Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
The Foywonder is a true lover of all things awful in the world of film. He doesn’t mock bad movies. He doesn’t hate them for being bad. He revels in their badness. He adores their awfulhood. He wallows in the sheer horribility of it all. And, when he is done, when he comes up for air, he can’t help but share a bit of that love with all of you. So, even though I figure everyone has already seen the film (hey, someone helped it earn that $95 million opening weekend), here’s The Foywonder with his take on EXTREME OPS, a movie that features not just Devon Sawa, but snowboarding!! How can you resist?!
SPOILER WARNING!!!
I have a bone to pick with Ain’t It Cool News. Normally AICN does a great job providing us with advance reviews of all the latest movies and even some foreign films that may never see the light of day at an American multiplex. And yet, for all your hard work, you have completely ignored a movie that came out this weekend called EXTREME OPS. None of the AICN regulars have bothered to take the time to put into words they’re thoughts on this movie. Using your search engine, I can’t find a single bit of information ever reported about this cinematic endeavor. It’s as if it doesn’t even exist. Why is this? I mean, come on, you guys endlessly pimped THE RULES OF ATTRACTION and nobody saw that film, so why the complete snubbing of EXTREME OPS? It’s not like anyone’s going to see this film either! In fact, I understand the movie is already bombing so badly that by the time you finish reading this very paragraph, it may have already begun playing at your local dollar theater. Since nobody else at AICN, or, from the looks of things, the movie going public at large is willing to take the EXTREME OPS challenge, I will.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really the target audience for a movie like this. I’m over the age of 25 and I’m just not into this whole X-GAMES stuff. I think John Stewart once said it best when talking about the Skeleton, in which competitors race headfirst down the ice at about 80 mph on a sled that looks like a large lunch tray, becoming a medal sport at the last Winter Olympics. “That’s not a sport! That’s a bet!” Frankly, I don’t think I could skateboard 10 feet without falling off and busting my ass. I can only guess that any attempt at snowboarding I were to make would result in the same result only with a softer landing. Personally, I view all these extreme sports in much the same fashion as I do monster trucks. Sure, it’s kinda neat the first time you see it, but you can only watch a guy flip around on a board or watch a giant truck crush cars so many times before the novelty wears off. In the case of EXTREME OPS, if you’ve seen one person shredding snow in slow motion then you’ve seen them all. Personally, my idea of extreme is paying full price to see junk like this. So After buying my ticket and loading up on popcorn and soda, I took my place at the very back of the nearly empty theater to watch this movie for myself. To be perfectly honest, a movie like this has the advantage over me. My expectations couldn’t possibly be lower, so it has nowhere to go but up. Maybe it’ll surprise me. Yeah, right! So after enduring the abysmal trailer for this alleged action comedy called NATIONAL SECURITY in which Martin Laurence continues to set the black race back about 50 years and Steve Zahn, in a show of racial unity, joins him to help set back the white race as well, EXTREME OPS begins.
In order to do justice to this movie in this review, I need to get specific about the plot, the characters, and certain details, like the climax. Here’s your SPOILER WARNING once again assuming you’re actually worried about having a movie like EXTREME OPS spoiled.
Three extreme sports enthusiasts who advertising firms hire to perform the kind of stunts you see in your typical Mountain Dew commercial are hired by a Japanese electronics corporation to film a commercial hyping their new digital camcorder by out skiing an avalanche. The group jets off to the Austrian Alps to film the commercial and wind up staying at this secluded mountain resort matte painting that is still under construction and looks like something out of a Swiss sci-fi film. Unfortunately, the unfinished resort also happens to be the current hideout of a Serbian war criminal who just faked his death days earlier to escape prosecution by an international tribunal. When the evil ex-general finds out that they’ve unwittingly gotten him on tape, he, of course, has to kill them and retrieve the tape. So goes what passes for the plot of EXTREME OPS.
Now what the hell is Rufus Sewell doing in this movie? He’s basically been saddled into what I like to call the “Bill Paxton role” and by that I mean that this is the kind of part that Bill Paxton or someone with Bill Paxton-like qualities would play. After making a major career breakthrough with FRAILTY earlier this year, I might have to stop calling it that since Mr. Paxton appears as if he’s finally on the verge of bigger and better things. Rufus Sewell should only be so lucky. Perhaps there just isn’t a big market in mainstream Hollywood movies for someone who looks like Eric Bogosian and has the personality of WWE wrestler William Regal and this was just the best part he could get. Maybe, like many British actors in Hollywood, he’s just decided to take make a quick buck. Either way, I can almost envision the conversation he had with his agent leading up to taking the role in this film:
SEWELL: Look, I’m tired of doing art house movies. Get me a role in a movie that will actually make money so that I’ll be able to raise my asking price. And this time, I don’t want to play a villain, I don’t want to wear period clothes, and I wanna be the one to get the girl.
