Bang, bang -- then BOOM.

Rating: 6/10 (6 April 2007)

As with any effective action movie, you're glued to the screen even as you goggle at the stupidity of it all. People get shot, sawed in half by wire ropes, blown up, run over by renegade subway trains, electrocuted by helicopters whose rotor blades make a mare's nest of high-tension power cables. I couldn't count the number of exploding fireballs. There are, I think, three maniacal car chases. (It depends on how you define car chase. Is a lone cab bounding at full speed through the woods of Central Park a "car chase"?)
It's like watching a Roadrunner cartoon. Bruce Willis is spat out of an aqueduct tunnel by the force of the water, loops through the air, and plops down into a mud puddle unhurt. "Whew," he's likely to say, "what a #@#%!%#@^%!ing close call THAT was!" Samuel Jackson as his unwilling partner matches him step for step, in a plot partly structured along the lines of the old mismatched cop movies that ran out of steam a decade or so ago.
Both Willis and Jackson are quite good for reasons most people already will recognize. There's nothing like a blood-covered Willis wisecracking and wincing with real pain as he extracts a piece of shrapnel from his flesh with his own teeth -- unless it's Jackson with his bulging eyes and crackling high voice responding angrily to some racist remark. "Say WHUT?"
I see I've kind of skipped much of the plot but it wanders off in several tenuously related directions anyway? Jeremy Irons with a faux German accent is the heavy and he belongs in a different movie. Nobody else registers.
You know what it's like? It's like a comic pornographic film. "Debby Does New York." Exciting episode follows exciting episode and they are linked by only the slenderest of narrative threads.
Let's see. That makes it a combination skin flick, mismatched cop movie, and Roadrunner cartoon. Hmmmm. Yeah, I guess that about covers it. It's tense, amusing, and filled with stunts. And if you're in the proper mood it's captivating.