Rating: E
Dir: Albert Pyun
Star: Rutger Hauer, Shannon Whirry, Norbert Weisser, Tina Cote
I was going to start tearing into this for shamelessly ripping off chunks of its style from The Matrix…except it was made in 1996. Oops! Not that it’s exactly original — most viewers of Albert Pyun films may not be aware of the works of Akira Kurosawa, but they might know A Fistful of Dollars. For this is largely Yojimbo post-apocalypse, in a world populated by robots – or perhaps just very badly-oiled humans, since they squeak and clunk every time they move.
Hauer gets the Clint Eastwood role, playing off two gangs of robots, both seeking a cache of weapons. There’s basically one set – a bomb site, which makes me wonder if this was filmed in Sarajevo – and it’s pretty static stuff, without even the big fights Pyun is known for, and Hauer’s stunt doubling is sadly obvious. While there are certainly some potentially interesting ideas here, rattling around like pennies in a bucket, even at barely 80 minutes, this taxed my patience severely.