Hey, ya wanna go out for a drink after this scene? Say ‘yes’, or I’ll force another retake!
Gods can be such jerks.
It’s a fight between a would-be god and a couple of humans in Lord of Illusions (1995), folks. Substituting blood for a plot clever enough to keep us engaged, and gore for the sense of humor such a ridiculous fight is going to require, this story bumbles along from incident to incident. We’re with private detective D’Amour, sent to Los Angeles from New York to keep tabs on some guy, but when the guy goes to see a fortune teller and leaves as if shot out of a cannon, D’Amour has to investigate. The dying man he discovers in the fortune teller’s den leads him into the tangled web of a ruptured, insane cult, out for revenge for the loss of their leader-god.
Besides the silly, yet not silly enough, violence, the problem is that victory or defeat in each incident appears to be random. No one is particularly clever nor stupid, so it’s difficult to nod and feel a connection, positive or negative, with each crash-bang-thud. How do the good guys defeat the dude who’s a God in the end? It actually beats the shit out of me. Maybe he just tripped and fell down a hole. Or something.
Remember our affection for Dr. Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)? It wasn’t his aura. or his charisma, or his good looks – it was his persistence, his flashes of self-deprecating humor, and his cleverness – even when that cleverness failed – that made us root for him. But the story tellers of Lord of Illusions don’t gift D’Amour with any real feature to admire, and as the only character who we might have sympathized with, it fairly much leaves the audience with a single, dull theme.
Don’t get involved with an insane religious cult, or bad things will happen to you.
And we all knew that already.
If you want to see a young Scott Bakula, this might be worth your time. Otherwise, all I can give it is a bit of a positive on the makeup; between a bad set of characters, some choppy editing (perhaps a result of the random requirements of television), and a complete lack of sense of humor, it’s really a total waste.
