Nuclear Alert

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

Some endearing characters played by a few name actors make this a tolerable ride. The great Frederic Forest (Blue Duck in Lonesome Dove and Cook in Apocalypse Now) plays a USN Admiral. However, the lack of competent technical advice made the military side of this submarine action thriller hard to take. On the SSN sub Ulysses, the new XO, we are told, is the youngest in USN history, yet he has --shall we say-- limited social skills. And his immediate subordinate ( a Lt. Commander) derisively refers to him as a "college boy". Problem is ALL USN commissioned officers are college graduates. Hatches are called "doors", lieutenant commanders are called "Lieutenant ", and an ex Navy SEAL also moonlighted as a submarine designer. Prior service guys will find these mistakes--and others like them--a hoot. But if you can say "whatever" and let it ride, it will provide a decent final act for your patience.

This was a really bad movie. It uses every cliché ever known to man, the 'romance' was even less unbelievable than most bad movies, and it was completely militarily inaccurate. Case in point: Catherine Bell's character Lt. Cmdr Lisa Starks was referred to as "Lieutenant" by all other characters. And she answered the phone with "Lieutenant Stark". Uh hello. A Lt. Cmdr is always addressed as "Commander." You'd think that even without any sort of original story line that they would have at least tried to get the technical details right Don't bother seeing this one. U-571 is much better. And Stealth is much more entertaining even if its kinda cliché too.

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.