Like many, I watched the descent of Mickey Rourke’s career with undue fascination. Here was a genuinely talented man, with a handful of superb performances and films under his belt (Angel Heart, anyone?), slowly and by all accounts willingly transforming himself into a punchline. First, there was the soft porn of Zalman King’s Wild Orchid. Then Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. Finally, before his late-aughts comeback, he became a bloated replicant of himself, bare-chestedly battling Jean-Claude Van Damme to the death in a mine-infested tiger pit in Double Team. No legitimately great actor has ever fallen so low, although Wesley Snipes sure tries.

But of all of them, Point Blank is the one that serves as an object lesson for how far a man may fall before redemption. Not, sadly, a remake of the dynamic Lee Marvin classic (catch The Limey for that, sort of), this Point Blank is a painful slog through a third-rate Die Hard plot, enlivened only by moments of sincerely funny attempts to convince the audience that Rourke is a martial artist.

In a performance that defines the phrase “go fuck yourself,” Rourke is Rudy Ray (either the worst or greatest name in action-movie history), a former mercenary called into action when a group of escaped convicts, including his brother, takes over a shopping mall. Mickey mumbles and grunts inarticulately, then goes in, his skin glistening with what I presume to be … oil? God, I hope it’s oil.

What follows are scenes of action so inept, they are tailor-made for YouTube clips. And, yes, the filmmakers honestly expect us to believe that the slab of greased ham that is Rourke is backflipping his way out of Danny Trejo’s line of fire. Not even Trejo, or even the great James Gammon, can save this. Here’s a good drinking game: Take a shot every time Mickey completes a full sentence. You’ll barely get a buzz on. —Corey Redekop

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Ringo Lam (City on Fire) brought his might as one of Hong Kong’s most noted action directors to the West for Maximum Risk, the first of three assignments starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Said Muscles from Brussels plays the cop Alain Moreau, twin brother of Mikhail, the guy who’s killed in the kick-ass prologue. (And before we proceed, with this, Double Impact and Replicant, just how many double-trouble movies does Van Damme intend to make?)

To find out — about his sib’s death, not the number of twin movies — Alain travels from France to New York, where he enlists the help of a possibly autistic cabbie (Zach Grenier, TV’s Deadwood) who’s writing the Great American Novel. Everywhere he goes, Alain is mistaken as his brother, a “big-time gangster” who evidently betrayed the Russian mob.

Even club hostess and former stripper Alex (Natasha Henstridge) assumes he’s Mikhail, and thus, throws herself at him because she’s the dead dude’s GF. Alain, however, backs off from her advances, which is how you know this is not based on a true story. Later, however, after he spots a peek at her fabulously real breasts while she changes clothes, Alain’s into the idea of letting her rub her Species DNA all over his parts, and allows it.

But this is an action movie, and generic though much of may be, Maximum Risk does deliver in that department, with Lam excelling at staging the car chases more than the gunplay. As so many of these flicks tend to do for no discernible reason, its climax is set amid hanging animal carcasses. I’m a bit surprised Van Damme was willing to share the screen with another slab of meat. —Rod Lott

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There are two kinds of Chuck Norris films. The first create a decent enough entertainment around His Holy Beardness by surrounding him with actors capable enough to distract the audience from the immovable post that is Grimace Highkicky, such as Code of Silence or Lone Wolf McQuade. The other kind allows Fisty Hardcheese to carry the heft of the film on his own charisma, leading us down a jagged path of despair to Hero and the Terror and The Hitman.

I’ve never seen the original Delta Force, but considering its cast includes George Kennedy (!), Robert Vaughn (!!), Robert Forster (!!!) and Lee Fuckin’ Marvin (!!!!!), I figure it must, at its worst, be an enjoyable shoot-’em-up. By comparison, Delta Force 2 has Billy Drago annnnddd … that’s it. Give Drago some credit: His performance as a drug lord is so ridiculously oily, he becomes not only the highlight of the film, but the only reason to see it.

Directed by Aaron Norris (favorite bro of Bristle McSoloflex, and as fine a director as his sib is an actor), Delta Force 2 finds Punch Rockgroin leading some kind of anti-terrorist group, a leader so magnetic that no backstory or character development is necessary. After a friend is killed by Drago, The Beard with No Name works out his rage by kicking the snot out of his men in a training exercise and then traveling to South America for revenge, backed by the U.S. government.

