Mean Guns (1997)

This is How Movies Should Be Made

not horrible nor great

The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

The first must-see film of the year.

I remember watching this on VHS with a friend who was obsessed with Christopher Lambert and thinking it was quite interesting and I would like to see it again. And walking through a Collector's shop there it was, the dumb title grinning at you on a now oversized looking VHS cover. I made the purchase. Let's whack it in the player and see if this was actually worth the $3 Australian I paid for it.So we start with Ice T (he's in this) a major player in a crime syndicate who's invited 100 hardened criminals (and one seemingly innocent girl), who have all wronged his syndicate, to fight to the death inside a prison facility that is to be opened the following day. Only the last three (at least they resisted the temptation to say "There can be only one") will walk away with $10 million. "What if we don't want to play?" one of the criminals asks. "THEN DON'T." Ice T answers shooting him in the chest.This is a pretty intelligent film given the subject matter. There are a lot of alliances made and the fighting, while artsy, does try to trend towards realism. Though there are a few scenes where director Albert Pyun (B-movie go to guy) can't help himself. The ending is surprisingly well thought out and satisfying. The main issue here is the lighting, it's usually far too bright and the walls are all white and grey. Darkness would have worked better. It would be interesting to see what David Fincher or Quentin Tarantino (for very different reasons) would have done with this.This is a good little movie. Decent story and passable performances. Smarter than I thought it would be. Hard to get hold of, but worth a watch.

I can agree with other sentiments here: "Mean Guns" is more than just the standard B movie. I was lured to this thing by the names involved, but what we get here is not relentlessly predictable stuff. A crime boss named Vincent Moon (Ice-T) gathers a large group of lowlifes together, people who've "betrayed" their organization basically by being screw-ups. Moon's idea is to put all of them into a "kill or be killed" situation, providing them with various weapons, and the last three standing will supposedly walk away with the sum of $10 million. In addition to The T, we get other B movie perennials doing their thing; Christopher Lambert brings his own brand of acting to a more jovial - and unhinged - character than usual. Also appearing are Deborah Van Valkenburgh ("The Warriors"), Thom Mathews ("The Return of the Living Dead"), Yuji Okumoto ("The Karate Kid, Part II"), Tina Cote ("Omega Doom"), Kimberly Warren ("Blast"), and Michael Halsey ("Dollman"). Hoke Howell of such classics as "Kingdom of the Spiders" and "Humanoids from the Deep" has a cameo at the outset. As one will notice, the cast is largely made up of regulars in the films of the prolific Albert Pyun, and it don't matter if the acting ain't ever gonna win any awards; it still gets the job done. The T is amusing in the lead, and Lambert is actually a hoot, although it's veteran Halsey that really stands out, playing one of the most interesting characters in the whole thing. Van Valkenburgh is likable enough as the most sympathetic of them all. Mathews and Okumoto have their moments as a consistently bantering pair of buddies. It's hard to knock a movie that immediately goes for the approach of underscoring the fast and furious action with mambo music, which adds to the humour. Of course, when one sees the ridiculous fate of one of the characters, they'll see this is never meant to be taken too seriously. At an hour and 50 minutes it IS awfully long for this sort of thing, but that kooky charm still pervades the proceedings. And, despite all the violence, there's really no gore at all. Fans of low budget escapist fare should find this reasonably interesting and diverting, all the way to its unexpected ending. Seven out of 10.

A gem amongst B-movies of its age - specifically, the ambiguous 90s age, when you weren't exactly sure if something was B or A variety just by looking.The premise itself is ingeniously simple - upturn a couple of IKEA plastic boxes full of guns, assorted ammo and baseball bats on top of a crowd of small-time hustlers, big-time killers and middlemen entrepreneurs, with a deadline and a 10 mil prize ahead of them. Hilarity will not hesitate for a moment to ensue.The movie demonstrates a surprisingly sure and purposeful grip of its unsophisticated material. The writing is full of self-indulging one-liners and disconnected shock scenes, but manages to remain concise and dry overall. The directing is full of action movie clichés (though less so if you consider that it was done before The Matrix or Bad Boys or Shoot 'Em Up), but retains a certain stylish fleur of mamba shindig where only the cool ones are invited.The acting is accomplished entirely by the way of good casting (suitably so for cutout characters that this movie so nicely puts to use) - Lambert as an unstable Leon-type children-loving killer with a weight on his conscience, Halsey as an implacable killer with a heart, a worn-out accountant-journalist with a dirty conscience, a cool blonde killer girl with a chrome-plated Desert Eagle and so on.Every cliché that this movie invokes it surprisingly fresh - no less because these clichés managed to become clichés without a worthy, contemporary manifestation in the actual films worth watching. Maybe these are common in literature or cheap TV, but in cinema, they lurk modestly in the background.Here, they are in the spotlight. And they create drama - maybe not a tearjerker, but epic enough to be respected and not laughed at benignly.All of the violent scenes are rendered with an aesthetic detachment, and at the same time, with geeky admiration for the heroes' undeniable coolness. This combination makes Mean Guns a singular experience - you're cheering for typical B-movie shootouts, but at the same time admire the stop-motion hallucinatory flashback-murder scenes; you're laughing at simple street-wise humour that Ice-T impeccably projects (from his personal experience, no doubt) - but you stop and wonder at the surreal scene where a roomful of crooks tries to shoot each other with empty guns in time lapse.After all, the location alone makes this movie unique - an ultra-clean, high-tech, dystopian prison, smack in the middle of a large city, littered with cold bodies and warm cartridge cases (or vice versa). Prize is in the middle of the labyrinth, and a cynical, steel-toothed demiurge is at the top of it; he seeks death but scoffs at weak attempts to deliver it.All in all, this movie in my eyes puts to life a chaotic reality of William Gibson's Sprawl (from his Neuromancer cyberpunk trilogy0. An assortment of selfish crooks, sophisticated in their choice of gadgets and styles, each one with a dark secret in their closet; somewhat flat personas, trigger-happy but cautious, in the middle of the lawless but tech-ridden world; this is Mean Guns all right.

Mean Guns (1997) was a nice surprise. I saw this movie on video a few years back and I enjoyed it. The plot is a re-working of the old "man hunting man" theme. Like I have said in the past, it's one of my favorite plot devices. The director Albert Pyun is one of those hit or miss directors. But this time the material succeeds despite the mundane direction and writing.The film for the most part takes place within a warehouse that is maintained by Ice-T. He's rounded up a hundred people and has filled several rooms with duffel bags filled with firearms. The participants have to play a game. Whoever survives wins the cash prize. An eclectic bunch of criminals, junkies and low-lives round out the cast of b-movie actors. A few old favorites also appear as well. The action is heavy and it seems to be heavily edited. I have to recommended this movie. The action is fast paced and the actors seem to be having fun and enjoying themselves. The only problem I had with this movie was the video transfer. It's a shame that they couldn't have produced a nice widescreen transfer (the movie was shot in Scope). A nice updated version of The Most Dangerous Game.