Joe Cornet’s new film, Assault On Rio Bravo, is casting up this week following announcements in January. The film, billed as an action-packed western with strong horror elements, is the latest project currently gaining traction for actor and producer Alexander Nevsky, who marks a reunion with several cohorts from his 2016 action ensemble, Showdown In Manila.
Fans of independent action cinema keen on following figures like stunt professionals Mitch Gould and Dan Southworth were rightly onto something since both appeared together in Isaac Florentine’s U.S. Seals 2: The Ultimate Force. Both have flourished in the years since then in their crafts behind the lens and thus attributing their work now seen in Gould’s solo directorial debut, Battle DRrone, finally hitting Netflix and serving up a worthy piece of entertainment for select streaming audiences and action fans alike.
Director Daniel Zirilli had been slowly hyping his latest project in recent weeks and now is officially in production in Los Angeles with action thriller, Hollow Point. Zirilli penned the script with writers Chad Law and Evan Law (The Shadow Effect, Hero Wanted), and reteams with actor Luke Goss (Blade 2, The Night Crew, Traffik) once more since the 2016 crime flick, Crossing Point.
Filmmaker Asif Akbar’s debut arrives as a franchise hopeful in which we reunite once again with action star and actor Gary Daniels in the sci-fi thriller, Astro. It’s not Akbar’s first stab at the genre and so some of what he contributes here holds up in terms of select moments of visual allure and character design.
It’s respite, though, and so what remains to be seen is if he can build on what he’s constructed with this film and improve the many flawed aspects that occur in his delivery. Many of the key CG shots are outright laughable in Akbar’s attempt to bring a vast, big scale science fiction film to serve as the backdrop of a Daniels-led vehicle, which bodes as only bodes as one of the more frustrating aspects offered in this hour-and-forty-five minute endeavor.
The film takes right off from a quote by Plato and echoing headlines from the 1940s about extraterrestrial life. Fast forward to December 2018, we meet Jack Adams, a former soldier living on a remote ranch with daughter, Laura, in a reluctant reunion with old friends, namely Alex Biggs, an ex-soldier with a billionaire fortune and a relentless obsession with space travel. That infatuation reveals itself to be something much more tainted following an armed attack on Jack’s home, and with deeper discoveries awaiting amid darker auspices that could grimly affect the universe.
Cutting through the fluff, even the trailer gives away one of the more interesting twists before anyone beyond early screenings has seen the film, and depending on your tastes, whether or not that turns out to be a bad thing is entirely up to you, the viewer. It’s when the film first starts that you’re almost guaranteed that Akbar’s efforts are at narrative sci-fi and fantasy are much more of a chore than preferred.
Astro doesn’t really get all that interesting until fifteen minutes in with the entry of actor Michael Pare in the mix as he plays another old friend of Adams’, and conveniently, an employee who works at Biggs’ firm. Even so, with Pare joining in and Daniels and actress Courtney Akbar leading the way, and actor Marshal Hilton emerging as our billionaire antagonist, Astro remains almost as flat as when it first starts out. Orson Chaplain lays the groundwork for a cringeworthy and risible addition to the cast as Biggs’ perverted and creepy son, Charlie.
The first action sequence doesn’t occur until about ten minutes later, courtesy of co-starring actress and veteran stuntwoman Spice Williams-Crosby who also serves as the film’s stunt/fight coordinator with stuntman Billy Bussey assisting. It’s enough to keep Daniels-fans hopeful and maybe even a little stimulated, although as ancillary as fight action is to a Gary Daniels film, you’ll seldom see the longtime action star in his element as you’re left waiting at least a little over an hour before the obligatory fight finale. And even then, you’re left wondering if it was worth being so patient.
Apart from the film’s intro, the story spans five days with several flashback by about thirty in which Akbar showcases the very origins of Biggs’ idée fixe. Actress Max Wasa and actor Louis Mandylor may their way in as Vivan and Victor, alien diplomats colluding with Biggs in a long-kept secrecy to help each other achieve their own goals.
Largely culminating the remainder of the film is an epic sci-fi family drama that eventually brings Adams together with his son, Mehta (Luke Crosby), born from a highly evolved species that was “created” and otherwise exists from another dimension. It’s a moment in the film that might have been more compelling if it didn’t feel as campy and contrived as the rest of the film does in constructing a film worthy of rather harnessing more Daniels’ dramatic chops.
There’s quite a bit of intrigue to go on in a concept as promising as what Astro shares. Much of it is ado in which we see the story unfold of a younger Alexander and his dealings with Victor and Vivian. Mandylor is easily a better actor among several others among the cast.
Unfortunately, it does nothing to salvage Astro in its multiple missteps, leaving viewers exerting themselves through a number of stumbling visual effects, fight action far too little, and acting performances that often bode more mechanical preferred. It helps even less that these are all worsened by an exhaustive script that weighs the film as an over-extended chore that takes itself way too seriously and completely forgets to be fun in the long haul.
Akbar’s Astro is far from the great franchise-worthy feature film he might have wanted it to be, and even farther from fun. It’s more hyperbole with a dash of cinematic allure and with Gary Daniels front and center and with almost nothing to show for it, plainly and simply, this movie is flat-out boring. Should this film be the standard bearer for sci-fi film franchise proliferation, then needless to say, you’ll sooner find me on Indiegogo crowdfunding my own billionaire space enterprise in hopes of leaving this planet.
