Ah 1999, I...vaguely remember that year. Or rather the end of it, you know it the whole Y2K Millennium Bug and end of the world prophecies, whether that be the technological apocalypse, the Rapture, a meteor, or the popular zombie apocalypse. Hey, the zombies are coming, you better have your zombie plan ready. Alas that isn't what this next film is about, though the end of the world theme is fitting for the year. Though the Antichrist doesn't make an appearance, stupid lying tagline.
No we instead find that an asteroid fourteen miles long (They made a really big point about this, remember, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs was only six miles long) is on its way to Earth. The military send out agents to pick up Doctor David Corbett (Linden Ashby), arguably the only person on Earth capable of developing something to stop the asteroid. However a cult, lead by Thomas Payne (Mario Van Peebles), kidnap him in order to stop him from stopping the asteroid. Not sure how the cult knew about the asteroid, but anyway. Agent Jeanine Tyrell (Suzie Amis) is put in charge of a rescue, joining forces with prisoner Mathew Reese (Ice-T) with only three days to find him.
The plot is okay. It's a rescue operation in a race against time. The problem is that it plods along, there is no real sense of direction that the film is going in. Even when a lead becomes a dead end, low and behold Tyrell and Reese are suddenly on another lead which popped the Hell out of nowhere. There's a few action scenes which seemed forced than anything else; though I do love the fact that Payne at the start is filmed saying 'we don't have gun factories, so where do they come from? Surely an authority figure is to blame' and then five minutes later he has a grenade launcher. Then again that shows that he's (probably) the reason why guns are in the community. Also he is the leader of a cult, all cults have an armory. There isn't really a sense of danger either, any problems are normally solved by either luck or consummate ease.
The acting...is okay. No-one really does anything bad, but they don't do anything spectacular. Although saying that, Peebles I thought was really good. He was charming, he was sophisticated, he basically showed why he was the leader; he basically has a silver tongue, he's a smooth talker, he can manipulate people. An actor who was surprisingly in this was Tommy 'Tiny' Lister as Brother Clarence. Again, I thought that he was pretty good, he certainly played the obedient servant well and was able to portray the right emotions when necessary.
In all honesty, Ice-T was probably the weakest of the cast. Well, him and Amis. Even Coolio as Luther and Dartanyan Edmonds as Damon in the supporting cast stood out more than our two heroes. I suppose it's because of the script and how everything basically went right for them than the actual acting. The characters themselves do have potential to shine, but the result isn't as bright as they should be, though we do have...some stereotypes in here.
The effects. Ooh boy. Well, the gun fights I suppose are pretty standard as well as explosions, again not great, but when it comes down to most of the other stuff, it's pretty bad. The asteroids look fake, and I mean really look fake. Then again it's a low budget B-movie in the late 90s, what else would you expect?
To be honest, this film is disappointing. It certainly has flaws, what movie nowadays doesn't? But I actually expected a lot more of this. So it was made in the late 90s, but I was expecting something like the 1980s action flicks. Compared to those, this film didn't really bring anything new, just more of the same thing we saw in the 80s (If this film WAS made in the 80s I'd have given it some slack). But the film isn't entirely awful, I actually quite liked it. It certainly shows potential, if it had a bigger budget, maybe some better acting, the kinks worked out, it could have been a really good film. It's certainly watchable, I'll say that and I will say give it a try, just don't expect much of a masterpiece.
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