Punching Day: Dollman (Patreon)

I dare you not to smile when I describe the premise of the movie Dollman to you. The main character is a cop, stop, wait, come back. He's a tiny cop, thirteen inches tall, and his superpower isn't his smallness. This is not an Ant Man scenario. His superpower is that he owns the most powerful gun on earth, so even though he's teeny tiny, he still shoots people with the force of a regular gun. Yes, his superpower is shooting people. Yes, this was made in the early '90s. In Japan, they called him Micro Cop.

The pitch for this movie must have been so fun. It's Muppet Baby Death Wish. It's Dirty Harry meets Honey I Shrunk The Kids. Dollman is played by comedian and actor Tim Thomerson. I love a name that sounds made up on the spot to avoid accountability for starring in a B-list movie about a whimsical lil' supercop.

The movie opens with Dollman foiling a hostage situation on his home planet, where he is just regular old Brick Bardo, a boring regular-size man. We learn that Brick was kicked off the police force for being too much of a violent wildcard who straight-up murders people. We're also introduced to Dollman's special gun, the Kruger Blaster, the most powerful handgun in the universe, which we know because a little boy hostage says, "WOW, that's a Kruger Blaster, the most powerful handgun in the universe!"

Dollman isn't nice to the little boy. He simply replies, "That's right, fat boy," and threatens to shoot the little boy's mother in front of him in order to get to the robber, which was absolutely the right move, according to this film. You see, threatening to shoot the child's mother caused her to have a heart attack, so she and another hostage collapsed on top of the robber and crushed him. That's our save the cat moment for Dollman. Don't worry; things are about to get radical real quick. The villain, Sprug, is a decapitated head on a Roomba; it rules.

Brick returns from his victorious encounter at the laundromat to a sad, empty house. We're all supposed to be confused about why this radical murderer lives alone, but it's quickly revealed that Brick's family was murdered. Brick reduced Sprug to a single appendage across multiple encounters, not one single accident. Sprug did a crime, and Brick blew his arm off, then he did another crime, and Brick took his legs, yet still Sprug continued to do crimes. The man had discovered his passion, and he was not going to give up on his crime dreams.

Sprug is still trying to live his dreams, and Brick still isn't having it. When Sprug kidnaps Brick, they end up in an ill-fated space chase that sends them through a "space band," which causes them to shrink and crash land on Earth. We know this because as Brick regains consciousness after the crash, his computer says: "Warning, you have landed on an alien planet. Air pressure and atmosphere are compatible to human life. Warning: Based on sensor calculation of planet structures, your size relationships are altered. This planet's life forms are a ratio of 6:1 larger."

The first thirty minutes of this movie cruise by at a breakneck speed I have to respect. It's too busy being radical to worry about good writing. Do you see his tiny spaceship? He's a tiny cop now! How did they not make sixteen sequels to this?

Our protagonist crash-landed in the South Bronx, where a young hot mother named Debi is trying to keep her neighborhood free of gang activity. The gang is run by Jackie Earl Haley, giving his best hot rodent boyfriend in the role of Braxton, the gang leader. Braxton is an extremely country club name for a gang leader. Usually, the worst thing a Braxton does is get trashed and wreck his dad's BMW, but Jackie Earl Haley manages to make Braxton the murderer kind of spooky.

Dollman rescues Debi from some gang members who are tired of her interfering in their gang activities, and Braxton ends up finding Sprug's ship, which is equipped with a powerful bomb he promises to let Braxton use in exchange for his help. Braxton says, "We could blow up the entire east side. It could all be mine." Which is a bad plan, and even Sprug knows it. You can't both blow up and own the entire east side, Braxton. If you blow it up, there is nothing to own. Private school educations really aren't what they used to be.

Sprug replies, "... what's left?" Because he really needs these idiot criminals. The man is addicted to failing at crimes. He's been reduced to the size of a thumbnail, and he's still trying to fight Dollman.

Meanwhile, Debi picked up Dollman and his toy-sized spaceship and brought him to her house against his wishes. Her son asks her if he's an alien, and she says, "He's not an alien. He's a small man that got lost." Yes, much more plausible. Some men are just 13 inches tall sometimes.

