Assault on VA-33

This movie has awful dialogue, excruciating attempts at humor, and cliched action. Assault on VA-33 is a mindless action movie that does, admittedly, derive some entertainment value out of unintentional hilarity. International terrorists, led by, of course, a guy with a slicked-back ponytail and bad Boris Badonov accent, take over a Veterans Administration hospital outside of Buffalo, New York, and it's up to our hero, played by Sean Patrick Flanery, to stop them by picking them off one by one and by any means necessary, be it through punches, kicks, knives, guns, assault weapons. The villains are killed off in order of their relevance to the story, and, making this even more like a horror movie, there's even a police chief who refuses to believe that anything amiss is happening until it's almost too late.

It's a low-budget movie -- there's a flashback scene in which Flanery's character is a soldier with his troops who seem to be fighting not in some foreign locale but an abandoned Rust Belt warehouse -- but that could be overlooked if there was anything fresh or redeeming about this. The violence is constant, with plenty of hostages and terrorists shot and killed in the head at point-blank range. While no one necessarily expects action movies like these to be masterpieces of cinema, there's at least a hope that they won't be so paint-by-numbers, like so many action movies done so many times before. This movie never does anything new or different or exciting, not even once. It's an uninspired action movie that tries and fails to make up for this lack of inspiration by throwing in as much gratuitous violence and profanity as possible.