The Specialist

There should be a law against casting Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and James Woods in the same movie. There isn’t, of course, though if our state representatives see The Specialist, legislation may be pending. In the meantime, you can wallow in the thunderous thespian talents of the terrible threesome without fear of being arrested. And if you really think that any of these people can act, then The Specialist is just the kick you need.

Loosely based on a series of macho novels that are written for the kind of guys who move their lips when they read and subscribe to Soldier of Fortune magazine, The Specialist tries for a softer and more sensitive brand of machismo. Its half-baked storyline is about an explosive vendetta, but large chunks of the movie consist of Stallone and Stone panting over telephones at each other. This film is the closest you can get to phone sex without dialing a 1-900 number. Granted, most of their chatter is about bumping off drug lords, but the topic gets them so hot and steamy.

Actually, The Specialist plays like an oddball sex triangle, with Woods as the third angle. He and Sly start out together as commandos working for the CIA. Their job is blowing up kingpins of the cocaine trade, and their high-tech expertise is evenly split between demolition and detonation. Or, as Woods repeatedly puts it: he’s the trigger and Stallone’s the rigger. Does this sound like sex talk, or what?

The pair ends their personal association, however, when Woods insists upon killing a kid. Years pass, during which Sly broods a lot. He’s tired of all the violence, though he doesn’t mind taking the occasional job as a hitman.

Which is how he meets Stone. She’s a client with two distinct peccadilloes. The first is that she wants Sly to get the mobsters who killed her parents. The other is her inability to use a phone while wearing clothes (who knows, maybe she has an allergy).

Unbeknownst to Stallone (but beknownst to us), Woods is working as the mob’s security chief. When flaming thugs start shooting through the air like Roman candles, Woods gets all hot and twitchy about seeing his old amigo again. You can tell that this is one trigger who misses his rigger.

The Specialist is loaded with atmosphere, but moves at a snail’s pace. It has some major booms, but you never feel the earth move. You may want to smoke a cigarette after seeing it, though.

The Crow

It’s excessively violent, extremely dark and has more style than logic or narrative. It’s The Crow, one of the first official films of the summer. It’s also a primary example of the new wave of movies inspired by comic books (The Mask will deliver the second “graphic novel” punch later this summer). In its comic book state, The Crow is an underground classic. The film version has already stirred controversy with its nihilistic vision and is looking to blast its way into the pop culture mainstream.

Assuming it could ever get to the theaters, that is.

“They had to trim back the violence,” explained James O’Barr, the creator of The Crow comics. “They got an NC-17 (rating) four times before they finally got a cut of the film that could receive an R.”

O’Barr is one of the hot artist/writers of the modern comic book/graphic novel form. The Crow is based on his two-volume epic about a man who returns from the dead to heap revenge upon the gang that murdered him and his fiancée. It’s a hyper exercise in purgatorial storytelling, set against a nightmarish recreation of Detroit as a burned-out urban shell brimming with squalor and despair. The movie is as unrelenting as the comics in its sense of madness and brutality. Even the tale of personal redemption offered at the movie’s conclusion comes off as way too little, way too late.

“I’m not as angst-ridden as people are trying to portray me,” sighed O’Barr, in a voice laden with the slow intonations of a manic depressive in a downward mood swing. But he also admitted that it took him a while to find a publisher for The Crow – “They couldn’t understand the depressed quality of the work.”

O’Barr claims that, at the age of 33, he feels more mellow, but that he still carries baggage from a childhood of orphanages and foster homes. But it was the death of a girlfriend that spurred him to create The Crow.

“It’s all been a long, dark ride.” He mused.

Add to O’Barr’s angst the accidental death of The Crow’s star, Brandon Lee (son of the prematurely dead Bruce Lee), and you’ve got a movie so enveloped in morbidity that Valium could be served along with the popcorn. But the movie’s very emotional darkness is also what works for it. Like it or not, The Crow’s feverish degree of pain and its highly disturbing visuals imprint itself on your mind.

“The filmmakers didn’t feel the need to pander to 10-year-olds,” said O’Barr. “The Crow isn’t meant for them.”

Surviving the Game

Wealthy hunters pursue homeless vet for homicidal fun. Sound familiar? You betcha. It wasn’t too many months ago that Jean Claude Van Damme proved to be a Hard Target. Now, in Surviving the Game, it’s Ice-T who’s making tracks through the Northwest forest as the prey of bored rich men. Surviving the Game has the same story as Hard Target, and a slightly better cast, but it lacks any real pop or fizz.

