'Chill Factor' (1999)
A movie review by Walter Frith
wfrith@cgocable.net
Member of the 'Online Film Critics Society' http://www.ofcs.org
Buddy action movies. I turned on 'Hooper' with Burt Reynolds the other night, and he, along with Jan Michael Vincent, portray two stunt men who aren't exactly close friends, but they respect each other's role in the same profession. The good ol' boy movies that Reynolds made famous in the 70's affected and continue to affect action movies today.
No better example of this is the 'Lethal Weapon' series, which are the buddy action genre's example of how great a formula can work if it's done properly. New and inventive situations eventually run out but flourish when the ideas are fresh and well in hand.
Sometimes fate chooses us and not the other way around. In 1996's 'Broken Arrow', two air men in the military split up a long standing friendship. One is the good guy (Christian Slater), the other (John Travolta) is the bad guy. Travolta's character becomes involved in a plot to steal nuclear weapons and sell them back to the government while Slater's character tries to stop him. Three years later, with 'Chill Factor' we have a movie with the same type of plot.
Cuba Gooding Jr. is such a great actor. His Oscar winning role in 'Jerry Maguire' hasn't seen him in a great role since. Like Rod Steiger and George Kennedy, he may suffer from the Oscar curse which plagues people with no great role after winning the award. In 'Chill Factor', set in Montana (but filmed in Utah and South Carolina), Gooding Jr. plays an ice cream delivery man named Arlo who becomes involved in a plot along with diner shop server Tim (Skeet involved) to stop a vengeful military man named Capt. Andrew Brynner (Peter Firth) who is looking for payback after serving a long prison sentence and is now planning to use a deadly chemical weapon on innocent people.
Sent to prison a decade earlier, blamed for letting a military experiment go wrong, Capt. Brynner wants quick cash by holding the deadly weapon and threatening to use it. Shades of 1996's 'The Rock' come to mind. Also, the chemical that will cause the catastrophe, nicknamed Elvis, will unleash its fury if it drops below 50 degrees. Kind of like that bus in 1994's 'Speed' that would explode with a bomb attached to it if it dropped below 50 miles per hour.
The movie is layered with a pretty entertaining pace for a film of its kind, probably the only thing that will save it from being a totally abysmal failure for something done before and now seen over and over again. Part action, part comedy, all complete hokum, 'Chill Factor' suffers from the old adage that the odds are not in its favour.
The scenery is under used in 'Chill Factor'. A golden opportunity is wasted to use the spectacular mountain scenery of a very visual state like Montana. The action scenes are close up and well edited but not from a lot of different angles you would expect to really make a movie move. Virtually every mode of transportation construction way is used. There are scenes on bridges, highways, and rivers.
Making his big screen debut as a director is Hugh Johnson. His vision shows some promise. The characterizations in 'Chill Factor', although stereotyped on the part of some, are clearly defined. The film's screenplay by Drew Gitlin and Mike Cheda is nothing more than a novelty with many plot holes. A cell phone even works in a tunnel in this movie!!! I also wondered while viewing it if it was little more than a marketing tool to boost the career of Skeet Ulrich. He has had some small roles in a few movies and this was perhaps an attempt to break him into the big time. He has had noticeable roles roles in 'The Craft', 'The Newton Boys' and 'As Good As It Gets' and hasn't quite found the star making role he is striving for.
The plot holes that make 'Chill Factor' impossible to recommend are simple. Two ordinary guys are not going to be able to stop a vicious military man and his gang where all of them are highly trained experts in weaponry, hand to hand combat and military strategy. At least for many of those involved, it won't exactly end their careers but it won't do anything to advance them at the same time in a film that is almost impossible to review where the ways to describe it seem to be repetitive. The film makers drew first blood in that category.
OUT OF 5 > * * *
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