We all like Danny Trejo. He's one of a kind. With his rugged mug he can be menacing, frightening, lovable and funny. In this outing, he gets off to a good start, even having some pretty good lines to spout. True, it's formula action, with, as usual in these films, lots of plot holes and contrived situations. As usual we have the good guy with serious problems, the bad guy who just can't get any badder, the child you know will end up being the bad guy's hostage. In this case they went overboard and threw in two hostages. And speaking of bad guys, who can better represent bad than Jonathan Banks? When he looks at you, you tremble. They even managed to work in a bridge in downtown LA. That's, as Tevye would say, "Tradition". Every action flick in LA has to have some scenes on, around and under one of the bridges. As soon as I saw the city hall in the background, I told my wife to watch for the bridge scene and we weren't disappointed. Maybe it's something in the city charter that any action film made in LA County has to have some scenes including one of the bridges over the LA River, or in the actual riverbed, or both. So far so good. They missed the abandoned factory shootout, but on a budget of $3,000,000 you can't have everything. Where this film falls apart — make that, where this film completely breaks down, is when a fully armored SWAT team with assault weapons hits an apartment and two men, one being Mr. Banks hitting on seventy, armed with two pistols, kill each and every one of the SWAT team plus a couple of other detectives with only Danny Trejo. escaping, we simply broke down in laughter. From there it was downhill the rest of the way, with the usual standoff and bittersweet ending. This started off as one of Mr. Trejo's better outings, but something got lost in the translation.
