Epicenter

I was really looking forward to watching this movie for a while but then I found it was airing on UPN network and that kind of disappointed me. It was a decent action movie but it lacked the martial art fight scenes that I was hoping on since Gary Daniels was starring in it. Gary's role was kind of like a villian role until the end of the movie I didn't really like that. If I were to rate I would rate **out of****.

A run-of-the-mill spy/action movie which entertains until the earthquake stops everything for several minutes just for the sake of special effects. If they HAD to have an earthquake in the movie, they could at least have tried to relate it to the plot! It's as though the story was already written and then someone decided they wanted an earthquake movie, picked the script off the shelf and then pasted an earthquake in over the top. A totally confusing mismatch, but take the earthquake out and you have an OK movie.

The building special effects were quite good, but others were rather poor - in fact they showed the same footage of a pipe being forced apart at least three times, once mirrored to make it look like a different one!

You can tell this movie is truly low-budget... I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the chase scene after the first 20 or so minutes into the movie, where two guys are chasing a cable car with their convertible... That whole 5-minute sequence was taken from the movie Metro, featuring Eddie Murphy and Michael Rapaport! You can see during a few clips the persons sitting in the convertible are clearly Murphy/Rapaport, even without freezing the frame.

I started watching this movie with a fairly open-mind, but taking scenes from another movie and then very poorly incorporating them to the plot is just wrong. Even with a low budget.

If you can't afford to make a scene such as this one, don't take a whole sequence from another film, think of something else! Watching this movie might have been a good way to kill off a couple of hours on a late night, but that scene was just too cheesy to even remotely try and take the rest of it seriously.

From the beginning, I was intrigued by mystery and the hi-tech security measures, but then came the car chase, and I decided Epicenter was aimed at the 10 to 12-year-old crowd.... cars flying through the air and a train crash that sent it rolling sideways, over and over. But fairly soon it turned into an x-rater with fully nude dancers in a night club, followed by a very explicit sex scene. The acting was mostly good, but the script made both the good guys and bad guys more interested in their jobs than in the severe earthquake all around them. The movie did keep me watching, so I rate it at five.

And here is another one from the guy's of PM entertainment. The people who brought you films like Hologram Man and launched the career of one Evan Lurie. I've seen a lot of movies from these guy's and yes there all nobrainers, lot's of explosions, a lot of rip -offs and second and third rate faces and acting, but fun strange enough. There all made for a shoestring budget and the plot is nowhere to be found but they look good and are quite well crafted. And so we have epicentre with a Traci - no I am not a minor - Lords and Gary Daniels, another PM star. The plot is about some stolen chip, a handy use of a webcam and an earthquake and a lot of it is shot in some ex Iron Curtain Country, try to piece the plot together from other movies in the dull parts.