A while back I informed the masses about the Burn Notice Prequel that would be staring Bruce Campbell’s character Sam Axe.

It excited everybody.

The movie has since aired as a lead in for season 5 (which airs June 23, 2011). The movie, which is called Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe, is the long awaited TV-Movie.

The first thing you have to understand about this movie is that it is Burn Notice in name only. This is a movie about Sam Axe, this does set up the unknown question in the series (Why did he get out of the navy? Why is he in Miami?) but this is not Burn Notice.

This is a Bruce Campbell movie.

The movie, although written by Matt Nix, lacks Burn Notice’s usual suave and flare. Instead the movie feels like it has been written to emulate the past film of Bruce Campbell. The regular humour is replaced by jokes based on popular Bruce Campbell movies (Evil Dead, Army of Darkness) and running jokes from the series.

The movie’s premise starts with Sam Axe being led into a room in full naval dress uniform where he is giving a debrief on his recent disaster of a mission. As he tell his story (which gives us Axe’s voice as the voiceover instead of Michael Weston’s) we see the events unfold, from the womanizing mistake that got him sent to Columbia, to the orders he is forced to disobey to save the innocents.

The movie, which has numerous similarities to the 24 tv movie 24: Redemption, plays out a little like a B-List war film, with the dashing hero trying to save everyone. All in all it wasn’t a bad film just sub-par for the Burn Notice norm.