MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*
I've occasionally appreciated the better formula-flicks from the defunct straight-to-video studio PM Entertainment. However, this brain-dead effort, despite starring what might be PM's most bankable star, proves thoroughly routine.
Don Wilson plays Eric Phillips, a secret service agent assigned to protect government bigwigs, lives in a near-future Earth that looks almost like regular Earth: the presence of cyber-trackers. These emotionless automatons serve roughly the same purpose as the judges in the British JUDGE DREDD comic: once assigned to overtake sentenced criminals, they immediately execute them with arm-guns. The script shows zero interest in how this sociological state of affairs came about, and we never see more than one cyber-tracker at a time. always played by the same hulking actor, Jim Maniaci.
Though Eric's devoted to his job, he's lost a wife who didn't like the danger he lived with, and an obnoxious fellow agent constantly seeks to undercut Eric's authority. (Since the other agent is played by Richard Norton, fans know there will eventually be a match between Norton and Wilson, though the script makes viewers wait until the bitter end for the fight.) However, Eric's biggest problem is that he won't help the governor he's guarding with some illegal project he's got going with Cybercore, the company that makes the trackers. So the villains frame Eric for murder and send a tracker to kill him. Eric is then conveniently enlisted by a rebel group seeking to eliminate Cybercore's influence over the government, and guess what, the head of the rebels is a hot young babe named Connie (Stacie Foster).
Some of the PM releases are good in terms of mounting decent if unremarkable action-scenes, but TRACKER's many scenes of gunfire and car chases are tedious in the extreme, and the one big kung-fu fight at the end is just fair. The Connie character can't fight but she's reasonably cast as a reporter allied to a rebel group in order to seek justice, though the script, having set up a new romance with her for Eric, doesn't develop that subplot. The movie's only original touch is a concluding quote from Ayn Rand.
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