★☆☆☆☆

Connor’s War should not have sucked. It had government conspiracy, CIA dirty deeds, a freelance wet work company, and a really hot woman sporting some impressive cleavage in a not-Vegas-showgirl kind of way. On the surface it ticked every “dude film” box. Sadly, it did suck. Even sadder still, I own a copy of this. It was a bad day for my discount bin fishing.

Given a chance, Nia Peeples can actually act. She’s not just a hot looking woman. Besides, any woman who has appeared in both T. J. Hooker and Matlock deserves a place in the heart of any Midwesterner. I don’t watch the show, but apparently she is currently in Pretty Little Liars.

Connor’s War – What Went Wrong

This movie went wrong early on. Someone who is supposed to be the head of or at least an upper mucky muck of the Secret Service comes into a hotel where the First Lady is being held hostage and knows exactly who the wet works contractor is sitting in the chair.

Seriously? Secret Service and wet work contractors travel in different universes. CIA, NSA, and sometimes FBI, would all have such information, Secret Service? And to know on sight?

It gets weirder. Later we find out the Secret Service mucky muck used to be a CIA field op in an active theater arranging for secret test deployments of chemical/biological weapons.

Right here is where the last wheel came off the cart. If you want to make up some wonder drug which can temporarily cure blindness, fine, I’m a science fiction fan. If we keep throwing huge piles of money into medical research we will one day be able to cure blindness, paralysis, and many other now permanent conditions. Oddly enough it now looks like we will just grow new organs rather than use a drug, but that is beside the point.

There is, however, established lore with respect to the CIA in movies. This organization is much like the mafia. Once you’ve been a field op, the only ways to leave is prison or feet first. For the grunts in the trenches there is no moving to a new agency. If they get promoted into management, then and only then can they seek to “leave the family.”

Fiction and spy stories in general are allowed to step outside the rules of reality, but they are required to provide an avenue to believability. They are required to provide some kind of premise which explains the breach of reality. This movie failed to do that.

Needed a Translator Character

Another thing which turned me off was the ghetto slang/talk. Maybe that was the target market, but to reach a broader audience you need to have bungling translator type character for the rest of the world. I’ve seen a great many spy movies and some set in ghettos which all did an excellent job of that. Quite honestly, those scenes, even when I could play them again via the DVD, left me lost.

In short, I couldn’t buy into this movie so for me it didn’t work.

For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.