Director: Andrzej Bartkowiak

Cast: Alexander Nevsky, Danny Trejo, Tom Arnold, Kelly Hu, Mark Dacascos, William Baldwin, Alphonso McAuley, Matthias Hues, Keith Powers, Bai Ling, Eric Roberts, Brian Kirchoff

Running Time: 110 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Let me start by saying that I’m a guy who’s all for giving second chances. I mean if I wasn’t, then I’d never have bothered checking out a movie like Wolf Warrior 2, and then I’d never have known it’s possible to stop an RPG mid-flight with just your bare hands and some wire mesh (plus I’d have missed out on a fantastic sequel to a lacklustre original). My point is, whether it be a franchise or an individual, you can never write off the action genre, because the adrenaline rush that audiences are looking for could be just around the corner. After telling myself the above several hundred times, I found myself apprehensively sitting down to watch bodybuilder (cum advocate for Russians being good guys in Hollywood movies) Alexander Nevsky’s latest showcase, Maximum Impact.

How there’s never been an action movie (specifically, a Steven Seagal action movie) called Maximum Impact before I’ll never know, but somehow it took us until 2018 for it to happen. I confess to not being the biggest fan of Nevsky’s last big screen adventure, Showdown in Manila, which I found to be atrocious on every conceivable level. But like I said, second chances, and this time Nevsky has brought on-board director Andrzej Bartkowiak to take the helm. Yes, as in that guy who was responsible for the early 00’s fad of pairing martial artists with R&B or rap stars. He sat in the director’s chair for Jet Li’s first starring role in Hollywood, Romeo Must Die, which paired Li with the late Aaliyah. He temporarily got Steven Seagal back into cinemas again with Exit Wounds, by pairing him with rapper DMX. Then thanks to some dark alchemy, he took Jet Li and DMX and threw them together for Cradle 2 the Grave, which was horrible.

Bartkowiak hasn’t really done anything of note since then, unless you count Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, so I’m sure it didn’t take too much convincing for him to say yes to his latest gig. He’s even worked with some of the cast before, with Mark Dacascos (who directed Nevsky in Showdown in Manila), Kelly Hu, and Tom Arnold all being reunited from their time on Cradle 2 the Grave. Of course, being a Nevsky production, the usual who’s who of “why the hell are you in this movie?” faces are also present and accounted for – Matthias Hues, William Baldwin, Danny Trejo, Eric Roberts, and Bai Ling all turn up with varying amounts of screen time. In fact the only person who stands out as missing is Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa. I guess some other ex-USSR funded movie must have been in production at the same time.

The plot, for what it’s worth (which isn’t much), is explained in some onscreen text that reads “Relations between Russia and the USA are at their worst since the Cold War. In hope of a breakthrough, top diplomats will hold a secret summit in Moscow.” Said diplomat is played by Eric Roberts, however when former German TV star turned international terrorist Mark Dacascos (you read it correctly), decides to kidnap his daughter and hold her for ransom, Russian agent Nevsky will have to do all he can to save the day. Or something like that, I can feel the vein in my forehead starting to pulsate, due to the sheer effort of trying to summarise the series of inconsequential events that take place into a few concise sentences. From the moment the onscreen text appears, set to ear bleedingly bad rap music, I knew things were going to be bad. Just how bad, not even I was prepared for.

We’re actually supposed to believe that Nevsky is a desk agent, who assists his partner in the field, played by fellow Russian Evgeniy Stychkin, to capture the bad guys from behind his computer screen. Sound familiar? That’s because we’re watching a Russian male version of the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy, and Nevsky is playing McCarthy (there’s even a similar scene with a scooter). The only difference is this version is minus any laughs and, well, everything else that made Spy kind of enjoyable. In fact the only laugh to be had from Maximum Impact is how it ever got made in the first place, and how Nevsky continues to be able to convince likeable actors to appear in his almost unwatchable ego reels.

