Virtual Weapon (1997)

Antonio Margheriti's last work is far from his best, but Virtual Weapon is still a quite entertaining Miami-based action-sci-fi-comedy with touches of Lethal Weapon - at least if Mel Gibson was an overaged italian with thin hair and Danny Glover where a lousy boxer-turned-actor! It's starts great with one crazy car-chase, all done with cool miniatures. The car's goes of the freeway and lands on some kind of railway-track (like a mono-rail) and the chase continues! Silly, but very funny.

It's Margheriti-movie, so the action is still great, even if the low budget shines through. The miniatures are as usual a lot of fun and the explosions are bigger than life itself. There's a fun fistfight á la traditional Terence Hill and and some smaller highlights here and there. The problem is of course that Marvelous Marvin Hagler is a crappy actor (he was okey in the Indio-movies I must say), crappy because he obviously can't act comedy. Terence Hill is somewhere else, but not in character. He smiles, makes jokes and tries to act funny, but his heart is far, far away from this movie. A pity. Okey, a quite boring script dosen't help, and the dialogue sucks.

But still, it's a Margheriti-movie and he's a stylish and competent director who has that kinda naive fascination for action like I have. It's all fun and fire between the boring comedy-scenes, and even if the finale is very weak... it still wasn't such a bad experience.

Yeah, there's one weird twist in this movie. You have the usual stuff: terrorists, car-chase, stiff FBI-agents, a romance, a cute kid - but not every movie has, totally unexpected, a hologram-ghost! Yes. Hill turns into a digital ghost and spends the last half hour walking through walls, playing jokes on both his cop-friends and the bad guys, being in a computer-game where he fights a dinosaur and being a transformer-robot! No, it's not a fun idea and it really slows down the movie.

It's out on a very cheap swedish dvd, slightly letteboxed, and it's a must for collectors of italo-trash.