ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT, OCT. 11, 1990
By Steve Newton
As if 1988’s Alien Nation weren’t enough, here comes another action flick about drug dealers from another world. Lord knows there aren’t enough of them on Earth to go around.
In I Come In Peace, Swedish hunk Dolph Lundgren (Rocky IV’s nasty Russian boxer Drago) plays maverick Houston cop Jack Caine, who gets caught up in a sinister, otherworldly drug scheme. It seems that one seven-foot-tall, white-eyed alien with no sense of humour but firepower to spare has been stealing heroin from Earthbound dealers, injecting it into the bloodstreams of innocent humans, and then—with the help of a wicked hypodermic needle—sucking the drug-induced “endorphins” from the victim’s brain.
Those endorphins are a precious commodity for dealers where this guy comes from, and if he gets back home with his supply intact, it’ll mean a lot more of his kind coming back for seconds.
Which wouldn’t be pretty.
With a bit of a nod to The Terminator, the bad alien is followed by a good one, a cosmic cop, and between the two of them they blow things up real good. Non-actor Lundgren and his by-the-books FBI partner Laurence Smith (Clean and Sober’s Brian Benben) stretch the limits of believability by surviving the ensuing chaos, and yes, the bad alien does, as Lundgren threatens in the film’s trailer, “leave in pieces”.
While an improvement over director Craig R. Baxley’s previous effort, the crummy Action Jackson, I Come In Peace is only an average sci-fi, buddy-cop thriller—a notch or two down from Alien Nation. The killer disc that the baddie uses to great effect actually steals the show, even though it looks a lot more like a plain CD than the dangerous, table saw-like item portrayed in newspaper ads.
An all-too-brief poolhall scene featuring perennial low-life Michael J. Pollard offers some humorous respite from the well-filmed (by Cronenberg cameraman Mark Irwin) but numbing parade of explosions, car chases, and gunfire.