By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * * )
Boom-bang supremo Jerry Bruckheimer and his henchman, Joel Schumacher, had the bad luck to make a movie about terrorists who threaten to blow up New York with a stolen nuclear device and have it ready to go to the multiplexes in September last
year. You won't be surprised to hear it was delayed. And if you think that's bad timing, I caught up with this one on a plane on September 11th this year.
Chris Rock's character is killed in the opening scene, set in Prague, but that's not a waste of an expensive star because we learn that he had a twin. The babies were separated at birth and never knew about each other. One was adopted by a rich family, sent to top schools and joined the CIA. The other, Jake Hayes, is a hustler who's in love with a nurse (Kerry Washington).
His brother's boss at the CIA, Gaylord Oakes (Anthony Hopkins, which is a waste of an expensive star), decides to swap the second twin for his deceased agent and try to buy a stolen nuclear device from suitably accented middle European types.
Naturally, the scheme gets messy when someone else wants to buy the bomb, too. And tricky when his late brother's girlfriend, a CNN correspondent (Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon) twigs there's something up because Hayes kisses differently.
It's a paint-by-numbers thriller. For the first third, Hayes is given nine days to become the brother he has never met, which involves learning to taste good wine and cognac, as well as learning to speak Czech, a language which has far too few vowels, from a dictionary.
Then, never having left America, he is dropped into some intense business discussion with some of the world's tougher negotiators (but is no match for a New York ticket scalper) and bang-bang-shoot-to-kill scenarios in the middle of an ancient European capital. But hey, this is not about plot. It is about stunts, special effects, chases and action, which it delivers.
DVD features: movie (117min), one feature.
