aka Interceptors

• Directed by Phillip Roth
• Written by Martin Lazarus
• Starring
  • Olivier Gruner
  • Brad Dourif
  • Ernie Hudson
  • William Zabka
  • Glenn Plummer

You ever order yourself Chicken McNuggets at McDonald’s, take a good look at them, and think, “What the hell are these things made of?” The chicken content is fairly certain, and I’m willing to assume that the breading involves flour in some degree; and you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to identify the molten lard leaving wet spots in the little cardboard container. But there’s something else in there, a sizable proportion actually, that doesn’t seem to be any of the above, the base cement in which the fragments of pressed/pureed chicken are amalgamated. What the hell is that stuff?

It’s filler. That’s the actual name of the substance. “Filler.” And it’s exactly the same stuff that fills about three quarters of Interceptor Force.

After opening credits shown over well-faked footage of UFO’s, we open outside Yellowknife, Canada 1993. (For the geographically challenged among you, Yellowknife is the capitol of the Northwest Territories, with a population of 18,000.) A half-dozen people run down an unpaved road, then stop and stare upward (No two people looking at the same spot — this is a recurring theme) before a CGI fireball envelopes them.

Ooh, nice opening! Are you excited yet? Are you?

Fast-forward, then, to present-day Seattle, in which our star, Olivier Gruner, infiltrates the corporate headquarters of Zircon Tech. Well, maybe “infiltrates” isn’t the correct word; he waltzes through the front door, the security guards get the drop on him and he gets beaten with a phonebook while cuffed until he starts in on the kickfighter-fu. Then more security pours in and ties him to the chair — so he gets up and does the same thing with the chair tied to his back. He then does what he came here to in the first place, which is to pull up the CEO’s shirt and plug a weird TV remote into a SCSI jack in his torso. (Huh?) See, that’s the secure place where said CEO stores their sensitive information. He then escapes to the roof, where he is lifted to safety by holding a big hook aloft and waiting for his cohorts to zoom overhead in a plane going fast enough that his head probably should have popped off and stayed behind on the roof.

Congratulations, you’ve just sat through our unrelated set-piece. Yeah, they do mention the data from the Belly-Button Drive later to tie it in, but it’s about as important to the plot as the set-piece in Cobra. (It’s really disturbing how many movies I end up describing in terms of, or comparing to, Cobra. Maybe Marion Cobretti’s going to take over The Heiratic Head of Ezra Pound’s job.) Gruner’s character’s name, by the way, is Shawn, but don’t fool yourself. He’s Olivier Gruner. He doesn’t act well enough to be anyone else. Sure, he could kick my ass even in a grossly-unfair fight, but he still sounds like he’s learned his lines phonetically by rote. He’s the poor man’s Van Damme (although he may be ousted from that position, as Van Damme seems intent on becoming the poor man’s Van Damme).

Just so Gruner won’t stand out too badly, his two cohorts are no better actors (although they do speak English as a first language): Russell (Glenn Plummber, a black guy with dreads) and Dave (William Zabka, a corn-fed Midwestern blond — and also evil Johnny from Karate Kid). We never do get to see the pilot who actually did the rescuing; Shawn’s friends simply hauled him the back of the plane and get all the screen time. Sean and friends are an “interception team,” which apparently means private contractor tough guys.

And they soon come in handy, because meanwhile a monitoring station under the command of a slightly portly Major, played by a slightly portly Ernie Husdon, has tracked a bogey entering the atmosphere in US airspace. Incensed that the UFO did not go through Customs, the Major scrambles a handful of stealth fighters to intercept. What ensues is easily one of the most lackadaisical air battles in cinematic history; after almost ten minutes of “I don’t see it anymore — wait, there it is,” the UFO has polished off all four planes with its laser beam. However, the last one was able to launch a nuke at the craft, and as the bogey exploded it ejected an escape craft.

