Bullet Points: The Bad Pack (1997)
You probably have no idea how hard it is to find a good movie to watch. I spend more time scrolling through the various streaming services and wondering what I should watch than I ever have actually watching them. First World Problems, I guess. Either way, it’s annoying as all hell when you shuffle through the same trash for twenty minutes on Netflix before jumping over to Tubi (should’ve started there) and landing on something this interesting. With a film like this, though, you already know I had to check to make sure Chris the Brain hadn’t reviewed it yet. It’s definitely right up his alley.
Synopsis: Mexican immigrants in a small Texas border town hires a small group of mercenaries to protect them from a local extremist militia.
- What’s the big idea: The film is no different than a dozen other ones that ripped off Seven Samurai in the years following it. A bunch of townsfolk who are being screwed over, ripped off, and murdered by a gang of bad guys pays some mercenaries for protection. In this case, it’s a small border town full of folks who can’t risk being deported if the State Police get involved, so they decide to pool their money and see if they can hire someone to protect them from the white extremist dicks down the road.
- Getting the band back together: Once they decide upon the plan, two brothers named Jose and Hector set off to hire a dude they found in a magazine. That doesn’t work, of course, and they instead get pointed in the direction of a man named McQue (Robert Davi). After some more hijinks, including meeting that gay dude from Revenge of the Nerds, they agree to pay McQue and his crew to come down and take on these militiamen. Oh yeah, we also get to see Ralf Moeller fight Jeep Swenson. You know, WCW’S The Ultimate Solution!!!
- Good bad guys: Even if you get Robert Davi, Ralf Moeller, and Roddy Piper together as your heroes you still need to find a couple of guys who could legitimately fight them. Enter Marshall Teague and Sven-Ole Thorsen. We don’t necessarily get to see them be super evil but they kill a local guy who confronts them and are obviously not the type to fuck with. Teague is probably a little underused and Thorsen might have been a little too old to give much in the way of action but you can’t deny that these two always look awesome in this role.
- Role players: Speaking of roles, it’s surprising that Robert Davi didn’t get more roles like this where he could lead a film. I can remember him playing second or third fiddle and as a villain even more. Maybe he just has the sort of face to play a bad guy. It works here, however, since he’s not necessarily supposed to be a knight on a white horse type of fellow and is instead in it just for the money. Everyone else does their parts and sticks to the times as we said in the rasslin’ business. A few of them like Teague and Piper probably could’ve used more to do but the pace of the film and the shorter runtime are definitely more of a positive than a negative.
The Verdict: The Bad Pack isn’t an original film, by any means. It’s essentially that standard low-budget remake of Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven. The thing that is refreshing about The Bad Pack is the number of recognizable faces it gathers for this flick that preceded The Expendables by over a decade. I will agree that Robert Davi and Ralf Mueller are no Stallone and Statham, but they are exactly the type of guys who work well when they share screentime. The Bad Pack might not be a great title for a film like this but it sure beats a majority of the crap they put out these days. If you’re an old-school DTV guy or you just love a good ‘paid mercs protect the town’ gimmick, get on Tubi and watch this right now.
