Thrill Seekers (1999)

Reviewed on May 03, 2001 under Action-suspense, Sci-fi |

Directed by Mario Azzopardi
Written by Kurt Inderbitzen and Gay Walch
Starring
- Casper Van Dien
- Catherine Bell
- Theresa Saldana
- Peter Outerbridge

Had a crummy day. Thanks to my allergy medicine, I woke up with a headache and a general feeling like someone had used me to wash their car, plus my stomach was still doing collywobbles thanks to the stomach flu I had caught from my son. At work, I had to redo a whole set of completed proposals because a client decided to give us an entirely different set of information to work from (that should have been sent in the first place). I found out that two software sets that I needed yesterday wouldn’t even be mailed until next Friday, and an application I had been using for months suddenly FUBARed so badly that nothing short of a complete uninstall and clean reinstall would make it function again.

So by the time I got to the video store, I said, “I am going to reward myself by renting something with no redeeming value whatsoever.” With that kind of attitude, is it any wonder that the name “Casper Van Dien” stood out on the New Release wall as if it had been formed in cancer-causing radium?

“Don’t worry, I can handle this! I’m Tarzan, I tell you!”

To be fair, it’s a competent movie (made for TBS, where they can’t just rely on a cool box to make their money; they have to actually keep things moving briskly enough that audiences will stay put during commercial breaks). In fact, it centers around a really good idea. But…

Well, we’ll get to the “But” later.

Van Dien is Tom Merrick, a once high-profile Chicago TV reporter now tortured by blood on his hands; his camera crew had gotten killed when he insisted on getting “just one more shot” inside a burning factory complex. Now, a few years later, he’s jettisonned the snazzy suits and great hair for garage-sale clothes and perpetual grimy stubble; he’s traded his wife and son for a seedy apartment with a hotplate; and he’s lost the network job and finds himself with a new job at the National Inquisitor, which is just what it sounds like.

Given that there haven’t been any notable disasters to exploit recently, his editor sends him to the archives to do research for an article on past disasters and our fascination with them. He meets their on-staff research librarian Elizabeth (Catherine Bell) and exchanges just enough supposed-to-be-witty repartee that we know that not only will she be reappearing later, she’ll probably turn out to be the love interest.

Merrick spends a lot of time browsing all the standard disasters — the Titanic, the Hindenberg, The Exorcist 2 — and stumbles upon a startling fact: in photos of disaster sites scattered across seventy years, he can pick out the same person in the crowd: A thin man (Julian Richings) with lank hair and an impossibly attention-getting nose. (In fact, since his name is never mentioned on-screen, we’ll refer to him as The Nose.) But that’s not all — he recalls seeing the same fellow, for just an instant, at the factory where he lost his camera crew.

Oh, I get it — she’s got glasses, so she must be smart, huh? (Bet she turns out cute when she takes off the specs and combs her hair, though.)

He takes his discovery to his editor, who is overjoyed at something so sensational. (Hello? Would anyone believe the National Expositor if they were to break such a story?) When Merrick objects that their electronically-archived pictures could have been tampered with, she sends him to the Smithsonian to examine the originals.

On the plane, we kill a few minutes as he phones his kid and former wife and gets an earful of ultra-concentrated bitching, and then the stunner: Sitting across the aisle is The Nose himself. When the latter makes a trip to the little boys’ room, Merrick rushes over and paws through his bag, discovered a “Thrill Seekers” brochure which, on each page, advertises a different great disaster — including “the largest mid-air collision in US history,” which just happens to be that very lightning-plagued flight.

The Nose returns and physically objects to the violation of his privacy, and in the struggle Merrick ends up with a gun in his hand from The Nose’s bag. He uses it to force the pilot to turn the plane around — which is exactly what he would have done, as lightning has shorted out the radar and radio. At the last minute, Merrick realizes that, if that’s what they were going to do anyway, he needs to change history, and orders them to climb instead; in doing so, they just barely miss hitting another plane head-on. (Actually, they graze by each other — but since, at that velocity, that’s as good as a mid-air collision, we’ll just pretend we didn’t see that.)

To show their appreciation, the FBI promptly detains him as a hijacker, and Merrick is beset upon by old bulldog Agent Baker (Lawrence Dane) and gadget-obsessed youngster Agent Stanton (James Allodi). Naturally, they don’t believe a word of his story, especially since The Nose disappeared with all of his incriminating possessions, plus Merricks’ file — and he wasn’t on the passenger list to begin with. Merrick uses his phone call to call Elizabeth (hey, it’s her again! Who woulda guessed?) to print some more hardcopies and bring them to the Federal Building.

Perhaps sending back a time tourist so easily noticeable was an error in judgement on their part.

