Direct Contact Review

• 6th Jun 2011

It seems of late that Dolph Lundgren has had a bit of a career renaissance both in front of the camera (with The Expendables) and behind it (evident in his gritty and back-to-basics action features). Direct Contact, from the direct-to-video (DTV) schlock double team of Avi and Danny Lerner, really is an utter mess from start to finish. It’s not hard to work out why it took two years to reach our shores.

The “story” concerns ex-US Special Forces operative Mike Riggins (Lundgren), who has been locked up in a Bulgarian prison. He is offered the chance of freedom and a large sum of money if he helps to rescue a kidnapped American woman. But as he does so he finds he is being chased down by several different underworld organizations. Now it’s a race against time to get the woman to the American embassy before they are both killed. It’s an over-used and tired narrative that brings nothing new to the table.

The unoriginal nature of the story could almost be forgiven if the action sequences where up to scratch. But either due to bad planning or lack of money, it instead mostly uses stock footage from no less than seven other direct-to-video films (one is the appalling Seagal feature Out for a Kill). It has absolutely no shame.

It is clear from the get-go that Dolph is sleepwalking through his scenes. Any fight sequences involving the Swedish karate champ are either badly executed or make the big man look like a clumsy geriatric. Worse, it looks like there were only two sets used.

This is a shockingly bad film (even by DTV standards) and as such has absolutely nothing to redeem or recommend it, and feels like a massive step back for Lundgren. What should have been a fun, clichéd, violent throwback to the non-CGI enhanced days of 80s action films is in fact so bad it that it does not even enter into guilty pleasure territory. Those who expected something in line with Lundgren’s more recent work (like The Mechanik, Missionary Man, The Defender and The Killing Machine) will be heartbroken. Yes that’s right, us DTV action fans do actually care about quality control when it comes to our cheap action flicks.

Fans of Dolph should approach with caution – and even they don’t need to own a copy of Direct Contact.  Everyone else can just give this a miss. I think Dolph is better off directing and writing his own action features in future.

Direct Contact is released June 13th on DVD