In some anonymous hotel bar somewhere, a man is trying to convince an attractive blonde to take him back to her hotel room. Well, that’s probably a given in any hotel bar, but this particular young man – played by Byron Mann – has a unique approach, weaving a tale of military-industrial conspiracy and cybernetic enhancement. Is he really a cyborg super-spy who escaped the lab in an awesome sequence of dynamic violence, dispatching a dozen or so faceless guards on his way out?
Well, of course. Characters in these stories, whether cybernetic assassins or T. Rex/raptor hybrids, always breach containment. Besides, it wouldn’t be much of a thriller if his story wasn’t true. As we cut between the exciting scenes Mann’s character describes, and the rather dull and cheap scenes of him relating this backstory in the bar (sample dialogue: “business conference”), we discover many more twists and little wrinkles in the story, giving us sort of a three-way cross between the subterranean paranoia of Ex Machina, the instinctive distrust of government/corporate relations of RoboCop, and the brutally efficient transhumanist violence of Upgrade, a film whose fight choreography was so startlingly, brilliantly original that it hasn’t been copied nearly as much as it ought to be (Malignant is the only other example that comes to mind). There is, of course, also a healthy amount of Terminator present; if you’re doing an action film with robots, it’s impossible to escape the shadow of Terminator so you might as well do what Dark Asset does and embrace it, casting Robert Patrick who memorably played the creepy liquid-metal T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Patrick recently gave a phenomenal turn on Peacemaker as the title character’s white supremacist father. He’s given a lot less to work with here, as a fairly stereotypical evil scientist, but his mere presence provides a sort of charming nostalgia.
Nothing threatens to overshadow Byron Mann as the star of Dark Asset, however. Like Jet Li, he may not be a first-rate actor but he gets by on physical charisma. He’s just watchable, even when delivering lines like “I have two loves: serving my country…and the bottle.” Mann has been around since the early 90s, appearing through the years in such forgotten actioners such as Street Fighter: The Movie, Catwoman and Skyscraper, along with much television work, but time hasn’t dulled his fighting edge. In short, he kicks a lot of ass. ★★★★☆