So, now you've got this great setup where two alien enemies have been brought into a human dispute. Sprug sends Braxton after Dollman, who, unfortunately, is very easy to find because the gang saw him shoot someone with his tiny gun that does normal-size damage. Yet, like Sprug, they are not at all concerned enough about fighting an extremely difficult-to-see man with a super gun. There are very few superheroes, very few anythings, who are as clearly dangerous as Dollman. Again, his power is just a gun. We know what gun does, and yet everyone thinks it will be fine.

Dollman absolutely annihilated Braxton's gang and shot up Debi's whole apartment in the process. Braxton manages to escape, but he's wounded. Sprug agrees to heal him if Braxton works for him. After Sprug heals his wounds, Braxton inexplicably squishes him in a way that makes me feel like someone's mom needed their Roomba back, and the human head attached had to go.

You might think with Sprug dead, Braxton would never need to deal with Dollman again, but no. Braxton confidently tells the remaining members of his gang that they are going to war, "with the fuckin' Dollman, who else?" This movie is so quotable.

Even though Sprug is now out of the game, Braxton still has access to his bomb, which you would think would be the focus of the third act, but you would be wrong. Braxton rounds up even more disposable gang members and goes after Debi in an attempt to lure out the fuckin' Dollman, who else? On his way to kidnap Debi, he discovers his wound that Sprug patched up is bleeding once again. Turns out squishing his alien ally was a bad idea. The moral of this movie is that everything Sprug touches fails, including Jackie Earl Haley. I feel like someone in this movie had a stepfather named Sprug, and this is revenge.

Debi decides to go to work even though a gang is trying to murder her, and her house is covered in blood, bullets, and bodies. I'm not sure what happened to all the bodies, but Debi is way more concerned about keeping her job at the toxic waste factory. Dollman sees Braxton abduct Debi, jumps out of a window, and attaches himself to Braxton's car. It's an amazing practical effect they achieved by hucking a Ken doll out of a window.

Braxton drags Debi into the same rubble pile where Dollman and Sprug originally landed. This would create a great symmetry to the beginning of the movie if Sprug were alive and not anticlimactically smushed in Act Two. After three hours of waiting for Dollman to appear, all of Braxton's henchmen get bored and decide to go home, and since Braxton is slowly dying of his previous injuries, he just sort of lets them. As the henchmen cluster together to pile into the vans, picking them up like kids at gang camp, Dollman appears and quickly blows them all to pieces. If he waited five minutes, Dollman could have saved a lot of bullets, but that's not his style!

With the henchmen all dead, it's time for a showdown between Dollman and Braxton…who is already dying. Debi manages to escape from Braxton, again because he's mostly liquid remains, and there's a chase through an abandoned building. At one point, Dollman uses a mirror to appear taller and says, "Why don't you pick on someone your own size, you fuckin puke." Of course, in the end, he corners Braxton and declares he has won the battle, but Braxton still has the bomb! The movie remembered the bomb! As he dies, Braxton detonates the bomb that was supposed to take out the entire east side. Oh no! What will our heroes, it's fine the bomb doesn't work.

It was Sprug's bomb, remember? Sprug sucks, he was the worst criminal in the universe, and everything he did ended in failure and several more pounds of flesh exploded off him. Fuck my stepdad Sprug. Dollman tells Debi to run, and they both survive the bomb by ducking and wincing a little. Sprug, Braxton, and the rest of the gang are all dead, and now all that's left to resolve is the romance between Debi and Dollman.

Except, of course, there was no romance between Debi and Dollman. The final beat of the movie should be Dollman returning to normal size but then there wouldn't be sequel potential (Dollman Vs. Demonic Toys). Instead, the movie ends with Dollman asking Debi to tell him size doesn't count. Apparently, there's a post-credit sequence that didn't make it into the Amazon cut of the movie where Dollman meets a tiny woman because he HAS to fuck! He has to! He solved gang violence with only the power of mass murder. He should get to fuck. The end.

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