CYBORG COP (1993)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In the first of three DTV flicks devoted to cops who fight cyborgs (not, as the title suggests, a cop who is a cyborg), the lead hero is one Jack Ryan, who’s also in the second but not the third film, and is played both times by David “Second American Ninja” Bradley.

Jack is a former DEA agent who just can’t follow the rules of the game, and so gets forced out of the organization when he antagonizes the great enemy of all action-heroes, the bleeding-heart American press. His brother Philip, also an agent, tries to carry on the fight against a drug-cartel, but the craven commander of Philip’s task force refuses to commit his whole forces to an invasion of the drug-lord’s island HQ. Jack thus has a mad-on for the whole world and makes plans to rescue his brother. On the way he accidentally falls in with an annoying lady journalist. Despite his less than winning ways, she becomes his main squeeze.

The targeted drug-lord, Professor Kessel, is also a designer of cyborgs for sale to third-world countries, and he uses the body of the slain Philip for one of his projects. Kessel, being enacted by John Rhys-David, provides the only bright spot in this predictable thriller, for the script gives the actor the attitude of a winsome child who’s endlessly pleased with his own cleverness. Aside from a mildly interesting villain, it’s a lot of shooting and fighting, a little better photographed than the average action-film—certainly better than Firstenberg’s two American Ninja films.

Bradley, who had attempted to play a stone-faced hero in his “ninja” efforts, goes to the other extreme with his irritable protagonist, but never proves sympathetic at the best of times. Oddly, though Firstenberg never directed any of Bradley’s ninja-outings, he did previously helm a flick devoted to Bradley as an “American Samurai.”