Daniel Millican's third feature film once again teams him up with martial artist Jeff Speakman (the two worked together previously on The Gunman) and this time throws Lou Diamond Phillips and Yancy Butler into the game. The results? A fairly predictable action movie with more than a few problems that entertains regardless of fair to middling quality in terms of its execution and its pay off.

Phillips plays Eugene 'Vash' Vasher, a former boyfriend to Emily Johanson (Yancy Butler) and all around tough guy/gun for hire. When Johanson's boss finds himself in trouble after an arms deal goes belly up, he has her call in a favor with Vash – it seems that the guys that Johanson's boss screwed over are big time criminals who don't take too kindly to being given the shaft and they want payback. Vash agrees and he brings along his team of mercenaries to help him out should the going start to get too tough for one man to handle.

Unfortunately for Vash and his team, Johanson's boss is just as much of a snake in the grass as the guys who are out to get him. Vash doesn't realize this at first and by the time he clues in to this, it's just a little bit too late. There's no way that he and his team can back out of this job now, whether they want to or not and they find themselves having to risk their lives to save a man that they don't necessarily want to save in the first place.

Striking Range (a film that was to be originally titled Bloodlines) moves along at a good pace. It starts off with a fairly intense scene in which Vash and his crew are already in the thick of some serious action having to shoot their way out if they want to survive. From here, things get a little talky for a bit and then, once again, it's time for some more action. The problem is that the script is fairly empty. Sure, it gives the characters sufficient motivation and it doesn't do a half bad job of building their quirks and characteristics so that you can tell them all apart, but that's about it. There's little development and what there is happens to be fairly superficial. There are plenty of action movies out there that work even though the characters are fairly one dimensional but those movies usually have a stronger script, unfortunately Striking Range does not.

Even if things are a little cliché and a little on the predictable side, the film does manage to entertain. The pacing is quite good in that it moves along at a good clip and the action scenes and shootouts definitely went a long way towards earning this film its R rating. There are a few surprisingly gory scenes in the film and these combat scenes are directed fairly well. The cinematography for the film isn't bad and the filmmaker's effectively build some tension towards the last half of the movie, but when you don't care about the characters all that much it's hard to be as enthusiastic about the finale as you would be otherwise. Also to the film's credit is the cast. Aside from Lou Diamond Phillips, who most of us know from La Bamba or the Young Guns movies, the film gives B-movie martial arts star Jeff Speakman a decent opportunity to strut his stuff. Alongside these two look for Yancy Butler who played the lead in the Witchblade television series and Tom Wright of the first two Barbershop movies. Millican's got a good action movie in him, you can tell from the bits and pieces of this film that do work, but unfortunately Striking Distance isn't different enough or interesting enough to be that movie.