Don’t Forget, We’re the Good Guys: I Come In Peace

Synopsis: Detective Jack Caine (Dolph Lundgren) is a Houston cop who prefers to operate outside those pesky, constraining rules. When he’s on a stakeout, he breaks off to stop a deadly liquor store hold up and manages to take out two armed and dangerous perps, but leaves his partner Detective Ray Turner (Alex Morris) out on a limb. Well, that goes about as well as you might imagine. Victor Manning (Sherman Howard) is a University educated businessman who finds himself in a career of crime, moving lots of dope in the city. His latest batch is actually purloined from a police evidence room. If this were a movie content to be an action adventure piece from the 80s, we would already know the story. However, this Christmas season, Houston has a new player in town, and he is from way, way out there. An intergalactic alien (Matthias Hues) is trashing the place, killing, stealing drugs, using them on his human victims before he sucks them dry. He is not alone. A “good” alien (Jay Bilas) is also on earth, trashing the place in an effort to blow the bad guy away; however, he lacks the necessary luck to handle this situation. Now, a hard hitting/kicking/shooting cop is up against mad mob killers and an intergalactic drug dealer in one of the weirdest Christmas shoot ’em ups ever to be committed to celluloid. Director Craig R. Baxley does a bang up job of upping the ante on the action hijinks of Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1987) with his sci-fi action extravaganza, I Come In Peace (1990).

DANIEL’S TAKE

I have to admit, I love movies shot in locations I have lived in. When I was growing up in the Metro Detroit area, I was a huge fan of Beverly Hills Cop (1984), which opened in my city before relocating to sunny California. Later, after we got married and relocated to Massachusetts, Trista and I got to see a slew of flicks set in our state: Scorsese’s The Departed (2006), Ben Affleck’s The Town (2010) and Gone Baby Gone (2007), Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (2003) to name a few. We have since come to Texas in time for the Hap and Leonard series (shot in New York, but it certainly looks like east Texas) and I have since developed a growing appreciation for I Come In Peace. Needless to say, I have lived quite a few dissimilar places, but they are certainly photogenic.

The flick appeared as the second, main attraction in a double bill here in Houston at the tail end of December as a sort of action-horror-Christmas entry in the Graveyard Shift film series. Folks who are weary of me extolling the virtues of Graveyard shift can the next paragraph.

If you are scratching your head asking if I’m referring to the Stephen King adaptation notable only for Brad Dourif’s electrifying cameo and the antagonist’s OUTRAGEOUS Maine accent, then read on: In a nutshell, the programming director for our Houston area Alamo Drafthouse (a great guy by the name of Saucedo, Robert Saucedo) has been showing a horror flicks each Friday night rain or shine. Sometimes it’s a single movie, often a double feature, rarely a triple feature. Last year, the series spilled into a complete weekend’s worth of flicks, a horror film festival called Graveyard Fest. The entries range from splattery gross outs to chilling cerebreal pieces to the occasional foreign horror entry to action packed extravaganzas and everything in between. Fun time and one of the best things happening in town for horror fans.

I had seen I Come In Peace once when I was back in high school or college when it was on cable TV. A fun little flick that I hardly remembered, but for its iconic last exchange between bad alien and bad ass cop. However, I had not seen the flick all the way through since that time. Let me say, the movie cruises along.

Dolph Lundgren is in the early phases of his popularity here, sporting the same hairstyle he wore for his often overlooked tour-de-something as The Punisher (1989). The color seems to change from his first appearance on stakeout to later scenes. “Wasn’t it black when he was in the car?” I wondered after it turned a warmer brown later on. Was this some sort of a lighting mishap? Ah well. Anyway: the action star is still learning how to act, but he spin kicks, jumps, fires a gun, and drops one liners with aplomb, keeping the adrenaline up. This would be fine if he weren’t given plenty of opportunities to exchange dialogue with comedian Brian Benben, who plays a straight-laced FBI man Arwood “Larry” Smith, or Betsy Brantley, who plays the cocky coroner Diane Pallone and Caine’s love interest. He does the best he can, bless his heart, but you can tell he is still in the early stages of Acting.

