• Directed by Albert Pyun
• Written by Andrew Witham
• Starring
  • Christopher Lambert
  • Ice-T
  • Michael Halsey
  • Yuji Okumoto
  • Thom Mathews
• Produced by Gary Schmoeller

Someone took exception to my characterization of Albert Pyun as the World’s Worst Working Director, since Jess Franco is still crankin’ em out. I hereby modify that characterization: Pyun is Hollywood’s Worst Working Director. And owing to the sense of intense linguistic legalism around here lately, I’ll further define “Hollywood” as “American made-movies, released for the mainstream.” Fair enough?

I suppose, though, that Pyun has realized that there’s a certain something missing from his films, and in this one he tries to compensate by being extra trendy. Mean Guns is no better for that, but it is more stylized; more artsy; in a word, more uppity.

We open with the exposition: the Syndicate (as in “the big bad Syndicate”) has somehow gotten respectable enough that they were contracted to build a new high-security prison. Now, the day before the official ribbon-cutting and stuff, the… um… I don’t know what he’s doing there, but anyway, Vincent Moon (Ice-T with platinum teeth) shoots the commissioner (Hoke Howell) who beats him at a game of chess and sets up a little private party in the prison. (That whole scene makes marginally more sense on screen, but I wouldn’t worry about it.)

A hundred or so lowlifes show up, including some we’ll get to know well: Marcus (Michael Halsey), an ageing hitman with weight on his conscience that drags his facial muscles down; D (Kimberly Warren), the blonde leatherclad femme fatale (because there has to be at least one); Karen (Deborah Van Valkenburgh), a matronly accountant who had tried to turn State’s evidence with some photos she came up with (more on that later); and Lou (Christopher Lambert), a bleach-blond psychopath who smiles like a canary and wields a baseball bat like a katana (wonder where he picked that up?).

Assembled in one room, they hear the bad-ass spiel from Moon: Everyone here has betrayed the Syndicate in some way or another, so this is the Syndicate’s way of rubbing them out. The three who are alive in six hours get to split $10,000,000 three ways. He dumps two bins of guns and baseball bats into their midst, then the ammo separately, and the game is on.

Plot descriptions from here on out would be practically useless; this is an Albert Pyun movie, after all. Suffice it to say that the next twenty minutes are nothing but shooting. And neither is most of the rest of the movie.

I did fail to mention the two glimmers of actual entertainment here: Hoss and Crow (Yuji Okumoto and Thom Mathews), buddy-thugs who double-team their opponents, argue about who killed more, finish each other’s sentences and compliment each other on words like “iota.” While their witty repartee wouldn’t stand a candle to the Tarantino material it’s inspired by, they are in this setting the most fun you’re going to have for ninety minutes. Unfortunately they run across Barbie, the helpless girlfriend someone dragged along, and the requisite triangle ensues.

Meanwhile, Marcus, D, Karen and Lou manage to fall together, figuring that four can fight effectively together, and one of them is likely to buy it anyway before the end.

Like I said, Pyun went out of his way to stylize this one. Exteriors of the prison are all shot with a heavy orange filter, while the steel-bedecked interiors are all in that washed-out blue so popular in trendy cookie-cutter music videos today. The editing also takes its cues from music videos, to the extent that the major gunfights are nigh-on incomprehensible. And to top it off, Moon loves mambo music, and plays it whenever he can — and when he’s not, composer Anthony Riparetti has conveniently inserted mambo themes into his score, meaning you can’t get away from the damned beat.

But because this is Pyun, we’ve got some standard Pyunisms, notably the overwhelming weight of backstory that keeps getting dragged into the present — not enough so that we’ll actually comprehend it, but enough to slow things down and muddy the waters. For instance, we never get to know what Karen has on whom, and that would be okay, if Marcus didn’t seem so danged interested in knowing about it.

Especially annoying is the inclusion of a little girl, apparently Lou’s daughter, whom he brings to the shoot-out and leaves in the convertible outside during the proceedings. Her real significance is never explained, and she’s never given a thing to do that a little girl would ever do.

Probably the biggest single blunder is the casting of Lambert as Lou, the devil-may-care psycho. Lambert’s got a good-guy persona that he’s built up in all of his films, and can’t seem to abandon here; despite the fact that he’s laughing as he’s shooting people right and left, he comes off about as threatening as Frank Gorshin’s Riddler.

The saddest thing is that, all in all, this is probably Pyun’s best movie. That’s not saying so much, given that we’re comparing it to such dreck as the four (!) Nemesis movies, Knights, Arcade, and The Sword and the Sorceror. But I suppose it’s the best you’re going to get from Hollywood’s Worst Working Director.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 96 (give or take a handful due to crummy editing)
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• psychedelic flashbacks that add nothing to the story: 4
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek:2
  • Jerry Rector (“Bob,” one of the lowlifes) was “Alien 1″ on the Next Generation episode “Allegiance”
  • James Wellington (“Ricky,” the thug with a thing against profanity) was “Al” in the DS9 episode “Badda-bing Badda-bang”