Our story begins on a damp day in Seattle. We first meet Ice-T as he’s hunting through trash cans for breakfast. He’s so far down on his luck that he finds the front grill of an oncoming Mack truck mighty tempting. But he’s pulled from the threshold of death’s door by a job offer from an odd, but friendly, businessman (Charles S. Dutton). Dutton explains that he and his partner (Rutger Hauer) need a guide for a hunting trip. Ice-T doesn’t know anything about hunting, but he can’t say no to the big money Hauer shoves at him.

Okay. This is when things get silly. Granted, it’s plausible that Ice-T doesn’t get the point when he’s flown into the woods along with the pig that the hunters are having for dinner. It’s even possible that he’s still kinda dense when Gary Busey (yes, Busey and Hauer together as baddies in the same flick!) shows up and starts chatting about the male need for violence. But having been so clueless for so long, it’s simply not believable when Ice-T finally catches on and acquires the savvy to fight back.

Surviving the Game is directed by Ernest Dickerson, who previously made Juice and is still best known for being Spike Lee’s cinematographer. He has a good eye for striking images – the movie’s scenery is truly impressive – but not much else. Even the social statements in this movie are so muddled that it makes Hard Target look like Das Kapital.

The Rock

Some scientists believe that during the last ice age, the male brain evolved into a rigid set of behavior patterns.

If this is true, then the first draft of The Rock may have been told round a campfire during a mammoth hunt. The movie is thoroughly drenched with testosterone as its cast of real men go out and do manly things with other real men.

Of course, that is what Sean Connery does best even if it does mean that he is coasting through his twilight years by playing the pensioners' answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Repeated comments are made in The Rock about the age of Connery's character. Then the old boy turns around and kills fifty some commandos without even getting winded. Obviously, Connery is one senior who doesn't have to take any guff from the youngsters.

He does, however, have to tolerate plenty of hooey from a loony kick-butt script. The Rock is carved from a slab of pure machismo with a strong vein of paranoia added in large portions. The movie plays like a cross between The X-Files and Ian Fleming as it presents its characters as the key players in every alleged conspiracy since the assassination of Lincoln.

For example, there is the movie's main villain. General Hummell (Ed Harris) is the highly decorated leader of Marine Force Recon, an elite team of the Special Forces who are routinely sent to wage covert war in countries that don't even know they are under attack. Hummell is a fiery-eyed idealist who despises the fact that the families of his men are never properly compensated when a Recon soldier gets killed in the line of duty. Of course, the duties that they perform are not even suppose to exist which is why the military is so stingy with the funds.

Lacking a union, Hummell handles the situation the old fashion way. He and his troops steal fifteen short-range missiles equipped with a chemical weapon so deadly that the screenwriters actually had to dig out a chemistry book to look it up.

Then Hummell and his crew take over Alcatraz prison, the stony island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. His demands are simple: either the US government finally pay these families or else San Francisco will be peppered with enough deadly toxin to rival the cleaner parts of New York City.

Ever prepared for such situations, the FBI fly in Special Agent Goodsped (Nicholas Cage). He has a doctorate in chemical weaponry and is extensively trained in demolition. Unfortunately, Goodsped has no real weaponry experience and thinks that hand to hand combat is a euphemism for bedroom hanky-panky.

Which forces the FBI to confront one of their own covert problems. For the past thirty years, they have illegally imprisoned John Mason (Connery), a mysterious British agent who was caught stealing a microfilm containing every dirty secret from the alien landing at Roswell to JFK. For three decades, Mason has refused to reveal the location of the microfilm. He has also refused to explain how he once managed to escape from Alcatraz. Since Mason was able to successfully slip out, he is also the only person who knows how to secretly slip back into the old fortress with a bay side view.

A substantial exercise in gratuitous violence is guaranteed for all. So much ammunition is used in The Rock that by the movie's final reel the heroes are having to blast guys with rockets. Which means that The Rock almost succeeds in delivering the right summertime mix of low content and high energy. It even discovers a weird and funny odd-couple team in the form of Connery and Cage as they bicker their way through every firefight.

But the last third of The Rock begins to splutter and lose stream. Ultimately, the movie becomes a victim of its own demented sense of overkill. Like its two heroes, The Rock runs out of ammo prematurely and that is a big mistake. After all, the audience isn't paying good money just to watch these people act.

Chain Reaction

Massive paranoia has long been a favorite American past time. Even the great American novel Moby Dick is thoroughly infused with enough cosmic fear and loathing to send some readers scurrying for the closet. But if the summer movies are any indication, then the great Yankee quest for the elusive white whale has taken on an obsessive, internalized dimension. In Mission: Impossible, The Rock, and Eraser, the enemies are all home grown as the country seemingly shifts its focus away from perceived foreign menace. Now the guns are being trained on the jerks who live next door.

