Dolph Lundgren may be a favorite here at Shitty Movie Sundays, but it is not uncommon to watch one of his films and come away feeling like everyone, from the producers all the way down to the caterers, were mailing it in. Such is the case with 2007’s Diamond Dogs, which Lundgren co-directed with Shimon Dotan.
A treasure hunting movie, Diamond Dogs follows Lundgren as Xander Ronson, a former American special forces soldier who had his entire platoon wiped out in some war somewhere, and who is now an underground bare knuckle fighter in Inner Mongolia. It’s a typical down and out backstory for a Lundgren character, as is the debt he owes to shady characters all over town. Salvation seems to come in the form of Chambers (William Shriver), who has come to Inner Mongolia with his stepdaughter, Anika (Yu Nan), in search of a jewel-encrusted Buddhist tapestry estimated to be worth some twenty million bucks. Chambers hires Ronson as guide and security, and the small group, with a couple other hangers on for fodder, set off in search of the lost tapestry and the tomb where it lays.
A treasure hunting flick wouldn’t be much without some bad guys, so Ronson and company are being pursued by Zhukov (Raicho Vasilev) and his band of mercenaries. Zhukov is never given a backstory, but it’s pretty clear he was Spetsnaz or some such. Any baddie with less of a pedigree wouldn’t be a match for Ronson.
The desperate straits of this film’s budget are apparent early on. It was filmed on location in the steppes of Inner Mongolia. There was an opportunity to film spectacular stretches of scenery, yet most of the footage was confined to a dry river bed, a couple of dirt roads, and 
one sparse village. The tomb with the tapestry, which the group finds with little fuss, looks like it was just up a hill from an asphalt road. The final fight (there’s always a final fight) takes place at a small abandoned Buddhist monastery. That’s all well and good, but I would have had an easier time believing in its remote location were it not for the power lines overhead. It feels as if the camera were turned around, audiences would see a bustling street scene with shops and maybe a couple of rickshaws.
The movie hits all the notes of an action adventure, but it seems to do so as if Dolph and company were just ticking off items on a list. That goes for the fights, the car chases, the love interests, the token characters, etc. There’s little life to any of it. That isn’t helped by the performances, which were flat all around. With the exception of Shriver. He went after his role with gusto. He just wasn’t very good. He does get the canned ham award for the film, though, so there’s that.
Diamond Dogs is a movie, in all the ways that one defines a movie. But I’ll be damned if a single moment or characterization was memorable. The entire experience passes over one like a random conversation with a stranger at a bus stop. The silence had to be filled with something. Diamond Dogs slots well into the bottom half of the Watchability Index, taking over the #437 spot from Fortress. This is a flick for the sicko Dolph completists out there, and no one else.