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Twin Van Dammes & Identical Todds - Double Impact (1991) vs. Soldier (1998) · Meet Your Double Feature | Movie Reviews & Forgotten Films

• 0:09
  Tonight on Meet Your Double Feature, after being separated
• 0:13
  at birth, twins Alex and Chad reunite to track down the men
• 0:17
  that murdered their parents. Jean-Claude Van Damme and
• 0:21
  Jean-Claude Van Damme star in Double Impact.
• 0:25
  Then, after being left for dead on a distant planet, Sergeant
• 0:28
  Todd 3465 must defend his new home against the men that cast
• 0:33
  him out. Kurt Russell stars in Soldier.
• 0:37
  It's an action-packed double feature, and it starts right
• 0:41
  now. All right, Frank, welcome back
• 0:52
  episode 4 of Meet Your Double Feature.
• 0:54
  How you doing today? Good, excited.
• 0:57
  Excited for episode 4? This guy, he's always excited.
• 0:59
  One of these days, I am actually.
• 1:02
  Oh, you actually are. OK.
• 1:03
  I didn't want that to feel like you had to because you can tell
• 1:06
  me like if we start and you're like, I'm just having the worst
• 1:08
  day, I'd be like, all right. Then we just skip the whole
• 1:10
  episode. Yeah, microphones down.
• 1:12
  Hard to hurt. Anyway, welcome back to the
• 1:15
  show. We have two more exciting movies
• 1:17
  to review for you today. And I don't know if we need much
• 1:20
  preamble. I think we can get right into
• 1:22
  it. I think I go first today, right?
• 1:25
  Yeah. Mm hmm.
• 1:27
  OK, so first movie on the docket again.
• 1:29
  If you caught the end of our previous episode, you'll already
• 1:32
  know what this is. But Frank, you selected for me
• 1:34
  to watch 1991's Double Impact starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.
• 1:39
  And get this, Jean-Claude Van Damme.
• 1:42
  Oh yeah, Which is exactly why I picked it.
• 1:44
  I was, I was. This was like a pic that I was
• 1:47
  jealous of because I wanted to watch this movie.
• 1:49
  But I was like this will be a good good one for you.
• 1:52
  Yeah, 'cause I think, I mean, we both like Jean-Claude Van Damme,
• 1:55
  We've seen several of his movies each, but this one just never,
• 1:59
  never popped up for either one of us before now.
• 2:01
  Dude, I love Jean-Claude Van Damme.
• 2:05
  He's just such an interesting, I don't know, like action movie
• 2:09
  star. He's very unique.
• 2:10
  He's very unique. So I'm I am excited to to hear
• 2:13
  your thoughts on this one. He is unique.
• 2:15
  I do think that a lot of his movies have similar traits, like
• 2:19
  he must have some level of input over the movies he was working
• 2:22
  on in the 80s and 90s because a lot of them have similar
• 2:25
  elements and a lot of that pops up here.
• 2:27
  But what does make it stand out is that unlike most of his
• 2:30
  movies, he is forced to play characters.
• 2:33
  I think like a lot of action stars and especially martial
• 2:36
  arts action stars, they usually just kind of play as themselves.
• 2:39
  But because as the premise will explain, he's playing himself
• 2:43
  and his own twin brother, he has to actually like play 2 distinct
• 2:47
  roles. And that is genuinely a
• 2:49
  challenge for someone who I would not say is like a
• 2:51
  classically trained actor by any means.
• 2:54
  No, I mean how does he do though?
• 2:56
  Well, I mean, to get right into it, the premise for Double
• 2:59
  Impact is about what you would expect, I think going into the
• 3:03
  movie. I wasn't, you know, looking for
• 3:05
  any sort of genuine emotional drama.
• 3:08
  And I think if you hear that premise, it's Jean-Claude Van So
• 3:20
  it's not like it doesn't deliver on the premise, but the way we
• 3:22
  get to it is genuinely pretty amusing right off the bat.
• 3:26
  Oh interesting. OK, I actually didn't expect
• 3:28
  them to fight each other, but I'm glad.
• 3:31
  Oh, that was my first thought. That was my first thought was
• 3:35
  like, because you and I both know because we've seen stuff
• 3:37
  from this era that a movie from the 90s about two act like 2
• 3:41
  characters played by 1 actor is we're going to get a lot of
• 3:43
  weird cinematography. We're going to get shots that
• 3:46
  are like static frames split down the middle with one take on
• 3:50
  the left of the screen and one on the right.
• 3:51
  And they're going to try to create this illusion that
• 3:53
  they're having a conversation when we know it was just filmed
• 3:56
  separately. And I just the whole time was
• 3:59
  like, this has to end with him fighting himself.
• 4:01
  And I'm so curious how they're going to do that.
• 4:03
  But to to just kind of set the board here.
• 4:06
  The premise of the movie is that Jean-Claude Van Damme plays two
• 4:09
  twins who were the sons of some kind of British businessman
• 4:16
  working in Hong Kong. Their parents are both
• 4:19
  assassinated when they are like newborn babies.
• 4:21
  There's some sort of business deal going on.
• 4:24
  And the guy who was working with their father betrays him.
• 4:28
  Basically has like a Batman moment where like the parents
• 4:30
  get gunned down in front of the two baby twins and then the kids
• 4:34
  survive because they're rescued by their father's like right
• 4:36
  hand man security guard. But due to a set of
• 4:39
  circumstances they grow up separately.
• 4:41
  One of the twins is rescued by the security guard and goes back
• 4:44
  to America and the other one inexplicably is left behind.
• 4:48
  It like a French orphanage in Hong Kong and has to grow up
• 4:53
  with as like a criminal living on the streets.
• 4:56
  I was going to ask because you were saying like British father
• 4:59
  Hong Kong and I was like, where's Jean Claude's accent
• 5:03
  come into? This.
• 5:04
  Yes, this was my first note. Every Jean-Claude Van Damme
• 5:07
  movie shies away from the fact that the man is from Belgium.
• 5:10
  It is a thick. Accent.
• 5:12
  They always try to come up with some convoluted scheme to
• 5:15
  explain why he's actually French and I did look up that.
• 5:19
  I mean French is one of the primary languages spoken in
• 5:21
  Belgium but the accent is different and it's so obvious.
• 5:24
  But for some reason all of his movies A feel the need to
• 5:27
  explain in the 1st place why he has an accent and B.
• 5:31
  It never makes any sense Like the one twin.
• 5:35
  When the movie like fast forwards and we see them played
• 5:37
  by Jean Claude. He's in like, Florida, but they
• 5:40
  sneak in a line that he spent most of his childhood in France
• 5:43
  to explain the accent. But then the other twin spent
• 5:46
  his whole life in Hong Kong. And the only thing we have to go
• 5:49
  on is that the orphanage he was dropped off at was run by like,
• 5:52
  a French nun. And it's like, OK, so they came
• 5:55
  out sounding the same. What a coincidence.
• 5:59
  Yeah. It's so strange.
• 6:00
  Like, they. I don't think anybody needed
• 6:03
  these explanations. Like, if you watched an Arnold
• 6:05
  Schwarzenegger movie in the 80s or 90s, Like he's famously an
• 6:09
  Austrian actor who has a similarly, like, thick accent.
• 6:12
  I don't think he often tries to explain where he's from.
• 6:14
  He's just like, I'm the Terminator.
• 6:15
  And they're like, OK. Yeah, yeah, that's true.
• 6:19
  Actually, even as a machine they don't try and explain his
• 6:22
  accent. There's no reason to spend any
• 6:25
  time on it, but this movie got 2 in its own head about it because
• 6:29
  again, hit their parents. They're either British or
• 6:31
  Australian. I couldn't exactly tell, but
• 6:34
  why? Why bother?
• 6:35
  We don't need this. It's an action movie.
• 6:37
  No one's going to be holding it to that kind of standard for
• 6:39
  like logical consistency. But regardless, that's our
• 6:43
  premise. The two twins, they grow up
• 6:44
  apart not knowing that the other one exists.
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  One of them grows up in the care of their father's like right
• 6:50
  hand man, essentially Alfred from Batman.
• 6:52
  Like that's kind of the dynamic we have here, except if Alfred
• 6:55
  was like just kind of lame in almost every aspect.
• 7:00
  OK. Because he's not.
• 7:02
  He's shown to be like a competent security guy who ends
• 7:06
  up saving the two twins from being murdered on the night that
• 7:09
  their parents were killed. And he, like, shoots out a
• 7:12
  couple of the bad guys and runs off.
• 7:13
  But then when we flash forward to the present, he's just this
• 7:16
  like, balding karate slash aerobics instructor working with
• 7:20
  one of the two Jean Claude's. And you're like, OK, this is our
• 7:23
  guy. He's also named Frank, which I
• 7:25
  thought was funny. Oh wait, slash aerobics.
• 7:28
  Is he teaching aerobics classes? I don't think he teaches
• 7:31
  aerobics, but Jean Claude supposedly does both because
• 7:34
  that's how we're introduced to our Americanized Jean Claude
• 7:38
  twin. I guess this is another point in
• 7:40
  my notes, but the two names given to the twins are Alex and
• 7:44
  Chad. And ironically, the one who's
• 7:47
  like super lame and not cool is not he's Chad.
• 7:50
  Oh, OK, They're trying to subvert the stereotype that goes
• 7:54
  with that name. I think it was probably that it
• 7:57
  didn't exist yet, but I did find that funny that it's like it
• 8:00
  kind of felt like the Chad Jean Claude versus the virgin Jean
• 8:04
  Claude meme. But instead like Chad is the
• 8:06
  lame one. But his introduction as an adult
• 8:09
  character is that he is teaching an aerobics class.
• 8:12
  And like in all Jean Claude movies, we spend a lot of time
• 8:15
  like sexualizing him for some reason.
• 8:17
  Like it's a room full of women in like 80s Pilates outfit, but
• 8:20
  like the frame is just centered on Jean Claude Van Damme's.
• 8:22
  But while he's doing the splits and I'm like, OK, this is like
• 8:25
  contractual. Why is this in all of his
• 8:27
  movies? Oh, I think that's a that's a
• 8:29
  John Claude thing. I think he wants that in his
• 8:32
  movies. That's what I mean, there's,
• 8:34
  there's these beats that we hit in almost all of his films that
• 8:37
  I've seen. And this, this one was no
• 8:38
  exception right off the bat. But he gets interrupted from
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  teaching his aerobics class by Frank, his who he calls his
• 8:44
  uncle who raised him. And he says like, Hey, can you
• 8:47
  step in and teach the karate class?
• 8:49
  I got to go talk to this guy. And then he walks over and and
• 8:52
  basically just demonstrates that he also knows karate.
• 8:55
  Sorry, I was just picturing them like they're doing like a an
• 8:57
  aerobics class and then he brings Frank in and he just
• 9:00
  starts like spin kicking these people.
• 9:02
  They're just they're like stretch.
• 9:04
  No, it's. Not like this is now a karate
• 9:06
  class. It's karate class now.
• 9:10
  Yeah, that'd be really funny. But no, alas, he he goes to a
• 9:16
  separate room and tries to teach karate, and they basically just
• 9:19
  want to show you off the bat that Jean Claude is like a
• 9:21
  trained martial arts guy. He does some cool kicks, but the
• 9:24
  plot basically kicks off right after that because he goes into
• 9:27
  his Uncle Frank's office and he says like, hey, what's the deal?
• 9:29
  And his uncle says we need to go to Hong Kong.
• 9:31
  And he won't tell him why. But the viewer has already shown
• 9:34
  that they've located his twin brother, who presumably the
• 9:37
  uncle has been searching for this whole time.
• 9:39
  But we're not. It's never really made all that
• 9:41
  clear, but the two of them go to Hong Kong and then the first act
• 9:44
  of the movie is basically like a short lived mistaken identity
• 9:49
  comedy bit where like he goes into town in Hong Kong and
• 9:52
  everybody there is either like acting like they're afraid of
• 9:54
  him or giving him money or all this other stuff or just giving
• 9:58
  him a lot of attention. And so Chad, our nice boy Jean
• 10:02
  Claude is like, wow, this is a weird place, huh?
• 10:04
  But then it goes sour because he bumps into his twins girlfriend
• 10:10
  and they like she's about to try to like hook up with him but
• 10:14
  then the other twin shows up and basically like immediately head
• 10:17
  butts this man in the face. As you do see, somebody just
• 10:21
  looks just like you trying to steal your girlfriend.
• 10:23
  You got to headbutt him. Got to headbutt him, and as
• 10:26
  we'll see, that's actually one of the heals.
• 10:27
  Jean Claude's signature moves. They try to differentiate how
• 10:30
  they fight. And the main thing about Alex,
• 10:32
  the kind of like Rugged 1, is that he headbutts people a lot.
• 10:36
  It's a dirty tactic, I guess. It is a dirty tactic.
• 10:38
  He also snaps several people's necks, but we'll get into that
• 10:41
  the the premise from there. Again, you would assume with how
• 10:46
  the story began that we would really drag out this part where
• 10:49
  there's two of the same guy in town and people keep mistaking
• 10:52
  one for the other and they haven't even run into each other
• 10:55
  yet. But all of that is introduced
• 10:56
  and then resolved in like 3 or 4 minutes of screen time.
