Okay, I gotta call shenanigans on this movie. If you can put together a production involving a legitimate C-level star like Doph Lundgren, a couple of recognizable faces like Stephen Macht and Randolph Mantooth and a babe like Natalie Radford who will get naked and can actually act, you've got the raw materials for some Perfectly Acceptable Entertainment. No, you're probably not going to win any awards but if you keep the production values reasonably high and come up with an action script that doesn't insult the intelligence of the average mollusk, cranking out something plenty of 14 year old boys will think is cool shouldn't be that great a challenge. Agent Red fails to meet that standard.
I can forgive the cheap and poorly conceived sets on display here. Stacking some props in empty office space and trying to pass it off as the command deck of an aircraft carriers doesn't look that bad and the inside of a factory can vaguely resemble the interior of a submarine, though you should know better than to let the audience see the cement floors in your supposed sub. What I can't look the other way on is that there's enough stock footage in this film to choke a horse and that fairly extensive action scenes from at least three separate movies, probably more, have been cannibalized to try and prop up the otherwise abysmal storytelling at work here. I mean, hardcore cinema geeks could make a drinking game out of naming where all the shots came from that obviously didn't originate with writer/director Damian Lee. If those are the kind of low, borderline crooked tricks a filmmaker has to resort to, it's better for everyone if they don't even bother.
And the script here is even more egregious. Again, I can excuse the blatant ripping off of Die Hard and the plentiful use of creaky clichés. Who expects something like Agent Red to be art? However, it frequently appears that no one read this screenplay all the way through. Otherwise, someone would had to have noticed the eye-rollingly repetitive exposition, the hammer-to-the-forehead foreshadowing and the you've-got-to-be-kidding me moments of dramatic illogic in the plot. Let me give you an example of what I mean by that third thing. Toward the end, an admiral (Randolph Mantooth) decides he has to sink a submarine in order to prevent an attack on the U.S. Almost immediately after that scene, we get another where the President (Bill Monroe) orders the admiral to sink the sub. But if he was already going to do it, why did they include the latter scene of superfluous command? And if the folks behind Agent Red thought there was some drama to be found in the President ordering the admiral to sink the sub, why include the former scene of the admiral deciding to do it all by himself? There's no way to explain both being in the same movie unless nobody was paying attention.
As for the details a deadly bio-weapon is being shipped from Russia to the U.S. by nuclear submarine, with Marine ass-kicker Matt Hendricks (Dolph Lundgren) and his bitchy, hard-faced scientist of an ex-fiancée (Meilani Paul) along for the ride. A group of terrorists who spend an inordinate amount of time moving in slo-motion, led by Dr. Kretz (Alexander Kuznetsov) and his fanatical love-mate Nadia (Natalie Radford), kill everyone on board except Matt and his honey and plan to launch the lethal bio-agent at both America and Russia to protest the creation of such genocidal weapons.
Lundgren practically sleepwalks through this motion picture, perking up only for the fight scenes where it's so clear the other members of the cast have such little training that Lundgren essentially has to fight himself. I do have to give him credit for knowing how pathetic this movie was going to be and trying to avoid looking as bad he might have. There a scene at the beginning involving a commando raid to steal a stealth fighter, which still doesn't make any sense no matter how many long I think about it, where every other member of the infiltration team is sporting this hilariously bad camouflage paint on their faces while Lundgren's mug is unadorned.
If you're still unsure about Agent Red, let me put it this way. Jean-Claude Van Damme is the only person I would encourage to watch this film and that's only because it would make him feel a lot better about his career choices.
I can forgive the cheap and poorly conceived sets on display here. Stacking some props in empty office space and trying to pass it off as the command deck of an aircraft carriers doesn't look that bad and the inside of a factory can vaguely resemble the interior of a submarine, though you should know better than to let the audience see the cement floors in your supposed sub. What I can't look the other way on is that there's enough stock footage in this film to choke a horse and that fairly extensive action scenes from at least three separate movies, probably more, have been cannibalized to try and prop up the otherwise abysmal storytelling at work here. I mean, hardcore cinema geeks could make a drinking game out of naming where all the shots came from that obviously didn't originate with writer/director Damian Lee. If those are the kind of low, borderline crooked tricks a filmmaker has to resort to, it's better for everyone if they don't even bother.
And the script here is even more egregious. Again, I can excuse the blatant ripping off of Die Hard and the plentiful use of creaky clichés. Who expects something like Agent Red to be art? However, it frequently appears that no one read this screenplay all the way through. Otherwise, someone would had to have noticed the eye-rollingly repetitive exposition, the hammer-to-the-forehead foreshadowing and the you've-got-to-be-kidding me moments of dramatic illogic in the plot. Let me give you an example of what I mean by that third thing. Toward the end, an admiral (Randolph Mantooth) decides he has to sink a submarine in order to prevent an attack on the U.S. Almost immediately after that scene, we get another where the President (Bill Monroe) orders the admiral to sink the sub. But if he was already going to do it, why did they include the latter scene of superfluous command? And if the folks behind Agent Red thought there was some drama to be found in the President ordering the admiral to sink the sub, why include the former scene of the admiral deciding to do it all by himself? There's no way to explain both being in the same movie unless nobody was paying attention.
As for the details a deadly bio-weapon is being shipped from Russia to the U.S. by nuclear submarine, with Marine ass-kicker Matt Hendricks (Dolph Lundgren) and his bitchy, hard-faced scientist of an ex-fiancée (Meilani Paul) along for the ride. A group of terrorists who spend an inordinate amount of time moving in slo-motion, led by Dr. Kretz (Alexander Kuznetsov) and his fanatical love-mate Nadia (Natalie Radford), kill everyone on board except Matt and his honey and plan to launch the lethal bio-agent at both America and Russia to protest the creation of such genocidal weapons.
Lundgren practically sleepwalks through this motion picture, perking up only for the fight scenes where it's so clear the other members of the cast have such little training that Lundgren essentially has to fight himself. I do have to give him credit for knowing how pathetic this movie was going to be and trying to avoid looking as bad he might have. There a scene at the beginning involving a commando raid to steal a stealth fighter, which still doesn't make any sense no matter how many long I think about it, where every other member of the infiltration team is sporting this hilariously bad camouflage paint on their faces while Lundgren's mug is unadorned.
If you're still unsure about Agent Red, let me put it this way. Jean-Claude Van Damme is the only person I would encourage to watch this film and that's only because it would make him feel a lot better about his career choices.