★ 4 / 10
The action is fun at least
ST03T04
"You really are as stupid as you look." "I have a doctorate in physics!" "Oh, I didn't know that."'Prepare to die' has serviceable, amusing and both…
"You really are as stupid as you look."
"I have a doctorate in physics!"
"Oh, I didn't know that."'Prepare to die' has serviceable, amusing and both beautifully tough, merciless action scenes and slightly silly ones. Overall, the action part of the movie is consistently entertaining, which for me is the most important thing in an action movie.The weak points are unfortunately plentiful and can be found everywhere else, such as in the passive direction, the weak script - which has too much unnecessary stuff in multiples, such as the overarching theme of the carebears-like stick-together-and-everything-is-possible idea and the explaining and apologising of own actions - the post-production cutting (a decent cutter would probably have cut out at least half of the non-action scenes, as they neither advance character development nor do the plot and pacing any favors) and, above all, the often terrible dialogs. There is simply far too much talking. Talk where action is needed. Talk where silence would make more sense. Redundancy and talking just for the sake of talking. Repetition and chatter at the wrong moments. It also doesn't help that the dialogs seem to come straight from writer's hell.
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★ 6 / 10
The filmmakers clearly "get it" - they wanted to make an old-school actioner and they did
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When Diego Padilla (Ryan Padilla) was just a young tot, the diabolical "Ruler of the Town" - you know the type - Blaine Richtefield (Lamas) one day just showed…
When Diego Padilla (Ryan Padilla) was just a young tot, the diabolical "Ruler of the Town" - you know the type - Blaine Richtefield (Lamas) one day just showed up on his family's land. Richtefield claimed he needed it so he could create a "beef farm". Said beef farm was so important to Richtefield to farm beef, he killed Padilla's parents. The goons were about to kill Diego as well, but with the help of Richtefield's sympathetic driver Silas (Wang), he escaped. Silas, being Chinese and all, sent Diego to live with his relatives in China. He figured it's going to take that amount of distance to keep him safe from the clutches of Richtefield. While in China, Diego trains in Martial Arts for ten years with Bingwen (Ng) and Xin Yi (Hsu), Silas's kin.
However, after those ten years, Diego figures that's enough time to then return to the States (or is it Mexico?) to get his revenge on Richtefield. Along the way he assembles a team of other people who also have been wronged by Richtefield: William Freeman (Williams), Blanca (Taylor), and James Swiftwater (Pinon). Each has their own skill set, i.e., Blanca is good with knives, Swiftwater has six-shooters, etc. Even though Richtefield has expaned his evil empire to include drugs and prostitution, and has a pimp/sidekick named Ryan Fruitwood (Jackson), Sheriff Hansen (Madsen) just looks the other way. Will our heroes finally take down the nefarious Blaine Richtefield? PREPARE to watch Tubi today!
Ryan Fruitwood. James Swiftwater. Blaine Richtefield. They're ALL HERE! Thanks to the genius character naming by writers Jose Montesinos (also the director) and Jacob David Smith, Prepare to Die consistenly holds the viewers' interest, because people in the movie are always saying these colorful names.
That being said, Prepare to Die is a fairly loving throwback to the 80's/90's-style "assemble a team and beat the bad guy"-type of action film. It doesn't offer anything particularly new to the mix - unless you count go-for-broke character names - but, then again, if you were seeking shocking and startling cinematic originality, you wouldn't be watching Prepare to Die in the first place. The fact that fan favorites Lorenzo Lamas and Michael Madsen are here - together for the first time - is reason enough to watch the film. Lamas plays the dastardly Richtefield (they say that name A LOT in the movie, so get ready for that) with what you might call "awkward aplomb" - he seems at ease, but not really. It's hard to explain. You just have to watch PTD to see what we mean. He looks like a cross between Richard Moll and Neal McDonough in the film. When he and his goons originally killed Diego's parents, he had gray hair. How, after ten years, did Diego know Richtefield wouldn't just die of natural causes? I guess it's just a chance he had to take.
As for our old buddy Mike Madsen...well, let's just say that it's a good thing that Tubi offers subtitles on all its films. It may not be one of his more coherent or "caring" performances, but it doesn't matter. Madsen is always entertaining to watch and this is no exception. Rampage doesn't do a heck of a lot here - his role is slightly bigger than in Acceleration (2019), but not by much. Our main hero, Ryan Padilla as Diego Padilla, is like an angrier Justin Long.
Curiously, there's a lot of unnecessarily repetitive dialogue throughout the film. For example, Diego at one point mentions "money I saved from working" - as if there was another income source he wanted to make sure the audience wasn't considering. Or, at a scene where the Freeman character is playing pool, he says something like, "No one can beat me at pool". We as the audience can see you're playing pool. The second half of that sentence is not needed.
There are other examples of repetition as well - there are multiple scenes of people saying they're afraid to go up against Richtefield, then eventually agreeing to. If the film had less repetition, and instead maybe a few more beat-em-up/shooting scenes, we might have a bit more of a winner on our hands. Repetition is especially noticeable in a made-for-Tubi movie, because we have to sit through six commercials for Mint Mobile just to get to the next scene. So to cover ground we've already covered seems even more superfluous than usual.
However, the filmmakers clearly "get it" - they wanted to make an old-school actioner and they did. We give all due credit and kudos to them for that. We can look past some of the silly-looking CGI (there's not much of it), because it's 2024 and apparently that's the way it is now. We don't have much choice, apparently. So, for the Madsen & Lamas factor, and to get a look behind the curtain of evil beef farms, Prepare to Die is worth a watch.
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80%
AUDIENCE
4.1/10
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Haha, man, the protagonist is a normal, athletic guy, and they cheaply retouched the cover to make it look like he has a Schwarzenegger arm. His face and neck are very poorly aligned with his body. I feel sorry for him; the producer didn't trust them to get a cool photo of the protagonist, like, I don't know... John Wick?. What an awful decision.