Let’s stop there a second and go back. These stealth fighters were armed with nukes. That seems odd enough — would stealth fighters scrambled for an interception be carrying the H-bomb as a matter of course? Not only that, but one nuke missile gets launched directly at the UFO, which means that these aren’t just H-bombs; they’re air-to-air nuke missiles. Hello? I know our military sinks money into a lot of unnecessary and counterintuitive projects, but who’s going to develop a nuclear missile that’s going to be used specifically for air-to-air combat? Maybe one of you military types can set me straight. (Of course, then you’d probably have to kill me.)

The ball is now in the court of Weber, apparently a civilian who nonetheless outranks Ernie Hudson and can authorize the use of nuclear weapons. In a fit of inept casting, Weber is played by Brad Dourif in a ponytail and black clothes. Crazy-man Brad Dourif is a top-secret-cleared government spook? Like anyone would put even a cap gun in this man’s hands? Whatever. I’m just imagining that Hudson and Dourif spent a lot of time at the craft services table (Hudson’s pretty obviously been frequenting it, anyway), playing a running game of “Back when my career was better.”

What? Oh. Right. The escape craft. It crosses the Mexican border roughly twelve seconds after the nuke went off, crashing in Baja in a small town run by a drug cartel. The head of said cartel, Rosaro (Stefan Lysenko), even watches the green “meteor” streak across the sky, although he and everyone else are apparently oblivious to the impact less than a mile away.

Weber calls in our boys, naturally, and feeds them a cock-and-bull story about a downed F-117 on maneuvers. He also attaches two people to their team: Perez (Mark Adair-Rios), an MIT boy with a device which can track any kind of matter simply by definition — tell it to look for iron, it’ll find iron; tell it to find humans, it’ll find humans, etc. Just call it a tricorder and be done with it. (I wonder if it can find me a nice cheap subtitled copy of Lady Battle Cop?) The other is Jena (Angel Borise), who’s… well, female. Weber says her specialty is communications, but if that means she’s the only person who can push the button to turn on their satellite-cellular phone, I’d say she’s got a pretty cushy job. She’s also got experience in this field — she was part of a team retrieving a similar “downed F-117″ in Yellowknife in 1993…

It was while the five of them were exchanging barbs and exposition in their SUV (in the hold of the plane delivering them across the border) that I glanced at the clock on the VCR. Would you believe that this is happening twenty-eight damned minutes into the movie? We’ve already spent twenty-eight minutes before we’ve gotten to anything remotely interesting, and such padding is usually a sign that the producers are trying to hold off the revelation that, surpise, there’s also nothing interesting in the ensuing two-thirds of the movie.

Permit me a sizeable digression here. If you’re going to make a simple movie, plotwise, make it a good simple movie. Find your hook and stick with it. Take Predator, for example, to which Interceptor Force will inevitably be compared. Hey, it’s the same basic premise, at least in very broad terms: A military-ish team goes head-to-head with a downed alien south of the border. We’ve even got the accented muscle in the starring role. And it’s not like Predator was terribly innovative, plot-wise; it was basically Alien in the jungle. Short, sweet, simple — and the basis of an enduringly-enjoyable movie. The Alien plot is one of the oldest in cinema (going back at least as far as The Creature From the Black Lagoon), and it’s so often imitated that my first video binge was on Alien ripoffs.

That said, what is it that prevents moviemakers from simply making that simple plot easily? Hey, what is it that forces them to monkey with it and pad the movie out with uninteresting crap so we have even less time for anything that might turn out to be interesting? I mean, look at Predator. Ahnuld & Co are sent on their mission within the first two minutes; they’re crawling through the jungle in five, and the predator is in evidence easily inside a quarter of an hour. Compare that to what we’re going through here.

Okay, digression over. Now back to the show.

