Mean Guns (1997)

best movie i've ever seen.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

This movie is a classic of film noir. Just because it has a low budget and a noted B movie director doesn't mean that he didn't create a bit of art out of what could have been schlock.Give it a chance if you like intense movies about the nature of violence or just a good shoot 'em up testosterone-fest that allows the few females a chance to shine as well. This movie is just a completely under-appreciated gem. Christopher Lambert does psycho well and there are quite a few of the usual suspects in this director's movies, but they all come together to do a good job.Try a few of the other of this director's works such as Omega Doom with Rutger Hauer and Tina Cote from this movie shows up as well, or try Nemesis which is a kind of terminator knockoff, but has a lot more edge and again some of the same actors.

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.

"Mean Guns" is a great movie as far as action goes. Christopher Lambert and Ice-T are really the only two big names in the movie. The rest of the cast is either virtually unknown or relatively unexperienced in the action movie genre.What happens when you dump a load of guns into a roomful of killers? You get this movie. As action as action can get, the confines of an empty prison makes for the perfect setting for the mayhem and murder of the contest that will leave only a certain lucky few alive, as per rules of the contest. Kill or be killed, the movie follows around a handful of central characters as they attempt to make it through alive.The soundtrack, the majority of which is Perez Prado, makes for the perfect background for the beautiful symphony of destruction and death throughout the movie. The acting leaves a bit to be desired. Some of the characters give very wooden and monotone performances (specifically that of "D" and "Cam"), but most of it is pretty decent. The action is on the more realistic side of the spectrum, going against many modern action movies in which the bad guys fly back 10 feet when they're shot with a small-caliber pistol. The deaths are fairly realistic; you don't get everyone being shot 14 times and then giving a long speech before finally doing a 540-backflip off a roof to their death.As far as action movies go, this is a good one. Don't expect any academy award winning acting, but its definitely an enjoyable movie.7/10

Filmed almost exclusively inside a 20 story building, this movie focuses exclusively on the end result of 100 gangster screw jobs done to the wrong man played wonderfully by Ice-T. If you are a fan of wrestling's battle royal or Royal Rumble, or are a fan of end-of-the-world genre's this movie will whet your appetite, as it a microcosm of end of the world movies, with the last man standing being Victorious and able to do as he pleases (that is, leave the gang world, or become head honcho) This movie is excellent if you view it without a critic's mind and watch it to free your suppressed anger and impulsive violence towards the world. -Al