Name: Retro Film Review: Decoy (1995)
Item: Decoy
Rating: 15
Author: @drax

(source: tmdb.org)

Italian visual effects expert Carlo Rambaldi is always going to be remembered for various impressive bad guys he had helped create for films like King Kong or Alien. When he was executive producer for Decoy, Canadian 1995 action thriller directed by his son Vittorio ("Victor") Rambaldi, the result was something which was only bad and hardly the stuff he is going to be remembered for.

Plot of this film deals with Travis (played by Robert Patrick) and Baxter (played by Peter Weller), two superbly trained mercenaries who used to work together and who are about to be teamed up again. Reason for that is their former employer who had obtained a revolutionary new chip. The competition has learned about that and they start making treats demanding chip for themselves. So, Travis and Baxter are hired to protect his daughter. The job is not so simple because it turns out that the opposition too is made of dedicated, superbly trained and well-armed professionals.

Cynics would say that Peter Weller and Robert Patrick seem like an excellent choice for the roles of mercenaries because they played killing machines in their best known films (RoboCop, Terminator 2). Author of this review tends to agree with that, but their presence alone is not enough to save Decoy from well-deserved road to "straight-to- video" oblivion. Everything else is a complete mess – the plot is incoherent, the action scenes look terrible, so in the end Decoy sinks bellow the lowest B-movie standards. The only thing that is relatively pleasing to the eyes is the use of Saskatchewan locations but the viewers might do themselves a great service if they watch some documentaries instead of this.

RATING: 2/10 (-)

(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on July 10th 2001)