Fluidly edited and photographed with a certain felicity, DEAD CENTER is an empty exercise in style. This masculinized rip-off of LA FEMME NIKITA falls short in all other departments.
Incarcerated by the police after a stolen art deal goes sour, career criminal/cop killer Joe (Justin Lazard) is given one last chance to avoid execution. Mary (Rachel York), fronting for a covert group of agents backed by the US government, offers Joe the opportunity to train as one of Uncle
Sam's elite international hit men. Although he demonstrates some potential by beating a guard nearly to death during an escape attempt, Joe initially makes an unpromising Galatea to Mary's Pygmalion. Nevertheless, strong-willed Mary prods Joe through an intensive physical and psychological
training course with the reluctant sanction of her superior, Saunders (Eb Lottimer). Constitutionally unsuited to being a team player, Joe is set up as an expendable assassin; he kills Ambassador Chavez (David Carradine) at a Washington, D.C. art gallery. Afterwards, Joe is chastised by Saunders
for not rubbing out an innocent tourist who photographed the crime scene. (She later dies mysteriously in a fire.) Suspicious of Saunders's methods, Mary secretly photographs his rendezvous with crime kingpin Emilio Cordoba (Frank McCarthy) and discovers that her boss is using agents to execute
contract killings for Cordoba. At a golf game, Saunders orders Joe to kill Congressman Clark (Joe Staader), and then instructs Mary to bump off her prized pupil. Joe is torn between his burgeoning passion for his Mary and Saunders's persuasive arguments against her. Mary forces him into her car,
where she convinces him that Saunders is a double agent using his post for profit. Joe helps Mary kill Cordoba in a restaurant. Later they infiltrate the toxic chemical plant that serves as their headquarters, massacring dozens of Saunders's agents. After Mary is wounded, Joe manages to torch
Saunders with a barrel of flammable acetylene, which blows up the entire agency hideout. Afterwards, Joe opts for some R&R with a sexy blonde waiting at his apartment, and Mary shows up just in time to save Joe from this unlikely bimbo assassin. The two lovestruck death merchants face the future
together.
DEAD CENTER is complicated without being complex, and it dawdles through its international double-crosses at a suspense-deadening pace. Hampered by two attractive but modestly talented leads, this handsomely photographed movie never heats up, either as an erotic romance or as a contemporary
espionage nail-biter. It's got visual style to burn, but the superficial flashiness rapidly becomes monotonous. Fashionably trashing the US government as hopelessly corrupt, DEAD CENTER fails to leaven its grim post-Cold War treachery with wit (its ham-handed nadir is easily a filmic interlude in
which Joe re-decorates his new apartment in speeded-up motion). Unlike LA FEMME NIKITA, which managed to create sympathy for its spiritually-numbed protagonists, this spy farrago never persuades us to care whether its protagonists live or die. (Graphic violence, extreme profanity, extensive
nudity) leave a comment
