This weekend I watched
T.N.T., a rather generic Olivier Gruner film, twice. Why twice, I don't know...Maybe it was the only thing I had around and I was bored
It's kinda sad really because Olivier Gruner's entire career seems to be summed up as "a rather generic action film" and I actually kinda like the guy. Not really a great actor or anythng but he usually comes across as a pretty likeable character and I find him more enjoyable to watch then some other action stars (*coff* JCVD) so it's a shame he's never been given roles in better material; maybe a better level of generic action film than "Interceptor Force" or something
In this one, Gruner plays Alex. Actually, Gruner seems to play "Aex" in every movie...so I checked IMDB and it does seem that he often plays somone named "Alex"..or "Caution Templar". Anyway Alex is an ex-Desert Storm special-ops kinda guy who now does dirty work for some secret organization in the government, and is starting to get burnt out on it and realizes that some of the work is more dirty than he'd really care to admit. So he quits the team, a "TNT" or "Tactical Nuetralization Team" (or any excuse to have the abbreviations "TNT" so we could have a cool sounding movie title). In quitting, he sends his boss a copy of a tape he's made that could expose the whole operation
As an aside but one nice thing about the two wars in Iraq is that it gives movie acion heros a new place to have seen military action. The Vietnam War is fading into history and it was getting a bit silly for men in their 30s to have "seen action in 'Nam", meaning they would've be in Vietnam when they were about 10 years old. Now we have Desert Storm, and whataver the new one is called, and men in their 20s can be action stars with current live military experience again.
Alex seems to be settling down in a small town in Denver, with a cute girlfiend whom he'd like to marry, ad a best friend in local law enforcement, Randy Travis. Yes, *the* Randy Travis. How he ended up here in his crossover to movies I don't know, but he makes the movie more fun to watch so...that's cool. Well, his old buddies from TNT come knocking. They want any more copies of the tape he made, and preferably they want Alex dead. I didn't quite pickup the time frame here; Alex seems semi-established here; he's he's considering marraige and knows some locals fairly well. Either he has lived here some time and just occasionally disappears to go do his TNT work. or TNT took it's sweet time to get around to going after the guy who quit with the evidence.
So his TNT buddies come calling;they kidnap his girlfriend, Jamie, and shoot poor Travis. And try to work a hostage deal of trading Jamie for the tapes. So Alex does what Gruner always does, and sets out to free his girl and kill the team of bad guys. And they live happily ever after. Not much to really say about it because , after all, it's a fairly generic action movie so you can pretty much see what's going to happen long before the characters do, culminating in the fist fight in the middle of the street and the cut shots to the oncoming truck.
The movie is not really bad, it's just a cheap generic action movie with Olivier Gruner as the action here and Randy Travis as some fun along the way. So if your bored with nothing else to do, you might enjoy it if you're into that genre. And you can pick it up at NetFlix
here if you're interested. The movie is almost more interesting in it's cliches and what it says about current action movies and the careers of some people (such as Eric Roberts, who plays the head T.N.T. bad guy) then it is as a movie itself
