Covert One: The Hades Factor

Lt. Smith (Dorff) is a former member of Covert One a government spy agency. Smith is engaged to Dr. Amsden (Myles) both having worked on virus outbreaks in the past and present. When a hemorrhagic virus named Hades, first seen during the Soviet Afghan war, starts to pop up in the USA, the government tries to hide the potential threat while investigating where it came from and race to create a cure. Terrorists are involved in this action thriller, and infiltrate far easier than one would imagine. Rachel (Sorvino) a renegade Covert One operative and everyone she comes in contact with dies. As Covert One tries to untangle the web to nab all those involved, it becomes clear that the origin of this plot is a old enemy. A sad thing is that it reinforced negative racial and cultural stereotypes. But it was on par with B+ or A- movies.

Lovers of action movies, fans of TV series like '24', readers of Robert Ludlum novels and similar have good chances to like this movie. It starts very well, with three mysterious virus-related deaths and a failed transaction of bio-weapons in Berlin that leaves as well its dose or corpses and evolutes quickly in a national crisis type of story, sort of a combination between 'Outbreak' and '24'.

The film is well done, well acted, the pace of the action does not trail almost at all and the story has the kind of logic you would expect from such stories. The principal problem may be the format - the two and half hours are too long for a feature film (although we have seen many similar length films lately on big screens) and two short for a TV series.

The professionalism of filming and acting lends more on the feature film side. Stephen Dorff in the principal role is credible and likable, and the principal critic one can bring to his act is that he looks so much as Jack Bauer. Mira Sorvino, Sophia Myles, Blair Underwood, Colm Meaney are all at their place and give credible acts. The only mis-casting seemed to me to be Anjelica Houston, which did not seem to be very comfortable as a Madam President.

It's not great cinema, just fair entertainment. Action movie fans should not miss this film, the other can skip it without problems.

Average.

This is the third bad (not good) movie in a row based upon novels by Robert Ludlum. I think that Ludlum is just too complicated for modern-day Hollywood, whose directors, producers and writers have all formed themselves by watching MTV music clips and PC Video games. Accordingly, this film is too fast, too short and too simple to be able to even begin doing justice to the novel. There is absolutely no character building, we have no insight into the motives, no details about the plot, etc...

In my opinion, the only decent filming of a Ludlum Novel was the first 'Bourne Identity' made sometime in the 80-ies. But then, those where completely different times...

The first part of the series was good as a movie in general. But I, being a fan of the book, was disappointed that the story was loosely based on the Gayle/Ludlum work. I have wanted them to make a movie out of this series of books for some time now. And I guess in my anticipation and already thinking about how the movie would be, I was a little angry. I can understand the director fast forwarding to recent events, but changing some of the backgrounds of the characters and COLONAL John Smith being out of USAMRID. But again, as a movie, without reading the book, this was a good story. Sorry, I just had to find a faucet to vent my thoughts.

If you enjoyed the Dustin Hoffman movie Outbreak, the TV series 24 and X-Files and the HBO/BBC series TheCell, and wondered what would happen if you mixed them altogether, then this is the result.

It trundles along at the usual pace of all the above, with Stephen Dorff doing his best Jack Bauer impersonation, in both looks and personality. Naturally the love of his live is offed fairly early on and that sets up the lone-agent working to recover the truth. Very 24'esque.

The X-Files element is all the government conspiracies that are woven into the plot and that makes for more distraction than anything else. The story is a good one on its own merit, no need to keep mixing in nonsense that really only serves to bog down the movie.

But on the whole it is a good watch.