Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:2	Budget Low

David Carradine's take on "The Gauntlet" only with lots more driving around.

In 1991 crime in America got so bad that the government turned over law enforcement to private enterprise and thus C.O.P.S. was born. The Civilian Operated Police Systems apparently was apparently able to curtail the criminal outbreak but their methods are a little extreme. Still if you want to make an amulet you have to break a few eggs. Or kill everyone suspected of a crime. When we first meet John Tucker (David Carradine - "The Warrior and the Sorceress ")he is sitting in a beat up old car. The camera starts with his feet and slowly reveals more of him. You get the feeling we are supposed to impressed with his physical poweress. Umm, not so much. At any rate, soon we find out what he was waiting for; a bookie or a drug dealer. After apprising the guy of his rights, he shoots him. The two "kids" he was selling something to take umbrage with Tucker's action and whack him with a 2 x 4. Foolishly the two persists in their efforts until Tucker is forced to kill them using a glove that shoots laser beams. Later at the strip joint the C.O.P.S.s all hang out at, he watches a news broadcast that announces an investigative report into the actions of the C.O.P.S. Tucker then shoots the TV. The head of C.O.P.S. Jason Adams (William Zipp) and Becker (Robert Tessier) are also watching the broadcast where Marion (Anna Rapagna) threatens to tell all and Adams sends Becker to take care of the problem. Which he does by putting out a warrant for her arrest for treason with an attached death penalty (yeah, that won't arouse any suspicion). Working on a tip, Tucker gets to the girl first but while attempting to take her into custody, two other C.O.P.S.s show up with instructions to shoot the girl. That does not work out well for one of them, but the other wisely runs away. Tucker decides that something is fishy and defends the girl instead of shooting her. She and Tucker survive, but nearly everyone else in the movie ends up dead.

In 1977 Clint Eastwood starred in and directed "The Gauntlet". In it he plays a cop who is assigned to get a witness to a trial of a mob boss. Any number of corrupt cops and city hall officials stand in his way as well as more than a few bikers. In that movie, gauntlet has two meanings; a particularly brutal form of military punishment and also "throw down the gauntlet" which is a challenge. We get to see Clint's character turn from a drunken pathetic cop to one of heroic proportions as he rises to the challenge. In "Future Force" there is also a gauntlet, but in this case we are talking about an glove that would protect the hand or belong to a suit of armour. I have a hard time believing the writer didn't see the Eastwood movie and perhaps he was "inspired" by it. Carradine gets a glove that shoots lasers, rips through a steel door, can stop a car and has a remote control. Way cooler than a steel reinforced school bus.

There are a lot of problems with the movie. First of all there is Carradine as a bad ass cop. He simply lacks the physical size and shape to be imposing. It's not just it looks like the other C.O.P.S. could take him, it looks like your grandma could take him. He doesn't look like he has any muscle and that beer belly does not help matters. His opponents are all considerably larger and more dangerous looking than him. He does not use any martial arts to take the guys out, just guns and bare knuckles. This gets more and more unbelievable as time goes on. Another issue is when Tucker is in a gun fight, Carradine plays him with the same sleepy-eyed way he played Caine and Kain ("Kung Fu" and "The Warrior and the Sorceress" respectively). While this works fine for a kung fu fight, it is not quite right for a gun fight. Several times we see him just randomly shooting in the general direction of the bad guys. The writing is a bit muddled and there aren't really any good lines for anyone. Carradine also breaks character a few times which makes it even more disconcerting. The movie would have been better served if he had played the bad guy but Carradine was the only name actor involved and he co-produced, so he got to play the good guy.

This is one of those movies where everyone around the hero dies. Pretty much knowing either Tucker or Marion is tantamount to a death sentence. Marion's roommate is killed because, umm, actually I have no idea why. Becker goes to her apartment and we see the two of them together and then the movie moves on to other things. Eventually Tucker and Marion end up at the apartment and find her body but there is no explanation about why she was killed. There are plenty of options here. He could have been trying to find out if she knew where Marion was, could have ransacked the place looking for the mysterious tape, could have left a goon waiting to ambush Tucker. But all we get is a corpse still wearing all her clothes but with a few red lines drawn on her. Becker also manages to kill Dawn Wildsmith and Tucker's tech genius buddy Billy who is in a wheelchair. The problem with these three deaths is that they seem just ridiculously tacked on and the timing doesn't make sense either. When Wildsmith is killed, Becker accuses her of letting Tucker go, which implies he saw her do it, watched them talk and then watch Tucker get in a car and drive away. You'd think he would have had time to do something. After Tucker and Becker get into a fight at the junkyard which Becker loses thanks to The Remote Controlled Gauntlet, Tucker calls Billy and asks him to do something and gives him five minutes to accomplish the task. Billy starts typing frantically and just before he finishes, Becker breaks in and shoots him. Of course, before he dies he manages to pick himself up off the ground long enough to press the one last key necessary to complete the task Tucker set for him thus saving Tucker's life. As Tucker walks away from his final confrontation with Adams, Becker is waiting outside with a gun. Man, that guy gets around.

In contrast to Becker zipping around from place to place seemingly instantaneously, we get to watch Tucker and Marion drive around in real time. When we are introduced to Marion she drives up to the TV station, then walks in the door, takes the elevator, and then explains to her assistant (who may also be her roommate) what a tough time she had getting to work today. She also states she expects something else to go wrong. Tucker spends a lot of time driving also. We never really know if he is going someplace, he just seems to be driving. My favorite driving scene though is at the very end of the movie. We watch Tucker and Marion get into the beat up old car and drive off down the road and then turn and then we get to watch an empty road for 10 or 15 seconds before the screen blanks and the credits roll.

In the right movie, David Carradine was a really good actor; "Boxcar Bertha", "Death Race 2000" "Kung Fu", "Kill Bill" and "The Warrior and the Sorceress" all played to his strengths as an actor. This one did not. In fact, it is fair to say that many of his roles did not play to his strengths. The man was in an amazing number of really crappy movies over the years. I am not sure he ever turned anyone down who asked him to be in their movie, he even worked for Fred Olen Ray in "Evil Toons". Perhaps he got his work ethic from his dad, John Carradine who may have never turned down a role either. One of John's last roles was for Fred's "Evil Spawn" playing across from Dawn Wildsmith. The world of B movies will not be the same without David and his odd presence.

In the end this is just another bad movie. Nothing about it really holds our interest; there are no brilliantly staged fight scenes, the dialog is flat and boring, the plot makes sense but the whole C.O.P.S. thing is poorly handled. It is a great idea, but not really used. Nothing happens in the movie that is dependent on it, the plot moves along like it was a simple "few bad apples" scenario. We are teased with a whole new idea of law enforcement and dumped immediately into a standard plot with a corrupt top cop. Like a lot of similar movies, there are not a lot of details shown. There is nothing that makes us feel that we are in a different place where the rules have changed. The sets are minimal and other than everyone dressing in 80's chic the people all look relatively normal. There isn't anything so bad about the movie that it might pique our interest and little to hold that interest. Some of it is worth a giggle but I would not go out of my way to see it.

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