1982, United States. Starring Ken Wahl, Steven James, Peter Hooten, Klaus Kinski, Alexander Spencer, Joaquim de Almeida, William Prince, Ron Harper. Directed by James Glickenhaus.

The Cold War produced a lot of great films, or at least a lot of enjoyable ones. It also produced some godawful dreck, though even some of that dreck was at least entertaining. Cold War paranoia films took on many forms. In the 1950s, there were a lot of those "realistic" atomic war movies that consisted mainly of a group of people sitting around in a bar discussing matters until an atom bomb fell and blew everyone up. The more creative films let giant red ants or some such creature stand in for the commies. Some of the more outlandish entries even had secret plots by the Chinese to tunnel under the Pacific Ocean and pop out in California ready for an invasion.

During the 1960s, the Cold War sci-fi film gave way to straight-up espionage thrillers inspired by the success of the James Bond films that always involved the Reds trying to steal some terrible device we never should have invented in the first place. Luckily, there's always a square-jawed G-Man on the case, ready to dish out some beat-downs and bed some Eastern Bloc babes. The best Cold War films of the 1960s were most definitely coming from Italy, Spain, and Germany. The Eurospy film was born, and it was probably one of the greatest achievements of the Cold War era.

When the 1980s came, Ronald Reagan rekindled the Cold War with a fire in his eye he'd not had since the days he was gleefully ratting out his co-stars in Hollywood and accusing them of being Commies during the Senate Un-American Activities Committee. Reagan made the escalation of the Cold War the primary focus of his eight-year administration, allowing education to falter and the economy to languish in disrepair. On the one hand, his crackpot brinksmanship seemed like it just might be the end of us all. On the other hand, he did bankrupt the Soviet Union and cause the downfall of European communism, thus ending the Cold War it seemed he was so likely to heat up. History is funny like that.

In the midst of the rhetorical sparring between Reagan and his Russian counterparts, Cold War paranoia films enjoyed renewed popularity. This time we were often blowing up the whole world then driving around in dune buggies after the dust settled. Although post-apocalypse films were the most noticeable and flamboyant, more than a few cloak and dagger thrillers slinked onto the screen as well. Unfortunately, a lot of those were geared toward kids and always featured a plucky young protagonist furiously pedaling his BMX bike away from pursuing Russian agents. I may be a lot of things, but a fan of insipid kiddy action films is not one of them. Even when I was a young tot, if I was watching an action film, I wanted blood and explosions, and if possible, ninjas and boobs. It was generally unlikely that I would get my requirements fulfilled by a movie starring Corey Haim or Henry Thomas riding their bikes to freedom.

Luckily, a few films emerged that satisfied my appetite for movies far more adult than I probably should have been watching. I remember very vividly the night I first got to watch James Glickenhaus' The Soldier. My friend Dan (then known as Danny) had this older brother named Dave who liked to do typical big brother stuff like hide out in the woods and howl like a werewolf (or a regular wolf, I suppose) to get us scared. It rarely worked, and it was odd that he'd go to such extreme and goofy measures to spook us since we were far more afraid of him simply delivering a good-natured pounding to us.

When he wasn't teaching us important things like how to endure an Indian burn or a red belly, he was a pretty cool older brother (or maybe it just seemed that way since I could always go home; Dan had to stay there and pray for the day his brother would have to go back to college). He was the one who let us hang out and watch The Soldier. While I remember the whole night with rather bizarre clarity, about the only thing I could remember from the movie itself was a scene where some guy sneaks into an apartment and tries to strangle some other guy with a wire. The other guy blocks it with his arm, but the wire still cuts through his sweater and causes a decent amount of blood to flow. I have no idea why that scene is the one I remember, but there ya go.

Since everyone my age builds their live around reclaiming their childhood and indulging themselves by purchasing every toy they were never able to get when they were ten, I figured it might be a good idea to track down a copy of The Soldier and give it another go-round. I mean, I remember that it was bloody and full of spies. That's enough to warrant at least one more look. Not too long ago, I would have gone into this film with some degree of trepidation. Would it still seem as cool to me now as it did nineteen years ago? However, after watching countless films from my youth that I should have grown out of, I discovered that my tastes have, for better or worse, changed very little since then. I still like the most godawful juvenile crap, and that part of the brain that makes you outgrow cheap barbarian movies and corny sci-fi remains as undeveloped as the part that should have me buying a house and starting a family instead of worrying about completing my Michael Caine spy thriller collection and tracking down a Fidel Castro action figure.

