In short: Termination Man (1998)

Evil-bad Serbian terrorist Yurdovich (Aleksandr Ilin) has acquired some sort of extra toxic nerve gas; he threatens to use it on a large scale, unless all UN troops leave the former Yugoslavia, so that he and his cronies can claim the whole country, certainly not using that nerve gas in doing so. That cannot stand, of course, so the US sends in their top agent Dylan Pope (Steve Railsback). Pope – not to be confused with the Pope as the film will indeed joke – has been “enhanced” via some mysterious technological wizardry, and also gets a pocketful of gadgets even Roger Moore phase James Bond would have called “lame”. Together with mandatory woman with big silicon implants Delilah Shane (Athena Massey) and soon-to-be traitor Ted Marks (Eb Lottimer) it’s off to save the world.

Not that anyone has any actual plan for going about that world saving business, but that’s clearly as optional as OPSEC in the world of this movie.

Which would be perfectly okay, even potentially awesome for an action movie with espionage and Six Million Dollar Man elements like this, but if a film wants to distract an audience from its perfectly empty head, it needs a director able to actually stage an action sequence. And I gotta tell you, Termination Man’s director and co-writer Fred Gallo isn’t that guy. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of many films whose action direction, staging and editing is quite as bad as here. Gallo never seems to be able to frame anything going on in an effective or even just efficient manner, so what looks as if it were perfectly decent stunt work has zero impact or rhythm. It’s not even as if Gallo were trying to be “edgy” or stylish and obfuscating what’s going on for that matter. This is attempted bread and butter filmmaking that never manages to point the camera quite into the right direction, regularly cuts away too soon or too late, and seems not to have been kissed by whatever fairy is responsible for kissing directors to teach them how to frame action properly on the screen. It’s all a bit embarrassing.

It is also rather frustrating, for Termination Man does have perfectly decent production values to show off, with a bunch of attractive Russian locations standing in for whichever part of the former Yugoslavia this is supposed to take place in, for the film to play in; much more than your typical impoverished action film can afford. Too bad nobody involved seems to have had any clue on how to make use of them.

The acting’s terrible, too, Railsback, not the greatest thespian on Earth at the best of times, seems completely zoned out, mumbling and grinning uncomfortably, while everybody else mostly seems to want to get through their lines as quickly as possible. One might come to the conclusion that the proper handling of actors isn’t in the filmmakers’ area of expertise either.


But then, what is?