Chain Of Command (1994)
Sometimes I look back on my life and reflect at the amazing and positively fantastical things that I have seen. Mind boggling disasters, assassinations, the collapse of Communism (except in China, North Korea and Cuba), KISS taking their make up off and then putting it back on, and of course the rise and fall of Diet Vanilla Coke. The thing though that causes me the most goosebumps when I sink back into one of my lengthy summer evening revelries is that I actually was alive to see commercials on TV for Michael Dudikoff movies that were coming to actual movie theaters!
I remember seeing an ad for his Platoon Leader and thinking that it looked and sounded a lot like Oliver Stone's Platoon, but more exciting! And American Ninja? I would have traded, sold, or killed my entire family for a chance to go see that once I got a look at those commercials! And if you think I'm just riding Dudikoff as some doofus action hero for cheap laughs, all I have to say to you is that American Ninja grossed more on its opening weekend than Basic Instinct 2! And that's a straight dollar for dollar comparison with no adjustments for inflation, despite the fact that American Ninja was karate chopping its way through the competition more than 20 years ago! Maybe Sharon Stone should have been making a sequel with Steven Seagal to Above the Law instead?
The mid 1980s were heady times indeed for both action heroes and their fans. I can even remember a time when not only would Dudikoff get some TV exposure and theatrical releases, but so would Jeff Speakman! Jeff Speakman? This was a guy whose gimmick was being a forgettably bland kenpo expert! Sadly, the home video market seems to have killed off any impetus for movie companies to release their low budget action films to the big screen and the only commercials we see for those kinds of movies that now go straight to DVD usually star Wesley Snipes.
Don't feel too bad for Dudikoff though because since American Ninja he's been in 30 plus movies. Admittedly, you've never heard of any of them, but I don't think that's a requirement for cashing a paycheck. One of them was 1994's Chain of Command and it was released by Cannon Pictures near the end of its second life. Cannon as you may recall was famous during the 1980s for all those Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Michael Dudikoff movies along with big budget bombs like Over the Top and Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. It went belly up at the end of the 1980s and resurfaced with half of the Golan-Globus team in the early 1990s and hacked up a few more action hairballs before finally giving up the ghost for good.
While Chain of Command is truly abominable on every level, it's really almost Italian-esque in the pleasingly effortless way it manages to get so many of the little things we take for granted in movies so wrong. Like hair. In looking back on the hair situation in this one, I can only surmise that Dudikoff used his pull as premiere third-rate straight to video action star to make sure his hair was the best in the movie by default. You had guys with hair slicked back. You had a guy with hair thinning in not one, but two spots on his head. You had a guy wearing a Richard Marx wig. Truth be told, I had forgotten that pop singer Richard Marx had ever existed until I watched head bad guy Rawlings strut into an oil company and take it over and I said to myself without thinking, "hey, the head bad guy named Rawlings is wearing a Richard Marx wig."
I bought this movie for $9.99 at Best Buy and as soon as I saw Richard Marx roll in and order all the non-American oil workers shot, I put the movie on pause, drove back out to Best Buy and promptly gave them another $9.99. The Richard Marx wig would have been more than enough, but Rawlings was a character with more depth than just a guy with the pelt of some unidentified roadkill on his head. Sometimes, he even put it into a pony tail. And I have to say that whomever was in charge of wigs for this movie did an excellent job because when Dudikoff was throwing Rawlings around by it, the dang thing never came loose. At all!
Just as hideously appealing as Rawlings' headdress was Michael Dudikoff's character. Or perhaps, I should call him Michael Dudikuss, because that's pretty much all he did during this movie. Apparently one of the main things they teach in Green Beret School and what you learn on your way to becoming an antiterrorist expert who ends up as a consultant for Western Oil is how to use the F-word. A lot. I'm a Super Strong Christian and much closer to God than any of you, but hell, I've been known to throw a cuss around when it was called for, so it's not like I'm aghast when someone calls a no good terrorist a dirty name. But this Dudikuss character! He must have gone to F-Con 4 at least 100 times in this movie! By the time we were in the last third of the movie, I couldn't help but laugh whenever he ejaculated his four letter friend. I suppose it was all part of the gritty action persona that went along with smoking cigarettes throughout the proceedings.
Another point in this movie's favor was its indiscriminate use of slow motion. Whenever there was an action sequence that needed that little something extra to distract us from the fact that it was really just Dudikuss ducking behind a counter while bottles smashed everywhere, the action would slow down so that we could appreciate its low wattage impact even more. I especially liked during one fight scene how the action went into slow motion, but Rawlings continued to speak in normal motion. Oh, and if the first forty minutes of the movie felt like it was playing out in slow motion, that's just your imagination. Well, that and the warmed-over dog puke that passes for the story and the intensely irritating female character that Dudikuss is forced to bicker with inanely. It's not like I was truly rooting for her to be violated by Rawlings' switchblade and lit cigar when he had her tied to a pool table in an underground lair at the end of the movie, but I really wasn't on the edge of my seat rooting for Dudikuss to get there any sooner than necessary.
The actual story behind all this foul-mouthed slow-mo mayhem makes as much sense as having the U.S. ambassador to the fictional middle east country involved be dressed in a sweat suit whenever he's in his office. The head of Western Oil is scheming to take over the country of Qumir and somehow Dudikuss gets mixed up in trying to stop him. There's lots of talk about the CIA, some bogus Qumir rebel group, and Mossad, but it all boils down to Dudikuss copying a couple of Microsoft Excel files from a Western Oil Company's computer onto a floppy disk which shows charts and graphs about how they're going to take over Qumir.
All that's just filler until he and Rawlings can have their showdown in the underground lair/bar that the head of Western Oil has in his headquarters. Dudikuss is one of those he-men that likes his showdowns hand to hand so he ditches his automatic weapon and goes after Rawlings with just the bayonet knife! What follows is a lot of slashing, heaving of one another into various breakable objects, smashing chairs over Dudikuss, and Rawlings even manages to find an old battle axe to swing around!
Rawlings shows some spunk when he's beating up Dudikuss and dumps him on the pool table by his still tied-up gal pal and starts to taunt her with lines like "what do you think of your boyfriend now!" I like a guy who can keep his head about him and remember the important things, even during a fight to the death! And a fight to the death it was!
Even Rawlings' fancy wig and witty banter can't stop Dudikuss from running him through with a pool cue! But Rawlings has the last laugh when, with the pool cue sticking clear out of his back about a foot, he says "my mama said there'd be days like this!" Okay, well I laughed anyway. But wait! Dudikuss returns fire with his own cutting witticism. Ready? "Not like this!" Uh, yeah. I guess we'll go ahead and give you that one, Dudikuss. You know, since you killed his ass and all. Sheesh.
I'd like to report that that was the end of the movie, but Dudikuss actually killed about 20 more guys as he, his girlfriend and their prisoner, the head of Western Oil, escaped in a helicopter. You could tell by this time though that even the filmmakers had lost all interest in the story, because they just had the helicopter fly off into the sunset with three paragraphs of text explaining what happened to everyone. Except for Dudikuss and his girlfriend! Come on! What the F happened to them? Did those F-ers get married? F each other silly or what? F me! I need to know! In any case, be sure to stick around for the credits so that you can hear Canadian metal group Slash Puppet's energetic performance of their hit song, "When the Whip Comes Down." All you need to know about them is that the cover to their album featured a monkey in a Civil War uniform riding a dog while another dog dressed in women's clothes watched. But what I want to know is which one of those F-ers was wearing the Richard Marx wig?