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It´s not fancy to like this movie. It´s just another of those hard kick-in-your-face movies that proliferated in the Iron Age (also known as the nineties)... but better and harder than most. The worst part is that Gibson isn´t that hard and isn´t that bad but he has his good moments a charismatic smile and knows how to fake enduring pain.
Gibson was (is) more suited for the good boys. He is kind of goofy and even in his hard characters he looks like a choir boy in some moments... The best thing is that this is a light movie, has lots of funny moments and the violence is so boldly exaggerated that everything looks like a big bloddy joke... and the big clown has the biggest gun and the hardest punch. This is the kind of hard movie Gibson was intented to.
The good thing about the action movies from this era is that filmakers knew how to knit the action, the plot and the bidimensional simple characters in a strong, high tension knot where everything and everyone seems to be in place. This is a good example. The protagonist goes from down to the top of the criminal food chain meeting (meaning "kicking and shooting") lowlifes one after the other while he shows that he is a baaaaaaad man. Then all those lowlifes come back later in the movie for a second ration of bullets and pain and no one ever remembers that Gibson is the bad guy anymore: he walks with the girl and the bad guys suck it and die.
That is the way it was meant to be.
The worst? Lucy Liu. She gives very little to the movie, sucks as always. The last time you see her is one of her best moments... probably because she got slapped.
All in all this is a decent enough film from a time when popcorn-movies where fun and fast and there wasnt any need for armies of bad guys from here to the horizon or green nor blue screens anywere.
Just some guns, some bad guys and some exploding cars.
And a blonde.
And a dog.
7/10
