This is one of the few films that so alienated me when saw it that I whispered to my wife "this movie isn't doing it for me" less than a quarter of the way in, a sentiment with which she concurred. The film is in trouble from the opening shot, in which the camera pans over a rocky, wave-swept shore before settling over a moonlit prison which is obviously a model. "Inside" the "prison" is a far- from-model prisoner, Ryan Gaerity. Played by a long-haired, Gaelic-speaking (both for this scene only) Tommy Lee Jones, he fatally stabs his cellmate, then combines chemicals he's hidden in various places, including inside himself (yuck), and using the cell's filthy toilet (more "yuck") as a casing , he sets of an explosion that blasts a large hole in the stone wall (rather than doing something sensible like destroying the much more fragile toilet). Having gotten out of the cell block in about the most conspicuous way imaginable, the movie asks the audience to believe he then gets away scot-free.
The action then shifts to Boston, where crack bomb squad member Jimmy Dove (Jeff Bridges) is on a tough assignment. A young woman's estranged boyfriend has rigged her computer with explosives which will detonate if she stops typing or the computer's drive runs out of space, then shot himself (making this murder/suicide the only one ever in which the suicide part is done first). The rest of the bomb squad brings in a robot to take over the typing, but when the robot malfunctions, Jimmy shoos everyone else and the robot out of the room and puts the poor woman back behind the keyboard; one of the cops could have done this, but you gotta have a damsel in distress (groan). As Jimmy gets to work on the computer/bomb, the sight of the shot-dead man on the floor causes him to have a vivid flashback of an injured woman lying on the ground and calling "Liam", to let the audience know "Jimmy" has a secret. The flashback trigger is bizarre, since other than the horizontal position of the person, nothing else is the same. Plus, the flashback is in black and white; is Jimmy/Liam color blind? Wouldn't that be a serious handicap in his line of work?
The film continues in this illogical vein, with the shared past of the two main characters revealed, lots of bombs, some explosions, convoluted twists and turns, weird photography, cliches, shifting characters, bad writing, and overacting. In a film about bombs, the film itself was the biggest bomb of all. The film "Speed", released around the same time (keeping with that odd 1990's pattern of two movies with the same subject matter being released close together) had plenty of flaws, but worked a whole lot better than this film. A case study in bad cinema.
The action then shifts to Boston, where crack bomb squad member Jimmy Dove (Jeff Bridges) is on a tough assignment. A young woman's estranged boyfriend has rigged her computer with explosives which will detonate if she stops typing or the computer's drive runs out of space, then shot himself (making this murder/suicide the only one ever in which the suicide part is done first). The rest of the bomb squad brings in a robot to take over the typing, but when the robot malfunctions, Jimmy shoos everyone else and the robot out of the room and puts the poor woman back behind the keyboard; one of the cops could have done this, but you gotta have a damsel in distress (groan). As Jimmy gets to work on the computer/bomb, the sight of the shot-dead man on the floor causes him to have a vivid flashback of an injured woman lying on the ground and calling "Liam", to let the audience know "Jimmy" has a secret. The flashback trigger is bizarre, since other than the horizontal position of the person, nothing else is the same. Plus, the flashback is in black and white; is Jimmy/Liam color blind? Wouldn't that be a serious handicap in his line of work?
The film continues in this illogical vein, with the shared past of the two main characters revealed, lots of bombs, some explosions, convoluted twists and turns, weird photography, cliches, shifting characters, bad writing, and overacting. In a film about bombs, the film itself was the biggest bomb of all. The film "Speed", released around the same time (keeping with that odd 1990's pattern of two movies with the same subject matter being released close together) had plenty of flaws, but worked a whole lot better than this film. A case study in bad cinema.