Icebreaker

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Under the Radar

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As far as this Campbell-filled summer goes, this is perhaps the weirdest title I've picked out to check. Despite a few big name actors, this one has totally fallen off the face of the Earth. It got to the point where the only version I could really find was a Rifftrax version on Amazon Prime. That makes it a bit harder to form a solid opinion on the actual movie, but I'll do my best.

We meet Matt Foster (Sean Astin), who is trying his best to continue a happy relationship with his new fiancée, Meg (Suzanne Turner). However, her wealthy father, Bill (Stacey Keach) sees him as a bit of a lower-class ski bum, and there's a slight concern of Bill having objections to their marriage. Despite that, they decide to announce their wedding plans to Bill, and invite him up to Killington Ski Resort, where Matt works.

Things are shaken up when a hijacked plane, carrying radioactive materials, crashes somewhere in the mountains. Enter the medically terminal terrorist, Carl Grieg (Bruce Campbell), who is the "victim" of the failed crash. Learning that the material is intact, he has his lieutenant, Frantz (Paul Schnabel) send in a team to get it. Grieg meanwhile takes the ski resort hostage, and threatens the whole area with a nuclear device if his plans don't follow through.

Now the FBI is on his tail, lead by Will Langley (John James), and Grieg has to race against time to retrieve the radioactive materials he was denied. Further to that, Matt sees an opportunity to prove himself to his, hopefully, soon to be father in law by attempting to put a stop to the terrorists by any means necessary. He even gets the help of a raggedy looking forester named Beck (Mark 'Woody' Keppel) who's meant to be a bit of comic relief and fails pretty miserably.

What can I say? This has been done before, and it never does work out to be a very good or memorable movie. I suppose the closest comparison I'd give to it would be something like 'Masterminds', where an "extreme" kid stops some sort of terrorist. It's not particularly funny, it's not particularly memorable, and you can pretty much gather how everything is gonna end. The names make it a bit worse, but one has to remember that this was filmed during a pretty down period for both Sean Astin and Stacey Keach. As far as Campbell, well, he's Campbell.

It's a little bit disappointing to see that Bruce had to play the role more or less straight. If he could have played this a bit more loose, and "Ashed' the character up a little bit, it would still be bad, but could be such a guilty pleasure. Sadly though, nothing in particular stands out (except perhaps a snowmobile crash that had me laughing ironically). It's perhaps passable for some kind of straight-to-TV movie, but it's so far under the radar that its Wiki page explains the whole plot in a single sentence.

So, if you're in the mood for an easy-to-watch giggle, the Riftrax version on Prime isn't a bad way to go. But I've also seen much better from that. All in all, this is one to just leave alone, unless you really wanna see what Sean Astin was doing before he played Samwise Gamgee in 'Lord of the Rings'. As far as it being a solid Bruce Campbell movie - it just isn't. There was nothing he did here that particularly stood out or impressed me, and you could tell that this was a simple paycheck movie for all of them. Nothing to hate, it's just kinda dumb and forgettable.

2/5

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