Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

An action-packed slog

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Samantha Stewart (Heather Marie Marsden) is a tough mercenary lady who shoots bad guys a lot. They are easy to spot because they all wear black masks. Not only during attacks, but also when they are alone in their hiding-place, maybe they like wearing masks so much, or is it just that the audience shouldn't realize the same 3 stunt-men are shot again and again? Anyhow, FBI agent Ethan Marshall (Frank Zagarino) wants Samantha to stay away from one particularly evil killer named Fedorov (Lorenzo Lamas), who is so evil that he shoots 2 of his own men just to test his new gun ('I like this gun!', he happily exclaims). But after Fedorov kills her friend Kordell (John Colton) and kidnaps her sister Heather (Jennifer MacIsaac), Samantha gets her Uzi and goes after Fedorov. Or maybe it was because Fedorov's men destroyed her kitchen? An action movie with a simple recipe - have masked men shoot at the pretty lady every 5 minutes to keep the audience awake. The funniest moment was when one guy hides behind a curtain, so bullets can't hit him. Very modest entertainment which is easily exceeded in quality by any television action series episode.

This is just about as phony and cliché as an action flick can get. It is so phony it almost looks like a spoof because every element a spoof would laugh at is in Lethal. You have everything--an evil psychotic Russian mobster, an ass-kicking bimbo, professional terrorist mercenaries who can never hit a target 20 yards away in the open and never shoot together (they pop up one after another just to miss their target and be killed by the bimbo waving a machine gun at them). The bimbo can walk, look straight ahead and still see a guy aiming at her from behind. And of course, they all love holding a gun to your head and telling you all about their emotional problems leading to them becoming terrorists, giving you plenty of chance to escape. Watching this movie, you almost scream "will you shoot her already!" To add insult to injury, a building where they develop space-age military technology must be guarded by a horny useless nerd. You can get in with someone's ID and of course the entire office floor is conveniently empty in the middle of the day, no computer is locked, no files are encrypted. But I'm sure if they were, any bimbo could quickly "break" the encryption or guess the password. And you guessed right, dear readers, you hear a police siren literally a second after the last shot is fired.

As an action film, "Lethal" is a joke: amateurish and underbudgeted (they didn't even hire extras for the scenes set on the streets or in office buildings!), with very bad fight choreography, editing and camera placement (which even manages to miss a few hits in the fight scenes). But, let's be honest here: the only possible reason you could have for renting this film (unless you're a Lorenzo Lamas fan!) is that the video cover features a good-looking woman in a black tank top holding a gun. And the film actually does feature a good-looking woman in a black tank top holding (and shooting) a gun (and occasionally two guns). Her "serious" acting is painful, but her tough-chick act is engaging, and she has really great abs. As for her co-stars, Frank Zagarino almost manages to come out of this looking decent, and Lorenzo Lamas, playing the bad guy, tries for a Russian accent, which at least shows that he doesn't take himself all that seriously. (*)

This was horrible. Bad directing and acting. Don't waste your time on this one. Everything feels fake in this movie. Have nothing positive about this movie to say. Failed