Marshal Law (1996)

The Age of Commercialism

Just perfect...

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The plot for this movie had some interesting possibilities but due to terrible direction, screen writing, and editing it became an incoherent mess. What is bad about it you ask? - for some reason there several bursts of quick editing montages that use a mix of film and video. It looks like something in a student in a film class would put together in their first try at editing. - Kristy Swanson's hair and wardrobe. Were they trying to make her look like a soccer mom? - the climax of the movie. There's a big showdown between the hero and the villain that takes place in the dead of night. 2 minutes later it is full on sunlit day. - the gang. What was it with their wardrobe? It looked like they were part of the gang from Death Wish 3.Just a terrible move.

An absolute pain in the *** to watch, it must have been a terror to act in - that is if the actors had any sense of what could be even loosely considered quality. This movie certainly doesn't qualify. Even my friends who watch trash for the fun of it turned it off after a few minutes. You kept wanting the bad guys to die in the first half of the movie and show you something interesting in the second half.The premise was, probably - it is hard to tell if it has one, the bad guys formed this gang, led by the guy who had been traumatized by the cops, so he hates them. The rest of the gang, including the toss away female had no reason why they were there, either in the gang or on this odd adventure to break into these expensive homes.As I learned in scriptwriting class, the first thing to keep in mind is motivation. If you don't have a decent motivation for your characters, the story will be a poor one. It doesn't help your telling the story if you just make up some motivation to simply have one. Like they did for this movie.I saw it on late night TV and actually cheered when the commercials came on. I hope I never have to watch it again.

This film is utter bobbins. Smits is good but the psychos are poor. Any rationale behind the plot is impossible to fathom and as straight to video's go this is at the lower end of the scale. A "comedy" sidekick is brought in later in the film who then appears to have no particular role to fulfill within the action. Rubbish.

JIMMY SMITS (L.A. LAW) stars as JACK COLEMAN. A sheriff with two kids who after 16 months loses his wife in a car accident spends Christmas in an L.A. County.Whilst there, he encounters danger when a girl is brutally raped by an escaped convict. After he saves the girl from the convict, it turns out to be that he shoots the convict dead as self-defence..The next thing, the gang led COUGAR (JAMES LeGROS) shows up and kills the girl, leaving SMITS to go on the run..As the night goes on, during a series of tremors, COLEMAN (SMITS) puts his life on the line to take on the gang in order to save his kids from COUGAR..This film is not a bad one.. It's worth a watch even if someone likes action movies.. In this one, SMITS proves himself that not only he's a cowboy, but a lawman who uses every trick in the book to nail down the bad guys..JAMES LeGROS though, looks hard as the notorious villain who'll stop at nothing to get what he wants..It's O.K. I guess Marshal Law is helluva die hard film.. It's a shame they never got BRUCE WILLIS for this one...