Chain Reaction is the latest reminder that we have met the enemy and he is us. Of course, for those who are old enough to remember the Vietnam years, this observation is hardly unique. But even a graying hippie would have to be a little startled by the degree to which this motto has now become an institutionalized norm.

Not that Chain Reaction isn't potentially loaded with some interesting references to a few of the dirty secrets of modern American history. The movie plays as a revisionist overview of the Manhattan Project, stripped of the short sighted jingoism of the World War Two era. The central gizmo in Chain Reaction is a process that can remove all the hydrogen from simple water and turn it into pure energy. But the idealistic scientists working on the project have no concept as to the nasty devils from the military/industrial complex who employs them.

At the eve of their successful completion of the project, the Chicago-based laboratory explodes in an neo-atomic fireball (the other hot thing this summer, e.g. Independence Day). One of the few survivors is Eddie Kasalivich (Keanu Reeves), a machinist who also just happens to be a physics school drop-out. Well, actually, he was asked to leave school after he blew up a building (for reasons never explained in the movie). Not surprisingly, Kasalivich is quickly promoted to the top of the FBI's most wanted list.

Equally suspected is Lily Sinclair (Rachel Weisz), a physicist who wasn't at the lab due to a major hang-over. The FBI becomes convinced that she was the brain behind Kasalivich's brawn's. This means that Lily and Eddie now have more in common with each other than most couples as they proceed to go on the lam together.

They are both young, attractive, and very sincere in their convictions. They also share an unfortunate faith in their project director, Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman). This is not that significant tipping of a plot point. After all, most academic administers don't travel to expensive Chicago restaurants in limos and maintain lavish estates in Georgetown. Ah oh! Do you think he might work for something known in intelligence lingo as The Company?

Of course, the plot of Chain Reaction quickly begins to resemble The Fugitive (on the run, but with a date this time). The resemblance is enhanced by the fact that director Andrew Davis created both films. But the deja vu quality of Chain Reaction is not the movie's real problem. Its real problem is ham-fisted message-making coupled with too many silly action scenes.

Technically, Chain Reaction could have been an incredible action movie with a sly political context. But the action is unloaded in a hyper-fast manner that eventually grows tiresome and absurd. Likewise, the social message is finally delivered in a quick set of broad statements that sounds like a lecture from a school child. At times, Chain Reaction is extremely engaging. But all too often, the movie plays like the world's longest coming attraction trailer. It's all highlights, minus any scenes that might make the viewer give a hoot about the characters (in this regard, it makes The Rock look like a character study).

Which is too bad, since the movie contains some fine work by both Freeman and Brian Cox as his Company connection. Likewise, Reeves has interesting possibilities as a hi-tech primitive who exists by quirky instincts, has a nearly supernatural command of computers, and is supremely capable of clubbing an assassin with the forearm of a real Neanderthal. Reeves might yet prove to be the definitive action hero of the Nineties.

But he better check the script next time. Chain Reaction never explodes beyond the special effects (which are very well done). Even Speed II might be an improvement.

The Phantom

It takes real gall to run through the jungle in a purple suit. But the Phantom has demonstrated such brave audacity for nearly four hundred years. Or at least that is what the local natives would have every one believe.

So convincing are their tales that these natives have successfully struck fear into the heart of evil doers across seven continents. Good story tellers, these chaps. Too bad they were not hired to make this movie about the lavender avenger. They would have done a better job.

Not that the movie The Phantom is totally awful. Actually, it is an extremely faithful adaptation of the old comic strip. But that is also its problem. The movie provides nothing more than a basic run through of the comic's original story while never finding any dramatically engaging focus for the big screen. What you see is what you get. Nothing more and nothing less.

On the plus side, the movie has a relatively charming performance by Billy Zane as the 21st Phantom (for the Phantom impaired, this is a superhero job that is faithfully passed on from father to son for many generations). He is a young and decent guy who has just recently stepped into the family's business after his father (Patrick McGoohan) met an untimely demise while on a minor case. Since the family's business largely consists of beating the stuffing's out of assorted poachers, grave looters, and general malcontents, Zane's Phantom is lucky to have an athletic physique along with his youthful good looks.

What he doesn't have is much in the way of feminine company. Presumably, it gets lonely in the jungle and even a ghost who walks must have a yen to run on the wild side. But the mad schemes of a power mad tycoon (Treat Williams) inadvertently gives the Phantom an unique opportunity to meet women.