• 10:59
  And for the rest of the movie we have almost no capitalization on
• 11:03
  that idea. Like they don't really
• 11:04
  successfully trick anybody and into thinking they had the wrong
• 11:07
  one or anything like that. It's all just a setup so that
• 11:10
  they can be like at odds with each other when they first meet.
• 11:14
  Do they like prior to this? Did they know the other one
• 11:17
  existed? I believe they did not.
• 11:20
  There's the the, the Uncle Frank has to explain to both of them
• 11:24
  that they're brothers and that he knows what happened to their
• 11:27
  parents because he happened to see that the person who ordered
• 11:32
  the hit on them was their business partner on this deal.
• 11:35
  They were closing when the movie opens in the flashback.
• 11:38
  So he's aware that there's these two businessmen, one of whom is
• 11:41
  also British and one of whom I think is Hong Kong based, that
• 11:45
  they just need to get revenge on because they are responsible for
• 11:48
  getting their parents killed. And so he pulls them both
• 11:50
  together and basically just tell them to go on like a murder
• 11:53
  revenge mission, which they eventually do.
• 11:58
  He tells them to do this. He says you got to go.
• 12:01
  It's not really clear. Like, their plan is not like we
• 12:05
  need to expose them and get them sent to jail.
• 12:07
  It's kind of just we need to dismantle their illegal
• 12:10
  operations. And by the end of the movie,
• 12:11
  it's like we're going to, you know, murder them.
• 12:14
  So it's not very complicated, which I suppose is fine for this
• 12:18
  kind of story. Oh, yeah, totally.
• 12:21
  So once we get both Jean Claude's together, obviously
• 12:23
  this is where the movie picks up, but also where some of its
• 12:25
  limitations begin because as again, we've seen, a movie from
• 12:28
  the 1990s does not have very complicated technology to
• 12:31
  convince you that there's 2 Jean Claude's on the screen at the
• 12:33
  same time. So we either get the
• 12:34
  aforementioned like split down the middle shot of them acting
• 12:38
  opposite, you know, probably a stand in and trying to match up
• 12:41
  the eye lines and such. Or we do like two people are on
• 12:46
  screen, but one of them is obviously a body double and
• 12:48
  they're just not showing their face, you know?
• 12:51
  Oh 100% yeah. Yeah, a lot of over the
• 12:53
  shoulders. Yeah, exactly like you said.
• 12:55
  Over the shoulders or even just kind of shooting it like shot
• 12:58
  reverse shots that you see one guy's face and then you see the
• 13:00
  other person's reaction that they, they use every trick that
• 13:03
  they had available to them for the time.
• 13:05
  And I do think that they didn't shy away from it too much.
• 13:09
  They tried their best to create opportunities to actually put
• 13:12
  both of their faces on screen at once.
• 13:14
  And so they get credit for that. I'm sure that's really
• 13:16
  complicated and they they did their best, but it does to a
• 13:20
  modern viewer look very silly. Yeah.
• 13:22
  I mean, especially of that era there, there was like I think we
• 13:26
  mentioned Parent Trap last week when we were introducing this
• 13:30
  this movie and like that's like a good, I mean, obviously it's
• 13:33
  not perfect throughout the whole film, but that's a good example
• 13:36
  from something of a similar era that did that really well.
• 13:39
  But yeah, there's a lot of there's way more examples of it
• 13:42
  not looking as good as that. Again, I think the most relevant
• 13:48
  thing that it reminded me of is that episode of Power Rangers
• 13:50
  where they make White Ranger Tommy fight evil Green Ranger
• 13:54
  Tommy. And they do that like gag of
• 13:56
  them kind of like staring each other down.
• 13:58
  And it just looks a bit funny because again, they took someone
• 14:00
  who's not much of an actor and we're like, play 2 versions of
• 14:02
  yourself. And they were like.
• 14:07
  Yeah, yeah. But at least in that they could,
• 14:09
  they could cover them up in the suits later too, because then
• 14:11
  they could. Exactly so.
• 14:12
  That was my thinking the whole time because as the movie wore
• 14:15
  on, I was like, I don't think we are going to get this fight
• 14:17
  scene between the two Jean Claude's.
• 14:19
  I I might have. Oh, I thought they fought right.
• 14:23
  Away I thought he head butted him and then they just started
• 14:25
  duking it out. Not quite.
• 14:27
  So the head butt is the Classic Cinema like knocked out
• 14:31
  transition that never makes any sense where he somehow passed
• 14:34
  out for like several hours and then woke up and was just like
• 14:36
  not, you know, brain dead. Yeah, yeah, there's something
• 14:40
  actually foreshadowing something similar happens in Soldier, so
• 14:44
  we'll get to that later too, OK? Fantastic.
• 14:47
  So anyway, plot wise, there's not a lot that you really need
• 14:49
  to recap for this movie. It's a martial arts action movie
• 14:52
  featuring a lot of punching and kicking and and and shooting
• 14:57
  people with guns. It's exactly what you would
• 14:58
  expect. They give themselves a couple of
• 15:00
  set pieces to do so, but the plot generally is that the two
• 15:05
  brothers do try to essentially uncover the criminal operations
• 15:10
  of these people who are responsible for their parents
• 15:12
  death. And part of their plan to do so
• 15:15
  is that Alex, the like rugged one from Hong Kong, his
• 15:18
  girlfriend is actually working coincidentally for one of these
• 15:21
  two businessmen already. And so she has to try to uncover
• 15:25
  some concrete proof that what Uncle Frank is saying is
• 15:27
  correct. And then by the end she
• 15:30
  naturally gets captured and so does Uncle Frank and they have
• 15:32
  to go save them both. And we get like because there's
• 15:35
  two business people, villains, we kind of get like 2 separate
• 15:39
  conclusions with each twin and that's about it.
• 15:41
  So plot wise, not a lot to break down, but I do think where the
• 15:45
  movie deserves a lot of focus is on how they characterize these
• 15:48
  two performances from from Jean-Claude Van I think he
• 15:59
  almost gets it almost just in the sense that what's on the
• 16:03
  page helps him out. So Chad, the American twin, he
• 16:07
  is supposed to be a like naive, boisterous kind of ladies man in
• 16:13
  his 20s who is in over his head with all of these like illegal
• 16:17
  crime operations and has to kind of mature a bit to get, you
• 16:22
  know, get his head in the game and get involved enough to
• 16:23
  actually help save the day at the end.
• 16:26
  Whereas Alex the like evil twin, essentially his whole thing is
• 16:30
  that he literally like isn't illegal smuggler.
• 16:32
  He's selling people like foreign imported cars and cigarettes and
• 16:36
  stuff. So he's he's a little bit more
• 16:38
  hard nosed, but he gets the interesting caveat that he has a
• 16:41
  girlfriend and actually cares very much about this person.
• 16:45
  He's not. They don't undercut that by
• 16:47
  making him like a jerk to her or anything.
• 16:48
  A lot of the movie is driven by the fact that Alex genuinely
• 16:52
  loves his girlfriend and is trying to keep her safe.
• 16:54
  I was. Going to say this is.
• 16:54
  I mean I don't know when this game came out but this is
• 16:59
  basically the plot of Double Dragon too it.
• 17:02
  Is it's very similar to the plot of Double Dragon, which is funny
• 17:06
  because it actually has one of the same shortcomings as the
• 17:08
  movie adaptation of Double Dragon.
• 17:10
  Because I saw that not that long ago too.
• 17:12
  And it's in a similar boat where they have a movie about martial
• 17:15
  arts action, but rather than choreograph interesting martial
• 17:20
  arts sequences, they kind of just throw the occasional kick
• 17:24
  that like immediately takes someone down and then go back to
• 17:26
  shooting their guns, you know what I mean?
• 17:27
  Oh. That's a shame because isn't
• 17:30
  what's his name? Bolo Young is in this movie as
• 17:32
  well, right? Bolo Young is in this movie, who
• 17:34
  people would remember as the villain from Bloodsport, which
• 17:37
  is probably Jean Claude's most famous film.
• 17:40
  It is a reunion of those two, and we do get another fight
• 17:43
  between those two. Bolo essentially becomes the
• 17:45
  main obstacle for Chad, the American twin.
• 17:50
  Oh, just him. I was just going to say, I would
• 17:52
  have assumed Bolo was, you know, like Broly, and he needed to
• 17:57
  fight both Jean Claude Van Damme's.
• 17:59
  Well, again, this is where some of the limitations in what they
• 18:03
  could depict on screen come into play.
• 18:04
  A lot of the climax of the movie, and in fact a lot of the
• 18:07
  middle of the movie, make sure to split them up either in
• 18:09
  completely different locations or fighting different people in
• 18:14
  different rooms. So like the third act set piece,
• 18:16
  they're on like a big boat, which they just use like a
• 18:20
  warehouse interior to be like the bowels of the ship.
• 18:23
  And they both get their own one-on-one fight against like a
• 18:26
  major hench men. And then they both get to
• 18:29
  confront one of the two evil businessmen and the whole thing,
• 18:32
  it takes place kind of separately.
• 18:34
  Interesting. OK.
• 18:35
  I yeah, I mean, I get, I get why I get why they they did it that
• 18:38
  way. But yeah.
• 18:40
  So those elements, again, there's almost not a lot to even
• 18:43
  sift through. If you've seen a 90s action
• 18:46
  movie, you've seen this kind of story before.
• 18:48
  None of it's all that interesting.
• 18:50
  I do think, again, going back to the characterization, Jean
• 18:54
  Claude tries his best to play Chad, the American twin.
• 18:58
  Again, is this more like silly, a little bit more jokey, Not
• 19:03
  like he's really cracking jokes the whole time, but he's just a
• 19:05
  more aloof character. Whereas his portrayal of Alex is
• 19:09
  very like, serious. Alex isn't very funny, but that
• 19:13
  comes back around because Alex does the funniest thing in the
• 19:15
  whole movie in the middle of the second act.
• 19:17
  Oh good. Amazing.
• 19:18
  Because the to to flesh out the plot a little bit more, at a
• 19:22
  certain point in the movie, the two twins and Uncle Frankie go
• 19:26
  to a like, abandoned hotel in this tiny island off the shore
• 19:30
  of Hong Kong. And that's like their base of
• 19:32
  operations. And then later in the story,
• 19:34
  like the bad guys show up and there's a brawl during that
• 19:37
  segment. And then they escape to set up
• 19:38
  the end. But there's this whole beat
• 19:41
  where they can only get to this island by boat, and they only
• 19:43
  have one boat. So there's this plot line where
• 19:46
  Alex's girlfriend, Danielle, is in trouble, and she tries to
• 19:50
  contact the two twins. Only Chad, the American guy, is
• 19:53
  there. And so he goes to try to help
• 19:55
  her while the other two are just like off on the island
• 19:59
  somewhere. And then when they find out
• 20:00
  about it, they can't get there. They're like, oh, he needs to
• 20:02
  come back with the flippin boat or else we're never going to get
• 20:05
  over there. But then in the interim, Alex is
• 20:10
  somehow convinced that his girlfriend is cheating on him
• 20:13
  with his twin. Again, this this plot point
• 20:16
  comes back. Yes, because that that beat
• 20:19
  happens at the beginning where she genuinely mistakes American
• 20:23
  twin for her boyfriend because she doesn't know he has a twin.
• 20:26
  But then later in the story he becomes convinced through a
• 20:30
  miscommunication that she actually is cheating on him with
• 20:32
  his twin. And his solution to this, while
• 20:34
  there's this whole action beat going on on the mainland with
• 20:38
  Chad and Danielle, you know, rude boy Alex is just sitting on
• 20:42
  their little hotel like base just drinking alcohol and being
• 20:45
  sad because again, they didn't want to have to put both of them
• 20:49
  in that action sequence. And he has nothing to do in the
• 20:52
  interim. So he's just sitting there
• 20:53
  drinking and spends, I kid you not, I think over 2 minutes of
• 20:59
  screen time visualizing his girlfriend having sex with his
• 21:02
  twin as a way to tell the viewer that he is worried that she is
• 21:07
  cheating on him. And it is the weirdest, most
• 21:10
  uncomfortable scene in cinema history.
• 21:13
  What's really What do you mean because the.
• 21:16
  OK, so as we said, a lot of Jean Claude Van Damme's movies, he
• 21:19
  kind of like makes himself the object of desire.
• 21:22
  And there's a lot of stories where he'll have a love
• 21:23
  interest, but they're not super like leery, you know, they're
• 21:27
  not very male gaze kind of putting in a bunch of naked
• 21:29
  women or anything. But this one, I guess felt
• 21:32
  obligated to have a sex scene in the middle and they had no idea
• 21:35
  how to fit it in the movie. So the way they show it is that
• 21:38
  he, the other twin, because he's worried he's being cheated on,
• 21:41
  imagines a sex scene between his girlfriend and his twin brother
• 21:45
  and we just keep intercutting between the sex scene and him
• 21:48
  stumbling around drinking for like an abhorrently long time.
• 21:53
  Oh, that is odd. That's not because, I mean, why
• 21:55
  not just if you want that scene in there and you already have
• 21:59
  one of John Claude Van Damme's characters with his girlfriend,
• 22:02
  like just why? Why not just have them have a
• 22:04
  sex scene like I? Don't know.
• 22:06
  And it just goes on forever because we use every time we cut
• 22:10
  back to Alex, we think, OK, now he does something right.
• 22:13
  Nope, we're back. We're going back to the sex
• 22:15
  scene and there's no audio over it.
