Bovie Movie

Die Hard at the Olympics is the pitch for this shamelessly entertaining action thriller from prolific straight-to-video specialist Albert Pyun. Andrew Divoff plays a terrorist who kidnaps the American women’s swimming team at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. However, he hasn’t reckoned on the resourcefulness of janitor and martial arts champ Linden Ashby and disabled anti-terrorist expert Rutger Hauer. Dumb fun if you can get over the fact that the action looks like it’s taking place at your local sports centre. 

The car’s the star in this boys-and-their-toys action drama that, unfortunately, has too little action to cover for the absence of plot. Nicolas Cage plays a reformed car thief who agrees to pull off an impossible job — steal 50 top-of-the-range cars in four nights — for bad guy Christopher Eccleston, in return for his brother Giovanni Ribisi’s life. Cage ropes in his old crew — including ex-flame Angelina Jolie and silent-but-deadly Vinnie Jones — for the job, but it’s over an hour before we get any stealing or crashing of any description. There’s a nice chase at the end, but the deficiencies in the storyline drive it headfirst into a cul-de-sac of unrealised tension. 

One would’ve thought that Guy Ritchie would have shied away from replicating Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels after the glut of British gangster movies that followed its success. Sadly not. Although Snatch has its merits — among them originality and the talents of Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro, and Jasons Statham and Flemyng — the diamond heist and East End Mob plot are just more of the same. Gangs, cheeky chappies, bare-knuckle boxing and cameos from Vinnie Jones and Mike Reid merge into a “seen it all before” mix. Ritchie can direct, but perhaps he should get someone else to write the material. 

Vinnie Jones doesn’t stray too far from home for his first leading role, working with several of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock company including Snatch producer Matthew Vaughn and an ex-footballer-turned-jailbird role. But what this remake of Robert Aldrich’s 1974 movie The Mean Machine — remember, ex-football pro Burt Reynolds trained his fellow convicts to take on the guards — really misses is Ritchie himself, since first-time director Barry Skolnick and his writers lack the creativity and vitality of Madonna’s film-making husband. That said, if you can overlook the rather thin characters and simplistic plot, the film’s final third — an ill-tempered soccer match between warders and inmates — is very well filmed and highly entertaining. Jones isn’t bad in a made-to-measure role, though the movie’s best moments involve Jason Statham’s maverick keeper and Jason Flemyng’s unconventional commentator. Definitely one for the boys. 

Joey Scalini (Tony SCHIENA) is one of Hollywood’s biggest action stars and the undefeated full-contact martial arts world champion. When his life-long friend and London mob godfather Dragos Molnar (Vinnie JONES) invites him to serve as a celebrity judge on the televised World Fashion & Cosmetics Beauty Pageant, hosted by Mr. Sakata (PAT MORITA), Joey finds himself falling for the most beautiful contestant Tatiana, (LISA McALLISTER). He is fully aware of Dragos’ number one rule that his top four girls are always off-limit, so when he gets caught entwined with Tatiana the new Number One Girl, Dragos orders all doors to be locked and the nightclub stage to be turned into a fighting ring where Joey will have to fight his five bodyguards and Dragos himself for a fight to death. When the closest friends engage into the fiercest and bloodiest battle on live TV, there is much more at stake than the beautiful Tatiana.

This is the film for which female lead Halle Berry was reportedly offered an extra $500,000 (on top of her $2 million fee) to bare her breasts. Well, she does, and it’s all over very quickly, and if anyone is tempted to watch for that reason alone, more fool them. This glossy, expensive computer-heist thriller amounts to very little behind all the fireworks. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the film, as it shows part of what industry types call the “money shot” — a technically brilliant 360-degree explosion that will act as director Dominic Sena’s calling card. He’s so proud of it, in fact, he gives it to us twice, such is the superficial nature of this film. The only real saving grace is Hugh Jackman’s performance as the cool super-hacker hired by counter-terrorist John Travolta to help steal $9.5 billion. Travolta is always watchable but you can’t help thinking this is the least anyone could do with an $80-million budget: a heist, some hostages, a lot of flashy, unrealistic computer hacking and an actress in her underwear. 

Though the 1969 adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard’s crime caper was poor, this updated version from Grosse Pointe Blank director George Armitage is not much better. Taking over the role that marked Ryan O’Neal’s debut, Owen Wilson plays a laid-back petty thief whose roving eye gets him into serious trouble when he falls for criminally minded thrill-seeker Sara Foster. Despite being perfectly cast, Wilson struggles to carry the feature, never completely convincing with his easy charm. It’s partly due to the weak script and unnecessarily convoluted plot, which twists and turns without any real explanation or character development to support it. Even the entertaining smart-talk rapidly degenerates into farce, giving superior actors such as Morgan Freeman and Gary Sinise little to get their teeth into.