I watched this film to play along with the "How Did This Get Made" podcast. Sometimes, the movies they do have enough about them that they're entertaining - not this time though, as this was truly dire.
30 years after a cataclysmic event has left most of the world uninhabitable, Ryan Murphy (Mario Lopez) joins the elite soldier training programme, ran by the formidable Sergeant Bradley (Richard Grieco). Murphy has an ulterior motive though, as he's looking for Liles (Charles Mattocks) a friend of his who joined the programme a few months earlier. As Murphy conducts his investigation, he discovers that, even amongst these soldiers, there is an elite tier, trained by Bradley himself for a secretive objective that only Bradley truly knows.
I mean, your tolerance for this might depend upon how forgiving you are for the fact that its an extremely low budget enterprise. The sets look cheap, the special effects, both practical and digital are poor, stunts are limited and the standard of acting in general is bad. Lopez never was much of an actor and though his charm works at the start of the film, where everyone hates him and he just has to be smug and annoying, but when he has to care about things, later in the film then he starts to struggle. He's like Marlon Brando compared to Grieco though, who's maniacal Sergeant Bradley has a plot reason for being a little unusual, but his decision to scream "for the love of Pete" every two minutes is as baffling as it is annoying. Other characters do swear, and die, and have sex, so why he chooses that particular juvenile phrase is really annoying.
Confusingly, given that they're supposed to be on an isolated base in the Arctic - the soldiers smuggle a couple of girls into the base, one of whom is played by Jamie Pressley, who is the only real positive about the whole film. She's really quite young here, but the only one capable of delivering a decent line read, let alone portray any emotion and it's really not surprising that she would have the best career of anyone in this one. Even she though can't defeat the mind-numbingly terrible, strewn together storyline that this film has, where huge great plot points that the film takes time to establish, then are ignored by the film when they need something different to happen. Then the ending... what?
An awful time that I really don't recommend.
