So one of the things you see a lot these days is this deep love for practical effects over CG effects, right. Because it’s so easy to do literally anything with CGI, when people decide to do something else, it feels like they should get extra credit just for degree of difficulty.

And that’s fine, I guess, it’s good to mix things up every now and then. But this movie points out the limitations of pure practical effects in the pre-CG era, because it’s just a grab bag of “stupid tricks that every action movie knows how to do.” Lotta samey driving stunts? Check. Basic-ass punching and shooting? Check. People being set on fire and/or falling in the carefully controlled ways that we’re all familiar with? Check. Models blowing up into slow-mo splinters and debris and sparks? Also check.

The net effect is that all the action stuff feels super by-the-numbers. I guess to some extent, it’s hard to really come at them too hard, because they didn’t have better technology available to enable a director’s vision to do anything at all they wanted, but like… watching a movie like this in between modern action movies really drives home how much creative freedom CG allows.

And this is John Woo, so this is a director who’s doing a stylized, distinctive thing by the standards of the time; it’s just that in practice it amounts to Generic Action Movie with doves and slow-mo and people holding guns stupid. A world in which this sort of thing qualified as even remotely fresh or original is a world that’s a lot worse than what we have today, and we have CGI to thank for today’s action movie excellence, so I for one welcome our new computerized overlords.

I realize that this is four paragraphs all about the special effects in action scenes, but honestly, there’s not much else to talk about here. The plot is an absurd “Most Dangerous Game”-inspired thing, the characters are beyond absurd, from Van Damme’s Cajun wrestler to Wilford Brimley’s hilariously-accented Cajun oatmeal pitchman. It’s just not a very interesting movie, and there’s no real reason to watch it.