Okay, so, um, this movie was really good? I did not expect that, like, at all.
This franchise makes absolutely no sense. The first movie comes out and is your spectacular late 80's/early 90's actioness (that's how you describe a female lion action movie). The second and third movie come out on TV and are reportedly so awful that they are erased from existence, so a new second movie is released with Jean Claude, the star of the first movie. The second movie was awful, but evidently not as awful as the first second movie, so it "counted." Then they needed to make a new third movie to replace the bad third movie but it was really the fifth movie, and it is AWESOME but also ignores the second second movie completely even though that one was supposed to count dammit! Also, this movie advances time like sixteen years and pretends that we are still at war with Russia.
Like I said, this movie once again decides to ignore pretty much everything that has happened before it. The second movie, where Jean Claude was inexplicably no longer a zombie robot shoulder but now a father and a man, either didn't happen or hasn't happened yet. I don't know. In this movie, Jean Claude is in a secluded Russian house being coached on how to become human. I don't think he has a daughter. Nor does he like boobs that much. He's indifferent towards them. He has a problem: he doesn't know how to become human because that would be way too much of a stretch for Jean Claude, so he beats up a guy in a restaurant for some reason. Then the US Army kidnaps him and says, "No human for you!" and makes him a zombie soldier again. This was good for Jean Claude (who, as it happens, has really done a decent job in the two "post-cocaine-addiction" era movies I've seen him in).
Here's sort of the plot: there is a bad Russian guy who has a UFC guy who is now a zombie soldier and a doctor on his payroll that manages and makes zombie soldiers and the Russian guy wants some of his friends released from prison so he easily kidnaps some kids and the doctor who made that zombie soldier for the Russian guy also hates the Russian guy so much that he brings Dolph Lundgren's zombie soldier from the first movie back to life even though Dolph Lundgren's zombie soldier was ground into a billion pieces by a farm combine. Also, Dolph Lundgren's zombie soldier never worked too good, and this has not changed. He immediately kills the doctor right after killing the Russian guy. MEANWHILE! Jean Claude decides to break out of the place where he's being re-zombified and runs to the place where UFC zombie and Dolph zombie are. He had to complete the mission no one told him about:
Save the kidnapped children of some other Russian guy who I think was the Russian president and stop people from blowing up the old Chernobyl plant. Oh yeah, this movie happened at Chernobyl. Is that in Russia? I think of all of those USSR places as Russia because it's easier to spell than everything else.
Spoiler! Jean Claude wins. He kills zombie Dolph (sidebar: even though they're zombies, Dolph and Jean Claude aged. Do zombies age? I don't know if we have a big enough sample of zombies that have survived longer than a few months to know. I mean, they might show some wear and tear, but they shouldn't age right? RIGHT?!?)
I don't know. The plot really sort of just fell apart about halfway through the movie. There were characters with motivation. Then Dolph killed them all as soon as he got introduced because he didn't want to answer questions. Really. That just left three zombie soldiers fighting over two kids who no longer mattered. BUT:
This movie was great. It was a very serious movie. I know this because it was shot with a blue-tinted filter. This also helped me know it was in Russia because Russia is so cold and so blue. There were a decent amount of explosions. Most of it was wrestling. The acting wasn't horrendous considering who the stars were. I would have actually preferred the original stars just stayed home because the movie took a weird, pointless turn once they started to show up. The movie had a cliffhanger which makes me now legally obligated to watch the fourth one in 3D in a movie theater.
This movie's ramifications to The Expendables: It shows that Dolph is now really old and looks nothing like Ivan Drago but still acts as bad as Ivan Drago, so that's good.
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