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It's easy to find flaws to this fast-paced action yarn (e.g., Brian Cox plays a retired agent who schedules a rendenzvous on his phone, which is obviously tapped...like, shouldn't he know better?). But suspend your disbelief for two hours and it's hard to resist this tale of a female James Bond with a major identity crisis. Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson have nice chemistry and create likable characters from their underwritten parts. The villains are strictly cardboard and there's one climax too many. Still, director Renny Harlin (then Geena's husband) shows a flair for terrific set pieces (love the scene where Geena and Samuel are falling onto solid ice and she shoots a hole in it on the way down). All in all, it's hard to figure out why the public didn't make it a hit.

This satisfying Hammer chiller falls somewhere between the studio's finest films (e.g., "Brides of Dracula") and its lame fillers (e.g., "Curse of the Mummy's Tomb"). The story moves slowly at times, but the brooding atmosphere works well. Andrew Keir, who was marvelous as the intrepid Professor Quatermass in Hammer's "Quatermass and the Pit," has too little to do (he spends a lot of the film unconscious). Fortunately, Valerie Leon, who plays his daughter, generates plenty of interest. This stunning beauty delivers an interesting performance and, well, she looks terrific in all those nightgowns. It's a shame Hammer didn't use her in other films.