Bullet Points: Instant Death

One of the hottest things in the action genre over the past decade or so is the ‘Old guy gets back into the killing game to get revenge for a friend or family member’. Any actor over the age of 55 has pretty much done this movie. Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Sly Stallone, Clint Eastwood, and most recently, Keanu Reeves has gotten into the game. Now, it appears that even bodybuilding legend and former Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno has decided to knock the dust off of his old leather jacket and get some sweet Charles Bronson-style revenge.

Synopsis: Military veteran John Bradley (Lou Ferrigno) has only been out of the Army for 6 months and he’s not been coping well. He decides to visit his estranged daughter and granddaughter in in the UK and immediately learns that men in his line of work can not live in peace for long. John’s family is brutally attacked by a gang of drug dealers and John is forced to return to his killing ways in order to deliver exactly what the men deserve….Instant Death

• Sweet Lou: Ferrigno has found the fountain of youth. The man has bulging muscles straight out of a comic book and while he may move a bit slower than he did in his younger days, the guy is in fantastic shape for a man who gets a Social Security check each month.
• Never a Dull Moment: If you’ve lived as a shadowy killer or assassin your entire life, never getting into the type of situations that might draw attention to yourself, only to grow old and retire to a life of peace, let me fill you in on a little secret; it ain’t gonna last long. Never in the history of action movies has a badass just retired peacefully. John Wick couldn’t get gas in his car so what makes John Bradley think he can travel across the globe to see his family? It only takes him about 7 minutes to make new and dangerous enemies which he’ll soon have to kill. He should have already known.
• Can’t You See the Resemblance: I couldn’t help but notice that Lou and his daughter Jane (played by Tania Staite) look absolutely nothing alike. I guess this is a bit of nitpicking on my part but it’s hard to look past it when he’s got that jet black hair and she’s sporting a much different look. It doesn’t hurt the movie in any way, but I had to acknowledge it.

• Bring the Pain: It only takes a few minutes for John Bradley to witness a crime, escape from the bad guys (after killing a couple of them), and then leave the area and return to find his family all sorts of messed up. I’d say it’s about halfway through the film when John finally goes berserk and decides to kill anyone connected to the drug dealin’ assholes who killed his granddaughter and raped and blinded his daughter. It was a crime that definitely deserved the leather jacket vengeance treatment.
• Razor: Jerry Anderson plays Razor, the biggest asshole of all the drug dealers and the one who essentially started all this killing. I was very surprised that it wasn’t Ray Winstone because he looks so much like him that I found it hard to un-see Ray’s character from The Departed. Razor runs the local crew and kills a bunch of people before setting his sights on the one man who could literally rip his limbs off. You can probably guess how it’s gonna end for Razor in this one.

• Killing His Way to the Top: It goes without saying that John Bradley has a couple of contacts no matter where he goes. He hooks up with his old buddy Colonel Neal (Michael James MacMahon) and gets the type of guns and resources that a man intent on killing a lot of people might need. John’s relationship with Neal reminded me a lot of the John Rambo/ Col. Trautman relationship in First Blood. That is a very good thing to be said for any movie.
• Killing Spree: Let’s get into the revenge! After John puts on his leather jacket, he’s ready to start killing all the bad guys. He works his way up from a couple of the foot soldiers before finding the main bad guy who is actually Razor’s boss. That’s like whooping up on Shredder before dealing with Baxter Stockman. But, in this case that Baxter Stockman did rape and kill your family members so it goes without saying that killing him was John’s ultimate goal. Hopefully the Ninja Turtles franchise never gets so dark that Stockman does rape and kill someone but if it does, they definitely need to watch Instant Death. Lou blasts away with pistols, shotguns, a massive Rambo knife (Yay!), and eventually puts enough people in the morgue to keep that poor sap working for a week straight. It’s beautiful revenge.

Don’t you dare go anywhere, you don’t wanna make Lou angry. Also, I have more Bullet Points:

• I love a good action movie cliché. It only takes 23 minutes for us to get to a strip club.
• Lou does a run-in on the strip club from earlier and bitch slaps a bunch of the guys before beating the utter crap out of the bouncers and taking out the bossman. Ferrigno’s fighting style is very tree-like. I mean, the man is 65 years old so he can’t be expected to move like he’s still 25. His bulking size keeps it from looking too ridiculous at any point and I bought in pretty quickly.
• At some point during the finale the bad guys just give up trying to shoot Lou. They basically run at him while he clotheslines them and beats the piss out of them. It probably works in their favor because some of them don’t get their necks broken and if they had tried to shoot him they would have been dead to rights.

The Verdict: I’m not going to say that Instant Death was an instant classic but it was much better than I expected. The film really picks up when they stop trying to humanize Ferrigno’s character and let him turn back into the monster that he once was. I think it would have been great for a short scene where Razor and his crew got information on exactly what kind of man John Bradley was in order to really drive fear into them (and give us a better look at his skills) but it never happened. Lou is a beast for being such an old guy but he’s not gonna win a foot race anytime soon so if he’s after you just run. I enjoyed the simplicity of the film and the brutality that ensued was just what I was hoping for. Props to director Ara Paiaya and his entire team for making an entertaining and worthy addition to the ‘Old guy gets back into the killing game to get revenge for a friend or family member’ sub-genre.