One is his old college sweetheart Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson), the spirited daughter of an important New York newspaper publisher. The other is Sala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), the leader of a band of leather-clad female pirates. Since Diana is helping her father to fight Williams' Xander Drax ( and Sala is employed by Drax to kidnap Diana), the Phantom eventually has to choose between these women and their respective ambitions.

Likewise, he is going have to ditch the funky suit for awhile since Drax is based in New York and the Phantom has to stop him from acquiring a set of three ancient skulls. When assembled, the three skulls are capable of unleashing more power than the world has ever seen. Besides, the man who killed the 20th Phantom now works for Drax and dad, who keeps slipping his son advise from the great beyond, would like to settle an old score.

As stated, Zane is charming but a little too low key for the lead. Williams makes for a surprisingly weak, and often silly, villain. MacGoohan delivers a weird Barry Fitzgerald impersonation as he hams it up with a variety of "Suffering saints alive" lines. Swanson is okay but a little drab, while Zeta-Jones is extremely striking as a macho-femme with a soft spot for men in tights.

But what The Phantom really needs (and most lacks) is a strong story. At the very least, the movie could have used a few original ideas.

John Carpenter's Escape From L.A.

There are two major warning signs of a director in steep decline. The first is when they remake their own movies. The second is when they remake them badly. John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. is vivid proof of both points. The fact that Carpenter stuck his name into the title even invokes the third warning sign. No wonder this movie has become the current favorite target for the critical equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

Unfortunately, the bad press is amply earned. In its efforts to redo and surpass the original, Escape From L.A. merely succeeds in making Escape From New York look like a masterpiece. Despite the critical beating that it received upon its release in 1981, Escape From New York has managed to achieve a well deserved cult reputation. But the lean and mean B-movie attitude that made the original so exciting has given way in its sequel to a pricey sense of flabbiness.

In Escape From L.A., everything is bigger and flashier than it was before. Everything is also slower and dumber. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is especially inclined to fits of denseness. Once again, the surly futuristic commando-turned-criminal is snatched by the U.S. Police Force and is about to be deported to the Island of Los Angeles (big quake, you know). Likewise, the President (Cliff Robertson) is once again in trouble (it's an occupational hazard). Seems that his bad seed daughter (A.J. Langer) has fled to L.A. to be with her Maoist homeboy lover (George Corraface). Even worse, she has taken with her a black box containing the satellite command codes to one of daddy's favorite secret weapons.

As usual, Plissken is indifferent to the national crisis which in the States should make him a prime presidential candidate). So the head of the U.S. Police Force (Stacy Keach) injects him with a deadly, time-delayed virus as a personal inducement. You would think that old Snake might groan under the weight of so much deja vu in one movie.

As was also the case in the original, Plissken has to deal with a treacherous ally (Steve Buscemi), an ex-partner (Pam Grier in an offbeat tribute to The Crying Game), and a helpful fan (Peter Fonda in a role that should have gone to Dennis Hopper). Completely wasted in minor parts are both Michelle Forbes and Bruce Campbell, though Campbell's freaky turn as the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills provokes a few chilly laughs.

But embarassed giggles will be the audience's main response to Escape From L.A. In between bouts of surprisingly mediocre special effects and lackluster stunt scenes, the movie limps from one dull gag to another. Post-apocalyptic Los Angeles festers with heavily armed gang members and fast talking con artists, which means that LaLaLand is still the same despite the geologic shift. But the movie never goes beyond the obvious and the result plays like a boorishly pushy afternoon in Burbank.

Equally uninspired is the political focus of the film, and Escape From L.A. is intended by Carpenter to be his political statement piece. The President is a right-wing religious zealot who lucked into office when he prophesied the coming of the great quake. His daughter has mistaken puppy love for a liberal cause. In turn, her boyfriend is a Shining Path guerrilla leader planning a Third World invasion against the United States. Plissken is a gun-toting civil libertarian who wants his red meat and cigarette right now, no matter what anybody else thinks.

Maybe this could have been good satire (as was the case in Carpenter's under appreciated production of They Live). But Carpenter would have needed a good screenwriter to pull it off. Since the script to Escape From L.A. was co-authored by the director, the producer, and the star, it's a safe bet that the story was hastily concocted during a power brunch with assorted agents.

Which also means that everybody was too busy making deals instead of a movie. Escape From L.A. appears to have been a quick afterthought jotted down on a few cocktail napkins during a heated discussion about percentage points.

Eraser

For some people, summer is that special season for long sunny afternoons with iced drinks and natty straw hats. For others, it is the traditional time of the year for watching big Arnie blow things up on a budget busting scale. Since Schwarzenegger is the star of Eraser, you can guess which group this movie is designed for.

