BEFORE: Just a quiet Sunday at home, stressing over this job interview coming up on Thursday. I tried to distract myself by clearing all the outstanding episodes of "Bar Rescue" from my DVR - really, they're all the same so I just kind of fast-forwarded through all of them, just slowing down long enough to get the key story-points. Really, how many times can you listen to John Taffer pimping for Partender and the company that makes ice machines? He actually refused to help one bar owner who wouldn't stop drinking, and I wish he'd walk away from more projects like that, some people really need to learn some hard lessons in life.
I also scanned through the channel guide to find a bunch of movies that are now recordable to DVD, but they weren't when I first watched them - so I've got a long list of films to start dubbing, that could keep me occupied for a while. Gotta get my mind off this interview, somehow, and my movie-watching just isn't helping.
Will Patton carries over from "A Shock to the System".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bulletproof" (Movie #4,308)
THE PLOT: Two prisoners chained together flee during an escape attempt gone bad.
AFTER: And this is the OTHER film from 1996 that featured two criminals, one black, one white, on the run together. "Bulletproof" was the other one, and I watched that one in January. It's too bad that I didn't put them on a DVD together - the two films also share a very important plot point, but no spoilers here. I sort of remember both films getting released in 1996 and thinking that they looked very similar - but now I see that one's more of a comedy with some action in it, and the other's an action film with very little comedy in it.
Yeah, this one's confusing as hell - it seemed like they were going for an "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" vibe, or that film with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier - "The Defiant Ones"? Yeah, that. But the world got a lot more complicated between 1958 and 1996, so there's all kinds of stuff in here about hacking, floppy discs, U.S. Marshalls who are secretly corrupt and prison convicts who are really undercover agents. So many reversals here that you may not know which way is up by the end of the movie.
The whole thing starts with a mob boss, and a witness being prepped to testify against him at a trial, only that witness never gets to testify, because there was a bomb in the Chinese take-out that the prison interrogators ordered. (Never order special combination plate "C-4" from the menu, I guess.). So the lawyers are in trouble, the trial resumes in a few days and there's no key witness.
Eventually, we learn that this is what leads to hacker Luke Dodge being allowed to escape from prison - it was supposed to be some kind of set-up, with the guards using blank ammunition, so that he could escape - but then some random inmate used the fight between Dodge and Charles Piper, another inmate, as a distraction to stage a REAL prison break, and then everything after that goes a little crazy. Piper was supposed to bring Dodge to wherever it was he stashed the mob boss's money - you know, because as a hacker he could steal $25 million from the mob just by using a phone, as you do. This is just proof that no screenwriter in 1996 fully understood the concept of "hacking" or how to do it - but they never let that stop them from writing about it, did they?
Once the shackled-together pair makes it to downtown Atlanta, they carjack the most attractive woman they can find, just to make sure one of them will have a love interest down the road - and by some coincidence her ex-husband is a cop, so she's got a spare handcuff key handy. What are the odds of THAT? The pair of escaped convicts SHOULD lay low, but Dodge can't resist stepping out to a strip club and a massage parlor, because that's where all of his contacts hang out, and that's where someone conveniently left a pair of motorcycles for him even though that person couldn't possibly have known that he'd broken out of prison AND had a partner. But he somehow brought two bikes for him anyway? That's more than a bit unbelievable.
Dodge figures out in another unclear manner that his money and the disc have been stashed on the Food Court level of the Georgia Dome - you know, it's safe there because only a few thousand people eat at sports events every week... And then once he recovers the disk, the handoff is scheduled to take place at Stone Mountain, because obviously one of this film's sponsors is the Georgia Tourism Board.
I think "Stephen Baldwin plays a genius computer hacker" is reason enough to avoid this film, if you specifically need a reason, that is. I managed just fine not watching this film for 27 years, so I really recommend doing that, avoid it for as long as you can. You're welcome.
Also starring Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Stephen Baldwin (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Robert John Burke (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Robert Hooks, Victor Rivers (last seen in "Havana"), David Dukes, Ken Jenkins (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Michael Nader, Brittney Powell, Salma Hayek (last seen in "Eternals"), Steve Carlisle (last seen in "My Fellow Americans"), Brett Rice (last heard in "Matinee"), J. Don Ferguson (last seen in "Freejack"), Kathy Payne, Robert Apisa (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Gary Yates, Jon Huffman, Anderson Martin, Bob Hannah (last seen in "Coal Miner's Daughter"), Angela Elayne Gibbs (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Michael Cary Hooks, Joe Torry, Bill Bellamy (last seen in "Any Given Sunday"), Taurean Blacque (last seen in "Rocky II"), K. Addison Young, Libby Whittemore (last seen in "The Blind Side"), David Dwyer, with a cameo from RuPaul (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel").
RATING: 4 out of 10 exotic dancers.
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