Jared: All right, Alex. Now this is gonna...
Alex: Sting a little? I know.
Jared: No, actually it's gonna hurt like a motherfucker.
Alex: Sting a little? I know.
Jared: No, actually it's gonna hurt like a motherfucker.
A cyberpunk movie from 1992 by Albert Pyun, starring Olivier "Poor Man's Van Damme" Gruner as a Cyborg ex-LAPD officer. Unlike most cyberpunk movies, though, it mostly takes place in tropical Java. Gruner's character Alex is a washed-up cop turned courier who is contacted by his suspicious former superiors to find a rogue cyborg (also his ex-girlfriend) but it turns out it's mostly just an excuse to get him close to her so they can make him explode and kill them both. What follows is a long, protracted chase scene with a lot of exploding machinery and machine people.
It was followed by three sequels that take place several decades after the the events of the first film, which follow Alex's genetic offspring named after him, played by bodybuilder Sue Price.
This movie contains examples of:
- Arrow Cam: Used in the shootout at the start of the movie.
- Awesome McCoolname: Max Impact, Alex's female sidekick.
- Bottomless Magazines: There are only a handful of reloads in the entire movie.
- Bullethole Door:
- Bullethole Floor. A full decade before Underworld (2003), this movie did it first and more crazily, with Alex shooting his way through three or four (maybe even five or six) floors.
- Some cyborg assassins make actual man-shaped doors with machine guns.
- Cool Shades: Lots of people, but mostly the bad guys. Farnsworth and his #1 henchman played by Brion James have a cool microphone/earpiece attached to them.
- Cyborgs: It's an Albert Pyun flick, after all.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:Narrator: It always scared him that they might take out his soul... and replace it with some matrix chip.
- Eye Beam: Eye Gun. One cyborg can flip away part of his face to reveal a gun where his left eye should be.
- Eye Scream: Alex's cybernetic eye being extracted from its socket.
- Fanservice: There's a lot of exposed skin in this film, and the ladies will enjoy it more because the majority is man-ass from guys like Gruner and a young Thomas Jane. We also have Deborah Shelton as Julian showing her exquisite figure post sex with Tom Hardy.
- Gender-Blender Name: And how!
- Alex (male)
- Jared (female)
- Sam Farnsworth (male)
- Angie (male)
- Max Impact (female)
- Germaine (male)
- Julian (female)
- Michelle (male)
- Claire (male) (offscreen character in alternate ending)
- Insistent Terminology: "Cyborgs" are what this film calls androids. Guys like Alex who have machine body parts? We don't know what they're called. Apparently, Albert Pyun saw The Terminator and got confused because the Terminator was called a cyborg there.
- Japan Takes Over the World: The US and Japan are in the process of merging, and this form the backdrop of the excuse of why Alex is on his mission to begin with.
- Large Ham: Tim Thomerson, who was basically Bruce Campbell before Bruce Campbell got famous, plays it mostly subdued throughout the movie but gets very animated near the end when he loudly declares his indestructibility. "[I'm] State of the FUCKING art, Alex!"
- Made of Explodium: The entire world. No matter what weapon is used and what's being hit, the result is a fiery explosion or at the very least massive sparks.
- My Species Doth Protest Too Much: A bunch of cyborgs are out to secretly replace everyone, but another group of friendly cyborgs is trying to stop them. Unfortunately Alex blows away a few of the resistance ones before he finds out the truth.
- Never Mess with Granny: A little old lady is harassed by one of the cyborg assassins searching for the protagonist. When he walks away, she pulls out a large pistol out of her purse and shoots him in the back several times, and then shoots him half a dozen times more when he's down for good measure.Old woman: Fucking cyborgs. Streets aren't safe anymore. Can't even go to the market without meeting some punk...
- Pet the Dog: Alex takes a timeout from a shootout to save a puppy.
- Super Window Jump: Whenever there's a window.
- Unexplained Accent: Almost every single character. Not just confined to the various European actors either - even the American characters played by US actors have inexplicable foreign accents. For example, Brion James (Leon from Blade Runner) playing a henchman with a weird Germanic accent.
- We Can Rebuild Him: The protagonist, Alex. Three times over the course of the film.Narrator: It took them six months to put him back together. Synthetic flesh, bioengineered organs.
- We Can Rule Together: Commissioner Farnsworth offers Alex to join forces with the other cyborgs late in the movie. Alex shoots him in the face while delivering a Precision F-Strike in response.
- What Measure Is A Nonhuman: Played around with. Some of the androids are pretty humanistic and emotional...sometimes.
- Who Needs Their Whole Body?: After the cyborg assassins blow up Julie's lower body, she still tries to crawl away and shares some last-minute banter with the bad guys before they put her down for good.
- Why Am I Ticking?: Alex is mostly motivated by the bomb in him.
