Bullet Points: Black Site Delta

Somehow I have watched two new movies starring Cam Gigandet in the past couple of weeks. That is two more movies starring Cam Gigandet than I’ve seen in my entire life prior to the last fortnight. One might think that I would becoming a fan of the young actor but I have to admit that Cam’s performance weren’t exactly my favorite things in either movie. You can read about my thoughts on The Shadow Effect here, and if you’re reading this then you can scroll down and see how round two of my two-week battle with my preconceived notions of the Gigster have gone.

Synopsis: A group of terrorists intent on taking over a nuke-carrying drone infiltrate a “black site” full of prisoners only to find that the group of prisoners refuse to let the men kill millions with the bomb.

• The Movie Bar Scene: For some reason, bars in movies and television always have attractive bartenders who are down to bang the hero almost immediately. That usually doesn’t happen, though, because some rude assholes in the bar always pick a fight with the hero and then we’re normally treated to a good bar fight.
• The Prisoners: Black Site Delta takes special care to bring out all of the stereotypes when it drops a little information on us for each of the prisoners. Some of them are former CIA, some are Navy SEAL’s, and then there is one guy who is essentially The Joker. No kidding. He is always saying stupid shit, stabbing people, and cutting them with knives while talking smack. Most of the characters are incredibly annoying because they’re so one-dimensional, but none of them were more annoying to me than Cam’s character simply known as Jake. Jake complains non-stop about seeing his daughter again but he’s only in the prison because he had stopped at a bar down the street from her house and got himself into a scrum. What a phony….

• Black Site My Ass: Whatever this prison is called, it has to be the least secured prison in history. The terrorists walk into this place and take it over without even breaking a sweat. The prisoner then escape, because everyone is inept in this world, and they re-take the prison in about twenty minutes with 6 people. As entertained as I might have been during this whole thing, I find it hard to completely dumb myself down enough to enjoy it as much as they might want me to.
• Big & Dumb: There are two characters named “Hudson” and “Vasquez” in BSD and they couldn’t be much different from the two in Aliens. While I wanted this movie to be more like Aliens, hell, I’d like for every movie to be like Aliens, BSD simply made its characters and especially its bad guys far too dumb for any of it to be really good. There is actually a scene where Hudson calls a guy “big and dumb” for putting down his gun to fight him only to have Hudson pick it up and blow him away. It was a good move on his part but it was pretty symbolic for how most of this movie felt to me.

• KHAN!!!!!: Apparently no writers can come up with any other Persian names except for “Khan”. This has to be the 150th movie where the bad guy is named Khan. I also have to believe that this Khan is one of the worst. His motivations are of the sort “I’m from Afghanistan so I must be bad”. They could have at least given him a better death.

• Generic Bad Guy #2: Michael Dale plays Colonel Irving, the right hand man of Khan and the leader of the mercenaries who took over the prison site. Besides his ability to sneak up on people (seriously, he sneaks up on at least 3 different people in this) he is utterly useless. He does have a radio, though, so he orders people around like he’s trying to accomplish something but their goal only really consisted of like two things in the first place so I would think that clearing the buildings and taking the mission control area would have been among them. Why are all these special operations guys so damned pathetic in the first place?
• Let’s Do It: Not only are we given generic video game backstories for all of our main characters but we’re also supposed to believe that the two leads are all of a sudden willing to drop everything and just start making out. They might have went all out and bumped uglies if they weren’t interrupted and it’s just another reason why I couldn’t fully enjoy this film. I understand that all of the characters have their own sad stories to tell but are we supposed to forget that all of them also MURDERED people?

• Hybrid Action: The movie takes on a sort of Under Siege/The Rock/ Con Air kind of vibe to me. Just picture those movies but with characters that you don’t care about at all then you’re pretty close to Black Site Delta. Cam is the most generic hero of all and Vasquez (Teri Reeves), who was my favorite character, was actually brought down by being seen to need him cause he was the man. The shoot outs and the action in general were all pretty fun. Hardly any of the heroes ever miss but that has never bothered me before. The bad guys were the biggest problem with BSD because they were just so terrible. They didn’t seem plausible and not a single one of them felt like they could kill anyone. Did any of the unnamed ski mask guys even get a shot off?

Okay, okay…maybe I need to take a break from Cam Gigandet movies for a little while. Right after I deliver a few more Bullet Points:

• John Brodsky plays the creepy Joker-like dude named Taylor. If you want to know what he’s like just picture Topher Grace’s little sister.
• The sniper guy in this shoots sooo much without ever reloading. I have many pet peeves in movies like these but a new one is when people pick up guns but never pick up any extra ammunition.
• The prisoner escape scene is them screaming for about 5 minutes. It’s a good thing there aren’t any bad guys in the area to stop them or anything.
• Who leaves a skeleton crew of Air Force guys to guard a black site prison and a drone program with access to a nuke? Stupid ass government…

The Verdict: As much as I’ve crapped on this movie so far it wasn’t a total waste of time. It was pretty much a cheaper less superhero type of Suicide Squad. The characters weren’t great but none of the actors were terrible and I generally enjoyed the action, which there was a lot of. The movie never slows down enough for it to get boring and if you’re watching a movie like this you’re probably a big action fan already so you won’t be too pissed off that there isn’t a deep level of character development. There is no doubt that all of the other movies I’ve mentioned to this point are better than Black Site Delta but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t watch it. Buy a six pack of beer and check it out.