Striking Range
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C Film: C
Lou
Diamond Philips is not a bad actor. He
really is professional enough to always put his full efforts into what he does
and early on, his work in La Bamba
and Young Guns set him up for a more
enduring career than even he could have realized. Though his choice of projects have not been
so great (though Courage Under Fire
is a really good film), in part because of the limited number of good scripts
of late, Writer/Director Daniel Millican’s Striking
Range (2005) is yet another B-movie in Action or Horror he seems to get
caught up in.
He plays
the head of an elite security squad trying to help a dumb businessman whose
illegal arms deal goes wrong, but he becomes more personally involved and
targeted as the story goes on.
Unfortunately, Millican’s script is very by the book with bad jokes and
predictability all over. Throw in a few
tired clichés and forget it. B-Action
fans will be happy martial arts expert Jeff Speakman is in the film, but that
never works out either. At least they
got their paychecks.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is soft and colors are a little weak,
but it is also trying to duplicate the current tired look of the action
genre. That works against it and this
transfer is nothing special, any more than the way it was shot. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is on the weak
side, with infrequent surrounds and suppressed dialogue. The only extra besides trailers is the
Millican audio commentary, which is so-so.
Philips
best recent work was in a role on the TV show Numbers (reviewed elsewhere on this site), though it was uncertain
whether it would be a new occurrent character or possibly a spin-off role for
another show in the long run. Hope he
gets another break.
- Nicholas Sheffo
