Radical Jack

Yikes.

"No one can hold him back"

Hi folks, welcome to another riveting edition of the Tagline! I know what you were thinking, "Oh hey Justin's totally going to review Age of Ultron this week!" THINK AGAIN SUCKERS I'm going to review this fucking piece of steaming garbage. What's better than a stupid movie about a CIA ninja soldier man? A movie about that where the supposed badass is played by Billy Ray Cyrus. Yeah that's right, welcome to my nightmare. This film was released in the year 2000, when the world was kind of ridiculous, and it's called Radical Jack. It doesn't 'star' anyone per se, but features Mr. Billy Ray "Achy Breaky Heart" Cyrus as the eponymous Radical Jack, which is his very real sounding code name, and definitely isn't reminiscent of any British statesmen. Anyway, Jack used to be a Navy Seal, but now he's double fisting booze and hanging out in a bar somewhere, until he gets called out of his... deep drunk cover to take a new mission, one that will give him a chance to get even with the man who took everything from him (you know murdered his wife and kid naturally). So without further explicit telling of everything happening in the movie with awkward exposition, Jack heads to the small town of Who-Gives-a-Fuck, Vermont, where he poses as an extremely conspicuous bartender at a local roadhouse. In addition to exciting the lady bartenders, Jack's other job is to locate a local arms dealer, who for some reason does all his business in the middle of nowhere, I mean I don't know who he's selling illegal arms to in the woods but... we'll overlook that I guess for now.

Finding screenshots of this gem was tough...

Of course, the story wouldn't be complete if there wasn't a lady that Jack could fall in sex with, despite his anguish over his dead wife. In a better movie, this role might be played by a famous person, but here we'll just have to settle for a lesser Pfeiffer. Because in poorly written fiction coincidence is king, Jack's love interest Kate is also the very recently former mistress of Rolland, the son of the aforementioned arms dealer, and also a massive tool. This establishes that Kate has absolutely miserable taste in men, and therefore makes her intense interest in Jack a lot more believable, despite the fact that his heart is so achy breaky. Also he has a super cool mullet did I mention that? Well he does, it really completes his radical look. Kate's best friend keeps trying to warn her that Rolland is maybe a bad guy, because you know he is a well known criminal, murderer, woman abuser, adulterer, just generally the worst kind of person imaginable, but it takes Jack, another man, for her to finally make that leap. Rolland is not impressed, and responds with some good old fashioned lady beating, but not before Jack does some good old fashioned Rolland beating.

Who would change their stage name to Dedee honestly.

This brings up a really important point about this movie, and that's that the action is really pretty bad. I suppose that's to be expected, but I mean... if this is how navy SEAL/CIA special agents are trained, I'm surprised that we haven't lost every military engagement our nation has ever been involved in. His training apparently involved things like, sloppy fist fighting, getting beat up by common thugs, walking into obvious traps, and spying on people so near to them in broad daylight that you would need to be dead not to notice. I'm really serious about that last one too, there's a scene where he's watching Rolland from his jeep about maybe 10 feet away from him, but somehow no one notices, perhaps because Jack is secretly some sort of redneck Jedi who uses a mind trick on them all. Needless to say, but Jack is one radical, gnarly, totally tubular dude, who knows how to get into sort of drunken brawls in the parking lot. Imagine Roadhouse, but only really terrible, and you have a pretty good idea about what to expect.

Y'know, I think he's almost TOO radical.

A direct to video garbage movie wouldn't be complete without awkward near nudity and really strange almost-sex scenes. Jack keeps trying to stave this off, because he can't engage in kissy-type behaviors without launching into uncontrollable flashbacks of his dead wife and family. Still, there's some time for some sleezy sex followed by murder, to establish that this movie wholeheartedly subscribes to the idea that woman exist to validate men, or be used and then disposed of. Basically they're cheap props and plot devices, and not actual people or characters. That said, they're more than capable of killing guys with guns, even if they've never touched one in their life. Basically anyone who picks up a handgun becomes a skilled assassin, if we can judge by Kate's kill count in the final warehouse confrontation.

Other highlights of the film include the old arms dealer dad, whose teeth are so horrifying that it will keep me up at night for weeks, and also the ruthless wife of the dead young sheriff, who has no compunctions against banging some murderer who killed her husband, if it means she might be able to get in on some of the hot criminal action. I think the only thing that could have made this movie better was if Billy Ray had taken some time out to sing some country music at the bar. That's it for now! Join me next week when I will actually review Age of Ultron.