The comedy is cringe inducing to sit through. One running joke has people frequently mistake Dacascos for other famous Asian celebrities. Try to stop your sides from splitting as he gets taken for Jet Li, Lou Diamond Phillips, Kato, the Hangover guy, and Harold from Harold and Kumar. It’s terrible. Dacascos himself gives a slightly manic performance that looks like he may be under duress, randomly bursting out moves straight from Dancing With the Stars, and blurting out dialogue in a mix of German and English. His character is revealed to have once been the lead of a successful German TV show, called Shaolin Cop (we even get to see clips from it, which are the highlight of the movie), however how he came to be a criminal mastermind is never explored. To be honest I’m actually ok with that, as it would only have extended the runtime. Perhaps his role here is punishment for Showdown in Manila not turning Nevsky into a megastar.

There’s also a strange undertone of pandering to the current US administration. A paparazzi photographer is given a hard time throughout, at one point being called a “smelly little rat bastard” (an insult worthy of any dubbed old-school kung-fu movie!), and a discussion about the media by government officials refers to them as “maggots and cockroaches”. If Nevsky is gunning for a role in Trump’s office, it wouldn’t surprise me if this is the way he’s trying to do it. The whole script is unbearably vulgar and offensive. Nevsky’s partner Stychkin plays a sex obsessed cop who’s supposed to be funny, but only manages to come across as a creep. If you want to watch a short Russian guy telling Kelly Hu that he’s on his way to boner-ville just from looking at her, Maximum Impact is the movie for you. When not listening to Stychkin’s A-Z of How to Get Embroiled in a #metoo Scandal, we’re subjected to some truly lurid product placement.

It’s explained that Eric Roberts’ daughter was adopted from Russia (of course she was), so she naturally jumps at the opportunity to visit, not least because it’ll provide the chance to meet with her rock star Russian boyfriend. The irony is that the ‘actor’ (I use the term loosely) playing her boyfriend is actually playing himself, as he’s a member of Russian rock outfit Multiverse (expect to see posters of the group frequently). It gets better, the daughter is played by Russian pop star Polina Butorina, the same annoying girl that interrupts a chase scene in Showdown in Manila just to say how much she’s loving the Philippines. Anyway, I digress. In one scene, believing that she’s being tracked by her phone, Multiverse guy throws it into a river, to which Butorina exclaims “But I love my 6!” Cue Multiverse guy presenting her with a freshly wrapped gift, accompanied by the line “You’ll love your 8+ even more.” I punched myself in the face.

Speaking of Kelly Hu, she plays a CIA agent sent as part of Eric Roberts delegation to Moscow, and unlike so many of the other familiar faces peppered throughout, thankfully she’s front and center for most of Maximum Impact. I’ve been a fan of Hu’s ever since she starred alongside Sammo Hung in Martial Law (ok, I admit it, The Scorpion King helped as well), and while her role here is hardly a career highlight, her presence at least makes proceedings slightly more bearable. She’s even given some Seagal-esque treatment when taking part in a boxing match, when she starts making quips against her opponent which have clearly been added in post, because the ADR sounds awful. Unfortunately a lot of her dialogue is solely there to give lip service to Nevsky, with a script that has almost every character somewhere along the way pointing out what a gentleman he is

To be honest, he may very well be a gentleman, but what he’s not is a thespian. Nevsky is the kind of guy who makes someone like Steven Seagal look like they have the range of Robert De Niro, with his acting pushed to the limits in a particularly awkward scene which sees him tickled by a bevy of Russian whores. By the time we’re given a Nevsky vs Dacascos finale, choreographed by a slumming it James Lew, you’ll just be grateful at how mercifully short it is (and that hopefully, after John Wick 3, Dacascos never has to appear in one of these movies again). In a comedy sequence that plays over the end credits in the form of a newsroom interview, Kelly Hu responds to one of the questions asked by the host with “I mean, shit just about sums it up.” I have a feeling she was probably trying to tell us something.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 1/10