Customer Reviews

Laser Mission [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

This movie was made close enough to the 80s when all the best action movies were made, and it shows. Brandon Lee fans don't have a large list of movies to choose from, so I was pleased to find out that in this movie he doesn't disappoint. He shows a lot of his good natured personality and sense of humor in the film, which is great to see. There is some slapstick humor thrown in, and that takes some of the edge off of the sometimes violent action. In the action department this movie rivals Showdown in Little Tokyo with gunplay, knife fighting, and physical fighting. There is a good amount of Brandon in the movie, so fan's of his will not want to miss this one. The film is not as slickly shot as Rapid Fire, but I woulndn't compare this film to that one, because they were made four years apart, and the action type movies were starting to change [around 1994], so I view this as kind of a 1980's style action movie (the film was made in 1990, so it just makes the cut). There's something about that style of movie that is still nice to see.

If you value the memory of Brandon Lee (and even if you don't) do yourself a favor and don't watch this movie. I give it two stars overall, but the second star is for extraordinary and unintentional comedy. The film opens with the monotonous and annoying power ballad "Mercenary Man" (the handiwork, I hate to reveal, of David Knopfler, Mark's younger brother) a song that fits the theme of the film, yet is played so often in the course of the movie that you will want to scream if you hear it one more time. Unfortunately for the viewer, the theme song is by far the best part of the movie.

The plot concerns Brandon Lee as Michael Gold, a mercenary US contract agent who travels to Cuba and then onward to some fictional country in Africa (though exactly how he gets there is a bit of a mystery.) This is all in an attempt to bring Ernest Borgnine (as Professor Braun) to the United States as he has developed a method of using a big diamond (which gets a subplot of it's own in an apparent homage to the original "Pink Panther") to make a laser that can start World War Three. Needless to say, Ernest (who has the worst accent in the history of cinema) is also wanted by the KGB led by the stiflingly bad Col. Kalishnakov (named for a similarly-named Soviet-manufactured combat weapon, evidently), and the amorphously evil "Eckhardt" who is menacing with his over-the-top pseudo-Austrian accent and diction skills. Think of William Shatner as an insane, evil member of the SS and you will come close to the degree of overacting present here.

The film boils down to some of the most ineptly directed combat scenes (it's always good to stand in the open when being shot at with a rifle; it is also wise to ignore the archer shooting huge arrows from about three feet above your head, but I digress) ever recorded for posterity. As a sidebar, we get the obligatory romance between Lee and Debi Monahan, an actress with a voice that can shatter glass at one hundred yards. She is supposed to be a super-spy of some sort (that's an issue open to conjecture as well) but spends the bulk of the film shrieking and running through the desert in a dress and heels. To say there is no chemistry between Lee and Monahan is to state the painfully obvious.

There are also plots about diamond mining, genocide, a team of comic-relief communist helicopter thieves, and a family reunion during an amazing turn of events in the last five minutes of the movie, which prepares us for one more round of "Mercenary Man" and the credits.

This film really would have been excellent fodder for MST3K or Joe Bob Briggs. As a final note, since the title of the film is "Laser Mission" it would be fair to assume that there was actually a laser in the movie. That's where you would be wrong: the laser is mentioned but never seen. Apparently it was cheaper to rent a helicopter, a small rocky outcropping in a third-world country, and a VW bus full of fake weaponry than to show a laser. The lack of a laser in the film despite the implicit promise of a laser in the title contributes to the second star I give this film.

