CHAIN REACTION
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, Rachel Weisz, Fred Ward, Kevin Dunn, Brian Cox. Screenplay: J. F. Lawton, Michael Bortman. Director: Andrew Davis.
Most of the time, it is fairly easy for me to put my finger on why a film didn't work for me: sloppy performances, inane writing, lackluster production, leaden direction, what have you. Then there are cases like CHAIN REACTION. There is nothing aggressively unwatchable about this new action thriller, no glaring stupidity; even Keanu Reeves didn't make me want to run screaming for the parking lot. Yet I left the theater not just unimpressed, but unsatisfied, as though I had just left a restaurant without getting a bite to eat. CHAIN REACTION may be one of the most generic film experiences I have ever had, a chain of events without a single speck of personality.
Reeves plays Eddie Kasalivich, a machinist at the University of Chicago working on a project to create a clean, limitless fuel source from water, funded by a foundation headed by Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman). One night, Eddie stumbles onto the final piece of the puzzle, and a new era seems right around the corner. That is before one scientist on the project is killed, another disappears, and an explosion at the research facility levels several city blocks. Suddenly, Eddie finds himself suspected of espionage along with physicist Lily Sinclair (Rachel Weisz), and the two take off on the run from the FBI. Of course, the Feds prove to be the least of their worries, as other parties seem eager to get their hands on Eddie and Lily first, and Paul appears to be the only person they can trust.
It would be easy enough to pick on CHAIN REACTION for its obviousness -- if you aren't aware that the government and oil companies would conspire to bury alternative fuel sources, you clearly haven't been doing your street-corner-leaflet reading -- but obviousness tends not to be terribly troublesome to most genre film viewers. No, the real problem is that CHAIN REACTION traffics in a kind of monotonous obviousness. We know our hero is going to be in for a series of chases until he ultimately proves his innocence, and that everyone is suspect except the spunky love interest. Those chases are fairly flat, however, and even paranoia becomes mundane in CHAIN REACTION. Director Andrew Davis appears content to do a remake of his own THE FUGITIVE, with a wrongly-accused man, traitorous colleagues and a hard-nosed but ultimately sympathetic law enforcement agent (Fred Ward as the lead FBI investigator). I suppose you can't blame Davis for returning to familiar territory after the dismal STEAL BIG, STEAL LITTLE, but the familiar in this case has left him wholly uninspired.
I think there is also a rather important lesson which Davis failed to take away from THE FUGITIVE, namely that for a plot of that kind to work, it is fairly important for the hero to be someone you want to root for. Harrison Ford's Richard Kimble may not have had a complex history, but at least you knew he had a history. Eddie and Lily aren't even stock characters in the service of this plot...they're non-characters. The script by J. F. Lawton and Michael Bortman gives us exactly one piece of information about Eddie (he once blew up a lab by accident) and exactly one piece of information about Lily (she's British), and neither one make an ounce of difference. One of the reasons CHAIN REACTION feels so dead is that every person in the film might as well _be_ dead, even the ordinarily ultra-sinister Brian Cox as a nasty CIA operative. I was so desperate for a character with some life that when Eddie announced that he and Lily were going to hide out with an old friend named Maggie, I said a silent prayer that she would turn out to be a lovably eccentric scientist. And she turned out to be Joanna Cassidy playing a bland astronomer.
I will give CHAIN REACTION credit for casting Keanu Reeves in a role where he can do little damage. Eddie probably has two dozen lines in the whole film, and a quiet Keanu is a tolerable Keanu. I will also give credit for casting Morgan Freeman, period. Even in a torpid piece of film-making like this, he commands attention, and his speech about the consequences of this new fuel takes on weight just because it is Freeman who delivers it. And I will give credit for a welcome refusal to explain the pseudo-science which allows the water-fuel to work. I just wish it could have generated some energy for this film. To borrow the over-worked comparison of action film to amusement park ride, CHAIN REACTION is more like the kiddie train at a petting zoo. It just goes around and around and around...and then stops.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 slow reaction times: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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