So given my short-comings when it comes to taste, I abandoned any misgivings a sane person may have harbored and dove headlong into the heart of this Cold War actioner. I wasn't really disappointed either, but I rarely am. I mean, if Space Hunter and Death Stalker aren't going to disappoint me, a film has to really be bad for me to regret wasting my time with it.

The Soldier stars Ken Wahl - fresh off his turn in 1981's Fort Apache, The Bronx -- as The Soldier, a CIA operative who is so tip top secret that only the director of the CIA (and maybe the President) knows he even exists. As you expect from such a movie, The Soldier is the guy you call when all other options fail, when the task at hand is impossible, so on and so forth. Maybe if they trained all their operatives this well, we wouldn't need those "final option" guys, because the first option guys could actually get the job done. Maybe if the CIA stopped relying on twelve-year-old kids on bikes to outwit Russian spies, there'd be less need for The Soldier.

When we first meet The Soldier, he's blowing away some terrorists in super slow-motion with ultra-wet bloody squibs. All while Tangerine Dream drones on in the background. So far, so good except for the fact that you can clearly see the squibs detonating and emitting a little puff of fire. Maybe they're using some of those explosive-tip bullets. Of course, this scene has nothing at all to do with anything else in the movie. It just shows us that The Soldier is a bad-ass, and the movie has really over-filled its squibs - something of which I always approve.

The actual plot kicks in when three terrorists - yep, three - hijack a shipment of weapons-grade plutonium that is being shipped on the back of an open-bed truck in a container clearly identifying it as weapons-grade plutonium, and with only one car (an Oldsmobile) to guard it. Oh, and a Southern cop somewhere else up in the hills. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I've never transported weapons-grade plutonium anywhere. Consumer grade for the kitchen, sure, but never weapons-grade. Nor have I ever been in the military in a position to be privy to the particulars of transporting such a cargo. Still, even with my ignorance fully fessed up to, I'm pretty sure they don't do it in a clearly-marked open-bed truck with only two guys in an Olds to guard it. Surely they'd do something like hide it amid a convoy of heavily armed Piggly Wiggly trucks full of well-trained soldiers. And surely they wouldn't stop for anything, even a topless woman hitchhiking or a broken down car. But the terrorists in The Soldier don't even need the topless hitchhiker, because this truck will stop for dang near anybody.

When you only have a couple slow-witted guys guarding the deadliest substance on the planet, it's no surprise that it only takes three terrorists to steal it. When the single cop finally shows up for support, he draws his gun and does the whole, "Freeze right there, mister!" routine. Now just as I've never been in the military, I've also never been a cop, but I'm pretty sure that even in today's skittish anti-cop atmosphere it's considered A-OK to come in with guns a-blazin' when you're approaching a group of men who you know gunned down two US soldiers, blew up a car, and are currently crawling around on top of the truck you know contains plutonium. No need to be diplomatic about things. Maurizio Merli would have immediately started kicking in teeth and bashing people's heads with the hood of a car. Hell, he'd let you have it with both barrels blazing just for flipping off an old lady. Of course, I suppose I could be wrong. If anyone in the military would like to confirm that James Glickenhaus is correct, and we truck around nuclear weapons with an escort of two Plymouths (one of which disappears), then I'll apologize, revise this review, and promptly move somewhere with a little more security when it comes to transporting the stuff that can blow up entire cities.

Now that they have the plutonium, the terrorists whip up an atom bomb and plant it somewhere in Saudi Arabia, demanding that Israel withdraw from the occupied West Bank. If Israel refuses, the terrorists will set off the bomb, thus contaminating over 50% of the world's oil supply and thrusting civilization into a state of panic and anarchy. Israel refuses, which frankly seems sort of prickish. I mean, I know you're all proud of holding onto a useless hunk of desert and all instead of just giving it to the people who live there, but this is the whole world we're talking about. Couldn't they just take it back later on? What's so great about the West Bank anyway? I hope that if something this goofy ever happened in real life, Israel wouldn't be nearly as rude about it as they are in this movie. Maybe Glickenhaus was once snubbed by a Hasidic Jew, so he decided to make Israel out to be a bunch of dicks in his movie.

Not wanting to see the world cast into chaos, the United States begins military preparations to force Israel out of the West Bank. Given our current relations with Israel in which we let them do pretty much anything no matter how adversely it affects us, this may seem sort of odd. Keep in mind, however, that the US and Israel were not always buddy-buddy. When Israel was carved out of the Middle East by European countries, it was populated almost entirely by refugees from Eastern Bloc nations. In other words, Communist nations. The US was supremely suspicious of Israel, which at the time seemed much closer to a Socialist nation than a democratic one. Anyway, what did we care? It was a problem for Europe and the Middle East to work out amongst themselves. It wasn't until it dawned on the United States that Israel had a lot of strategic value as a base and as a place to test new weapons that we figured it might be worth buddying up with them. So now we have the mess we have today. If only we had a man like . . . The Soldier!

