Just the Ticket #174: Mission Of Justice

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a The Ticketmaster.

Welcome to the third week of March-al Law Month, Ticketholders!

The 90s were a simpler time in America, when you didn't have to worry about the government (blatantly) lying to you or technology being both so smart and so dumb that it could be programmed to lie to you (or for you). In the 90s, you could think professional wrestling was real. Cartoons were kind of allowed to sell your children articulated hunks of plastic. Radical dudes in their twenties and thirties could convince children and teens that a crappy 8-bit movie tie-in game was so awesome that it could farm enough aura to blow up the Earth through your television. And the movie industry could get away with exploiting name recognition and minor plot similarities to convince the renting public that a completely unrelated movie was a sequel to their favorite franchise. It's the reason behind the whole Troll/Ator clusterfuck. It's why there are so many Amityville movies, it's partly why franchises like Pumpkinhead, Wishmaster, Hellraiser, and Ghoulies went so far off the rails in their later installments, and it's why I get to review today's movie even though it technically isn't a Martial Law sequel: the desperation of shareholders to capitalize on popular branding and the fruits of concurrent thought for the sake of a paycheck.

I don't get paid for doing this (yet), so I live on my love and compulsion, and the hope that you will finally remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't yet, leave comments at the bottom of my Blogger posts, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to leave the country if Trump declares martial law, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my ass-kicking content.

Stop me if you've heard this one: Jeff Wincott plays a cop with a female partner and a martial arts background who goes undercover in a criminal organization to get revenge for the death of a close friend and ends up hanging one of the villains in the process.

Yep, 1992's Mission Of Justice (a multi-entendre of a title) may not be a true Martial Law threequel despite much international marketing to the contrary, but the basic plot is just Martial Law II: Undercover...again! But better!

After using excessive force against a domestic abuser, armed robber, and car thief, officer Kurt Harris (Wincott, clearly not playing Sean Thompson because different character name) is asked to "turn in your badge and your gun" (not really, but it's a 90s cop movie and he gets fired, so the reference stands). Unfortunately, his troubles are far from over, as an old boxer friend of his named Cedric Williams (played by Tony Burton, a.k.a. Duke from the Rocky movies) is found murdered, his hands broken and his championship belt stolen. Clues lead Kurt to the Mission Of Justice, a Scientology-like martial arts cult run by Dr. Rachel Larkin (Brigitte Nielsen, who was almost the first live-action She-Hulk, and once had a short-lived relationship with The Masked Singer's Space Ranger, Flavor Flav),

a mayoral candidate who uses her disciples' familial connections to extort (and murder) the elderly for their land rights, and uses the Mission Of Justice to train a private army of martial artist youths (mostly former gang members) called the Peacemakers (no, not that one) for a Mission Of Justice: to Make New York Safe Again (but also discredit the police department so she can install Kurt - whom she has grown...impressed with - as a puppet commander and use her political and martial influence to rule the city for her own interests.

Yeah, maybe there's a bit of recency bias involved, but I couldn't help drawing comparisons between the villain of this thirty-plus-year-old movie and the administrations of our current president. The systemic corruption, the cult of blind and complicit followers, the Euro-trash sidekick (here, it's Rachel's physically imposing brother, Titus, played by Matthias Hues, who was in Bounty Tracker with Cyndi Pass, who plays Rachel's other main goon, the sexy blonde one, because the villains in Martial Law sequels - and "sequels" - have to have a big guy and a sexy blonde as henchmen), the kiss-ass underling (Stockwell, played by Ghoulies writer-director Luca Bercovici), the real estate angle, the dismantling and discrediting of essential infrastructure, the privatization,.... There's even a goon with a chainsaw that Kurt has to fight.

It just rings too eerily contemporary for my mental comfort that things Americans of generations past decried in fiction as worst-case scenarios are now shaping our reality, and a frighteningly large minority are okay with it. Like, a recent poll saw over forty percent of Americans approving of Trump's tariff policy despite the very real possibility that it could plunge our economy back into the 1930s. That's fucking insane!

Anyway, enough reality for now....

At first, Mission Of Justice feels incredibly cheap and rushed, with some early fight scenes feeling slow and sloppy, the foley sounds coming in noticeably late or early relative to the filmed hits, and a few punches being filmed at such poorly thought out angles that the distance between fist and opponent would make a WWE Superstar yell "fake!"

Cyborg² star Karen Sheperd plays Lynn Steele, Kurt's partner in this movie. Like Cynthia Rothrock before her, Sheperd is a skilled martial artist, and it shows in the little screentime she's given, as Mission Of Justice is a Kurt-focused movie. Their relationship is shown to be close, but unlike Sean and Billie's weakly romantic/sexual dynamic, Kurt and Lynn are more of an "I know I can count on you," trust-based partnership (like cops, I guess) that's strong enough to where Lynn can talk Kurt out of a dark place and it reads in their performances. As such, Kurt gets to make suggestive eyebrows at Larkin and her...flexible henchwoman like he's one of the guys in that old Dead Or Alive commercial.

Unlike Carradine or Johansson from the previous movies, Brigitte Nielsen lacks fighting skill (and acting, frankly), so Mission Of Justice is merely an excuse to let the audience look at her in tight, femme fatale suits (not that I'm entirely complaining) while Larkin's sidekicks do the fighting and most of the killing on her behalf. And what is Larkin a Doctor of, anyway?

Those flaws and the formulaic plot aside, Jeff Wincott shines here, and the movie is all the better for it. Kurt is an emotionally realized character with clearly defined motives for his own Mission Of Justice and plenty of opportunities to do competently executed policework, suspenseful espionage, and of course, a ton of fun, impressively dangerous-looking ass-kicking (like when he and two of the Peacemakers fight a car-chopping crew in a working auto shop,

or when he fights through an initiation gauntlet - one of whom is Supernatural, Dexter, and Lethal Weapon 3 actor Mark Pellegrino - to join the Peacemakers) on his path to revenge and justice.

My only real gripe, as it has been for all of these movies so far, is that because of the era, the male lead must be cool and macho, and doesn't get to grieve as much as he should. This movie is the best of the three in this regard, giving Kurt the chance to handily (puns!) and brutally defeat Titus (who was stupid and cocky enough to wear Cedric's title belt under his suit-jacket for the entire movie) and visibly struggle to not kill Larkin with her own knives at the end. Good, if a little mixed, message about the challenges and benefits of pursuing justice, the dark temptation of giving in to vengeance, and the twisted allure of power and influence, that our country needs right now, painful as it might be to hear. But watching a cool dude beat people up might ironically soften the blow.

B+

Next week, I hit up YouTube to close out March-al Law Month with a Wincott joint that isn't part of the Martial Law series, but has "Martial" and "Law" in the title.

For movie reviews and all my other content in between, Stay Tuned and engaged, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't yet, leave comments at the bottom of my Blogger posts, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to leave the country if Trump declares martial law, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my ass-kicking content.

Ticketmaster,

Out.

Law.