They arrive at the crash site. Yup, this is a crack covert operation; they’re all wearing street clothes, and just pile out of their SUV like they’re off to the picnic grounds. What they find is a big-ass crater. (Those were the exact words I had just written in my notes when one of the characters says, “That’s one big-ass crater.” Thank you for that.) Immediately Shawn and friends know the story’s fishy; according to them, an F-117 would have to be going at least Mach-5 to make a crater like that. (If you say so — I’m thinking that if an F-117 hit the ground at Mach-5, you wouldn’t have a deep crater; you’d have a long smear that smells vaguely of burnt F-117.) They fail to note several others things, mainly because the script ignores them. To wit: They’re on a gravelled road. There’s cut lumber all around. Thirty feet away is a barn; beyond that, a farmhouse they never bother to reconnoiter. and of course, there’s the town within walking distance. Seems to me there should be crowds of tourists at this big-ass smoking crater.

There is, apparently, one curious soul in town — the old priest, to whom Dave gives chase. Which one was Dave, you ask? The blond one, but this isn’t the time to get attached to him, because he follows the priest into the barn. We get a POV shot in green-tinted CreatureVision, and then Dave’s truncated scream; when Russell (that’s the black one) investigates, he finds Dave’s clothes, spattered with slime. From everyone’s reactions, you’d think they find the idea of Dave traipsing around naked to be, I dunno, a trifle odd; it’s not like anyone draws a weapon or acts like there could be something hostile around.

Shawn and Russell do play good cop/bad cop with Rena to get some info, though. It’s pretty ludicrous: an eight-man team went into a similar crashsite outside Yellowknife, and only two survived; the US promptly nuked the site to kill the creature. (That was the fireball we saw in the opening scene.) When Shawn protests that there’s no way that someone could have detonated a tactical nuke in North America — near a (marginally) populated area, at that — and have no one notice, Rena’s argument of support is almost elegant in its ridiculous simplicity: “When was the last time you met someone from Yellowknife?” (It’s a “city” of 18,000, for crying out loud! When was the last time anyone met someone from Yellowknife? Hell, I lived in Canada for seventeen years, and I don’t know that I ever met anyone from Yellowknife!) You’d think, also, that if she knows there’s something gruesome and dangerous abroad, she’d be just a wee bit edgier, don’t you? Maybe to the point of carrying a weapon, perhaps?

Anyway. She goes back to the SUV to call in to Weber, while the others start walking toward town. Why did we just split up? For no good reason, except that it gives us a chance for a predictable false scare as the CreatureVision buzzes Rena. That’s all. She calls Weber, who tells her that he’s ordered the bomb to drop at 20:00 if he hasn’t heard from her. Okay, get this — she then gets in and picks up the guys before they reach town anyway. Why did we split up? Good question.

In town, Perez’ tricorder keeps going off, and they all keep feeling that whole “presence” thing go by them. (Invisible monsters are so cheap to film, you know.) Sean and Rena venture into the crummy bar (far too crummy to have as stacked a stripper as they do) for information, and simply because cartel honcho Rosario likes to throw his weight around, we get a completely gratuitous barfight. It’s not just the fact that there’s a barfight that’s gratuitous; everything that happens is gratuitous. Shawn does that “gulping shots of whiskey between combatants” thing twice. How original. (I’ve yet to see a real bar in which full shot glasses are just lined up along the edge of the bar, just waiting for whoever needs a hit.) And one of the fighters is a scrappy little Asian dude, who does that flying kick thing — you know, the one the hero evades, and the ninja-wannabe goes sailing past him into the furniture like Kato in the Pink Panther movies. This guy does it three times.

Naturally, this pisses Rosario off, so when Shawn and Rena runs off from the bar, he orders all of his men to seek them out and kill them. (This is one of those Movie-Mexican towns populated entirely by drunk fat-asses who have to put down their tequila to pick up their ill-maintained guns.) and thus we cat-and-mouse all over town, with Shawn showing off his high kicks to good effect. But remember, there’s also a space alien in town — who iexplicably starts picking off the goons, phasing through walls in a green CGI glow and grabbing them back, leaving them all without their heads. (Which brings up the question — where did Dave’s body go?) Eventually, the alien appears to Shawn in Dave’s form, telling him he’s justing “helping him out.” (Shapechanging aliens are also a great cheap monster, especially when the character being imitated is already dead — you can cut down on those expensive split-screen effects.)

