“The Silencers” Theatrical Poster
Director: Richard Pepin
Cast: Jack Scalia, Dennis Christopher, Carlos Lauchu, Lucinda Weist, Clarence Williams III, Stephen Rowe, Lance LeGault, Madison Mason, Terri Poch
Running Time: 103 min.
By Henry McKeand
PM Entertainment always understood how to borrow the most successful elements of mainstream action cinema and synthesize them into sweaty, single-minded B-movies that somehow delivered more fireworks than tentpole films with three times their budget. If the composition of your average high-testosterone Hollywood effort was about 40% set pieces, a PM joint would manage to bump that number up to somewhere around 60%. To find this sweet spot, they treated the contemporary action landscape like a machine that could be stripped for parts; no trend or plot idea was safe.
The Silencers, a ’96 PM vehicle for Jack Scalia, is no different. Set in (you guessed it) sunny California, it looks and feels like so many other L.A.-set actioners of its time, regardless of budget. The use of a high concept sci-fi premise (here, the government’s infiltration by secretive extra-terrestrial agents) as a catalyst for copious amounts of gunfire and vehicular destruction will feel familiar to anyone who’s seen anything PM-related. Buddy cop banter and fish-out-of-water humor and divorced tough guy redemption…there isn’t a beat it doesn’t hit.
But it’s more interesting to look at how The Silencers was actually ahead of its time. That’s a sentence that probably would have surprised anyone involved in the production, but there are ideas at play here that would take cineplexes by storm Continue reading
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