Ben says: What can you say about Andrew Davis' latest film that hasn't already been said about his previous outing - The Fugitive? Well, for a start, this movie's cast (other than Morgan Freeman as the suitably ambivalent Mr. X) is considerably more wooden than Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Even Brian Cox as the pop-eyed prinicipal baddie (why does Hollywood always seem to cast Britons (even one's with as poor American accents as this) as the villain? Alan Rickman in Die Hard and Prince of Thieves, Jeremy Irons and Charles Dance in all sorts of rubbish and even Brian Cox himself in Manhunter the "prequel" to Silence of the Lambs) makes a fool of himself.

The story, implausible as it may seem, revolves around Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz (who I last remember having seen in Dirtysomething on British TV), who are part of a team that discovers a way to extract the potential energy from tap water somehow. No, don't worry, Keanu isn't a rocket scientist - nothing that implausible - he's just a machinist, and yet, it is he that discovers the final piece to the jigsaw. Unfortunately, the head scientist's plans to release the info on how to create this unlimited energy to the world are curtailed by bad guys who come and asphyxiate him and blow up the lab (destroying a fairly large part of Chicago in the process - no bad thing, some might say).

What follows is an interminable chase sequence, much like the Fugitive, where you are always assured that the good guys will win out. Safe, compromising crap, same as usual...

Ben gives it:

last updated: 3rd November 1996