Fans of independent action cinema keen on following figures like stunt professionals Mitch Gould and Dan Southworth were rightly onto something since both appeared together in Isaac Florentine’s U.S. Seals 2: The Ultimate Force. Both have flourished in the years since then in their crafts behind the lens and thus attributing their work now seen in Gould’s solo directorial debut, Battle Drone, finally hitting Netflix and serving up a worthy piece of entertainment for select streaming audiences and action fans alike.
Bleach-blonde Louis Mandylor leads the sci-fi thriller as seasoned solider Rekker, a former military captain-turned-gun for hire whose dishonorable departure from the formalities of military service have all but re-calibrated his worldview and moral compass with more-than-enough shades of grey. His means of income enlists his employment with his own team of equally-skilled badass mercenaries to get off-the-radar jobs done for the CIA, no matter how dirty.
Actress Dominique Swain joins in as government agent Hayes, whose sense of right and wrong in contrast with Rekker’s questionable last immediately set the tone for the two in the film’s earlier minutes prefacing the narrative in which we later meet actor Michael Paré in the role of government arms dealer and pseudo-diplomat Kess. With a coup underway in Europe, Kess assigns Rekker to acquire a load of weapons ordinance for rebels from the abandoned island of Chernobyl, only for airs of betrayal, distrust and duplicity to arise as Rekker, his team and the observers Kess assigned find themselves in a whirlwind gorilla war against manned synthetic drones, making the nature of what was instead supposed to be a retrieval mission all too clear.
Excellent independent sci-fi is hard to come by. Some are pretty exceptional although films of this kind vary in their own way. Battle Drone is clearly meant for action movie fans and, though subject to its fair share of flaws in its delivery, puts up a good fight from start to finish. Its billing as an “Expendables-style” thriller is only as good as its Expendable-dissimilar cast can help make it; Chemistry and charm certainly plays a part in this as we meet the characters who comprise Rekker’s squad and save for a just few albeit dissonant areas of dialogue and timing, there’s plenty of the former the film exhibits in the first half which finally gives the viewers something to work with.
Gould pens the script along with scribes Michael Phillip and co-star Jo Marr who plays Agent Smith in the film as complacent CIA agent Smith. Actress Natassha Malthe (D.O.A.: Dead Or Alive) stands out as solo female member Valkyrie who, despite her somewhat cluelessness on certain subject matter, serves as the team’s sniper and sharpest shooter among the lot. Jason Earles aids in the bloodletting as team member Dax, something of a lesser menacing Garland Greene sans the Laurie London jingle with Richard Reed joining in as the shotgun-toting Blackwood, character actor favorite Oleg Taktarov as mini-gun-wielding free agent Romanov, and Power Morphicon favorite, and the aforementioned Southworth as the terse, otherwise silent but deadly Shiro.
Romania serves as the backdrop for the film’s production which took place in 2013 under working title-hunted. Southworth, who actually went viral later that year in a short behind the scenes clip that gave some idea for fans to enthuse over, pulls double-duty here as both co-star and fight choreographer whose time lapse-style action sequences, lensed by cinematographer Stephen Chandler Whitehead, bare perfunctory characteristics in visual style as each technique is crafted via speed ramping, mobility of the lens between performers and close-ups that interact with the action all around.
Visual effects that coincide with the film’s action packed setting are an acceptable feat for Gould’s small scale sci-fi offering, showcasing drones that are near-impervious to most firepower and take quite the effort to neutralize. Corey Macfadyen’s score bares the film’s recurring theme at the top and bottom of the film, juxtaposed accordingly with the film’s opening and closing action scenes.
Much to our chagrin, not a lot of press was made available in the years since Battle Drone was filmed and completed with Highland Film Group shopping it in the markets. It’s something that just happens for some films and understably, it can be a crap shoot, makes Netflix’s acquisition of it all the better as of March 1; At least this way, and hopefully with more reviews and reactions such as this one, it’ll help the film gain more ground as our own James Couche vociferously expressed last year in discussing Scott Adkins headliner, Boyka: Undisputed IV.
For Battle Drone, Gould serves a consistent, solid leading man in Mandylor along with Parè and actress Swain whose short hair and mature traits provide fun trivia in discerning her from previously playing daughter to John Travolta and his villainous counterpart in John Woo’s Face/Off. It also helps to have a director who, despite the median drama and dialogue from time to time, is a lot less eager to treat his cast like ragtag B-movie throwaway than other directors, in addition to having, by far, one of the best action professionals on either side of the camera in Southworth.
By the end, you’re left with a much more feel-good finale than expected. Battle Drone isn’t perfect sci-fi, but it’s damn good fun if you’re into independent niche titles and not too keen on going to the movies this weekend. Indeed, Gould now emerges as part of a movement that puts stuntmen in the director’s chair in an effort to employ people who can tell a feasible, quality story and translate it all into comprehensive, entertaining action and stunt work, and for this, he is plentily suited for another shot at the helm in due time.
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