“I come in peace.”

“And you go in pieces.”

How have I not reviewed this one yet?

Dolph Lundgren is Jack Crain, a Houston cop who teams up with FBI agent Larry Smith (Brian Benben) to investigate who is killing criminals in H-town.  The killer is a drug dealer but not your everyday drug dealer.  He’s an alien named Talec (Matthias Hues) and he’s figured out how to say “I come in peace,” but the rest of the English language is beyond him.  “I come in peace,” turns out to be the scariest phrase you can hear when you’re being pursued by a white-haired, intergalactic mass murderer.  His targets include Jesse Vint and Michael J. Pollard.  This terminator wannabe is after character actors!

On the second-tier action stars of the 90s, Lundgren was the one who could actually act.  Van Damme could actually do all the acrobatic stunts his characters did but he couldn’t show emotion like Lundgren.  Steven Seagal seemed like he could handle himself in a fight but he lacked Lundgren’s self-aware humor.  Lundgren plays Jack as almost being a parody of the type of hard-boiled cop who is always getting yelled at by the commissioner for wasting the city’s money.  Brian Benben is remembered, by some, as the star of HBO’s Dream On, the sitcom that convinced a generation of young men that there’s nothing women love more than obscure pop cultural obsessions.  Benben is actually pretty funny in I Come In Peace.  He’s the everyman who can’t believe he’s having to deal with an intergalactic drug dealer.  Good heroes need a good villain and Matthias Hues is just right as the drug dealing alien who literally doesn’t know what he’s saying.

If you want to see a Terminator rip-off with nonstop action, a memorable villain, frequently (and intentionally) funny dialogue, an Al Leong cameo, and Dolph Lundgren as a hero who pushes people around just because he feels like it, I Come In Peace is the movie for you!