Don "The Dragon" Wilson, Olivier Gruner, Gary Busey, Martin Kove, and Fred "The Hammer" Williamson together at last! The first time ever pairing of these five individuals should have made CROOKED a b-action movie lovers dream come true. Major emphasis on "should have".

I freely admit I'm not the biggest fan of either Don "The Dragon" Wilson or Olivier Gruner. I've not bothered with most of their movies because the ones I have seen have almost universally underwhelmed me. Ah, hell, these guys have starred in some major league crapfests even by low budget action movie standards. Both have solid martial arts skills but, unfortunately, neither have much by way of screen presence. That Wilson has never been much of an actor is made worse considering he has little or no charisma. Gruner's got some charisma, almost all of which is hindered by his sometimes impenetrable accent. The way I've always seen it "The Dragon" is just an ordinary guy with some kicking skills, and to me Gruner has always been the poor man's Jean Claude Van Damme; that was until Van Damme's career went to hell in a cocaine-fueled handbasket and he himself became the poor man's Van Damme. Still, it's rare that you get two bonafide action movie stars together in the same film even if they are on the lower end of the action hero totem pole. While not exactly on the level of having Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren square off in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, having Don "The Dragon" Wilson and Olivier Gruner play LETHAL WEAPON is something that should have at the very least made for an amusing b-action flick.

Nope.

You'd think a movie starring two martial artists would at least guarantee you'd see a lot of high-kicking action - and you would be wrong. Wilson and Gruner do precious little of the kickboxing that made them b-movie action regulars and what little they do is unspectacular at best. Instead we get shootouts a plenty, and when I say shootouts I mean the sort of shootouts where the shooters have unlimited ammo and just stand there shooting at one other, often from close range and usually not even trying to take cover behind anything for protection. Even out in the open no one seems capable of hitting their target. The film is rife with shootouts of this ilk. Outside of one random henchmen getting shot in the chest and next seen flying out a second story window in a manner that could only be achieved by someone getting a running start and diving face-first through the glass, the gun battles are shot with no excitement, intentionally so or unintentionally so. Just show the good guys standing there with their gun shooting, then the show the bad guys standing where they're at shooting back, and eventually the bad guys either fall down or run away. These are the sort of shootouts you'd see on an early 1980s TV cop show.

In a weird sort of way, CROOKED almost plays out like an arcade shoot'em up from the late Eighties. Before the good guys can finally get to the boss character they have to eliminate wave after wave of assorted, nameless, often faceless henchmen. These henchmen come in three varieties: guys dressed like greasers, guys dressed like dock workers, and guys in ski masks and black clothing that makes them look like dimestore ninjas. Don't bother asking why some henchmen choose to hide their face while others have no problem being easily identifiable. And maybe I just got confused but I'd swear I saw one of the dock workers get killed in a shootout only to rise from the dead for a later shootout.

An action movie that fails to deliver the action goods leaves audiences with nothing to fall back on but the plot. Yeah, right. Watching CROOKED it's like you're not actually watching an actual story unfold. It's more like  you're literally watching the formula for this type of movie filmed in its natural pre-scripted state; somebody just filled in some names and perfunctory dialogue. CROOKED isn't just formulaic - it is the formula!

Cops are protecting a high profile mob witness at a motel. The mob witness was allowed to order himself up a pair of call girls, one of which was a rookie prostitute who realized she couldn't go through with it. The other hooker tells her to just hide out in the bathroom while she services the client. Masked gunmen then stage an ambush and massacre everyone. One of the cops played by blacksploitation legend Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, though badly wounded, manages to fend off the masked assailants. An unseen individual enters that Williamson recognizes as a friend. This mystery man then guns down Williamson. The mobster's wise guy son enters and demands the witness reveal the whereabouts of the money the guy stole from his father. The mob son does kill the witness but fails to get the key to the locker where the money is being stashed or notice the half-naked woman in the bathroom who is now in possession of the very key he needs. Everyone not dead makes a getaway.

The cops want the girl as a witness and to try and find out who the inside man was tipping off the mob about the motel safehouse. Somehow police chief Gary Busey is able to deduce that the hotel slaughter was an inside job set-up by a crooked cop based solely on the belief that Williamson's veteran cop character would never have allowed a gunman to get that close to him in that sort of life or death situation unless he knew the guy as a fellow cop. DNA testing of a stocking found at the scene of the crime tells them the identity of the witness-of-the-evening they need to find. Between Busey's intuition as to why a crooked cop had to have been involved and the instantaneous and super precise DNA testing revealing the only surviving witness' identity, it kind of make you wonder how any murder ever goes unsolved in LA.

