BEFORE: Stuck at home again today, there haven't been many shifts offered to me at the theater, I realize that the school has been on winter break, but that's small consolation when I'm counting on the second income to help pay my bills. But then, if I spend enough time at home, I'm not out working, buying lunch, paying subway fares and going to see movies in the theater, so I'm kind of saving money by just sitting at home, but it's boring. Three days a week I'm working at the animation studio, which is always running out of money, which generates more anxiety for me - I should be used to it by now, this October I'll have been there thirty years, and it's always kind of been like this, only it never used to stress me out so much. I'm keeping busy by selling art online to customers, which does bring in some money, but all other attempts to raise money there (by creating a web-site with a donation function, or buying a table at Big Apple Comic Con, which is a solid investment in my mind) have been nixed by my boss, so he and I have really been clashing over the best way to keep the studio in business. He has his own ideas about how to raise more funds, and I obviously have to defer to him, however if I'm right and he's wrong that will be small consolation when the landlord locks the doors and we lose the studio space - I've decided that if that should come to pass, then I'm done there, and I tried my best to save the place, but who wants to work at a job where no one listens to your advice or ideas? Again, I should be used to it by now, but it's really starting to bother me. Out of desperation today I applied for a new job online, so I wonder if anything will come from that. It might be nice to make more money each week, even if I (shudder) have to work a five-day week.
James Caan carries over again from "Undercover Grandpa".
THE PLOT: A Witness Protection specialist becomes suspicious of his co-workers when dealing with a case involving high-tech weapons.
AFTER: This one sort of starts out believably, but by the end it becomes completely ridiculous. Do I believe in a character played by Schwarzenegger, a U.S. Marshal who protects witnesses by "erasing" their lives, while also killing the people who are trying to kill them? Yes, of course I do. Do I believe that a group of other U.S. Marshals would be corrupt and involved in an arms deal with a foreign merchant, and that those Marshals would be willing to frame the honest Marshal and kill the witness who flipped on the gun company? Eh, not so much.
The worst offender here, however, is the depiction of the high-tech weapons, which are called E-M rifles, or electro-magnetic rifles I guess, and at other times in the film they're called "rail guns" - well, which is it? I just checked on Wikipedia, though, and those apparently are two names for the same thing, which is a gun that uses electro-magnetic force to launch high velocity projectiles. Umm, OK, but this film came out in 1996 and now, over 25 years later, the E-M gun is still largely theoretical, so if they're not a practical military weapon NOW, well they sure as hell weren't one THEN, either. Some screenwriter placed his hopes on technology catching up with his script, and it just didn't happen. Anyway, they're depicted here as laser rifles that can fire explosives that blow a hole in a person and also knock them about 100 feet back, and, well, that's just not a thing. Also somehow they have the equivalent of x-ray vision, they enable a shooter to see through a building and find a person's skeleton, I'm guessing this is B.S. too.
Again, I like the premise here, a guy who protects witnesses is a great character and there's certainly story potential there, but mixing that storyline with an arms deal is like putting chocolate on an onion. Unless the corrupt marshals knew all the time that the guns don't work, if that were part of the storyline and the arms dealers were pulling a fast one on the Russians, I might... nah, it still doesn't work.
This is two days in a row where people faking their own deaths is a major plot point, like two characters did it in "Undercover Grandpa" and here it's the main engine that drives the plot. But don't you think after a while the mobsters and other evil people would get wise to this trick? "Hey, that guy testifying against me is going to enter the Witness Protection program, I want to try and have him killed... What? He died? In a weird, random accident? Geez, that's the third time this week this has happened, what do you suppose the odds are against that? It's really weird..."
A couple other unbelievable things here, like our hero Kruger falling out of a plane and somehow catching up with a falling parachute - NITPICK POINT #1 is that everything falls at the same rate, he can't streamline his body to "fall faster" and catch up with the parachute, the laws of physics on falling objects prevent this, I think. Acceleration is a constant due to gravity, if you drop a ping pong ball and a bowling ball at the same time, they should land at the same time, all things being equal. "Swimming" through the air to fall faster is pure Hollywood invention. Then, of course, he manages to put on the parachute WHILE falling and never blacks out or panics from hurtling toward the ground at an incredible speed (NP #2) and then there's the plane that's approaching to try and crash into him, which is moving forward at a constant elevation, but isn't he, you know, falling? So the plane would either have to be moving closer to earth at the same rate, or aiming for a spot BELOW him in order to crash into him - if they're on the same level plane, then he's in the clear, because he's moving toward the Earth, and he won't be at that elevation when the plane reaches him, right? (NP #3)
It's also a HUGE coincidence that the former mobster that Kruger erased and relocated in the earlier part of the film is also the cousin of the mobster that controls the docks in Baltimore harbor where the marshals are loading the guns onto a ship - just me?
Wait, wait, I also forgot about that same character getting shocked by a defibrillator after faking a seizure at the complex. The doctor who shocks him with the paddles must be a rookie, because he's clearly conscious and talking, and I believe they're only supposed to use the defibrillator when a patient is non-responsive. It's probably meant as a gag, but it's not all that funny, and the gag doesn't work because any doctor properly trained would not use that device unless it was absolutely necessary and medically the right treatment for a patient's condition. "Oh, she just went by the beeps on the EKG..." Nope, not good enough.
Don't even get me started on the depiction of a plane missing a door and somehow not every character being sucked out - or worse, an executive who shoots out his office window, and somehow there's a similar rush of wind like one would expect from an open window on an airplane. Yeah, so the effects here are JUST a bit over the top....
Also starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Vanessa Williams (last heard in "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay"), James Coburn (last seen in "Hudson Hawk"), Robert Pastorelli (last seen in "Striking Distance"), James Cromwell (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Danny Nucci, Andy Romano, Nick Chinlund (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Michael Papajohn (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Joe Viterelli (last seen in "Narrowsburg"), Mark Rolston (last seen in "Midway"), John Slattery (last seen in "Reservation Road"), Robert Miranda, Roma Maffia (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Tony Longo (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Gerry Becker (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), John Snyder (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Melora Walters (last seen in "Venom"), Olek Krupa (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Cylk Cozart, K. Todd Freeman (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Rocco Sisto, Steven Ford (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), Tommy J. Huff, Rick Batalia (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Michael Gregory (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Patrick Kilpatrick (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Camryn Manheim, Skipp Sudduth, Rick Marzan, Denis Forest (last seen in "Cliffhanger"), Sven-Ole Thorsen (last seen in "Bulletproof"),
RATING: 5 out of 10 hungry alligators (in a kid's petting zoo? Come on...)
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