• 22:16
  And it's shot in a very strange way because it's supposed to be
• 22:19
  almost like a dream. I hated it.
• 22:21
  It was one of the weirdest things.
• 22:22
  I've ever seen Oh, that's, I mean, it's not OK.
• 22:26
  It sounds dumb. It does sound.
• 22:28
  It does sound dumb. Extremely dumb.
• 22:31
  You could cut that whole beat out.
• 22:32
  The only thing we need to know is that he's worried she's
• 22:35
  cheating on him. Because then when Chad and his
• 22:38
  girlfriend get back, this is what cues the 2 Van Damme's to
• 22:42
  get into a fight with each other because evil Van Damme has been
• 22:45
  drinking. He's not making any sense.
• 22:47
  We do also get a bit where his girlfriend tries to explain and
• 22:50
  he like slaps her and I was like, OK, that's a that's a
• 22:52
  bridge too far if his whole characterization is that he like
• 22:55
  cares about her so much. So I didn't like that.
• 22:57
  But then we get a very short, actual one-on-one fight scene
• 23:02
  between the two van dams. OK, All right, so the one.
• 23:06
  So they're both good guys really throughout the whole film.
• 23:09
  It's just one is a little more hard boiled like you said.
• 23:14
  Essentially, which I do think is maybe something they could have
• 23:17
  approached differently. Because when he first shows up,
• 23:20
  his whole dynamic is that he's a criminal himself.
• 23:22
  He's doing like petty crime, he's just selling illegal goods.
• 23:25
  But most of his criminal connections don't really come
• 23:29
  into play. Like the bad guy tries to hire
• 23:32
  him to do something, but he accidentally grabs the wrong
• 23:34
  twins. So we get this interaction where
• 23:35
  Chad is being approached by one of the villains and that moves
• 23:38
  the plot along, but character wise they get on the same page
• 23:42
  almost immediately. And other than this brief spat
• 23:45
  where they're fighting each other, they don't really get in
• 23:48
  each other's way at all. They try to work together and
• 23:50
  then they have some hurdles but eventually succeed, Which I just
• 23:53
  think is a oversimplification of a plot that could have gone in a
• 23:57
  lot of more interesting directions.
• 23:59
  Especially because this fight scene isn't really worth the
• 24:01
  build up as we talked about, they have to shoot.
• 24:04
  It mostly is like a shot, reverse shot thing where we see
• 24:07
  Chad throw a kick and then we immediately cut to Alex selling
• 24:10
  that he got hit with a kick. And then they kind of just like
• 24:12
  brawl around for like 90 seconds and then it's over.
• 24:14
  Well, I mean the other thing because it's this is I think you
• 24:19
  would say falls into like the buddy cop movie genre.
• 24:24
  And for sure, usually that genre has 2 characters that are very
• 24:29
  distinct from one another, whereas both of these guys, one
• 24:33
  maybe a little more nerdy I guess as you described him, but
• 24:37
  they're both still like kick ass Kung Fu guys.
• 24:39
  So it's like. Absolutely, this is the biggest
• 24:42
  problem. These two needed to be
• 24:44
  significantly different characters and I think the
• 24:47
  easiest thing they could have done is make one of them more
• 24:50
  karate focused and one of them more of like the guns guy.
• 24:53
  Because even the poster for the movie says like 1 pack's a
• 24:56
  punch, one pack's a pistol or something like that.
• 25:00
  Oh, sure, yeah, that could have worked.
• 25:01
  Like, yeah, like the one guy going around blasting people,
• 25:06
  like the other one's much more of like, you know, pacifistic
• 25:10
  martial arts Jackie Chan type guy.
• 25:12
  I. Think that would have totally
• 25:13
  helped it. Maybe it was like it was either
• 25:16
  how it was scripted or it was just maybe a bit of an ego thing
• 25:18
  for Van Damme that he needed both.
• 25:20
  He's like inside of me. There are two wolves.
• 25:22
  They are both very good at martial arts.
• 25:24
  It's true. It is true though.
• 25:27
  So I, I agree that that really would have helped here.
• 25:29
  I guess you couldn't have had the one-on-one, but you could
• 25:32
  have even leaned into the fact that despite their training,
• 25:35
  Chad Van Damme was like more of an aerobics guy.
• 25:38
  He could have been doing like, like judo throws or something,
• 25:40
  you know, something more specific.
• 25:42
  Because as it stands, once the action starts, it doesn't really
• 25:45
  matter which Van Damme we're following.
• 25:47
  And visually, the only difference between them is that
• 25:50
  Alex Van Damme smokes a lot of cigars and has like slicked back
• 25:54
  hair, and then Chad Van Damme just doesn't smoke and has like
• 25:57
  normal hair. Yeah, it's it's Van Damme and
• 26:05
  Cooler Van Damme is the 2 cooler.
• 26:07
  Van Damme is essentially the problem.
• 26:08
  Yeah, he's like, he's like, I'm just worried that Van Damme
• 26:12
  thinks people can't change because he used to have his
• 26:15
  slicked back hair. Yeah, exactly.
• 26:18
  Exactly. He's basically that you could.
• 26:21
  Have had the one like when they do fight, he's shooting at him
• 26:23
  but the other guy's doing like aerobic stretches to get out of
• 26:26
  to dodge the bullets and get out of the way that.
• 26:28
  Would be pretty good. I just, yeah, that's the problem
• 26:30
  too. Is that also Chad Van Damme
• 26:34
  tries his best to look at a place.
• 26:36
  Like there's a couple of funny bits.
• 26:38
  Like when they first get to the island hideout, it's like a
• 26:41
  completely broken down building. And Alex Van Damme has brought
• 26:44
  like nothing with him but the cigar in his mouth.
• 26:45
  Whereas Chad has like his suit pressed and is like hanging off
• 26:48
  a hanger. And he's trying to like
• 26:50
  daintily, like step over puddles so that he can go hang it up.
• 26:52
  It's kind of like when Johnny Cage shows up in the first live
• 26:55
  action Mortal Kombat and he's got all of his luggage and it
• 26:57
  all falls in the water. It he's he's trying, but a lot
• 27:00
  of that is in the script and not so much in Van Damme's
• 27:02
  performance. Yeah.
• 27:03
  Well, and it's funny, I mean, Johnny Cage, the character was
• 27:06
  literally based on Jean-Claude Van Damme.
• 27:09
  Like they. Oh, that's true.
• 27:10
  Yeah. So it's.
• 27:12
  'Cause his signature move in Mortal Kombat is the like doing
• 27:15
  the splits and then punching the guy in the nuts.
• 27:17
  Which is how Van Damme wins at the end of Bloodsport.
• 27:20
  Yes, exactly. Exactly.
• 27:21
  Yeah, actually. Come to think of it, we get
• 27:24
  payback from Bloodsport cause at one point Bolo Young and Chad
• 27:28
  Van Damme have a original encounter like halfway through
• 27:31
  the movie and Chad Van Damme's doing pretty good, but Bolo gets
• 27:34
  one over on him because he punches him in the nuts.
• 27:36
  Oh, that's. Great.
• 27:37
  See, I love that. I love that it's like a
• 27:39
  continuation. It's like a.
• 27:42
  Meta narrative yeah like their feud has continued and we do get
• 27:46
  I will say the action beats at the end of the story are OK like
• 27:50
  we do get more of a fight scene between Bolo and Chad.
• 27:54
  We also have a fight scene between cool guy Alex and this
• 27:58
  unnamed henchman whose gimmick is that he works for the Triads,
• 28:03
  but he kind of looks like an Italian mobster.
• 28:06
  And he has shoes with spurs as if he's a cowboy, but the spurs
• 28:10
  are super sharp so he can stab people with them.
• 28:14
  Good. Yeah, No, that's great.
• 28:15
  That's all of. Which is great and you'd be
• 28:17
  surprised at how little attention that gets.
• 28:19
  I think he kills one guy with those super spurs and then
• 28:22
  towards the end he fights Alex Van Dam and is trying to kick
• 28:25
  him with the Spurs. So both of those fights are
• 28:28
  decent and Bolo Young does get killed with basically a Mortal
• 28:31
  Kombat fatality because they're inside the, you know, the like
• 28:36
  cargo ship. And Chad Van Damme essentially
• 28:39
  does the classic move where he kicks him into like a high
• 28:42
  voltage like electrical box thing you got.
• 28:44
  To watch out for those, you got to watch out for those.
• 28:47
  Everybody knows you go anywhere near one of those boxes, you
• 28:49
  just immediately get electrocuted even if it's
• 28:51
  closed. But he gets knocked into one of
• 28:53
  those and then it creates a spark that catches like a bunch
• 28:58
  of barrels of gasoline on fire and blows up the whole ship.
• 29:00
  So it's a very like big ending to that fight.
• 29:04
  But again, you might have been better off trying to craft like
• 29:06
  a two on one where they have to work together to beat Bolo
• 29:09
  Young. That's.
• 29:10
  What I was hoping for, yeah. Yeah, rather than one of the
• 29:13
  twins fight this like nameless henchman who has no role in the
• 29:16
  story. Yeah, especially because it's
• 29:18
  like the the Bloodsport reunion that that would, that would have
• 29:22
  been great. But it's OK, We got, we got
• 29:24
  enough, I suppose. This is helping me hone in on
• 29:27
  what I thought was frustrating about Double Impact because like
• 29:30
  you were saying, it's a buddy cop movie.
• 29:32
  They're not really at each other's throats.
• 29:33
  We don't spend 2 acts in the movie with them working against
• 29:36
  each other. They're on the same page.
• 29:37
  They just don't get along. But again, because of how
• 29:41
  complicated it is to shoot, the 2 van dams don't really talk
• 29:45
  directly to each other that much.
• 29:47
  They mostly speak through Uncle Frank as like an intermediary
• 29:51
  for dialogue. And I think that's probably the
• 29:52
  biggest thing that drags down the energy, is that there's just
• 29:55
  not enough of like a banter. Yeah, exactly.
• 29:58
  I mean, that's that's what makes like the buddy cop movie work.
• 30:02
  It is is that these two characters, I mean rush hour is
• 30:05
  the perfect example that you have these two completely
• 30:08
  different characters that are like imagine.
• 30:11
  If rush hour was too Jackie Chan's, and the only difference
• 30:14
  was that one of them slicked his hair back and they never spoke.
• 30:18
  Which would still be fun. I mean, that's the thing.
• 30:20
  Like, that's that's kind of why I picked this movie, because I'm
• 30:22
  like, this is going to be fun regardless.
• 30:24
  But like and it is yeah, I, I. I think the movie is still fun
• 30:30
  and odd. Oddly, my main take away when it
• 30:32
  was over was this was not a fully realized idea.
• 30:36
  But it is actually a pretty good vehicle for Jean-Claude Van
• 30:39
  Damme because while he is primarily known for like, his
• 30:42
  martial arts skills, he is a charismatic performer.
• 30:46
  He's not like someone who you could trust to deliver, you
• 30:49
  know, a super nuanced performance.
• 30:51
  But just giving him these two very like, obvious contrasting
• 30:55
  characters to play is fun. And I do think that if they were
• 30:58
  to have made a sequel or done it again later with like something
• 31:02
  that took advantage of that premise, you could have had a
• 31:04
  much better movie. So I'm glad you brought that up
• 31:06
  because I was reading the IMDb trivia and as recently as 2012
• 31:12
  when Van Damme was promoting The Expendables 2, which I forgot he
• 31:16
  was in, but while they're promoting.
• 31:18
  So this is 2012. Like he was talking about
• 31:21
  wanting to do a double impact too, which is just really
• 31:24
  interesting to me over the course of his whole career that
• 31:27
  like that, like far down the line, like this was the film
• 31:31
  franchise he wanted to return to.
• 31:33
  And I can read this was his quick pitch for what the rough
• 31:36
  idea of the he. Has a yeah, he's got a story
• 31:39
  pitch, yeah. Exactly.
• 31:40
  He's into this, so he said during the interview.
• 31:43
  He gave a rough idea of what the plot could be.
• 31:47
  It would be two twins. 1 is coming back from Asia to Los
• 31:50
  Angeles to help his brother, who is a con artist and pretending
• 31:53
  to be a big Hollywood producer. And he's in trouble with the
• 31:56
  mob. So I don't know if this is like
• 31:58
  we're rebooting or if we're following up from.
• 32:02
  That the first one would be confusing because that would
• 32:04
  imply that nice guy Chad Van Damme had gotten into trouble
• 32:08
  with the mob and had become a con artist.
• 32:11
  Yes, but he also the other interesting thing too is on this
• 32:16
  particular movie talking about Bobo young, Van Damme said he
• 32:19
  specifically wanted Bobo Young for a double impact, but he also
• 32:23
  wants him for the sequel and he wanted them to team up in this
• 32:26
  one like he wanted them to be on the same side in the sequel,
• 32:30
  which sounds like he died in this first one.
• 32:33
  So I don't know I. Mean we didn't see a body he
• 32:35
  could come back as like. I didn't hear Nobel.
• 32:38
  I didn't hear Nobel. He could come back as like the
• 32:40
  Human Torch or something. Wow.
• 32:43
  Yeah. OK.
• 32:44
  That's great. Or like.
• 32:46
  The Phantom of the Opera. It's funny actually, because
• 32:48
  he's already scarred because when the movie opens in the
• 32:51
  flashback, he gets shot a couple of times by Uncle Frankie.