Not that there isn't an odd pleasure to be had from wallowing in another Schwarzenegger ode to mass destruction. The guy is good at what he does on the screen. But has anyone figured out what exactly it is that he does?

As U.S. Marshal John Kruger, Schwarzenegger spends his time single handedly slaying every imaginable threat to Western civilization. While most U.S. marshals merely clog the line at a Dunkin' Donut Shop, Kruger swats down jet airplanes for recreation and feeds thugs to alligators for entertainment.

Which is why he is called the Eraser. Technically, Kruger's job is to protect people on the Federal Witness Protection Program by erasing all traces of their past identity. Mostly, he erases the folks who are out to kill them. The man is a firm believer that the best defense is a brutal offense.

But even Kruger has problems with his new assignment. Her name is Lee Cullen (Vanessa Williams), an honest secretary who has discovered that her company is preparing to illegally sale a secret weapon into the hands of some foreign arms dealers. Since the weapon in question is a hand-held version of a hyper-velocity rail gun with an X-ray scope, Cullen's realizes that the bad guys are about to gain the hi-tech edge in a special effects fantasy movie.

Kruger only has his bulging muscles, crafty wits, and indescribable accent with which to save her. Since his own organization turns out to be thoroughly peppered with traitors, he also has to do all of the fighting on his own while his fellow U.S. marshals are chasing after him. Even worse, he has to confront stunt scenes so outrageous that even the computer-generated graphics in the movie nearly swoons from the excitement.

But it is Arnie who should be swooning. The rail gun rapidly becomes the main star of the movie. The weapon is not exactly a wild fantasy since large-scale prototypes already are stationed on some U.S. warships while eyewitness accounts from the U.S. invasion of Panama would strongly suggest that a smaller version was tested in a few combat zones (only the boys in Area 51 know for sure). Real or unreal, the rail gun is the liveliest element in Eraser.

Schwarzenegger himself has retreated to his old screen persona. On the plus side is the fact that he doesn't have to deliver any Junior-sounding bits of stupid dialogue ("Mein nipples, they are so sensitive"). Instead, he has returned to the implacable machine of destruction mode. As Kruger, he seemingly has no emotions. He can't be stopped. He feels no pain. He can't be killed. He's the Terminator with a badge.

Which begs an obvious question: if the guy is so limited, then why do so many of us dash out to see his films? The simple truth is that Schwarzenegger is still the best at unloading brainless, violent fun. The man is like a roller coaster ride without brakes. You know that the results are going to be loud and bloody, but the sheer mindless decadence of the spectacle makes for compulsive viewing.

Besides, how often do you see a Republican right-winger star in an action movie that tackles the IranContra scandal and presents an Oliver North clone as the main villain? About as often as you see the same man marry into the Kennedy family. Schwarzenegger knows how to cover his bases on both ends and still have time to run a movie into deficit spending.

On Deadly Ground

Steven Seagal doesn't like pollution. It makes him mad. So mad that he has to kick the stuffing out of six trillion bad guys and blow everything up.

Roughly speaking, that's the plot of On Deadly Ground, Seagal's message movie on environmentalism. As screwy as it sounds, the movie kinda works. In fact, I'm starting to like the mindless, PC action genre.

In the tradition of Kung Fu and Billy Jack, Seagal plays a sensitive guy who knows how to handle himself. Early on, he's forced to beat up a coupla dozen racist oil workers. After mopping the place up with them, he gives the boys a pep talk on how they need to get in touch with their sensitive side. His Tire Iron John approach must be effective — from the way they're moaning on the floor, they must be in touch with something sensitive.

Michael Caine plays a villain who doesn't have a sensitive side. He does, how­ever, have a virtual time bomb of an oil refinery and doesn't give a hoot about lay­ing waste to the Alaskan tundra. Unfortu­nately for Caine, he's the kind of movie baddie who employs only bungling hitmen. Seagal survives their attempts to kill him, then manages to meet an elderly shaman and his (obligatory) beautiful grand-daugh­ter (Joan Chen).

Seagal and the shaman have a brief debate about whether he's a bear or simply a mouse hiding from the hawks (remember, we're getting mystical and metaphoric here). Then he has a face-to-face with Mother Earth herself, who sends him on a spiritual quest to save the environment. But neither Seagal nor his fans are much for spiritual quests, so he champions Mother Earth with about 40 tons of (recyclable) bullets and (environmentally safe) high explosive, instead. He's one serious dude when it comes to fighting pollution.

The movie's final minutes are spent with Seagal lecturing the audience about the evils of environmental destruction. Let's give this boy the Smokey the Bear award.

P.S. Don't litter the bus stop with this paper — Seagal may be standing nearby.