Bounty Hunters

Last weekend a couple friends and I engaged in what is usually our quirky quarterly tradition - bad movie night! We all selected a movie to endure, and usually we try to go with something so cheesy bad that it is fun to just rip apart as we go along. One of the films was the Pauly Shore hit, Jury Duty, which still has great moments, but mostly does not hold up well at all. Another friend picked out a Mystery Science Theater 3000 film. It has been over a decade since I saw one of these! I forget the name of it, but I think it had "final" in the title, and was a abysmal action/chase flick taking place in the middle of the Canadian wilderness that we enjoyed watching the MST3K crew rip apart.

One of my buddies Matt has a tradition of buying me a random movie with wrestlers in it I have never heard of, and usually is among the direct to video fare. That is exactly what we watched for my pick, which ironically also happens to be a Canadian action flick too. I am talking about the 2011 straight to video thriller that is Bounty Hunters (trailer), or as it is known in Canada as Bail Enforcers, which I am guessing that title has more pizzazz then Bounty Hunters up there.

Former WWE Diva sensation Trish Stratus makes her feature film debut as Jules, who by day....or night actually works part time at a strip club to help make ends meet, while at day is part of a three person crew that is known as the Bail Enforcers Agency (BEA). Jules and her two fellow BEA partners Ridley(Frank J. Zupancic) and Chase(Boomer Phillips) are making a routine bust when they stumble upon intel that sends them on a mission to hunt down a prized $1 Million bounty. Of course it is not that easy, and the trio run across plenty of opposition along the way in hopes of making their ultimate bust.

Trish is from and currently resides in Toronto, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this is where it is shot because a majority of the actors here have heavy Canadian accents. They even wrestle a little bit of it back into Trish who use to mask it for years in her WWE days. To give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, they never outright say where this film takes place, so it could be taking place anywhere with a city that has a surprisingly strong Canadian sector. I do not mean to poke fun at the accents so bad, but Matt was obsessed at pointing this out throughout the film so I feel obligated to dedicate a paragraph to this here.

As far as the actual movie goes, well it lives up to the straight to video fare. There is a decent amount of action and fight sequences throughout the film, but the build up to them is all over the place and just does not feel nearly as epic as your big screen encounters. It gets painful to watch Chase ham it up as the comedic relief for the film, who plays the knucklehead partner getting himself into more trouble and usually tripping over his own feet. Probably the biggest plus to this film is that it is just shy of 80 minutes, because around the hour mark my friends were starting to wonder how much we had left to endure.

There are a couple of brief extra features on the DVD release. There is a brief three minute behind the scenes clip of Trish and an adversary rehearsing a fight scene, and about another ten minute interview with Trish who spends the bulk of the time talking about how much fun she had doing the fight scenes. Neither of these are particularly insightful, and are not must see by any means. The same can be said for Bounty Hunters in general, where unless you want to make somewhat of a unique night of it as part of a bad movie night like I did, you should absolutely avoid at all costs.

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