worst film ever? i think so...

Rating: 1/10 (18 March 2001)

Oh dear. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that 'character IS action'. I wonder what he may have said on seeing this film? My suspicions were first aroused within the first 7 seconds of the film in which John Travolta is simpering on a fairground ride with a child with a haircut so bad that he simply had to be American. When the poor 'bowl cut' blighter was blown away by Nicholas Cage (with seemingly an enormous caterpillar on his upper lip), I began to think that I was in trouble. To say that these characters were one dimensional would be to insult, well, one dimension. They blunder around talking lines that truly no-one in the whole world would ever say outside of an action movie.
To think that John Woo has come to this, he made superlative action movies in Hong Kong but the rubbish that he makes in the US is in danger of making us forget all that. There are many of the trademark Woo incidents, people leaping diagonally through the air with a gun in each hand (and always in each hand, I wonder if it is a John Woo fantasy for us to discover a species which has 3 arms, my my, we would have a veritable arms race then!), gunfights in churches etc etc. The subtleties that do appear in his HK films are simply lost here under a welter of bullets, bad acting and a simply woeful script. Yes, some of the stunts are very good, but how many times can you see a stunt and be amazed, by and large they are merely variations on the same theme. Remove them and what are you left with? Really, really bad acting by John Travolta and a performance by Nicholas Cage that makes me think that he felt like buying a new swimming pool when this script turned up. I was little surprised by Travolta ('Battlefield Earth' anyone?) but could this really be the same Cage from 'Leaving Las Vegas'?.
Luckily the picture failed on my copy for the last 3 minutes so I was spared Travolta getting his own face back, re-uniting with his lovely (Doctor) wife, connecting with his once wild daughter and now taking over the upbringing of Cage's son (who incidentally also had a very bad, bowl type american brat haircut). If only i had lost the sound as well then maybe I wouldn't have been left wincing with utter agony as much as I did.
I only wish that I could give this utter trash -1000000000000000 let alone only 1. A film for those who see Hollywood action films as the zenith, the apotheosis of entertainment.