When I was in high school, we watched Casablanca on one of those old classroom TV carts. Afterwards, the teacher had us submit sequel ideas for a grade. Thanks to my ADD, my mind blacked out the whole movie; I did not know a single detail about the plot, except there was a plane at the end. With my back to the wall, I wrote down, “The plane crashes on an island full of dinosaurs. The first movie is just the introduction to this one.” I turned it in.
I am not making that up. Years later, I stick by my idea. It would be amazing to see Casablanca presented as an elaborate first act—cinematography, dialogue, and character development untouched—all to set up a T-rex chasing Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid.
I went back and watched Casablanca to prepare for a first-ever Barb Wire viewing, knowing beforehand that this 1996 movie rips off Casablanca's plot. Henceforth, let it be known I do not half-ass it on this site. Oh, and guess what? Casablanca isn't a bad movie. I won't make a habit of viewing it every year, but I get it. I understand what makes it work.
Now I find myself teetering close to the armchair reviewer's pratfall: the comparison/contrast essay. One should judge a movie on its own merits, not put it alongside whatever material it's adapting. Anything else is irrelevant information.
But dammit, comparing and contrasting is so hard to avoid in this case! Now, I will admit I was naïve in my approach to Barb Wire. I expected it to copy Casablanca not just story beat by story beat, but shot for shot as well, with two plastic torpedoes slapped onto a Humphrey Bogart stand-in.
There are places where it…sort of does that. For instance, there's a bit that's supposed to be Casablanca's apartment affair scene, where a few shots suggest the writers were film buffs.
However, Barb Wire deviates from its obvious inspiration in terms of attitude. The film couldn't make that any clearer than in the first sequence. Instead of city streets flooded with desperate refugees, the opening depicts Barb Wire (Pamela Anderson) pole dancing topless to a Gun track while stagehands spray her with water hoses. Within moments, she drives a stiletto heel through a drunk patron's face. We see some guy whose appearance and accent suggests he's supposed to be Peter Lorre; Barb shoots him in the head with a gun disguised as a cigarette. He and Lorre are similar, then, in their limited screen time.
Cold neutrality defined Rick Blane, who valued his bar enough to watch Nazis drag a man away. Barb's character quirk is she turns into a murderous psychopath whenever someone calls her “babe.” I predicted this would happen at least once every act, and I was not disappointed.
It's 2017, the height of the Second American Civil War. The U.S. government has devolved into a fascist regime called “The Congressionals.” I don't mean they casually flirt with fascism, either. If their preference for electroshock torture weren't proof enough, they wear Nazi S.S. regalia lifted from Hitler's walk-in closet.
Barb runs a nightclub called The Hammerhead in Steel Harbor, the last free city in America. Heartbreak and war have hardened her into a bitter cynic, a trait Pam Anderson expresses by speaking through gritted teeth. And yeah, she's not lacking in assets, nor is she ever ashamed of showing them off. If she isn't topless, every frame has her posing like it's a Playboy pictorial.
Though Steel Harbor is a neutral zone the Nazis can't interfere in without probable cause, Barb is hounded by two Aryan-American supermen. The first is Chief Willis (Xander Berkely) this movie's version of Captain Renault/Claude Rains. The other is Colonel Pryzer (Steve Railsback), Barb Wire's Major Strasser/Conrad Veidt. While Willis is laid back and cool, Pryzer is a cartoonish sadist, who loves slapping on gloves before his homicidal interrogations.
Both take an interest in Barb after someone kills two couriers carrying letters of passage. Oh, my bad. I meant contact lenses. In 2017, social media sites retinal
scanners reveal travelers' personal details at checkpoints, making it impossible to evade the authorities.
Then Barb faces the worst possible dilemma, in the form of Axel Hood (Temuera Morrison), her former lover, and his wife, Cora D (Victoria Rowell.) They are trying to get to Canada so they can spread the word the AmeriNazis plan to unleash an airborne HIV superweapon on the resistance front, and Cora D needs the contact lenses to cross the border. Now Barb must choose between her newfound independence or 'the right thing.'
One positive thing I can say about this movie is that it didn't go cheap on a budget. The sleazy bar is always flooded with extras, bright lights, and loud licensed music. The explosions and gunshots must've cost the producers a small country's bank account.
As mentioned before, Barb Wire is Casablanca without any of the subtlety of Casablanca. It's a dark, loud and violent comic book movie, like Darkman with tits. In fact, there were so many Darkman vibes, I double-checked the credits for Sam Raimi's name.
Unlike Darkman, however, Barb Wire was based on an actual Dark Horse comic instead of grown from scratch. I never knew about the comic, and I did not read any of it prior to this review. Based on a quick Wikipedia scanning, several elements, such as Barb's blind brother Charlie (Jack Noseworthy) were lifted from the comic. The screenwriters mixed those with the Casablanca parts to create something that was almost, but not quite, unique.
The last act is where the silliness goes to eleven with nonstop car chases, explosions, and shootouts. In a way, this was my dinosaur sequel plot idea come to life—minus Bogart and Claude Rains trying to stop Germans from harvesting Allosaurus DNA to throw behind the Blitzkrieg.
Assigning a Final Grade to Barb Wire was tough. It didn't make me angry like Jay and Silent Bob Rebootdid, and it didn't leave me feeling gross inside like Knock Knock. I tend to grade lower based on what a bad movie put me through, and higher based on how entertained I was.
Barb Wire is still a bad movie, though. It's a parade of excess that could have only arisen from the envelope-pushing '90s. Granted, some of it is bad on purpose, like they knew what kind of movie they were making and rolled with it. Then there's the constant cornball delivery mixed with the audacity of the concept itself. Casablanca with giant fake breasts is an idea not even I, at my horniest and laziest, could have imagined.
Oh, and can Pamela Anderson act? I don't know. I wasn't paying attention to that.
Final Grade: C-