Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Ogosmith Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

HKfilmsaddict I'll be honest with you. When I first saw Mean Guns back in 2007, I was not a fan of the film. I thought that the film was horrible. I felt the plot was nonexistent, the dialogue was cheesy and nonsensical, and the gunfights were poorly choreographed. At the time, I felt that the odd soundtrack and the quality of the acting were the film's strongest suit. The best performances in the film were from Christopher Lambert and Michael Halsey, playing polar opposites. I knew the film wasn't meant to be Citizen Kane, but I was disappointed. As a result, I didn't watch the film again for years.HOWEVER, my opinion has completely changed. I saw this film a few years later, and boy was I surprised!The entire film is a social commentary on violence in film, as well as the typical Hollywood romanticizing of hit men that are goodhearted and trying to redeem themselves. Michael Halsey's Marcus and Christopher Lambert's Lou are perfect examples of this archetype. When you first see Marcus in the film, you don't like him as he kills a detective and kidnaps Cam. Solemn faced and soft spoken, his character is slowly fleshed out, to the point to where you believe he is the 'good guy'. Lou is a likable character. He's dressed like he is out of a John Woo film, has charisma, with a childlike playful quality to him. He admits in the film that he asked to be invited for the $3 million, and later you find out that he is doing this for his daughter. As the movie progressed, you find that Lou is insane. He loves laughing at and killing the other 'bad guys'. But, you root for him. After all, he is likable, and they are killers. Then, you see that he is having hallucinations of a child, you later find out was someone he accidentally killed. But, you have sympathy for him. Marcus on the other hand, was there at his employer's behest. He was Ice-T's murderous enforcer, and you presume he is the antagonist, as he murdered a cop and kidnapped the female lead. It should be noted that the female lead is the only one in the film who is not a killer, but merely a witness for the prosecution. Once the shooting starts, Marcus saves Cam's life, and you begin believing that this is a tale of redemption for the 'kind-hearted hit-man'.By the end of the film, the point of these characters becomes clear. Marcus towards the end picked up several pictures of a dead man's children, reminding the audience that killers or not, these were people with families, and the families are also victims by Marcus' hand. Marcus at the end asks Cam for the photo evidence she had of the Syndicate, with the photos revealing how Marcus coldly strangled a man to death, and that he worked for a man (Ice-T) who was not above pointing a 12 gauge at a Senator to get his way. As a result, the audience is reminded that these are not good men with redeemable qualities, like Hollywood would have you believe. This is why at the end Marcus asks her if he killed dozens of people but had good reasons for doing so, would excuses make it right? Another example is immediately after this, Cam asks Marcus about why he helped her, and he responds by saying it "doesn't matter anymore". This is because contrary to Hollywood's principles, redemption of his character doesn't matter, and he knows it. He just wants to do one good thing, even though it won't excuse his actions. With Lou, you see how demented he is by the end of the film. He is a mentally unstable drug addict, who gets off on murder. We sympathize with him wanting to help his daughter, but realize that he is just as dangerous. He admits that his daughter was raped, which possibly led to his breakdown. The point is that whether he was mentally damaged from killing a child or from his daughter's rape, it doesn't matter. He is a rabid dog. This is illustrated when his daughter of all people, asks Marcus to kill her dad.I believe the style, dialogue, lack of blood, and the upbeat music were intentional. The stylish shootouts were similar to John Woo's and Robert Rodriguez's films. The dialogue and 'Mexican standoffs' were Tarantinoesque. The upbeat music was similar to music played in Rodriguez's Mariachi films. This film as much pays homage to them and their films, as it does criticize them. I felt the lack of blood was to make the killings look 'G- rated', cool and cartoonish, especially when paired with the happy sounding Mambo music. By the end, I felt this was a satire of Hollywood's typical portrayal of violence. Once we see who Marcus REALLY is, with him viewing his and his employer's depraved acts in photographs, it sinks in. When it is admitted that Lou became crazy because his daughter was raped and he killed a child, it sinks in. When his daughter doesn't feel safe and wants him dead, it sinks in again that they're not good men. Violence has touched their lives and made them inhuman. You can disguise the perverseness of violence with upbeat music and 'family friendly' shootouts. But when we see the victims of these 'heroes', it shows us the reality that Hollywood doesn't. These men are not heroes. The heroes and the violence are not cool and stylish. They were falsely glamorized to make a point. I commend Albert Pyun on this film. This is a film he should be praised for. 10/10

