The Deadliest Weapon Of All.
Starring: Luke Perry, Olivia d’Abo, Roger Moore, Tom Conti
Director: Tom Kinninmont
2001 | 98 Minutes | Rated R
“This might be your spy game but it’s my life and I’m sick of being pushed around.” – Mike Ashton
The Enemy is one of those movies you catch on Netflix or late night TV and just stop and watch for seemingly no reason. I got hooked and now here we are.
Penny (Olivia d’Abo), a beautiful CIA agent, teams with Mike Ashton (Luke Perry), the son of a kidnapped scientist, to stop terrorists from destroying the world with a deadly bio-weapon.
Other than the slightly high blood spillage The Enemy has all the usual benchmarks of a made for TV movie – crap story, crap acting, crap dialogue, crap music. Just a very hokey viewing experience.
The Enemy is chock full of WTF moments. The classic, I have a bad guy in my sites but pause just long enough for him to disarm me moment. The why the F is a 90s stick shift Chevy Corsica the best car they could get for this scene moment. But my favorite, after getting introduced to a woman named NATALYA he only realizes that she is Russian when she says “dosvedanya” as she leaves. Her name was NATALYA. If I’m ever introduced to someone named Natalya my instant reaction is “She’s a Ruskie.”
Olivia d’Abo is still just as cute as she was on The Wonder Years (or at least she was in 2001). Still one of my favorite shows of all time. She does a much, much better job than Luke Perry does but she still seems like an extremely odd choice for a CIA agent.
Luke Perry really just isn’t a good actor or at least he had no desire to show it here if he was. Through the entire movie he is either over acting or not acting at all. He never finds that happy, believable medium. And his eyes have this look to them that says “I can’t believe I am doing this.”
The action is, like anything else in the movie, TV quality. The gun and explosion effects are actually quite good but the sound effects don’t fit and there never seems to be much thought behind it all. Every car crash results in a cut away and then the car exploding. The gun fights amount to nothing more than the director telling one actor to shoot one direction and telling the other to shoot back. I know, that is what a gunfight is but the director’s job is to make it look good and that takes some set up and choreography sometimes.
I don’t even really know why I watched The Enemy. All signs pointed to it being a bust but I was flipping through Netflix and saw “Action & Adventure” and “Olivia d’Abo” and clicked play. I don’t know what else to say about it, it’s not horrible but it definitely isn’t good. If you are in the mood for a really mediocre pseudo action thriller then The Enemy is perfect, otherwise I’d probably skip it.
Action Movie Fanatix 