sipovic

This movie positioned itself as mindless fun. And as much I agree with "mindless" I found really hard to see this movie as "fun". And there are a lot of reason to it. Steven Sommers forgot the 1st rule of good action - the movie needs a HERO. Yes, formally there is one, but he is no different than dozens other characters with silly names (which I honestly try but couldn't remember). Characters are probably the weakest element of this movie (primitive script doesn't count no more, since now it is a genre standart) . This movie has so many popular names in it but there isn't a good (or decent at least) character. I sometimes even confuse good guys and bad guys. I was a little amused by J. Gordon-Levitt's appearance in Darth Vader's style mask and small (and absolutely unnecessary) cameos of Arnold Vosloo and Jonathan Pryce but that's all. And what even worse, instead giving personality to characters, Sommers made pathetic soap opera flashbacks about them which not only make them looks even more unpleasant but also waste valuable screen time. The most important thing that you must not do during watching this is asking "why?" because if you do, nothing make sense. How dumb man could join elite military squad? Why Gordon-Levitt's character turns evil? Why somebody would build a secret military base in the middle of Egypt? Why somebody would build a secret military base underwater in Alaska where is could be easily buried with one shot in ice? And the most important - why in the vocabulary of ancient Celt was a word for emergency catapulting? There are much more but this I remember after only a few seconds. Yes, this movie has nice action sequence (especially chase in french) but not of the action is that good, for example final fight is a one big mess, nothing of what happened made any sense so the only thing you can do just look on explosions and bright colors and wait till it's over. In total this movie probably a little better than "godawful Transformers 2" but just slightly but still I hardly could imagine any reasonable human being who will want to watch it second time

Unfortunately, this movie is a fail. Especially unfortunately because Val Kilmer acted awesome. This movie is separated on two parts - first happened in interview room where Kilmer is interrogated by Assante and second happened in the same time in the steam room between six other people. And as much I enjoyed really good Kilmer\Assante scenes as much I disliked steam room. Except cute steam effect and and yellow color of screen all rest there was very predictable for this genre - screaming, yelling and everybody went crazy one by one as usual. Boredom. And Eric Robert unfortunately dissolved among nameless actors there. Combining it with pretty ambiguous plot with very dissatisfying twist plot in the end this movie really hasn't a chance. Val Kilmer couldn't save it.