While Jalal Merhi would not officially put his career in action movies on hiatus 'til later that decade, 2001's GUARANTEED ON DELIVERY marks the last action vehicle he'd star in for about 15 years. It's understandable: Merhi was never one of my favorite karate guys, but he had done way better than this in his prime and seems to be running on fumes, here. Despite its cool cast and provocative title, this is a pretty boring action flick that, at best, is a poor version of THE TRANSPORTER.
The story: When a security guard-turned-courier (Merhi) realizes that his cargo is actually a victim of human trafficking (Justine Priestly), both of them are hunted by the minions of the perpetrator (Olivier Gruner).
There's few things that the film outright does wrong, but nothing it does otherwise ever really clicks. The story is almost completely devoid of surprises. The characters move the plot from point to point, but none of them really catch your attention – even Daddy David Carradine, in his role as Merhi's ex-employer, is forgotten as soon as he's off-screen. The look of the film is flat and the acting's exactly what you'd expect from a Merhi movies.
The action's surprisingly minimal, coming from the guy whose movies used to be stuffed with adrenaline scenes. There's some shooting and some punching, but only about three scenes of gunfighting and fisticuffs, each. Carradine doesn't fight at all and neither does Olivier Gruner, leaving the brunt of the action scenes to be carried by Jalal. Though his on screen opponents include kickboxing star Luraina Undershute and the much-missed Darren Shahlavi, none of the fights are particularly good and they uniformly suffer from lax editing.
Stay away from this one. Us action fans can do a lot better.
