Der Chill Faktor

Good action flick about regular guys turned defenders of the American people. Cuba Gooding is great as an excitable type, while Skeet Ulrich is the cool one. Once the story is set up, the action is non stop with a lot of "Edge of your seat" scenes. Cuba & Skeet deliver some good comedy lines to take a bit of the edge off the intensity of this film. Their relationship as friends grows throughout the movie so it gives you a good feeling & brings some believability to how they react to each other in tough situations. If you like fast, hard hitting action with a bit of humor thrown in, this movie is for you!

I'm no snob who only loves foreign movies and turns his nose at mainstream entertainment - in fact, I am quite forgiving for genre films, and I enjoy a lot of B movies as well. However, this major Hollywood is just as bad as many of the worst B films. Despite a respectable budget, the movie looks quite cheap, sometimes embarrassingly so, like when you see a guide cable hooked to the boat, or when you see that a major highway up a mountain is A DIRT ROAD (?!) The protagonists are annoying little jerks, and you feel sorry for Gooding for playing a foul-mouthed stereotyped hustler. In fact, the chief antagonist is more sympathetic than they are! There's also not that much action, and what there is has been filmed a la "Speed 2" (jiggily camera close-up).

Even if it's free on TV and you're feeling undemanding, you'll feel as frustrated as I felt at the end.

I loved this movie. Of course, I like any movie that is packed with action, but is not so serious, that your depressed halfway through the movie. This movie portrayed a pair of undesirables stuck together in a, "wrong place at the wrong time" kind of situation which made them into heros.

Is this realistic? Absolutely not! But was it entertaining? Most definitely! The humor in this movie is what made it good. If they had tried to make this into some kind of serious drama, it probably would have flopped. Thankfully they didn't try that. This movie gets an A+ from me.

Chill Factor left me a little cold. The contrivances of this film were at such a level that I was unable to suspend my disbelief. Unfortunate, because it boasts good acting talent. I got the feeling they had to shoot the film in a week, forcing the production team to take a machete to their basic "FORMULA" for a commercial action /thriller. Further compounding a fracture, they wasted the adroit talent of Hudson Leick. The film would have been more interesting had they expanded her role. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts at the box office.

This film was complete trash, but in a good way. I've always looked upon Cuba Gooding Jnr as a semi decent actor but if this is the kind of film he is going to be starring in, then I can see him descending the same way as Charlie Sheen.

You can see from the outset that the makers tried to make one of those high octane action thrillers, which are ten-a-penny these days. But when you've got a budget that would struggle to finance an episode of quantum leap, then maybe making a film of this kind wasn't such a good idea.

They make use of computer graphics in a lot of the action scenes which, to be honest, doesn't look the worst I have ever seen, but still prompts you to snicker at how bad it is. The most ridiculous of which occurs at the end of the movie, when a chemical weapon which we have been told has the power to blow up basically a quarter of America, detonates in a tunnel.

At this point we are subjected to rotten computer graphics which are so bad that I instantly had flashbacks of Dean Stockwell and the film-making atrocity that was the Langoliers.

But the story is complete nonsense, so even with a budget the size of Lord of the Rings, there would be no way of making the whole thing believable anyway. So you can perhaps see where the producer was coming from i.e. lets make a cheap action thriller and we'll plaster Cuba Gooding's face over the front cover and we'll maybe make some money.

It would've have been better if Eric Roberts had been given the leading role.