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It's Unstable! Shut It Down!

Chain Reaction, starring Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, and Rachel Weisz; directed by Andrew Davis

Despite its innumerable shortcomings, there is something bizarrely entertaining about Andrew Davis's eco-thriller Chain Reaction. As the movie begins, a team of really smart, nice scientists work together in a top-secret facility in Chicago. They are building a super-scientific Plexiglas hot tub, which they hope will one day turn water into pure, clean-burning fuel. It doesn't work too well at first--it just wobbles around like a big, electrified dunking booth, while all the genius scientists run around and holler at each other, "It's unstable! Shut it down!"

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Keanu Reeves, playing a student machinist named Eddie, fortuitously discovers the key sound frequency that enables the super-hot-tub to start churning out the fantastic supergas. For a few brief moments, everything is apple pie à la mode. Then the chief scientist, who wants to give the new technology away for free, is murdered by the forces of greed and pollution. The forces of G&P want to hoard the super-tub technology, because without it America will lose its "competitive edge" in the world market. Eddie is framed for the murder--at which point the puppyish Reeves, that wooden soldier of cinema, gets to display the perfectly blank look he gets when something really, really tragic happens. (Feel free to lie down and take a brief nap at this point, if you're feeling lightheaded.)

After a spectacular explosion--eight blocks of the Windy City disappear in a mushroom cloud--our hero goes on the lam with a cute British physicist named Lily (Rachel Weisz). Eddie and Lily hopscotch across the country from Illinois to Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. Weisz keeps an admirably straight china-doll face, despite the fact that she is obliged to wear red eye shadow (I believe it's called "24-Hour Flu" at the Nordstrom makeup counter) as she tags behind brave Eddie from state to state.

38 Fred Ward turns up as an F.B.I. agent assigned to the case. Nobody's fool, the G-man is suspicious of the pat frame-up: "I don't buy it," he barks with Dick Tracy sincerity. Morgan Freeman plays a shady, possibly nefarious bureaucrat, a role that allows Freeman to make a number of ridiculous pronouncements without laughing, for which he should receive some kind of award. "People want to live in their split-level homes and eat microwave dinners," he pontificates. Thank you, Morgan. Please take your parting gift and leave the movie immediately.

Packed with ridiculous plot points and winningly awful dialogue, Chain Reaction caroms with senseless abandon from one overblown special-effects sequence to the next. Davis (helmsman of the overpraised, vastly popular The Fugitive) seems bent on demonstrating that he couldn't direct traffic at the North Pole; the whole movie has a blocky, unnatural quality. But bad as it is, Chain Reaction is by no means charmless. I look forward, in fact, to stumbling across it some day thirty years from now on Mystery Science Theater 3000--preferably dubbed into Polish, with a Bobby Vinton soundtrack. --Mary Brennan

(Rated PG-13 for some intense action and violence.)

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