AGENT: Well, I do have this one script called THE EXTREMISTS. I know it’s a terrible title. I understand they’re going to change it before the movie gets released. Anyway, there is a part you could play, but...
SEWELL: I’ll do it.
AGENT: Uh, Rufus, maybe you should actually read the script first?
SEWELL: Just go work out the deal.
AGENT: It’s a movie about extreme skiers who…
SEWELL: A paid ski vacation? This is going to be great!
AGENT: But your character hardly does anything other than…
SEWELL: Even better! More time to ski!
AGENT: Rufus, I’m begging you. I have other scripts you can look at. I know I can get you a better role in a better movie!
SEWELL: Oh, really? Like you did with BLESS THE CHILD? Can you get me another part in a movie as good as that one was?
AGENT: (Long Pause) I’ll contact the producers and work out the details.
Sewell’s role in the movie consists of skiing, filming others skiing, arguing with the comic relief, and talking on the cell phone with his girlfriend. Seriously, seeing Mr. Sewell sleepwalk his way through this movie makes you just want to put your arms around him, give him a big hug, and tell him that everything’s going to be okay.
I don’t know if I can say the same for Devon Sawa, who plays the junior member of the team. I’m guessing he too was out for a paid ski vacation because his character development consists of having more lines than everyone else. The only thing that made him stand out from the crowd was his appearance. Watching him in this movie, he looked like someone who has been partying way to hard. He’s seems to have developed the puffy faced, vacant stare of someone who constantly has the urge to scratch his face, if you know what I mean. I hope that it was just its all for the role, but considering the fact that there is essentially nothing to his part and it quite literally could have been played by just about anyone reading this right now, well, I just hope my suspicions are completely without merit
Rounding out the group are the afore mentioned comic relief in the form of their producer who is a typical corporate yuppie weasel who constantly bitches about everything and Bridgette Wilson, I mean Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, as the Gold Medal skier who is supposed to star in the commercial and perform the dangerous stunt of out skiing an avalanche, but Sewell keeps giving her a hard time because he doesn’t think she can do it. For reasons unknown, they also decide to add two other young extremists to the group in the form of this one annoying as hell guy who seems to have learned everything he knows about acting from watching Matthew Lillard in HACKERS and this raver chick who not only bears a passing resemblance to Angelina Jolie, but seems to be playing the exact same character she did in HACKERS only substituting extreme sports with computer hacking. These two also persistently mock the Gold Medalist because they believe competitive skiing is child’s play compared to their EXTREME!!! kind.
Now that you’ve heard the plot and a description of the protagonists, let me sum up for you the first hour of the movie. You’ve got skiing, more skiing, skiing during the day, skiing at night, snowboarding, more snowboarding, snowboarding during the day, snowboarding during the night, triggering an avalanche, people filming the avalanche they just triggered, people getting into a helicopter, people getting out a helicopter, and, the always popular, scenes of people walking around while carrying heavy luggage or equipment. Keep in mind all of this is set to generic techno music. And a personal message to director Christian Duguay, footage of people skiing/snowboarding in slow motion is not unto itself exhilarating. The only innovative or should I say “EXTREME!!!!!!!” scenes consist of those two extraneous characters snowboarding off a rooftop onto a flaming bar and hanging off the back of a speeding train with a rope and essentially jet skiing behind it with their snowboards. The first is laughable because it’s so obvious they’re gliding off that rooftop via wires and the latter annoyed me because the scene just ends and cuts to them at the train station. I really wanted know how the hell they got back on the train especially since they were practically destroying their boards at the end of that scene. It was about at the time this scene took place that I came to the conclusion that if EXTREME OPS were an actual flesh and blood person, it would be Jerry O’Connell. Ever see Jerry O’Connell on a talk show? He’s always comes across as someone who is trying so damn hard to hip and funny that he instead ends up coming across as some poseur that you have the overwhelming urge to give a wedgie to and then dunk his head in a toilet. Yep, EXTREME OPS is Jerry O’Connell personified.
