In Dolph Lundgren's Diamond Dogs the B action superstar plays a former American green beret named Xandar Ronson making a living in a a small city in China by competing in illegal underground fights and trying to run a small security business. He gets arrested and is told by the courts that he four weeks to pay off his $20,000.00 in debt and that if he doesn't, he'll go to jail. Enter a strange and effeminate rich guy named Chambers (William Shaver) who hires Ronson to lead his expedition to a remote area of the country to find a rare and extremely valuable Buddhist tapestry called the Tangka. Chambers offers Ronson $100,000.00 to take the job, and he agrees.

What Chambers doesn't know is that a crafty Russian and his devious crew also want the Tangka. They offer to double Ronson's should he opt to work for them but he refuses and the mission continues as planned. As Chambers' crew makes their way through the treacherous territory, people start getting killed one by one. Is it a curse? Is it the evil Russians? Will Ronson live to find out?

Dolph plays a fairly likeable type here. He's got a sense of humor about himself that makes him hard not to like and he seems to be having fun during the first chunk of the film. He also handles himself very well during the opening fight scene where he takes on a huge Mongolian dude (played by a Mongolian wrestling champion named Huriga). Once Chambers comes into the picture, however, things start to get hokey. Really, really hokey. Chambers is an irritating man and while we're not supposed to have any sympathy for this greedy 'money will buy me everything I want' type, it doesn't take long before he starts grating on our nerves. Considering he and Ronson are the only people in the film with any character development, this leaves Dolph to do all the heavy lifting in the acting department and while he's a pretty capable action hero and a better actor than a lot of people give him credit for, you wouldn't know that from this film.

This would be perfectly forgivable if the action scenes delivered but sadly the film disappoints in this department to. The aforementioned opening fight scene is good and there are a couple of quality firefights in the last third of the picture but they're few and fare between. Instead the film tries to work more as an adventure picture, an Indiana Jones type of quest movie, but the plot isn't interesting enough for that to work either.

Dolph is solid in the lead but Diamond Dogs has too many slow spots and too few interesting characters or plot elements to compensate. There are a couple of fun moments in the film that will appease Dolph's fan base but they aren't enough to make this film work as well as it should have. That's a shame as Dolph's last few films were a lot of fun.

Video:

Diamond Dogs looks alright in the anamorphic 1.85.1 widescreen presentation on this DVD despite the irritating presence of constant artificial grain that we can only assume was meant to make the movie look gritty. Color reproduction and skin tones look decent though a couple of scenes have been intentionally flattened a little bit for artistic effect. There aren't any problems with mpeg compression artifacts or edge enhancement though diagonal lines tend to shimmer now and then. Reference quality? Nope. But the movie looks decent.