When everyone regroups, laughing and relaxing as if the whole rest of the cartel weren’t within two hundred yards, there’s more filler as Russell takes exception to how much Perez and Rena are getting paid. Then Rena finally breaks out the Big Gun — an “electro-magnetic disruption warhead,” since the creature can apparently phase between a pure energy form and an organic form. (The prop is a conventional AK-47-ish machine gun with more boxes and cables Crazy-Glued on.) And all I can think is, What the hell were you waiting for? You knew from the moment of arrival that there’s an alien nasty running all around, and you waited until now to bring out the single weapon with a chance to defeat it? If that had been me, that bad boy would have been locked and loaded before I crossed the border!

They hatch a plan whereby Shawn will walk through town as bait, bringing out the alien, while everyone else waits at the other end of town with the gun. (Why do they think the alien will now want to fight Shawn, when it had previously been helping him?) Shawn leaps from the moving SUV (Why? Why couldn’t they just stop and let him out?) and walks into town, whereupon the alien leaps from a building, and we finally get to see it. It’s a CGI creature, with the body of Sil from Species and a head inspired by This Island Earth. Shawn fires effectless bullets at it, but naturally, as soon as it morphs into Dave’s shape, he lowers his gun. (Duh….) We get some needless hand-to-hand, and then the alien pulls its own gun and starts firing at everything, which causes lots of explosions (except when it hits the SUV — that just vaporizes, because blowing up an SUV is too expensive). The good guys manage to rally Rosario and the rest of his cartel to their side; some start herding the women and children out of town, while the others stay and fight. (This is a notorious cartel? Four off-duty patrolmen could wax their asses without breaking a sweat.) By the way, we’ve got about three hours until the airstrike.

Will the untested weapon work — and will Rena, who insists on using it herself, figure out how to cock the damned thing in time to use it? Will they be able to contact Weber to call off the airstrike, now that the SUV with the communications gear has been vaporized? Will the alien inexplicably turn out to be alive after thought dead, and will it develop an evil laugh reminiscent of the final minutes of Predator? Will Shawn be able to save himself from being practically at ground zero of a nuclear strike by leaping down a well? Will we end with an ill-placed and insipid “humorous” ending?

Gosh, I wonder.

It’s not just the filler that’s so irritating here (although it’s about as pleasant as a rash). There are just so many arbitrary things going on here. Some I’ve mentioned: Why does Rena go back to the truck alone? Why does the alien help them, then try to kill them? Then there are all the others:
- If option B is a nuclear strike on foreign soil, don’t you think you’d beef up option A to be better than three uninformed mercenaries and two civilians?
- Why the hell are we trying to kill aliens anyway? Perez mentions that this has happened about a half-dozen times around the world; by “this,” does he mean that we’ve fired on alien craft and they’ve crashlanded? Why the hostility so strong that we will nuke foreign countries rather than try to, I dunno, communicate? And if these aliens have the technology to travel through space, plus beat our stealth fighters five to one, who thinks it’s a good idea to royally piss them off?
- Do drug cartels really just hang around in run-down Mexican towns? You’d think that somebody’s actually got to do the work of running the drugs.

I could go on, but I’m depressing myself. But that’s not nearly as depressing as this: As the credits roll, two cards come up:

To my Mother
IDA,
You will always
be in my heart.
- PhilIn Memory of my Father
MAX,
for your years
of love and support.
- Olivier That’s right, both the director and the star intended this utterly forgettable shelf-filler as memorials to their dear departed. I’ve seen some sad things in my day, but few are as truly pathetic as this well-intentioned but hopelessly-misguided gesture.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 19
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 23
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Brad Dourif (Weber) had a recurring role on the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Voyager as the sociopathic crewmember Suder
  • Andrew Hawkes (Morgan — who was that again?) played “Amat’igan” on the DS9 episode “Broken Link