Directed by: Andrew Davis
Screenplay by: J. F. Lawton, Michael Bortman
Story by: Arne L. Schmidt, Rick Seaman &
Josh Friedman.
With: Keanu Reeves (Post Speed, pre Matrix) as Eddie Kasalivich, a machinist, part of a team at the University of Chicago, trying to prod clean, cheap energy from water for the good of all mankind.
Morgan Freeman as Paul Shannon, UC project manager, a man who makes evil sound reasonable and even desirable.
Rachel Weisz as Lily Sinclair, an eye-candy physicist, damsel in chronic distress.
Fred Ward as FBI Special Agent Leon Ford, Flatfoot in charge. He has a role similar to Tommy Lee Jones as Deputy U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard in director Andrew Davis’ The Fugitive.
Come to think of it, all the cops and news people from The Fugitive are here.
Kevin Dunn as FBI Special Agent Doyle, a sidekick.
Brian Cox as Lyman Earl Collier, a southern Snidely Whiplash, Ace No-Goodnik with fiendish plan.
Joanna Cassidy as Maggie McDermott, Eddie’s friend who lives in an observatory. She may be an astronomer, but this is unclear. She is first viewed looking through a refracting telescope, at what is never revealed, and it makes no difference anyway, as it has no bearing on the story. Maggie’s part in the film is simply to look good, which she does very well. No, Oscars are not awarded for looking good, but why not? Oscars for casting and stunts are next, to be followed by craft-service, I’ve no doubt. In fact, I am surprised looking good is not already a Golden Globe Award. I did not see the last awards show, but based on some stills they show on the network as Breaking News, I’d vote for Demi Moore.
Nicholas Rudall as Dr. Alistair Barkley, the physicist in charge so naive he does not realize the Powers that Be have not the slightest intention of allowing cheap pollution free energy for all. That solar power will become more used as soon as guys like Elon Musk can find a way to meter the sun’s energy. Best for free enterprise to rely on a finite resource like oil, a tried and true moneymaker.
It is unclear in the film if Barkley is trying for fusion energy, or extracting hydrogen from water, but it makes no difference to the story. The man is doomed the instant he archives his goal, the Result.
The UC team comes up with a dry hole (to borrow a phrase from our friends in the wildcat oil trade) until the lone machinist Eddie discovers the experiment must be accompanied by an audible sound frequency. This tone is never identified, but let’s say it’s 1000 cycles, the same as a movie sync-pop.
The team has the Result and Dr Barkley is about to post it on the net, but the duplicitous Morgan Freeman as Paul Shannon makes THE phone call. Soon, the capitalist death squad is on its merry way. Well, you can kiss Dr Barkley and eight square blocks of south side of Chicago goodbye. The unleashed Result has a fearsome temper and makes one big of a motherfucking explosion. BOOM! “Ah, 911?”
Needless to say, those two adorable cuties, Keanu & Rachel, escape the blast, only to be blamed for the whole goddamned mess for being foreign agents. No one who has read a John le Carré spy would be fooled for an instant. A spy doesn’t get instruction from her handler via fax, or leave $250,000 in cash under the kitchen sink. No, they use Moscow Rules. FBI Special Agent Leon Ford knows this, and suspects the frame, but chases the cuties anyway, keeping Paul Shannon on his screens.
It turns out Lyman Earl Collier
practices the evil his pardner Shannon just talks about. He dwells in an underground lab complex guys like Vivek Ramaswamy and Kash Patel can only dream about. He’ll get the Result or know the reason why. He’s asking, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?”
Keanu & Rachel escape the police, and what follows is largely a foot race. Keanu, absent Rachel who is apparently no track star, through Chicago, up and down the Michigan Street drawbridge, to the Yerkes Observatory where we met Maggie, around the observatory, across a frozen lake, through a Chicago museum and ending in the underground lab complex. Whew.
Keanu & Rachel end up in the warm embrace of the FBI, a and depending on who is the AG there just might be an investigation and a minimum of cover up.
But let’s face it, it is more likely the process for the production of clean and cheap energy will end up parked right next to the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant in a government warehouse.
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