tushania A gem amongst B-movies of its age - specifically, the ambiguous 90s age, when you weren't exactly sure if something was B or A variety just by looking.The premise itself is ingeniously simple - upturn a couple of IKEA plastic boxes full of guns, assorted ammo and baseball bats on top of a crowd of small-time hustlers, big-time killers and middlemen entrepreneurs, with a deadline and a 10 mil prize ahead of them. Hilarity will not hesitate for a moment to ensue.The movie demonstrates a surprisingly sure and purposeful grip of its unsophisticated material. The writing is full of self-indulging one-liners and disconnected shock scenes, but manages to remain concise and dry overall. The directing is full of action movie clichés (though less so if you consider that it was done before The Matrix or Bad Boys or Shoot 'Em Up), but retains a certain stylish fleur of mamba shindig where only the cool ones are invited.The acting is accomplished entirely by the way of good casting (suitably so for cutout characters that this movie so nicely puts to use) - Lambert as an unstable Leon-type children-loving killer with a weight on his conscience, Halsey as an implacable killer with a heart, a worn-out accountant-journalist with a dirty conscience, a cool blonde killer girl with a chrome-plated Desert Eagle and so on.Every cliché that this movie invokes it surprisingly fresh - no less because these clichés managed to become clichés without a worthy, contemporary manifestation in the actual films worth watching. Maybe these are common in literature or cheap TV, but in cinema, they lurk modestly in the background.Here, they are in the spotlight. And they create drama - maybe not a tearjerker, but epic enough to be respected and not laughed at benignly.All of the violent scenes are rendered with an aesthetic detachment, and at the same time, with geeky admiration for the heroes' undeniable coolness. This combination makes Mean Guns a singular experience - you're cheering for typical B-movie shootouts, but at the same time admire the stop-motion hallucinatory flashback-murder scenes; you're laughing at simple street-wise humour that Ice-T impeccably projects (from his personal experience, no doubt) - but you stop and wonder at the surreal scene where a roomful of crooks tries to shoot each other with empty guns in time lapse.After all, the location alone makes this movie unique - an ultra-clean, high-tech, dystopian prison, smack in the middle of a large city, littered with cold bodies and warm cartridge cases (or vice versa). Prize is in the middle of the labyrinth, and a cynical, steel-toothed demiurge is at the top of it; he seeks death but scoffs at weak attempts to deliver it.All in all, this movie in my eyes puts to life a chaotic reality of William Gibson's Sprawl (from his Neuromancer cyberpunk trilogy0. An assortment of selfish crooks, sophisticated in their choice of gadgets and styles, each one with a dark secret in their closet; somewhat flat personas, trigger-happy but cautious, in the middle of the lawless but tech-ridden world; this is Mean Guns all right.

zardoz-13 The prestigious American Film Institute will probably never recognize Hawaiian movie director Albert Pyun for his cinematic achievements. Pyun has helmed over 40 films since 1982, including titles such as "Adrenalin" (1996), "Kickboxer 4" (1994), "Omega Doom" (1996), "Nemesis" (1993), "Captain America" (1992), "Bloodmatch" (1991), "Dollman" (1991), "Cyborg" (1989), and "The Sword and the Sorcerer" (1982). Moreover, Pyun has written 14 of his own feature films, many of those mentioned above as well as "Radioactive Dreams" (1986), "Heatseeker" (1995), and "Nemesis 2" (1995). Pyun's action-adventure sagas belong to either the science fiction or martial arts genres. Typically, Pyun's virile heroes find themselves entangled in suicidal situations against villains who appear in greater numbers or who have special mutant features that give them a deadly edge. The women in his movies are not slacker by any sense of the imagination. They are sometimes as strong, if not stronger, than his brawny indestructible male protagonists.All the "Mean Guns" characters are indisputably unsavory. You wouldn't have lunch with any of them. Christopher Lambert's Lou emerges as an extremely dangerous dude with a puff-adder smile who revels in killing bad guys. As revealed in the film's expository dialogue, Lou's cute daughter has been raped. This incident turned Lou into a rabidly unstable killer who the syndicate feels is better off dead. Michael Halsey gives the sinister Marcus the full benefit of his hypnotic Mick Jagger personality, his stern features, and his gravel voice."Mean Guns" delivers everything its generic title promises. Toplining "Highlander" star Christopher Lambert and rapper Ice-T, Andrew Witham's brawling screenplay focuses on an army of vicious mobsters who have betrayed a crime syndicate by snitching, stealing, seeing too much, plotting disloyal acts, or failing to do enough. Instead of hiring hit squads to cap these cretins, gangster Vincent Moon (Ice-T) has devised a more