Don "The Dragon" Wilson came to fame by making almost a hundred Bloodfist movies, he also was in a bunch of PM movies like Cyber Tracker, Out For Blood and uh, Cyber Tracker 2. Anyway things have gotten fairly quiet for our favorite WKA kickboxing champion. Olivier Gruner came to fame by ripping off Jean-Claude Van Damme and becoming the guy they hired when Van Damme (And Sasha Mitchell) said no. His output included the watchable likes of Nemesis, Angel Town, Mercenary,Savage and Automatic before hitting the skids with duds like TNT, Velocity Trap and well basically anything that I didn't mention as being watchable. Gary Busey was once nominated for an oscar and now picks up easy paychecks in straight to video crap. Also aboard is Martin Kove and Fred Williamson who are way too old for this type of thing. Anyway this brings us to Crooked a generic cop flick which was made on the cheap and features many sequences guaranteed to baffle your mind with such a display of unconvincing acting.

It's really something else. Let me put it to you this way, Gary Busey gives a performance that most likely was conducted while he was stinking drunk, and yet his drunken stubor of a performance is easily the best one in this utterly hopeless movie. Fred Williamson is barely in it and Martin Kove makes no impression, it's as if they asked Kove to be in this movie for no other reason but to add a name to the movie. Anyway a movie like Crooked is to be expected awful, but such can be forgiven, (I mean for an audience like me.) proivided there is tons of ridiculous action, well staged martial arts and a big bodycount. Here is what makes Crooked such a disaster, it contains barely any action, and what little action there is barely rivals a sub-par episode of the 60's Batman. It really is an awful film.

The plot for what those who care, is basically teaming up Don "The Dragon" Wilson with Olivier Gruner. The Dragon is a straight and arrow cop who is seriously by the book, Gruner is a play by his own rules cop who sometimes operates outside the law to enforce it. (See how original this movie is?) Anyway The Dragon and Gruner end up protecting a hooker who saw a mobster hit go down (How many times have we seen this?) and the tedious running time is taken up with a group of anonymous thugs chasing our heroes and the girl, ad nauseum. It's become obvious by the look and the overall feeling surrounding this borefest that nobody involved with this was having any fun with their roles, it's the type of paycheck movie that involves the actors giving the most minimal of effort. When it comes to the market such as this, straight to video movies live and die by how much energy are put into the action sequences and how much effort the cast puts into the movies, and Crooked contains little effort in either category.

Of course the biggest disappointment are the action sequences. Like I said, these action sequences are all really lame. The action consists of feeble shootouts, where bullets spark off of cars and consist of the good guys picking off stuntment while said stuntmen (Supposedly bad guys) return fire and barely hit air. The fight sequences are even worse since the camera somehow manages to distance itself at the worst moment and indeed most of the martial arts is filmed from the waist up. Also the editing is so haphazard and just plain bad that even if the choreography wasn't so boring, things would be just as dull.

And then one came to the conclusion about the stars of this worthless film, both Don 'The Dragon' Wilson and Olivier Gruner were at one time great martial artists and terrible actors, now years later they're too old to do martial arts and are still bad actors. (Though to be fair, as I alway am, they're better actors now then when they began.) And as such they just don't have the chops to play anything but dull as dishwater, the problem this time is that they no longer have their martial artistry to fall back on and without that, they have nothing of merit.

And that in the end is why Crooked is a bad movie of the worst kind. The type of bad movie that is as dull as it is ridiculous. As lifeless as it is dopey and as unwatchable as it is cliched. Crooked is truly a waste of time.

Hamlin Grade: 2

Ryan
-Board certified professional safety dancer