Firetrap

Dean Cain, the one time Super-Man, plays Max Hooper the super-thief. He can break into any company and steal any thing for the right price. Unfortunately his latest heist ends him up in a high-rise in which someone else has set a fire to hide their own attempts to steal the product. Now the thief finds himself having to be the hero rescuing everyone in the building. Unfortunately the other thief is still in the building and the F.B.I. & C.I.A. are outside waiting for Max.

The movie is barely passable. Dean Cain is a fun actor and has done much better with more improved material but here he is saddled with a weak script and pretty poor direction.

Lori Petty clearly steals the show. Her best performance since "Tank Girl". Dean Cain acts with the quality normally associated with him. A lot of people get toasted. The fire is on people like monkeys on racehorses.

This terrible action movie will try the patience of anyone who's not in a coma. I don't know if I have some sort of problem with Dean Cain, but any film I've seen him in has turned about to be really boring. Firetrap is no exception. Despite the premise, it took four attempts to get through this film without falling asleep.

Dean is a thief out on one last job – to get a disc from a building that's gone on fire while he's in it for some reason. Trapped with some other survivors, and pretending he's a cop, Dean must get the disc, escape, and probably help some other people get out too if he has the time. His token black sidekick is waiting outside in a van for him, although that hardly needs to be pointed out as there's always someone waiting in a van somewhere for people in these kinds of films (it helps break up the monotony of watching folks bickering all the time).

In a case of how to do this kind of film wrong, everything in this film is done wrong. There's no real drama outside of the burning building. Folks bicker, Dean gets found out, and someone in the building isn't quite who they appear to be. Try staying awake to the end if you dare, because this is one bland film with a predictable plot line. It's the film equivalent of a Dutch crisp bake.

Lori Petty is brilliant and Dean Cain pulls off the performance of his career in this entertaining movie. I think I now have a favorite movie of all time: Goodfellas but this movie was pretty good too. Richard Tyson put in a dandy of a performance as well.

"Firetrap" opens as a technological heist movie in the vein of "The Score" or "The Italian Job". Its an adequate enough "Mission Impossible"-inspired opener as Dean Cain squirrels his way through a highly survielled museum (?) to snatch a diamond. Of course he's being helped by the classic sidekick who eats chocolate in a truck and helps him with directions. He starts off as the irritating token black dude, and he only gets more and more annoying.

"Go on with your bad self," he says in one scene. No one can argue with me that he's not the token black dude after such a line. If anyone still should want to, here's some more evidence: "You da man!" So the heist opener is pleasant enough. It quickly shifts into an action picture with a fun shootout and a surprisingly well-done car chase. Heist thriller and action adventure can be a fun mix, so "Firetrap" caught my attention. Until...

After the attention-grabbing beginning, it's time for some good old-fashioned character exposition. This is where his boring, bland, Hallmark-ish family attachment is introduced. His bangin' wife divorced him because of his criminal involvement that led him straight to the slammer. Wanna hear something original? "Just one more job!" He imploringly says.

I can live with a couple clichés in a generic heist/action flick. So I kept watching. Dean and his token black friend for hire train and plan to knock off a company that is quickly going under. So off Dean goes for the score of his life, covertly dressed as a cop to get him in the building.

Then something unfortunate happens: it turns into a burning building escape movie "Inferno"-style. This threw my attention (and approval)off like a train being derailed. If there's one sure way to make a bad movie, it's to ineptly try to bind many genres together. The director whose name sounds a lot like Harry Dunn from "Dumb and Dumber" seemingly has a fitting name. His movie is a complete mess that starts off mildly entertaining, then goes up in flames with an unwatchable second half.