Stay Tuned #53: K-9000
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster
As the exposition on Uma Thurman's character (Mia Wallace) in Pulp Fiction famously informed us once upon a time, TV shows are pitched using a single produced episode, called a pilot because it's trying to get a show off the ground. Sometimes you get bangers like Moonlighting, sometimes you get things that are famously super-different (like that Mighty Morphin Power Rangers pilot where Trini was black, Bulk had a full-on punk gang, and Ernie's Juice Bar was a bowling alley), and then you get absolute stinkers like the Knight Rider and Wonder Woman reboots, Mockingbird Lane, the trilogy of Midnight Run sequels, and today's...effort.
A common practice in the late 80s and into the mid-90s was to make feature-length, TV-quality movies (sometimes spun off from theatrical properties to give more options to those who could not afford a VCR or regular trips to the video store or movie theater - possibly giving rise to the "we have [X] at home" meme as well) as a way of cheaply boosting primetime viewership on the weekends and gathering analytics on potential new series, effectively serving as "backdoor" pilots (a term that has been more recently applied to some crossover or character-focused episodes of existing series like Supernatural, Arrow, JAG, and The Rookie, but has history going back to the late 1950s).
I'm no stranger to spinoff series, crossovers, and pilots (all in blog form and all relatively successful because I do what I feel like regardless of public opinion and do what I am able to keep them viable, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave your unruly Luddite partner down in the comments until they learn to behave, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to pay off my debts and not get stuck with a thirty-year-old virtual pet, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my dog-training content.
Anyway, K-9000 stars a young Dennis "The Allstate Guy" Haysbert (24 and The Unit) and Chris Mulkey (who has almost a hundred film and television credits - I counted - including Captain Phillips and Cloverfield) as Lethal Weapon-lite cops investigating an attack on an animal rights rally at a local biotech research facility. Speaking of Supernatural, K-9000 was directed by Kim Manners (best known for directing episodes of The X-Files, 21 Jump Street, and Supernatural). The script was co-written by Die Hard, Commando, and 48 Hrs. scribe (and Street Fighter: The Movie writer-director) Steven E. de Souza. And like the Midnight Run sequels, it is currently available to watch for free (in terribly dated audio-visual quality) on YouTube:
K-9000 initially plays like a What If? scenario of K-9's ending (one where Jerry Lee didn't survive getting shot), with Dooley getting PTSD and Luddite's Disease between movies and being partnered up with a future insurance spokesman.
Except it’s not. Meet Eddie Monroe (Mulkey). He's not funny enough or good enough at side project blues music to be Jim Belushi, but "K-9 except my dog died" is his backstory, and he has a "slapstick comedy relief curse" relationship with machinery that was meant to be an episodic gag in the ultimately flightless series even though it was also the basis for his feature-length character arc, and wouldn't have made sense going forward. Also not a good mix: making your hapless slapstick victim the main hero. And yet Mulkey gets the majority of the runtime and physicality here. It's not that he's incapable or unlikable; Mulkey can elevate even the most awkward of this movie's fight scenes to "baby's first sports entertainment match" levels of believability because he knows how to fight and move theatrically. The problem is that his character is written to be too many things at once, and ends up feeling at odds with itself. The mix isn't inherently impossible; it's just not integrated well in this movie. But I digress; as mentioned above, there is a protest happening at a local biotech facility because of its supposed unethical animal testing practices, led by animal activist Ms. Wiffington (Liar Liar's Anne Haney), and a literal truckload of mercenaries looking to bury evidence of the company's ties to an off-book military project show up to shoot and burn everything at the same time Eddie is there to hit on Generic Hot British Scientist (Dynasty's Catherine Oxenberg). In the aftermath, Eddie discovers that he has been microchipped as the symbiotic partner of Niner (basically a German shepherd cyborg with an AI brain and the powers of a modern smartphone, voiced by Brady Bunch spin-off costar Jerry Houser). Eddie learns to be more tolerant of technology, Niner re-learns to be a dog, they defeat the bad guys, Hot British Scientist gets Eddie as a romantic tension love interest because she's a smart attractive woman in a turn-of-the-90s TV movie, and Eddie and Niner get a job at her lab for the series that never happened.
While Eddie and Niner have heartfelt buddy chemistry, the acting on display is stilted, the majority of the action is laughable, the pacing is agonizing, the tropes are blatant and dated, Dennis Haysbert is woefully underutilized, and the character writing feels less like Die Hard magic and more like Street Fighter production Hell. Roll over and play dead.
F+
Stay Tuned for an actual sequel review on Friday and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave your unruly Luddite partner down in the comments until they learn to behave, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to pay off my debts and not get stuck with a thirty-year-old virtual pet, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my dog-training content.
Ticketmaster-3000,
Out.
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