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A couple years ago a film crew descended on tiny Golconda, Illinois -- a blink-miss Ohio River hamlet downstate where my dirt-bike buddies and I used to stop for a Pepsi break while riding (legally) in adjacent Shawnee National Forest -- to shoot the big escape scene for Fugitive sequel U. S. Marshals. It was quite a to-do, what with an upside-down 737 replica in the water and Robert Downey Jr. running around asking the guys at the bait-and-tackle shop if they could score him some blow and a nice country girl. When the completed movie was released in ‘98, my parents came with me to check it out, looking for landmarks that would be more familiar to them since they grew up, and once again live, in the nearby Massac County seat of Metropolis: “Superman’s Home Town,” pop. 7300. (Dad has now been to the pictures four times that I know of since John Wayne died; the other three were Star Wars and Crocodile Dundee, to which I treated him and Mom, and an unnamed flick where they sneaked in a bottle of wine and got a little tight in the back row.) It was fun to hear them comment, when Wesley Snipes skulked into a phone booth outside a locally infamous truck stop, “The Health Department closed them down again last month.”
What does any of this have to do with Chill Factor, the Leftover High-Concept Action Movie of the Week, whose production last year prompted a wave of Cuba Gooding sightings in the Upstate?
The only people likely to find much enjoyment in it are the citizens of Liberty, and Vernal, Utah, where the rest of the location footage was shot: “Look, honey, you can just make out the shadow of our Winnebago.”
In a prologue we learn that, ten years ago, after a horribly nasty chemical weapon developed by Pentagon weapons expert Dr. Long (David Paymer) turned out to be more potent than expected and messily wiped out everybody on a little island who wasn’t sealed in a Glad sandwich bag, the facility’s strack, upright commander, Capt. Brynner (Peter Firth, from The Hunt for Red October), takes the fall for his superiors by doing a decade in Leavenworth. Upon release he tries to steal the stuff -- christened Elvis just to provide the one little bit of suspense, which is, how long before somebody says it’s “left the building” so we can get on with things -- from a weapons-lab freezer in rural Montana, where Long now does penance fly-fishing with Skeet Ulrich (that sounds kind of dirty, doesn’t it?), who plays Mason, an itinerant cook...or is that Cook, an itinerant Mason? Long manages to escape with Elvis after being mortally wounded by Brynner and his black-clad techno-ranger ninja terrorist squad, and stumbles into a diner where Mason is wrapping up the midnight shift, just in time for ice cream man Arlo (Gooding) to drive up. Which is very important, because Elvis explodes at exactly 50 degrees Fahrenheit, so in a long, wheezy death-bed -- well, death-floor -- exposition, Long charges rebel-without-a-thaw Mason with getting Elvis safe and frigid to an Army base in Billings. They toss the stuff in Arlo’s refrigerated truck, and with Brynner in pursuit, the chase is on.
Sigh. Movies like this get made, while talented writers commit suicide. Written and directed by a first-time crew, Chill Factor serves up an unforgivable litany of cliches, from a vehicle that never starts when needed, to a villain who stomps on the fingers of a hero dangling over a ledge, to bad guys who refuse take their injuries like men and lie down and die anytime before the end credits can roll. There’s even a “Six Million Dollar Man” sound effect -- ‘’ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.” All the while Cuba and Skeet (darned if that doesn’t sound like the waste of a perfectly good title for a cute Disney Channel series) get stuck with dialogue like “Oh s--t! Oh s--t!” and “You’re an a--hole!” “No, YOU’RE an a--hole!” while too-sympathetic Peter Firth delivers Sun Tzu aphorisms such as “Power without caution is death” in low-talking growls like a caucasian Barry White.
The only good things I can think of to say about this Eskimo Pie-Hard howler are, Cuba Gooding can truly deliver the heck out of a line, and I don’t remember ever seeing an ice cream sandwich used to such comic effect. D
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