HARD NIGHT FALLING is another routine DIE HARD clone shot on a tiny budget with a tired, seemingly past-it lead actor, this time in the form of Dolph Lundgren. Nobody is making any kind of effort here so it's unsurprising that it's such a bored and drawn-out film. This time around terrorists take over a dinner party but it's more melodrama than tension and the fight scenes, although plentiful, are by rote. Watch out for chief bad guy Hal Yamanouchi, the same guy who turned up in scores of Italian post-apocalypse flicks back in the 1980s...

Michael (Dolph Lundgren) goes up against Goro (Hal Yamanouchi ) who has a party held hostage for $150 million. Michael manages to escape and notify his Interpol group. Cat and mouse at the mansion.

Fairly straight forward and rather boring action film. The faux family drama didn't make it. It was just a bad script.

Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity.

Although it's a paycheck potboiler, director Giorgio Bruno's "Hard Night Falling" manages to entertain with its formulaic action tropes, and for that reason alone, this 85-minute actioneer kept me occupied. The favorite first scene occurs after the plot has unfolded and everybody has been taken hostage by an Asian terrorist in an Italian villa. Dolph's wife ends up trapped with these unfortunates, but he is able to get his daughter out of harm's way. Apparently, Dolph works for Interpol, and he has his own version of an A-Team. Anyway, our hero gets into a face to face fight with one of Goro's minions. Dolph, being the big lug that he is, cannot connect with any of his haymakers, but the smaller, more nimble henchmen kicks him repeatedly, but to little effect. Imagine kicking a statue. Dolph moves with such clumsy dexterity that the scene verges on being hilarious. Eventually, he takes down his adversary, but it is fun watching this shrimp tangle with this giant! The second scene . . . and boy was it a shocker. I wasn't prepared for this turn of events. This came right out of the blue. Meantime, the action scenes are orchestrated with elan. Hal Yamanouchi makes a splendid villain who doesn't have to raise his voice to command attention. Indeed, he almost gets away with everything. Curiously, there are some interesting scene that you wouldn't normally see in a exploitation epic like this that make you think. One of Dolph's snipers takes out Goro's sniper, but the guy recovers despite the severity of his wound to shoot the sniper who shot him earlier. Payback can be a terrible thing. The scene where Dolph's wife treats a gunshot victim with a severed tampon and tells a bystanding villain that a French surgeon used them to stop wounds from bleeding was interesting. Dolph's wife extracts the bullet, but . . . making this a gritty movie. Look out for Ukrainian lovely Natalie Burn, who plays another of Dolph's A-Team. She is a deadly dame indeed with her bullet-proof vest and her acrobatic moves. She carves up several beefy henchmen in a stairway. Some of these unwittingly villains conveniently let her know about their impending presence when their laser sighting mechanism warned her in advance of their progress. "Hard Night Falling" is worth its time.