CHAIN REACTION (34)

Directed by: Andrew Davis

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, Rachel Weisz

The Pitch: A young scientist, wrongfully accused of murder, goes on the run, pursued by government agents both official and covert.

Theo Sez: A scientist is working on the extraction of hydrogen energy, claiming that a glass of water contains enough energy to power Chicago for weeks. Mysterious villains kill him and destroy his work. However, they choose to do so by using his equipment to create a mini H-bomb, blowing up not just the lab but also eight blocks of the surrounding area (thus calling attention to the dead man's work, and even leading to Senate Committee hearings). If the above makes sense to you then you probably wrote this rickety action movie ; if you don't particularly care one way or the other, then you're undoubtedly its target audience ; and if you find it comically implausible but admit that it makes for a super-spectacular explosion, you're a discerning viewer understandably puzzled by Hollywood's insistence on putting mega-budgets behind ramshackle, hastily assembled scripts. After the debacle of STEAL BIG, STEAL LITTLE director Davis returns to FUGITIVE territory - a wrongfully accused man on the run, a fast-talking semi-sympathetic FBI pursuer - and proves that he can still stage some terrific action, notably in a wonderfully engineered set-piece around a raised draw-bridge ; but the film, especially in its later stages, is riddled with coincidence and lazy plotting - e.g. when our hero not only stumbles across an empty police car but also finds its on-board computer primed and ready for him to trace a vital license-plate. Not that plausibility is a must for this kind of movie - it was barely missed in NORTH BY NORTHWEST - but the air of unreality does rather undermine the film's pretensions to political thriller ; though at least it fits perfectly with the spectacle of Keanu Reeves, Action Hero.