Crash Dive

Small budget ripoff of Under Siege (minus Erika Eleniak topless) staring Michael Dudikoff and produced/directed by Andrew Stevens.

A movie to see if you are not in the mood for some heavy thinking. There is plenty of action, the usual amount of dead people, and some pretty decent special effects. The movie is your standard terrorist movie, although it has the twist that these terrorists are working from inside a nuclear submarine. Since large parts of the plot are not too believable, the viewer should watch this in a relaxed state, just to enjoy some adrenaline, and not pay attention to the odd things that sometimes happen (like the guy can swim faster than the sub or a laptop computer that melts like it was made of foam). All in all, enjoyable if you are bored.

This non-entity of a movie doesn't deserve a long review, so here are my brief thoughts. You will have seen every single element of this movie done better elsewhere. It is Die Hard and Under Siege on a submarine, yet so much worse than any of the films in either series. It is utterly predictable and totally unmemorable apart from the single worst shootout I have ever seen in a movie. This shootout manages to be completely mesmerising due to the total lack of jeopardy and the catastrophic editing. It is staggeringly poorly done, however, for this hilariously bad sequence I have added an extra star.

I saw an episode of Good Witch and was looking up Catherine Bell and saw she was in this. Ironically I don't even remember her appearing in this mess. Pretty sure she wasn't even on the sub, despite the billing.

This was a bad movie. The technical flaws were obvious even to a civilian who never served on a missile boat. And that wasn't even the worst part. The story was written by Xerox Machine from Under Siege.

In Under Siege we had ex-SEAL Segal putting down the Slim Jim's long enough to defeat bad guys headed by Tommy Lee Jones who took over a battleship. This had ex-SEAL Dudekoff putting down his daughter long enough to defeat bad guys consisting of D-listers with Russian accents. Dudekoff is no Segal, which is bigger insult than it sounds, and his acting was on the order of the tension created by whether he would make it back in time for his daughter's piano recital.

This movie had everything I hate about one-man-army action movies. The bad guys killed ten times their number in good guys before they're finally stopped by our hero. It's great that they're eventually stopped, sure, but I'd prefer my fictional hero to prevent further loss of life from the moment he enters the fray. A one-man-army cartoon character who is continually outsmarted and outmaneuvered while more people die is just another James Bond. Been there, done that.

For all the fight scenes in this movie, you'd think they would have devoted some creativity to them...Ooops Sorry, There was no creativity in the entire movie. The director should be shooting video of the South Dakota RV Association annual meeting instead.

It really comes across as soft-headed and amateurish to the point of being offensive. They entire thing stumbles in a gooey fog through second rate (why not use first rate?) cliché's.

The best they can get out of the few serious actors in it is a sort of half-hearted professionalism, where they recreate (from better memories) some more prestigious and more watchable previous roles.

Painful. Turn it off and go clean the garage. You'll have more fun.