Ah, the action-packed movie summer of '96:
"Twister" — dumb but fun.
"Mission: Impossible" — equally as dumb but still some fun.
"Eraser" — even dumber but fun in places.
"Fled" — about as dumb as they get, and not much fun.
And now comes "Chain Reaction."
Unfortunately, despite the presence of Andrew Davis at the helm — he directed "The Fugitive" and the first "Under Siege" — "Chain Reaction" is even dumber than "Fled" — as hard as that may be to believe.
Keanu Reeves stars (he won't do "Speed II" but he does this?) as a student working with a team of scientists who have come up with a cheap, clean energy source. So, naturally, there is a government conspiracy to shut it down.
When the head of the team is bumped off and the research lab is blown up — taking several city blocks with it — Reeves and a young woman scientist (Rachel Weisz) are the chief suspects.
So, of course, they run.
This doesn't help the story, but it does give director Davis plenty of opportunities to flex his action-scene muscles in various Chicago locations and on a lake of ice in Wisconsin. And the action scenes are very good, if highly implausible (not that that's anything new).
But the screenplay (by no less than five writers) is a mess.
Sadly, we've come to expect that movies like this will make no sense, that it's not a good idea to sit down and try to analyze them too closely. But it's all the more noticeable when there is also a dearth of wit. "Chain Reaction" takes itself so seriously that it just seems more and more ridiculous as it goes along.
Reeve and Weisz work pretty well together, though neither is asked to do much more than react to explosions. And Morgan Freeman, as the mysterious head of the foundation that backs the project, is enigmatic enough to pull off his "is-he-a-bad-guy-or-is-he-a-good-guy?" role. (Although one wonders if he sleeps with a cigar in his mouth, since he's never without one.)
In the end, however, the question you may well ask is whether these folks ever tried to figure out why a picture like "The Fugitive" worked so well.
It isn't the action scenes, guys! It's what's in between the action scenes. If we care about the characters, if we are still interested in the story when nothing is going boom, that's when a movie really works.
And films like that have been in short supply this summer.
"Chain Reaction" is rated PG-13 for violence, vulgarity and a few profanities.