Tough and Deadly Reviews

The generic title is perfectly in keeping with all the other faceless aspects of this Brand-X action feature, which seems to have little reason to exist other than to line video-store shelves. An American secret agent code-named Quicksilver (Billy Blanks) is ambushed at an informant's French chateau. Taken back to the US, he manages to crash his kidnappers' car, but the escape attempt leaves him gravely wounded. By chance, cop-turned-bounty-hunter Elmo Freech (Roddy Piper) is sniffing though the hospital emergency ward in case any felons show up, and he more or less adopts the amnesiac commando as a Man Friday around the office and in barroom brawls, where he's pleased to see that "John Portland" (as Quicksilver has been renamed) is a kung-fu fighting machine, helpful in Freech's running grudge against crimelord Vincent Milan (Sal Landi). By an amazing coincidence, Milan is also in league with the baddies who bushwacked Quicksilver in the first place, a rogue cabal of his fellow CIA spooks turned drug-smugglers. Quicksilver and Freech eventually bust up the villains' big payoff, while CIA Director Winston Briggers (James Karen) realizes what's happening and spearheads a helicopter rescue raid. The closest TOUGH AND DEADLY comes to a theme is the faint comparison of outlaw Milan and his openly violent mob with the Ivy-League CIA elite, who cloak their own lethal operations behind euphemisms and disinformation. Otherwise this is workaday B-movie macho mayhem, not exactly elevated by former pro wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (real name: Roderick George Toombs) as an unusually sadistic roughneck who seems to delight in shooting creeps in the kneecaps.(Violence, substance abuse, profanity.)