YMMV / Laser Mission

• Accidental Innuendo:
  Alissa: "I'm trying to apologize! What do you want me to do, get down on my knees?!"
  Gold: (smarmily) "That would be nice."
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: What are Cuban and Soviet soldiers doing in Africa? This actually happened in 1988, during the Angolan Civil War.
  Bill Corbett: "It's a hard life here in South American Africa."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The two henchmen stealing the helicopter at the end. Why did they do it? How do two soldiers that we've seen are very ineffectual manage to pilot a helicopter? Where are they going? Why do we care where they're going? All these questions are unanswered and the film leaves off on an extremely awkward Everyone Laughs Ending worthy of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law.
• Complete Monster:
  • Colonel Kalashnikov is a brutal KGB colonel who has multiple people murdered to steal the Virbeck diamond, also enslaving the kindhearted genius Dr. Braun to force him to use the diamond to create a super weapon to initiate devastating attacks on the West. Using slave labor in Africa to work on the weapon site, Kalashnikov takes the heroine Alissa hostage and later attempts to rape and kill her. Upon the completion of the project, Kalashnikov then attempts to massacre his slave workers to keep anyone from talking.
  • Eckhardt, Kalashnikov's vicious mercenary henchman, is a German killer who lives in Africa and also uses slave labor on his estate while working to make Kalashnikov's plans of mass-murder a reality. Stealing the Virbeck diamond by gassing an auction, it is revealed that Eckhardt regularly massacres anyone in his way when he takes a job and has a darker hobby. When threatening Braun to work on Kalashnikov's project, Eckhardt reveals his Trophy Room consisting of a large amount of human heads, with a promise Braun's daughter will join the collection should Braun refuse to work.
• Ending Fatigue: Fortunately, it only extends the movie by a minute or so, but there is absolutely no reason why Kalashnikov doesn't die the first couple of times and resurfaces still alive only to be crushed by Gold's truck a minute later. It doesn't add anything to the tension and his original death was fine. Worse, it causes a bad case of Mood Whiplash since the movie's very short but light-hearted "wrap up" scene is now interrupted with a grisly murder. The characters don't even comment upon the fact that they just watched a man be crushed to death by a truck.
• Strangled by the Red String: There is absolutely no reason that Gold and Alissa sleep together other than their relationship is clearly modeled after Indiana Jones and Willie from Temple of Doom so their "romance" can get grating in nothing flat. Most of their dialogue isn't even flirting, banter, or just suggestive in nature (not counting the above Accidental Innuendo quote, that is), but just flat insults at each other. Gold literally calls her a bitch at one point, thus showing us his level of charm as a main lead.
• The Scrappy: Both main leads. Gold is a smug, ineffectual dickhead who is just as nasty to Alissa as she is to him. Alissa turns out to be a liar who was sent to keep tabs on Gold and is a shrieking harpy clearly modeled after Willie from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Ernest Borgnine seems...mostly confused to be in the film and does very little, so overall it's just not a great experience to put up with these two, plus the annoying comic relief soldiers, and it's all on top of a rather cheaply made, incomprehensible movie.

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