Film Summary DCCLXXIX (Lightning Bolt)

 


Do you want to see a dazzling sexy femme fatale infiltrate an underwater lair. 
Karate chop hordes of henchmen and take on a personal fight against the evils of Doctor Red!*

Well then you better keep looking cuz you're not getting here. 

Our main Kick-Ass woman is a glorified tritagonist. I can't even call her a secondary character. As the semi antagonistic blond lady fills that role instead. 
This original woman who is supposed to be a super professional secret agent, is a useless eneffective field operative. 
She can't hold herself together, she can't see traps coming a mile away, she doesn't smack her idiot assistant in the face when he smacks her on the ass.  She's not even a good romantic interests. The chemistry between her and our real protagonist (a James Bond stand in) is lukewarm at best.
I wouldn't make such an issue about this if it wasn't for the misleading poster and the first 10 minutes of the film. 
It builds the whole thing up as if she's going to be our main focus of the movie. 
But then we just switch over to this other guy. Who admittedly is not a bad choice for a protagonist and I can at least call him a sexy man. 
So the analogy of a sexy protagonist does stand. 
But as mentioned before he is just a James Bond filler. 

Although I do prefer this man's technique for dealing with enemies as opposed to that of bonds. James Bond used precision shooting with high calibre pistols. Tons of high-tech gadgetry** and sometimes just his own Debonair personality. 
Our protagonist uses his cheque-book. He dose it several times over too. Including the big bad boss of the movie himself. 
Admittedly it doesn't work with the last guy as he wants to conquer the world. But still, I love that he tried it all the same. 

The story over all is fine. It involves this strange Beer Baron living in an underground volcanic layer using radiation signals to screw up American missiles. To purposely keep them from going to the moon so that the Beer Baron can put his own rocket on the moon with a giant laser beam. That will somehow allow him to control the rest of the planet.
It's something to do with Magma and deep core energy sources that can literally destroy the planet. 
I'd say it was a pretty cool world domination plan. But as you see later on in this very movie even the slightest hindrance to the actual tectonic stability can destroy this underwater base with relative ease. So I think the whole thing would have ended up being suicidal if this guy tried to go through with his plans.

The pacing is decent enough, the environments have enough variety as to not make you bored of them. 
The acting is decent even if everything is dubbed over as this was clearly an Italian film repurposed for American audiences. 

I wonder how much better the story would have been if I just watch this with Original Italian with English subtitles. 
But as it is, it's perfectly fun and entertaining.

*That's not the antagonists name but he reminds me of the leader of the Red Ribbon Army from the original Dragon Ball series. All you have to do is put an eye patch on this guy and he's fit the bill just fine.

**In fairness our secret agent protagonist does have a few high-tech gizmos of his own. Though they're always secondary to the chequebook. There's even a point in the movie where he runs back to his book while being shot at

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