Drug Runners (1988) User Reviews

No Entertainment To Be Found In This Weakly Directed Film.

[rsoonsa · 1/10 · 18 March 2006]

This is one of those infrequent cases wherein it is difficult for a viewer to find anything at all positive to say of a film, due to a general lack of imagination provided by writer/director/editor Allan Kuskowski who reduces his characters to foolish puppets displaying no merit in their actions or dialogue, while suffering an additional handicap of remarkably poor post-production sound processing. The movie wastes talents of those few able individuals, particularly from among the crew, whose fate it is to be a part of this grotesquely organized work in which threadbare production values are actually bedwarfed by the more obvious shortcomings of a preposterous plot and glaringly inane acting. Filmed on location in downtown Los Angeles and that city's San Fernando Valley community of Encino, as well as in Palm Springs, California, and Mexico City, the work's plot, such as it is, narrates of an American Federal narcotics agent assigned to an undercover role inside Mexico, an endeavour designed to halt the smuggling operation of a drug kingpin, while along the way wooing a female C.I.A. agent also deployed to an undercover mission involving the same felon's illegal arms transactions. There is a great deal of gunplay with uncountable rounds of automatic weapon fire frantically fired and evaporating without a trace after whizzing by intended human targets, although little skill is required to kill an opponent when the screenplay calls for it, and it is to be taken for granted that all will come out well for the Forces of Good in their struggle against the Forces of Evil, especially so since no apparent effort is taken to lessen predictability of the storyline. A surfeit of episodes offering embarrassingly unbridled emoting by the players is best explained by an obvious lack of direction, in evidence throughout the picture by verbal stumbling, with patently inadequate blocking and setups, while post-production flaws are principally related to sound processing inadequacies in the synching and dubbing; this woeful film has not one scene or sequence that may be considered tolerable to a viewer with a scrap of discrimination.