It’s the aftermath of the Second American Civil War. Now Steel Harbor is the only free city. It’s city of crime, chaos, corruption, sleaze and depravity. You can have a lot of fun in Steel Harbor and you can get into a lot of trouble.
Barb Wire (Pamela Anderson) runs a bar there, called the Hammerhead. Curly (Udo Kier) manages it for her.
Barb makes her living in various ways, some legal and some illegal, including bounty hunting and stripping.
She has an uneasy relationship with the local chief of police Willis (Xander Berkeley). Willis is moderately corrupt but Barb doesn’t mind that since she’s moderately crooked as well. There’s some erotic heat between them. An attraction of two morally compromised people.
There’s a totalitarian government and of course there’s a Resistance. There’s a genius scientist named Cora D with the antidote to the government’s most potent bioweapon. She’s on the run. And she needs some high-tech retinal contact lenses to escape detection.
Barb has the contact lenses and they’re worth big bucks and that could be her ticket out of Steel Harbor. But the bad guys (from the totalitarian Congressional government) are determined to get the lenses and to get Axel and Cora D (who are irritating starry-eyed idealists and not that bright).
Axel is helping her to escape. They want Barb’s help. Barb had loved Axel but he betrayed her. Barb has now had enough of causes.
Barb’s brother Charlie is with the Resistance and he’s idealistic and you just know he’s going to get himself into trouble.
Now at this stage you might be thinking that you’ve seen this film before. And if you’ve seen the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Cyborg you have seen it before. The plot is pretty much identical. Barb Wire also owes a lot to Casablanca.
The bad guys are cardboard cutout villains.
The main thing wrong with Barb Wire is that the basic concept is not very original and the plot is very unoriginal.
On the plus side the action scenes are extremely good. I can’t really fault the job done by director David Hogan. He keeps things moving and as interesting visually as he can.
And there’s Udo Kier who is always a joy to watch.
In my view the movie’s biggest asset is Pamela Anderson. Barb is a larger-than-life outrageous comic-book kickass action heroine and that’s how Anderson plays her. And with impossibly voluptuous figure, her blonde hair, her leather gear and her corsets she doesn’t look real. She looks like a comic-book heroine. That’s how it should be.
It’s easy to point out this movie’s many faults (and they are many) but if you don’t worry about the plot you can just enjoy the mayhem. There’s very little gore and very little blood. It’s about excitement rather than gore. It’s also very tame where nudity and sex are concerned. Perhaps too tame.
Barb Wire is a comic-book B-movie with a comic-book B-movie heroine and that’s fine by me. Mindless entertainment but it’s not trying for anything more than that. I enjoyed it. Recommended.
And it looks nice on Blu-Ray.
No comments:
Post a Comment