The Rage (1997)

“Fidelity, bravery, integrity. Those are more than just words.”

Directed by Sidney J. Furie

Written by Sidney J. Furie & Greg Mellott

Starring Lorenzo Lamas, Kristen Cloke, Gary Busey, and lots and lots of explosions

The Stage.

FBI Special Agent Nick Travis is trying to catch a deranged serial killer alongside his new partner, Kelly McCord. Their search leads them to the forests of Utah, where the scenery is beautiful and everyone (even the cops) has a Mac-10 for some reason. The pair then has to battle a group of angry Vietnam vets, other officers, and of course, their hormones.

The Review.

Admittedly, I watch a lot of movies that by all quality control standards are flaming piles of shit, but once in a while, you stumble onto some gold. Call me a leprechaun, because that’s what I found with 1997’s The Rage.

From the opening scene, you know this one is going to be a barn burner as the well-dressed, sexist FBI agent Nick Travis (played by Lorenzo Lamas) and his inept band of goofy, overzealous badges try to stop a man in a van from kidnapping a girl. Immediately they open fire on the van with dozens of guns in the middle of a town street as Lamas and his dimwitted partner give chase. His partner keeps shooting from the passenger side of the car as they’re chasing the van through a park filled with young children. Lamas yells, “Be careful of those kids!” but neither one of them gives a fuck, he’s just blasting away. Later on, we see the back of the van and there’s not a bullet hole in it, so who knows where those bullets landed. They chase the van straight into an afternoon rodeo where they allow the van to plow through the crowded bleachers, turning it into a fireball that definitely caused more civilian casualties. That’s the first five minutes of this film.

And Lorenzo Lamas, bless his heart, he’s trying to act and shed tears for his undying love for the FBI, but his range makes it seem less like a devastated man and more like a Cincinnati Bengals fan just watched their team lose again at the end of a two-win season.

Fortunately, we get a flashback to tell us why he’s on the FBI shit list, and it’s amazing.

Shortly after this moment, you realize you don’t care about Lorenzo Lamas’s lack of acting chops, because Gary Busey enters the frame. He plays Art Dacy, an ex-military whacko with a mutilated dick who’s plan is…who knows what his plan is. He’s a Vietnam vet and he’s mad about something. He’s introduced while making out with a woman who wears a variety of wigs and has smeared lipstick all over his face for some reason, as if he was preparing for some kind of Native American ritual.

Then we get a second car chase, as a giant logging flatbed diesel driven by a bootleg version of WCW’s General Rection takes on Lamas and Kelly McCord, his new female Bureau babysitter. The truck blares its horn, completely ruining the art of surprise, but when it smacks the back of Lamas’s car, he says, “What the hell was that?” Probably the big truck you’re staring at in the rear view mirror, Nicholas Travis. It’s amazing he solves any crimes at all with that big brain. During this scene, they even left in a shot with unfilled green screen outside of the car as it goes under the truck Christmas Vacation style. All that said, this scene is fucking awesome and it ends in a really cool way. This scene starts setting up the relationship between Travis and McCord, which starts as a playful “will they/won’t they” situation and ends as, “just fuck and get it over with already, you kooky kids!”

The rest of the film is a cat and mouse chase as our two Mindhunters try to track down Busey and his pack of yokels, who continuously gain the upper hand on the stupid agents but aren’t good enough to ever finish the job. Busey is in full crazy town mode, with awesome lines like, “The more words you use, the closer to death you are.” and “You want war? I am war, cocked and locked, and a robot!” while hollering about his ability to get a hard on.

A fun game while watching this movie might be trying to calculate Agent Travis’s bullets shot to hit ratio, which is probably less than 1%, since he can’t hit anything (vehicle or human) unless it’s standing directly in front of his gun barrel - and he spits a ton of hot lead in this film. In fact, there’s a scene in which a Jeep Wagoneer is basically doing circles around a cluster of FBI agents who are giving it all they got, but they don’t hit a goddamn thing aside from an innocent bystander’s car that flies into a trailer home and presumably wins a giant lawsuit somewhere down the line.

Basically my face (both of them) while watching this movie.

The last action set piece is a boat chase, because, well…it’s a Lorenzo Lamas movie, and it must be written into his contract. It’s a long chase and it’s honestly pretty fucking sweet. How it ends is utterly bananas and features a man fully engulfed in flames waving an axe around. Face/Off also came out in 1997 and this boat chase is honestly way more entertaining and features less doves. The explosions in this scene (and in the entire movie) are really awesome, and there’s a ton of them.

The End.

This movie was such a blast. It’s filled with all kinds of stupidity, but I was fully entertained the entire time. You could have probably swapped Lorenzo Lamas with a crash test dummy doll and gotten a similar performance but everyone else just left it all on the field. Cloke really tried with the garbage script she was given, but Busey is the real hero here as the dickless psycho.