Agent Red (2000)

Stephen Macht: 'Ever hear of Agent Red?' Dolph Lundgren: 'Sounds like a bad action movie.' Macht: 'I wish it was.' Mindless DTV fodder, with human cartoon Lundgren pretending to be an American Marine entrusted, along with his estranged bioweapons specialist fiancee (Meilani Paul), with the task of bringing back from the former Soviet union a tub of deadly bioweapon (Agent Red) once stolen from the US and more recently used to wipe out a whole village. The job is described as 'babysitting Pandora's Box to a nice safe hiding place', which is qualified with 'if this stuff gets out, there is no safe hiding place'. Aboard the rather nuclear roomy submarine with Lundgren, Paul and the killer bug is a vengeance-crazed Russian doctor (Alexander Kuznetsov) who comes from that murdered village. With his girlfriend Natalie Radford, Kuznetsov plans on exposing American and Russian biological perfidy by zapping doses of the bug against New York and Moscow. The usual exchanges of shots and take-over and counter-take-over gambits ensue, with the hulking Dolph getting the better of the (rather reasonably-motivated) baddies, who both wind up dosed with Agent Red and bleeding swiftly to death (though Kuznetsov still takes another dozen bullets to go down). Lundgren and Kuznetsov both like doing that gun-in-each-hand bit, the women make Denise Richards seem believable and a bunch of obscure character actors get a lot of cutaways at the end of phone and radio lines as they worry the plot along and pad out the footage (they all get individual, name-tagged shots during the lengthy end credits crawl). Directed by Damian Lee. And rubbish.

First published in this form here.

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