There’s no easy way to dive into this review for Mark Savage’s newest film, Bring Him Back Dead. I say this, if only for the fact that trying to find the highs amid so many lows makes things all the more difficult in that it stars Gary Daniels, who has long been heralded as one of the most beloved action movie icons of the last thirty-years plus, with a career that ranges between working with the likes of Jackie Chan, Tony Leung Siu-Hung, Isaac Florentine, Albert Pyun, and eventually even Sylvester Stallone to name a few.
Hell, the first Daniels film I saw growing up was Riot, and it was a shoe-in for me in the 90s as someone looking for the next thing to consume in the direct-to-video market to hold me down until the next big Van Damme or Seagal spectacle. To this, it’s unfortunate that I have not gravitated positively to a lot of Daniels’ movies in the last twenty years or more, although there are some choice titles a fan can make do with. Sadly, Savage’s newest dishonor-among-thieves heist thriller isn’t one of them, culminating a tale centered around very bad guys doing bad things, with an ending that fares well for almost no one after the bodies drop.
In the midst of all this, we have Daniels in the role of Alex, the wheelman of a ragtag gang of bankrobbers whose latest job results in a couple of dead bystanders with one of their own taking a bullet and hanging on to dear life just as they retreat back to their remote hideout in the woods owned by the gang’s leader, Trent, played by Louis Mandylor. With Alex, Killian (Ryan M. Shaw), Zarina (Zhuzha Akova), Hayden (Chris Torem), Geoff (Lejon Woods) and Trent’s daughter Lisa (Katie Keene) all holed up in the cabin for the next few hours until a buyer arrives to purchase the gang’s stolen satchel of diamonds, things have gotten more than tense, and it’s only a matter of time before Alex decides to go rogue, incapacitate the team, and steal the diamonds with Lisa in toe before the team wakes up and realizes what’s happened, officially making him a target.
Sounds like a pretty good premise for a Gary Daniels-led action film, right? Well, it probably would have been if it were better executed. The amateurish writing only worsens the film’s slow pacing and stilted acting from some of the cast, with very few areas of character development to lean on from any of the roles on screen, leaving Mandylor to bear the brunt of presenting anything interesting as our film’s main villain for the film’s duration.
Some of the scenes are pretty silly and poorly directed. At one point, Alex takes a gun from his waist while leading a character out of the cabin, and the gun disappears in the shot that follows. In another scene, Alex and Lisa find themselves being shot at by hunters, and the way that the scene resolves does so in one of the most absurd story points in the whole film. There’s also a scene where Alex confronts two of the members of his team in the woods in what ends up being a laughably failed ambush. All this and more occurs roughly eighty minutes before one of the worst fight finales you will ever see on screen, for which, at this stage, I refuse to fault stunt coordinator David Lavallee Jr., who stands as one of the most shining examples of burgeoning stunt and fight choreography talent I’ve ever covered on this website.
To the action’s credit, there are some moments of gore to whet the average R-rated film fan’s appetite for the red stuff. One guy gets stabbed in the neck with a broken tree branch. Another gets stabbed in the nuts before getting his eyes caved in at rifle-point off camera. The gory shots do the trick if you’re into that sort of thing, and there’s a few small twists and cheeky reveals, including one with actor Daniel Baldwin midway in the film, but none of it is enough to carry the viewer through before things become even more inexorably jejune and droll than they’ve become within the first ten minutes into the film.
Additionally, it’s a shame if you waited more than twenty five years after Daniels fought Mandylor’s brother, Costas Mandylor, in Tony Randel’s Fist Of The North Star, to bring your action film fandom full circle. Penmen Ben Demaree and Jeff Miller are now two-for-two after The Gardener, which I earnestly feel doesn’t do a whole lot of justice for Daniels as he continues onward with his career in film, and I say this as constructively as I can, just as anyone could, in hopes that he will get in some memorable licks in the action genre before retiring one day if he so chooses.
It’s also worth mentioning that there’s a harebrained notion going around that I’ve never been a fan of Daniels or his work, and that this website’s never supported him. Surely enough, if this were even remotely true, then among other things, I wouldn’t have been pushing trailers for his films in the time I’ve existed on this platform. I love that he’s still around and motivating fans who still remember him as far back as the Kenshiro of his heyday, or as the Ken to the aforementioned Chan’s Chun Li in the gonzo glitch arcade scene in Wong Jing’s City Hunter. With all this in mind, perhaps Daniels may one day end his career on a deservedly high note, one far from the mediocrity of some of his films of late, including and especially Bring Him Back Dead, as lifeless as this film is upon arrival. With any luck, R. Ellis Frazier’s Repeater will fare better.
Bring Him Back Dead will release on Digital, DVD and On Demand August 2.