One day I told myself – why not binge-watch Dolph Lundgren’s movies? Well, wishful thinking, as I don’t have time to binge watch anything anymore, but the idea has stuck with me. Yeah, why not to watch (or re-watch) Dolph’s movies? Surely, there are quite a lot of them, but as I haven’t seen all of them, it’s surely sounded like a nice challenge.
And I usually start from the very beginning, but for some reason I’ve just picked one movie at random and this is the result.
The movie, if you haven’t bothered to read the title, is “Command Performance” and was released in 2009. Dolph plays the role of Joe, the drummer of American punk band CMF (which stands, as he whispers in the ear of a fellow actress Melissa Molinaro, for “Cheap Motherfucker” in the honor of band’s manager), a former biker with not so clean a past. Well, we all have done things in the past, right?
Anyway, the movie unfolds in Russia of today, but first we encounter a scenes from the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991, as this inevitably serves a backbone for the whole movie. We might not now it yet, but the suicide of old Army officer (who just before killing himself kills his wife) so he’s not arrested as a part of the old communist guard (I suppose), doesn’t sit very well with his son. And we will see very soon how things can get really, really bad.
Be it as it was, President Petrov (played by veteran Bulgarian actor Hristo Shopov) attends (along with his two daughters) a concert of girls’ favourite singer Venus (played by stunning Canadian Melissa Molinaro) and so it happens Dolph’s band opens the whole gig. Well, you can’t get more diverse acts on one gig, can you?
But attending the gig is also a little diverse lot, a band of terrorists led by Oleg Kazov (Dave Legeno), and little later we learn that he’s the son of the aforementioned Army officer commiting sucide. Well, talk about a really big grudge here.
And as we are in Russia, even the terrorist attack is done in a big style. People are killed left and right (because who would give a shit about some concert visitor), and some kills are pretty bloody. Which, for the movie viewer, just makes a little more realistic portrayal.
Fortunately, our hero Joe was able to hide himself from the terrorists as he smokes his joint in toilets, and he gets in action. In the end, he’s not that bad guy anymore and having his band killed won’t further your music career anyway…wait, does that setting sounds familiar? Yeah, another Die Hard rip off!!!
Joining shoulders with a member of the President’s security Mikhail Kapista (played by Zachary Baharov, another skilled Bulgarian actor), they finally saved the day, liberated the hostages (and we learned also the fact that the President Petrov was the prosecutor arresting the old Army officer, the father of Kazov, back in 1991, which was the reason for the revenge attack). You know, with Dolph in a positive role, it would end with a happy-ending. So, yes, the story is nothing original and there are no twists, but it’s a nice movie and any action cinema fan shouldn’t pass that one over.
The whole flick, directed by Dolph himself, is well paced, quite realistic (Dolph is an ex-biker here, so no martial arts choreography, just a pure hand-to-hand combat) and it’s just the guilty pleasure you want to watch after a busy work day. Add to it aforementioned Melissa Molinaro (who, unfortunately, is delegated to a little more than a cameo role here, but thanks anyway), and you have a flick you can re-visit a few times.
Although the scene with the reporter holding the disc (and get killed by Special Forces soldiers) was totally unnecessary. No reporter would be that stupid as not to follow the orders from guys like these.