January 20, 2012 -- Arnold Schwarzenegger transitions from politician back to actor again in this standard action film. He's got to be happy to be back on the movie set after the horrors of politics and the disaster of his private life. Most politicians would probably do the same thing, if they had that option.

Schwarzenegger stars here as a small town sheriff, Ray Owens, with a big town background. He and his deputies are up against the head of a major drug cartel, Gabriel Cortez (played by Eduardo Noriega of “Vantage Point”). Cortez has hired an army of mercenaries to aid his escape, along with a custom high powered Corvette capable of speeds up to 200 miles per hour (and which doesn't seem to need any gas). His escape from federal custody is a complex operation that takes up the early part of the film. It involves a hit squad, aerial transit lines, a large snowplow-like vehicle to smash through roadblocks and a team of military-style bridge builders.

Cortez is headed toward the small border town where Owens is the sheriff. He has to get through the town in order to cross the border into Mexico. After the preliminaries are out of the way, we get down to the fight between Cortez's men, led by Burrell (Peter Stormare of “Lockout”). Burrell is in charge of building the bridge across the border and clearing the way through town so that Cortez can get through to cross the bridge. Cortez, an experienced race car driver, is driving the Corvette himself.

One of Owens' deputies is killed investigating the bridge construction project, which also involved the murder of the owner of the property where the bridge was built. Owens' deputies, Mike Figuerola (Luis Guzmán of “The Count of Monte Cristo”) and Sarah Torrance (Jaimie Alexander of “Thor”) are aided by a couple of local volunteer deputies, troublemaker Frank Martinez (Rodrigo Santoro of “Che”) and gun nut Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville of “Lords of Dogtown”).

Aside from the elaborate setup and the complicated escape plan, this is basically just “High Noon” with a big shootout between the good guys and the bad guys on the main street of a small border town. Dinkum's collection of guns includes a fully automatic 1939 Vickers large calibre machine gun. Also seen in the film are hand-held rocket launchers, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, knives and some large calibre handguns.

As you would expect from the above description, this is a violent film. People are shot, stabbed, decapitated and blown apart, all in the name of fun. The film's message is that if you want to survive an attack from the bad guys, you need a big supply of illegal machine guns and other heavy duty weapons. That's why the NRA should love this film. That's their message, more guns make us safer, and if machine guns are outlawed, then only criminals will have them. This film rates a C+.

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Copyright © 2013 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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