Silent Trigger 
                                    
Director: Russell Mulcahy
Year: 1996
Rating: 6.0
I always seem to forget that I have watched Dolph Lundgren in a few movies other than one of the Rocky films. Not many but a couple. My brain seems to blank them out from embarrassment. So I am always a bit surprised at his inability to act. His acting makes Chuck Norris's grunts sound profound, makes Steven Seagal's self-love seem Shakespearean. I expect a few thousand mocking words have been written about his inability to act, to change his rock hard facial expression, to emote and they are all true. But I think he has wisely chosen roles where that doesn't matter that much. He is a man who knows his limitations. His role is to kill a lot of people and never look sorry about it. He is fine for this film as a professional assassin as long as you are willing to be in the low brow action category. But the script here is actually sort of clever and a really good actor could have made something of it. But I guess Anthony Hopkins was busy.


 
The film opens in some war riddled country in Europe and he has an assignment to take out a female leader. His spotter is played by Gina Bellman (in the Brit comedy Coupling). Her duty is to inform him when the target is in the kill zone, the distance, wind etc. I could probably do that if any Spotter positions are open. His job is to pull the trigger. She gets extra credit for killing him if he fails to pull that trigger. He does fail. Then a helicopter shows up and tries to kill them both and they go on the run. But this is really the backstory and told in flashbacks.

 

The real story is the present and he seems to still be working for the Agency - which agency is not clear but probably not the EPA but then you can never be sure. He sneaks into this high rise building under construction with a line sight of the target the next day. His spotter shows up. What do you know. It is Gina who was supposed to kill him before. She is very pretty and has a mild English accent so I was glad to see her. At this point you may think you know where the film is going but it doesn't. It gets interesting. One of the two guards of the building is a psycho sicko who wants to rape her, Dolph is setting explosives over the building, Gina is hiding a silencer and the rest of the film all takes place in this building over the night into the early morning. So there are really only three action scenes - one in Europe, fighting the sicko and the climax - all well done - but the rest is just trying to figure out what is really going on. It is directed by Russell Mulcahy who has some fine films under his belt - in particular the first two Highlander films.