On DVD: Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia

The third Behind Enemy Lines flick is like mediocre TV served with extra cheese and a side of YEE-HAW!
'Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia'
'Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia' - 20th Century Fox
C. Robert Cargill

Some folks just aren't all that discerning. When they sit down to watch a movie, they aren't looking for an elegance of storytelling, the subtlety of acting, or a finely woven tale of human truth and beauty. They just want to watch some shit blow up -- real good. And if the guys doing it happen to be good ole boys from the US of A, all the better. And because there is a market of guys out there that want this kind of lowbrow entertainment, there is a machine out there to make it cheap, fast and lacking as much quality as humanly possible.

Which brings us to Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia. Released directly to DVD and Blu-ray disc this January 6, it's the third in a trilogy after those two immortal classics Behind Enemy Lines and Behind Enemy Lines: Axis of Evil. The plots of these films involve American troops finding themselves somehow abandoned -- yes, behind enemy lines -- only to fight their way out with the help of people safe in the comfort of their own command center. This time our heroes are a group of Navy Seals sent into Colombia on a recon mission in order to discern what is going on at a secret jungle location. The hang-up is that it's being done without the knowledge or consent of Colombia, our ally. When a rogue group of villains shows up to murder everyone our heroes were spying on, the Seals take the blame and find themselves at the center of an international incident.

The beauty, as well as the sweet, sweet irony, of BEL: Colombia is that in order to prove that they did not kill dozens of innocent FARC and Colombian military personnel, the Seal team must make their way across Colombia, killing dozens of innocent FARC and Colombian military personnel. Because that's the American way. Produced jointly by 20th Century Fox and WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), this thing wasn't designed to be thought about as deeply as I've just presented it. This is a thin-on-plot, heavy-on-the-pickup-truck-patriotism, low-budget action movie served with extra cheese and a side of YEE-HAW!

Starring Joe Manganiello -- best known as Flash Thompson in the Spider-Man movies -- and Ken "Mr. Kennedy" Anderson, a professional wrestler for the aforementioned WWE, the film forces us to ask some hard-hitting questions such as "Really? Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Antonio Sabato Jr., Wesley Snipes, and Don 'The Dragon' Wilson were all busy? All of them?" This movie is exactly the kind of crap you think it is -- a film so lame and uninteresting that the DVD commercial they've been distributing for the last six months is entirely made up of footage from the last two movies.

Most notable here is that this is directed by veteran actor Tim Matheson, who has done a fine job directing episodes of television but has no real sense of action. This makes sense, because the movie feels like it was directed by someone with a lot of TV experience -- it never feels at all cinematic in scope. It's meant to be watched in a DVD player, sometime between some sporting event and passing out drunk in your easy chair. Nothing more. And if that's all you ask out of it, it's fine. I've seen far worse movies on the big screen, recently. But you'd never so much as catch me handing my copy to a friend to watch or ever think to mention it in public. It's not good, but it most likely will entertain the lowest-common-denominator crowd it's gunning for.

Are there extra features? Yeah. Sure, lots of them, actually. I would spend more time talking about them had my eyes not glazed over at about the time the cast members were asked, "What was your favorite explosion," only to follow this predictable questioning by once again showing us the explosions they were talking about. There's a handful of making-of pieces on the special effects, the training the actors endured for the film, as well as an introduction to the actors, capped off with a two-minute gag reel.

Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia is available this week from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.


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