John Nguyen (Cung Le) is a bad man. Ask
those Taliban bastards who thought it was a good idea to
kidnap John, torture John, and slit his best friends throat
before trying to kill him how bad a man he is.
Unfortunately this incident has left some scars on poor John
as he is one PSTD suffering sonofagun. However, this
isn't going to stop some bad people from doing some bad things
to John in this interesting, if not somewhat generic action
film, 'Puncture Wounds'. As you might expect, they will
regret their actions.
So John is minding his own business in his sleazy hotel room
when he hears a ruckus outside. In retrospect, John
probably should've let Tanya the Hooker (Brianna Evigan) just
take her whoopin' from these asshole pimps of hers, but John's
not that kind of guy. Plus, when John goes down to break
things up, they call him stuff like 'gook' and 'chink' so you
know these aren't good people. Or should I say 'weren't'
good people. Problem is that Tanya and these jerkoff
racists work for completely evil and oppressive Hollis, as
played by Dolph Lundgren sporting the ugliest wig I've ever
seen. Not quite sure what the game plan was with this
look. Regardless, Hollis figures out who killed his boys
and he has a little revenge in mind. It's a horrible,
horrible form of revenge, but this Hollis is not a very nice
person. Seriously. You oughtta hear the
awful things he says to Tanya the Hooker. Completely
uncalled for.
Well, after John received the message about Hollis' 'revenge',
Hollis done made himself an enemy for the rest of his
life. Or until the end of this movie. Whichever
comes first. First thing John needs to do is find out
who has done him this egregious wrong, which means he has to
kick ass from the bottom up. And it doesn't get much
lower than Carl the pedophilic drug addicted apartment super
as played by Eddie Rouse. I'm telling you, and I'm being
serious here, this dude is an amazing actor. This cat
literally slams the door the shut on the sleazy, fast talking,
drug addicted character. He was killing me. Had I
not seen this actor in other things, I'd swear he was actually
a fast talking, drug addicted pedophile.
Anyway, John goes about the business of
beating up folks near to death … or to death… to find out what
he needs to know, along with the help of his best friend J.P.
(Jonathan Kowalski) and a haggard cop dealing with a personal
loss in Sgt. Mitchell (James C. Burns), with this cop kind of
wanting John to stop killing people, but kind of not.
Eventually, as you might imagine, John is going to have to
bust into the Hollis compound and dispense a little
justice. Eventually, this justice is going to require
him to go head up against a giant old dude in an awful
wig. I hope John wins. The wig is creeping me
out. Did I mention that Vinnie Jones is in this
movie? Vinnie Jones is in this movie. There, we
mentioned it.
As we mentioned earlier, 'Puncture Wounds', directed by
Giorgio Serafini and James Coyne, is a bit of strange action
film. In many ways it's a typical as typical gets.
Supreme badass done wrong has to go through an increasing
number of challenges until facing his ultimate challenge to
attain his revenge. Pretty simple. But this one
added some strange melodrama in the mix here and there which
kind of brings things down, and it also adds some intense
brutality and a particularly wicked performance from Dolph
Lundgren which brings everything back up again.
Take the melodrama for instance, such as the cop and his dying
wife. I'm not quite sure what I was supposed to get out
that. Was it to humanize this cop in some kind of
way? The time spent with us fooling with the cop and his
dying wife probably would've been time better spent getting to
know John's doomed family so that when something bad happens
to them, it has a little more effect than it did. As it
was, it was up to Cung Le to generate that emotion to us
through is acting. That's asking an awful lot of Cung
Le. We could also whine about the Hooker melodrama a
little bit, but on one hand the plight of Tanya was integral
in setting up for us how truly awful a person Hollis was, but
she had another side bet going on with one of Hollis henchman
which really went nowhere. Then there was this scene
ripped right from First Blood where John's C.O. informs the
grieving cop on why John does what the does. It wasn't a
bad scene, just hilariously derivative is all.
But there were some good things too though. Dolph was
great in this movie. Wig and all. There was no
wiggle room with Hollis as he 100% rock solid awful, and Dolph
played it for all he was worth. Plus the movie was
unapologetically brutal. Super violent movie, this
one. Not that violence is a good thing, but it fit the
mood and the subject matter of the film. The action was
pretty solid, but if I'm putting Cung Le in my movie I'm
probably going to have Cung Le fight with his hands more and
shoot and stab people less. It's what he's excels
at. And the final fight between John and Hollis was just
a little underwhelming when it should've been the coup de
grace.
The end result of 'Puncture Wounds' is mediocre, but the way
it got there was odd in that we could see clear elements where
it looked like it could be really good, and other elements
where it looked like it could've ended up far worse than it
did.
