Shot in the Philippines by
an American director with American leading actors, this shoddy action/thriller
picture contains a handful of moments that almost work, but the movie overall
is incoherent and inept. Leslie Nielsen, back when he was still a wooden
dramatic actor, stars as John Trevor, the chief instructor at a secret training
camp for government operatives. He’s grown weary of using drugs and mind
control to transform recruits into killers, so he flees the base and seeks
refuge with former war buddies who are based in the Philippines. Meanwhile, the
government sends John’s lieutenant, Frank Lasseter (Gary Lockwood), to track
him down. Complicating matters is the fact that both men use the same drugs as
their trainees, so John is going through painful withdrawal. Another wrinkle is
the murky presence of a Filipino crime boss, Alok Lee (Vic Diaz), who wants to
find John before Frank does. In theory, Project:
Kill should be a simple chase story. In practice, however, it’s a mess.
Director William Girdler, who generally fared better in the realm of monster
movies, can’t do much of anything with the jumbled script, which is credited to
David Seldon and Galen Thompson. Moreover, Girdler botches many scenes by
creating logic gaps the size of the Grand Canyon. For instance, many scenes feature characters walking away from fistfights and/or shootouts as if nothing happened. Similarly, John spends
most of his time romancing a pretty Chinese woman, Lee Su (Nancy Kwan), even
though he knows his brain is disintegrating and even though he’s supposed to be
finding a safe hideout. Furthermore, the picture’s action scenes are confusing—Frank
and John are supposed to be super-deadly martial artists, but Lockwood (who is genuinely terrible in the film) and
Nielsen move with the grace of skid-row drunks. Project: Kill also suffers from cheap production values and nonexistent
transitions between scenes. Capping all of these problems is the difficulty of
taking Nielsen seriously, given his subsequent career as a comic actor. In
fact, one scene features a line Nielsen could have delivered in one of his Naked Gun movies—while lamenting to Lee
Su that it’s hard to shake his mind control, John says, “I’m not programmed to
love.”
Project: Kill: LAME
Reading this, I suddenly flashed back to 1967's "Code Name: Heraclitus" in which Nielsen is the handler of a kind of proto-Bourne, a man devoid of memory or emotion who is "built" into a spy known as Gannon played by Stanley Baker. This seems downright thematic, as if the makers figured "Okay, we know they can be kind of wooden -- but maybe we can make that an asset."
ReplyDeleteIf you've never heard the audio commentary that Stella Stevens and Carol Lynley recorded for THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, I highly recommend it. Not only are they genuinely hilarious women - Lynley especially, who knew?! - they expound with glee upon Nielsen's woodenness, cackling with hysterics at his classic delivery of "Oh, my God". They make great fun of themselves, as well. Well worth a listen!
ReplyDeleteGreat blog.
"This seems downright thematic, as if the makers figured 'Okay, we know they can be kind of wooden -- but maybe we can make that an asset.'"
ReplyDeleteIt's not a bug, it's a feature.