Not wanting to see the world torn asunder, nor wanting to see the US go to war with Israel, the CIA sends The Soldier in to do what he must do, however it must be done. Of course, if he gets caught, the US government will deny his existence, et cetera. You'd think after about the nine hundredth time someone heard that speech, they could just skip it. This isn't his first mission. He knows the "deny any knowledge of you and your actions" spiel. If they just gave it to them the day they graduated from "super duper spy training" school and added, "And this applies to everything you do from here on out, starting . . .now!" they'd save everyone a lot of time.

Meanwhile, over in Israel, a hot female Mossad agent is torturing Iceman. Seriously. Sure, it's just a ruse to get someone to talk, but doesn't anyone notice that the guy pretending to get tortured has simian-like features and a forehead that slopes like a Neanderthal in order to hide the blood packets the Mossad installed in it to make his interrogation and execution seem realistic? Palestinians may not be up on all the latest techniques from Stan Winston, but I think even the untrained eye can spot a guy with three inches of latex protruding from his forehead and making him look like some of your more involved Star Trek: The Next Generation aliens. About the only reason this sequence even exists is to introduce the chick, and the only reason she exists is so she can sleep with The Soldier later on for no real reason.

While The Soldier prepares for his mission by playing Konami light gun games, the terrorists pass the day eavesdropping on the CIA. After building a bomb out of a light bulb, the terrorist infiltrates CIA headquarters and plants the dastardly device in the office of the head of the CIA. Let me do this one more time: I've never been a member of the CIA, but I have been by their office in DC for a tour once a long time ago. I seem to remember them having security. You know, being the CIA and all. Yet this guy gets past all their security simply by throwing on a granny dress and a gray wig and pretending to be the cleaning woman. Wouldn't security recognize the fact that she has man scruff and a wig that isn't on properly? And wouldn't they know who was and was not supposed to be cleaning the director's office? Surely even the CIA wouldn't fall for the old "the regular cleaning lady is sick, so I'm taking her place" bit. Actually, given what we've learned in recent months about how the CIA and FBI operate, I guess they could possibly fall for a trick involving a European terrorist masquerading as the lady from Mama's Family.

Something I've always wondered is how terrorists always manage to get a job as part of the cleaning or maintenance crew at wherever they need to plant stuff for later on. Take Shiri, for instance. It's one of my favorite action films, but how the heck did all the terrorists get jobs at the stadium they'd be attacking later on? Did they have a contingency plan in place just in case they were told that the stadium wasn't hiring anyone? Why are there always just enough employment opportunities for the terrorists to sneak in however many people they need to do the job? Similarly, even if the guy from The Soldier had been masquerading as a cleaning lady long enough to bug the office, how did he get the job to begin with? I assume the CIA screens everyone heavily, even their janitorial staff. Didn't they catch that this cleaning lady was actually a man who, until a few months ago, had been living in Poland or East Germany or something? It seems that no matter how screwed up the CIA may be, they'd at least catch that one.

So what I'm learning here is that The Soldier is slightly less believable and more bone-headed than even the most outlandish Eurospy films. I mean, I'm willing to accept a few plot contrivances to help move things along, but this movie is really pushing things. Luckily, it's countering the colossally inept plotting with a lot of slow-motion shooting and blood-spurting bullet wounds. Just don't mistake this for anything even remotely resembling intelligent regardless of how much the dreary Tangerine Dream music may make it sound like an arthouse experiment.

The Soldier eventually goes to meet up with Klaus Kinski at some ski resort for no real reason, at least not one I remember them telling us. If The Soldier had watched any movies before taking this assignment, he'd know that you can never trust Klaus Kinski. He'll always betray you or crawl through the ductwork to watch you undress. Maybe The Soldier figured the guy did give the world Nastasia Kinski, so he'd give him the benefit of the doubt. How a guy as creepy looking as Klaus contributed to making Nastasia is as great a mystery as how a greasy little guy with a crappy haircut like Dario Argento could have had anything to do with the production of Asia Argento.

The Soldier and Klaus meet at a ski resort for no other reason than it's a convenient place to have the ski chase and shoot-out that's become required for all spy films since James Bond first popularized them. Seriously, how many spy films have ski chases and shoot-outs? Bond seems to have had one in almost every movie since On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Heck, even next generation spy movies like XXX knew enough to have a ski chase. But at least they make some perfunctory attempt to justify it in the story. Here, they just go to the ski resort for absolutely no reason. And then Klaus Kinski immediately betrays The Soldier, whom he seemed to have been friends with up to about this point.

