Bovie Movie

In this excellent adventure thriller, Meryl Streep takes her family white-water rafting to try to revive their disintegrating relationships. But what promises to be an enjoyable break soon turns into a nightmare when armed robbers Kevin Bacon and John C Reilly hitch a ride on their raft with $250,000 of stolen loot. Directed by Curtis Hanson, this is a terrific roller-coaster ride filled with hair-raising action scenes and some equally tense moments on the river bank. In a dramatic break from her usual roles, Streep is utterly convincing as the strong-willed wife and mother, taking charge as husband David Strathairn wimps out, and struggling to keep her head above water as the sinister Bacon and the wounded Reilly become distinctly unpleasant. Streep performed many of her own stunts (at one point she was thrown overboard and resurfaced 500 yards downstream where she was rescued by a kayak crew) and put in a lot of training for the role. Her muscles are as pumped-up as the plot — which is little more than a thrill machine with added nuggets of political correctness about the family unit and sexual equality — but the incredible action and Streep’s performance more than compensate for any shortcomings. 

After a string of routine action thrillers, Steven Seagal hit the jackpot with this slick nautical spin on the Die Hard concept. Portraying possibly the unlikeliest cook in the history of cinema, Seagal is the US Navy’s only hope when a crack squad of terrorists, led by Tommy Lee Jones, hijacks his ship. Seagal may lack natural charisma, but a flamboyant performance from Jones, plus some sterling work from fellow baddies Gary Busey and Colm Meaney, more than compensate for his deficiencies. Former Baywatch babe Erika Eleniak has little to do but pop out of a cake and scream a lot, but provides the requisite slice of glamour. Like Seagal, director Andrew Davis earned his spurs with mainly straight-to-video fodder, but here he never misses a beat and stages some awesome set pieces. 

Having exhausted the more traditional threats to human existence (asteroids, volcanos, large boats sinking), the Hollywood disaster movie now moves on to positively esoteric cataclysms: in this case the Earth’s core ceasing — for reasons just barely explained — to rotate. While international landmarks explode and surface-dwellers face terminal sunburn, a secret team of top scientists builds a burrowing machine designed to penetrate the core and set it spinning again. Best described as Journey to the Center of the Earth meets Armageddon, this is by-the-numbers movie-making, with enough excitingly staged set pieces to offset the daft plot. Aaron Eckhart — on sabbatical from the more sober likes of In the Company of Men — puts in a pleasing turn as a boffin recruited to save the planet, while the excellent Stanley Tucci is amusingly slimy as his duplicitous colleague.