While THE LAST GRENADE is perhaps the longest 90-minutes you'll ever spend on an action film, it actually needed to be twenty-minutes longer, right up front, since once-good-mercenary-turned-double-crossing Alex Cord is so deadly right off the bat, there's nothing to base things on when former partner Stanley Baker feels so betrayed...
Directed by Gordon Flemyng, the beautiful jungles of Hong Kong China are shown in revealing wide shots, not only to establish the location (when not in the busy city) but to show it off...
Meanwhile Baker and his men, including muscular Andrew Keir, token black Rafer Johnson along with Julian Glover and John Thaw, randomly traipse the jungle where Cord -- like Kurtz from HEART OF DARKNESS made famous later in APOCALYPSE NOW -- has become an eccentric kingpin surrounded by trained Asian foot soldiers...
So while there are some decent action sequences with Baker not only against Cord but the jungle itself, his third-act romance with British general's wife Honor Blackman (married to Richard Attenborough) kills the pace...
Leaving only a miscast Cord... speaking in a bad southern drawl and adorned in ironically mundane attire.. to be killed simply because, well, he's the villain. And Baker isn't.
Directed by Gordon Flemyng, the beautiful jungles of Hong Kong China are shown in revealing wide shots, not only to establish the location (when not in the busy city) but to show it off...
Meanwhile Baker and his men, including muscular Andrew Keir, token black Rafer Johnson along with Julian Glover and John Thaw, randomly traipse the jungle where Cord -- like Kurtz from HEART OF DARKNESS made famous later in APOCALYPSE NOW -- has become an eccentric kingpin surrounded by trained Asian foot soldiers...
So while there are some decent action sequences with Baker not only against Cord but the jungle itself, his third-act romance with British general's wife Honor Blackman (married to Richard Attenborough) kills the pace...
Leaving only a miscast Cord... speaking in a bad southern drawl and adorned in ironically mundane attire.. to be killed simply because, well, he's the villain. And Baker isn't.