CIA agent Mark Graver narrowly escapes with his life when former agent turned international terrorist Ralph Straker stages a raid on a Company warehouse & steals a nuclear missile actuator module capable of managing an entire nuclear arsenal. The CIA's director believes that Straker cannot steal the module's chip, but that item is stolen from another warehouse by a rival terrorist named Franz Kluge. Graver decides to contact his former lover, the former terrorist Alexa, who is living in a rural town with her young daughter. Alexa, meanwhile, foils a robbery by shooting one of the robbers but is arrested by the cops by mistake. Being an unlawful citizen, she is threatened with deportation or prison time but Graver manages to hold it off on the condition that Alexa help him recover the stolen module & chip. Heading into Kluge's hideout on her own, Alexa tricks her way into staying there so that she can steal the chip. This she does but Straker, learning of the chip's location, stages a raid on Kluge's base. Alexa escapes but is captured by Straker. Kluge decides to make a deal with the CIA & Agent Graver to recover the equipment for his freedom. Together they head into Straker's base at the same time Alexa breaks out of her confines & takes on Straker for the chip.

In the very early 1990s, producers Richard Pepin & Joseph Merhi had a surprise minor hit on their hands when they made C.I.A. – Codename: Alexa, a cheap action film that became a cult hit on cable TV when one of its stars, O.J. Simpson, was put on trial for the murder of his wife & her lover shortly after the film premiered. The unexpected success of what was essentially a very cheap & crudely put-together action thriller, made PM Entertainment's name & resulted in the studio becoming a major player in the 1990s' DTV action film market. A year later, Pepin & Merhi got Lorenzo Lamas, the star of the film, to make a sequel with his co-star & wife Kathleen Kinmont, only with Lamas directing as well this time with Kinmont writing the story for it.

I never particularly liked the original C.I.A. film but this sequel is an improvement over it in almost every aspect, even if the overall improvement is not by much. Lamas does a fair job of staging moderately exciting action set pieces (although the budget for the film was not substantially better than that of the original). The opening raid on the CIA warehouse is filled with some of the trademark PM shootout style where key characters stand in the open & avoid getting hit by bullets while everyone else in the vicinity are massacred with little effort (during this scene, somebody fires an RPG with no actual warhead but a blank charge, making me laugh my head off). The subsequent action scenes are okay by cheap action film standards but nothing too exciting.

The film has a pretty good cast of action film troopers. Lorenzo Lamas & Kathleen Kinmont make a good team & conduct their relationship with some conviction. John Savage is a hoot as semi-villain Kluge, making the most of his role as the conniving & one-step-ahead-of-everybody-else terrorist who gets more than he initially bargained for when rival terrorist John Ryan takes his own loot from him, only to play a major hand in getting it back. In all, the film might not be much than a cheap action film, but it does have some value in making an average actioner for late night TV & cheap DVD trash trawlers.

The first C.I.A. film was a hoot - an O. J. Simpson starring actioner filled with hard-hitting fight scenes - but this undistinguished sequel is a big step down. Gone is director Joseph Merhi, to be replaced by Lorenzo Lamas who can barely act let alone direct a sufficiently exciting action flick. What we're left with is the kind of film you end up forgetting about roughly five minutes after it finishes.

Kathleen Kinmont is back as the tough heroine, once more coerced by the government into fighting some nefarious bad guys in her quest for justice. Lamas is now long haired and mooches around in the background. The villains are an uninteresting bunch, aside from warrior woman Lori Fetrick, who gets to engage in some frenetic and hard-hitting bouts with Kinmont.

Elsewhere, the plot is a mess of explosions, grubby fight scenes, and general inanity. Say what you like about Merhi but the guy knows how to shoot tense and hard-hitting fight scenes which are all about the staging. The fights here are by comparison poor indeed, and nothing feels very exciting, just ho hum.

I don't get attached to that many action movies, and this isn't one of them, actually. One off-putting thing about it is a scene where a character gives a sort of "war whoop" while machine-gunning someone - what's weird is that it's one of the GOOD GUYS doing it. But one thing made me watch it. Like "Brad the Lad", I've always been mad about Lori "Ice" Fetrick. And as he says, she's very convincing in that villainous role (that smile of hers works in a role like that as much as any other way, and, needless to say, everything else about her). I just wish she'd gotten to wear the kind of skimpy clothes Kathleen Kinmont did in the previous movie. No offense to Lamas and Kinmont, but 5 stars for the movie, and 10 for her.