Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

No doubt my friends, it is time and there is room for another guy. Seagal at close to sixty and Van Damme surging past fifty are getting a little long in the tooth for this action movie thing and Wesley… well, Wesley has other things on his plate. There are other guys out there from Don the Dragon to Gary Daniels to Oliver Grunner who do the straight to DVD action thing, but those cats operate on the fringe. We need another 'main' guy. Some people with money are betting that professional wrestler ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin is that guy and he just might be that guy. True enough he can’t act but he’s a big dude who looks like he can kick some ass, has some presence, and what few lines he is given he delivers them with conviction. We found his last straight to DVD action joint ‘Damage’ pretty damned entertaining giving us hope that Stone Cold might be that next guy. Not so much with this movie here ‘The Stranger’. Still, Stone Cold still might be the guy because one of the anchors that comes with being The Guy is making really crappy action flicks.

Somewhere wandering around in this universe is a 6’4" 260lb muscle bound fool with instant death inducing skills who has no clue who he is. This character would be played by our hero Steve Austin. A year ago something really bad happened to this Stranger which caused him to lose his memory, with this something really bad being his family exploding in a car. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a surprise or not because they show bits and pieces of his family exploding in the car in fragments, over and over again as something I guess is suppose to represent the Stranger’s fragmenting memory. Problem is every time this cat remembers something about his past he goes all ‘Memento’ on us and forgets everything he was doing prior, and actually creates a brand new reality for himself to exist in.

Trying to find this guy is his doctor Grace Bishop (Erica Cerra) who has been working with him to retrieve his memory, and truth be told has become a little obsessed about it. Helping the doctor is FBI agent Mason Reece (Adam Beach) who needs to find this guy because apparently the Stranger was working undercover inside the Russian Mob and has unearthed a mole at the Agency, the identity of whom has been locked away in the Stranger’s messed up brain.

Tracking down this cat isn’t all that hard since all you have to do is follow the dead bodies each made up reality of his is leaving in its wake, though FBI top cop Picker (Ron Lea) doesn’t seem to be all that gung ho on finding my man. Or is he? Hmmm… naturally all isn’t what it seems. But with his hot obsessive psychoanalyst by his side and quite possibly the world’s worst squad of FBI agents on his tail, the Stranger is going to find out what happened, who he is and get his revenge against those who have done him wrong.

I don’t want to spoil it for you but at the end of this movie when the hero kills the bad guy we see a list he’s made up with about ten names on it with the top name crossed off. I hope to God this doesn’t mean there’s going to be nine more of these because you know I’m gonna have to watch ‘em. Anyway ‘The Stranger’ is a unique cinematic experience in that this is a movie that is literally all over the place while actually going nowhere. I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced that before. There’s flashbacks and cuts and pans and swooshes and shaky cameras but in reality nothing is really happening. A great example of this revolutionary technique engaged by director Robert Lieberman was the Motorcycle Chase Scene. In this particular scene Stone Cold and Erica Cerra are on the back of a Harley being chased by a State Trooper and clearly it’s them on this motorcycle since neither of them are wearing helmets. Since our stars are really riding this bike, helmetless, they can’t go too fast because we can’t have anything happen to them. So while they’re speeding along at about 8 miles an hour, the camera was shaking at about 142 miles an hour to enhance the illusion of speed. It didn’t work. One of the reasons it didn’t work was due to Stone Cold’s ‘This is total bullshit’ look of benign boredom on his face during this entire scene.

I also dug the scene where our bad guys busted into FBI headquarters and manually chloroformed every agent in the building. Worst FBI agents ever. The rest of the movie consists of more shaky camera flashbacks resulting into not much of anything and a lot of actors looking really bored. Adam Beach in particular. The good thing is that everybody’s boredom in this movie was easily offset by Erica Cerra who seemed to be really fired up and grateful to have this role.

For his part, except when he was looking bored during that lame chase scene, Steve Austin was fine in this movie looking big, mean and ugly. Yes, he’s not much of an actor but when searching for the next straight to DVD action star, the ability to act is pretty low on the list of requirements. So while ‘The Stranger’ isn’t all that good it is a rite of passage for any potential straight to DVD action star to drop a turd on us every once in a while. Hell, Seagal had like a ten turd streak before he came through with a few decent flicks not too long ago. Here’s hoping that Steve Austin can hold on and be that next guy.