Before hitting it big (and inadvertently buying the farm) with The Crow, Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon, starred in the cheapo actioner Laser Mission, in which he plays American spy Michael Gold. He’s dispatched to encourage defection in Russian professor and laser weaponry expert Braun, played by Escape from New York-er Ernest Borgnine. (Unfortunately, at this point in Oscar winner Borgnine’s storied career, the Hollywood vet was believable only as a consumer of vast quantities of pastrami.)
As Prof. Braun disappears, the glittering Gold gets in deep with the Russian army and finds himself on the run, searching for the educator with the assistance of the prof’s daughter, Alissa, the blonde-haired, helium-voiced and breasts-forever-verging-on-escaping Debi Monahan (Wolfgang Petersen’s Shattered). Together, Michael and Alissa have a chase in a Volkswagen Microbus, shoot countless baddies with dead-on aim and bicker so much that the two are destined to become one (“That’s mister asshole to you!”).
Quite clearly, Lee possessed an easygoing charm that worked for him, although here, he acts largely through his tank top. Monahan has … well, I mentioned them already. For this action film saddled with a science-fiction title, director Beau Davis (Stickfighter) apparently could afford only one song, which they run into the ground: Knopfler’s “Mercenary Man.” (And sorry, but that’s David Knopfler, not Mark, so it’s not Dire Straits so much as just plain dire.) Faults and all, for five-and-10 adventure flicks that populate hundreds of public-domain DVD collections, you can’t do much better than Laser Mission. —Rod Lott