Nato per combattere

Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi and Franco Gaudenzi, i.e. the four horsemen of the trash apocalypse and musketeers of plagiaristic trickery, set out on their last foray into the Philippine jungle. Compared to their previous works, Born to Fight mostly radiates resigned sloppiness. In their previous projects, a rip-off of Rambo: First Blood Part II in the Strike Commando diptych and especially the goofy Robowar, where they spliced together Predator and Robocop, they still sort of made an effort to reward the unfortunate punters who picked up their works in video rental shops with admittedly dubious but still at least straightforwardly functional attractions and a vague semblance of passionate production. With Born to Fight, however, they didn’t even bother to drag their asses into a real jungle. Instead, they set up a POW camp in a parking lot, populated it with washed-up actors in haphazardly soiled uniforms and filmed all of the chase scenes in the clearing behind the hotel or in the hotel itself. This aspect shines an even brighter light on the basic principles of all of Mattei’s flicks, i.e. an artless lack of consideration that oscillates on the edge of simple naïveté, boyishly unlimited imagination and pragmatic silliness. The execution of the action sequences and partial peripeteias exhibits an almost negative value in terms of ambition to create the slightest semblance of believability and causality. The most creative feat appears to be the premise itself, in which the filmmakers copied the story of Rambo II, or perhaps Missing in Action, but mixed it with parasitic elements of Crocodile Dundee, whose style was “borrowed” for the protagonist and his bickering with a reporter travelling to Vietnam to rescue her father. When we add to this the once-handsome but now shabby Werner Pochath, who as the bad guy makes an attempt to imitate Klaus Kinski, and a truly iconoclastic variation on the Vietcong’s tunnels, Born to Fight provides another spectacular bit of Mattei’s cornball entertainment. (08.01.2023)