Precious Find

Precious Find

Since his breakthrough performance in Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer has largely wasted away in a decade-long string of forgettable action and science-fiction films that usually made brief and not especially fruitful expeditions to the local multiplexes. Now, however, Hauer's career is in the process of hitting a new low, as he stars in not one but two different low-budget, straight-to-video, post-apocalyptic thrillers. In Precious Find, a pudgy and distracted-looking Hauer sleepwalks through his role as a disgraced banker in the distant future who teams up with a motley group of misfits (including Brion James as a crusty old space miner/garbageman, as well as an underutilized Joan Chen) in an attempt to mine gold on a faraway planet. Thematically and visually, Precious Find resembles a Battlestar Galactica-era television pilot, complete with special effects that look like they were designed using a Commodore 64. And while one of Blade Runner's strong points was its intricate and sophisticated portrayal of the future, Precious Find seems to have stolen its vision of the future from early Duran Duran videos. Omega Doom, on the other hand, seems much more influenced by the early music videos of Robert Palmer, as Hauer plays a poetry-spoutin' android killing-machine-with-a-conscience who crash-lands on a distant planet and must make peace between androids who resemble the women from the "Addicted To Love" video, and androids who resemble extras from a Bush video. In addition to being incompetently written and directed, Omega Doom is also laughably pretentious, as characters make weighty speeches on the nature of mankind when not making silly robot noises or tearing each other's heads off. If nothing else, you have to admire writer/director Albert Pyun's chutzpah in ending his warring-cyborg epic with Hauer's character solemnly reciting a Dylan Thomas poem.

 
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