20160206: Action Review--Mercenaries

Name: Mercenaries (2014)
IMDb: link to Mercenaries

Genres: Action   Country of origin: USA

Cast: Brigitte Nielsen as Ulrika, Tim Abell as Grigori Babishkov, Zoë Bell as Cassandra Clay, Kristanna Loken as Kat Morgan, Vivica A. Fox as Raven, Cynthia Rothrock as Mona, Nicole Bilderback as Mei-Lin Fong, Gerald Webb as Bobby, Edward DeRuiter as Vez, Alexis Raich as Lexi, Tiffany Panhilason as Elise, Bernard Babish as Pavel.

Directed by: Christopher Ray.  Written by: Edward DeRuiter.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux: 
Ulrika kidnaps the President's daughter.  The ransom is the overthrow of Ganzar, a fictional country that Ulrika wants to rule.  Great.  Ulrika has a pathological hatred of men, and a deep disdain of women.  Even better.  The President is in a funk, so trusted aid Mona runs the op to recover the daughter.

Mona goes to prison to recruit female tough cases to make the extraction.

Delineation of conflicts:
Ulrika wants the ransom; the US does not wish to pay it.  Mona wants the prisoners to do the extraction; the prisoners are hardly interested.  Mona hopes to make the prisoners offers that they cannot refuse.  Ulrika wishes the extraction to fail; the prisoners would like to get their individual pay offs.

Cassandra was a captain in Delta Forces; she will be tactical command.  Raven was CIA, like Mona, and will handle the close in wetworks.  Mei-Lin specialises in explosives.  Kat is a talented sniper, who will be sniping.  The egos are as big as the talents here.  What are the chances that they will not kill each other instead of the enemy?

The local teenager Lexi wishes to help the team in return for passage to America.

Resolution:
This ends pretty much the way I expected it to.

One line summary: Female mercenaries versus female terrorist.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 7/10 Well-lit with good focus and depth of field.  A little shaky cam, but not too much.

Sound: 5/10 The actors were miked well.  The canned background music did not add anything good.

Acting: 4/10 Zoë Bell was fun as the protagonist.  Vivica Fox was her usual surly self.  Veteran actor Kristanna Loken was better than I expected.  Most of the cast was just terrible, though.  I thought Brigitte Nielsen would have been more engaging.  Then again, the lines written for her were poor.  Tim Abell was incredibly bad.

Screenplay: 3/10  Where does one begin?  It's clearly a low-budget operation, and that includes the script.  The anti-male bigotry is really thick, but so it goes; it's an exploitation film after all.  The likelihood of success of many of the actions in the film seemed small, and too many events were just too convenient.

Final rating: 4/10