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I love this movie so much

Excellent but underrated film

Absolutely the worst movie.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Back in 'Nam, Santos (Vennera) rescued McBain (Walken) when he was captured and made a prisoner. A bond developed between the two men, as represented by a ripped hundred dollar bill. In the present, Santos is leading a revolutionary army in Colombia against the dictator oppressing their country. When Santos dies in that fight, his sister Christina (Alonso) goes to New York to find McBain. McBain then agrees to help Christina finish what Santos started, and rally the revolutionary rebels to victory. To do this, he re-assembles his team of old 'Nam buddies, including Eastland (James), Dalton (Patterson) and Frank (Ironside), among other helpers. Will McBain's team - and the people of Colombia - be victorious? Thanks to its cast and its professional sheen, McBain was one of the more well-known action titles around video stores back in the golden age. While it may not have had the visibility of a Van Damme, Seagal, Stallone or Schwarzenegger vehicle, it did have Christopher Walken instead, which is interesting - you don't see him in roles like this too often. The only other one that comes to mind is The Dogs of War (1980). Walken's square hair and Steve James wearing a Wrestlemania hat brandishing a rocket launcher is a great combination.At its heart, this is just another exploding hut/falling guard tower movie, it's just glossier. Imagine your standard "El Presidente" movie (for an explanation of this, see our review for Hour of the Assassin, 1987) crossed with the camaraderie of Last of the Finest (1990). The film tries to be all things to all people, throwing a lot at the viewer: A Vietnam movie, an urban thriller, an airplane slog, A Mercenary action movie, and the aforementioned El Presidente and Exploding Hut scenarios are thrown in too, and the movie, trying to accommodate all these things, is overlong.Alonso is there to provide the societal comment and relevance to supposedly justify all the action, and Steve James proves he's one of the most under-appreciated and awesomely cool stars of the era. And who wouldn't want to do what McBain's team does - get the old gang back together to bust some heads? This A-Team-inspired scenario is appealing, but there's way too much fat around this steak. The middle section, where the gang is in New York City taking down the baddies, is excellent. The whole movie should have been THAT. But there's all this other stuff, like an interminable tangent about airplanes and bogeys and such. In our eyes, even though McBain is of a higher quality and budget than a lot of the stuff out there, that ends up being irrelevant because the movie doesn't live up to its potential. That New York City section, rather than just being a color on the action movie palette listed earlier, should have been expanded and brought to its full flower.While the movie is called McBain (not to be confused with Frank "Bulletproof" McBain or the Simpsons character), it's really not ABOUT Christopher Walken's character per se. We don't know that much about him, and the movie doesn't really revolve around him. It's more about his team and the Colombian rebels scenario.While there are some cool aspects to this movie, we can't wholeheartedly recommend it, which is a shame, because we'd like to. But the NYC portion of the film and the presence of Steve James, while they can't support the whole thing, are bright spots in this mixed bag of a movie.for more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com

