Another Fox Family Flick shot in Canada. Is it wrong to hope that Jürgen's contract with these people is up really, really soon?
This thing had the worst qualities (were there any other kind?) of Heaven's Fire and The Other Side of the Law combined, and my first coherent thought after seeing it was no way would I put all that effort into writing up what's wrong with it. "Ugh" would about sum it up. However, it's been a couple of days and I feel better now, thank you, so here's the important stuff.
All the actors were reasonably bad except for Prochnow and two bit players. One of the bit players was Birgit Stein and I'm too lazy to look up the other one's name. (Or anybody else's.) Birgit just had a cameo in a low-key comic relief role which she played very nicely. She was taken out of the action early and never came back, which was tragic because this movie NEEDED that comic relief. Patrick Muldoon's impersonation of Psycho Ho-Boy from TOSOTL wasn't quite doing the trick.
Nothing much works in this movie except the scene in the middle where Prochnow gets all weepy about his younger daughter's death... an event which you get to watch at the beginning. And this film must set the record for most deaths by bad special effect of falling off a cliff. But rather than going through the whole litany of plot bloopers I'll just cover my two favorites:
When one of the bad guys' hostages makes a break for it on the mountain at night, Prochnow & daughter pour kerosene on the ground and wait for the guys to get up to it. They do, and happen to fall right there, at which point somebody lights the kerosene which sets the bad guy's legs on fire, enabling the hostage to get away. And if they hadn't fallen right there? Oh well, of course they did. It's a Fox Family Flick.
The other one was at the end, where a mile-wide avalanche comes roaring down the mountain, burying trees in its path... straight toward Prochnow. What's he do? Jumps aside. Does it work? Oh, you betcha. Somehow he escapes the mile-wide avalanche by making a jump for it, but ends up dangling off a cliff by one of the Toys R Us mountain-climbing ropes they kept using in this film, which always sawed themselves in half whenever anyone actually tried to use them to get over a ledge. I dunno how far he was from the ground, but I know how far he was from the edge of the cliff: one and a half feet. Sort of curled facing upward, which put Linda in mind of an overturned turtle. (She also characterized this scene as "Help! I've fallen eighteen inches and I can't get up!") Why he couldn't just straighten up and pull himself over the edge which was right next to his face, we don't know. His daughter bravely saved him, however, so that was all right.
I can't pick on the gals this time the way I usually do, because I'm too busy picking on Antonio Sabato, Jr. Patrick Muldoon's performance was worse, really, but he was clearly just having as much fun as possible and I can't blame him for that. At least he WAS fun. Antonio Sabato, Jr., however, needs to give up and just go into the insurance business or something. Please.
Jürgen was terrific as usual, and got to do some entertaining things: getting whacked on the back of the head, submerging himself in a river, having a fistfight in the snow (Fourth War flashbacks), and then there was all that mountain-climbing and the turtle impersonation. Nevertheless, I still couldn't believe it when Linda said she watched the movie twice. On purpose. Sheesh, and she thought I was nuts for giving Wing Commander a second try...