The Detonator

Wesley Snipes latest straight to video film is a convoluted mess, horribly reminiscent of Steven Seagal's latest works. The script is horribly written and makes no account for the low budget it is and tries to be too clever for its own good. Sadly too, Snipes has fallen into the trap of having an ADR voice double doing much of his dialogue, and an entire narration that comes every now and again through points in the movie. It's sad to see a guy of Wesley Snipes talent doing garbage like this film, and producing a tired and clearly bored performance, barely bothered to produce his own dialogue. It's become somewhat of a joke with Steven Seagal, the fact he doesn't perform his own dialogue, but it's not something I'd have expected from Snipes. Perhaps it's due to the producer, Andrew Stevens who has worked with Seagal previously, or the director Po-Chi Leong, responsible for Seagal's epically bad Out Of Reach.

The plot involves shady government officials, terrorists who coach soccer teams, disks with incriminating evidence on and a hefty chuck of missing money. Oh and biological weapons. Now how they are connected I don't know but what I can tell you is the diabolical script is pretty hard to fathom and like many of these DTV movies, this likes to include one twist too many. The plot is also uninterestingly told, playing out it's cards with people having shady one to ones in offices and dark alleys etc. It's all kind of "lets have a sit down and dish out some plot points for the sad bastards watching this film!" The pace of the movie as such suffers because despite the dullness of the performances and the storyline, the film does have some nice action scenes. As an example of how a DTV film has successfully put across a storyline of a twisting nature, I give you Dolph Lundgren's directorial debut, the Defender. That movie had it's share of twists and over complexity but the movie has a last hour of almost entirely action, with Dolph under siege form terrorists. The plot points are told in the context of action, on the move, while avoiding death. The movie doesn't stop to tell us what's happening, it doesn't break up the pace. As such although the plot was a little convoluted, it was more forgivable cause the action never let up. The Detonator like too many of these films, stops everything to give us a convoluted walk through of who's bad, and who isn't, before inevitably shifting that round in the pulled from the rear end twist at the end. These movies can often suffer with pacing issues.

Snipes himself as I mentioned is pretty bland here. At the beginning he's putting on a camp persona as he's undercover with some arms dealers. Initially it seemed as if he was enjoying himself but unfortunately the rest of the movie sees him and his occasional voice double sleepwalking through the role. Snipes only comes alive when he's called upon to kick ass. There's some nice action here though, with some swift and crunching martial arts and some nicely punchy shootouts. The film also features a decent car chase. Silvia Colloca co-star and she's not much of an actress, but she is gorgeous, with a costume that screams "look at my cleavage!" The rest of the cast flit in and out with clichéd and uninteresting roles.

Snipes thankfully has better projects lined up from now. He has another team up with Mario Van Peebles, called Hard Luck, then he will do Chasing The Dragon, from the director Chris Nahon, who did Jet Li's Kiss Of The Dragon. Finally Snipes is apparently doing Toussaint, a biographical drama, directed by Danny Glover. The future is suddenly looking brighter for Snipes, but lets remember he was getting extremely well paid for his DTV films, around $7million a movie, possibly more. It's also funny to consider that of all these DTV god's Dolph Lundgren is doing the better films, directing himself, with the enjoyable Defender and the supremely violent and nicely done The Russian Specialist, and what's more he's doing them on a fraction of the budgets of these diabolical offerings from Wesley and Steven Seagal are producing. *1/2

After an undercover mission in Bucharest to disclose an international gang of weapon dealers, the agent Sonni Griffith (Wesley Snipes) is assigned to protect the Romanian Nadia Kaminski (Silvia Colloca), the widow of an accountant of the Romanian Mafia. However, the CIA safe house is broken in by the criminals, and Sonni realizes that the information was leaked from inside the Agency. Alone, trusting only in his friend Michael Shepard (William Hope), Sonni fights to survive and protect Nadia.

The career of Wesley Snipes is downhill. I have just seen this flick, and it is another disappointing movie of this actor, whose career is presently very similar to Steven Segal's one. The movie has many explosions, shots and car chase associated to an awful story and horrible acting. First, the Afro-American Wesley Snipes is chased by the police of Bucharest, but they never find a black American man. I have never been in Romania, but I believe there are not many Afro-Americans in this country. His character does not like to bath, wearing the same clothes along many days. There is no chemistry between Sonni and the sexy Silvia Colloca, but she freely has sex, falls in love for him and shares her fortune with him. The boy that performs Nadia's son is horrible. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "O Detonador" ("The Detonator")

When the Rumanian Mafia break into the safe house he's storing their accountant, Snipes' bosses are angry with him. Telling only his buddy, William Hope, he gets ahold of Silvia Colloca, the accountants widow, and runs around Bucharest (the architecturally uninteresting parts) trying to keep her alive.