• 32:54
  So when he pops up again in the present day story, he has like a
• 32:58
  like a white, like solid eye and like a scar all over his face.
• 33:02
  So it'd be pretty funny if he just kept coming back as like an
• 33:04
  increasingly like scarred body of of Bolo Young.
• 33:08
  And he's like, I got one more in me.
• 33:10
  Wait, Uncle Frankie Kong shot Bolo Young He.
• 33:14
  Did so at the beginning. It's again, it's kind of
• 33:17
  Batmany, but it's more like a mob hit thing where the parents
• 33:19
  are getting out of their car and these triad guys, including
• 33:21
  Bolo, just like shoot both the parents.
• 33:24
  But in order to rescue the baby twins, the uncle had to like
• 33:28
  shoot a couple of the guys himself.
• 33:29
  And he did clip Bolo like in the eye as he was getting away dude.
• 33:33
  Another, you're just, you're previewing Soldier so much.
• 33:38
  There's so many connections here.
• 33:39
  Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess that makes it a
• 33:42
  good double feature, huh? Yeah.
• 33:43
  I suppose so. Look at us, look at us, look at
• 33:46
  us. We did this.
• 33:51
  Anyway. Anyway, yeah, what else can we
• 33:53
  take credit for? I did have you were talking
• 33:55
  about a sequel. It's so funny that that actually
• 33:57
  was talked about because one of the things I did when I was
• 33:59
  finished is I, because I want there to be a sequel.
• 34:02
  I wrote down a list of potential titles for a sequel.
• 34:05
  Oh yeah, let's hear those So. I'm thinking we got a couple
• 34:08
  ways to go because the first one was not silly enough.
• 34:10
  For instance, it says the movie is called Double Impact.
• 34:13
  And then in the top of the credits, the first name that
• 34:15
  kind of slams down just says Jean-Claude Van Damme.
• 34:18
  And I was so expecting it to be like Jean-Claude Van So I think
• 34:27
  you could call the next one Double Impact to the doubling
• 34:30
  the. Doubling OK.
• 34:33
  You could call it double, double impact, impact.
• 34:38
  It's like a stylized title because that's kind of what it
• 34:40
  looks like, the poster for this one says.
• 34:42
  Oh, sure. Yeah, OK.
• 34:44
  Or if we wanted a Simpsons reference it could be I'm C and
• 34:47
  double here for Van Dams. Well, yeah, I mean, The Simpsons
• 34:52
  one gets my vote if we're picking for that line up.
• 34:55
  Or or alternatively, we could do triple impact and there could be
• 34:58
  like a third twin and it's like the Austin Powers gag where we
• 35:01
  just pan slightly over and there's like another baby in the
• 35:03
  car. Well, that's what I was going to
• 35:06
  say when you were saying like, his name drops in and then it
• 35:08
  drops in again and then it just keeps dropping in.
• 35:11
  You just, it's like, it's just like.
• 35:14
  Spider Man across the multiverse, but it's just a
• 35:16
  bunch of very slightly differential combatants.
• 35:20
  It's got different sized cigars and stuff.
• 35:24
  It's just, yeah. It's like I'm a martial artist
• 35:26
  and I have glasses. Any pending questions about
• 35:33
  Double Impact? Again, it's kind of a short
• 35:35
  summary. The plot is whatever.
• 35:37
  It's pretty boring. You get some satisfying villain
• 35:40
  deaths at the end and you get 2 van dams.
• 35:43
  Albeit it's really like 1 1/2 characters.
• 35:46
  There's not enough to differentiate them.
• 35:48
  Which is. Kind of funny, honestly.
• 35:50
  Like it is. Kind of funny.
• 35:52
  That almost makes it better, yeah.
• 35:53
  It does actually that they couldn't do.
• 35:56
  I mean, they it sounds like they tried.
• 35:58
  It sounds like they tried to make I.
• 36:00
  I think you described him as dainty.
• 36:02
  The the more like clean cut Van Damme but at the end of the.
• 36:05
  Day I would say that the the clean cut Van Damme is kind of
• 36:08
  playing it like Johnny Cage from Mortal Kombat, whereas the other
• 36:10
  one is playing it just again, more villainous.
• 36:14
  I do think that there are a lot of stories of twins separated at
• 36:17
  birth who go on to have remarkably similar qualities.
• 36:21
  Like it'll be like, oh, we both married someone named this and
• 36:25
  then had a second wife who was also named the same thing.
• 36:27
  Like so maybe that would be the better joke in the movie is if
• 36:30
  their lives are like remarkably the same despite them trying to
• 36:33
  push this. Like you grow up with everything
• 36:35
  handed to you but then they just turned into the same guy.
• 36:38
  Yeah, yeah. It could have been funny too, if
• 36:40
  they just never had any issues either.
• 36:41
  They just like, really. Like, this guy's awesome.
• 36:43
  Like, yeah. We just become best friends.
• 36:46
  Yeah, exactly. You want to go double impact
• 36:47
  everybody? That sounds bad. 01 other point.
• 36:57
  So last episode I talked about how as and we'll get into
• 37:00
  ratings later, but I talked about how I subtracted a whole
• 37:03
  point from Soap Dish because it had the classic 90s trans panic
• 37:07
  ending, right? Yes, this does not have that.
• 37:11
  But we do get multiple instances of Alex Van Damme calling Chad
• 37:17
  Van Damme A homophobic slur. So whoa.
• 37:21
  Jeez, it is so sharp. It's one of those things where
• 37:24
  it's like, yeah, I guess in 1991 this wouldn't like turned as
• 37:26
  many heads, but A it should have and B, it's jarring to watch
• 37:31
  now. So I I do think that factors
• 37:33
  into it should be a very silly movie, but a couple of things
• 37:37
  like that kind of like sour the the vibes a bit.
• 37:41
  Sure. Yeah, that I mean, that's that's
• 37:43
  unfortunate. That isn't it's, you know, we're
• 37:46
  exploring films that I think, as we said before, our product of
• 37:49
  their time. But yeah, viewing it through a
• 37:52
  modern lens, that sounds very cutting to to hear that.
• 37:55
  Couldn't believe the film. Yeah, couldn't.
• 37:57
  Believe he said it once, couldn't believe he said it
• 37:58
  again. I was like, wow, he is doubling
• 38:01
  down. Double impact.
• 38:04
  Yeah, both been cancelled and just like, wow, we really are
• 38:11
  alike. That's a fun movie too.
• 38:14
  One of the John Claude's gets cancelled and then like the
• 38:16
  other one has to like fill in for him.
• 38:18
  He's he's cancelled from his crime syndicate.
• 38:21
  Oh, there you go. We.
• 38:22
  We sell, we sell drugs, but we draw the line at homophobic
• 38:26
  slurs. Van Damme.
• 38:28
  It's cryptography, just like. Super racist and homophobic.
• 38:32
  And then just like we don't want that in our organization.
• 38:34
  And there's like a guy tied up in the background.
• 38:36
  There's like. An HR person that it's just
• 38:38
  like, I'm sorry. All right, well, more than dozen
• 38:41
  for Double impact. So we will head into our
• 38:44
  intermission and then come back with Frank's review of 1998's
• 38:47
  Soldier. OK, we are back now for review
• 38:57
  #2 on the day, Frank, this was your film to watch that I
• 39:00
  recommended 1998's Soldier. Before we hand it over to you, I
• 39:05
  picked this one out again almost as a challenge to myself because
• 39:11
  on paper I'm trying to recommend the best movie possible because
• 39:13
  I want to win. I'm a winner.
• 39:16
  But this movie has terrible reviews and I'm convinced that
• 39:20
  you're going to like it anyway. Are the reviews terrible?
• 39:24
  What do? How bad were they the.
• 39:26
  Rotten Tomatoes score when I looked it up I want to say was
• 39:30
  below 20% no. Are you?
• 39:32
  I actually, I hang on, I'm going to look this up just yeah,
• 39:36
  because like I rented the movie on some platform and it looks
• 39:40
  like it had like A58I. Don't know if mine was showing
• 39:42
  me the critics score or the user score.
• 39:44
  Sometimes those are pretty different.
• 39:46
  Yes, yes. So it is sitting on, it is at a
• 39:50
  58 right now, but it's that's I actually don't know if that's
• 39:53
  the. Weird.
• 39:55
  OK, so maybe go go show me something funny.
• 39:57
  But I definitely knew the movie was not well regarded.
• 39:59
  But it stars Kurt Russell, who is a favorite for both of us,
• 40:03
  and it was directed by, I think the name is.
• 40:06
  Called WS Anderson, right? Yeah.
• 40:08
  Yeah. Who directed a ton of Resident
• 40:12
  Evil movies? And I know that there was a
• 40:13
  point in time like 10 years ago where you were trying to make me
• 40:17
  watch all those Resident Evil movies and I didn't.
• 40:19
  But I know you like them. So that's that was my other
• 40:21
  angle for why I think you might like Soldier.
• 40:23
  Yeah, well, first of all, those movies are a lot of fun and you
• 40:25
  should watch them, but those are going to be easy first.
• 40:29
  Thing out of the way about soldier right watch Resident
• 40:31
  Evil they're. Just they can't be.
• 40:33
  They're fun. Yeah.
• 40:35
  I, I actually, I, I, I know you've mentioned that last time,
• 40:38
  but when I was watching the movie, I wasn't even thinking
• 40:40
  about that, that this was one of his directorial credits because
• 40:44
  he I just because like he, he he made the Resident Evil movies,
• 40:47
  but he's always making like these other.
• 40:49
  He made a recent movie with his wife, Mila Djokovic and Dave
• 40:52
  Batista. He's.
• 40:55
  Married to Mila. Jovovich Yeah, that's that's why
• 40:59
  there's so many Resident Evil movies.
• 41:00
  It's just like, it's just like what they do together.
• 41:04
  It's just. Them daring the other one to
• 41:06
  cave, it's like you're gonna star in another one and they're
• 41:08
  like, you're gonna direct another one and then they both
• 41:10
  get to set. They're like, Dang it, I was
• 41:11
  hoping one of us would back out here.
• 41:13
  We go again. Resident Evil 8 double impact.
• 41:18
  It's just yeah, but there can't be either fun.
• 41:22
  It's so it's it's interesting to go back and watch one of his
• 41:25
  earlier films, actually. But yeah, Soldier was
• 41:29
  interesting. I there's there's a lot of like
• 41:32
  interesting elements to this movie.
• 41:36
  And I will say, I think you were mentioning that it that it's not
• 41:38
  what was not real received. I think it's a film that has
• 41:42
  found an audience long after its release.
• 41:47
  I think it's become sort of a cult film in a way.
• 41:50
  OK. And I mean, to preview our, you
• 41:55
  know, our scoring system at the end here.
• 41:57
  I have no idea how I'm going to score this film because.
• 42:01
  I'm in the same boat with mine today so that's that's a theme
• 42:03
  for the day. But.
• 42:05
  It's just, it's so interesting because I, it's rare that I see
• 42:11
  a film like this where I, I can't fault it for much.
• 42:15
  I feel like it didn't make any real egregious mistakes or
• 42:20
  things that you would look at and be like, you know, this was
• 42:22
  a real miss or, you know, it didn't execute on this in a
• 42:26
  certain way. I feel like it did most things
• 42:29
  right, but was not that entertaining.
• 42:33
  So that it kind of puts it in a weird place for me, but there's
• 42:39
  some very interesting production behind the scenes elements too.
• 42:43
  That it that I found out after watching the movie that that
• 42:45
  really intrigued me. So there's there's a lot going
• 42:48
  on here. Yeah.
• 42:49
  So the. Movie All I know I watched it
• 42:51
  might to give some information about how I try to select these
• 42:54
  movies. I never want to know too much
• 42:55
  because I don't want the decision to be that well
• 42:57
  informed. So I'm a fan of watching
• 42:59
  trailers for stuff with the sound turned off.
• 43:01
  And all I could tell from this one is just that it was a
• 43:04
  science fiction movie and it pretty much looked like Kurt
• 43:07
  Russell trying to play Master Chief from Halo.
• 43:10
  And I assumed that would that would be kind of the main arc of
• 43:12
  the movie. It's just like sci-fi action,
• 43:14
  man. Yeah.
• 43:15
  No, I mean, it's, it's appropriate that you bring up
• 43:17
  Halo. That was my first thought at the
• 43:19
  beginning of the movie is because he is, he's like, the
• 43:24
  movie begins with him as like a baby and he's just taken
• 43:29
  straight from the hospital and put into this like military
• 43:32
  training program. Whose job do you think it is to
• 43:35
  look at like the nursery filling newborn babies and be like,
• 43:37
  which of these would be a good soldier?
• 43:39
  And the other guy's like what? That's literally there were
• 43:42
  people there was like there was like army guys going around.
• 43:45
  I think like giving scores or something to these babies as to
• 43:49
  like, you know, like it's an. 8 out of 10 baby.
• 43:52
  Yeah, I think he literally goes up to to baby Kurt Russell and
• 43:56
  puts like 1A. Like this is like S tier baby
• 44:01
  right here. Like.
• 44:02
  This is an ultra rare holographic baby.
• 44:05
  Yeah, exactly. So I don't know how he knew that
• 44:08
  or what he was basing that on. What an easy.
