Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding Jr. once started out their careers as promising new actors, Gooding Jr. had even already won an Oscar at the time of this movie. I have however always regarded this movie as the sort of turning points in their careers, as it's simply a very bad genre movie, with a lame concept and a story that borrows too much from much better other genre movies.
It's not just its concept that makes this movie bad, it's just the overall execution of it all as well. For an action movie it simply isn't a very good one, not in the least because it also borrows heavily from other movies and just isn't original enough on its own to really add anything. The movie is like "Speed" meets "Die Hard" meets "The Rock" and than some movies thrown in the mix with it.
No, I didn't really enjoyed watching this movie, even though the movie obviously got aimed toward it to bring some entertainment, by also adding a dose of comedy to the movie. Gooding Jr. has just never really been my favorite comedy actor and Skeet Ulrich just doesn't fit this genre. The movie tries to be like a buddy flick, in which two totally different mismatched persons just by chance end up with each other, running from a couple of bad guys who want to have a new deadly chemical weapon that detonates when it reaches temperatures over 50 degrees. Luckilly Gooding Jr. is an ice cream truck driver. This already should provide you a troubling image of how this entire movie is being like.
Seems amazing to me in the first place that they decided to turn this concept into a movie. Its concept alone was reason for people to not go and see this movie, which made this movie an instant flop already, far before it had been released. And why some of the actors within this movie actually agreed to be in it is perhaps an even more strange thing. The movie does have some big names in it, next to Ulrich and Gooding Jr., such as David Paymer and Peter Firth.
A movie that is as bad as its concept.
4/10
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