• Directed by Deran Serafian
• Written by Stephen Sommers
• Starring
  • Christopher Lambert
  • Mario Van Peebles
  • Denis Leary
  • Patrick Stewart
  • Kadeem Hardison
  • Brenda Bakke

First off, I just gotta ask: Why is Patrick Stewart not on the box? I mean, he’s not listed on the front as a star, he’s not even mentioned in the copy in the back — you have to seek him out in the tiny credits at the bottom. Did he dislike the finished movie so much that he had his name withheld? I have to say, I actually like Gunmen a lot more this time than I did when I first saw it, three years ago; I was in the middle of major Highlander fanaticism at the time, and was expecting Christopher Lambert to do his stoic/heroic bit.

Here’s the mainspring of the plot: Some guy named Carl stole $400 million from Loomis (Stewart), a drug king in the bogus South American country of Boa Vista, and hid it on a boat somewhere south of Corpus Cristi, Texas. Carl was caught and killed coming back to Boa Vista for his brother, Dani (Lambert), a likeable doofus who’s rotting in some Boa Vistan jail for a minor offense; instead, Dani is sprung by Cole Parker (Mario Van Peebles), New York homeboy done good, now an independent contractor for the DEA in South America. (BTW, it’s a good thing that the prison had absolutely no motor vehicles with which they could give pursuit. Damned cutbacks.) Dani knows where Carl hid the boat; Cole knows what its name is. Let the buddy movie begin. (I don’t know which was filmed first, this or Highlander: The Final Dimension, but Lambert and Van Peebles obviously enjoyed each other’s company enough to make two movies together in the same year.)

Of course, it’s not that simple; as Cole and Dani are trading off holding the gun on each other, Armor O’Malley (Denis Leary playing himself, as usual), Loomis’ potty-mouthed enforcer, and his team of soldiers-for-hire are shooting up all of Boa Vista, trying to get the money back.

In Hollywood terms, you could call the boat the “McGuffin,” Hitchcock’s word for it — the object which drives the plot simply because it is valuable (think of the Maltese Falcon, or the microfilm in North by Northwest). Also known as the “Broomstick Engine” (think The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy and crew spend half the movie trying to get the witch’s broomstick).

As a buddy movie, it has the requisite snappy bickering between Cole and Dani as they bond; the dialog only falls flat when they try to get meaningful — then it sucks green weenies.

Some thoughts:

Leary’s soldiers are about as smart as toast. How many times do they enter a locale, guns blazing, with Leary having to tell them, “No! We have to get them alive”? (In fact, the entire story would never have happened if someone hadn’t gotten too enthusiastic and killed Carl upon his capture.)

How fortuitous that there is a body of water below whenever Dani or Cole need to jump from a height. No such luck for the bad guys, however.

Boa Vista must be the hip-hop capital of South America, judging from all the rappers making cameos.

I’m certainly glad that two guys who have been shot in the leg and beaten to hell can swim from an exploding boat back in to shore, at least ten minutes away.

DEA agent “Bishop” was played by Deran Serafian, the director. And Chief Chavez was Richard Serafian — his father, I assume.

A Notable Quotable:

“What is that f*ing thing, man? Huh? I mean, you hear that thing in every single Tarzan movie. Is it big? Does it bite you? I mean, should we be running from that shit?”

- Cole, on hearing that “ee-ee-ee-ah-ah” jungle noise

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 28
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 3
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 5
  • Patrick Stewart, obviously
  • Robert Hooper (Rance) was in the TNG 4th season episode “The Host”
  • Brenda Bakke (Maria the bionic bitch) was “Rivin” in the 1st season TNG episode “Justice”
  • Christopher Michael (DEA agent Rhodes) played generic officers on one episode each of TNG and DS9
  • and Charles Stewart (the knife grinder) was “Captain Ramart” in the classic episode “Charlie”