But first, two darkly-dressed mysterious types break in, knock out Merrick’s guards, and abduct him at gunpoint. And then it’s a big street chase scene, as Merrick breaks away from his rescuers, who pursue him (using a handgun that can blow a car to kibble), and the two FBI agents pursue all of them (you’d think that the Federal Building would have more than those two agents, wouldn’t you?), and Merrick snags Elizabeth, who just arrived, and hides with her in a utility closet in the subway. Subway? Now he remembers — the next page in The Nose’s brochure had mentioned a Chicago subway crash the day after the mid-air collision!

Meanwhile, we find out that the two mystery abductors, Cortex (Theresa Saltana) and Felder (Peter Outerbridge) are agents of the future company that is using illegal time-machine technology to send its clients on tourist outings to the past. Unfortunately, Merrick’s actions have disrupted the flow of the timeline, making it increasingly hard for them to use their fold-open notebook thingies to communicate with their boss in the future (Martin Sheen, doing a confined cameo). This much is certain, though; they have to stop Merrick from making any more changes.

But when The Nose is one of your clients, it’s hard to keep people from noticing him. Merrick spots him and intuits that that must be the train that’s going to crash, so he and Elizabeth leap on board and disconnect the front car from the rest, preventing more than minor scrapes and bruises. The Nose, however, stays in the lead car and dies — and Cortez and Felder are missed. Especially because the next major disaster is the fire in Copps Coliseum in New Jersey the next night, where 11,000 people are supposed to die.

Including Merrick’s son.

**“They told you they this was The Matrix 2? Better check the script again, Casper.”**

It all sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it? Time-traveling tourists, sight-seeing famous disasters, and someone who’s supposed to be in one of the disasters figuring it out and trying to stop it in time… It’s a terrific idea. So good that it’s already been done, exactly that way. Ever hear of the 1992 made-for-cable Grand Tour: Disaster in Time (aka Timescape)? Jeff Daniels discovers the same thing: tourists who time-hop from disaster to disaster for fun. They even use a passport-book as the time travel device, similar to the book-disguised device used by the Thrill Seekers clients, and the hero there attempts to use it to go back in time to prevent a tragedy which has just elapsed, just like in this movie.

Of course, in that movie, it took Daniels about three-quarters of the running time to figure out what was going on, whereas Merrick clues in about a half hour into Thrill Seekers, with the rest of the running time being taken up by avoiding both the FBI and the Time-Cops as he tries to prevent the Big One.

Still, I’d be willing to forgive the obvious borrowing (the director’s Italian — what did you expect?), if there weren’t several other big buzzy flies spoiling the ointment of competency.

For one thing, as usual with time travel movies, causality is shot to hell. It makes little red flags go up when Martin Sheen calls his underlings to let them know that a crucial piece of technology has just disappeared because the inventor never invented it, thanks to the modified time stream. The script tries to cover for the obvious “Huh?” by mentioning that Sheen is in a “containment bunker,” which minimizes the effects of the modified time stream, but it still comes out as a slightly less dumb version of the photograph in Back to the Future. (So, if the future changes and all three siblings disappear, does that mean that someone was purposely taking a photograph of just a hedge?) And a little later, when Merrick has to time travel himself to take a second stab at preventing a disaster (you knew it had to happen), he pops back into his own body, in mid-conversation with Elizabeth. How, exactly, does that work?

Told ya.

A further annoyance is a complete setup without payoff. Merrick’s whole mission for the whole second half is to prevent the Copps Coliseum fire, mainly to save his own son. Cortez, meanwhile, is determined to make sure that history resumes its previous course, largely to return her son to existence in the future; in fact, she’s willing to make the disasters happen herself to assure the outcome. There’s an obvious parallel here between their motivations, and it’s hard to believe that it’s coincidence — so why does it never come to a head? The ideal would be for Merrick to be put in a situation as ethically iffy as Cortez’s, i.e., where he has to decide whether to save his own son or prevent a larger catastrophe. At the very least, there should have been some pontificating on whether he and Cortez are really similar. (You know the scene, you’ve seen in a million times: “You and I are very similar, Captain Picard…” That sort of thing.)

Instead, Merrick is given no hard choices, and the fates seem to reward him for that. He’s repeatedly in the right place at the right time, and armed opponents have a habit of being knocked out by acts of God or other uncontrollable events. (This happens twice in the last ten minutes!) Ideally, he should have to retread some situation from the initial factory fire, which started the chain of events that lead to his alienation from his son, in order to save the same son.

Maybe I’m asking for too much. Maybe I’m looking for too much thought in an adequate little TV-movie. But time travel’s a premise that comes with a lot of baggage, and if you aren’t willing to deal with it in the script, it’ll come back to bite you.