interesting alternative. The crime syndicate has financed the construction of a modern prison with pay-offs, so Vincent sees this as the ideal arena to obtain redemption. The day before this state-of-the-art correctional facility opens; Vincent schedules a no-holds-barred shoot'em-up on the premises. What makes this prison so perfect for Vincent's macabre scheme is its vast network of video cameras. During his tirade to the hundred or so hit men that he has assembled for this bedlam, Vincent proclaims that the syndicate can enjoy the playback of their massacre. "It's better than pay-TV," Vincent screams with maniacal glee.Vincent's rules are few but simple. Only three hooligans will emerge from this baptism by gunfire. Everybody else must die! These miscreants have six hours to rub each other out, before Vincent Wipes them out himself. Anybody who tries to escape will be 'disqualified' permanently. Sharp-shooting snipers prow the prison walls. As an incentive, Moon offers a $10-thousand reward to the three surviving killers to divide up among themselves, at $3.3 million per person. Vincent's henchmen disarmed these cutthroats before they entered the hoosegow, so that everybody gets a fresh start. After Moon's speech, his men dump an arsenal of guns, ammo, and Louisville sluggers at their feet.Happily, little is predictable in freshman scenarist Andrew Witham's bullet-blasting screenplay. The story vaguely resembles novelist Richard Connell's oft-filmed classic "The Most Dangerous Game," where an innocent man battles for his life against a homicidal madman on a remote island. The island in "Mean Guns" is the prison. Witham and Pyun confine the bedlam to the prison where Lou (Christopher Lambert), Marcus (Michael Halsey), Dee (Kimberly Warren), and Con (Deborah Van Valkenbugh) must dispatch hordes of gun-toting, bat-wielding bruisers with extreme prejudice. Witham's script makes reference also to Agatha Christie's timeless yarn "Ten Little Indians." Other cinematic allusions are made to "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." In one scene that recalls Eli Wallach's gunfight in a bubble-bath with a loquacious killer, Ice-T repeatedly warns a knife-wielding hood that he should throw his knife instead of wag his tongue. When the evildoer ignores Ice-T's advice, the criminal mastermind kills him. The final outcome is nothing that you'd expect from a straight-to-tape actioneer, and elements of the Leone classic appear here, too. Some of the dialogue pays homage to other famous Hollywood movies. When Lou threatens to kill Con, Marcus borrows a line about solidarity from Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" about sticking together.Albert Pyun choreographs his multiple, high-body count shoot-outs with the comparable acrobatic aplomb of the late Sergio Leone, the maestro of the spaghetti western, or John Woo, today's popular Asian filmmaker. At one point, two-gun packing Christopher Lambert cavorts from table to table in a dining hall blasting away at scores of bad guys without missing a single shot! Talk about fantasy! Nevertheless, Pyun avoids lingering on the aftermath of the violence. He depicts the shootings, stabbings, and slugging with clinical, antiseptic care. Indeed, "Mean Guns" is a bloodbath, but there's comparatively little blood. Instead, Pyun displays greater concern in charging up the adrenalin content in his action scenes, none of which are as brutal as his previous effort, the hugely underrated "Adrenalin." Obviously, the squeamish will loathe "Mean Guns" with it s dark, subversive humor and its nihilist sentiments about a world warped, according to one character, by television. At the oddest moments, something silly occurs that catches you off guard. For example, as an elevator carrying the gunmen to the prison ascends for the staging area, the sounds of mambo music fill the air. Two tough guys abruptly break into an improvised dance. In another instance, when the killers scramble to arm themselves as an arsenal of hardware showers down on them, they start firing at each other. The humor here is that their weapons are empty, and the comedic effect comes from the way that Pyun films their frenzied efforts to kill as many of their opponents as possible. Overall, Pyun achieves a surreal effect with his over-the-t0p, bloodless, wall-to-wall violence where only the featured celebrities survive and the anonymous extras drop like flies.

winner55 The real reason to see this film is the stunningly stone-cold performance by Michael Halsey as a gunman who has finally had enough of the dark side of life, but who needs to ply that close to the chest in order to survive an impossible situation.The situation is actually rather allegorical, a fact driven home by the absurdist intervention of a seven year old girl who plays a pivotal role at the end. This allegorical touch actually lifts the film from being just another Albert Pyun bloodbath and yet somehow avoids becoming just another Albert Pyun urban fantasy. The camera work and editing is also superior to what we've come to expect from Pyun.But it is Michael Halsey's show, really, and needs to be watched as that, as a tour de force from a largely unnoted actor of considerable talent.