“Tactical Force” American DVD Cover
Director: Adamo Paolo Cultraro
Cast: “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Michael Jai White, Candace Elaine, Lexa Doig, Steve Bacic, Michael Shanks, Michael Eklund, Darren Shahlavi
Running Time: 90 min.
By HKFanatic
If you rent a movie with “Stone Cold” Steven Austin dead center on the cover, you probably know what you’re in for. There’s gonna be low production values, Stone Cold is gonna spout off a few one-liners like “You can run but you can’t hide, sunshine” and wrassle a few bad guys, and then the credits are gonna roll. Expectations met, right?
But it’s a different story with “Tactical Force,” the 2011 direct-to-video action movie from Buena Vista. Glance at the cover again and you’ll notice that martial artist and actor extraordinaire Michael Jai White (“Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown,” “Blood and Bone“) receives second billing after Stone Cold. In addition, another great martial arts movie star, Darren Shahlavi (“Bloodmoon” and the British boxer in “Ip Man 2“), is in the cast. All of a sudden expectations are raised. Both White and Shahlavi have talent to burn; they’re amazingly skilled fighters and, with the right camera angles and choreography, they could easily deliver a fight scene for the ages. Might “Tactical Force” turn out to be a fun, guilty pleasure direct-to-video flick with just enough over-the-top action to make fans happy?
Sadly, no. “Tactical Force” is what happens when you have plenty of talent in front of the camera but no talent behind the camera. The film was written and directed by Adamo P. Cultaro, who has one previous feature length credit to his name – a Tom Sizemore movie called “Bad Ass” from 2009. I can’t really mince words: Cultaro stages scenes like a NBC sitcom and constantly undermines what could have been a good action movie with pedestrian camera angles. Way too much of the runtime is eaten up by filler content, like endless shots of SWAT team members and the bad guys going up or down stairs.
Worse than the directing is the editing, which was done by no less than three people. The editing constantly draws attention to itself with eye-straining “flashbulb” style transitions from scene to scene or aggressive screen wipes. They also commit the unforgivable sin of frequently cutting away from Michael Jai White and Darren Shahlavi’s big fight scene, which doesn’t occur until over an hour into the film. Filmmakers, please. If you tell a good story and deliver solid fight scenes, you won’t need to rely on flashy editing to make your film feel “edgy” or “modern.”
Michael Jai White has already publicly distanced himself from “Tactical Force” on Twitter, saying he’s happy if fans enjoy it but personally he disagreed with the direction of the film. Granted, I don’t blame him one bit but I wonder how a script this hokey got so many decent action stars to sign up for it. As a screenwriter, Cultaro mistakes profanity for poetry and peppers the dialogue with nonstop f-bombs. Maybe he was hoping that the sight of well-dressed criminals cursing in a warehouse would recall “Reservoir Dogs,” but there’s so much more to Tarantino’s language than dirty words.
There’s always the chance that the cast was roped in by the film’s simple but effective premise – a weapon-less SWAT team trapped in a warehouse with warring criminals – that recalls “Assault on Precinct 13.” But it’s difficult for the plot to generate momentum when it’s continually stalled by the self-serving monologues that the criminal characters always seem to give. I understand a low-budget film is hard-pressed to come up with any action scenes at all, but killing time with two or three villain speeches is one or two too many. Not even Bond bad guys wax philosophical this much.
I never could get into wrestling except for a few 16-bit WWF video games back in the heyday of Hulk Hogan and Jake the Snake, so the appeal of Steve Austin has always been lost on me. That said, he’s pretty funny in this movie. His delivery of normal dialogue is wooden at best but he knows how to talk shit, which I can always respect. “Who the hell are these guys?!” one of his men asks when the SWAT team comes under attack. “I don’t know but they’re fuckin’ dead,” Stone Cold replies matter-of-factly, like the villain’s deaths are already carved in stone.
Michael Jai White and the rest of the cast do their best to look good despite being saddled with some dumb lines. Poor Darren Shahlavi is an English actor playing an Italian gangster so his accent is all over the place during the entire film. “Tactical Force” is actually not the first time White and Shahlavi have faced each other; they had a fight in the initial episode of the “Mortal Kombat: Legacy” web series, in which White was the character Jax and Shahlavi played his rival Kano. After fans expressed disappointment at their battle, it was revealed that the entire production was on a rushed schedule and White was sick during filming.
Their fight in “Tactical Force” isn’t bad but it’s crippled by spastic editing, so fans are still left waiting for the definitive clash between the these two martial arts titans. Imagine if “Ip Man” director Wilson Yip flew to America to shoot a movie where Michael Jai White and Darren Shahlavi were able to square off with the kind of quality choreography, directing, and editing that such a fight deserves. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
“Tactical Force” is a movie that is less than the sum of its actors. It proves you can have two of the most talented onscreen martial artists around – as Michael Jai White and Darren Shahlavi surely are – and the movie still won’t work if you don’t have the right filmmaking talent. You need a competent director able to evoke good performances and deliver the action onscreen in a compelling manner. Here a hokey script and amateur directing, both sloppily put together in the editing room, mean that “Tactical Force” loses what luster it might have had as a guilty pleasure DTV flick.
HKFanatic’s Rating: 4/10