So they have a big ski chase, which is admittedly pretty cool. The Soldier even does a 720 while firing an Uzi. Unlike the real world, where this would be an incredibly idiotic thing to do that would result in you hitting no one while everyone was free to take potshots at you, in the world of poorly-conceived Cold War action films, you can do the same stunt in slow motion, allowing you to nail half a dozen fast-moving gunmen on skis while at the same time being able to completely dodge all their attempts to shoot you. Eventually, The Soldier is able to punch one of the gunmen, which causes him to confess the entire plot to The Soldier, revealing that it's not terrorists at all who are behind the atom bomb threat. It's the Russians!

Now wait just a minute here.

The Russians? Okay, I know it's the Cold War, and the Russians are responsible for everything bad that happens, even the decline in ratings for Battle of the Network Stars, but come on! The Russians need oil, too. I know they have some of their own, but surely even Russia can't benefit from casting the bulk of the world into a state of anarchy. I mean, it is going to affect them as well, like having unruly Eurotrash neighbors who smoke hasch and blast dull trance albums all night. This is silly even for Cold War Russians. And why are they putting on this whole stupid show with making Israel vacate the West Bank? Why do they give a rat's ass? Are they pissed because so many Jews left Russia and moved to Israel? If Israel had agreed to pull out of the West Bank, would the Russians just go, "Well, we didn't expect that. Guess we better go turn off that bomb like we promised." What's with the dog and pony show? Why don't they just set the bomb off and be done with things? I've seen better plans hatched by the kids down the street who were trying to take over the Little Rascals fort, and all those plans involved dressing up like pirates and flinging Limburger cheese at each other.

In order to alert the CIA to the fact that it's those dirty, no-good Commie pinkos behind the plot, The Soldier must break into a military base to use the phone. Why? Who knows. You'd think after all this time he'd have a better way to contact the one guy who knows who he is. For some reason, the head of the CIA is sitting in the dark in his office, and only turns on the lamp with the exploding bulb when it's convenient to the plot. Now The Soldier is on his own, with no allies save for the crack team he assembles to help him pull off a scheme even stupider than the one dreamed up by the Russians.

The first guy he recruits is "the black guy." Since this movie was made before Ernie Hudson was a big star, the black guy is played Steve James, who played "the black guy" in every movie requiring a black guy before Ernie Hudson became the official black guy of Hollywood. Anyone who is a fan of crappy action films recognizes James, who's probably best-known for his role as "Kungfu Joe" in I'm Gonna Get You, Sucka!. James was almost always relegated to playing sidekick to some lead-footed white hero, which was ironic since James was a better fighter and actor than pretty much everyone to whom he was forced to play second fiddle. He was definitely one of the great fixtures of action cinema until his untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 1993.

He'd already worked with James Glickenhaus in 1980 on the "'Nam vet gets revenge" flick The Exterminator. In The Soldier, he's the guy who sneaks in and does that attempted wire assassination to Ken Wahl. Of course, after some fighting, they just laugh and embrace, glossing over the fact that had The Soldier not reacted in time he would have been decapitated. And even though he did react in time, he still has an inch-deep gash in his forearm. Do people, even highly trained people, really do this "trying to kill my buddy as a good joke" thing? Rough housing is fine and all, but most people draw the line at attempted murder, even if it's all in good fun. It's like Kato constantly attacking Inspector Clouseau. Most people would just sneak up and give their buddy a wet willie or something, not try to slice their limbs off.

The Soldier assembles the exact same crack team that is assembled for every movie of this nature. There's the black guy, the drunk, the chick, and the guy who doesn't want to be there. Together, they hatch a scheme in which the rest of the team will commandeer a nuclear missile silo while The Soldier drives around Berlin in a Porsche for no discernable reason. The job of the guys in the silo is to threaten to nuke Moscow unless they drop this whole scheme with irradiating the Saudi oil fields. To show they mean business, The Soldier will drive fast and jump a sports car over the Berlin Wall.

That's their plan? First of all, taking over the missile silo is ridiculously easy. It must have been on the same base that ships nuclear materials in open-bed trucks with no armed escort. Or it's the same base that can be infiltrated by a precocious bike-riding pre-teen who made his own clearance cards. Seriously, even though it's adults doing the espionagin', their plans are even more ridiculous than what any spy-thwarting youngster would have devised. I mean, we don't want to lose the oil, so instead we'll start World War III and destroy the whole world? At least the Russian plan could have resulted in Russia itself surviving and being a society where everyone wears burlap sacks and hoes the fields all day. I mean, they were pretty much there already. But The Soldier's plan makes even the oil field scheme seem like a good idea.

