Bullet Points: General Commander

As I was watching 2019’s General Commander, I could not help but feel I had stumbled on to another television series I had no previous knowledge of.

So it was really no surprise when I learned that the original plan for General Commander was for it to be a 9 episode series following Jake Alexander and his team of CIA agents as they took down crime and corruption in Southeast Asia.

• Heart Attack: The movie begins with Jake Alexander (Steven Seagal, Marked for Death) and his team tracking a hooker who they believe lures in unsuspecting victims for an organ harvesting operation run by a mobster name Orsetti. One of Jake’s guys, Zach Stevens, is posing as a John and he picks up the hooker in question at a bar and it isn’t long before she’s taking him back to a motel. When they get to the room, she suggests that Zach freshen up, while he’s in the bathroom, she’s slipping a mickey in his drink. Figuring this was the move, Zach takes a pill that will counteract the drugs that are in his his drink. The organ harvesters show up and that’s when Jake’s team gets into position to move in… but things don’t go exactly as planned and there are casualties on both sides… including Zach Stevens.

• Disband of Brothers: The monumental motel failure brings CIA handler Jessica Thompson in all the way from Langley. Jessica informs Jake and his team that their group is being disbanded and that they are all expected to return to Langley, where they will be retrained and reassigned. This does not go over well with the team who are more motivated than ever to take down Orsetti and his operations. Sonia Dekker, who we learn was more than just teammates with Zach, takes his death especially hard.
• Start Up Company: The next morning nobody shows up to meet Jessica on the plane back to Langley. Jake Alexander is not there because he’s gone to Hong Kong to meet up with an old friend, Katarina Sokolov. There’s definitely a joke that can be made here with Steven Seagal consorting with Russians, but I’ll resist the low hanging fruit. With the CIA no longer an option, Alexander asks Sokolov to help finance his team so they can take down Orsetti. Sokolov agrees to not only finance the deal, but become a full partner in this endeavor. Alexander says he’d like their base of operations to be in Manila and business is about to pick up.

• Revenge: It should be noted that Orsetti wants revenge on Jake Alexander and his team as much as they want revenge on him and he spends a good deal of the movie trying to figure out who was responsible for disrupting his business. But Jake Alexander and company end up finding Orsetti, before he finds them. Not surprisingly, Sonia Dekker offers to go undercover as a woman looking for a heart for her dying husband in order to bring Orsetti to justice. Things get crazy when Orsetti is going to get her the freshest heart possible since he has an actual live body on a table being prepped to have his heart cut out of his body. And that is the spark to ignite the final showdown… which includes a knife fight between Orsetti and Alexander!

After watching 2019’s General Commander, I could not help but feel that they shot an episode and a half of the would be series, realized they were going to run out of money, then shot some non-action stuff on the cheap so they could make use of the footage they already shot and then cobble everything together to create a feature length film.

General Commander was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I did think it was great use of Steven Seagal. Seagal lent his action credibility to the movie, but most of the actual action was done by the younger cast members. Jai Day, who played Zach’s best friend Ben Harrison, was a standout and if he was around in the 1990’s I feel like he’d have had an opportunity to star in many a DTV movie.

Here’s an opportunity for you to read some Bonus Bullet Points…

• Familiar Face: Long time stunt performer, Ron Smoorenburg plays an assassin ordered to kill Jake Alexander by a CIA big wig named Hayes (Spoiler Alert: He fails miserably). Smoorenburg is probably best known for his work with Jackie Chan in Who Am I?
• Fan Theory: Along with a lot of the non-action stuff that I believe was shot after the fact, I can’t help but think that the scenes that involved Hayes ordering Jake Alexander’s death were something added in after the fact to pad the runtime and give General Commander an extra helping of Steven Seagal.
• Memorable Quote: “You are like a fork in the soup. Useless.” – Orsetti