Chill Factor - Pericolo imminente

A scientist (David Paymer) develops a biological lethal weapon and accidentally kills eighteen soldiers in an island during the tests. Colonel Andrew Brynner (Peter Firth) is the commander and becomes the scapegoat of the incident. He is sentenced to go to the prison for ten years. Along this period, he becomes unbalanced and decides to get the bomb to sell to terrorists. He commands a group of mercenaries to steal the bomb from the base where Dr. Richard Long is researching. He shots the scientist but he flees with the weapon to the convenience store where the clerk Tim Mason (Skeet Ulrich) and an ice-cream trucker driver Arlo(Cuba Gooding Jr.) are negotiating. Mason receive this weapon from the injured Dr. Richard Long, with an advice to keep it below 50 F. they try to reach a military fort and try to escape from the colonel's team that is hunting them down.

"Chill Factor" is not a bad film; indeed it is slightly above average for this type of action movie. There are some terrible cuts of the scenes in the edition and the egocentric Arlo is annoying most of the time. The deceptive conclusion makes this film forgettable. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Suando Frio" ("Sweating Cold")

Note: On 02 October 2015, I saw this film again.

There's only one reason to watch "Chill Factor", and that's Peter Firth (Colonel Andrew Brynner) and his bunch of totally useless elite commandos / terrorists.

The plot is awful, the dialogue is terrible, and it makes you wince to think that Cuba Gooding Jnr once won an Oscar. However, this movie contains some of the most useless bad guys you've ever seen .

Laugh out loud as one chap abseils into the path of a moving van, whilst another rides his motorbike into the grill of an oncoming truck. Grab your sides as Peter Firth delivers line after line of hilarious empty threats, movie clichés, and, in some cases, complete and utter rubbish.

The movie lacks pace (apart from a nicely done initial disaster) and has no idea which genre it belongs to. Is it a bad action movie, a send up, or a comedy buddy movie? Who knows? What I do know is that Peter Firth realised he was making an absolute stinker of a movie and took the opportunity to ham-it-up to the max. He's a serious contender for worst movie bad guy ever, who clearly recruits his goons from the school for the seriously challenged.

Watch out for his numerous attempts to steal best movie leer from John Voight in Anaconda!

This film was complete trash, but in a good way. I've always looked upon Cuba Gooding Jnr as a semi decent actor but if this is the kind of film he is going to be starring in, then I can see him descending the same way as Charlie Sheen.

You can see from the outset that the makers tried to make one of those high octane action thrillers, which are ten-a-penny these days. But when you've got a budget that would struggle to finance an episode of quantum leap, then maybe making a film of this kind wasn't such a good idea.

They make use of computer graphics in a lot of the action scenes which, to be honest, doesn't look the worst I have ever seen, but still prompts you to snicker at how bad it is. The most ridiculous of which occurs at the end of the movie, when a chemical weapon which we have been told has the power to blow up basically a quarter of America, detonates in a tunnel.

At this point we are subjected to rotten computer graphics which are so bad that I instantly had flashbacks of Dean Stockwell and the film-making atrocity that was the Langoliers.

But the story is complete nonsense, so even with a budget the size of Lord of the Rings, there would be no way of making the whole thing believable anyway. So you can perhaps see where the producer was coming from i.e. lets make a cheap action thriller and we'll plaster Cuba Gooding's face over the front cover and we'll maybe make some money.

It would've have been better if Eric Roberts had been given the leading role.

I'm no snob who only loves foreign movies and turns his nose at mainstream entertainment - in fact, I am quite forgiving for genre films, and I enjoy a lot of B movies as well. However, this major Hollywood is just as bad as many of the worst B films. Despite a respectable budget, the movie looks quite cheap, sometimes embarrassingly so, like when you see a guide cable hooked to the boat, or when you see that a major highway up a mountain is A DIRT ROAD (?!) The protagonists are annoying little jerks, and you feel sorry for Gooding for playing a foul-mouthed stereotyped hustler. In fact, the chief antagonist is more sympathetic than they are! There's also not that much action, and what there is has been filmed a la "Speed 2" (jiggily camera close-up).

Even if it's free on TV and you're feeling undemanding, you'll feel as frustrated as I felt at the end.

The whole plot was tired and foolish, must of us know that. I myself happen to like cheesy and stupid action movies. Cuba was funny, as I thought he might be, even Skeet turned out to have slight humor in his bones. This is one of those movies where two guys hate each other at first, but end up becoming the best of pals. If you like dumb jokes, and asinine plots, you'll LOVE this movie!