Critical Mass

Rating

Director

Ed Raymond (Fred Olen Ray)

Screenplay

Sean McGinly

Length

1h 35m

Starring

Treat Williams, Udo Kier, Lori Loughlin, Blake Clark, Doug McKeon, Andrew Prine, Richard McGonagle, Shanna Moakler, T.J. Thyne, Charles Cyphers, Jack Betts

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
The desires of a small band of terrorist put the lives of millions in danger as they overtake a nuclear power plant about to be decommissioned in Critical Mass.

Treat Williams stars as Mike Jeffers, a war vet consigned to a job working security for a nuclear power plant that’s in the process of being permanently shutdown. Udo Kier plays Samson, an anti-government militiaman who has come up with a plan to sabotage Jeffers’ power plant to kill millions if his demands are not met. With his band of terrorists, Samson knocks over a corporation housing nuclear rods, where they begin building a dirty bomb that will set off the nuclear power plant effectively. Trapped in the plant is a group of journalists filming a commercial for a state politician who hopes to capitalize on the closing plant’s imminent loss of jobs in his upcoming re-election bid. His press secretary Janine (Lori Loughlin) merely tolerates the blowhard while she, the senator and Jeffers are the only ones left alive to fight off the roaming villains.

Critical Mass is a fight for survival as the incredibly unlucky Jeffers attempts to thwart the plans of the terrorists while the federal government virtually sits on its hands refusing to negotiate with them. Jeffers’ misfortune nearly gets everyone killed, but soon his luck turns and he begins winning, only to have his good fortune disappear once again.

Williams seems tired from a long career, as he fails to deliver a believable character. Jeffers is a strong-minded ex-military security guard but Williams doesn’t capitalize on the down-and-out nature of his life and the luck-starved attitude he should possess. When Jeffers breaks down in one scene about his inabilities, we don’t see a dramatic collapse. Instead, we see a haphazard mess of emotion. Kier does try to capitalize on his character’s lack of morals but doesn’t give his character more than a single dimension of villainy. Our favourite villains are ones with souls who have human needs and desires, but here we see a soulless wretch with no redeeming qualities. Loughlin, most noted for her performance as Becky on television’s Full House, provides a great disservice to this film. Her role isn’t the most tantalizing of roles; it’s a weak, modestly-impassioned woman who seems to serve only as a romantic interest for the story’s main character. Loughlin does nothing to help this image and goes so far as to hinder it further. Her limited emotional range, flat facial tones and unsentimental voice give the character a negative dimensionality when she instead should have given the audience a reason to care about the people in the film.

Mixed in with these already miserable performances are a lot of substandard supporting performers. Each individual character is an amalgamation of every stereotype imaginable and we never learn to care for any one of their characters, relying – without success – on director Fred Olen Ray to give us the opportunity. We find ourselves hoping for a huge explosion at the plant, potentially levelling miles of land, but that never happens either. However, we do get a small blast at the film’s conclusion, but its impact is lost as – by then – we have long –since concluded that we’ve wasted our time on an uneventful movie.

Critical Mass has plenty of attractive people, self-aggrandizing and good versus evil scenarios. The problem is that the filmmakers deliver these in a hackneyed, humdrum way that supplies the audience with minimal action and a plethora of boredom.

Review Written

June 7, 2003