Imagine the barrel-scraping
depths to which you’d have to sink
in order to mount a sequel to a minor Jean-Claude Van Damme movie without
the services of Jean-Claude Van Damme. And yet, somehow, Cyborg 2 not
only vastly improves on the original, it even features a pretty decent
cast – including the debut performance of an 18-year-old Angelina
Jolie, as the high-kicking cyborg seductress with an explosive secret.
It is the year 2074, and cyborg technology dominates the derelict husk
of the Earth. Two major corporations battle for supremacy in the realm
of biotechnology – the Japanese firm Kobayashi, and US conglomerate
Pinwheel. It’s the yanks who gain the upper hand though, when they
perfect the formula for the ultimate assassin – beautiful female
cyborgs, programmed with human emotions, which carry a powerful liquid
explosive in their system.
Angelina plays one such creation – Casella “Cash” Reese – and
unknown to her she’s destined to be smuggled into Kobayashi’s
HQ and detonated, thus handing control of world’s cybernetic market
to Pinwheel.
She’s made aware of her planned fate thanks to the constant intervention
of a mysterious benefactor, Mercy (Jack Palance) who appears only as
a mouth or an eye on conveniently located video screens. He teams her
up with Colson “Colt” Ricks (Elias Koteas), her human combat
instructor, and helps her escape into the world outside. Pursued by a
deranged tracker and a lethal female robot, the pair fall into forbidden
love and fight for the right to live out their days together. Bless.
The price for their freedom is that, after a lot of running around and
shooting, one of them must fight to the death in an illegal arena to
earn the money for their passage to Mombasa, the last free place on Earth
where cyborgs and humans can tweak each others diodes in peace. For reasons
that are never explained this highly hazardous task falls to Colt, the
soft and fleshy human, rather than Cash, the super-tough robot.
A cheesy mixture of Blade Runner and The Terminator, Cyborg 2 avoids
the pitfalls of complete crappiness largely thanks to the quality of
the lead actors. The part of Cash plays to Jolie’s already obvious
strengths – she’s tough but vulnerable, sexy but deadly – and
Elias Koteas is one of those underrated leading men whose tight-lipped
scowl calls to mind a younger, more muscular DeNiro. He turned in another
solid leading turn in The Prophecy (see: Viggo Mortensen) and was even
the human sidekick in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
Although both acquit themselves reasonably well in the action stakes,
neither has the limb-flailing prowess of a Van Damme and so the story
wisely stacks its deck in favour of the areas where they’re considerably
stronger than the Muscles from Brussels – basically everything
but the limb-flailing prowess. The movie ends with a still young and
gorgeous Cash cradling the now-ancient Colt as he dies of old age in
their desert love nest, though the poignancy is somewhat marred by the
rubbery make-up that makes Colt look like a giant pink raisin.
Despite it’s guilty pleasures, you simply can’t escape the
fact that Cyborg 2 is a movie in which Angelina Jolie stars as a sexy
exploding fembot and this cheesy charm is heightened further by Jack
Palance’s turn as their mysterious benefactor – a performance
that doesn’t so much chew the scenery as devour it in one gulp. “If
you want to dine with the devil, you better bring a long spoon” he
barks inexplicably as Cash and Colt make their final break for freedom.
Quite.
Need to know: In the original Cyborg, all the major
characters were named after guitars, leading to such priceless titles
as Fender
Tremolo, Marshall Strat and Van Damme himself as Gibson Rickenbacker.
Sadly this pointless but hilarious conceit was not carried over to the
sequel. There was one more Cyborg movie, released in 1994, aptly named
Cyborg 3: The Recycler. The character of Cash returned in this entry,
though Jolie was replaced by the dubiously named Khrystyne Haje. Her
leading man was played by Zach Galligan, the nerdy hero from Gremlins,
and if you plot a chart with Van Damme at one end and Galligan at the
other, it paints a rather shitty picture
of the future evolution of the male gender.
For another barking
mad Jack Palance cameo see: Oliver Reed.
Availability: Cyborg 2 is available on DVD in the
US.
