from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Scoop's comments:

Do or Die is a typical if slightly below average Andy Sidaris "bullets and babes" movie. In other words, it makes essentially no sense at all, and exists solely in order to get former Rabbitladies into hot tubs. Andy made about a half dozen or more of these "bikini chicks in the CIA" movies, but you can't really call it a series of movies in the sense that the James Bond movies are a series. Andy didn't make several sequels to the first one. He just kept remaking the first one over and over with minor modifications.

Tuna likes them far more than I do.

One thing to be said for this one: at least the basic concept is simple and clear. Mr. Miyagi plays some kind of international criminal genius, and he kidnaps two undercover female CIA agents out of a leisure time activity. (A luau, of course. Don't these things always start in Hawaii?) Being a cinematic villain in the true James Bond tradition, Mr Miyagi has no intention of killing them right then and there. Instead, he informs them that their cover is broken, and that he is sending six teams of assassins to kill them. He gives them a brief head start. Unbeknownst to them (I've always wanted to use "unbeknownst" in a sentence), he has planted a secret transmitter in the wrist watch of one of the women.

The chase is on.

The action starts as the women head for the airport. A helicopter follows their vehicle, and a gun battle ensues. The women win this battle because one of them is limping! You see, her cane - which actually appears to be a golf putter - is actually a secret rocket launcher of some kind, which blows up the helicopter. Thank God she had that limp! Since there is no further need for the limp, she immediately discards it and walks normally the rest of the film.

The action moves to Vegas because the action in Andy's movies always moves to Vegas. That's just part of the official formula. Now pay attention, because a quiz is coming up. The girls land in Vegas, grab a land vehicle, and proceed to a model airplane show. It seems that they need a model airplane for something which will not be revealed until the final battle. When the girls arrive at the air show, there are two assassins waiting for them in a trailer. The male assassin wakes up the female assassin and says, "OK, Ava, they're here"

OK, here's the quiz. How could the assassins have been there BEFORE the girls. They are being tracked by the wrist-watch monitor, to be sure, so the assassins know where they are and where they have been. But how can the assassins possibly know where they will be in the future, so that they can go there, rent a trailer, catch some z's, and wait for their arrival? Has the wrist watch been implanted with a psychic device?

That is only the first time this happens. One of the next steps in the journey takes the girls to a catfish restaurant deep in the Louisiana Bayou. They meet their friend, the proprietor, who introduces them to the two new cooks. Well, it seems that the regular cook got sick and these two guys are filling in. They are assassins who try to poison our heroines. Now if you are paying attention you know that this doesn't make any sense. The assassination plan obviously had to be in the works for a day or more. It took these guys some time to take out the regular cook, and then to get hired as replacements. Going back to the point when the assassins would have had to set this all in motion, the assassination "targets" didn't even know that they would be in this restaurant. So if the targets didn't know, how did the assassins know to be there? Again, we are left marveling at the psychic powers of the magical wristwatch.

The funniest thing about this segment was when the restaurant owner introduced the girls to the two new cooks. The two guys came out of the kitchen with a frying pan, and immediately said "we prepared this for you because you are special friends of the owner". Are you paying attention. How could a couple of new cooks have known that these two girls were friends of the owner? They just came out of the kitchen, had never met the girls before, and the owner hadn't said anything about the girls being his friends. Besides that, even if the owner had said, "here are my special CIA friends" at that time, the food was already prepared when the poisoners emerged from the kitchen. They had to have started cooking it when the women were still in their seaplane, many miles distant.

Interestingly, the CIA girls did not find this at all suspicious, thus demonstrating why the CIA was never able to kill Castro.

In the next mini-adventure, the girls team up with some other agents, and the gang splits into two groups. They try to "synchronize watches", but one of the groups doesn't have a watch, so the target girl lends the magical tracking watch to the other group! The group with the magical watch then drives a speedboat about a mile into the swamps when they are attacked by two guys in wet suits, shooting pistols from Jet-Skis. Obviously the bad guys were hiding in that very place, wearing their wet suits, waiting for this opportunity. This was pretty illogical on their part, since the two target girls arrived by seaplane, so there was no reason to expect them to leave by boat, but - by God - their plan worked, so who are we to question it! Well, it would have worked except for the switching of the watches.

Of course, he misses all 19 shots, but that's no problem because the other agents in the boat are deadly marksmen with high powered rifles with scopes, and once they bring out their weapons they eliminate the two Jet-Ski dudes with only two perfect shots. Remember they are in a zig-zagging speedboat, shooting at Jet-Skiers. Now that's marksmanship.

Whether that is possible or not, their skill should make you wonder why they had previously entrusted their lives to the defense of the crazy revolver guy with his 19 wild shots (he did kill a duck, however).