• 44:11
  Job, no matter what happens if like if it doesn't pan out,
• 44:14
  you're like, I mean, it was a baby, but I don't know what you
• 44:16
  want me to do what do? You want from me, which that
• 44:19
  actually gets into the plot of the movie.
• 44:20
  So like it's it's that's interesting.
• 44:24
  But yeah, basically to like roughly set it up, I guess it's
• 44:28
  very like near future sci-fi. You know, it's it's not, it's
• 44:33
  not Star Wars, Star Trek where we're on different like, you
• 44:36
  know, traveling through space and visiting aliens and stuff
• 44:40
  like that. This is like a near future
• 44:42
  Earth. Is, is, is kind of what the film
• 44:45
  is presenting and the beginning of the film.
• 44:49
  It is, it is very much I was thinking of Halo because it's
• 44:51
  this, it's kind of the same origin for that character where
• 44:55
  like, you know, he's picked up at birth and put into this
• 44:57
  soldier program and then he basically spends his whole life
• 45:00
  doing this. We kind of get this montage of
• 45:02
  him like growing up and a fun bit of trivia right off the bat
• 45:07
  is like, you know, we see him as a baby and then like a 12 year
• 45:11
  old or something. And then you know, he's like 18
• 45:14
  and then like adult Kurt Russell.
• 45:16
  And 12 year old Kurt Russell was played by his son Wyatt Russell,
• 45:23
  now from Thunderbolts. From Thunderbolts.
• 45:25
  Yeah, exactly. So I think this was his first
• 45:29
  movie. See, that's a different
• 45:31
  categorization. So when they got Kurt Russell,
• 45:33
  they put 1A, but when they got to Wyatt Russell, they just put
• 45:35
  nepo? Yes.
• 45:38
  Exactly 1. A distinct military
• 45:41
  classification Nepo baby. So that was fun.
• 45:46
  That was just a fun little thing.
• 45:50
  But then so he just leads to this really interesting
• 45:57
  character for Kurt Russell because he spent his whole life
• 46:01
  just killing people. You know, there's a montage of
• 46:04
  him and all these different battles, these different wars,
• 46:06
  you know, and he does not speak. He has no lines until maybe
• 46:14
  30-40 minutes into the movie. Wow.
• 46:17
  Yeah, it's, it's late into the film that we get like the first
• 46:21
  line of dialogue from Kurt Russell.
• 46:23
  And then even after that, he, he, he just, he speaks very
• 46:26
  rarely. There's there's like 3 or 4
• 46:28
  scenes where he actually talks. So it's it's interesting in that
• 46:33
  regard. And I mean, Kurt Russell is huge
• 46:35
  in this movie. Like he is jacked and I've never
• 46:40
  seen him look like this before, you know, normally.
• 46:42
  Kurt Russell. I must have been short lived.
• 46:44
  Yes, and and this again, this this also right away it gets
• 46:47
  into some of the interesting like production elements in the
• 46:49
  movie because you know, I see him and I'm like, what's it
• 46:53
  what's it called in Space Jam? I was like Kurt Russell's been
• 46:56
  using some of Michael Jordan's secret stuff and I was like, all
• 47:02
  right, so he was he's a little juiced up for this movie.
• 47:05
  But then apparently, allegedly Kurt Russell is like in pre
• 47:11
  production for this movie, knew that he had to get into a
• 47:15
  certain shape for this character, but he did not want
• 47:18
  to use steroids. And so he went on this like
• 47:22
  intensive 18 month training regimen in order to bulk up for
• 47:27
  the role. And it led to production getting
• 47:32
  delayed for like a full year almost because, you know, they
• 47:36
  they just needed him to get into shape for the role.
• 47:38
  And then I think the director in between went to go work on a
• 47:40
  different film. And that led to what I would
• 47:45
  consider like really one of the only major, I guess something
• 47:48
  you could look at is like an error or fault of the film is
• 47:51
  the the visual effects are really bad.
• 47:55
  It's certain points to the visual effects of like certain
• 48:00
  landscapes because I guess the idea originally was, you know,
• 48:06
  they had an idea in mind of this looking somewhat like a Western.
• 48:11
  And so but like, you know, sort of a sci-fi Western.
• 48:14
  And so they had all these exterior locations, you know,
• 48:18
  that they had scouted and that's where they were going to film
• 48:19
  the movie. But then because they had to
• 48:22
  wait these 18 months for Kurt Russell to get in shape for the
• 48:26
  role in the interim, like the El Nino hurricane apparently came
• 48:31
  through and destroyed a lot of the filming locations that they
• 48:34
  were going to use. And so they wound up having to
• 48:38
  shoot a lot of those scenes that they intended to shoot there on
• 48:43
  location on like sound stages. And they just wind up looking
• 48:47
  really like wonky green screen, that is.
• 48:51
  A bummer because I bet that the once they had were probably.
• 48:55
  I mean, nothing holds up better in an old movie than a real
• 48:58
  place, whereas anything that is completely generated like that
• 49:01
  is just gonna look terrible. Exactly.
• 49:04
  And it looks, yeah, it looks awful.
• 49:06
  And I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's 1998 green screen
• 49:09
  visual effects for these like massive landscapes as opposed
• 49:11
  to, yes, just planet Earth, like outside.
• 49:17
  Guys, I got this fascinating idea for a filming location
• 49:19
  right over there, just pointing to the door, right?
• 49:22
  There we had to get out. But anyway, to get into the
• 49:29
  story a little bit, the villain of the film is introduced.
• 49:33
  It's Jason Isaacs, who is probably most well known for
• 49:38
  being Lucius Malfoy, I think in the Harry Potter films.
• 49:42
  So he comes in and Kurt Russell's character, his name is
• 49:48
  Todd. He has it tattooed on his face.
• 49:51
  He's just on. His face.
• 49:53
  On his face. It's like his it just says Todd
• 49:55
  and then his service number. And then all of these soldiers
• 49:59
  that went through this program have the same thing.
• 50:01
  They just have first names that are tattooed on their face.
• 50:04
  I thought you thought they were all named Todd.
• 50:08
  Just Todd in different numbers. That would have been good too,
• 50:10
  actually. Like Todd 117 Todd.
• 50:14
  And they're just like, Sir, I feel like we didn't need the
• 50:16
  first part that. Was pretty good actually.
• 50:21
  You know what? It's funny though, because it
• 50:22
  does kind of remind me, it was reminding me of a lot of other
• 50:26
  things actually. You know, it's, it's like on
• 50:29
  paper, I should really like this film because it was reminding me
• 50:32
  of like Deep Space 9 and it was kind of reminding me of like the
• 50:37
  Clone Wars TV series. Because, you know, we have these
• 50:41
  these like perfect soldiers, you know, that are raised from
• 50:45
  little babies that, you know, to be these murderers.
• 50:48
  And they're they're captain. Whoever's in charge of the unit
• 50:51
  is played by Gary Dusey, who's just always a very interesting
• 50:56
  actor. Strange man, Very.
• 50:58
  Strange man who always gives unique performances, but he's,
• 51:03
  you know, he's in charge of their unit.
• 51:04
  And then Jason Isaacs comes in and he's like, I have these new
• 51:08
  soldiers that are genetically engineered, like they weren't
• 51:12
  born as normal babies and then raised to be soldiers.
• 51:14
  Like we like bred these soldiers to be better.
• 51:18
  So your guys are obsolete and OK, you get yeah, which is
• 51:24
  interesting. Like that's a good.
• 51:26
  Deal. That's a good premise, yeah.
• 51:28
  And so like they to demonstrate this, they're like, well, Todd's
• 51:32
  our best guy, Todd number. 3465 Todd All 600 pants.
• 51:38
  Not you, Todd, not you. Just we never found out a better
• 51:45
  way to categorize. Pictures of talking to each
• 51:48
  other too. Like what's up, Todd?
• 51:56
  Anyway, Kurt Russell, Todd, they're like, he's our best guy.
• 52:00
  So we're going to have him, you know, go up against one of your
• 52:02
  genetically engineered guys and there's some other shenanigans,
• 52:06
  but basically they fight each other and Kurt Russell.
• 52:10
  And this ties back to what you were mentioning in, in Double
• 52:13
  Impact, Kurt Russell while they're fighting, he like
• 52:16
  somehow like he, he hasn't like he's trying to put like a
• 52:19
  chokehold or something on this other soldier guy.
• 52:21
  He's fighting. And the guy's like pulling him
• 52:23
  off. And Kurt Russell like grabs one
• 52:25
  of his eyes and kind of like basically rips one of the guy's
• 52:28
  eyes out and like scars his face.
• 52:32
  But then the other soldier guy, because they're, you know,
• 52:35
  trying to show he's he's better. They're the genetically
• 52:39
  engineered ones. This it's this interesting
• 52:42
  scene, I feel like was difficult for them from like a visual
• 52:47
  production standpoint because he like they're fighting like up on
• 52:52
  this, these like chain catwalk things.
• 52:55
  They're you know, they're high up and he kind of like elbows
• 52:59
  Kurt Russell, you know, off his back.
• 53:01
  And then Kurt Russell falls to the ground, you know, like lands
• 53:04
  on his back, eyes wide open and it looks like he dies, right.
• 53:09
  And so they're like, all right, well, get that body out of here.
• 53:14
  Like Jason Isaacs is like, see, I told you.
• 53:16
  But then he's all mad at his guy who was supposedly better.
• 53:18
  And he's like, how do you let that inferior soldier like Scar,
• 53:22
  you like that? You know he's like you're
• 53:24
  useless now because you have no depth perception.
• 53:28
  I got to throw a football now, yeah.
• 53:32
  So it was just interesting because basically what happens
• 53:36
  is, you know, they toss Kurt Russell's body onto this like
• 53:42
  trash planet because they're like get rid of that.
• 53:46
  And then they drop him off there and then he like wakes up from
• 53:49
  being dead. Just thought this is the.
• 53:52
  Unconscious gag again. So he somehow just wasn't
• 53:56
  moving, but was not dead, it was just just a little concussion.
• 54:00
  But his eyes, and This is why I was, I was watching it and I'm
• 54:02
  like, I can tell they didn't know how to do this.
• 54:05
  Because if they if they'd done it the other way and just, you
• 54:08
  know, he fell on his back and closed his eyes, then the
• 54:11
  audience would assume, oh, he's just unconscious.
• 54:13
  He's not dead. And so why would they be
• 54:15
  dragging his body out of here? But then the opposite also
• 54:19
  doesn't work because it's like, oh, his eyes are wide open, he
• 54:24
  looks like he's dead, he is dead.
• 54:26
  Why does he wake up later? Like he's dead.
• 54:30
  He is dead. What's the coroner's report?
• 54:34
  Just like, you know what I mean? Like Todd, Todd, what's going
• 54:38
  on, buddy? Like Todd?
• 54:39
  Stay with us. Yeah.
• 54:40
  Like, the whole thing is just a series of communications, right?
• 54:43
  Did you get a dead Todd into the morgue today?
• 54:45
  And he's like, yeah, every day there's a.
• 54:47
  Lot of dead Todds, let me tell you.
• 54:49
  You know how many dead Todds I go through every day?
• 54:53
  But do you know what I mean, though?
• 54:54
  It's like they didn't know how to show that.
• 54:56
  That's a very. Important piece of your premise
• 54:58
  to not be able to depict visually.
• 55:01
  Yeah, exactly. And I and I, I can see running
• 55:04
  into that wall of sorts because both neither option works in
• 55:08
  terms of how you're going to communicate this to your
• 55:11
  audience. You know you'd.
• 55:12
  Be better off throwing him into some sort of thing that he
• 55:15
  disappears into, like he collapses under a pile of
• 55:17
  machinery, you know, just like something obscures him
• 55:21
  completely and they're like, no way he could have survived that
• 55:23
  as opposed to look at him, he's dead.
• 55:27
  And like, literally they like drag him away and his eyes are
• 55:30
  wide open and it's just like, what happened here?
• 55:33
  What that what did he just reboot your brain?
• 55:35
  Like I don't understand how this happened to you.
• 55:39
  That beat would make sense for the genetically engineered
• 55:41
  soldiers to have like inhuman qualities like that.
• 55:44
  But Kurt Russell is just a holographic baby.
• 55:46
  He's he's normal. Yep.
• 55:48
  Yeah, he's just a super rare. So anyway, that's what sets the
• 55:52
  plot off is they drop, they drop him off on this garbage planet
• 55:58
  and just leave him there because they assume he's dead.
• 56:00
  And then Kurt Russell is, you know, he finds a civilization of
• 56:06
  people that are living here on this planet.
• 56:08
  There are people that have been abandoned here for other reasons
• 56:10
  or have escaped Earth because Earth is this war-torn place
• 56:15
  and, you know, it's natural resources are destroyed and
• 56:17
  stuff. And so he just starts living
• 56:19
  with these people. And then essentially the, the,
• 56:24
  what the plot evolves into is a sort of, I guess call like
• 56:30
  almost like A7 samurai type thing, but just with Todd where
• 56:34
  it's like the, you know, 7 Todd. 7.
• 56:36
  Todd. But it's just one Todd.
• 56:40
  Parentheses. It's just one Todd.
