CHILL FACTOR (Warner Bros.) Starring: Cuba Gooding Jr., Skeet Ulrich, Peter Firth, David Paymer. Screenplay: Drew Gitlin and Mike Cheda. Producers: James G. Robinson. Director: Hugh Johnson. MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity, gore) Running Time: 104 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
For nearly 15 minutes, CHILL FACTOR actually warrants comparison to the film it tries so hard to bring to mind. The sequence occurs on a switchback section of highway, where our protagonists -- Mason (Skeet Ulrich) and Arlo (Cuba Gooding Jr.) -- are trying to escape our villains -- a military unit headed by renegade army man Maj. Andrew Brynner (Peter Firth). Mason is trying to get a dangerous and volatile chemical defoliant known as "Elvis," which must be kept below 50 degrees to avoid a deadly explosion, to a military base, and has commandeered ice cream delivery driver Arlo's truck for the job; Brynner wants to auction the weapon to the highest foreign bidder. As the wreck of a truck rattles along the two-lane highway, the passengers must contend with members of Brynner's team jumping on board, a blown-out section of blacktop over a precipitous fall, and close-encounters with other vehicles. For 15 minutes, it's almost SPEED with a thermometer instead of a spedometer.
During that 15 minute chunk of the film, director Hugh Johnson does everything an action film director needs to do, offering plenty of close calls and nervous laughter. Unfortunately, those 15 minutes occur smack in the middle of the film, between 45 minutes of excruciating introductory exposition and 45 minutes of alternatingly absurd and tedious conclusion. The burst of action seems like it's going to be the payoff for sitting through one of the longest, least interesting prologues to an action film _ever_, a prologue which lays out Brynner's feud with "Elvis's" creator (David Paymer) in exhaustive detail. Then, almost before you get a chance to enjoy the few thrills CHILL FACTOR can provide, it sends Mason and Arlo on a leisurely paddle down the river so they can bond over their past mistakes. And it's all downstream from there.
It might have been at least remotely worth sitting through all that exposition if the characters or performances hadn't made you want everyone involved to end up chemically defoliated. Cuba Gooding Jr. is rapidly turning into one of the most aggravating Oscar-winning actors in history, a one-note performer who widens his eyes and tightens his jaw to express practically every emotion (the direction of the corners of his mouth is the only hint as to his mood). His work in CHILL FACTOR borders on the embarrassing, a frantic collection of over-the-top reactions that would make Martin Lawrence and Chris Tucker blush. Skeet Ulrich could only hope to register an emotion of any kind, using a flat delivery for even flatter lines. And Colin Firth squints and rasps his way through the villain role, never quite sure whether he should be a moustache-twirling melodrama baddie or tormented soldier with shattered patriotism.
The absence of a sympathetic hero and solid villain damage an action film, but they're not always fatal. It can even get away with ridiculous plot developments, like the idea that a toxic chemical gas could be contained inside a traffic tunnel by blowing up both sides of the tunnel (creating the ever-effective pile-of-rubble vacuum seal). But there is no way an action film can get away with so little action. CHILL FACTOR just sits there, inert, for nearly its entire running time, even forgetting during its best moments to remind us of the status of its key plot element's rising temperature. It's hard to believe that a film this weightless would waste so much time on setting up the premise, then never exploit the premise. If you want to want to imagine CHILL FACTOR -- and imagine why it's not even worth the time of a true-blue action fan -- think of SPEED, with 90 minutes of the film set at a bus stop.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 dry ices: 3.
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