What Not To Watch: Attack Force

A total of 26 movies that I have reviewed for Bulletproof Action have had the dubious honor of being dubbed What Not To Watch. Attack Force will make #27. But in all the previous 26 What Not To Watch movies, I was able to make it to the final credits. The same can not be said for Attack Force.

I did watch at least 80% of the film before I had to tap out. And had I watched until the end I seriously doubt my opinion of the movie would change. Maybe if Charles Bronson showed up in the final scene and shot everybody  and turned to the camera and said “You’re welcome”, I may have. But considering this movie was released 3 years after Mr. Bronson’s death I’m 100% sure that is not how the movie ends.

Attack Force is a rather unique movie. It was originally conceived as a sci-fi/horror/action hybrid known as Harvester. But the producers were not happy with the final product and decided to re-shoot some scenes, re-edit the film and do some ADR work (that’s Automatic Dialog Replacement for those of you not in the know) to change the story from an alien invasion to a story about a powerful synthetic drug, known as CTX, that turned people into super human killing machines.

On one hand I want to praise the producers. Having sat through more bad movies than I care to remember in my time, when those movies are finished filming, somebody involved in the making of these bad movies has to realize they are awful, but the awful movie is  also paid for so it was going to get released anyway and better luck next time.

But in the case of Attack Force, the producers should have remembered that old saying… you can’t polish a turd.

It is almost like they said, “Boy, Harvester is a really bad movie, but I think if we re-shoot some scenes, do some ADR and re-edit the movie and call it Attack Force we can actually make it worse!”

And it is the three letters A, D and R that immediately took me out of this movie.

Steven Seagal was not brought back to do the ADR, so they just have somebody else do his lines. This somebody makes ZERO effort to sound anything like Steven Seagal, who I think we can all agree has a pretty distinctive way he speaks and delivers a line. I’m no Rich Little (how is that for a dated reference?) but I think I could pull off a sub-par Seagal voice if need be. It certainly wouldn’t be worse than any other aspect of this movie.

There are scenes in the movie where a few lines are actually Seagal, then the voice over dude, then back to Seagal, etc. It is maddening to watch and that is what caused me to finally hit stop. And I’m not even that big of a Seagal fan. I imagine a true Seagal fan would get violent watching Attack Force.

As you may imagine, Frankensteining together a movie with footage that was already shot, footage that was re-shot and footage that was already shot now with 50% new dialog is a mess of story telling.

There’s a scene in the first few minutes of the movie where three soldiers who have been assigned to the Attack Force to serve under Commander Marshall Lawson (Seagal) are having a discussion about Lawson. One of the soldiers asks about Lawson, another of the soldiers says there’s only two things you need to know about Lawson, 1) That he’s a bad mo fo and 2) That he’s a baaaaaddd mo fo! Yet, later Lawson mentions how he trained those men… so wouldn’t the one soldier who was asking about Lawson already know that?!? Or did they take Lawson’s online course so they never really met him until today?!?

I am getting a headache reliving this movie for the purposes of this post and remember I didn’t even see all of it.

To sum it up in one line… Attack Force is a complete disaster and should be avoided at all costs.