Barthelme (4/1/02)
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Epicenter. [Richard Pepin, 2000.]
Brooding enigmatic technoweenie Gary Daniels — rendered more than usually unstable, we gather, by the untimely passing of his wife — prepares and executes an elaborate solo caper which circumvents the ineffectual security precautions [fools! they know not the mind of the Übergeek!] of his employer, manytentacled multinational “Global Tech”; allowing him to abscond with the darkest secrets of the Stealth Bomber and spirit them away on a Zip disk [is this meant to be product placement?] into the back room of a dark and smoky strip club, where the inevitable representatives of the Russian mafia [notably designated Dragon Lady Daniela Nane] await their delivery with wicked, wicked smiles.
Fortunately for the stability of civilization and the profit margins of the American aerospace industry, ace undercover FBI babe Traci Lords is on the job and at the keyboard as the Mob transfers the eightfigure payoff to a numbered Swiss account, and smoothly interpolates her own twist into the proceedings by changing the password even as the Mob is trying to short Daniels and Daniels is withholding a crucial Magic Microchip — making this, I guess, an octuple cross, if one could keep score.
Somehow this entails a carchase through the streets of San Francisco [somewhere Steve McQueen must always be smiling], ending with one of those classic runaway cablecar predicaments and Daniels’ apprehension and transport by our heroine to a safehouse in LA — where, meanwhile, by one of those coincidences on which the art of the scenario is nourished, her neglected teenage daughter has relocated herself to freak out.
The Mob, of course, immediately picks up the trail, thanks to the intervention of highly-placed double agent Jeff Fahey [making this now I think a double-to-the-fourth cross][but don’t quote me]; and everybody ends up drawing down in a fancy restaurant in a highrise — a Mexican standoff abruptly resolved by the timely intervention of The Big One the title has promised; motivating much cheesy f/x of collapsing buildings, panic in the streets, falling bricks and/or bodies, the burning skyline of Los Angeles [a prospect which never fails to cheer me]; by now you surely know the drill. — Meanwhile the daughter gets trapped in an elevator [you remember that one too]; Lords and Daniels, bonding despite their adversary relationship, flee the mob and the bent FBI guys, escaping through the sewers of Paris [or maybe it was the subways of Los Angeles] after somehow mysteriously for a brief passage getting trapped in a series of rooms flooded by burst pipes, swimming underwater to escape, fighting sharks, struggling with the mob that rushes the boats, arguing with one another whether the band was playing “Nearer My God To Thee” or “Whole Lotta Love” as the great ship went down; finally ending up handcuffed together like Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll and arguing the ethical fine points of espionage while they careen about the ruins of the city doing good deeds, rescuing various other people trapped in predicaments familiar from
Speed and
Volcano, and, of course, each other, repeatedly. — After the deranged FBI dude takes the runaway hostage, the Mob returns in helicopter gunships. Undaunted, our heroes face them down with a couple of BB guns and a water pistol and a few well-aimed rocks, Ms. Lords falls several stories into a pile of stuffed animals [this may be new], the good triumph, the wicked fail to prosper, and, lo and behold, Daniels is allowed to escape to the South Seas [cf.
Out Of Sight]; somehow avoiding romantic entanglement, which has to be a mistake. Nonetheless all concerned live happily ever after.
A silly pastiche, obviously, but it’s still fairly remarkable how many big-budget action movies the authors managed to quote on a nonexistent budget. — As for Ms. Lords as Action Babe: well, why not. Indeed, when has she ever been anything else?
____________Man of mystery (3/6/02)
