Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Written and directed by David Mitchell
• Starring
  • Roddy Piper
  • Han Soo Ong

Roddy Piper is a Seattle cop in a buddy movie with a straight-laced commander from Red China.

The end.

No, seriously; you know everything there is to know right there. The generic character of this movie is apparent right from the title — Last to Surrender is the kind of label that could be slapped on any mid-list action movie, starring Billy Blanks or Jean-Cleade Van Damme or Jeff Speakman… or Roddy Piper.

It’s not that it’s an obviously poor movie; production values are really quite high. It’s just that it’s such a damnably generic buddy movie; absolutely nothing happens that’s unexpected.

Piper is Nick Ford, scruffy and rebellious Seattle cop, and the part of Seattle in tonight’s performance will be played by Toronto. (Side note: Has Piper actually moved his career back to Canada? I mean Jungleground was shot in Toronto, with no mention of what city is was supposed to be; and Sci-Fighters was shot with Montreal standing in for Boston.) He and his partner are monitoring what looks like a big meeting of all the West Coast drug lords in a Chinese restaurant, and Ford blusters his way in just so he can see the face of the unknown man talking. There follows a big shoot-out, in which Ford’s life is saved by a mysterious waiter; when Ford chases the mystery man outside, he’s just in time to see his partner buy the farm. (And how do we know he’s going to buy it? Because we can see the bloodpack through his white t-shirt before the shot is fired.)

Then there follows the requisite car chase, in which, for comedic effect, Ford accidentally commandeers a car in need of a brake job. But because Ford and the waiter are both chasing the mystery man, they get in each other’s way and the fugitive escapes.

Ford gets severely chewed out by his commanding officer (if you get bored here, amuse yourself by counting how many times and in how many ways the C.O. tells Ford to shut up); also present are representatives of the DEA, the FBI, and the State Department. It seems the mystery man is known only as “Tiger,” and he’s the coordinator of all drug running from the Golden Triangle. Unfortunately, he’s a complete mystery; no one knows his real name, and no one’s seen his face. (In case you’re wondering, he just looks like the standard young Asian bad guy: Curly hair pulled back, lidded eyes, a slouch that’s supposed to be menacing in its casualness.) No one, that is, except Ford. Ford and…

…the waiter! Because obviously the waiter is actually Yin, a Red Chinese Commander working with the State Department. And Ford already hates his guts, so we get the following (after a lot of arguing and “shut ups”): “You can’t force me to work with him!” Gilligan cut to Yin getting in the car with Ford.

They have some adventures and find out that Tiger’s got another big meeting set up in Burma in one week. So naturally Ford and Yin are sent to Burma together to see what they can find out. Which seems like a set-up for cross-cultural hilarity, but is more just plain stupid: Ford doesn’t have the finesse to get through a confrontation without bullets fired in his home turf — what are the odds he can get anything done in a country where he doesn’t even speak the language? Their mishaps are naturally punctuated by arguments of whose country’s police methods work better (and right here, on behalf of the citizens of the United States of America, I’d like to disavow that Ford’s “methods” are in any way indicative of the preferred operating procedures of any police force in the country).

Well, the rest continues getting generic; they end up getting planewrecked in the jungle and surviving together. It’s like twenty minutes in which the filmmakers decided to dump all of the male bonding, instead of spreading it out through the movie. They have the inevitable fistfights, fall over the inevitable waterfall, Ford has to reveal he can’t swim, Ford refuses to eat the snake Yin caught for supper until Yin’s out of sight… The only suspense comes from trying to guess which of the obvious buddy-movie tropes will come next.

Eventually they get separated in a rafting accident, and Yin gets captured by the bad guys; Ford, who washes up in the village with the cute girl, then has to go rescue him. So naturally he manages to knock out a guard and magically make the little man’s uniform fit him. Naturally no one notices a hulking white guy walking around, simply because he’s got a hat with a bill. And naturally, once he’s untied the tortured Yin, they find an unlocked munitions building, complete with enough extra ammo and hand grenades for two men to take out a heavily-guarded drug dealer’s world convention. (Did I mention it was unlocked? As in, any of the oppressed villagers being maltreated in the compound could have wandered in and gotten his hands on the goodies? Watching this scene, I started having flashbacks to some of the D&D campaigns I played in high school…)

One good point is that the Burmese segments were shot in Indonesia, adding a feel of authenticity. But this is quickly outweighed by the cliches piled on thick and deep, and by the most obvious good guy traitor in the history of cinema (I won’t tell you who it is, and he really makes little impact on the story, but jeez — it’s so obvious! There’s no other reason the character was introduced!). And the most unbelievable feature: I can suspend disbelief at Piper’s smooth, hairless chest and belly — it’s movie reality, and we aren’t supposed to object to things like that — but there’s no way that a rough-hewn Seattle cop is going to have shaved armpits. No way in hell.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 41
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 21
• dream sequences: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0