Much poorly choreographed shooting and roundhouse kicking follows. If nothing else, Delta Force 2 serves as a primer for right-wing darling McFootinyourface’s nuanced understanding of U.S. foreign policy.

Fun fact: Chuck Norris is the only man alive with less facial expressions than Steven Seagal. —Corey Redekop

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It may have a Playboy Playmate in the lead, but Andy Sidaris’ Stacey is the most un-Sidaris movie Sidaris ever made (documentary The Racing Scene excepted). No matter. It’s still a damn good time. Anne Randall portrays Stacey, “the centerfold private eye,” and she’s actually a better actress than one usually finds in Sidaris movies, exuding a real wholesome, Heather Graham quality. As the film begins, she tells us she “just finished a case involving a pet chimpanzee and a talking parrot. The chimp was a slob and the bird knew too much. The maid shot them both.” Whatever that means.

Stacey is hired by a rich, old bat in Bel Air who is confined to a wheelchair, on which hangs a bullhorn so she can yell for people to push her. The woman wants Stacey to find out exactly who’s who and what’s what among her family members so she’ll know to whom she should leave her inheritance.

It doesn’t take long for Stacey to find out the chauffeur is banging the whoreish wife and trying to blackmail her with pictures of their trysts. The real mystery comes when the chauffeur is stabbed to death, but Stacey — whether she’s wearing blouses, bikinis or bare breasts — is on the case, lugging her pilot boyfriend around as she investigates. After barely escaping death a second time in one day, he finally asks her calmly, “Stace, will you tell me what that was all about?”

The action centerpiece is a bloody shootout in the parking lot of a speedway (where nary a bystander even bats an eye), soon leading to two goons in a helicopter chasing Stacey in a borrowed race car down the coastline highway. This being a Sidaris film, there’s plenty of action in the bedroom, too, and Randall is quite the hottie. Hell, even with the huge hair and the ugliest of ’70s outfits, she’s still a hottie. I also didn’t mind her T-shirt, which reads “FONDLE WITH CARE,” too. —Rod Lott

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Today, Steven Paul is best known (if at all) as the guy who keeps Jon Voight working in such modern crapsterpieces as Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Karate Dog and Bratz, but back in 1986, he was busy trying to live down the failure of his infamous 1982 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation, Slapstick (of Another Kind), which likely will go down in history as the worst movie ever made based on a book by a modern literary master.

Apparently, Hollywood decided four years was long enough to leave him dangling before allowing him to co-write and produce Never Too Young to Die, a strange attempt to create a new action franchise that tried to fuse the retro campiness of ’60s secret agent movies with the gender-bending campiness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Future Full House icon John Stamos plays Lance Stargrove the (teenage?) son of American secret agent Drew Stargrove (George Lazenby, who presumably got the part because Roger Moore read it and told Paul and company to go fuck themselves), who’s killed attempting to stop an evil scheme to turn the nation’s drinking water into radioactive sludge by a hermaphroditic maniac named Velvet Von Ragner (Gene Simmons, summoning the collective spirits of John LaZar and Tim Curry). Lance is aided in his mission to avenge his father’s death by his glamorous partner Danja Deering (ex-Prince associate and Tanya’s Island star Vanity, who isn’t quite hot enough to make up for the fact that she’s one of the worst actresses of all time) and his (boarding school/college?) roommate Cliff (Peter Kwong), an Asian gadget genius.

Directed by TV vet Gil Bettman, Never Too Young to Die clearly was meant to stand out from the ’80s action crowd, but its overt attempts at over-the-top campiness only serve to highlight how boring and generally crappy the rest of the film is. Simmons obviously had a fun time playing his version of an Adam West Batman villain, but his giddiness only serves to prove how bland Stamos and Vanity are in comparison. Because of this, the implied sequels never happened and the chances of Stamos ever appearing in an Expendables entry turned to naught. Somehow, however, Paul managed to keep on working, if only to give his friend, Voight — who gets a songwriting credit (!) in this flick — a much-needed paycheck every now and then. —Allan Mott

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