of those experiences so unrepentantly bone-headed, and overwhelmingly naive, you can’t help but enjoy yourself as a magnificently miscast Walken upends an entire sovereign nation on a whim, simply because he feels like it.
Insane in the McBain, insane in the brain.
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