The script consists about 97% of crashing-cars stunts, and I figured out about three minutes in who in the CIA was leaking information to the bad guys. There are plenty of shaky-cam shots, and I think there may be more footage with the camera tilted than with the camera level. Although Snipes and Miss Colloca are both capable actors, this is a movie where more care was taken in making sure that the lady's brassiere always rises the same height above he blouse than the script. Unless you're one of those people who think that crashing cars and gunfire make a good movie.

I rented this movie last week and after watching Snipes' 7 Seconds movie, this one was definitely a significant improvement.

One of the things that bothered me was there were numerous areas where I could not understand what was being said and I even hit the remote to go back again and again and still remained stumped. There was no English closed-captions/subtitles option on the DVD, so I was stuck with moving on. One comment from numerous Asians I know whom have come to live in the USA and have learned to speak our language is, "I try to watch African-American movies, but can't understand what they are saying." I had a few areas of trouble with understanding some English spoken in Van Damme's movie Second in Command and that DVD didn't offer English subtitles/closed captions option either.

The second main thing that bothered me was with the sound affects. If you close your eyes and listen to the gunfire and explosions ... they all sounded the same, like someone banging a bat against a piece of thick glass. I appreciated the sound in one scene near a swimming pool and could hear the pool's water, but then poof the sound of this just disappeared ... but was nicely replaced with the sound of a light breeze through the trees. At least in this movie the irritating same old clapping boom boom sound was absent for the background action scenes. But, do all car engines racing around in streets and different guns being fired and numerous explosions have the same sounds? This movie like 7 Seconds contains pretty much the same visual candies and the car chases really could get lessened and shortened. They reek of filler padding to add length to what would probably be a TV length show if cut out. We have come to expect action films to have loads of visual candy, but the combination of lackluster sound affects and padding took this movie down more notches than it deserved. The visuals were good, but my ears were insultingly assaulted. LOUD can go only so far before I'm mentally handicapped.

Once again, the script was very good and so was the acting. There was not as much of Snipes' bopping heads as other movies. Snipes has a tough guy image that perhaps he should shed and consider calmer/quieter scripts. This movie would have done better if it had less padding and a better sound crew (plus add subtitles!). I wasn't disappointed in watching this movie and would recommend it for at least a one time viewing. I wouldn't buy the DVD.

The CIA secret agent Sonni Griffith(Wesley Snipes) travels to Romania for investigating a gunrunners and avoid the selling a nuclear weapon.Meanwhile he's killing Romanian gangster at a national soccer event,he's interrogating,gunning down people and burning suspects.Griffith is arrested at the Romanian semifinal cup match.Then is jailed but is freed by his friend ,the CIA agent Michael Shepard(William Hope).He's assigned a new mission ,scorting the Romanian named Nadia(Silvia Colocca).But he aware that Nadia is pursued by Josef Bostanescu(Tim Duttom),a megalomaniac nasty,he owns the stadium and soccer team and is preparing the biggest deal he've ever made.He tries to get from Nadia the information he needs: the location where are the thirty millions of dollars that she hid of her murdered ex-husband and accountant of Bostenescu and he wishes for buying the atomic bomb.When an information into CIA is leaked,allegedly from his chief(Michael Brandon)and reveals where are placed ,they must fight to survive against the gunrunners and save themselves.

The movie displays suspense,thriller, unstopped action and lots of violence when the killing happen.It's an average actioner movie with some entertaining moments but also with no sense scenes.Wesley is nice as action hero ,his early performances were as serious actor in dramas ,later turning as tough action man in films with big budget like¨Money train,Murder at 1600,US Marshall and Blade trilogy¨,although nowadays he solely movies with middling and low budget like as ¨Unstoppable,7 seconds,Chaos,The marksman¨.The movie is produced by Andrew Stevens Entertainment Inc.Andrew Stevens(son of Stella Stevens) was a famous actor of the 80s,today turned in successful producer,besides is produced by the starring Snipes and by Pierre Spengler,he's a veteran producer of known movies like the saga Superman-Reeve and the classic Three Musqueteers. The motion picture is shot in Castel studios of Romania where have been film the last vehicles of Steven Seagal and Van Damme.