By Richard Winters
My Rating: 1 out of 10
4-Word Review: Truckers with big muscles.
Rafe and Victor (Peter Paul, David Paul) are brothers who make a living driving a truck though they’re always missing the freight deadline to the constant consternation of their boss (Richard Moll). He gives them the ultimatum: either get this new delivery to its intended destination within 30 hours, or find a new job. Holly (Ari Meyers) is a teen genius who has invented a mechanism that can electronically deactivate any code allowing one to start, or stop any other device without having a key, or password to do it. When she finds out that the company she’s been working at, or more honestly enslaved at, wants to use her invention for unscrupulous means she escapes with her device in hand and then hides inside the brothers’ truck. Initially the brothers want to throw her out as they consider her presence a sign of bad luck, but eventually they help her out in her quest to avoid the bad guys.
The Pauls, who were bodybuilders before they got into acting, made their film debut in D.C. Cab, as The Barbarian Brothers, which lead to guest starring roles in TV-Shows like ‘Knight Rider’ that eventually got them starring in their own movie The Barbarians, that did well enough at the box office that producers gave them this comedic vehicle though it proved to be a disaster. Most of the problems lie with the silly script that’s filled with pseudo science, dated technology, and campy humor, which will amount to one long, continuous eye roll from the viewer.
The brothers are poor actors with their scenes in Natural Born Killers getting deleted because of what director Oliver Stone felt was shameless overacting, and their dialogue here doesn’t help. It’s one thing to be bit dimwitted, but these guys are infantile and their chicken bone chant that they do is highly redundant and annoying. For big guys they’re quite wimpy as they allow their boss to grab them by the neck and during fights they get punched by men who are far smaller and immediately fall down backwards by the power of the blow though you’d think in reality the person doing the punching would get their hand injured and they’d run-off hollering while these two big buys would remain standing. Their profession isn’t interesting either and puts to waste their big muscles. Instead of driving a big rig they should be working as club bouncers, or security for celebrities, or even just owning a workout gym.
The plot is also cluttered with villains. Martin Mull plays the head of the evil agency and while he does get a few funny ad-libs I didn’t feel his part was necessary. David Carradine, who plays this cantankerous repo man that tries to take back the brothers’ truck, gets wasted too. Initially I was surprised why a star with his stature would even appear in this though I did find him amusing and the caricature he creates to be colorful, but the stupidity of the script overshadows him and since he’s only seen sporadically his acting efforts get lost.
Richard Kiel was the one bad guy that I did like. In his past roles he’s played the one who’s strong, but not bright, but in this film he’s the exasperated leader that gets irritated by the dummies around him. For this reason I thought he should’ve been the main heavy and Mull’s presence cut out completely. It’s also interesting seeing him take-on the Paul brothers as usually his physical presence dominates everyone else, but here it’s a much more of an even fight. I did though find it frustrating that we see him struggling to get out from underneath a car and the film then cuts away, only to see his character appear later, uninjured, with no explanation for how he got out of his predicament.
While Ari Meyers’, who’s best known for her work on the ‘Kate & Allie’ TV-show, acting isn’t the best she’s still easy-on-the-eyes and therefore should’ve been made the lead while the brothers could’ve been cast in support as these bumbling truckers she’d meet along the way, where their presence could be used as comic relief, but having the whole thing centered around them kills the movie right from the start. Throwing-in a sappy ‘life lesson’ speech at the end just makes it even worse and a genuine insult to the intelligence of anyone who sits through it.
My Rating: 1 out of 10
Released: October 23, 1989
Runtime: 1 Hour 26 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Director: Jon Turteltaub
Studio: Motion Picture Corporation of America
Available: VHS, DVD-R (dvdlady.com)
Scopophilia 