L.A. gets nuked in this Final Solution to the Problem of Traffic and Urban Sprawl in Southern California. Most of the other reviewers of this turkey have given it the pan it deserves, but this is the kind of film that just invites more comments. I grew up in L.A. and left more than 20 years ago, and with every visit back, I grow to hate what it has become more and more. This film was probably thought up by some disgruntled New Yorker who moved out to L.A. and is stuck there and wants revenge. It's a direct-to-video attempt to capitalize on the latest string of planetary catastrophe movies. It may fool you because despite its low budget, it starts out looking like a real movie: Its production values and musical score are actually quite respectable. However, the plot is based on a ridiculous premise and feels like something that was banged out in a 30-second story conference. There is some kind of complication involving nuclear testing that results in a shift of the tectonic plate that runs through Southern California (the plate boundary is the San Andreas Fault). If the plate displacement reaches 44 centimeters, boom! Global catastrophe as the molten mantle spews out and causes a great mass extinction, including all human life. How to stop the plate displacement? Why, a little old 15-megaton nuclear explosion or two right in the middle of the L.A. basin. A seismologist I'm not, but what little I know about plate tectonics tells me that the forces driving the plates are such as to defy any merely human intervention. Why is the film set in L.A.? So that the filmmakers don't have to leave town but can use L.A. locations for the shoot. One laughable premise is followed by another when the feds order the evacuation of Los Angeles, and we're asked to believe that the local and national authorities can 1) actually carry this out, and 2) do it in just a couple of days. Then there is a race against time to place the nukes and detonate them while dealing with stock villains, irrelevant and contrived side-stories about family squabbles, impossible coincidences, and implausible crises.
Let's not ignore the cast, which consists largely of third-rate B-movie regulars who don't exactly light up the screen. Mark Dacascos, who appears to be a cheap imitation Bruce Lee, has little or no screen charisma as the male lead; ditto for Tamara Davies as the female lead: She is beautiful but not much of an actress. Ditto for most of the rest of the case. Two very good foreign-born actors, Rutger Hauer and John Rhys-Davies, are completely wasted in their roles: Hilariously, the Dutchman Hauer plays the U.S. president (!), and Rhys-Davies plays a scientist who is essentially a reprise of the role of Maximillian Arturo that he played in the series 'Sliders.' The excellent and under-appreciated Mark Rolston, who has the misfortune to have been born with a face that invites type-casting as an evil guy, looks so bored and unhappy in his stereotypical role as the evil FBI agent with the hidden agenda that it's actually distracting.
This movie is strictly desperation time for insomniacs. Turn it off, take a sleeping pill and go back to bed.
