“Let’s go sit. Out on the deck.”

Drake’s rating: I’m super serious, guys. Seriously.

Drake’s review: OK, sure, from the outside one might look at McBain and think, “Who in heck thought they could turn Christopher Walken into an action movie star?” But we’re talking James Glickenhaus here, and Glickenhaus had a reason to be confident. After all, just a decade earlier he’d directed Robert Ginty in The Exterminator, an exceedingly skeevy revenge flick, and turned the young actor into an unlikely action hero. Surely he could do the same for Walken?

As it turns out, not so much. One of the reasons is that Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment opted against studio distribution, preferring to release the film themselves, and that just did not go well at all. In fact it cost the company millions and McBain fell into obscurity.

But another reason is, the movie just isn’t very good.

McBain starts with a U.S. Army unit in Vietnam led by an officer named Santos (Chick Venerra). They stop by a POW camp to kill a bunch of guys and pick up McBain (Walken) on their way home from the war. Eighteen years later, Santos is in Colombia fomenting rebellion but it doesn’t turn out well. He ends up pretty darn dead and so his sister (Maria Conchita Alonso, Predator 2) heads for the Big Apple to track down McBain and convince him to repay his old debt by helping to overthrow a foreign government.

I guess buying a funeral wreath just wasn’t going to be enough.

McBain, now a steelworker, gathers together Santos’s old unit from Vietnam (all of whom are conveniently living in NYC and just as conveniently unhappy with their lives*) and together they perform the unlikeliest paramilitary operation since Jason Gedrick talked Louis Gossett, Jr. into invading Fake-istan.

And look, if this were still the ‘80s, and if the characters were either Arnold Schwarzenegger or a band of plucky teens, this might have worked. It would still be an awful movie, but it might at least be entertaining.

Unfortunately, McBain (the movie) is far too serious for its own good. As is McBain (the character). Because, let’s face it: Four Vietnam vets waltzing into another country and overthrowing the ruling regime with barely a hitch in their plan is as far-fetched as it gets. And McBain (the movie) wants a total buy-in of that premise without the audience chuckling even once over the absurdity of it all.

At least Megaforce** gave us flying motorcycles, the leader of The Warriors and a character named Ace Hunter. McBain gives us a clearly bored Christopher Walken, an admittedly cool but underused Steve James and one of those other guys from The Warriors (but not Ajax). And no flying motorcycles. Sure, there are some jets, but those things are supposed to fly. There’s zero absurdity when they do.

And even when we do get jets, what happens? Well, McBain shoots one of the jet pilots from the cockpit of his Cessna.

With a pistol.

And kills him.

Again, we’re evidently supposed to be taking this seriously, but I have no idea how at this point. It’s all ludicrous and stupid and just begging for a director with a sense of the absurd to come in and let us all in on the joke. Glickenhaus cautiously tiptoes up to that line a few times, but can never commit to stepping over it and making McBain the movie it’s really meant to be. It’s like taking 90% of the humor out of Commando and then expecting it to work as a gritty action flick.

McBain is basically one of those stupid, overly-serious action flicks that Hot Shots! Part Deux lampooned so well. If you’re in the mood to go Walken, take in The Prophecy or A View to a Kill instead. At least in those flicks he looks like he’s having a good time.

*And even more conveniently they’re all seemingly single and unattached, as not one of them asks a Significant Other if it would be OK if they invaded Colombia over the weekend.

** Still Justin’s favorite movie.

Intermission!

• Wicked paint job on that helicopter. I’d be trying to sneak that thing home with me.
• Threatening to crush women and children with tanks is pretty uncool. I’m beginning to think the Colombian dictator is not a nice guy.
• OK, bad movie or not, I’m always happy to see Luis Guzmán, Greendale Community College’s most famous alum. And his performance is the BEST. The “heroes” come in, guns blazing and kill his whole crew, and he’s just “What the [censored] do you want?” Totally the coolest guy in the room.
• Pretending to be Mossad is probably an incredibly bad idea. I mean, like historically bad.
• The Filipino stuntmen are putting in some serious overtime on this flick.
• Too bad for the Colombian army that they only had that one tank. Once it’s gone they’re fighting a losing battle.
• We’re into the third act and we’re only just now being introduced to the evil foreign drug cartel that’s secretly running the country? This should have been established by the 15-minute mark.
• And they should have a cool name, like EuroCrime or something. And flying motorcycles. Or even just your average, every day orbital laser!