The last few years have not been kind to some of our great­est actors, what with Steven Seagal’s weight gain, Sasha Mitchell’s nasty divorce and descent into cameos on third-rate police dra­mas (Why?), and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s uphill bat­tle with dig­nity ever since Knock Off. The post-90’s bug appar­ently bit every­body except for, you guessed it, Dolph Lund­gren. And being one of our more pro­lific action direc­tors and stars on the mar­ket, he’s about to deliver 2200 pounds of pres­sure per square inch of awe­some to your loins with Com­mand Per­for­mance, his lat­est face-rearranging epic. It’s a flawed yet bril­liant cin­e­matic gem that simul­ta­ne­ously crushes every aesthetic-loving bone in your body while sati­at­ing every manly part of your soul with its unflinch­ing vio­lence and Lundgren’s refresh­ingly good per­for­mance. If you can over­look the half­hearted Russ­ian accents and the jerky cam­era move­ments that seem to be more appro­pri­ate for hard­core Japan­ese porn films, then it lives up to its billing as the great­est movie where Dolph Lund­gren fights ter­ror­ists at a rock con­cert. Ever.

The Lund­gren­ian star sys­tem for review­ing action films

Before I move on, I feel it’s nec­es­sary to explain the metic­u­lous cri­te­ria by which I gauge action films. Famil­iar­ize your­self with the Lund­gren­ian star sys­tem, which essen­tially relies on two cat­e­gories: plot and violence.

You will obey the star sys­tem. If you don’t, he’ll be waiting.

Plot: This is where a bunch of words and actions typ­i­cally explain, con­sti­tute, or lay the foun­da­tion for a series of events in a lit­er­ary or cin­e­matic work. Of course, this is pretty much use­less unless it’s one of the fol­low­ing films: Any­thing that’s not an action film with the excep­tion of First Blood. To it’s credit, it tried to go down this route until Sylvester Stal­lone and James Cameron turned Rambo into a commie-killing ultra man, which is prob­a­bly what God would’ve wanted anyway.

Vio­lence: Pretty straight­for­ward. A gen­uine action film requires scenes in which peo­ple are being killed, maimed, dis­fig­ured, vapor­ized, or turned into mush­room soup, etc.  Basi­cally, a movie gets a per­fect score in this cat­e­gory as long as xenomorphs, Godzilla, or peo­ple — which, by def­i­n­i­tion, includes zom­bies and Gary Busey — are killing peo­ple, and it’s not as bor­ing as shit. Most films meet this cri­te­ria unless they’re Full Metal Jacket, which doesn’t count because thin air doesn’t count as people.

Both of these val­ues are then used in a time-tested and wholly non-arbitrary method to deter­mine how incon­tro­vert­ibly awe­some action films are, which we know as a star sys­tem. The Lund­gren­ian star sys­tem, to be pre­cise, goes from one to five, with five denot­ing sheer cin­e­matic great­ness and one being Fat Slags (2004). So, with­out fur­ther ado, the review:

Plot

The plot, more or less.

Dolph Lund­gren plays your ordi­nary drum­mer with firearms and close com­bat exper­tise who gets caught in the mid­dle of a tense sit­u­a­tion when ultra-nationalist ter­ror­ists take over a rock con­cert in Moscow, mow­ing down hun­dreds of patrons and tak­ing the attend­ing Russ­ian Pres­i­dent and his fam­ily hostage for good mea­sure. The ter­ror­ists’ motives some­how rotate between grand lar­ceny and revenge, and their pal­try attempts at act­ing that go part and par­cel with their ran­dom scream­ing and obscenity-laced solil­o­ques fur­ther com­pli­cate our efforts to find out which, but we really don’t need to. We don’t watch action films for dis­cern­ing plots or Shake­spearean thes­pi­anism, so most of this is negligible.

Rat­ing:

Not applic­a­ble, but it gets a 5/5 because Dolph Lund­gren is in it.

Vio­lence

The money shot

Who says that Dolph Lund­gren can’t do improv? In over an hour and a half of B-grade gut-twisting may­hem, he goes through the laun­dry list of ways in which every­day objects can be used as instru­ments of lethally-retributive jus­tice. To wit, he shanks two ter­ror­ists in the face with a ka-bar, impales another one with an elec­tric gui­tar, blud­geons another one to death with the blunt end of a Kalash­nikov, and jump kicks one more into a leaky faucet. The orig­i­nal script sup­pos­edly involved a scene where he shishke­babs some­one with the drum­sticks, but the pro­duc­ers decided at the last minute that it’d be too macabre.

Rat­ing:

4.5/5, with a point docked because it didn’t have a scene where he plays Mason Williams’ Clas­si­cal Gas after split­ting some­one in half with a ukulele.

The Ver­dict

So with every­thing tab­u­lated and adjusted for the lack of a scene where some­body lauds his report­edly large endow­ment, Com­mand Per­for­mance scores a keen 4.75 out of 5 on the Lund­gren­ian star sys­tem for hav­ing Dolph Lund­gren and copi­ous amounts of Lundgren-induced violence.

Thus, it’s a must see unless you’re fat or even in the least bit finicky over what you fancy.