Bullet Points: Nemesis
It has been years since I watched Nemesis, a film by Albert Pyun and starring Olivier Gruner. I decided to sit down and take a second look at it and see if 31 year old Chad would have the same thoughts about the movie as I did when I saw it way back when.
The Gist: A retired cyborg Los Angeles policeman is forced out of retirement and is assigned to apprehend his former partner whom is smuggling data to a terrorist organization that plots to assassinate government officials.
The Cast: Olivier Gruner is a poor man’s Jean-Claude Van Damme. From his Euro accent to his mediocre martial arts; he is a C-level action star with D-level acting chops. I’m sure that I’ve seen other Gruner vehicles and I know he has better movies but in Nemesis his charisma is next to nothing. Thomas Jane makes an appearance in one of his first films and while it shows his naked ass for like 60 seconds straight, he literally does nothing else and is as forgettable as this movie is.
I really liked the opening action sequence but it was all downhill from there.
The Villain: There are a bunch of different “bad” guys that Alex Rain kills in this movie but I didn’t really understand why they were all chasing him. There was something about him being an LAPD cop. Then he got all Robocop’ed and turned into a cyborg. I think that happened a couple of different times actually and I never really got who was shooting him or why. At some point it’s a terrorist group, then a bunch of rebels, then other cyborgs. It seemed like every other person who got shot blew up and was revealed to be a cyborg. That was another thing, some bullets didn’t really faze them, while others made their bodies explode. The only somewhat promising thing was that Vincent Klyn from Cyborg and Sven-Ole Thorsen from every Arnold movie make cameos for all of 30 seconds each.
As much as I love Brion James, he sure has a knack for bad movies.
The Action: I had a lot of hope for this movie after the opening scene. It was a pretty good action scene where a few people are chasing Olivier Gruner around. He’s finally stopped and we find out that he is actually part machine…so much for that reveal. This movie is like the opposite of Blade Runner in that it revealed that our hero is actually becoming more and more machine throughout the movie but is still fighting the other cyborgs. Yeah…but there were a couple of decent action scenes. In one scene, Gruner uses a sub-machine gun to fire into the floor of a hotel and he falls like five stories to the ground level. I guess it should have hurt him and he probably didn’t have a magazine in his gun that held 400 rounds but who cares, I guess. The same scene actually appeared in the vampire movie Underworld so someone liked it. At this point I was beyond calling out all of the inconsistencies. Gruner didn’t even really use his martial arts skills either. He threw a couple of kicks but nothing flashy and no one even put up a fight against him.
These two men stood shooting at someone in the same room for about 10 seconds before they hit her.
Take it Home:
- Favorite Quotes: “Shang Loo takes no shit.”
- Favorite Quotes: “It pays to be more than human.”
- Hair: Alex has like 4 different hair styles in this one. They must have had a decent wig collection that they wanted to show off.
- Linguistics: It felt like they asked Brion James to use the worst accent he could come up with cause it was terrible. Even worse than the one he used in Red Scorpion.
- Geography: Where the hell is Shang Loo, Java??
- Center mass: In the hotel room shoot out, three characters stand no more than 15 feet from each other and fire off hundreds of rounds before they all fall over dead. It was pure garbage.
- C-List Heaven: With guys like Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Brion James, Vincent Klyn, Sven-Ole Thorsen and Olivier Gruner this should have been an awesome movie.
If you’re looking for a movie set in the future dealing with cyborgs and all that business just watch Blade Runner or Cyborg. Pyun directed Cyborg so you shouldn’t feel too bad for the guy but Nemesis is not one of his best outings and while I feel bad for Olivier Gruner, this turd needed to be flushed.
Rating 1.75/5
