FLED
A film review by W. Graves
Copyright 1996 W. Graves
I did exactly what the title suggests when this film ended, but for a good reason. Is it me, or is the "disk" plot getting extremely tiresome? I literally shook my head when the story turned out to be just like the dreary disk-chasing story lines of "Eraser" and "Mission:Impossible." When disks are brought into the picture, it's useless to chase someone that can just copy a 1.4 meg floppy in seconds or send it out to thousands of internet users' E-mail boxes....don't you think? It's not the 80's anymore, and this plot needs to die with the decade. Period. The movie actually had potential, and Baldwin was entertaining, but the script should have been modified for 1996. I thought at first that it may have been a cheap "Fugitive" rip-off, but Baldwin's character made a comment about Harrison Ford's escape tactics in the film, and that was humorous enough to end that idea. The action sequences were awesome, especially the motorcycle chase scene during the climax of the film. These I enjoyed, and most of the acting as well. The theory that the action takes over when the plot lacks, ie Twister, couldn't be applied here because it wasn't fast enough to be a summer blockbuster, and the plot was a typical disk-chasing shoot-em-up. Hollywood: out with the old writers and in with the new generation...and I'll be the first to volunteer. The story follows a fugitive, Baldwin, that hacked into and transferred money from a company which turns out to be the Cuban mafia. He transfers vital data onto a floppy, which becomes the hot item needed to nail the head of the company with all the necessary charges. After all the testimony hopefuls against the head of the mafia are killed, a fake chance for an escape is setup in order to get Baldwin to run....while he is cuffed to another person, Fishburne, he thinks is a fellow fugitive. This is all in hopes that Baldwin will take them to the last alternative, the disk, which he has left with a friend. The rest is predictable. For myself, it was worth seeing this for Salma Hayek alone. Other than that, wait the storm out. There will be plenty of clear skies for the drive to the video store.
AS SEEN AT: http://www.txdirect.net/users/aaron/toad/movie.html The ALTERNATIVE page.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews