CHAIN REACTION
A film review by Philip Lam
Copyright 1996 The Flying Inkpot
Directed by: Andrew Davis
Written by: Michael Bortman, Josh Friedman (story), J.F. Lawton, Arne Schmidt
(story), Rick Seaman (story)
Cast: Keanu Reeves (Eddie Kasalivich), Morgan Freeman (Paul Shannon), Rachel Weisz
(Dr. Lily Sinclair), Fred Ward (Ford).
Produced by: 20th Century Fox/ Chicago Pacific Entertainment/
Digital Domain/ Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. (distributor)/ Zanuck
Co.
Running Time: 106 minutes.
Rating : *1/2 out of *****
Theatres : Shaw
CERTAINLY NO ALCHEMY GOING ON HERE
Boy, what a great movie!! Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman acting together, the director of THE FUGITIVE (Andrew Davis) back again to give us another thriller, and the beautiful Rachel STEALING BEAUTY Weisz thrown in to boot. How could this not be a blockbuster? All die-hard Keanu Reeves fans, read on.
Ol "Much Ado About Nothing" plays Eddie Kasalivich, a machinist studying at the University of Chicago. To help pay for the rent, he takes on this job making the machinery for a hydrogen project being conducted by the university. By happy coincidence, he also happens to stumble on the solution to the final problem and thus is the only one who knows the key to performing this feat of miracle physics. This project holds great promise: taking hydrogen from water and giving out more energy than is put in. A potential solution to the Earth's energy problems without the pollution cost. Surely nobody could have any problems with that?
Morgan Freeman is Paul Shannon, the project's sponsor. He works for a very powerful organization that disagrees with the paternal project leader as to how quickly technology should be released to the public. He figures the world will disintegrate into anarchy if the results of the project are released too quickly. So he murders the project leader, blows up the project (great but short scene here, sort of like a mini ID4 city-devastation thing) and tries to simulate the experiment at some other hi-tech hush-hush location. Unfortunately, our intrepid machinist and an English physicist (Weisz) manage to get away and now follows a Fugitive-like chase using a not too dissimilar rehash of that movie script.
This movie is just dying for a comparison with "The Fugitive". Both movies use Chicago as the main city and since the place doesn't change much, I guess we can't really blame the setting for the paucity of atmosphere. The trouble here is that where THE FUGITIVE had Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, CHAIN REACTION only has Keanu Reeves and Fred Ward. Credit to them, but we aren't really given much of a chance to empathise with the characters. Where Ford was able to work within the confines of the movie to evoke sympathy, Eddie Kasalivich just doesn9t seem very believeable and Reeves' character is never given the time to develop. It might have been a better investment in film to give the characters more depth and spend less time on the chase sequences, which frankly, get quite boring after a while.
Harrison Ford was "the man against the world." He was alone in a world where he didn't know who to trust and it came across real well. In CHAIN REACTION, Keanu Reeves isn't alone. Now that would be fine if the fleeing couple had some chemistry and could really portray some paranoia, vulnerability and confusion. We don't get this. We get him thinking he's still in SPEED, only now our Sandra Bullock has an English accent, probably doesn't drive a bus, and hardly contributes anything to the movie.
The producers here probably thought, "Hey, what if Keanu and Rachel don't hit it off too well? Let's rope in that Morgan to help us out." Well, Keanu and Rachel didn't hit it off well on the screen, and most unfortunately, Morgan Freeman doesn't help much either. The only thing we come to really know of Paul Shannon is that he always has a full load of cigars in his cigar holder. It's not really his fault. Once again, Andrew Davis just doesn't take the time to build his characters. Someone must have convinced him that this time round, cinema dollars are best earned by making the movie run like a headless chicken.
The Flying Inkpot Rating System: * Wait for the TV2 broadcast. ** A little creaky, but still better than staying at home with Gotcha! *** Pretty good, bring a friend. **** Amazing, potent stuff. ***** Perfection. See it twice.
____________________________________________________________
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