This and Streetfighter marked a turning point in the career of Jean-Claude Van Damme - his movies were getting steadily better, Universal Soldier and Time Cop were earning him more and more fans, then he started to flounder with some movies that were crap. This must have sounded like a no brainer - Die Hard set in an ice hockey rink, reuniting Van Damme with Time Cop director Peter Hyams, throwing in Powers Boothe as a villain and giving a decent budget. But the filmmakers totally stuff it, ending up with a ridiculous movie.
Why is it so bad? It's lazy - there's no logic. It's unpleasant. The villains are not smart, they are dumb - they kill people constantly: random workers, security guards, members of the general public, hostages; I think the intention was to go "oh yeah, they're going there, they're doing it, killing little old ladies" but the death toll is so high you become completely desensitized to people dying. There's no mystery to their plan - they take over, saying it's all for money, and that's it, there's no real twist except the head of security being in on the plan.
There's no reality - explosions are going off outside the game, there is a siege situation, and yet the audience of the game are completely unaware of what's going on outside (no one ducks outside? no one leaves? no one tries to contact a family member? even with the media there?). A villain runs around in a large penguin suit for extended periods of time, during which time she kidnaps Van Damme's daughter and fights to the death with Van Damme (was Peter Hyams taking this piss?). The main hostage is the vice president which means people are constantly saying "we need to rescue the vice president" which sounds ridiculous. Powers Boothe drinks scotch, smokes and relaxes during the hostage situation. Another villain plays a video game!
Also Jean Claude's two kids are there and his little girl especially witnesses a lot of violence, which is upsetting, even if it is comic book - she screams, almost plunges to her death, sees several people get shot. And his little son is an annoying brat.
It's as though the filmmakers thought up all these "great bits" that they "just had to have" and tried to construct a movie around it. So there's Jean Claude pretending to be a hockey player, and using the lights outside the stadium to pass on a message, and using sign language to communicate with his son. And it's just dumb and stupid and annoying.
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