Enter the dragon, Don Wilson that is, who we're first introduced to as he walks up and randomly beats up some thugs roughing up one of the fine citizens of the City of Angels. We'll soon come to learn that he's actually supposed to be the straight-laced, disapproving-of-his-partners-methods cop in the impending mismatched cop partnership. I also have to say that middle-aged Don "The Dragon" Wilson looks disturbingly like the offspring of a Sulu/Chekov coupling.

Because he deems them his most trustworthy cops, Busey pairs "The Dragon" with another detective, a foreign-accented tough talker played by Olivier Gruner. Wilson immediately begins complaining about not wanting to be partnered with Gruner because, well, just because. Gruner is supposed to be the Riggs to Wilson's Murtaugh which means Wilson instantly dislikes his new partner even though they'd only shared about 60-seconds of screen time during which there was never any sign of actual tension between the two.

The most basic fundamental aspect of the buddy cop movie is establishing the two buddy cops at the beginning as being polar opposites with conflicting personalities and police methods. This movie can't even do that right. Hell, they barely have any personalities at all. Wilson is a quiet, by the numbers cop who's only real character trait has to do with the suicide death of his policeman father making him considering quitting the force. Gruner says some stuff that makes him sound like a surly tough guy, though still not enough to justify Wilson's instant disdain. The first real tangible difference between the two doesn't come until a scene shortly thereafter when they interrogate a guy in a bar who they believe knows the hooker's whereabouts. Wilson tries it as a good cop and gets no results. Then Gruner goes alll Vic Mackey on the dude and gets the info they need. A few friends of the guy that just got roughed up step in and Wilson has to help Gruner fend them off. Afterwards, Wilson lets it be known that he disapproves of Gruner's violent tactics. Uh, excuse me, wasn't Don "The Dragon" Wilson's very first scene in this movie him beating the ever-loving snot out of a couple thugs and just leaving them crumpled in a heap, not even bothering to arrest them for their crime?

They finally find the hooker they've been looking for and spend most of the movie trying to find a safehouse that's actually safe, repeatedly being attacked by mob henchmen after the girl. How incompetent are these henchmen? Driving to one safehouse, the trio will be ambushed by a carload of ski-masked gunmen. The shootout lasts all of about 20 seconds until the good guys escape by merely driving away and the henchmen, having apparently been so demoralized by not being able to hit the broadside of a barn from such close range, opt not to give chase.

When they finally get someplace where they have a moment to breath without being shot at the film screeches to a total halt - it was barely chugging along as it was - by transforming into a Dr. Phil therapy session with Wilson telling his sob story about his cop dad committing suicide, Gruner telling his own less than cheerful backstory, and the hooker telling her hardluck story as to how she lost custody of her son and became a not-so-happy hooker. These three sob stories combined should have been more than enough to warrant the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition team showing up to build them a new safehouse.

And just when you think you can't take anymore boring sob stories AN ORGY BREAKS OUT!

Gruner's busty blonde girlfriend shows up at the place they're hiding out at and immediately they hop into the bath tub for some wet & wild sex - easily one of the most gratuitous sex scenes I've ever seen shoehorned into a movie - while the middle-aged cop with the demeanor of an Eagle Scout starts getting it on with the unhappy hooker on the couch until she changes her mind again after getting half naked. You can almost hear the producers in the background discussing ways to cram more breast shots into the movie as these dual love scenes unfold.

And what does this multiple murder witness who has been targeted by the mob and ambushed multiple times already do once everyone else has fallen asleep? If you guessed go outside the safehouse for some fresh air, get ambushed again, and barely escape with her life then you would be correct.

Good grief.

The rooftop shootout finale involving helicopters is so poorly staged that it does provide some very mild amusement. More than likely by this point you'll have long since given up on the movie entirely. I know I had.

Notice I never mentioned Martin Kove in any of what I Just described? That's because he's barely in the movie. His contribution to the film is to show up infrequently for seconds at a time acting suspicious so you'll think he might be the dirty cop - the actual identity of the dirty cop should be obvious by just listening to what the person giving the film's opening voiceover says - before finally showing up at the climactic gun battle to inform them of the true identity of the mole and then die seconds later.

And the reason Kove has to inform Wilson and Gruner of the crooked cop's identity is because when the crooked cop is finally revealed to be exactly who you expect it to be, he's then killed mere seconds later and not by the good guys either. The crime family use the old car-hotwired-to-blow-when-they-start-the-engine routine to eliminate him - no discernable reason why they felt the need to kill off their inside man at that particular moment. That was the moment I officially declared this movie to be utterly useless.