Bullet Points: Recoil (1998)
After being burned on more than one occasion with films that are classified as action movies by IMDb or by the major streaming services or by the distributors of those multi-pack DVD collections, only to find out the movies don’t have much action in them at all… I started thinking that it may be in the best interest of action fans everywhere if action movies had their own classification system, similar to the alcohol proof system.
Take Jack Daniels for instance. It is classified as being 80 proof, which means it contains 40% alcohol by volume. Now if I was perusing action movie offerings on Prime Video or Netflix and I could see that a particular action movie only contained 40% action… I could either avoid the movie or at least know where to set my expectations before I watched.
If this proposed proof system already existed, then the subject of this movie review, 1998’s Recoil, would be the Bacardi 151 of action movies…
- Ready, Set, Go: After the opening credits, we see Detective Ray Morgan (Gary Daniels) and his partner Detective Lucas Cassidy driving in Los Angeles when a call comes over their radio that officers need assistance at the scene of a bank robbery. Morgan and Cassidy don’t hesitate for a moment and they find themselves en route. When Morgan and Cassidy arrive on the scene it looks like a war zone. Officers are down, cars are flipped over, fires are blazing and it is clear these aren’t just any bank robbers, these guys came prepared with body armor and superior fire power. Morgan and Cassidy quickly get in on the action as the shoot out escalates. When it appears that the cops and their numbers advantage have neutralized all the robbers… one of them goes whizzing by them on a motorcycle. What follows is a spectacular chase on the streets of Los Angeles featuring some top notch stunt driving, as the participants weaved in and out of traffic, the chase moves off the streets and into a huge warehouse with the motorcyclist maneuvering through tight spaces while the multiple cop cars pursuing him are hitting barrels and stacks of pallets. Just when it looks like it is the end of the road for our fleeing felon… he manages to ride right over a cop car and the chase continues, but now the motorcyclist is throwing grenades behind him taking out cop cars and leaving a path of destruction in his wake. The chase spills back out onto the streets of Los Angeles as the remaining participants literally go bursting through the side of the building! And that is about the time an innocent motorists becomes the victim of a grenade and my eyes witnessed one of the most spectacular car jumps in movie history… the car is like a rocket shooting through the air, taking out a traffic light in the process before it violently hits the ground flipping over multiple times before it finally comes to a complete stop.
- Mob Rules: The chase does eventually end and things don’t turn out well for the bank robber as he is shot by the five cops who actually made it to the end of the chase. The cops believed the bank robber was reaching for a weapon… a safe assumption considering he was throwing hand grenades just a few minutes prior. BUT it just so happened that there was an amateur videographer on the scene and they captured the fact that our bank robber was unarmed when the cops shot him. The video also showed the identity of the grenade tossing bad guy… a face that was instantly recognized by his mob boss father, Vincent Sloan. Sloan was watching the footage on the local news. Sloan is pissed and orders his other three sons to avenge the death of their baby brother. The Sloan Boys will be assisted by Mr. Brown, one of the dirty cops on the Sloan payroll. Our mafia hit men manage to take out four of the five cops Vincent Sloan wanted dead with relative ease, including a hit at the police station! But the fifth cop proved to be a little tougher to get to… if you guessed that fifth cop was Detective Ray Morgan, you would be correct.
- Desperate Times: After some unsuccessful attempts on Ray’s life, Mr. Brown the dirty cop tracks down Ray and his family as they make their way up to the mountains for a getaway (Brown placed a tracking device on Ray’s SUV). Brown is driving a truck and he forces Ray and his family off the mountain road they were traveling on and their SUV plunges to certain death… certain death for everyone but Ray, who miraculously survived the catastrophic crash. Once Ray has fully recuperated… the hunted becomes the hunter as Ray goes after the Sloan family and Mr. Brown. With everyone he cared about dead, Ray has absolutely nothing to lose and we get some more balls to the wall action including my second favorite scene in the movie where Mr. Brown meets his demise on a bridge in a most poetic fashion.
Recoil may be my new favorite Gary Daniels movie. If the high action content wasn’t enough to put the movie on the top of my Gary Daniels list, I have to admit I am a sucker for a good revenge tale and when you have a man with the skills of Gary Daniels seeking revenge, the results are pretty much guaranteed to be entertaining.
Bonus Bullet Points are pretty much guaranteed to be entertaining too…
- Directed By: Recoil was one of the first films directed by famed fight choreographer and stunt performer, Art Camacho. Camacho deserves credit for making this direct to video offering seem like a big budget feature. Camacho also has a writing credit for Recoil.
- T&A: PM Entertainment had a knack for incorporating some nudity into most of their action films and Recoil does not deviate from that tradition as we see a topless hooker during one of the scenes where our cops get whacked by the Sloan family. I was a little disappointed that we did not get to see “more” of Ray’s hot wife Tina (played by Kelli McCarty)… although it appears shortly after Recoil was released McCarty found herself working in movies that likely provided her with more opportunities for exposure.
- The Name Game: “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Danny Trejo starred in a film titled Recoil in 2011.