This is the kind of crap that probably sparked the events we saw in Red Dawn. I always wondered why the Russians would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States, and why they'd have a bunch of sun-loving tropical island boys from Cuba invade a small town in Colorado. Now we know they were pissed about the stupid crap The Soldier was trying to pull. The Cubans probably just wanted to see snow and shoot at C. Thomas Howell. Who doesn't want to shoot at C. Thomas Howell?

Talk about a lunkheaded movie. When a stupid action film aspires to be nothing more than a stupid action film, it's usually not bad. You know what you're getting, after all. What's far more entertaining, however, is when an action film tries hard to be smart and the effort just makes it ten times stupider than it would have been without the delusions of intelligence. Chimps could hatch better plots than Glickenhaus has concocted for this mess. Nothing makes any sense even by Cold War standards when lots of things countries did seemed to make no sense. Even Ronald Reagan, who damn sure had some fruitcake ideas, would have dismissed these schemes as a bunch of junk. Why would the Russians want to catapult the whole world into a state of total chaos? Oh sure, because they're evil. Even Tom Clancy wouldn't devise a plot that inane.

And what about The Soldier's plan to prevent it from happening? Why did he have to have his guys break in and take over the missile silo? All he does is meet up with The Russians in East Berlin and say, "We're going to blow up Moscow if you blow up the oil," and they take him at his word. They are terrified by the revelation that The Soldier now has a missile pointing at Moscow. Was it somehow a shock to the Soviets that we had missiles pointing at them all ready to go? Who did they think we were pointing them at? His whole plan is the brinksmanship equivalent of spending a million dollars to catch a guy who stole a hundred dollars. Rather than breathing a sigh of relief that the crisis has been averted, you just sort of sit there and go, "That's it? Really? Man, I'm glad the Cold War's over."

The film isn't helped by the plodding Tangerine Dream score, which seems totally out of place in an action film. Moody synthesized new age music hardly communicates a sense of urgency, so even at the points where the film is well-paced and action-packed, it seems slow-moving and dull. Sometimes a score that seems contradictory to the onscreen action can end up working quite well. This is not one of those times.

Speaking of dull, it seems like Steve James is the only one doing any acting. The concept of having more than one facial expression or tone of voice seems lost on Wahl, who glides through his performance as The Soldier with somnambulistic dreariness. Was he even aware of the fact that he was making a movie? Klaus Kinski is fine, as he always is, but he's only in the movie for a tiny bit, long enough to justify listing him on the movie poster to snare any of the types of people who might be snared by Klaus Kinski's name on the marquee. Everyone else turns in performances that could be called "below average" had Ken Wahl not set the bar so low. Compared to him, the other actors seem as low-key as Cesar Romero playing The Joker. Not that the script gives them much to work with.

With so many things going against this film, it's no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a miserable failure as an intelligent espionage thriller, but as a crappy action film it succeeds marvelously. There's a lot of shooting, and when people get shot the blood really gushes. Ken Wahl (or his stunt double) gets to have a ski hill shoot out. He also gets to jump an expensive sports car over the Berlin Wall -- score one for capitalism, baby! A lot of things blow up, and there's one of those scenes where a fight breaks out in a cowboy bar and the band just keeps on playing as if it's nothing out of the ordinary (I think that joke was old even in 1982).

Although I feel there's too much poorly used slow-motion (made worse by Tangerine Dream's meandering synth score), at least there's a lot of action, and some of it is even fairly exciting. Despite making a number of action-oriented films, Glickenhaus just never got the hang of it. For his next movie, 1985's The Protector, even Jackie Chan couldn't help Glickenhaus figure out how to stage a compelling action set piece. That The Soldier has any action at all worth watching is a bit of a miracle, but it's a welcome surprise. The ski chase is good, as are a number of bloody shootouts and car chases, though you'll be left wondering what sort of lame Porsche is unable to outrun an Army jeep.

The horrendously thought-out plot adds to the charm. At least they tried to make something smart. They simply didn't succeed. But they did make something that is more entertaining than it is disappointing. Better spy films have come and gone, but The Soldier has enough gratuitous violence and bad writing to keep it on the list of fond memories I've been able to relive. If you want your thrills delivered with brains and wit, you'd best look elsewhere. If you want them delivered with bloody squibs and asinine writing, then The Soldier just might be the man for the job.

Labels: Espionage, Stars: Klaus Kinski, Year: 1982