It wasn't my intention to watch this movie so soon after The Dogs of War (1980), but the mood struck me to watch another Walken flick, so here I am. I'd never seen McBain (1991), but since I am more or less a Walken completist, I bought the Blu-Ray some time ago and finally got around to watching it.

And I got exactly what I expected:

Rather than a serious study of the life of a mercenary as in The Dogs of War, we get the more typical Hollywood shoot-'em-up with barely a veneer of reality with McBain.

McBain's (Walken) Vietnam War buddy gets killed while fighting a revolution in Colombia, so, at the behest of his dead friend's daughter-- Christina, who is also a revolutionary, played by Maria Conchita Alonso --McBain leaves his steelworker job in the States, gets some of his other Vietnam veteran buddies together, and off to Colombia they go.

On the way down, crammed into their little propeller plane, they are intercepted by Colombian Air Force F-5 jet fighters. However, somehow, they've also got a friend who owns an S.211 jet trainer, who shows up at just the right time, and with his little machinegun-armed low-performance jet shoots down all three of the missile-armed high-performance F-5s. (Trivia: the Fuerza de Aire Colombia never operated F-5s, and the ones we see are apparently from the Philippine Air Force, where much of McBain was filmed and to which the filmmakers credit at the end of the film. You can see where the aircrafts' normal insignia on the tail fin have been painted over. Along the fuselage the insignia of the Colombian Air Force have been applied; probably the only time in the history of cinema where the Colombian Air Force has been depicted. Although Colombia never operated the F-5, it is cool to see these planes in action).

Oh, and when McBain and friends arrive in Colombia, they've somehow also got a connection with a guy who privately owns a C-130 transport and flies them in supplies-- including anti-tank rocket launchers and multiple Stinger missiles.

!!!SPOILERS FOLLOW!!!

Anyway, a resistance movement with hundreds if not thousands of insurgents, who have failed to topple the corrupt Colombian narco-government in decades of fighting, now that they have the help of McBain and four of his buddies, within just a few days march into the presidential palace in Bogota and topple the government, executing the Colombian President in the process (who is played, amusingly, by none other than Victor Argo-- who played opposite Christopher Walken just one year before in another movie, 1990's King of New York).

Oh, and did I mention, that prior to this, McBain's medic buddy performs a field surgery on a wounded little girl? Yeah, she suffers a collapsed lung in an explosion during the insurgency. So, while she is unconscious, in the space of about just two minutes, using only the shaft of a hollowed-out writing pen and a pocketknife, he opens up her torso and "re-inflates" the lung. She then wakes up and smiles happily at her mother. Never mind that she never cries or screams, considering that the whole procedure was performed without anesthesia!

Yep, all in a day's work. So, by the end of the movie, the Colombian government is toppled, the people are happy, and, though this is where the movie ends, we can assume McBain and his crew all return to the United States, facing nary a consequence for the string of laws they've broken both before while preparing for the mission and during the mission itself.

McBain:

It has its moments, but all in all, it is just . . . wow. One doesn't merely have to suspend disbelief, one has to float around to the very edge of the solar system, all the way over to that planet that isn't a planet anymore.;)

4 out of 10.