Whew doggies! This one's up there with Nasty Rabbit on the stink-o-meter! Superspy and international man of mystery, Michael Gold (Brandon "The Crow" Lee) must save Dr. Braun (Ernest "Devil's Rain" Borgnine) from the clutches of an evil austrian guy named Eckhardt, who has a human head collection in his family room. Eckhardt has also stolen the world's biggest diamond in order to make a deadly laser (which never even comes close to actually happening). Gold travels from Cuba to Africa, apparently via astral-projection, as he simply appears there; where he encounters Braun's daughter, Alissa, who is either a dim-witted superspy herself, or a dim-witted, frizzy blonde bimbette with ever-popping soap bubbles in her skull. Gold and Alissa secure a VW hippie-van loaded with guns and explosives, and tear around shooting and blowing up stuntmen until being blown up themselves (the van that is). Most of the action takes place in the desert, where austrian thugs come at our heroes one at a time, seemingly from nowhere, on foot and on horseback! The whole thing culminates in a sub-par climax at a diamond mine. Watch as Gold is shot in the back, a through-and-through wound that most certainly mulches his liver! Watch as he gets better, without so much as a band-aid! He's tough! Given the choice between watching this again or being roasted alive, I'd put an apple in my mouth and head for the barbecue pit! Take heed...

Given the tragic circumstances of his untimely death, not to mention the deep respect I have for his father, I feel sort of bad about denigrating one of Brandon Lee's films (albeit, one of his earliest films). Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that Laser Mission exists solely to be made fun of, as it's such a hilariously bad movie. The plot barely holds the whole thing together, the acting is pretty weak all across the board, the dialogue is so cheesy that that the film should come with a warning label for lactose-intolerant viewers, the special effects don't exactly blow you away, and even the music proves to be highly annoying. Obviously, I really have no choice but to give the film a low rating, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the heck out of watching it - this thing is chock full of unintentional hilarity.

Brandon Lee plays Michael Gold, a secret agent-type guy who really isn't very good at his job. Apparently, all of the CIA's spies were at a meeting or something because the Americans hire Gold to go down and try to talk a Cuban scientist (played by "well-known Cuban actor" Ernest Borgnine) into bringing his knowledge of advanced laser technology to America. Gold screws that up pretty quickly but manages to beg his way into a second chance with the guys at the American Embassy. With Professor Braun (Borgnine) now missing, Gold seeks out help from the professor's daughter Alissa (Debi Monahan, who's about as Cuban as Marilyn Monroe) - and I must say that the disguised manner in which he first contacts her is not to be missed (nor is the somewhat revealing dress Monahan wears throughout most of the movie - without it, there would be absolutely nothing worth looking at in the entire film). Even the setting of this film is problematic. It seems pretty clear that the whole thing begins in Cuba, so I was pretty confused when Gold starts talking about heading south for the border (the last I checked, Cuba was an island). The next thing I knew, he and Alissa are in Africa (and still driving the same beat-up VW van they escaped in). That pretty much sums this whole movie up in a nutshell (that and the fact that the word "titles" is misspelled in the closing credits).

In closing, I thought I would just jot down a few of the things I learned from watching Laser Mission:

* Anyone can pass as a Cuban, even without a fake mustache (and it's OK if you forget your accent every now and again).

* It is not altogether shocking for high-ranking officers in the Cuban army to drop out of trees and start barking orders in English to bivouacking soldiers.

* No one at any level of the Cuban army can hit a target, so you have plenty of time to walk toward them and make sure your aim is perfect before killing any of them - actually, you don't even have to aim at them if you don't want to. Brandon Lee shot up a truckload of Cuban soldiers with his gun pretty much pointed toward the ground.

* You can apparently drive from Cuba to the African desert in just a few hours.

* It's possible to walk across 400 miles of desert in high heels, without any water to drink, and come out looking only moderately sweaty - and your clothes won't be dirty no matter how many sand dunes you roll down while fighting incompetent assassins.

* All you need to make a nuclear bomb is the right kind of laser and a big honkin' diamond.

Of all my time spent on Friday night watching a movie or two, one time was quite rememberable. Enjoyable so. I put in this movie into my DVD player, hoping to see some Brandon Lee class and exciting action, but in this little gem we saw his satirical side. The whole movie was a thrill ride, that frankly, didn't end, and made me want to puke. I'm not sure if the puke came from the absense of acting, staging, plot transitions, wit, generativity, a budget above triple digits, or the little game me and my buds played during the course of the movie. We called it "Take A Shot of Beer Every Time A White Dot or Square Appears on the Top Right Hand Corner of the Screen Or We Catch Glimpses of the Stage Crew". One drunk night...

