Day of the Warrior from 1996 starts on the wrong foot, as it opens in a strip club with the opening credits interspersed between shots of a stripper in a ski mask, so that’s a rather specific fetish. Those credits, if you know the names, and if you don’t the trailer let us know explicitly, that we’ll be treated to the acting skills of two penthouse pets, one Playboy centerfold, an American gladiator, and “WCW wrestler Marcus “Buff” Bagwell. This is not the selling point they think it is. 

So in the Day of the Warrior, There’s a spy agency called LETHAL which sounds badass, LETHAL is an acronym for Legion to Ensure Total Harmony and Law, which doesn’t sound badass.  One agent receives a red alert and goes into the boss's office to pass it on to the director. The director, Willow, is in the middle of a meeting with a random suit. Also, the director is multitasking by working out on her Stairmaster in a leopard print thong, a perfectly normal thing to do in an office building when you’re the director of a government spy agency. The red alert has nothing to do with Romulans in the neutral zone, but the fact that the Warrior is onto their spy operations in his strip clubs and porn industry. 

Let’s take a minute to talk about this movie’s star, Buff Bagwell. At the time this movie was shot, he was in a Tag Team called the American Males, which, although they wouldn’t say so directly, was supposed to be a tag team made up of Chippendale-like strippers, and boy it shows in this movie because, in every damn scene, he looks every bit the oiled up stripper. Now this movie could have been helped out by the fact Buff was about to become “the stuff” and join a new faction called the nWo. It could have helped the movie, but it didn’t. Buff would go on to have the worst gimmick match of all time, a take on the pole match, but involving his mother, the “Judy Bagwell on a Forklift” match. After the downfall of WCW, he would also have what many wrestling journalists would call the worst match ever upon his WWE debut. Post-wrestling career he would appear on an episode of the reality series “Giggalos” and that would become more than a one-off appearance, but he actually had an entire a second career as a gigolo for him.  What does any of this have to do with the movie? Nothing. But it does have a more interesting plotline. 

Bagwell plays the Warrior, not to be confused with the Ultimate Warrior who was unhappy with his name being used. the character's backstory is the warrior Olympic gold medalist, and a former CIA operative who, after the fall of the Soviet Union found himself unneeded, so he becomes a pro-wrestler with a Native American theme to honor his mother being 1/64 native american. When he retired from wrestling he used all his spy contacts to develop his criminal empire The character of the Warrior is costumed …. Well … as one would expect a pro-wrestler to costume themselves in 1996 trying to pretend to be a stereo type native american. So a Native American Spy Stripper wrestler. Porn movie pirater, strip club owner. So that’s …. Awesome. Is there anything this man can’t do? Oh yeah, act. Unless he’s fighting someone, which only happens in his role as head of his gang, and only happens in the wrestling ring,  Outside of the wrestling ring, he seems to have the emotional range of a dill pickle. He glistens ever so slightly in the light, but not much more than that. 

So half of the good guys are trying to warn the other half of the good guys that their cover may have been blown. Suddenly we have four simultaneous plots going on, Tiger and Tyler Ward are to warn Doc Austin who is imbedded art smuggling in the woods. Shark and Scorpion who are undercover pornstars, Willow the agency boss, and Fu, the offensive Asian stereotype and Vegas Elvis impersonator spy, will be rescuing. There’s Cobra the Stripper/Spy who deals with diamond smuggling, but she’s on her save herself except for her pager. Each has at least two named baddies to deal with, and it’s hard to keep them all straight. 

There’s a great deal of this movie is spent moving from place to place. Whether it be by car, boat, plane, rollerblading, or even by foot no distance is too far to travel to exchange two lines of dialogue and then move on to the next location. At one point someone drives a jeep in a circle just to deliver a single line. It’s like they wanted to show off all the cool high-end luxury vehicles they could, and then realized they could only afford mid-range sedans, but went ahead with it anyway.

The warrior just sits around in his wrestling gear, and face paint, covered in baby oil, inside a wrestling ring, and runs his criminal empire, and then when he ever so briefly sits down at the computer, loses all personality. He attempts to remove some of his face paint, and on the right side of his face it’s already gone, but that does not stop him from trying to remove it anyway. No.  three times, no. He then attempts to remove face paint from the left side and misses completely. He then tries to remove the non-existent face paint from his right side again. He then tries a fifth time to remove the makeup from his right side, then misses on the left again, before a sixth attempt to remove nonexistent face paint on the right side.  Did he get baby oil in his eyes? What’s happening here? What are you doing? 

One set of baddies are a bunch of Harvard Business grads, who in addition to playing the stock market also are hitmen who disguise themselves as surfer dudes. Because no one can have just two jobs in this movie. 

Fu tells Willow they can find Shark and Scorpion by finding a White Audi station wagon with Louisiana plates parked in an industrial complex. Which is somehow oddly specific and completely unhelpful. The entire movie reads like a soft-core movie with all but one minute of two sex scenes edited out, and oddly the sex scenes aren’t the scene where they’re supposed to shoot a porn starring Shark and Scoprion. This is likely for the best as the bad guys/boom mic operator and cameraman/surfer dudes, Harvard business school grads think that they’re supposed to be the ones making the moaning and other sex noises while filming. Also no one in this movie knows the difference between pirating a porn movie and making a porn movie. 

That’s not to say there isn’t any nudity in this film, because there’s plenty, just most of it is women putting on clothes, which is a rather specific fetish. Shark and Scorpion get shot by the baddies as they tried to steal the porn tape they shot, but luckily Fu and Willow show up to make the save.  I’m confused why their secret mission was to retrieve a movie that they had no yet shot. But whatever dude.  Then they all head to Dallas. So does the boss of our hapless heroes, flying in from Washington DC. 

Doc is saved and he heads to Dallas with Tiger and Tyler. Cobra responds to her recall page and heads there as well.  At HQ Doc accidentally walks in on Cobra, who is showering in a bikini and with her gun, She pulls him in fully clothed and they start to get it on as his clothes magically disappear, and hers don’t. 

The bad guys are also converging on Dallas and it’s revealed that low-level baddies girlfriend, played by American Gladiator Zap, is secretly playing with Buff’s stuff.  Giggity

Good guys shoot at bad guys, bad guys shoot at good guys,  There’s a bulldozer involved for some reason. 

After capturing Willow and Fu, At an hour and 15 minutes, Buff Daddy finally gets around to working on the title of the movie into his dialogue. “This is it Ron, the day of the warrior”

Good guys shoot at bad guys again,  bad guys shoot at good guys again, repeat until Zap decides to shoot her boyfriend, to reveal her double cross and that she’s secretly working for the mole, who is Washington DC’s boss’s assistant, who I had missed was even a separate and distinct character. He was in one, maybe two scenes before this, and spoke maybe 2 lines. Not a very shocking reveal. I was more shocked that I remembered this guy was in the movie than that he was the bad guy, 

Good guys shoot at bad guys again, bad guys shoot at good guys again. There’s a weird moment where Mr Tyler and Mr Doc are both holding the same handgun, one hand sensually atop the other. 

 But the thrilling climax to the movie takes place inside the wrestling ring, where The Warrior Buff Bagwell wrestles Willow and Fu. He’s been in his faux native american wrestling gear and oiled up nearly the whole movie, so it’s about time engaged in some of that sports entertainment. Willow has seen professional wrestling before and wins when she goes all Nancy Karrigan and hits him in the knee with a foreign object. 

And with that, the sun sets on the Day of the Warrior, opening the door for the Night of the Giggalo, and the Dawn of the Dill Pickle.