Bordering on unwatchable, 'Black Friday' is easily one of Gary Daniels' worst movies. Starting out initially as one of the second-hand Jean Claude Van Dammes, Daniels has has an interesting C movie career with more misses than hits on his plate. He's starred in everything from erotic vampire thrillers to genuine Hong
Kong action films opposite Jackie Chan; from futuristic Robocop/cagefighting movies to standard kickboxing movies; and even led the cast of a mid-budget adaptation of the classic Anime 'Fist of the North Star'- this is a new low. A truly mind-numbing waste of time, here is an example of the dialog (5 minute scene): "We stand down!" "Bullshit!" "I'm in charge here and I say we stand down!" "Bullshit!" (silence) "Stand down!" "This is Bullshit!" (stare down) "fuck!" I kid you not, this was a scene in the movie. Gary Daniels stars as a dude who used to be in a super secret government agency, but has retired to become a big-shot lawyer with a wife and family. He comes home one day to find his family is being held hostage, somewhere along the way has to stop a bomb from being detonated, and then... The movie just meanders, and dies a slow, ugly death. Confusing, stupid, badly directed, and boasting- I kid you not, a 15 minute dialog flashback scene that advances the movie in no way whatsoever. People stand around for minutes at a time without saying a word. It does however, boast better special effects than the Tom Cruise version of 'War of the Worlds.'The only brights spots are (a) Daniels has a couple of brief, but clumsy bad action fight scenes; and (b) one of the baddies looks like Triple H if he decided to stop working out and lived on Pecan wheels and macaroni and cheese, (c) there is a really bad christian rock song that sounds like it's being sung by Starscream from the Transformers cartoon. The one part I got the biggest kick out of was watching Daniels try to be this wise semi-Christian sage at the end, trying to convince the baddie to see the errors of his ways: "I chose to change the present! Its ova, man. It's ova." A great monologue up there with anything Michael Keaton did in 'Gung Ho!" As the other reviewers have pointed out as well, there is no samurai sword in this either- he doesn't slice anyone up or do anything remotely interesting. I read that the producers ran out of money before finishing this movie, and that would probably be the best explanation as to why so much of the story is told in paragraphs on the screen periodically throughout the movie. The soundtrack is this awful Christian hard rock music that is completely inappropriate in tone and just adds to the unintended hilarity of the movie. Rent 'Bloodmoon' or 'White Tiger' instead to know what Daniels is really about. On the other hand, if you wanna watch two guys sitting on a bench talking for fifteen or twenty minutes and hear christian rock songs sung by Starscream from the Transformers, 'Black Friday' might be the movie for you.
March 23, 2009