Some one explain to me how they got from Cuba to South Africa. Hell, since realism isn't a factor in that movie, I suspect they drove. This movie also seems to defy medical science, since anyone beat-up/crushed/shot full of two clips/centered in explosion will obviously live, until they are droven into a magical brick wall.

I've said enough, and to end, I say "Watch this movie".

Its funny for the wrong reasons.

This is beyond question the worst movie ever created by a human being. I have never seen anything that I consider to be more poorly done. The entirety of the movie's budget seems to have been spent on casting Ernest Borgnine - which is fortunate, as none of the other "actors" are the least bit capable, except Brandon Lee, who clearly isn't even trying. I've seen better cinematography from camcorders. Also, the "special" effects are questionable at best, the chase scene has all the enthusiasm of a college student eating ramen noodles cooked a week prior, and at some point, they manage to get from Cuba to somewhere in Africa without ever telling the audience. Furthermore, the female "lead" has a most amazing item: a isappearing-reappearing bra. Though her clothing only comes off once (off camera), her bra, as near as we the viewer can tell, is present only every other scene. It disgusts me that this movie was ever released, and the fact that it is now on DVD, where it will never biodegrade, makes me weep for humanity's future.

However.

This is by far the most ludicrously fun cinematic experience I have *ever* had, and I heartily endorse making unsuspecting fools watch this movie. If you can stomach it.

Good luck.

Laser Mission was a great movie. My teenagers and my husband enjoyed it too. Now my teens want all of Brandon Lee's movies. Thanks Amazon for having such a wide variety of movies. I will continue to order from Amazon and their providers. I received my movie when the said and it came packaged as was said.

This movie is a real dud. How Brandon Lee ever got involved with this ... is beyond me. No fight scenes and a dull, slow-moving plot.

Trust me, NOT WORTH YOUR TIME OR MONEY TO SEE THIS ...

Brandon Lee, Ernest Borgnine and Debi Monahan should have made this movie watchable. About the only thing I found interesting in this movie was the exposure that Debi Monahan got in her dress. The rest of the movie is a loosely connected series of action scenes that have almost nothing to do with a laser. I was quite sad about not having a laser.

Michael Gold (Lee) is a super spy out to rescue Dr. Braun (Borgnine). There is a lot of action and hitting and shooting and jumping, and the next thing you know there is this girl, Alissa (Monahan), who we all think is Dr. Braun's daughter. Alissa seems to be quite handy with guns and explosives for someone who supposedly works in a zoo.

The next thing you know, we are in a desert and there is a big showdown and Gold gets shot in the back, and there are all kinds of blood on the front of his shirt, and yet Gold seems awfully spry. There is still no laser at this point, but there is a big diamond (really big) that could be part of a laser if Dr. Braun is allowed to do his scientific thing.

In order to stay within the spirit of the movie, there is more shooting and blowing up, and it takes three attempts to take out the #1 bad guy. Then there is a needless scene with a stolen helicopter and the movie is finally over. There is STILL no laser. I was so disappointed. We have a movie called "Laser Mission" and there was never a laser.

I like a good action movie; it is just that this movie was not a good action movie. I have to believe that the actors in this movie wish they could take this one back. I know I would like to get back the time I wasted on this movie. The only people who should consider getting this movie are those who have to have every Brandon Lee movie, or every appearance of Ernest Borgnine (which is approaching 200 television and movie appearances). Everyone else should stay away; far away; really far away.

First of all, I confess to being a Brandon Lee fan, so any movie in his unfortunately small filmography is worth watching to me. Brandon did not disappoint, giving a great performance with charm and good humor and making the best of a terrible script. Even so, this is a nebulous, plotless, cliched to the hilt, dull film. But I'm giving it three stars because, believe it or not, I've seen worse...much worse.