Point Blank (1998)

Point Blank

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In The Wrestler Mickey Rourke mentions that the 90’s “fucking sucked”. It’s nod to Mickey’s career back in the 90’s. Mickey, who was on top of his game in the 80’s with a bunch of moneymaking movies, ended up in the 90’s in all sorts of trash. Point Blank was made in 1998 and is one of those trashy titles Rourke now has on his resume. In Point Blank he plays a former Marine, ex-mercenary, ex-military adviser for the government of Sierra Leone and a Texas Ranger for 3 years. That’s a lot of exes.
Rourke, here a man named Rudy, goes into a mall where convicts who broke out of jail are holding hostages and his brother is one of the hostage takers. Yes, for once the fly in the ointment has a relative inside who’s actually on the side of the bad guys instead of a victim. It’s Die Hard meets Con Air!

The movie starts out promising with some nice scenery shots of the Texas country and a well staged prison break sequence that reminded me of Another 48 Hours and Nowhere to Run. It all goes downhills as the convicts who broke out take over a mall. Why the hell would they take over a mall you ask me? Well, it seems the man behind the prison break has his corporation located in the mall. A company which is never named and of which we only get to see one office space and a basement of some sorts. Their master plan: send the officials on a wild goose chase by making fake demands about planes and food and in the meanwhile escape through a tunnel under the mall. Or at least this is what I understood of the whole scheme here. If none of this makes any sense to you and actually sounds very stupid, it’s OK. It doesn’t make any sense to me either.

Danny Trejo in Point Blank (1998)

So Rudy, the man who is switches jobs a lot and is currently working on a farm, gets notified that his brother is one of the convicts and decides to venture off to the scene of the crime. While the police have surrounded the mall Rudy has no problem going in unseen. He just ends up on the roof like that (insert finger snap). This is when the whole Die Hard scenario starts with Rudy taking of convicts one by one with his supreme mercenary skills.

Now a movie with a scenario like “Die Hard in a mall” could be very entertaining if it was made by skilled hand. Unfortunately such is not the case. Mickey Rourke has an impressive physique, but he hasn’t gotten any martial arts fighting skills. So the only way to make him do moves that are not a problem for Van Damme is with the aid of the editing room. Which is clearly what they’ve done here. It would have been wiser to just have Rourke be a customer who manages to escape from their clutches instead of a former this and ex that.

The plot stinks and the star of the show never convinces. Not helping is that the whole movie makes you feel stupid because at some point I had no clue what was going on. Then I realized that isn’t my fault but the fault of sloppy editing. Like in Blast there is no structure in the scenes and the building. We just get to see people in rooms that don’t feel connected at all. Speaking of Blast, in that movie the villains also wanted to escape from the scene through a tunnel under the building. Man… ripping of Blast, what has the world come to?

Mickey Rourke in Point Blank
No Die Hard clone is complete without an air vent crawl.

Point Blank Poster
Point Blank Poster
Point Blank
  • Year:
    1998
  • Director:
    • Matt Earl Beesley
  • Cast:
    • Mickey Rourke
    • Michael Wright
    • Danny Trejo
    • Paul Ben-Victor
  • Genres:
    Action, Crime, Drama
  • Running time:
    89m

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