Product: Mean Guns [VHS] (1997)
Rating: 4.0
"Get this straight, nipples... this ain't the Girl Scouts of Melrose Place."
I tell ya, nothing goes with fragging someone like mambo music. It used to be banjos, but that turned out to be a flash in the pan, and no one ever did capitalize on DELIVERANCE. MEAN GUNS rolled around in 1997 in all its made-for-cable glory (or, at least, that's where I first saw it), and it rapidly lured you in with its soup of hot mambo and nasty dark humor and sparse plotting and its onslaught of screeching bullets and homicidal attitude. Mmmm, fun.Ice-T breaks it down: In one way or another, they've all betrayed a powerful crime syndicate. The syndicate's representative is Vincent Moon (Ice-T) and he means to mete out a balanced measure of punishment, reward and entertainment. The site is this vacated penitentiary, in which a host of killers and reprobates (and maybe an innocent or two) is set loose and scrambling for the tossed-out cache of firearms and the heaps of ammo and the baseball bats for the anti-NRA contingent. Moon's offer: Everyone kills everyone. The last surviving three split ten million dollars. The deadline is in six hours. Off you go.Plot, schmlot. This isn't Jane Austen's MEAN GUNS. It's Ice-T's MEAN GUNS, and that means lots of hip hop swagger and teeth made of platinum and what passes nowadays for cool gangsta shizzy. Christopher Lambert, with his raspy, French-tinged accent and the street creds garnered from HIGHLANDER still somewhat intact, he saunters in playing a demented killer who gets himself invited into the "tournament" because he thought it would be fun. Accompanying him to the bloodbath is a little girl, because I guess you gotta do what you gotta do when you can't scarce up a babysitter or when you're barking mad. Lou, Lambert's character, tends to chew Valium, Prozac, and Ritalin. So "barking mad" it is. Demonstrating a streak of common sense, the film doesn't even try to portray Lou as the good guy. In fact, a good guy is nary in sight.The tongue-in-cheek vibe and the mambo soundtrack (and the occasional Spaghetti Western guitar riffs) perform a sleight-of-hand trick, enlivening things, lending an off-kilter note, distracting us from the fact that this B-movie could just as easily be this repetitive and morose shoot-'em-up. And, of course, we already realize that it's all senseless. It could've been interesting, being privy to these little immorality plays and seeing how the group dynamics would form and then the inevitable back-stabbings and falling out. But, really, there's not much of an attempt at characterization and you end up not giving much of a whiff for anyone onscreen. Even the cute little girl wants blood. 'Kill that creep, will you, Marcus?" she suggests. We're left with cardboard cutout characters, all but one of which are supremely callous and amoral.If there's one prohibitive person that you pull for, I suppose it's Marcus, that wintry gent who looks like Lyle Lovett nursing a grudge. But his recounting of a fable about cannibalistic bears doesn't count as character development. And you certainly don't root for Ice-T. You know that sucker's gonna get his sooner or later. He can't sit in his control room the entire movie, watching the bloody spectacle on his all-seeing surveillance camera, hovering over his pewter chess pieces like the master manipulator that he is.The DVD includes the trailer and a bio and filmography for both Lambert and Ice-T. Seedy stuff indeed. These two cats aren't what you'd call top-shelf actors, and MEAN GUNS, looked at one way, can be easily dismissed as a meagerly budgeted claptrap of action cliches. I happen to think that the judicious application of mambo salvages the movie, that the bent characters, hollow and trite, do work because of the dynamics involved, and the violence is so cheerfully over-the-top that I ended up overlooking the cheesier, lamer elements. Because interspersed here and there are some pretty nifty action-packed moments. Ultimately I have to quote Lou, that unhinged pistolero who must've called out to the perverse in me: "Sorry, I couldn't help it... heh heh... just too much fun."