Epicenter

I was really looking forward to watching this movie for a while but then I found it was airing on UPN network and that kind of disappointed me. It was a decent action movie but it lacked the martial art fight scenes that I was hoping on since Gary Daniels was starring in it. Gary's role was kind of like a villian role until the end of the movie I didn't really like that. If I were to rate I would rate **out of****.

"Epicenter" has a neat premise but spotty execution, and is ultimately undone by lousy casting. But it's nowhere near as bad as the dogpile of negative commentators here would have you believe.

Gary Daniels is a techie who tried to sell spyplane plans to a foreign government, but is caught in the act by an FBI agent and stressed single mom laughingly played by Traci Lords.

Suddenly, the Greatest Earthquake Ever Known doesn't send them to the Land of the Lost, but just makes it a little bit more difficult for Traci to deliver Daniels to the proper authorities, while the bad guys try to execute them both.

You know what? This movie was a hoot. It was a low-budget, Traci-Lords-starring, direct-to-video, not-enough-Jeff-Fahey hoot, and all you h8ters can just hush the heck up.

So what if this movie repurposes a scene from "Metro"? Have you seen "Metro"? I wouldn't wipe the schmutz under my nads with the rest of that movie. I'm glad someone put its one decent action scene to a better use.

And to all those folks crying, "Hey, that's the same elevator from 'Speed'!" Find a girl, kiss her, and stop spending your time pointing out similar elevators in movies.

Dollar Tree had this for, yep, a dollar. Not sure I'd spend much more, but glad I laid out the buck for this one.

You can tell this movie is truly low-budget... I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the chase scene after the first 20 or so minutes into the movie, where two guys are chasing a cable car with their convertible... That whole 5-minute sequence was taken from the movie Metro, featuring Eddie Murphy and Michael Rapaport! You can see during a few clips the persons sitting in the convertible are clearly Murphy/Rapaport, even without freezing the frame.

I started watching this movie with a fairly open-mind, but taking scenes from another movie and then very poorly incorporating them to the plot is just wrong. Even with a low budget.

If you can't afford to make a scene such as this one, don't take a whole sequence from another film, think of something else! Watching this movie might have been a good way to kill off a couple of hours on a late night, but that scene was just too cheesy to even remotely try and take the rest of it seriously.

A run-of-the-mill spy/action movie which entertains until the earthquake stops everything for several minutes just for the sake of special effects. If they HAD to have an earthquake in the movie, they could at least have tried to relate it to the plot! It's as though the story was already written and then someone decided they wanted an earthquake movie, picked the script off the shelf and then pasted an earthquake in over the top. A totally confusing mismatch, but take the earthquake out and you have an OK movie.

The building special effects were quite good, but others were rather poor - in fact they showed the same footage of a pipe being forced apart at least three times, once mirrored to make it look like a different one!

From the beginning, I was intrigued by mystery and the hi-tech security measures, but then came the car chase, and I decided Epicenter was aimed at the 10 to 12-year-old crowd.... cars flying through the air and a train crash that sent it rolling sideways, over and over. But fairly soon it turned into an x-rater with fully nude dancers in a night club, followed by a very explicit sex scene. The acting was mostly good, but the script made both the good guys and bad guys more interested in their jobs than in the severe earthquake all around them. The movie did keep me watching, so I rate it at five.