Search and Rescue in the Wasteland

Jean Claude Van Damme found his fame and fortune in the 1990s era of action. He was well muscled, stoic, and looked great when he did kicks. While I don’t think anyone would accuse him of being the greatest action star – his performances during the heyday of his career really weren’t that great – he has something special that helped propel him along for a number of years before audiences finally grew bored of his style of action and wanted something else.

That special something? The ability to do the splits really well. Seriously, go watch any of his movies and there’s always one moment where he does the splits while balanced on a couple of objects. It happens in Timecop, and it happens here in Cyborg, among many, many other action films where the man does the splits and it’s supposed to look cool. And the weird thing is… it kind of does. Like, there’s nothing inherently cool about doing the splits unless you’re a cheerleader, but here he is, doing it in hardcore 1990s action and everyone cheered. Sometimes all you need is a gimmick.

Frankly, gimmicks are all that Cyborg has to offer because, outside of a few specific moments, this is a dreadful slog of a film. That makes sense since the film started life as a Masters of the Universe sequel. That film was a massive bomb at the Box Office, making only $17.3 Mil against its $22 Mil budget, and it really put production house Cannon films in a bind (the failure of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace also didn’t help Cannon at all). While the script for Masters of the Universe II was tossed out, many of the costumes and much of the production work was moved over to Cyborg, leading many to consider this film an unofficial sequel to Masters of the Universe. That film was bad, and so is this one, and whether that’s because of the Masters of the Universe connection, or simply because Cannon made bad films…

No, yeah, it was the latter. Cannon made low-budget, cheap as hell, B-movies and while their lesser, cheaper efforts found enough acclaim to make them money, they eventually started overspending and under delivering, and the production house eventually went belly up. But before that happened, with owners Golan and Globus selling off their stake in 1989, we got to see the release of one more Cannon film: Cyborg.

The film is an absolute mess, and we see that right from the get-go. The movie opens with the titular cyborg, Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon), fleeing with her armed escort from the evil cohorts of Fender Tremolo (Vincent Klyn). It’s the distant future, in a plagued ravaged United States, and Pearl has come to NYC to investigate the ruins and find a cure for the plague. Tremolo doesn’t want a cure for the plague, though. He’s in power, and he has that power because the world fell apart and if the plague ends, he wouldn’t be in power anymore, so he wants Pearl for himself. He can take her to Atlanta, where the scientists are working on a cure, and prevent that cure from ever happening.

Before he can catch the cyborg, she encounters Gibson Rickenbacker (Van Damme), a slinger (someone who helps get people out of the city). She asks him to help her, but Tremolo and his gang show up and capture her. Rickenbacker initially decides not to help, it’s not his problem, but when he picks up a stray wanderer, Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter), she convinces him to help the cyborg and save the world. If only it would be that easy…

Cyborg really doesn’t work on any front, and that’s really all due to an absolute mess of a script. The first and most obvious issue with the movie is that it’s named Cyborg and yet the titular character is barely in the film, doesn’t do anything during the course of the movie, lets herself get captured over and over again for no reason, and then, at the end of the film, doesn’t even save the world like she promised she could. Nothing actually changes about the world during the film, and you’re left wondering why you watched any of it to begin with.

The whole point of the cyborg is that she’s going to stop the plague that ravaged the world. One issue with that: no one seems to have the plague in the movie. It’s mentioned as the plot device that ended the world, and the characters are supposedly working towards ending the plague, which would be a worthwhile goal if the plague seemed to still exist. Except no one has it, no one is suffering from it, and anyone that might have had it seems to be dead. So why, exactly, is finding the cure for this disease so important? The movie doesn’t even seem to care to figure that out at all.

Tremolo has similar conflicting motivations. He wants the end of the world to continue, so he wants to destroy the cure. Or he wants to head to Atlanta to control the cure. Or he wants to go there to kill the people trying to create the cure. His stated motivations change from scene to scene, with the only real thing we know is that he doesn’t want the cure to exist, or if it does he wants it for himself… maybe. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t help that we don’t know anything about his character beyond him having weirdly blue eyes and that he’s generically evil. He has no character development or real motivations, making his whole quest for the cure seem utterly empty and pointless.

Not that giving characters development really helps either. Van Damme’s Rickenbacker is a troubled soul who helped a woman and her young siblings escape the city and then, almost immediately, she decided she was in love with him and wanted him to stay with her and the kids forever. They eventually died, due to Tremolo, and Rickenbacker then had to go back to being a slinger so that he could… well, that’s not really clear. He wants to be left alone, and he doesn’t even seem to care about revenge on Tremolo. He’s just… there. He has all this development that does absolutely nothing for his character. It just exists to waste time in a threadbare script where nothing of consequence actually happens.

Even the action isn’t that great. It’s pretty clear that Cannon couldn’t hire good stunt coordinators, so most fights are choreographed poorly and involve a lot of quick editing to try and cover for how terrible the action is. Van Damme can hold his own, and Klyn is pretty great as well, but the two don’t actually have a fight together at all until the very end of the movie. The rest of the extras and bit players that Van Damme fights are bad at their jobs, giving every action scene in the film a high school production vibe.

The funny thing is that after Cannon was sold off and a new production house picked up the pieces, more Cyborg films were made. Someone out there decided this movie was great, and watched it over and over again. Hell, it was made on a microbudget (reportedly less than $500,000) and somehow made at least $9 Mil at the Box Office, which was a huge return on investment. Cyborg was a hit, at least by 1989’s standards. Going back and watching it, though, I just don’t understand how.

This is a poorly made, poorly conceived film that only barely manages to get by on a couple of okay action scenes and a few moments of decent special effects. It’s a bad film, through and through, making its legacy all the more surprising. Even if you hear it’s a successful film, don’t believe it. Cyborg is just bad.