Meanwhile, Ponch from CHIPS, playing an army colonel who has been recruited to help the girls, gets on his CHIPS motorcycle and goes after another of the six teams of assassins. It finally comes down to a gun battle between Ponch and a baddie, and Ponch runs out of bullets, but luckily he has some baseballs in his pocket. So Ponch and the baddie do the old "pop out from behind a tree and fire" routine, except the bad guy has a rifle and Ponch has baseballs. The bad guy thinks this is hilarious and is acting kinda smug, until it turns out that Ponch's third baseball is really a grenade. Apparently a baseball-shaped grenade is now standard military issue.

In the battle against the final team of assassins, the model plane finally works its way back into the plot. Ponch and the two girls load up the model helicopter with rockets and use the little toy to blow up the baddies. We watch this scene from Ponch's P.O.V., and we can see that the bad guys are only about eighty feet away from ol' Poncheroo at the time, but instead of simply shooting them directly from his own position, Ponch attacks them from the side with a toy helicopter. Mind you, the toy doesn't have any kind of sighting device on it, so Ponch may or may not have the rockets aimed right. There would be no way for him to know. The control is just the same kind of controller you would buy at Hobby World. In fact, for all Ponch knows, those rockets might actually be pointing back at himself. But no matter, Ponch and the girls fearlessly launch the rockets, and they hit square on the target.

Then all the agents celebrate and party and let down their guard and start to get drunk and hang out in Dallas restaurants. Never once does one of them say, "wait a minute. We think there were six teams of assassins only because that's what Mr Miyagi told us. What if he lied? What if there are seven teams, or twenty?"

Nah ....

It turns out, of course, that Mr Miyagi was not lying. He is one of those dependable James Bond world-conquest guys who always tells the agents his exact blueprint for global domination. Lying would spoil all the fun of it.

In the end, the agents decide not to kill or arrest Mr Miyagi. Instead they plant their own "bug" and will monitor his movements. This not only leaves him free to hire another thirty teams of assassins, but robs us of the usual catharsis of seeing the bad guy brought to justice, or hearing the inevitable clash of words between the feds and the arrogant criminal mastermind.

If you think the plot is silly, you should hear the dialogue. In fact, it is fair to say that this film has no dialogue. Oh, yeah, they do say some words, but they are all completely unnecessary. The film would play exactly the same if it were a silent movie, except for Mr Miyagi's necessary explanation of the premise at the very beginning. All the dialogue after that merely articulates things we already know, or can see in front of us. For example, after Ponch and some other agent defeat Team 3 of assassins, Ponch says sagely, "well, that's three down", and the other guy replies, with sheer Cartesian brilliance, "that means only three more to go". Similarly, if there is a helicopter, some character will invariably say, "look, a helicopter".

Here's approximately how the running time of the film breaks down:

• Shots of planes taking off, landing, or in flight: 20 minutes.
• Shots of model planes or choppers taking off, landing, or in flight: 10 minutes.
• Shots of other vehicles (cars, helicopters, boats, Jet-Skis) moving in chase scenes: 20 minutes
• Gun battles (includes rifles, rockets, etc): 20 minutes
• Chicks in hot tubs (includes all topless and sex scenes): 20 minutes
• Unnecessary dialogue: 5 minutes
• Humorous dialogue: 1 minute
• Dialogue necessary for plot exposition: 1 minute

Plusses: (see the three pictures immediately below)

• Chicks having sex with Mr Miyagi. (Left) I believe Mr Miyagi prepares his partners by teaching them the "wax on" technique. Of course, when they are interrupted, Mr Miyagi has to replace sex with "wax off".
• Chicks having sex with Ponch. (Center)
• Chicks having sex with other guys.
• Chicks in the movie topless for other reasons.
• Chicks topless and not even in the movie. Julie Strain introduces the film with Andy. (Right)

Minuses:

• The chicks are all basically women of the same body type: anorexic or nearly anorexic with enormous store-bought titties. See Pandora Peaks to the right.
• The nude and sex scenes are often too dark or show fleeting body parts.
• There is no full-frontal nudity, and no sign of a pubic area except for a VERY brief look at Pandora Peaks in darkness, and even then with her body almost completely covered by the guy.

Overall: by the standards of an international espionage thriller, the film is obviously an E by our definition (below). By the standards of "titty film", it is probably a D. I can't really say C-, or "marginally acceptable to genre fans", because if you are a fan of titty movies, you can find other ones that have better acting, younger girls, natural breasts, better lighting, and sexier nudity. In fact, you can find other Andy Sidaris films which deliver the goods better than this one. Even Andy's usual pleasant cinematography is largely missing from this film, although the action sequences aren't bad at all.