The Detonator

Wesley Snipes latest straight to video film is a convoluted mess, horribly reminiscent of Steven Seagal's latest works. The script is horribly written and makes no account for the low budget it is and tries to be too clever for its own good. Sadly too, Snipes has fallen into the trap of having an ADR voice double doing much of his dialogue, and an entire narration that comes every now and again through points in the movie. It's sad to see a guy of Wesley Snipes talent doing garbage like this film, and producing a tired and clearly bored performance, barely bothered to produce his own dialogue. It's become somewhat of a joke with Steven Seagal, the fact he doesn't perform his own dialogue, but it's not something I'd have expected from Snipes. Perhaps it's due to the producer, Andrew Stevens who has worked with Seagal previously, or the director Po-Chi Leong, responsible for Seagal's epically bad Out Of Reach.

The plot involves shady government officials, terrorists who coach soccer teams, disks with incriminating evidence on and a hefty chuck of missing money. Oh and biological weapons. Now how they are connected I don't know but what I can tell you is the diabolical script is pretty hard to fathom and like many of these DTV movies, this likes to include one twist too many. The plot is also uninterestingly told, playing out it's cards with people having shady one to ones in offices and dark alleys etc. It's all kind of "lets have a sit down and dish out some plot points for the sad bastards watching this film!" The pace of the movie as such suffers because despite the dullness of the performances and the storyline, the film does have some nice action scenes. As an example of how a DTV film has successfully put across a storyline of a twisting nature, I give you Dolph Lundgren's directorial debut, the Defender. That movie had it's share of twists and over complexity but the movie has a last hour of almost entirely action, with Dolph under siege form terrorists. The plot points are told in the context of action, on the move, while avoiding death. The movie doesn't stop to tell us what's happening, it doesn't break up the pace. As such although the plot was a little convoluted, it was more forgivable cause the action never let up. The Detonator like too many of these films, stops everything to give us a convoluted walk through of who's bad, and who isn't, before inevitably shifting that round in the pulled from the rear end twist at the end. These movies can often suffer with pacing issues.

Snipes himself as I mentioned is pretty bland here. At the beginning he's putting on a camp persona as he's undercover with some arms dealers. Initially it seemed as if he was enjoying himself but unfortunately the rest of the movie sees him and his occasional voice double sleepwalking through the role. Snipes only comes alive when he's called upon to kick ass. There's some nice action here though, with some swift and crunching martial arts and some nicely punchy shootouts. The film also features a decent car chase. Silvia Colloca co-star and she's not much of an actress, but she is gorgeous, with a costume that screams "look at my cleavage!" The rest of the cast flit in and out with clichéd and uninteresting roles.

Snipes thankfully has better projects lined up from now. He has another team up with Mario Van Peebles, called Hard Luck, then he will do Chasing The Dragon, from the director Chris Nahon, who did Jet Li's Kiss Of The Dragon. Finally Snipes is apparently doing Toussaint, a biographical drama, directed by Danny Glover. The future is suddenly looking brighter for Snipes, but lets remember he was getting extremely well paid for his DTV films, around $7million a movie, possibly more. It's also funny to consider that of all these DTV god's Dolph Lundgren is doing the better films, directing himself, with the enjoyable Defender and the supremely violent and nicely done The Russian Specialist, and what's more he's doing them on a fraction of the budgets of these diabolical offerings from Wesley and Steven Seagal are producing. *1/2