• 56:44
  So it's him, obviously he makes friends with this community of
• 56:49
  people. And then for some reason, I
• 56:53
  don't really know why, some convoluted reason, Jason Isaacs
• 56:58
  and Busey, they're like, oh, we got to bring our super soldier
• 57:01
  guys to this trash planet for some training thing or
• 57:06
  something. And Gary Busey's like, what if
• 57:07
  there's people there and Jason Isaac's like, don't be silly,
• 57:10
  that's stupid. But if there are, we're going to
• 57:11
  kill them. So like they, they take their
• 57:17
  guys there. They, you know, the Super
• 57:19
  soldiers start killing this community that's kind of adopted
• 57:22
  Kurt Russell and he has to fight back and and kill them all.
• 57:24
  And it ends with him having another one V1 against the Super
• 57:28
  soldier who's he took out at the beginning.
• 57:31
  And then the Super soldier loses cuz he tries to swipe at him but
• 57:34
  he has no depth perception he's just.
• 57:37
  Embarrassingly inept and yeah, can't buy.
• 57:44
  Him. Jesus.
• 57:45
  Yeah, this movie. I wasn't.
• 57:47
  We're making fun of it quite a bit.
• 57:48
  But like, on paper, this premise ought to work just fine.
• 57:50
  It's like everything. Million tropes with a like
• 57:54
  passable, you know, leading actor, someone who I would trust
• 57:57
  to play a character that doesn't really speak just cuz it's not a
• 58:00
  Jean Claude situation. Kurt Russell's like an actor
• 58:03
  before he's an action star. He should be able to do it.
• 58:05
  So I'm curious what like, you know, I guess just the execution
• 58:09
  fell apart even before the movie started filming.
• 58:12
  Yes, I mean. It's just kind of disappointing
• 58:15
  because I think they had, you know, some of their sets, some
• 58:18
  of the production design looks really good.
• 58:19
  And I think they had an idea for the whole movie to look like
• 58:22
  that. And I think that would have
• 58:23
  really elevated it. And it's not bad.
• 58:26
  That's the thing. It's it's not bad.
• 58:27
  It just is sort of lacking kind of a spark almost.
• 58:32
  It's it's, I don't want to say boring because that's a really
• 58:35
  reductive description, but it's hard when your main character
• 58:40
  doesn't talk and is this very not only doesn't talk, but is
• 58:45
  very emotionally stunted because that's the character he's
• 58:48
  playing. Yeah, and there's some good
• 58:50
  again, there's some good beats in there.
• 58:52
  There's some good dialogue, some good performances.
• 58:54
  There's an interesting kind of thing.
• 58:57
  It's it's a trip that I don't like so much in movies, but you
• 59:01
  see sometimes where it's like, so Kurt wrestles with this
• 59:05
  community of people, but there's really specifically like one guy
• 59:08
  found him out in the wasteland and this one family are the ones
• 59:12
  that kind of really bring him in.
• 59:14
  And it's a man, his wife and their young son.
• 59:16
  And the man and his wife are portrayed as a very happy
• 59:20
  couple. But, you know, you can see that
• 59:23
  Kurt Russell is like, never. He's not used to being around
• 59:27
  women, I guess, or something. And he's just very attracted to
• 59:30
  this woman. And I'm like, oh, Kurt Russell's
• 59:31
  going to ruin this man's family, isn't he?
• 59:34
  Because he's a home wrecker. Exactly.
• 59:38
  And they they have their their young son, but they're it's not
• 59:41
  like there's anything, you know, they go out of their way to to
• 59:44
  show that this is a happy, happy family unit.
• 59:46
  And basically Fast forward to the end, like the guy winds up
• 59:49
  dying And then like the movie ends with like Kurt Russell,
• 59:53
  like carrying around this kid like it's his kid.
• 59:55
  It's like you just stole some other man's family does.
• 59:58
  He rename the kid Todd. Is that the frozen beat?
• 1:00:01
  It's it's so funny because he and again, this it's like silly
• 1:00:06
  in execution, but like makes sense narratively, I guess for
• 1:00:11
  the character. But Kurt Russell, he ends every
• 1:00:14
  sentence with Sir. Everybody he's talking to, he
• 1:00:17
  talks to them like they're like a superior officer.
• 1:00:20
  So like even when he's talking to the kid or like the man's
• 1:00:25
  wife, I don't remember the name of her character, like he always
• 1:00:27
  calls her Sir, you know, because he just doesn't know what else
• 1:00:30
  to do. Like his literally his entire
• 1:00:32
  life, he's just been this soldier.
• 1:00:33
  He has no idea how to do anything else or how to interact
• 1:00:37
  with people in any other way. And but that, and that's some of
• 1:00:40
  the limited dialogue he actually speaks in the film, right?
• 1:00:43
  That'd get annoying if he said it too much.
• 1:00:44
  That almost seems like it's driving him not having a lot of
• 1:00:47
  lines. Is this gimmick that he has to
• 1:00:48
  say, Sir? Yeah.
• 1:00:50
  Right. Every single time.
• 1:00:52
  So yeah, it's just, it's interesting.
• 1:00:55
  Like, it's almost at odds with itself in ways like that where
• 1:01:00
  it's like, yeah, this makes total sense.
• 1:01:02
  This is good sci-fi, but it's just it's sort of lacking this
• 1:01:07
  entertainment factor throughout the film.
• 1:01:09
  Because especially, like, the last act of the film is this,
• 1:01:12
  you know, big action sequence where all these soldier guys are
• 1:01:15
  coming in and Kurt Russell's kind of set up his like, Home
• 1:01:18
  Alone traps all over the place to like you.
• 1:01:20
  Know. Get rid of them all.
• 1:01:22
  And that part's fine, you know? But it's like, that's really
• 1:01:26
  outside of like him fighting that other soldier guy at the
• 1:01:28
  beginning of the film and then that longer sequence at the end.
• 1:01:32
  Those are the only action moments in the film, too.
• 1:01:36
  Not that that in itself is a bad thing, but it also feels a
• 1:01:38
  little bit unbalanced in terms of being like an action sci-fi
• 1:01:42
  because it's like we're kind of telling this smaller story.
• 1:01:44
  Yeah. That that almost sounds like
• 1:01:46
  Miss Marketing to even frame it as an action movie, which it
• 1:01:49
  definitely does. Yes, it's it's funny because I
• 1:01:52
  was watching it and I mean this in a good way, but I was
• 1:01:54
  watching it and I'm like, this feels like an episode of Deep
• 1:01:56
  Space 9. I feel like Deep Space 9 would
• 1:01:58
  tell this story really well in 48 minutes or however much time
• 1:02:04
  they have per episode, you know? And that's great, that works as
• 1:02:08
  an episode of Deep Space 9, but it almost needed something else
• 1:02:11
  to make this like a feature film that's not connected to anything
• 1:02:17
  outside of that. Which is a thing that people say
• 1:02:19
  about because Deep Space 9 Star Trek.
• 1:02:21
  I mean, a lot of the Star Trek movies that people don't like
• 1:02:25
  would also work as episodes of their respective shows, but
• 1:02:27
  there is an element missing to make them a movie.
• 1:02:29
  Like, that's a different set of expectations for what that kind
• 1:02:32
  of story would be. Yes, totally, totally.
• 1:02:36
  But that does bring me to 1 of the interesting like production
• 1:02:40
  elements as well. Is like Speaking of this not
• 1:02:44
  being related to anything outside of, you know, this
• 1:02:47
  story. This film was written by David
• 1:02:53
  Webb Peoples is his name and he was the writer for Blade Runner,
• 1:02:59
  the original Blade Runner. And really, yes, which this was
• 1:03:04
  very interesting. I did not know any of this until
• 1:03:06
  after I watched the film and it really kind of recontextualized
• 1:03:09
  things in an interesting way. But it's the writer for Blade
• 1:03:12
  Runner. He was writing this film while
• 1:03:15
  Blade Runner was being produced. And According to him and Paul WS
• 1:03:19
  Anderson, this takes place in the same world as Blade Runner.
• 1:03:23
  This is the same universe. This track, so I don't know if
• 1:03:27
  you saw this, I didn't want to say it before you saw the movie,
• 1:03:30
  but the reason I was introduced to Soldier was because of like a
• 1:03:32
  Reddit post or something that there's this blinking you miss
• 1:03:36
  it shot where they pull up his military profile and it has a
• 1:03:39
  bunch of references to other sci-fi stuff.
• 1:03:41
  Like it says that this Kurt Russell character was present at
• 1:03:44
  one of the battles that the guy mentions in the monologue at the
• 1:03:47
  end of Blade Runner. Yeah, he's in two, two of the
• 1:03:50
  battles and and and you see those battles, they're part of
• 1:03:52
  the montage at the beginning of the movie and it'll pop up on
• 1:03:55
  the bottom of the screen like what it is.
• 1:03:57
  And yeah, it's it's it's battles or wars that they mentioned in
• 1:04:01
  Blade Runner that are then shown here in this movie.
• 1:04:05
  And there's more production elements.
• 1:04:07
  Sorry, go ahead, I was. Just going to say there's more
• 1:04:09
  production elements that tie it to Blade Runner 2.
• 1:04:11
  There's there's ships like spaceships that are from Blade
• 1:04:15
  Runner are seen in this movie. And there's even it's not
• 1:04:21
  clearly stated, but somewhat speculated that these new super
• 1:04:24
  soldiers that they made are replicants and that's why they
• 1:04:27
  have these sort of enhanced abilities, which is kind of like
• 1:04:30
  how the the replicants were in the original Blade Runner.
• 1:04:34
  It's also funny because Blade Runner is a movie that I would
• 1:04:38
  describe as very good, but in its own way kind of slow and
• 1:04:42
  boring. Like, it makes some similar
• 1:04:45
  plotting mistakes that ought to take away from your enjoyment of
• 1:04:47
  the film, but it's just saved by the, like, kind of meditative
• 1:04:52
  atmosphere of the whole story. But it's in a similar place to
• 1:04:55
  Soldier where it feels like it's missing elements that you ought
• 1:04:57
  to have to tell like a fleshed out story.
• 1:05:00
  And I think this one, without that saving grace, just falls as
• 1:05:03
  flat as Blade Runner easily could have.
• 1:05:05
  Yeah, totally. Yeah.
• 1:05:07
  And I mean, to bring it back to Soldier, yeah.
• 1:05:08
  It's just like there's films you can look at like, I mean, double
• 1:05:13
  impact, it's like you look at double impact, you're like, OK,
• 1:05:15
  there's here's some things that could have made this a better
• 1:05:17
  film. Here's some things that were
• 1:05:19
  that you could objectively say were mistakes or bad choices,
• 1:05:23
  like whatever. But with this movie, it's like,
• 1:05:26
  honestly, I feel like they executed pretty well on what
• 1:05:30
  they were trying to do. You know, it like there's no
• 1:05:34
  glaring like technical issues outside of the the kind of poor
• 1:05:38
  green screen effects, you know, decent performances that the IT
• 1:05:42
  was like it was an interesting concept.
• 1:05:45
  It just was lacking something that's kind of hard to put your
• 1:05:50
  finger on what it is like what it would have taken to kind of
• 1:05:55
  bring this movie around. But I think for some people, you
• 1:05:59
  know, like I was saying earlier, I think it's found an audience
• 1:06:02
  that does really appreciate it, which is interesting too.
• 1:06:05
  I think science fiction, more than most genres, runs the risk
• 1:06:08
  of falling into that kind of middling, boring territory.
• 1:06:12
  And I think there's like some obvious reasons from that from a
• 1:06:14
  storytelling perspective. Like, so much of what a film
• 1:06:17
  wants you to feel is based on setting up expectations and then
• 1:06:21
  subverting them or doing something to create a reaction.
• 1:06:23
  And that's so much easier to do if the movie is primarily
• 1:06:27
  grounded in concepts and imagery that a person is familiar with
• 1:06:31
  or a science fiction definitionally has to make the
• 1:06:34
  whole space and tell you so much lore upfront.
• 1:06:38
  But this one, yeah, it's an action movie.
• 1:06:42
  It was marketed as an action movie.
• 1:06:43
  It's got Kurt Russell in it. Like, you need stuff to happen.
• 1:06:47
  You need some double impact in here or else it's just never
• 1:06:49
  going to work. Yeah, and I mean, again, also to
• 1:06:52
  the movies credit it, it, it cut out so much unnecessary things
• 1:06:57
  that I think another film might have done where, you know, there
• 1:06:59
  was no opening credits scroll like in the year 2049, Earth
• 1:07:05
  filled, you know, none of that. It was just like, it just jumped
• 1:07:08
  right into it and it didn't dumb itself down to its audience at
• 1:07:10
  all. But, you know, your main
• 1:07:12
  character is not even speaking for most of the film.
• 1:07:14
  And it just, it doesn't like, hold your hand through that.
• 1:07:17
  It just is like, yeah, like here's what's happening.
• 1:07:21
  It's telling it all visually as like right off the gate, like,
• 1:07:25
  you know, but it's very clear. It's very easy to understand,
• 1:07:28
  you know, this sort of sci-fi space that you're in.
• 1:07:32
  And at no point really does it, you know, like I said, do what
• 1:07:36
  I, I've seen other films do where it would try and like over
• 1:07:39
  explain. Like, like you're saying with
• 1:07:40
  John Claude's accent, we don't need to explain that the man has
• 1:07:43
  an accent. You know, it's like you can just
• 1:07:45
  understand what's happening in front of you.
• 1:07:48
  So yeah, because you need to go ahead.
