Laser Mission

Warning:  Spoilers Ahead

Occasionally I come across a movie that I would have thought I would have known about by now.  I came across Laser Mission and I was immediately surprised that Brandon Lee starred in this movie.  Outside of The Crow and Rapid Fire, I did not think he was the star in any other movie he made in his short career.  So on one hand I was excited to see him in another starring role but I was concerned that since I have never heard of this movie before I wondered how good it really was.  Since I went into this movie with some lower expectations because of my concerns, I wasn’t disappointed.

Laser Mission stars Brandon Lee as Michael Gold, a mercenary who is hired by the U.S. government to have Professor Braun (played by Ernest Borgnine) come to the states and not use his knowledge to build a nuclear weapon.  The professor ends up getting captured and Gold gets thrown in prison.  After his escape, he is retasked to go find the professor and recover a diamond that was stolen and to be used to make this nuclear weapon.  With the help of the professor’s daughter Alissa (played by Debi Monahan), they go on a rescue mission to get the professor and the diamond back.

The plot for this movie is paper thin, but it gets the job done.  I enjoyed the action scenes and while they could have been better, there was a decent amount of them scattered throughout the movie.  My biggest issue with the plot/action scenes, and really my biggest issue with the whole movie, is there are parts of the movie that look like whoever was doing the editing just cut out.  In one scene, Lee’s character walks into a room, we see random people fighting and then we see Lee’s character walk out of the room.  In other scenes there is action going on and then they abruptly switch over to a scene with no action going on while advancing the story.  Maybe this was done on purpose, but it looks like either someone messed up the editing or the scenes they shot were so bad they opted not to use them.

I went into this movie really wanting to see Brandon Lee’s performance and seeing what he was given as far as a script, he did alright.  He was good in the action scenes and pulled off some of his more comedic lines well enough.  I also thought Debi Monahan did a good job with her role considering she likewise probably didn’t have much to work with as far as a script.  Ernest Borgnine wasn’t in too much of the movie but when he was he pulled his role off pretty well, as I would have expected with his extensive acting background.

This is not a great movie.  Between the basic plot, the bad script, the weird scene edits and the ok action scenes, I can see why I didn’t hear about this movie before.  However, I can’t say I was bored with this movie.  This is the definition of a B movie.  This movie is average across the board but has just enough charm (mostly from Lee and Monahan’s performances) to keep it interesting until the end.