Who Are You To Leave “Code of Honor” Behind?

Digital Playground's latest blockbuster is a sprawling epic of drugs, kidnapping, and pornography, in which a crack team of retired crimefighters led by Jesse Jane must adhere to their "Code of Honor" and regroup to liberate kidnapped comrade Selena Rose.

Code of Honor

Studio: Digital Playground
Director: Robby D.
Starring: Jesse Jane, Riley Steele, Selena Rose, Stoya, Kayden Kross, Jesse Jane, Brooklyn Lee, Tasha Reign, Manuel Ferrara, Tommy Gunn, James Deen, Keiran Lee, Bill Bailey, Marcus London, Erik Everhard

Review by: Gram Ponante

It's like "Saving Private Ryan" meets "La Femme Nikita" meets Danny Glover meets some Rosetta Stone software that will help us learn what Bibi Jones is saying.

"Remember, Girls," says Jesse Jane, "No one gets left behind."

Manuel Ferrara is a drug kingpin. Just look at the cocaine and cash lying carelessly around his home, and the bikini'd women languidly adjusting their bottoms by the pool for greater ass cleavage visibility, as if someone just out of frame had told them to do so.

To underline his decadent, devil-may-care lifestyle, we watch Ferrara effortlessly pluck Brooklyn Lee and Tasha Reign from their poolside lounging to fuck them. As he finishes, Selena Rose's team of narcotics agents (it's her new job, apparently) storms Ferrara's hideaway.

Up 'til now, most of the action has taken place with limited speaking.

But then undercover cop Bibi Jones and Rose begin talking, and it all goes south.

Jones talks with an even more marble-mouthed California drawl than the one Kristen Wiig made famous in the SNL sketch "The Californians" and is mostly incomprehensible. What's more odd is that Jones is from Oklahoma, so this affectation is a choice.

Rose, despite her "seven tours of Saudi Arabia, two tours of China" (what does that even mean?), and proficiency in hand-to-hand combat (we learn this as it is read from her dossier by a much better actor later in the movie) is kidnapped with very little effort by Ferrara, who is portrayed as bumbling in every aspect of his life other than fucking.

"Manwhall?!" Rose protests to Ferrara, "yr gounna get cawt."

Back at HQ, Jones explains to boss Marcus London (he is reading the dossier) that Rose was once part of an elite team of mercenary ladies who would probably help to bust Selena loose.

Thus begins an awkward series of scenes that get the gang back together. Jesse Jane is now a housewife to a useless (except in the sack) fiancee, Keiran Lee. Kayden Kross is an independent film director who uses bombs to motivate her actors (and shoots on film). Riley Steele hangs out at shooting ranges without headphones, which might explain a lot.

And it is 52 minutes into the movie until we meet Stoya, now working as a very strict librarian. When James Deen comes in with some overdue books, she says: "Not so fast. Let's just see how overdue these books are."

It's the first time in the movie any word out of anyone's mouth is remotely credible.

"A public library is a privilege," she says, cornering him. "You've abused it."

Then Kross has an emotional scene with Church (Tommy Gunn), who has been a basket case since Kross dumped him in Colombia four years ago.

"No one gets left behind," she says.

"I guess that rule doesn't apply to boyfriends," he replies. ZING!

Gunn doesn't rejoin the group--though he and Kross have sex anyway--but he does give Kross the location of Ferrara's jungle hideout.

90 minutes in, we come to the third act of this porn movie.

"Getting Selena is our mission," says Jesse, "and this time it's personal."

The gang charters a helicopter and a motor raft and head up the river like it's Collagen Lips Now. They free Selena and bring Ferrara to justice, but not before letting him fuck them in the interrogation room.

"Code of Honor" is so bloated that it's a shame there weren't any BBWs in it. Rather than shoehorning these performers into characters that don't fit (only Stoya, Kross, Deen, and Gunn make it out of this movie with relationships that make any sense), it would have been nice to shoot three or four movies without scripts and donate the rest of the cash to a library.

Writer/director Robby D. can obviously make a movie. All the sightlines, reaction shots, inserts, and angles are the work of someone who has been improving his technique for nearly two decades. What he doesn't have is a very wide palette; he's stuck by some code of honor that requires him to stick to stock characters that grow more diluted each time, and it is really hard to believe any of these women as trained assassins, pilots, entertainment lawyers, Amish, firefighters, or whatever other ensemble group of super-fucky women Digital Playground's Bottom Line Generator requires them to be.

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