• 1:07:50
  I was just. Going to say there's a lot to
• 1:07:52
  give the movie credit for in that regard.
• 1:07:54
  It's like I appreciate it more than I liked it, if that makes
• 1:07:57
  sense. Oh, absolutely.
• 1:07:59
  There's a ton of movies that that fall into that camp that's
• 1:08:02
  curious. Any other like major beats you
• 1:08:06
  wanted to talk about with it or do you think that kind of sums
• 1:08:08
  up your your feelings on Soldier?
• 1:08:11
  I mean, you know, I think it does.
• 1:08:13
  There's there's other things that happened throughout the
• 1:08:16
  film that, you know, were interesting.
• 1:08:20
  There was like there was a lot of snakes.
• 1:08:24
  There was. What does that mean?
• 1:08:28
  There was. There was just this whole
• 1:08:31
  recurring thing. I skipped over it completely,
• 1:08:33
  but there was so that, you know, this family, this this community
• 1:08:37
  at large, but specifically this family of three that takes Kurt
• 1:08:40
  Russell in. You know, they have this young
• 1:08:41
  boy who who also doesn't speak. He he's, you know, like Kurt
• 1:08:45
  Russell, like Kurt Russell can't speak.
• 1:08:46
  But this kid like, I guess at one point, like they're
• 1:08:51
  gardening, they're on this like trash planet and they're so
• 1:08:53
  they're like trying to, you know, grow food in this little
• 1:08:55
  makeshift garden that they have. And I guess this planet is
• 1:08:59
  covered in snakes and so like. OK, so it's a junk planet full
• 1:09:03
  of snakes, yes. And so like a snake shows up
• 1:09:06
  and, you know, like one of the, the woman in this family, she
• 1:09:09
  like kills it. And she explains to Kurt
• 1:09:11
  Russell, she was like, you know, our son, he was bit by one of
• 1:09:13
  these snakes when he was really young.
• 1:09:14
  And he hasn't spoken since then. And so then, like, later in the
• 1:09:17
  film, like, Kurt Russell and the kid are together.
• 1:09:20
  And like a snake comes into the room.
• 1:09:23
  And Kurt Russell's like, trying to show the kid, like, how to
• 1:09:26
  smash it with a shoe. He's trying.
• 1:09:29
  Like, he's like, he's trying. He's like, you know,
• 1:09:31
  pantomiming. He's like, he has a shoe and
• 1:09:33
  he's like, slamming it on the ground.
• 1:09:34
  He's like, pointing at the kid and the snake, like, you know,
• 1:09:37
  kill that snake with a shoe. And then the parents walk in
• 1:09:39
  and, like, what are you doing? Why are you, like, trying to,
• 1:09:41
  you know, like, get the snake out of here?
• 1:09:42
  And So what this leads to later is this couple is in bed later.
• 1:09:49
  And this is after this is another ploppy that kind of
• 1:09:51
  skipped over because it's resolved pretty quickly.
• 1:09:53
  But at one point, Kurt Russell, you know, he has like severe
• 1:09:55
  PTSD from his experiences and he's like training while he's in
• 1:09:59
  this community at one point and somebody kind of comes up behind
• 1:10:02
  him and he like turns around and starts like choking the guy out.
• 1:10:04
  So they're like, you were crazy. You got to go.
• 1:10:07
  You got to go out. And go.
• 1:10:08
  Out. Yeah.
• 1:10:10
  So he gets kind of kicked out of the community at one point.
• 1:10:12
  And while he's gone, the couples are in bed and a snake is coming
• 1:10:16
  to the bed. And I'm like, this is the third
• 1:10:18
  instance of snake. I was like, at this point I'm
• 1:10:20
  like, this is too many snakes. But the snake is crawling in
• 1:10:25
  their bed and it's about to bite one of them.
• 1:10:27
  And then the kid grabs the snake, pulls it out of bed and
• 1:10:30
  smashes it with a shoe like Kurt Russell showed him to.
• 1:10:33
  And then immediately the husband is like, you know what?
• 1:10:36
  We're wrong. I got to go get Kurt Russell.
• 1:10:38
  We got to bring him back. I had no idea he had such
• 1:10:42
  advanced shoe smashing technology.
• 1:10:44
  That he taught her son how to kill the snake.
• 1:10:46
  I love him. You know what?
• 1:10:47
  You stay here, wife. I'm going to go die.
• 1:10:49
  And then Kurt Russell will come back without me.
• 1:10:51
  It'll be great. Well, he.
• 1:10:52
  Dies going to fetch him, yeah. Yeah, because that's when the
• 1:10:55
  Super soldiers show up as well. He's out there bringing Kurt
• 1:10:57
  Russell back and they they show up and they just start blasting
• 1:11:00
  people and they kill this guy is.
• 1:11:03
  Any of that with the voices and the snakes, Is that a metaphor
• 1:11:06
  that I'm not getting or is this just like noise for the plot?
• 1:11:10
  Honestly, I don't know. I mean, I like there's some,
• 1:11:14
  there was something kind of, I think about the facts that Kurt
• 1:11:18
  Russell wasn't like Kurt Russell spoke throughout the film, just
• 1:11:21
  very rarely. But I think there was something
• 1:11:23
  about the fact that he didn't talk and the kid didn't talk and
• 1:11:26
  there was a fourth instance of snakes where he.
• 1:11:29
  Super. Where the Super soldiers are all
• 1:11:32
  there attacking. He throws one of them into a
• 1:11:35
  giant pit of snakes and it looks like, you know, Raiders.
• 1:11:38
  Like why did it have to be snakes and then the snake and if
• 1:11:41
  any? Movie has earned the right to
• 1:11:43
  say why did it have to be snakes?
• 1:11:44
  It's this one. Yeah, and, and and you know
• 1:11:46
  what? I almost completely didn't
• 1:11:48
  mention it at all, but they were all over the film.
• 1:11:49
  There was a lot of snakes. That is such a buried lead in
• 1:11:53
  this movie. It's not like there was a simple
• 1:11:55
  beginning, middle, end and you're like, oh, we filled the
• 1:11:57
  interim time with mostly just snake content.
• 1:12:01
  Yeah, exactly, though So again, it's an interesting film.
• 1:12:05
  There's a lot to discuss here. I like that we don't fill in all
• 1:12:11
  the gaps. There's stuff a double impact
• 1:12:12
  too that I didn't cover. So I'm just picturing someone
• 1:12:15
  who got this far in and went, I guess I'll watch Soldier anyway.
• 1:12:17
  And then they got to the end. They're like, why didn't he talk
• 1:12:19
  about those snakes? Yeah, there was a lot of them.
• 1:12:24
  There was a lot of a lot of snakes on this trash planet.
• 1:12:28
  I don't know why. Maybe somebody just dumped a
• 1:12:30
  boatload of snakes off one day. Like we don't need like what the
• 1:12:34
  trash. Was.
• 1:12:35
  Yeah, just. Anyway, leave those there.
• 1:12:38
  That's for Todd. That's for Todd.
• 1:12:43
  It's become. Like part of their culture that
• 1:12:45
  they say things in general, just like, you know what they say.
• 1:12:47
  Another day, another Todd. Oh, also one more thing.
• 1:12:50
  All the other Todd's. So the whose names are not Todd,
• 1:12:54
  they all have their own names, but disagree.
• 1:12:57
  Yeah, agree to disagree on that one.
• 1:13:00
  But they so immediately got like replaced by these super soldiers
• 1:13:07
  that they became like, it was just this interesting beat where
• 1:13:12
  like all of them were still with this military organization.
• 1:13:16
  But you know, Jason Isaacs and his crew are like, we don't need
• 1:13:19
  you anymore. Like you, when we get to this
• 1:13:21
  planet, we're sending you guys out there without weapons to
• 1:13:24
  just like set up like machinery or something.
• 1:13:28
  You know, they're like, you're just grunts now.
• 1:13:30
  You're not even soldiers anymore.
• 1:13:32
  But again, it was interesting, you know, it's like, oh, OK,
• 1:13:34
  this, you know, because like, they're all like, Kurt Russell
• 1:13:36
  where it's like they have emotions.
• 1:13:38
  They are human beings, but they just don't know how to process
• 1:13:41
  or deal with any of this because all they've ever been is these
• 1:13:45
  soldiers, you know? Is that the imagery we're trying
• 1:13:49
  to get is about like finding your voice while living in a
• 1:13:53
  system that is trying to like oppress you and control your
• 1:13:57
  every move? Possibly, I mean, because
• 1:14:01
  there's there is one good line of dialogue too, between Kurt
• 1:14:04
  Russell and the the wife that in this family unit where she's
• 1:14:10
  just talking to him and she was just like, what do you think
• 1:14:12
  about, you know, and he doesn't know how to answer.
• 1:14:14
  She's like, sure, you know, surely you must be.
• 1:14:16
  You must think things, Todd like.
• 1:14:21
  Like the worst first date ever. You surely you think things,
• 1:14:24
  Todd. And she's like, what about
• 1:14:28
  feelings? She was like, you know, do you
• 1:14:30
  have feelings or emotions? And, you know, at first he
• 1:14:33
  doesn't know how to answer. But then after a minute, he just
• 1:14:35
  goes, you know, he's like fear. And she's like, you know, what
• 1:14:41
  do you mean fear? She's like, all the time.
• 1:14:42
  He's like, yeah, He's like constant, he's like fear and
• 1:14:46
  discipline, like that's all I feel.
• 1:14:48
  And, you know, so, so she just feels really bad for him in that
• 1:14:51
  moment 'cause he's just this like kind of child almost, you
• 1:14:56
  know, that just doesn't know how to deal with these things.
• 1:14:58
  And at the end of the movie, once they kill all the Super
• 1:15:01
  soldier guys, they, they bring all the other Todds with them to
• 1:15:06
  join their little community too. So they they all live happily
• 1:15:11
  ever to oh, they actually blow the planet up at the end.
• 1:15:13
  I'm I'm bearing a lot of leads here.
• 1:15:15
  They what? They can't go home with them,
• 1:15:17
  but they blew the planet up. They so they steal at the end of
• 1:15:20
  the movie, they steal Jason Isaac's ship that he brought all
• 1:15:24
  these super soldiers there on and and cuz I guess.
• 1:15:28
  Oh yeah. So once Jason Isaacs realizes
• 1:15:31
  that Kurt Russell is out there killing all of his super soldier
• 1:15:34
  guys, he's like, screw this. Like we have a a planet
• 1:15:37
  destroyer bomb on this ship. He's like, leave that here and
• 1:15:42
  we're leaving. So that's what he was sending
• 1:15:44
  the other Todds out to do was to to set up this bomb.
• 1:15:48
  OK. And so they would, they wind up
• 1:15:51
  taking the ship and leaving Jason and Isaacs and his crew
• 1:15:54
  outside when the planet explodes.
• 1:15:56
  And then they like, fly away and they, you know, find a new home
• 1:15:59
  to live on together or something.
• 1:16:01
  Sounds like the end of Thor Ragnarok.
• 1:16:04
  A little bit, yeah. Yeah, pretty similar to that
• 1:16:06
  actually. So at the end, at the start of
• 1:16:08
  the next movie, Thanos shows up and then they all get killed
• 1:16:10
  anyway. Thor doesn't, so I assume all
• 1:16:13
  the other Todds will die, but Todd number all the.
• 1:16:15
  Other Todds. Russell Todd will be fine.
• 1:16:22
  OK, well I OK, I guess I almost stopped you too soon because I
• 1:16:25
  did not clearly did not yet know enough about a soldier before we
• 1:16:30
  got into the snakes and Todds of it all.
• 1:16:32
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great stuff in there, great
• 1:16:35
  stuff in Soldier. Oh.
• 1:16:38
  Geez. OK, well, that was a lot.
• 1:16:45
  Why don't, why don't we move on to scores?
• 1:16:46
  Because I think that's going to be a sticking point for both of
• 1:16:49
  us this week. Yeah, you have to go first, so.
• 1:16:52
  Yeah. Oh, geez.
• 1:16:55
  So double impact. God, it feels like a lifetime
• 1:16:57
  ago we were talking about double impact.
• 1:16:59
  Double impact. We're so young.
• 1:17:01
  We were. So young, that was the pre
• 1:17:02
  taught days double impact I went into with very low expectations,
• 1:17:07
  which is to say that I was probably going to like it unless
• 1:17:11
  it really found a way to be like super boring or offensive
• 1:17:15
  somehow. And it did get kind of close
• 1:17:17
  with all the homophobic slurs. But again, you, you, you almost
• 1:17:20
  have to brace for that when you watch a movie that's this old.
• 1:17:23
  So I was torn the whole way through of like, what do I say
• 1:17:27
  about this? Because now that we're like 4
• 1:17:29
  episodes in, our scores have become relative.
• 1:17:31
  You know, I mean if you give, I think I gave soap dish a three
• 1:17:36
  last time, right? Yeah, which I think is what I
• 1:17:39
  also gave. Grifters.
• 1:17:42
  Rifters Yeah, in. Episode 2.
• 1:17:44
  So that's currently our bottom, like our lowest ranking films.
• 1:17:48
  And I'd be hard pressed to say that I'd like to double impact
• 1:17:51
  less than either of those. I mean, I didn't see Grifters,
• 1:17:54
  but I liked it more than Soap Dish because I was bound to.
