‘Blade Runner’ meets John Woo: Is ‘Nemesis’ one of the 1990s most underrated action movies?
The assumption that any action movie deemed unworthy of a large-scale theatrical release and restricted almost entirely to the realms of home video isn’t going to be anything to write home about carries plenty of evidence to suggest it’s a completely accurate one, but every now and again something like Nemesis comes along to buck the trend.
Of course, thanks to its status as a distinctly B-tier operation, it was franchised to within an inch of its life by four sequels and a reboot, but that doesn’t detract from the unique and sorely underrated charms of the original. Director Albert Pyun was a leading light of the straight-to-video arena for almost his entire filmmaking career, and there was no shame in that when he doubled as one of its most reliable fixtures.
Kickboxer-turned-actor Olivier Gruner leads the line in only his third-ever feature as the fantastically-named Alex Rain, a cybernetically enhanced former counterterrorist agent working as an assassin/bounty hunter in a near-future dystopian Los Angeles, who finds himself tasked by his former employers to murder his former lover and fellow android Jared after she’s accused of smuggling data to nefarious parties planning a string of government assassinations.
The plot alone should offer a reasonable gauge as to whether or not Nemesis piques the interest, and the Blade Runner comparisons are there for all to see. There’s neon lights, rain-drenched backdrops, and plenty of brooding to be found as synthetic creations battle against their base impulses, but where it really sings is in the action sequences.
Make no mistake, though, Gruner is clearly not a professionally-trained actor, even if his emotionless performance does neatly fit his artificial existence. While the visual elements may be clearly and heavily indebted to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, the set pieces themselves lean very far into the bullet-riddled heroic bloodshed that had turned John Woo into one of the action genre’s all-time greats.
Nemesis doesn’t possess so much as an original bone in its body, but that’s not really the point. The distinctive works of an uninhibited auteur have no place in the gun-toting bargain bucket, with Pyun overcoming the lack of inventiveness and restrictive budget to pull some impressive fights, shootouts, and scraps out of the bag.
Along with the visual odes to Blade Runner and the balletic fingerprints of Woo’s pioneering style, there are practical effects and tangible gore that feel positively Cronenbergian, while there’s even a sequence towards the end with janky stop-motion that feels ripped right out of The Terminator. The storyline is the weak link through all of this, but again, who cares when Nemesis is supposed to be a feast for the eyes first and foremost?
It’s not supposed to be high art, and while there are plenty of things wrong with Nemesis on a technical, screenwriting, structural, and performative level, it’s still a whole lot of fun. The 1990s was a wonderful decade for action cinema that knocked out a cacophony of all-time classics, but for anyone who wants to climb a little further down the ladder for greatness, this should be one of the first ports of call.
After all, how can a movie that comes across as the bastard child of Blade Runner and The Terminator, fathered by David Cronenberg and John Woo, that’s been slathered in a thick layer of (most likely) inadvertent and accidental cheese played with the utmost sincerity be anything less than a good time?