Now remember how the director of BRING IT ON bragged about how the bikini car wash scene was going to help sell the movie? Well, the moment Sawa’s character gets the hot tub working, I instantly predicted that this was going to be the “let’s get the girls half naked to sell the movie” scene. Boy, was I wrong! This movie can’t even do that right! This whole hot tub scene accomplishes absolutely nothing and doesn’t even deliver on the titillation aspect unless you really want to see the Matthew Lilliard wannabe get buck naked and roll around the snow like a jackass during a drunken game of Truth or Dare. When Mrs. Wilson-Sampras is shown briefly getting out of the tub in a red, one-piece swimsuit, instead of going, “Man, she’s hot,” I instead found myself wondering, “Why the hell did she bring her Baywatch uniform with her on a trip to the Alps?”
It doesn’t stop there because immediately following this scene we get one in which a drunk and despondent Bridgette Wilson begins pouring her heart out to the Sewell character with whom up until this scene she hasn’t really gotten along with. She bemoans how she’s always skied competitively and it was always more like work than play and that she’s not as good as the others because she can’t ski their EXTREME!!! style and so on. I’m sitting there thinking, “You a Gold Medalist! They, on the other hand, are blithering idiots trying to commit suicide! What the hell are you upset about? You’re better than them!” But, alas, this, in the end, is a movie about conformity. Yep, conforming to that what others perceive to be hip and cool and anyone who doesn’t shall be shunned. In other words, the MTV mentality! Coincidentally, this scene that lays the groundwork for a romantic subplot between the two of them takes place mere minutes after the scene in which Sewell’s character breaks up with his girlfriend on the phone. Amazingly, the romance never materializes. In fact, it’s just never followed up on. The same goes for the budding romance between Sawa and the raver chick. Disney movies are less platonic than this film!
And it’s absolutely hysterical how this movie makes such a huge deal about outskiing an avalanche and you just know that this is going to be the big F/X scene it’s building up to. Unfortunately, XXX already did it, and did it much, much better too back in August. Talk about a movie being ill timed.
By now, you’re probably asking, “What about the bad guys?” Well, basically it goes like this. This hot, European model-type the guys saw on their Austrian train ride shows up at the under construction resort in the dead of night and is escorted up stairs where she is reunited with her Serbian strongman sugar daddy. Two of the guys follow her and secretly tape her making out with the wanted man. They don’t realize who he is and life goes on until the last half hour when one of the bad guy’s henchmen spies them going through video footage of the shoot and sees that they caught his boss on tape. When told of this, the war criminal assumes that they are CIA agents that are spying on him before they come to arrest him so he must have them killed. Up until the last half-hour, the movie seemed destined to be a lame retread of last year’s OUT COLD, but then the bad guys finally remember that they’re not supposed to be passive and suddenly the film shift from being really lame to utterly ridiculous.
I used to think that the evil warlock that Chuck Norris quite literally karate kicks to Hell in his movie HELLBOUND was the single worst movie villain I have even seen. Well, that’s all changed now because the bad guys in EXTREME OPS are the stupidest, the lamest, the most idiotic, the most inept, the most mentally retarded, the most brain dead, and the all around worst villains I have ever, AND I MEAN EVER, seen in a movie! And you know they must be the villains because they all wear black! If this international war criminal is hiding out there and suspects that they are with the CIA, then why in the hell did he ever let allow them stay there to begin with? And why is it that neither he nor his military goons are able to hit the broadside of a barn? And there there’s the bad guy’s son who looks like a scrawnier, oilier version of Sean Penn and doesn’t have a single brain cell in his head who ends up meeting an early demise in a way that will most certainly dumbfound audiences like it did me. It’s literally one of those “You’ve got to be kidding me” moments.
It all culminates in the movie’s unintentionally hysterical finale. The Serbians have commandeered the helicopter and have our heroes trapped on the side of a mountain. As the Serbian warlord is shooting at them, all of a sudden, from right behind him, this Randall “Tex” Cobb look-a-like dressed in blue jeans and a baseball cap who we’ve never seen before suddenly sticks his arm out of the helicopter and begins shooting at them. It’s like one of the actor’s playing a henchman got sick the day they filmed this scene and so the filmmakers just went to the local redneck bar, found a replacement, and then didn’t even bother to send him to wardrobe. Needless to say, I busted a gut laughing the moment this guy came on-screen because he just looked totally out of place. After wounding two of the good guys, one seriously, the big bad has a clear shot at Devon Sawa when suddenly his gun jams and then before he can grab another gun, the pilot tells him they have to turn around and go back because they’re almost out of fuel. Well, not only do they go back to refuel, they apparently also decided to call it a day because night falls and they still haven’t come back to kill these people who it was supposed to be so urgent that they eliminate immediately.