This is a rather nonsensical action drama, with plenty of (entirely unintentional) comedy to go round. To start with, the film itself is called 'McBain.' Anyone who saw that famous Arnold spoof in 'The Simpsons' could be forgiving for looking twice at this title, which essentially features the same cut-and-paste plot, cheesy acting, and incoherent developments that Wolfcastle parodied. It's really nothing great but worth watching for the belly laughs at all the countless errors and overbearing cheesiness!The 'plot' involves a Vietnam Vet Bobby McBain (Walken)whose friend Santos, a Colombian revolutionary, is killed by the evil dictator on live TV, whose sister comes to McBain to help organize a revolution in that country. For no real reason, other than to alleviate his self-confessed boredom and to avenge his Columbian ex-colleague from Nam, he and his gang of overtly gay middle aged nerds get into a little prop plane and fly off to Colombia to do this. I started writing a review for this, but deleted it because it ended up totally incoherent. No wonder really, as the madness I was trying to chart is so messed up it's really hard to know where to start. So instead of indignantly providing analogies of McBain's sheer crappiness, I'll just list a few examples from the film which sum it up suitably:• several people are murdered by people who we have seen die themselves moments earlier• the special effects, especially some mid-air explosions, look like they were done by a small child with a chemistry set• at one point, McBain is sitting in the co-pilot seat of a small prop plane. Flying next to them is a jet whose pilot is trying to force them to land. McBain pulls out this stupidly small pistol, and shoots the jet pilot, who crashes, despite the noticeable non-smashing of either windscreen!• Some rebels attempt to infiltrate the presidential palace using a stretched limo. The driver opens the boot and four men jump out. Four! • Near the end of the film, a government soldier was asking an old man at a café if he has seen Christina, the rebel leader. He beats the man who doesn't tell him anything. This is great because at the next table are a load of American mercenaries in sunglasses, Hawaiian shirts, and fedora hats! • In a similar vein, during all the battle scenes the good guys can generally just stand around without so much as a bullet touching them, where the bad guys get routinely mowed, and in many cases clearly fail to even notice the machinegun-toting middle aged mercenaries!• The doctor of the group has to perform emergency surgery on a little girl after a battle. He says she would die without proper facilities, but McBain tells him to go ahead as she would die anyway. After briefly slicing her with a little knife (the girl has had her rib cage severely crushed), she sits there for a second, and smiles! The stupidest survival from mortal wounding since Marie in Biggles: Adventures in Time.• A tall, Germanic looking drug dealer is really running Colombia. Predictably, he is called Hans.• A typical example of the nonsense value of the plot: the group doctor declares he is going to stay with the wounded to help them. Then, in the next scene, he is back doing soldiering!• And another: at the start, the guys are told the Vietnam War is over, and they get into their helicopter to fly home. All of a sudden they see one VC on the ground, and decide to launch a full scale covert assault on a POW camp they hadn't even seen. Yeah, that's exactly what you do right after getting discharged.• You know a movie is in trouble when even the extras don't look convincing. I blame the director.Normally I like mercenary movies. They make great viewing and the body count is typically high enough to make up for the lack of plot. Skeleton Coast and Wild Geese were both enjoyable. But McBain, thanks to a total lack of plot development, realistic effects, bearable acting, and tongue in cheek humour, comes across merely as a convoluted, confused mess. In honesty it looked like a load of set pieces had been brought in from a variety of scripts, banged together any which way, and then tagged together with the formulaic 'South American dictator/drug baron revolution' shtick.Don't get me wrong I sat through it fine, it was never boring, because I was splitting my sides most of the time at the hilariously bad production values and situations. There are some pretty good moments, such as when McBain's gang kidnap a gangster called John Cambotti and dangle him off a skyscraper pretending to be Israeli agents. That part was cool. But the set-up for it, where they killed everyone in a crack house without either taking the money or destroying the drugs, and getting a lecture from the drug chief, was so artificial I just didn't understand why it was put in. Needless to say, mindless killing and slaughter is only entertaining if its well done on a technical level, unlike this ham-fest, where someone is dragged out of a window after a ceiling fan and hundreds of extras overtly mis-time their exaggerated death throesThere is lots of violence but some of it is so poorly done that it actually looks funny, which is not always a good thing. I bought this DVD for £1.49, which in retrospect seems like a bit of a rip-off. I'll hang onto it though, for any occasion in which I want to either play drinking games for number of dead etc, or as a showcase for some truly shoddy film-making.

First of all i'd just like to say this movie rawked more than any of the recent crap that hollywood has cooked up out of its bowels. McBain is a true action film with more violence than most viewers can handle. It has all of the classic elements of a late 80's/early 90's action film....the random gratuitous acts of violence (ie. when Walken and crew go in to confront the drug dealers to get money they just show up and kill them rather than letting them live and just taking their money), the snapping of necks, the guys on fire, the guys that get blown off buildings, and of course the guys who are on fire that get blown off of buildings. Walken is at his finest in this picture delivering memorable lines such as, "let's go sit..........out on the deck." and others that make this film a top buy off of the clearence rack at the local video store. if you have a bloodlust for unnecessary random acts of violence rent this movie today and satisfy your thirst.

Okay, 'enjoy' is a pretty relative term, but flexibility is in order when you're dealing with a filmmaker of James Glickenhaus' calibre.McBain is truly one of the most ridiculous, over the top action films I've ever seen, without the nasty edge of The Exterminator. Other reviews have commented on a suspension of disbelief regarding the film's heroic middle aged commandos, but how about making a film in the Philippines that is set in Colombia? All the extras are Filipino. In fact the only character who looks remotely Hispanic is good ol' Victor Argo as the much reviled 'El Presidente'! Oh yes, we also have Maria Conchita Alonso overemoting like crazy as a rebel leader. There are tons of explosions and bodies flying everywhere in this amusing paean to the glories of American imperialism.