by Nathan on 14 Aug 2010, 18:15
Okay, so I got my Icarus/Killing Machine dvd through today, £6.99 and it comes three days before release, holy shit!! Anyway here we go, this is gonna be a bit of observation here. First of all yeah there aren't any special features which seems kinda odd because the dvd which arrived was The Stranger starring Stone Cold Steve Austin, also released by Anchor Bay, a week earlier, did have. The covers and menus are pretty similar yet The Killing Machine has no special features whereas The Stranger has a behind the scenes and a trailer. It's not through lack of material because we've already seen some making-of shit and interviews from Icarus.
Anyway here goes. We all know that Cinetel took the movie away from Dolph and re-edited it and I think the faults which are in the producers cut would not have been so obvious in Dolph's cut. First of all you have the 85 minute running time, which by the time the movie gets properly started and all the titles are by you are talking about an hour and about fifteen minutes of movie. Pretty short. That's one of the main problems, it seems an awful lot was crushed into that hour and fifteen minutes, because you have so many characters etc and it seems there isn't much time for their reactions to situations, any character build up or anything, for example Dolph's daughter in the movie seems pretty calm for a little girl that has just witnessed her father brutally murder several people in his own home. I don't know if these things existed in Dolph's cut, a better reaction from the girl or simply more drama and character development but what I can guarantee without even knowing is that Dolph's cut would have been longer and BETTER. I think that the fact that a whole lot is crammed into the time leaves little room for very much thought about the characters, the action is very fast in places too and despite the action scenes being very frequent they last a couple of minutes at most.
I think that unfortunately the low-budget shows, not neccessarily in the locations or the type of action which is on screen because actually shootouts can be made to look very elegant and almost like a ballet, a style developed by John Woo, add to this a host of mansions and large buildings to have the shootouts in and you have a very nice backdrop for some good action. The problem is I think, the lack of time, sure the locations are there, the blood, the guns and the body count is also fairly high. But the lack of time has meant that the direction and editing isn't quite as sharp and fluid as Dolph's usual style. It's mostly noticeable during the times in which Dolph is running from place to place or there is movement of any kind, instead of steady cam shots it appears there is a lot of hand-held stuff in here, which almost defeats the purpose of a very visual film noir style assassin thriller that Dolph was going for. No fault of his because I can safely say Dolph would have done his best with what was available.
I'll move onto the editing because every single one of these problems relates in some way to the way the film was edited. I'm not sure what you call it but the first thing I noticed was that the editor seemed to use this technique, whereby in the flashbacks the camera would move, and the scene would be blurred, like the viewer was whipping their head all around and it was smudging the image. I found this very annoying as a lot of the time Dolph does flashbacks they are very stylised but in an artistic way, here I found that they took away the beauty of the locations which was more apparent in the stills which I saw before the film. The editing tends to be too fast in the fight scenes and whilst you can tell what is going on through concentration, it's not with the same clarity that came with the fight scenes in any of Dolph's other directorial efforts. Maybe this was intentional to highlight the struggle during the fights but I found it more distracting than anything. Anyway, overall the editing leaves a lot to be desired.
I did notice another similarity between Icarus and The Stranger, and that was that they both had the same editor, and if I'm not mistaken, the same motherfucker that hacked Steven Seagal's Kill Swith to pieces. The editing in The Stranger is very similar, especially may I add during the flashbacks. The editing is not very focused at all in The Stranger and he seems more content to play around with the different features the editing software boasts rather than actually edit the fucking movie properly. In conclusion for the bad stuff, Cinitel comprises of useless arseholes who know nothing about film-making, nothing about the audience and obviously nothing about Dolph's previous directorial work otherwise they would have given him a decent budget, shooting schedule and left him the fuck alone, and also let him play the bad guy like he had originally planned. Fuck them.
On the plus side Dolph's acting is good in this one, there are some nice scenes, I think Anchor Bay have colour corrected the other editing fuck up a little but the scenes in the farm house are still diabolical. The action is good, Dolph has some great guns and is a bad ass and Bo Svenson is cool in his limited role. Make no mistake, it's a good movie and I like it but if they had kept that talentless hack with the mentality of a five year old who just wanted to play with the software out of the editing room it would have beenmuch much better. Not Dolph's best directorial work but not his worst, doesn't match upto Command or Mechanik though. Forgot to mention I loved the titles and the titles song.
"Are we having fun yet?" - Dolph Lundgren, Universal Soldier