B Plus Movies

I don’t mean to keep ending the week on a Most Dangerous Game derivative, but there are so many to choose from. Violence is one of the easiest forms of conflict to use in a movie script and the “let’s see who’s standing at the end” type stories give a plausible contrivance to get characters harming one another.  Putting them in a closed setting also lowers the budget.

Say for instance you took a bunch of criminals, snitches and thugs, put them in a newly built but unused prison and then introduced ten million dollars. Advise them that they have six hours, are locked in and no more than three of them can remain standing if any of them one to live to collect the prize. If you could do all this and film it, then you’d have Mean Guns.

I started catching this movie in bits and pieces on cable. What made me finally sit down and watch the whole of it was the manic performance of Christopher Lambert who plays a wonderfully drug addled and happy go lucky hit man and the only character who volunteers to play in the game. He makes the movie.

Ice-T is also in the picture as Moon, the organizer and provider of the literal buckets of weaponry (guns and baseball bats) to be used in this exercise/game. His performance is very stripped down and a little too stereotyped, but still enjoyable.

The rest of the cast is made up of a host of other B movie veterans, enough that one might see at least a half dozen faces and ask “where do I know that guy from?”

Mean Guns has a number of subplots to accent the carnage; each of the players in the game has at some point betrayed the criminal syndicate that has put this affair together. There’s an accountant who wants to turn state’s evidence, a hit man who is tired of the criminal life and a hooker who is there by complete accident. The movie plays on archetypes to establish character and while you might not consider any of these folks family by the time the movie ends, there’s still enough there to let you care about them before they die.

The violence in the movie is stylized and takes a lot of elements from Asian cinema including the patented John Woo, point-blank standoff. The film is shot well enough and the dialogue is okay. It’s not a masterpiece of art direction or anything, but very watchable on the small screen.

As action movies go, this one isn’t bad: lots of gunplay with enough plot to string it together and keep it interesting. If I ever catch this in a $5 bin, I’m getting it for the collection.

But is Mean Guns a B+ movie? No, not quite. But it is a solid B.

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