Soldier of Fortune, Inc (1999)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

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

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

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

I was very confused by the variety of the actual shootouts - trying to figure out which one was real was difficult. It took awhile to figure out what was going on. At least the group returned to extract revenge - that was satisfying. Actually there wasn't much to the movie.I did not feel the nude pool scene added anything - and I was disappointed that an actor like Brad Johnson who is a family man would agree to do this scene. I am not a prude - but I tried to picture Tom Hanks, John Wayne and other actors in the scene and couldn't. The pool scene appeared to be shot in a hospital physical therapy pool - gee, do they frolic around like that in a hospital pool devoted to therapy. Guess I've gone to a different kind of hospital.

OK, first off, this review and spot on IMDb is for the series not the movie. I agree that the movie is horrible. However the series was a classic, one that was sadly ahead of its time(ahead of the popular terrorism fad brought on by modern events). It cataloged the covert actions of a small company of rogue ex-military and ex-intelligence types. It not only featured some excellent acting(for a TV action series), but the special effects were not bad either. The stars of the show were the Major(who went on to make minor impact in small roles) who lead the group and Melinda Clark(the bombshell who went on to star in the O.C.) who was the gifted hacker/linguist ex-intel operative. The plot wasn't difficult to follow-the operatives would be handed a secretive mission sponsored by unknown financiers(the good guys) and carry out the mission, usually eliminating the opposition(the bad guys).Anyways unfortunately for those lucky enough to discover it, the show met with a drastic nose-dive on the second or third season. This is when producers decided to "spice-up" things a bit by making a couple of cuts in the cast and replacing them with none other than basketball's badboy(prima donna) Denis Rodman. Let's face it-the guy can't act to save his life. Soon after the show lost what little it had going for it in the gritty realism department and was destined for cancellation.

This DVD movie was made by combining two episodes of the syndicated series of the same name. I never got to see the series, because it was never picked up by a local affiliate, but if this movie is representative of the rest of the episodes, I can see why the affiliates avoided it, and so should you. If there's a plot in this, you'd need a microscope to find it. It opens with a mission gone wrong that is shown over and over again, the same lame action sequence repeated monotonously from each team member's point of view. The requisite drawn out recrimination scene comes next. Now comes the revenge sequence, but do they now have a master plan? Unh, unh. It's almost the same mindless 'action' (read: everyone incessantly firing machine guns at each other) sequence as the beginning, but now it somehow goes right. Cue credits. Utter formulaic garbage - there is nothing clever, imaginative, or exciting in this movie. I wonder if the producers needed a tax write-off.