Holy crap, Gabriel is back!

It’s been one week since you looked at me, and also four years since I reviewed Angels Fallen by Ali Zamani. And earlier this year I happened to check out his IMDB profile and learned that not only did he direct an utterly stupid and hilarious movie called C.I.Ape, but that he did indeed create a sequel to Angels Fallen. Angels Fallen: Warriors of Peace released earlier this year and was distributed by Uncork’d Entertainment who also distributed Hunt Club.

Josh Burdett plays Gabriel, and in case you’re confused they didn’t recast Houston Rhines with his adorable blue eyes. This Gabriel isn’t actually the same Gabriel from the first movie, and the film does go the length to explain that they are in fact two different characters. The one thing tying the two Gabriels together is their past of death and misery, in this case new Gabriel is a soldier who saw some bad stuff during the Iraq war. Going by Ali Zamani’s logic, I am completely safe from being hired for a mission by God as I am not named after a Bible character.

Gabriel is tasked with a holy mission by the Jesus himself, and by Jesus I mean Jesus sends a mouthpiece in the form of Cuba Gooding Jr. who plays Balthazar. Gabriel gets his team back together of Trigger (Arifin Putra) and Leah (Korrina Rico) to go to Tibilsi and track down the demons and the spookies. Leah is a Scryer much like Hannah from the first movie, which means that she has an unnecessary bath scene so we can see part of her breasts and she can have her visions.

Michael Teh returns from the original movie as Michael, the evil archangel who wants to make the world a burning hellhole by razing it to the ground, damning all its people, and discontinuing the waffle fries at Chic-fil-a. Michael is building an army of the damned, and he recruits a bunch of z-list bad guys in order to do so. What are his plans with the army of the dead? Something evil no doubt. Lee Kholafai confused the hell out of me at first, because he appears in both films but as completely different characters.

The CG on a lot of the monsters is actually pretty darn good. The pantomime fights are terrible and nobody seems to know what they’re doing with their arms during these battles, but the monsters are pretty good looking. I don’t want to mock the actors but they do look like weenies while fighting the CG enemies. There’s a scene where Gabriel has a sword made of flames and the CG on that looked a lot better than you might expect out of a movie like this.

It’s nice seeing Randy Couture and Denise Richards in the film, Richards herself clearly having a fun time as the weapons expert who gears the team up. The worst thing I can say about this movie other than the monster fight scenes is the pacing. It feels like a lot of the movie got lost on the cutting room floor and cut for time as they skip around a lot without much rhyme or reason. I will also say that the ending kinda blew my mind and left me a little stunned.

I was trying to figure out why Denise Richards looked so pissed off and the IMDB says her car was shot at in a road rage incident on the way to the set, and that puts her performance into more perspective.

I’m not sure Ali Zamani is legally allowed to make his endings this deep. Warriors of Peace is the first film Zamani has directed in three years and I’m willing to bet given he doesn’t have anything in the pipeline on IMDB that it’ll be a while before his next film. I’ll be waiting, Mr. Zamani. Waiting and watching.

But is Warriors of Peace a good movie? Is it worth the price of admission? Well the price of admission was one hour and forty five minutes of my time, being a free Amazon film so…yeah. I may like Ali Zamani’s films more than most people, and this didn’t have nearly the same level of goofy schlock as the first film. It did have full boobage though, but not as big as the first flick.

Rating: B-