Detroit is in the middle of an unemployment surge and a boom (lol) in illegal firearms. Rich (Jackson) is a street-level gun dealer, and we open on him and his crew gunning down a rival (Malik Barnhardt) at a club, along with a bunch of innocent bystanders, including one cocktail waitress (Jill Dugan) whom the camera seems to linger on. Hmmm, very significant!
Anyway, then Angel Hawkins (Kilmer) gets released from prison. Turns out he saved Rich from getting pinched, so Rich feels like he owes him and lets him into his crew. Of course, Angel is working for the Detroit PD (as represented by Rogers (Remar) and Jenkins (Calerdon)), because it turns out that cocktail waitress was Albert Einstein Angel's wife! (He'd been listening to his wife's outgoing phone message all through the movie, in a move I thought was cribbed from Captain America: Civil War, but actually this came first.)
So Rich gets shot and arrested, Angel gets shot and released to go be with his daughter (no idea who plays her, she's not credited on the wiki or the IMDB page), and the evil businessman in charge of all the guns ever (John Larroquette - the businessman, not the guns) pleads out to something minor.
OK, so obviously this movie is terrible. Jackson is credited as the writer, but evidently he didn't write a word of it (I don't have a source on that, though). As I mentioned when I talked about All Things Fall Apart, he can't act for shit, but his portrayal of the snappy, fast-talking Rich works a little better - Jackson is better able to play an amoral gun dealer. Of course, having Kilmer helps, because although Kilmer's career was very much in decline here, he's still Val Kilmer and brings a little life to the movie. Likewise, James Remar is a workhorse and is competent enough.
None of that changes the fact that the dialog and story is pretty damn simplistic. Honestly it sounds like a 13-year-old gun bunny who may or may not have had black friends wrote the screenplay. I actually do think Jackson had some input into it, because as with All Things Fall Apart, we get a protracted sex scene with, like, lots of thrusting (as a side note, the woman in that scene, Gabriella (McCord), is probably the most interesting character in the movie - is she a politician? A gangster? An ATF agent? All we ever learn about her is that she's banging both Rich and the evil businessman, which unfortunately reduces her role to "sexy assistant", but up until then she had some potential).
So to sum up: Kilmer's career was in a dark place. Remar and Calderon take the work they get. Danny Trejo cameos, and I'm not 100% sure why because it ain't like he was hurting. Jackson cannot act and is no great shakes as a screenwriter. The effects are bargain-basement, and you can tell they blew the budget on the final shootout with the car explosion because in much of the rest of the movie they couldn't even spring for squibs. But it's better than All Things Fall Apart because at least it's an action movie and that gives us something to watch, rather than the glurge.
My Grade: D-
Rewatch Value: Low
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
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