The 1990’s was a decade best described with the words “rich”, “fertile” and “loamy”, where just about any old pop-culture seed dropped on this heady mixture of adjectival modifiers yielded some sort of cinematic fruit. In Expect No MercyBilly Blanks and Jalal Merhi cultivate their first team up since TC 2000 introduced us to the millenarian concept of next-week future dystopian Canada. I know it must be hard to believe that such a thing could actually exist, but in the future, Canada, or at least the immediate Toronto/Scarborough area is going to be perpetually threatened by some white guy or other with ambiguously evil plans from which Billy and Jalal will repeatedly be called upon to save it.
Head.
In this installment, anchored firmly in the center of the decade, evil white guy Warbeck runs a giant Virtual Reality dojo where he trains an army of mercenaries which he hires out for various unspecified industrial espionage conspiracies. Justin (Blanks) and Eric (Merhi) are both posing as “students” at the complex, and soon get hip to Warbeck’s nonspecific dastardly plot and attempt to thwart it with some martially artistic action versus exponentially ineffective faceless lackeys. Despite their overwhelming numerical inferiority, the heroes are captured and subjected to a series of virtual reality battles with goofy ‘90’s video-game vilains. The digital environments are actually more aesthetically appealing than the industrial-park architecture and interior design styles in the rest of Expect No Mercy proving beyond a pixelated shadow of a doubt that unfinished slabs of bare concrete will be at the cutting edge of the future. A disappointment to be sure.
Real.
Justin and Eric escape again of course and drag Expect No Mercy to its conclusion in a hail of gunfire and “kee-ai’s!”, but the Mortal Kombat-esque virtual reality scenes and Billy Blanks fishnet shirt prove to be the high-water marks and historically significant touchstones of this engagingly asinine film. For the benefit of fisherman-fashion enthusiasts and very-near-future science-fiction fans throughout the Toronto metropolitan area, this makes Expect No Mercy one of the most visually exciting parochial dystopias available for retinal consumption.
When I think of dystopian near-future scenarios, Toronto is definitely one of the first places to cross my mind as the ideal setting. What major metropolitan area is more evocative of a sun-scorched and toxic post-apocalyptic environment than the largest city in Canada? I can already see what will happen… The rich white folks will hide underground and name their new exclusive community “Underworld”, leaving all the brown people on the surface to be ravaged by an epidemic martial arts plague which causes chronic competitions and terminal sparring. Subjected to repeated raids by these mud races, Underworld will evolve into a highly militarized society based on retro technology from the 70’s.
It's like a speech bubble that says "radical" right there on his head.
In order to evade charges of overt racism which is totally uncool in future-Canada, they will employ a token negro to lead their defense against the surface, Jason Storm (Billy fuckin’ Blanks) who sports a haircut that screams “the future will be awesome” even more than hoverboards and robot vacuum-cleaners combined. (Neither of which, sadly, will appear in this dystopia.) However, when it becomes clear that the relationship with his white partner, Zoey Kinsella is more than just professional, Underworld’s leadership will concoct a quick justification for preventing the consummation of such a taboo relationship. It sounds far-fetched, even paranoid I know, but like the cosmetics stockpiles of which the surface hordes will generously avail themselves, even miscegenation taboos will miraculously survive the pre-opening-credit apocalypse of TC 2000.
In order to make the final cleansing of Underworld seem totally not about race or anything like that, Zoey will be gunned down during a raid. Storm will be blamed as a traitor and replaced with Teutonic Ubermensch Mathias Hues, which would make perfect sense. In order to render their union permanently unconsumable, Storm will be “totally deprogrammed” and Zoey more than likely turned into a cyborg. Of course, no female-super-death-bot would be complete, or futuristic enough without a cheap vinyl hooker outfit and a menacing acronym, probably something along the lines of TC 2000-X. It will be the pinnacle of post-apocalyptic military science, merging a beautiful woman’s body with the finest in modern cybernetic killing technology all for the purpose of beating up some raggedy-ass extras.
Despite, or perhaps because of the epidemic spread of combat drills, the aboveground survivors will unite under the reluctant guidance of Jason Storm who might conceivably band together with a reluctant and quiet, but astonishingly powerful kung-fu master named Sumai (Bolo Yeung). With luck, Underworld might have forgotten to take the emotion and/or memory parts out of Zoey’s brain potentially causing her to return to the proverbial “dark side”. Compared to all the other hypothetical dystopian near-future scenarios out there, it doesn’t look like things will really be all that different in Toronto. But hey, I’m just guessing.
If after seeing the 1993 action flick Back In Action starring Roddy Piper and Billy Blanks you thought to yourself, “This movie shouldn’t have a sequel”, you would be among a respectably discerning demographic. But if, after pondering for some time over a highball, you subsequently concluded, “What this movie does need is spiritual continuation, the further development of the Blanks/Piper dynamic, and the expansion of their unique and compelling action universe/milieu”, you would be in a small and daring group of envelope pushers.
Elmo Freech (Piper), a private detective with painfully macho and stylishly-unmatched uber-90’s perma-stubble stumbles across the comatose form of a man who, thanks to an arbitrary flip of Freech’s pocketknife at a wall map will soon be known as John Portland (“One more inch and you would have been called Puget Sound!”). Portland, played by a perpetually sweaty and obscenely fit Billy Blanks is a deep cover CIA agent who has just been beaten, drugged and car-wrecked to the point of amnesia. Together they spend the rest of the movie punching the shit out of people until they are unconscious and then punching them in the face again for extra “actioniness” in a quest to discover for themselves what the audience saw in the first five minutes of the film.
Tough and Deadly attempts to load a tasteless and mindlessly violent bash-fest with enough shitty, witless one-liners delivered by the eerily youthful Piper, and enough flying high-kicks delivered by the chiseled-yet-childlike Blanks to dull our minds beyond the point of realizing that this flick isn’t about a goddamned thing. Unfortunately, lacking the finesse and grace one would expect from either of these gentleman actors Tough and Deadly fails to deliver a sufficient volume of either wit or wailing to achieve its goal.
When I think of dystopian near-future scenarios, Toronto is definitely one of the first places to cross my mind as the ideal setting. What major metropolitan area is more evocative of a sun-scorched and toxic post-apocalyptic environment than the largest city in Canada? I can already see what will happen… The rich white folks will hide underground and name their new exclusive community “Underworld”, leaving all the brown people on the surface to be ravaged by an epidemic martial arts plague which causes chronic competitions and terminal sparring. Subjected to repeated raids by these mud races, Underworld will evolve into a highly militarized society based on retro technology from the 70’s.