The supporting cast do a great job of . . . well, supporting. Bad guy alien Hues chews the scenery endlessly delivering one line (the title of the American release for this picture) until a second line shows up in the final act. He gives the irony plenty of growl and he has a fairly good physicality. Most often this shows up with him towering, running, slamming people onto their backs and looking menacing while a tube-thing snakes out of his sleeve to deliver an OD level of heroin before he jams a spike through the forehead to extract endorphins from the supercharged pineal gland. Every now and then he smiles, and there is a wistful, childlike quality to that smile which is unsettling. Also, the poor dude has to run around with milk white contact lenses, making him look blind while he does all this. For all I know, he is blind with those things in. The good guy alien Bilas also has to run and jump and shoot and snarl while wearing the same contact lenses. He has a scar on his face to tell you he’s suffered for his career in intergalactic shoot ’em up law enforcement, but he at least gets to deliver more lines of dialogue than his villainous flipside.

Movies like I Come In Peace are intended to get the adrenaline up. The genre might be spare on a deep plot or in depth study of its characters psychologies or even uniform applications of rigorous logic in favor of some wild set pieces; however, the script from Johnathan Tydor and Leonard Maas, Jr (actually David Koepp!) have a few fun twisty plot moments throughout. The gangster storyline is a ruse, starting out like a major thread, and it shortly disappears. The mob is a source for the heroin the aliens need and are therefore relegated to a subplot or that dreaded incarnation of men with guns showing up when things get boring. There is fun dialogue that employs irony beneath things like the titular “I come in peace!” or the FBI guy saying, “Don’t forget. We’re the good guys!” when he’s going to meet a fellow fed who is anything but good . . .

On the plotting: The film is a deft little vehicle for constantly switching up threats. At first, it’s the crooks. Then, the aliens. Then a few of the law enforcement guys show their true colors, turning into adversaries. The world in this picture is one fraught with double-dealings and double crosses. Lundgren’s character hinges on keeping promises—this it made a central point in an early scene which is then carried throughout the picture. He seems to be the only guy in the world to do so. That tells you something doesn’t it? The mean streets have only gotten meaner since Raymond Chandler’s day.

The film might have some things to say about morality, but it couches these with explosions coming out the whazoo. The gray spaces this picture shines a light on is never as clear as when you stop to think about how many of those explosions have zero repercussions. A federal building explodes near the beginning, calling in the FBI, but nothing more is made of it. Alien guns fire explosive rounds at high rates of speed, nuking cars and derelict squats and various buildings and wildly missing one another, but we don’t get a sense of a city in lockdown. It lends one a wistful nostalgia to the wild days long before 9/11 raised awareness in the public that explosions are really something to be reported, researched and resolved . . .

If it sounds like I might be slagging I Come In Peace, in fact I am not. This movie might not be as classy a holiday set actioner as Die Hard (1988) or Lethal Weapon (1987), but it is nevertheless a fun little slice of cosmic action-horror. I’d pair it with the Rutger Hauer vehicle Split Second (1992) as a double feature any day of the week. The two movies are about badass leading dudes, smaller secondary partners who make it past the halfway point, big guns and monsters with a plan.

I Come In Peace is my current preference if only because it takes place right here in Houston, though it’s the far uglier, dirtier Houston of 1990 than the slicker, cosmopolitan town of today. Dolph Lundgren does not get enough love from the action community. Dude is an intelligent, physical actor who has appeared in some odd flicks as well as some that I have a great affection for. I Come In Peace is a weird and wild ride, which is well worth catching when you’ve had a rotten day and want to watch things blow up good or see a grown action hero gape at the injustices of the world.

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I Come In Peace (sometimes known by its European release name Dark Angel) is available in DVD, Blu-ray and streaming editions.

Next up, we will check in with Trancers, a low budget, noir-inflected, time-traveling-cop-tracks-down-hidden-menaces-in-the-modern-day scifi-horror flick from the 1980s. It’s got Tim Thomerson and Helen Hunt (yes, that Helen Hunt). It’s directed by Charles Band. It’s a treat when it isn’t a slog. How does that work? Find out next week! Until then, grab a copy and give it a look; Trancers is available in DVD, Blu-ray or streaming editions.

“Don’t Forget, We’re the Good Guys: I Come In Peace” is copyright © 2020 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Poster and still image taken from IMDB.

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