a.k.a. Desert Heat
Suicidal vet heads into the desert to find old army buddy before topping himself, runs into douchebag local criminals who upset his plans... and he theirs.
Supposedly inspired by the Kurosawa classic Yojimbo (and even makes an on-the-nose reference to it in the epilogue) but character-wise and intrigue-wise, not a patch on the original, or even remakes like A Fistful of Dollars or Last Man Standing. JCVD-action-wise, a perfectly cromulent entry in his oeuvre.
Surprised I'd never heard of this until @LaurenceWoise's The Silencers post got me looking at the Wikipedia page for 90s straight-to-video action studio PM Entertainment, whose swansong this apparently was.
They somehow got the director of Rocky and The Karate Kid, John G. Avildsen, to helm it, and assembled a cast that includes:
- Danny Trejo (Machete) (giving JCVD the kind of massage that would enrage Marcellus Wallace!)
- Pat Morita (Do or Die) (for some reason doing a highly questionable English accent)
- Vincent Schiavelli (Buckaroo Banzai)(for some reason doing downright brownface)
- Larry Drake (Darkman)
- Jeff Kober (One Tough Bastard)
- Gabrielle Fitzpatrick (Mr Nice Guy)
- David "Shark" Fralick (Fist of the North Star)
- Jaime Pressly (Mortal Kombat: Conquest)
- Silas Weir Mitchell (Seagal's The Patriot)
- Bill Erwin (The Cry Baby Killer)
- Lee Tergesen (Tooken)
- Priscilla Pointer (Blue Velvet)
- Paul Koslo (The Omega Man)
- Brett Harrelson (From Dusk till Dawn 2)(brother of Woody) (me wondering if it's time for a season of "lesser-known siblings B movies")
