Cosmic Cinema: CYBERTRACKER

The Movie: Cybertracker

Year: 1994

Director: Richard Pepin

Cast: Don 'The Dragon' Wilson, Richard Norton, Stacie Foster, Joseph Ruskin, John Aprea, Abby Dalton, Steve Burton, Dana Sparks

Format Viewed: DVD (R1)

MPAA Rating: R (For non-stop mindless violence.)

Premise: In the not too distant future the United States has become a socialist corporate state. Corporate computers tell citizens what to think, how to live, what to buy, and when to die. However all is not yet the perfect neo Marxist/Maoist paradise. There is a resistance movement.

The Reality: Tragically bad formulaic low budget ROBOCOP/TERMINATOR inspired action knock-off nonsense with cut-rate special effects. .

Minimalist sets reminiscent of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. .

And an anemic "plot" following the basic pattern of: gun battle, things blowing up, car chase, plodding poorly scripted melodramatic rubbish interspersed with martial arts pugilism; wash, rinse, repeat. I kid you not.

The Story: Body guard witnesses an assassination. Body guard has shoot outs, gets chased by the bad guys, and blows things up. Bad guys send a Cyborg assassin after body guard. Body guard has more shoot outs, gets chased by more bad guys, and blows yet more things up (including the Cyborg). Bad guys send another Cyborg assassin after body guard. This continues until the viewer either stops playback, falls asleep, or their eyes weep tears of joy as they realize the end credits have begun to scroll.

Assessment/ Verdict: The following quote from the movie pretty much sums up how I feel about Cybertracker: "I just want somebody to tell me what the hell is going on here!"

Cybertracker is a mindless action flick that uses all the clichéd standards of the genre: gun battles that expend more ammunition than a clip could actually hold, car chases, pyrotechnical explosions, threadbare plot driven by stupid people doing stupid things, and poorly choreographed martial arts kick-fighting with the usual Junior High level mind numbingly bad dialogue used to punctuate action scenes. Characters were introduced who talked about things and stuff only to be quickly forgotten as one tediously senseless action scene melded into another. Most dialogue is recited by rote with all the passion and vitality of road kill bloating in the high noon sun leaving the audience scratching their heads in confusion.

Based on snippets of dialogue spread throughout the movie the setting is apparently a bleak future United States in which the White House has been burned down and the government taken over by corporations who have replaced the judicial system with computers; more specifically the United States Computerized Judicial System. Flesh and blood police officers are in the process of being replaced by "Core Trackers" (basically Cyborg terminators) and that's where the movie bogs down.

Cybertracker wastes so much of it's runtime trying to look like other Cyborg movies that it comes across as soullessly derivative. Worse, the movie is just one great big ruse for "Don 'The Dragon' Wilson" to exhibit his rusty martial arts skills. Had the premise, loosely outlined as it was, of the back story and it's cultural ramifications been explored this could have been an interesting political allegory ala THE SECOND CIVIL WAR. Instead it's all throwaway dialogue used only to provide dull pauses between action scenes. Cybertracker is thus the sort of pointless timewaster that's okay to have on in the background while you're cooking or working on a essay. Otherwise this movie should be reserved for testing the will power of bad movie aficionados and interrogating terrorists.
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