Brigitte Nielsen is running for mayor! And on a platform of beating guys senseless, cutting throats of washed up boxing champs, killing cops and framing other cops, torturing her own employees and smothering grandmas!
But the biggest crime she commits in Mission of Justice is the succession of dressy outfits she accomplishes all of her bleached blonde beatdown buffoonery in! And with our country’s unerring instinct to elect and reelect even the most venal, incompetent, and criminal misanthropes, it won’t come as any surprise that the crime-ridden town of Eastgate elects her!
Neilson plays Dr. Larkin, the leader of the Mission of Justice, a combination cult/community policing agency/criminal enterprise. It may have been because of the pressure to get elected mayor, but I never really understood exactly what Dr. Larkin’s scheme was.
Locked in a tight race, she felt compelled to murder her former ally, the local boxing champ and steal $5000 from him after he refused to endorse her. Her main concern though was on getting a little old lady to change her will so that some valuable property would go to Mission of Justice which Larkin would then get it rezoned, and make millions! I’m still not sure how becoming mayor of some dirtbag town advances any of this – does she really need to be mayor to get the land rezoned? And if she does, isn’t she worried it might run afoul of conflict of interest laws? At a minimum, wouldn’t it just be easier to bribe some city officials?
Luckily, the movie doesn’t dwell on the intricacies of city ordinances and zoning meetings, but instead smartly chooses to concentrate on walking anger management problem, Kurt Harris.
Kurt (Open Fire‘s Jeff Wincott) is a cop who doesn’t play any favorites when it comes to brutalizing his fellow man. Domestic abuser? You get chucked out a window! Liquor store holdup? Shotgunned, kicked, elbowed, etc. His own sergeant back at the station? Punched in his smug face once Harris finds out Sarge let loose the domestic abuser! And yes, it does involve Kurt slamming his badge on the counter and quitting the force! And then going to his local gym and getting in a workout with the ex-champ to relieve his stress!
It’s the sort of set up that gets a movie re-elected over and over! But what Mission of Justice is after in the Jeff Wincott pantheon of cheap unknown and/or forgotten martial arts films is a landslide! And it accomplishes that and more when it turns the electoral map from red and blue to black and blue!
A lot of lame wanna be violent cop movie candidates deliver the same stump speech involving a partner who gets murdered, usually because the partner is a pussy and not nearly the killing machine the supercop star of the movie is. Kurt’s partner? A little spitfire played some gal named Karen Sheperd! Yep, that Karen Sheperd! Seventh degree black belt, Black Belt Hall of Member and first woman to ever be ranked as the #1 Black Belt Forms Champion Karen Sheperd!
As Kurt’s no-nonsense partner Steel, Sheperd easily more than holds her own with Wincott during the fight scenes, the fury of her feet and hands matched only by the deadly expression on her face whenever she had dish out a spinning kick to some buttwipe’s head!
I kept waiting for the standard plot to kick in and for her to get killed or end up in the hospital, but whenever she got her head rammed into a wall or thrown across the room, she just got up even more pissed and shook down the kung fu thunder on whatever fool had laid hands on her! The only disappointment was that she never got to drive her foot through Brigitte Nielsen’s heavily made up face!
Following Kurt’s abrupt (but awesome!) resignation from the police force, he discovers that his good buddy the ex-boxing champ was murdered. A clue at the scene leads him to suspect that the Mission of Justice was responsible, so he immediately joins their organization as Peacekeeper to investigate them further.
The Peacekeepers are citizens who fight crime and this allows Kurt to dole out the detached retinas as he and his crew bust up drug deals and car theft rings. This was another part of the Mission of Justice I didn’t get. All the Peacekeepers did was really fight crime. I guess it was kind of a cover story for Larkin, but it seems like an awful lot of work to go through just to become mayor and get some land rezoned. (Larkin was also a best-selling self-help author, so she wasn’t even desperate for money, making all the gyrations she goes through for this land even more confusing.)
Everything falls apart for Larkin on election night when Kurt upstages her victory party, by trashing her monstrous brother and pummeling her when she pulls a couple of knives on him after an incriminating video of her torturing a Peacemaker is made public. Kurt’s partner even gives him his old cop job back, despite her being only simple patrolwoman! That’s the democratic process for you, I guess!
The story in Mission of Justice is obviously borderline random nonsense (which is what we were no doubt promised when we saw the screenplay was by the same writing team behind the spontaneous abortion of a script for American Ninja V), but damn if Jeff Wincott and Karen Sheperd didn’t just work their asses off in all the nonstop brawls!
It’s hard to care too much that the bad guys get brainfarts at just the right time (why torture the guy who knows you killed the champ and his grandma instead of just killing him? Why try to frame Kurt for murder instead of just killing him, too?) when you are watching gigantic dudes crash through windows, Kurt battling 20 guys in a stick fighting gauntlet, and a final battle that has Kurt down for the count until the bad guy takes his jacket off to reveal he’s wearing the championship belt he stole from Kurt’s slain boxing champ friend thus flipping the switch on Kurt to end all switches!
No need for any recounts here! Mission of Justice has a mandate for change – to change your panties from all the pleasing soiling its sweaty, head-snapping violence will unleash on your body politic!
© 2017 MonsterHunter
