Action movie time with 2012 After Dark Action flick El Gringo, starring martial arts badass and Yuri Boyka, Scott Adkins. I really liked this film and it would be easy to compare it to Mel Gibson's Get The Gringo, but both films share very little in common. Check out my review after the Jump...
Written By Peter Osmond
Last
year saw the release of two Mexico set action film, one starring
everyone's favourite Jew hating Australian, Mel Gibson and the other
starring up and coming british action star Scott Adkins, One was
called Get The Gringo or in the U.K, How I Spent My Summer Vacation
and the other was simply called El Gringo, It's the latter film I
shall be taking a look at today. I've already taken a gander at
Gibson's Mehican actioner and while it would be easy to compare the
two, they are wildly different film, El Gringo more Spaghetti Western
meets Desperado in modern day Mexico.
Now
if you have an awareness of action cinema and I'm not talking The
Avengers or fucking transformers, i'm talking the outside action
flicks, ones that don't get $200 million dollar budgets, i'm talking
low budget, action packed bullet flicks with stars like Van Damme,
Dolph Lundgren and to a lesser extent Steven Seagal. This time around
it's a main role for Brit ass kicker Scott Adkins, now the action fan
amongst you will know that name and i've bandied it around quite a
bit here on the site. Adkins is the star of the 2 Undisputed sequels
where he played Yuri Boyka, the worlds most complete fighter against
Michael Jai White's version of Ving Rhames' character fromWalter
Hill's original prison boxing flick. He has a pretty large fan base
which includes me, and after seeing him in last years incredible
Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning, I was anxious to get hold of a
copy of El Gringo.….. Well I did get a copy and it's fuckin'
awesome.
El
Gringo follows “The Man” as he makes his way across the
U.S/Mexican border to a small town called El Fronteras which is run
by a corrupt sheriff and a gang of skull faced criminals. He has a
bag with $2million in it. They want the money, he doesn't want to
give it up so they try to get the money and fail because he pretty
much kills everyone.
Doesn't
sound like much of a plot does it, and you'd be correct in assuming
that, it's not heavy on plot, in fact we've seen this plot many times
before but the execution is spot on. It looks fantastic with some
great camera work, some really good editing and sound FX and a good
performance from Scott Adkins and a crazy performance from Christian
Slater.
Director
Eduardo Rodriguez handles the film brilliantly, there are some great
shots of El Frontieres and his handling of the action scenes puts
some of big name hollywood directors to shame. Rodriguez doesn't have
a great track record when it comes to films with only an old Robert
Rodriguez horror screenplay from 2005 called Curandero that sat on
the shelves for a nearly 8 years and the 2010 Dolph Lundgren home
invasion flick Stash House ( actually a pretty decent flick) under
his belt, but his work on El Gringo is commendable and very
reminiscent Robert Rodriguez' Desperado. Like directors John Hyams
and Issac Florentine, If given a sizeable budget, What these guys
could do with a Studio action flick may never be seen but if this is
the level of action cinema coming from outside of the Hollywood
system, i'll keep supporting these directors.
Overall,
El Gringo is a pretty badass action flick, Adkins kicks ass, the
action is superb and the script is straight and actually kinda funny.
I enjoyed the hell out of it and I hope to see Adkins in more roles
like this and more from director Eduardo Rodriguez. For this I'll
give El Gringo 4 stars.
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