Tactical Force [Import]

In the battle of Austin and Seagal I have come to believe Austin is the better actor. The movie starts out improbable as a gang of men in masks, rob a grocery store, take hostages and issue demands. A grocery store? Now I know they get robbed, but by a gang who has to share the loot? SWAT team leader Austin ignores proper police protocol and raids the place, killing the thieves, injuring the hostages, and doing huge amounts of property damage. To their surprise they are not rewarded, but are forced to take SWAT team training again. Michael Jai White, a young Carl Weathers with a BB gun is part of the team. Lexa Doig is a third member.

The upstairs of an abandoned(?) warehouse is set up with paper "bad guys" for the SWAT team to practice with simulation rounds. As fate would have it, two rival gangs are in the downstairs of the warehouse wanting "a case" which was stolen from them. One of the rival gangs learned to speak with bad Russian accents. I was waiting for one of them to say, "What about moose and squirrel."

The dialouge was mildly humorous at times, a step up from Austin's other movies. The plot left much to be desired. There were no real plot twists except at the very end...and then it didn't make much sense.

If you like Steve Austin movies, I think this was one of his better ones.

F-bomb, no sex. no nudity, no moose or squirrel.

"You want to do this the easy way or the hard way?" After a S.W.A.T. team led by Tate (Austin) get suspended they are assigned to undergo a re-training exercise. During the training they hear something and are left to stop an actual crime, with no real weapons. This will be a hard movie to review. The movie itself is not all the bad. The action is good and it moves pretty quick. The biggest problem with the movie is the dialog. Being an action movie starring a wrestler I can usually overlook stuff like this, but the words were distractingly bad. Lines like "Eat my grandma" shouted before firing a gun really take away from the action and makes you laugh throughout the movie instead of wondering what is happening. This will be the worst comparison ever but the action to dialog problems are "Star Wars" quality. The dialog is that bad, not so much the acting, just the dialog. Overall, a pretty entertaining movie that is made worse by the talking. Action is a B, dialog is a D. Taken together, I give it a B-

Would I watch again? - I don't think I will.

Not a strong outing for either Steve Austin or Michael Jai White, both of whom I enjoy when the productions are done right. For Stone Cold done right means 'Damage'. And for Mike that would be 'Undisputed II'.

This collaboration misses on several cylinders, but chugs along okay.

I'm the last film fan to go around pointing at the lack of realism of any movie. All film is a "lie" to one degree or another, and certainly action/adventures fall into the mythic realm of Escapism. Mind you, I love escapism, that's one of the main reasons why I enjoy watching them - to get away from the 'real'. I don't want to constantly bombard myself with daily, sometimes hourly, reports of the sick, twisted maelstrom of inhumanity against ourselves and our fellow earthly denizens. Films are a non-addictive and easy escape.

But even films have to have some foundation, some kernel of truth, allowing the audience to suspend belief. 'Tactical' failed this basic premise.

The first thing that strikes you is the laughable make-up of the SWAT team. Could you be more politically correct? One caucasian, one black, one hispanic and a female. All they're missing is the goofy computer guy in a wheelchair, preferably a wheelchair that has a built-in secret weapon. That would just about pacify the slobbering demographically perturbed amongst us.

Anybody with even the smallest scintilla of how police officers work will notice that there are usually something like a dozen special response team members at any given scene, sometimes as many as three dozen depending on the situation. A four-person team based out of one of the largest cities in the entire US? That's strike one. And SWAT has no females, not male chauvinism, just an observation. I read all the online reports that go back to 2008. To the best of my knowledge, across the entire nation, only one single female has earned a spot on her respective team - and she's not with LAPD. Strike two. Finally, with or without live fire, you don't assign a team to some abandoned military outpost for retraining. Getting access to such locations often requires difficult to obtain permits which can take up to a year or more to process. Not to mention, police have their own MOUT sites; they wouldn't train someplace where they couldn't exert authority over their area of operations. And that's strike three.

Are you telling me the writers/director couldn't come up with simple plausible explanations? Like why the team was so small? Why there was a female officer. And why they would be at an abandoned military complex? Seriously? That's like three 30-second scenes. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

I detest laziness in screenwriting and direction. Detest it with a passion.

And no matter how much weight he puts on or how much facial hair he grows - I'll never see Michael Shanks as anything other than a science geek. Apologies, I don't like typecasting actors, but for some it will always be that "one role" for life. To be fair, I even gave him credit for this production despite watching him deliver a very similar performance on the hit tv show 'Burn Notice'.

Overall: Once you accept the ridiculous, you might as well try to enjoy the ride. And to enjoy - just go with it.

Two small notes. Oddly, both involve body parts. One enjoyable - the other not.

- Gotta love the close-up of Keith Jardine's infamous cauliflower ear. Nice they were able to work that in. Enjoyable.

- Gotta hate the now ubiquitous plastic surgery fish-face that so many women wear nowadays. Not enjoyable. In fact, what spurs a woman to do that? It honestly looks horrible and truly defines the word 'traumatic'. Please no more fish-face in movies. Please.