Whatever it Takes (1998).
“I heard it makes your dick fall off.”
Directed by Brady MacKenzie
Written by Jack Capece and Raymond Obstfeld
Starring The Dragon, The Diceman, and The Hammer
The Stage.
After a drug bust goes terribly wrong, the DEA sends Neil Demarco and Dave Menardi on a makeup assignment to go undercover to investigate a super steroid that’s making its way through the world of wrestlers and body builders.
The Review.
We start off with Neil, played by Don The Dragon Wilson, painting while shirtless. He smashes his painting and throws a tantrum and then tries to kill himself, leading us to wonder, “Was the painting really that bad?” Fortunately, we’re then introduced to the real reason he’s suicidal. During an undercover operation at a warehouse conveniently filled with soft bags and empty cardboard boxes, we meet a greasy, drug dealing maniac named Roland. Neil and Dave, played by Andrew Dice Clay and his revolving closet full of leather jacket variants, have been staking this lunatic and his boss out for eight months. Now, I’ve seen a lot of scumbags in movies, but Roland is definitely up there with the worst of them. One of his highly irresponsible exes comes to his drug warehouse looking for a score with her 13-year-old daughter. He agrees to hook her up, if he can deflower her kid, and the mom is just like…”Take one for the team, kiddo.” Of course The Dragon isn’t going to let that shit slide, so he breaks cover and causes a huge shootout. Unfortunately during the ruckus, the little girl takes a bullet, and he’s pretty broken up about it. And rightfully so, because he definitely got her killed, but to be fair he was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
We fast forward two weeks, and Neil is back on the job because in the late-90’s, no one cared about mental health. The feds stick these two goobers on a case to go in deep to find out who’s distributing a new human growth hormone that’s three times more powerful than your normal steroid. The bad guys are Uncle Paulie, played by blaxploitation legend Fred “The Hammer” Williamson and Kevin, the town’s source of the great parachute pants shortage of ‘98 who looks like the Goofus version to John Cena’s Gallant. We’ll call him John Weena. As Neil embeds himself into the steroid crew, we get to see some typical direct-to-video fight scenes that would feel right at home on the set of a TV show like Lorenzo Lamas’s Renegade - a lot of body shots and broken tables, but no blood and no broken bones. Of course while he’s on the job risking his neck, Andrew Dice Clay is watching everything from the back of a van because the only thing he’s fighting is his wardrobe and the urge to smoke another cigarette.
As the film goes on, highlights include Don “The Dragon” Wilson trying to play basketball in jeans to impress a girl, plenty of shots of oiled up men and women, double and triple crosses, a smattering of racist and homophobic jokes, Uncle Paulie’s obsession with comfortable shoes and delivering a monologue about George Bush going into Panama, and a good old fashioned junkyard shootout.
Finally, we have got to talk about Andrew Dice Clay for a minute. There are certain actors who take a bad role and just kind of get stuck in Hollywood jail, but this dude landed in that jail immediately after his first movie, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane in 1990 absolutely bombed. That’s basically why his filmography consists of shit like Brainsmasher…A Love Story and Master P films. in 1995, he kind of denounced his Diceman persona so he could move onto other stuff, but clearly he did not. I don’t know what the fuck he was doing in this movie. After the initial shootout, in which, while being shot at, he improvs by yelling, “Are you hungry?” to The Dragon, who yells back what the audience is thinking - “What?”, he yells, “Well I’m starving!” and jumps into a forklift and instead of barreling into a strategically placed hotdog stand or something that would have to do with food, he just runs into some cardboard boxes. It’s absolutely puzzling. He goes from an outfit that looks like a half-Fonzi, half-mercenary doll stuffed with packing peanuts to literally the same jacket but with no sleeves so he can class it up over a purple turtleneck. Then, the Diceman just disappears for 45 minutes in the middle of the movie and reappears towards the end of the film dual wielding pistols like a fat Chow Yun Fat while sliding down an actual slide. Honestly, it’s the most entertaining part of the movie, but not the whole coming down the slide part. It’s the part when he gets to the end of the slide and falls through the floor, but just can’t get himself up from the hole. So he is comically hanging there in a position that any normal person could have lifted themselves out of while the shootout goes on for literally minutes.
The End.
Whatever It Takes is a brand of stupid that is just slightly entertaining. Andrew Dice Clay is all but worthless in the film and solely exists to make a few wise-cracks and shoot a few bullets at the end, so if you’re here for him, you might be disappointed…but then again, let’s be honest, you’re not here for him. Don “The Dragon” Wilson does the heavy lifting here, and he barely lifts. He displays about a thousand jump kicks, but they all look slow as molasses. We also don’t see a fitting end to John Weena and the final fight that the film works up to between the two of them was unsatisfying to say the least. On the plus side, we get to see a character sacrifice themselves by spearing someone down an elevator shaft for no reason.
I can see why Vinegar Syndrome tossed this one in their VSA line - it’s a silly, DTV action film, but it’s not as entertaining or as action packed as this line typically is. If you’re looking for an entry point to the series, L.A. Wars is probably a better starter, although you’ll have to pay insane prices at this point. In typical VS fashion, the picture looks pretty good, but oddly, the extras are really lacking on this one with only two interviews by The Dragon and The Hammer. This was the only film directed by Brady MacKenzie and really the only thing written by the screenwriters, so it’s safe to say they either abandoned or were run out of Hollywood, which I guess isn’t surprising as you see the credits roll. I blame Andrew Dice Clay.
