Twitter Plot Summary Ignore the name, it’s nothing to do with Van Damme’s almost equally awful film. Angelina Jolie is a cyborg, Elias Koteas is the man who loves her. Billy Drago is awful.
If you needed any indication about the intended audience for Cyborg 2, please note that it opens with a scene where a number of executives watch a cyborg man and woman have sex until they literally explode. The cyborgs, that is, not the executives. Although that could have been fun to watch.
As if to emphasise the point, one of the executives snaps his pencil at the precise moment when… you know, things happen. So then, this is either a late night weekend film on a channel hidden somewhere high up on the EPG, or one of those 18-rated direct to video productions designed to titillate whilst offering a token sci-fi storyline. If you needed any further evidence as to its direct to video qualities, the cast include Elias Koteas (who, to be fair, is always reliable no matter the material handed to him) and Billy Drago, the latter a perennial presence in this sort of tosh. Even Jack Palance gets in on the action, no doubt at the “I don’t care” stage of his career. He probably literally did this for a dollar. Maybe two.
It’s also the film that introduced the world to Angelina Jolie. She plays Cash, a cyborg who is designed to go undercover and explode at the appropriate moment in order to take out her target. Yet she defies this plan and goes on the run with Koteas’ Colt. They are then chased by a mixture of robot and human assassins, which makes up most of the plot. It’s rather thin, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Not that Jolie was ever going to win many awards for her acting ability, but it’s horribly clear she is at the beginning of her career. For most of the time in Cyborg 2 she’s almost nothing more than a pair of lips followed around by the rest of her, and is almost the worst thing about the film. That is until you get to the teeth gnashingly horrendous love scene between her and Koteas, which is rather strangely intercut with shots of a whimsical Jack Palance. It’s not good, people, it really isn’t. If nothing else it’s a really odd pairing – I’m talking about the love scene contrasting with Palance and not Koteas/Jolie, although the Koteas/Jolie pairing is a little odd. Their relationship has a distinct air of unpleasantness to it, like a much older man kidnapping a teenager but, in a twist that the papers love, they have contacted the media and declared their relationship to be true love. Enough to make you sick.
Going back to the film as a whole, if you didn’t think the awful romance storyline was bad enough – and it’s really, really bad – you have some less than stellar action sequences that are flabby around the edges and badly edited. There’s the odd glimmer of hope, a shot or a location that gives off an appropriate Blade Runner vibe, but they are that infrequent you’d be better off just watching that film instead. Let’s face it, Blade Runner makes Cyborg 2 look like an awful amateur effort in almost every respect. As if the result of that comparison was going to be any different.
Still, you can’t complain much about a film that pairs Jack Palance with a rifle and uttering lines like “If you’re going to dine with the Devil you need a long spoon!” Absolutely bonkers. And, it must be said, absolutely nothing to do with the Van Damme film. A small mercy.
Score 1/5