Meanwhile, the Serb’s mistress has had a change of heart and agrees to help the corporate weasel, who had been taked hostage back at the lodge, escape on the condition that he take her with him. He agrees. They escape. The next day, the chopper loaded with the main villain and what’s left of his heavily armed Serbian nogoodniks finally decide to return and finish the job. Sewell and Sampras, both of whom have made it off the cliff, begin skiing down the mountain and the chopper pursues them.
Okay, let me pause here for just a second. There is one other member of the team who I didn’t mention earlier. I guess the best way to describe him would be to say that he’s the team’s stunt coordinator. He has very little screen time and even fewer actual lines of dialogue. Usually, he’s just off somewhere by himself on a higher peak overseeing that everything goes well. He’s also the guy helped off the bad guy’s son in that most ludicrous manner. Well, as the helicopter is pursuing those two, he, well, I can’t really accurately describe what he did because it happened so fast that it was a total blur. Whatever he did was some sort of over the top snowboarding stunt involving some cable wires that destroyed the chopper’s rotor causing it to crash into the mountain and explode. Everyone cheers. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this extraneous character who is barely in the movie just comes out of nowhere not once, but twice and single handily killed all the bad guys! He’s like Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe! He doesn’t talk, but he shows up just in time to save the day! If the way they took out the chopper was part of a plan, they apparently forgot to include the scene where they formulated this plan. It all just happens from completely out of left field without any build-up whatsoever.
Before anyone in the audience has a chance to truly comprehend what has just happened, the helicopter’s explosion triggers an avalanche and so Sewell and Sampras are off to the races again. Now ever though they are in mortal danger from this impromptu avalanche that they were totally unprepared for, Sewell, who is out in front, still has the frame of mind to whip out the camcorder and film Wilson outrunning the avalanche and then tosses her the camera so that she can momentarily film the pursuing avalanche herself. Narrowly escaping it with their lives, the movie abruptly cuts back to the Madison Avenue office where the Japanese businessman is watching the finished commercial and the Serbian war criminals mistress now works. Sewell, like a proud papa, looks out the window and sees the gang, even the one who had suffered a near fatal gunshot wound, performing some crazy skateboard stunt on top of a moving Amtrak train and that’s it. More techno music plays, the closing credits roll, and I sit there in my seat staring at the screen in a state of slack-jawed disbelief.
There is simply no way in hell that I can in good conscience recommend that anyone rush out and see EXTREME OPS, but MY GOD do you need to see the last 15 minutes of it. EXTREME OPS is crap, but it’s crap in a Golan-Globus sorta way. Like many a Golan-GlobusIt falls into this gray zone of being cheaper looking than your typical Hollywood production, yet more expensive than your typical direct-to-video flick. Oh, if only EXTREME OPS had been released in 1987 by Cannon Films starring Michael Dudikoff in the Rufus Sewell role with the rest of cast played by the offspring of more famous actors. Toss in Richard Lynch as the villain and cast Sho Kosugi as the silent stunt coordinator who saves the day and you’d probably had a minor hit followed by a string of direct-to-video sequels. If you include the fact that XXX already did the centerpiece of the movie, EXTREME OPS came along about 15 years and 5 months too late.
To sum it all up, I’ve seen worse. Hell, I’ve seen CHILL FACTOR and MOST WANTED so I’ve most assuredly seen far, far worse. Wait for EXTREME OPS to come out on video and then watch it when it airs on pay cable. I’m predicting right now that in the not-to-distant future, this film is going to be in heavy rotation on the USA Network. As for me, if I want a movie about extreme sports, I’ll just go back and rent Hal Needham’s 1986 BMX racing flick, RAD.
RAD is no Jerry O’Connell!
The Foywonder
I’m convinced. Bring on the Sewell! Bring on the Sawa! Bring on the DEEEEEEEP HURRRRRTING!! And bring on more Foywonder while you’re at it!
"Moriarty" out.