• 1:17:57
  I like martial arts action movies.
• 1:18:00
  So I'm tempted to say that my score for Double Impact is a
• 1:18:03
  four. It could.
• 1:18:05
  It's lower. Than I thought it.
• 1:18:06
  Could easily have gone lower because really it loses a lot of
• 1:18:11
  every point that it gains by just doing something strange or
• 1:18:14
  poorly. I mean the I think one of the
• 1:18:17
  biggest things I forgot to talk about is that the film
• 1:18:19
  cinematography ought to be really cool because they're
• 1:18:22
  filming on location in Hong Kong and they're shooting a lot of
• 1:18:25
  scenes out on like the port side of Hong Kong with like boats and
• 1:18:29
  stuff. And it should look really neat.
• 1:18:31
  But in so many of the scenes, they're so concerned about the
• 1:18:34
  fact that they can't convincingly show you 2 Jean
• 1:18:36
  Claude's at once that the whole thing feels kind of boxed in.
• 1:18:40
  It's like unconfident in how it is shot.
• 1:18:43
  And I think that's one of the biggest things that between that
• 1:18:46
  the 2 Jean Claude's barely speaking to each other and the
• 1:18:48
  lack of like thoughtful choreographed martial arts
• 1:18:51
  sequences, it just doesn't hit the marks I was expecting it to.
• 1:18:56
  So I do think a four is as as much as I can give for double
• 1:18:59
  impact. That's.
• 1:19:00
  Fair. That's fair.
• 1:19:01
  I like I said, that is lower than I thought you would give
• 1:19:04
  it, but it sounds like it it earned A4.
• 1:19:08
  It would have been A5 if not for some of the weird stuff like the
• 1:19:12
  horrible sex scene and the homophobia and stuff like those
• 1:19:15
  things. Collectively I was like, you
• 1:19:16
  can't, you can't get by unscathed after having all of
• 1:19:19
  this in here. Sure, sure.
• 1:19:21
  OK, 4 for double impact. Is it my turn?
• 1:19:27
  Yeah, now. You know what else to go?
• 1:19:31
  Todd, what do you think? Todd Todd, What were your
• 1:19:33
  thoughts on Sweeney Todd? How many snakes would you give
• 1:19:36
  this, Todd? I'm just gonna make Todd watch
• 1:19:40
  Snakes on a Plane and tell us his thoughts about it.
• 1:19:43
  But he won't speak, so he would just stare.
• 1:19:45
  He can't. Speak.
• 1:19:46
  Yeah, surely you must have thoughts about this, Todd.
• 1:19:49
  He just says feel. It's valid.
• 1:19:54
  OK, Soldier, man, it's a tough one.
• 1:19:57
  Soldier is like, it's like it's more interesting than it is
• 1:20:01
  good. But.
• 1:20:04
  Yeah, I. Do appreciate a lot about it.
• 1:20:08
  So that puts it in a sort of interesting middle ground, which
• 1:20:12
  is not like I feel like satisfying score wise.
• 1:20:17
  I feel like I I do like to be more try and be more definitive
• 1:20:21
  when I can, but it feels kind of like a six.
• 1:20:25
  Oh see now this is the opposite. I thought you'd go way lower.
• 1:20:28
  No, no Soldier was again good in its own way because I'm thinking
• 1:20:34
  back to how I scored Gamera. Like I gave Gamera a 10 out of
• 1:20:37
  10 because. Because it was, obviously.
• 1:20:39
  Yeah, it was awesome. And obviously there were things
• 1:20:42
  that it, you know, it it, it succeeded at exactly what it was
• 1:20:47
  trying to do. It knew exactly what it wanted
• 1:20:49
  to be. And I think in a lot of ways
• 1:20:51
  Soldier did as well. I think it succeeded in
• 1:20:55
  executing like the the concept of the film.
• 1:20:59
  It just it wasn't as awesome as Gamera.
• 1:21:02
  So I feel like it lands, you know, like I, I'm going to say
• 1:21:09
  6. I almost had 7, which I know we
• 1:21:10
  made fun of seven in our first episode.
• 1:21:14
  Is this sort of a non committal score?
• 1:21:16
  But this listen. If if you give a movie A7, we
• 1:21:18
  have to have a whole separate episode about it because that is
• 1:21:20
  the Holy Grail of this show is to find an actual 7 out of 10
• 1:21:24
  movie this. One feels really close.
• 1:21:26
  I, I feel like the closest almost you can get to being a 7
• 1:21:29
  out of 10 movie is something like this where it's, it's like
• 1:21:34
  didn't make enough egregious errors or mistakes or offensive
• 1:21:38
  in any way, but still fell short of being a great film or great
• 1:21:46
  for what it is. So this one's close.
• 1:21:49
  I was between 6:00 and 7:00. I'm going to say 6 for Soldier,
• 1:21:53
  though. I do appreciate it though.
• 1:21:55
  It's it's a strong six. That's a strong six.
• 1:21:59
  It had 7 in its sights, but it couldn't get there.
• 1:22:02
  Yeah, well, you know, it had no depth perception.
• 1:22:09
  OK, so that's double impact is a four out of 10.
• 1:22:12
  Soldier is a six out of 10. Oh, that means I win.
• 1:22:16
  Oh, you do. Good for you, I.
• 1:22:17
  Did we're tied now on number of wins?
• 1:22:21
  Because I think the films you picked won episodes one and two
• 1:22:24
  and now I have won episodes 3 and 4.
• 1:22:26
  Cool. All right, let me.
• 1:22:27
  See where that puts us for total scores though, because again,
• 1:22:32
  I'll meet your double feature. We care about who wins the day,
• 1:22:35
  but this is about who wins the war.
• 1:22:37
  So collectively, across 4 episodes, we've watched 4 movies
• 1:22:42
  each. The total review scores, which I
• 1:22:44
  guess it'd be a total out of 40 at this point, you if you earned
• 1:22:48
  A4, you'd be at 23 points, and if I got a six, I'd be at 25
• 1:22:53
  points. So still pretty close in the
• 1:22:55
  season 1 rankings overall, yeah. Yeah, Anybody's game.
• 1:22:58
  Anybody. 'S game, which really could have
• 1:23:00
  easily not been the case 4 episodes in.
• 1:23:02
  This could have been very stratified by now, but we're
• 1:23:04
  still close. Yeah.
• 1:23:05
  Yeah. I mean, going into this week, we
• 1:23:06
  were tied. So that's pretty fascinating.
• 1:23:09
  Unintentionally, just for the record.
• 1:23:11
  Yeah, yeah. No, we're not gaming the scores
• 1:23:13
  for drama. We actually just.
• 1:23:18
  OK, let's take a look then at our recommendations for episode
• 1:23:21
  5 of the show. Again, we're still in our
• 1:23:24
  forgotten 90s theme because I won the episode today.
• 1:23:27
  I guess I go first. So your pick Frank for next time
• 1:23:31
  is going to be 1992's Deep cover starring Laurence Fishburne and
• 1:23:37
  Jeff Goldblum. Oh, that's an interesting duo.
• 1:23:41
  Guess what? That's the only thing I know
• 1:23:42
  about the movie. I saw that it had those two in
• 1:23:45
  it. I think it's something about
• 1:23:47
  crime. I don't know, but I like the
• 1:23:49
  idea. I like the idea of those two as
• 1:23:52
  an on screen pairing, as two leads.
• 1:23:54
  I think Jeff Goldblum's the bad guy and that just sounds
• 1:23:57
  interesting. It has good reviews.
• 1:23:58
  So it's not a it's not like a a Hail Mary.
• 1:24:01
  I think this one I'm confident will be pretty good.
• 1:24:03
  I. Don't know if I've ever seen
• 1:24:04
  Jeff Goldblum. I guess he was an antagonist in
• 1:24:08
  that one Thor movie maybe. Yeah, that was.
• 1:24:11
  Like a comedy antagonist, I think this one might be more
• 1:24:14
  straightforward villain. The title again.
• 1:24:16
  Deep cover. What was the year?
• 1:24:18
  Deep Cover 1992. This is another one too that
• 1:24:21
  maybe is not like completely under the radar.
• 1:24:23
  I believe it had a Criterion Collection release.
• 1:24:26
  And that's actually part of what drew me to it is that the
• 1:24:28
  Criterion release cover for the film looks awesome.
• 1:24:31
  It's just this interesting shot of Laurence Fishburne covered in
• 1:24:33
  like kind of like blue and magenta lighting.
• 1:24:36
  It's just very dynamic. OK, cool.
• 1:24:38
  I mean, I've never heard of it, so that's close.
• 1:24:41
  Enough. If we forgot it, it's forgotten.
• 1:24:43
  Yeah, yeah. Or, I think honestly, isn't the
• 1:24:45
  rule just that we've never even never seen it?
• 1:24:48
  Well, that's the rule for the show is that we haven't seen it.
• 1:24:49
  But the vague premise for season 1 is just somewhat overlooked
• 1:24:53
  films from the 90s, and I think this counts.
• 1:24:56
  Totally, totally. OK, deep cover.
• 1:25:00
  OK, how about you? I got nothing so let me Google
• 1:25:03
  I. Forgot.
• 1:25:05
  I forgot you said you didn't have one ready.
• 1:25:07
  OK, this is. Literally nothing A.
• 1:25:10
  Thrilling look behind the scenes.
• 1:25:11
  I can't believe you don't have a list.
• 1:25:13
  I have like 20 movies written down already that I could
• 1:25:15
  recommend dude. I, I, I have no memory of this
• 1:25:19
  place. OK, we stop recording and I just
• 1:25:21
  like just walk away from it all. I give you a call on Discord
• 1:25:27
  every two weeks and you're like, I wonder what he wants to talk
• 1:25:29
  about. And I'm like, no, I want to
• 1:25:32
  leave this all in by the way. No, no.
• 1:25:43
  Welcome back from what I believe was a fade out, fade back up.
• 1:25:47
  Now that Frank has found his film for episode 5, we'll.
• 1:25:50
  See. Leave it all in.
• 1:25:51
  How long did that take? 5 minutes on the clock I think
• 1:25:53
  I. Did.
• 1:25:54
  Another five. Yeah.
• 1:25:55
  Oh. OK, I'll just make the audience
• 1:25:57
  wait for five uninterrupted minutes while you while you
• 1:26:00
  figure it out. Yeah, yeah, good.
• 1:26:02
  Just. Build this Credits See.
• 1:26:06
  OK, I got one. OK, next.
• 1:26:09
  Time feature What am I watching? 1996 Everyone Says I Love You, a
• 1:26:19
  musical romantic comedy directed by Woody Allen.
• 1:26:24
  OK, that he's a pick. We talked about how sometimes we
• 1:26:29
  pick like the virtually the same type of movie.
• 1:26:31
  But something tells me that deep cover and whatever that title is
• 1:26:35
  you just said are not going to be anything alike.
• 1:26:38
  Will stay tuned. Will somebody get their eye
• 1:26:40
  ripped out or something like this week?
• 1:26:44
  All right, I, I, to my knowledge, have never seen a
• 1:26:47
  film made by Woody Allen. I don't think I have.
• 1:26:50
  Either I really do not think I've seen a single one of his
• 1:26:52
  films I. Think that's because despite
• 1:26:54
  being a very influential filmmaker, by the time we were
• 1:26:56
  coming up into choosing movies to watch, the prevailing
• 1:27:00
  sentiment about Woody Allen is that he's kind of a creep.
• 1:27:02
  So Yep. I haven't.
• 1:27:04
  Felt like compelled to go back and watch any of those films,
• 1:27:07
  but that does make it a blind spot.
• 1:27:09
  So what? What did you say it's called?
• 1:27:11
  It's called Everyone Says I Love You musical.
• 1:27:14
  Romantic. I mean, I like the idea of it.
• 1:27:16
  So do the next time when we discuss the intricacies of how
• 1:27:20
  good the movie is versus how good of a person Woody Allen is.
• 1:27:25
  Spoiler it's not very not. Good.
• 1:27:28
  This movie has an interesting cast, so you have that to look
• 1:27:31
  forward to. Yeah, You know, if they forgive
• 1:27:34
  them, I forgive them. Well, I mean.
• 1:27:42
  Slow down. It's so funny because I The
• 1:27:46
  funny thing is too, I don't know what he's done.
• 1:27:48
  I genuinely don't know what the oh.
• 1:27:50
  You don't. Oh, I haven't idea.
• 1:27:51
  I have an idea of what he's done, but he's just done.
• 1:27:54
  A like he's just done like a cork board of like
• 1:27:57
  unmentionable. So just I thought.
• 1:27:59
  You really see he's on a list, He's just on a list.
• 1:28:02
  It's all it's fine just on a list.
• 1:28:04
  He has to introduce himself when he moves into the neighborhood.
• 1:28:09
  Hi, I'm excited there's a TuneIn in two weeks for a controversial
• 1:28:13
  episode of Me You. Total feature A very special
• 1:28:16
  episode. Very special episode.
• 1:28:18
  Yeah, Awesome. OK, that's a good pick.
• 1:28:22
  Thanks so much for joining me today.
• 1:28:23
  And we will see everyone in two weeks.
• 1:28:26
  Bye. Can't keep doing that, It's
• 1:28:31
  delayed by. Coming up next.
• 1:28:37
  It's deep cover. Followed by Everyone says I love
• 1:28:41
  You on Meet Your double feature.