Director: Dolph Lundgren
Writers: Dolph Lundgren, Michael Worth, Hank Hugues
Stars: Dolph Lundgen, Kelsey Grammer, Christina Villa
Synopsis: Follows a police officer who must retrieve an eyewitness and escort her after a cartel shooting leaves several DEA agents dead, but then he must decide who to trust when they discover that the attack was executed by American forces.
There’s been a real paradigm shift in American action movies lately, where A-list filmmakers/actors star in vehicles that harken back to the good ol’ days when Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus ruled the 1980s action sphere with their low-budget B-movies when all audiences had to do was sit down in front of a screen, turn their brain off, and enjoy the mind-melting maximalism on display. It put actors like Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, and Michael Dudikoff in stable vehicles where all they needed to do was walk on screen and blow stuff up, delivering risible, reactionary dialogue in such a stilted, unengaging way it’s almost incredible that they would even lead a movie.
Dolph Lundgren became a leading man through the Cannon Group pipeline with Gary Goddard’s Masters of the Universe. While his previous role in Rocky IV didn’t require him to utter many lines, the world saw Lundgren’s He-Man as a towering physical force but an actor who mumbled through serious dialogue as if he had a gun pointed at his head. In 2015’s Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, Lundgren remarked that he “felt a little stupid doing it.” Perhaps he did, but its ramifications for his career were huge. With each subsequent effort, whether starring in Showdown in Little Tokyo, Universal Soldier, John Woo’s Blackjack, or even his numerous direct-to-video efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lundgren has seemingly tried to chase the same kitschy feel of a Cannon Group production.
It’s no surprise, then, that his directorial efforts have the same feel, with Missionary Man, Command Performance, The Defender, and, most recently, Castle Falls, harkening back to the Golan-Globus days of mindless action pictures with a brutal action star at its forefront delivering justice to the ones who need it. His latest movie, Wanted Man, sees Lundgren direct himself as Mike Johansen, a veteran cop who has been caught in an accident where he hurled racist slurs at a Mexican immigrant. While Johansen believes he had it coming, considering the man was transporting trafficked women in his truck, his chief doesn’t think his actions were appropriate and forces him to go back to Mexico to perform a job for him, or he will lose his badge.
The mission sounds simple enough: retrieve two eyewitnesses who have key information on the assassination of two DEA agents during a cartel bust from jail to the United States border. However, it goes predictably wrong, with corrupt police officers from Mexico looking for the two and Johansen, who shoot their car in a drive-by. Johansen ultimately gains the upper hand but is shot in the spleen, requiring medical attention. The setup is formulaic enough but gets the job done from point A to point B, and the audience knows it won’t be a simple witness retrieval.
However, what comes after grinds the film’s pacing to an unbearable halt when Johansen is handcuffed to a medically supervised bed in Rosa Barranco’s (Christina Villa) family home. For a good chunk of the runtime, he sits on the bed and discusses his next steps with Rosa, when we know exactly how it’ll go down: the American cops can’t be trusted, even if they are Johansen’s partners, and will be revealed as the ones who killed the DEA agents in an attempt to save face. Of course, one has to figure out who. It’s quite simple: if Kelsey Grammer is in your film, it’s probably him.
There are virtually no surprises in Wanted Man. Everything is laid out in front of us: from the reactionary dialogue from Johansen knowing that he will ultimately have a change of heart once he realizes that all of us are different and deeply human to the partners who absolutely are bad guys, it doesn’t take long to figure out exactly where the film is going. In fact, if you’ve seen a Cannon actioner where a [white] protagonist saves someone of a different ethnicity from bad [white] guys, Wanted Man takes the same template but has little more to offer.
It’s a bit crazy to see the similarities laid out, with Johansen fully trusting the American justice system and only believing the bad cops are on the other side of the border while American ones serve their country. That’s a fairly conservative way to view things, but at least Lundgren attempts to give his protagonist a redemption arc, where Johansen finally sees the weight of the problem through Rosa’s eyes. And credit where credit is due: Lundgren directs himself quite well and shares a somewhat palpable chemistry with a charming Christina Villa.
But the rest of the film is a complete wash: the grittiness of Lundgren’s earlier directorial efforts seem completely removed from action scenes that have little emotional and cathartic impact. You would think someone who worked with Sylvester Stallone, Roland Emmerich, John Woo, John Hyams, and, most recently, James Wan, would know a thing or two about directing action, but Lundgren’s action direction is almost non-existent, with many scenes breaking key notions of photography, almost as if he just wants to get the shoot over with and move on to the next project.
Of course, one can’t blame Lundgren for wanting to do so if that is the case, as the actor recently revealed he has been battling kidney cancer since 2015 and was told by his doctors that he had two to three years left to live in 2020. You can feel his exhaustion both in front and behind the camera, which makes the release of Wanted Man not just commendable for Lundgren’s passion for entertaining the masses, but as a testament that he still wants to be here, making movies for all of us. It’s just a shame it’s not worth our time, but at least it continues the hopeful trend to finally resurrect The Cannon Group brand once and for all. If Orion Pictures rose from the dead, anything’s possible.
