Barb Wire (1996) – Film Review

Director: David Hogan
Cast: Pamela Anderson Lee, Steve Railsback, Temuera Morrison
Certificate: 18

By Roger Crow

There’s a greatness to the badness of Pamela Anderson’s highest profile movie. Shot like a high gloss rock video, and featuring a one-note performance from the Baywatch veteran, it’s set in the mythical Steel City in 2017, which seemed like a lifetime away when I first reviewed the movie in 1996.

Pam is the permanently snarling eponymous bounty hunter who hates being called “babe”. She hates it so much she’ll pretty much kill anyone who does so.

Based on a long forgotten comic book, but actually inspired by Casablanca (yes, really), Barb Wire is one of a batch of flop 1990s sci-fi flicks like Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days that have dated badly in the video graphics department, but the new 4K HD version holds up pretty well.

The movie received six nominations at the 1996 Golden Raspberry awards and Ms Anderson landed a gong as Worst New Star. But you wonder how good she could have been given the lack of a decent screenplay, zero character arc and little levity.

Steve Railsback, no stranger to ultra bad fantasy movies like Lifeforce (1985), is the alpha bad guy, a neo-Nazi officer who offers Barb a deal, while future 24 and Terminator 2 star Xander Berkley delivers clunky lines about Ms Wire’s ‘assets’, just in case the audience hadn’t noticed she buys clothes far too small for her statuesque figure. Look out too for Temuera Morrison before he achieved cult success as Jango Fett in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and Boba Fett in assorted hit-and-miss Star Wars TV shows.

“Unintentionally hilarious”

Director David Hogan, a veteran of Alien 3 and Batman Forever, does his best with a limited budget, but he faced an uphill battle given the calibre of the script. Just a shame everyone took the project so seriously. With some decent gags, and maybe the odd catchy song, this could have been a more enjoyable watch, though the flashback of Barb as a trooper is unintentionally hilarious.

She may be street smart, but when the salad-dodging crime lord Big Fatso sells her out, it comes as a shock to Ms Wire. Or does it? That third out chase/shootout should wake up anyone who nodded off during the tortuous second act, and there are some nice explosions to take your mind off a stunt person with a blonde wig doubling for our heroine on a motorbike.

Inevitably the hero and secondary heroine get their precious contact lenses, enabling them to get on a plane which takes them to freedom. Normally I’d avoid spoilers but in this case it makes no difference.

To paraphrase Casablanca: “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in Barb Wire’s crazy world.”

On reflection, I do wonder if watching a hill of beans would have been preferable to Railsback’s cackling performance at the finale.

And that awful final shot lifted from Casablanca in which Pam references ‘Paris’, like Humphrey Bogart in the original, would have been a nice sign off, if they’d left it at that. But then they go and spoil it with a dreadful addition.

There are assorted bonus features, but probably the best bonus is knowing I’ll never have to sit through this again.