Extreme Ops

It's not that Extreme Ops is just a bad movie... if you go by the books it isn't the worst it can be. It's that the movie, despite being about stunts, terrorists, sex, and extreme sports, doesn't have enough energy to turn on a light bulb. Extreme Ops has all the power of a Tide commercial. It has all the chemistry of a vat of acid. It has all the excitement of eating oatmeal. Extreme Ops is so slow it's the antidote to amphetamines.

The plot of the thankfully-short movie involves filming a commercial for a Handycam-like DV camera with the backdrop of extreme sports. See camera used for kayaking. See camera used for dangerous man made-avalanche. See camera somehow used in getting rid of a Milosevic-like Bosnian terrorist.

Rufus Sewell stars as a cheaper Gabriel Byrne, somehow stuck directing this mess of commercials and leading a bunch of daredevil athletes and a World Cup Gold Medalist (you figure they at least would be kitschy enough to have the girl be an Olympian, but no). Everyone is recruited in a Crystal Method-theme-song montage, and they are all up and off to Austria, right near the border of Yugoslavia. Courtesy of a freak snowboard-and-rum conundrum at the hotel they end up staying at a resort that's under construction at the peak of the mountain, trying to get busy with each other aided by quantities of beer and a makeshift hot-tub... and by the time you've reached this point half of the movie is over. Extreme!!!

The other half deals with a terrorist who is so unmemorable in the annals of villainhood that I can't remember his name for the life of me. Our terrorist pal decides that this is his mountain and the nice daredevils are going to have to die. An action sequence or two later, everything meets its predictable, happy-go-lucky ending.

Extreme Ops in the end succumbs to one of the worst-written scripts I've ever come across. There isn't a sense of pace or even general direction to the movie. There's no anticipation, little payoff, and, if you're smart, no money spent on the whole affair.

Extreme acting.