From the moment he gets a visit from his old Major General, Franklin Kirby
(James Olson), trouble comes to his house. People fire at Arnie and miss,
Arnie fires back and scores a direct hit. Throw in car chases and multiple
explosions whenever you like and the adrenaline would be pumping if it had a
soundtrack to match it.
There's also stacks of one-liners, beginning with a man who's entered Arnie's
house and sitting calmly in a chair explaining how his daughter's been
kidnapped and that the only way to get her back is to co-operate. "Right?",
asks the cool customer. "Wrong.", replies Arnie - gun in hand - and
blows the guy's brains out.
Alyssa Milano, yesterday.
The film is presented in the original 1.85:1 widescreen ratio and is anamorphic.
It's a reasonable transfer with no obvious artifacts, but it's far from
outstanding.
The average bitrate is 6.21b/s, often peaking over 7Mb/s.
As for the sound, oh dear. I said it could use a Dolby Digital 5.1 remix, but
even a decent surround soundmix would be nice. What we've been given here is
so quiet I had to turn my Sony STR-DB930 amp up to nearly halfway to get some
enjoyment out of it and even the dialogue is slightly out of sync at times.
The only extra is a 2-minute 4:3 trailer that you'll watch once.
There are 24 chapters to the film which is fine and subtitles in 11 languages:
English for the hard of hearing, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian,
Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish. Menus are static and
silent.
As a standalone DVD, it's not worth the full asking price and deserves more
of a budget pricing.
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
