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Brascoe and Cody (Olivier Gruner) are undercover trying to recover military secrets being sold, in trying to halt a suspect, Cody shoots and kills a child. In the ensuing court marshal Brascoe refuses to indict his fellow officer and is offered the chance to resign his commission in the Navy or be dishonourably discharged. His young son is dying of cancer and he is offered a chance to enroll him in an experimental drug program, but only at private cost. He appeals to businessman Baker (Michael Ironside) to help him, but when he declines, Brascoe decides to go in and help himself to the millionaire's money...
Although promoted as an action film and showing occasional signs that it fancies moving in this direction, Extreme Honor comes across more like a daytime movie for a mild elderly audience. Brascoe is kicked out of the Navy for daft reasons (apparently his code of honour means not writing accurate reports about his missions) then we get slowly introduced to his entire cliché heavy family complete with divorced wife, dying son, dying mum and military father who doesn't approve of his son's departure from the navy.
We are given no reason to actually care about any of these characters, nor the "hero", particularly not when he demands a rich businessman gives him money to help pay for his son's treatment and then decides to launch a military style operation to break into his house to get that money, happily killing or at least severely wounding numerous guards along the way, then being completely surprised to find himself facing revenge attacks. There is no worthwhile connection between the Navy and robbery storylines making the entire premise seem rather pointless - pacing is lackluster and after treating us to a most pointless and unbelievable romance, the film drags on to a dull ending with the script never building enough interest in the characters to make for any actual tension.
Much like the script, Simon Rush's direction is pretty unexciting. Fortunately this does mean he doesn't usually try and over-edit or use hand-held camerawork and the film is perfectly watchable. A generic orchestral thriller score provides fitting backing.
A few familiar faces crop up, veteran character actor Michael Ironside and DTV regular Michael Madsen have small parts as the victim and leader of the robbery respectively. Olivier Gruner gets an all too brief appearance as Brascoe's fellow officer. Charles Napier has brief cameo appearance in the court marshal while Sven-Ole Thorsen appears as a body guard. Yet despite all these good actors appearing in the film, the lead is played by the otherwise unknown Dan Andersen who gives a thoroughly unexciting, expressionless performance in the primary role and does nothing to lift the extended dialogue scenes the script forces viewers to endure.
A few unoriginal thriller scenes are loosely tied together with some painfully dull Lifetime Movie drama, boosted by a few enjoyable familiar faces and passable direction but countered by the thoroughly uninteresting lead actor. Absurdly promoted in the UK as a sequel to action packed Interceptor Force aka Last Line of Defence, Extreme Honor has nothing to recommend it and is definitely one to miss.
| Anyone famous in it? | Brief appearances from Olivier Gruner, Michael Madsen and Michael Ironside. |
| Directed by anyone interesting? | Steven Rush - a little known director who also helmed obscure thrillers The Black Rose (2000) and Running from the Shadows (2000) |
| Any gore or violence ? | A little blood but nothing gory. |
| Any sex or nudity? | A very brief topless shot. |
| Who is it for? | A dull attempt at a thriller, not recommendable. |
| Visuals | Original aspect ratio - 1.33:1 fullscreen. Colour Picture quality is fine, good colours and plenty of detail. Shot for video premiere so the academy ratio is correct. |
| Audio | English stereo - audio is excessively loud and there is a lot of hiss and distortion. |
| Subtitles | None |
| Extras | The disc includes:
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| Region | Region 0 (ALL) - PAL |
| Other regions? | Available in the US from Mti Home Video |
| Cuts? | Believed to be fully uncut. Titles and credits are in English. The UK release title is crudely overlaid onto the print. |