Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Instant Favorite.

Boring

A lot of fun.

Umpteenth variation on the "Die Hard" formula stars Eric Roberts as an unnamed hero who turns out to be the only hope for the President of the United States (John Beck) when a traitorous government agent (Bryan Genesse, who also wrote the movie) takes advantage of events that occur. You see, it seems that the Presidents' ratings are very low and a member of his staff engineers a phony kidnapping to try to make him look sympathetic. Genesse, a part of the group involved, sees this as his opportunity to make a bunch of money. However, Roberts, an agent himself, still has some scruples and tries to foil Genesses' plans.The movie isn't completely worthless. Director Sam Firstenberg, who'd guided so many classic martial arts movies of the 1980s, keeps it moving forward at an adequate pace. Some of the action set pieces, such as the fights and one amazing stunt, are competently done. However, the script isn't very good, and the nods to "Die Hard" are way too obvious. The characters are fairly nondescript, good guys and bad guys alike, although some of the actors try their best. If one is watching this for co-stars Ice-T and Michael Madsen, be warned that they never do very much. Things very much fall on the shoulders of Roberts and Genesse. The oddest touch is occasionally cutting back to a redneck couple watching the whole event on TV and making commentary.A cast of familiar faces helps some. The movie co-stars Roberts' wife Eliza as the Presidents' Chief of Staff and Genesses' wife Brooke as one of the villains (with whom Roberts has a big fight scene). Also appearing are Larry Manetti, Sal Landi, and Brookes' TV dad Bill Kirchenbauer (from the series 'Just the Ten of Us') in a cameo as a "loud Texan".If you stick it through to the end, you do get rewarded with some fairly amusing outtakes that play out alongside the ending credits.Five out of 10.

The original concept, the president sanctioning his own kidnapping to help his popularity, is always an intriguing one. Unfortunately, then finding out that the President didn't authorize anything and that it is the Cia and then not really the CIA and that Eric Roberts is some anti gravity, bullet dodging hero ends anyintegrity the movie started out with. Find something else to watch or watch the grass grow. It will provide more entertainment.

Eric Roberts once received rave reviews for movies like "Star 80", "Runaway Train", and even "The Pope of Greenwich Village." This movie, which has several inconsistent titles, is so bad, that one must assume that Mr. Roberts has hit bottom. Perhaps he wishes to embarrass his sister, Julia Roberts. She should give Eric half of her future film salaries, approximately $20 million per film, just to stop him from making any more trash.The other comments are all to the point: the plot is so stupid, unbelievable, so low budget, so silly, that it is an insult to Hollywood and to America. I can't believe that HBO actually airs this film, even if it is at 4:00 am.The worst Kung Foo movie from the late seventies is ten times more entertaining then this so-called martial arts film. There is no reason to watch, except if you have insomnia and need a film to bore you to sleep.

Despite this movie being an obvious rip-off of "Die Hard", I wouldn't have minded seeing this same story again had it been written and executed with relative competence. But overall it's not. The things that happen here are so implausible (shootouts where everyone keeps missing despite it being VERY OBVIOUS that there's no way they could survive, as well as extremely stupid decisions by both the hero and villain) that it becomes quite annoying - quite soon you get annoyed at the gall the filmmakers had for not even TRYING to place one foot in reality. It seems they just had all these stupid things happening so that the movie would last 90 or so minutes.Also, the low budget of the movie is quite obvious at times. Now, I've seen action movies with similarly low budgets that managed to stretch their few dollars out for the entire movie. This time around they do manage to overcome the low budget in several aspects (the cinematography, for one), but every few minutes we see something that smacks of cheapness - a crowd of protesters consisting of just a few people (and all holding signs with exact same style of writing on them), hotel hallways that don't look like the hallways of a high class hotel, a goofy-looking flame thrower that is supposedly shooting long flames (but is obviously not in each shot), etc.The cast is wasted. Ice-T is given prominent billing, but only appears for the first 20 minutes. Madsen has nothing to do but bark orders. Roberts appears in almost every scene, but with the material he's given, the movie ends up being another waste of his talents.It's not all bad. There are a few hand-to-hand fight sequences that, despite not having the speed and flow of Hong Kong movies, have excitement and high power to them. (And are quite brutal.) And a hilarious blooper reel runs during the end credits.