Most Wanted (1997)

I guess I've about reached satiation on noisy and implausible action films. They have to have some sort of sheen in order to make any impression at all. "The Bourne Identity" was interesting because of the location shooting, the direction, and the performances by the leads and the support. It also had a cool narrative thread. Just who IS this guy Bourne anyway? This one isn't interesting.Keenan Ivory Wayans is an honorable Marine gunnery sergeant on death row, recruited by a rogue military group to be framed for the assassination of the first lady -- a dangerous woman who is a card-carrying member of the ACLU and who favors veterans' benefits.He manages to escape the roof-top set up and rushes to the safe spot from which he calls his handlers, an army group headed by the viperous General John Voight with a Southern accent. The dialog in the scene is lifted straight out of "Three Days of the Condor." "Are you damaged?" "What?" "Are you injured?" "No." "Stay where you are, Poker One, I'm going to bring you home." Something like that. It hardly matters.The rest of the film contains no big surprises. As is customary, a beautiful young woman is swept up in Wayans' attempts to save himself and expose the plot. Jill Hennessy is certainly pretty enough but the only thing that would have saved her here would be a gratuitous nude scene -- maybe a couple of them. Wayans himself is an imposing physical presence but his thespian talents are modest at best.There are some good guys on Wayans' side. The CIA team led by Paul Sorvino is trying to help him but they're blocked and frustrated by one or another circumstance.But why go on with this. If you like action movies you'll like this production with all its bangs and zipping bullets and exploding time bombs and screeching cars and sprinting bodies and venal villains and some guy cold-cocking another by bumping foreheads in violation of every one of Newton's laws of physics -- you'll like this one too.You know something? I made fun of this flick by citing Newton's laws? Well, actually, this movie exemplifies one of them. All dynamic systems eventually run out of steam and grind to a halt -- unless they are fed some inventive energy from an outside source. How about another action movie, just like this one, except it stars nothing but kangaroos?

**SPOILERS** Ridiculously inept action movie with funny-man Keenen Ivory Wayans playing on the lamb and on the run escaped murderer James Dunn who was set up to take the rap for the assassination of the First lady, Donna Cherry, of the United States.Dunn who was sentenced to be executed by an army court-martial for killing his superior officer, who ordered him to shoot a 10 year-old Iraqi boy, during the Gulf War is rescued as he's being sent to Levenworth Prisons death row. Dunn is to be recruited by this gong-ho and very unstable nut-job Gen. Woodward, Jon Voight,in a complicated scheme to off big time pharmaceutical businessman Donald Bickhart.Robert Culp. Being the designated hit-man in this covert operation Dunn never gets off a shot as the First Lady is gunned down by an unknown gunman and he ends up being accused of her murder.On the run with his face plastered all over the newspapers and on TV Dunn seems top have no trouble at all eluding the police and US Army. kidnapping hospital administrator Dr. Victoria Constantini, Jill Hennessy, Dunn has his ace in the hole that can prove his innocence, her video tape of the assassination. It's then that he stupidly hands the tape over to a reporter who's even more nuts then he is by not bothering to make a copy of it and then having the tape turned over to Gen. Woodward! The every person who set Dunn up and more then anything else in the world wan't him dead!The movie "Most Wanted" get more and more outrageous as it goes along with Dunn on the run and not bothering to even keep out of sight with the police army CIA FBI with even almost half the population of L.A is out looking for him with a 10 million dollar reward on his head. With the help of a first very reluctant Victoria Dunn tracks down the reason for the First Ladies murder to non-other then Bickhart, the person he was to assassinate. Bickhart together with Gen. Woopdword was involved in some kind of secret experiment on the men of the 82nd Air-Borne division during the Gulf War that had almost all of them end up either dead or hospitalized for life. The First Lady a champion for veterans causes was about to expose this fiendish experiment to the public and had to be silenced and Dunn, a perfect pasty, was the one picked to be framed for her murder.If he didn't have enough trouble already Dunn who thought that CIA Deputy Director Rackmill, Paul Sorvino, was on his side in this whole mess found out later to his, but nobody else's, surprise that he wasn't. Rockmill, like Gen. Woodward, was setting the guy up in order to get the 10 dollar million reward, offered by Bickhart, for his capture dead or alive. Dunn for his part being very experienced in electronics explosives and all around covert activities ,including the unique ability of being able to fool people to who he is without even having a disguise on , gets to the bottom of what Gen. Woodward & Bickhart are up to. It's then that he plays them off against each others without them even knowing it. By the time the movie is finally over with about as much explosions car chases and all around destruction that you would see in half a dozen of these type of mindless actions flicks Dunn or Keenen Ivory Wayans is off to the races with him free as a bird. Dunn is no longer wanted by him being falsely reported reported on the TV news as being captured as executed by the government. I could only hope that some other innocent pasty, like Dunn, wasn't the one who took his place in Levenwoths execution chamber.

Most Wanted is considered an action movie, however in a perfect world it would be categorized as a comedy. One fateful rainy day I stumbled upon this movie while channel surfing. I thought it was rather funny seeing Keenen Ivory Wayans, funny man and mastermind from In Living Color and other movies, as a machine gun toting commando. At first I thought it was a spoof of an action flick. Spoofing has been and still is the specialty of the Wayans brothers. However I was shocked to find that this was a serious attempt at an action film. Needless to say, it made me laugh five times harder after learning that this film was unintentionally funny. Since then I have told my best friend to keep an eye out for it in the 5 dollar DVD rack at Wal Mart so we can both share a night of laughs. I really would not know where to begin with this movie. For one thing I do not understand why solid performers like Jill Hennessy and Jon Voight would do such a badly written and unoriginal movie. The dialogue is just hideous, the whole time you get the feeling that Wayans is just trying way too hard to sell himself to the audience as a cool and calculating ex-marine hit-man. Then there is the whole scene where he is being chased by the entire city, which takes the film from bad to ridiculous. There is also the scene where Wayans and Hennessy's characters find information about a COVERT OPERATION on a website in a public library. Yeah, OK, sure...That makes sense. I would have sworn they called it covert for a reason. Like a previous reviewer on this film said, I could sit here write on and on about how bad this movie is. But you have to see it for yourself. Don't see it to see if its good or not. Instead, see it to laugh at how bad it is. With all due respect to Wayans, Hennessy, and Voight, this movie should have never happened. Fortunately for those involved, it didn't seem to put a damper on their careers.

Enjoyable movie by today's standards. It used some technology that was exploited one year later in another movie called "Enemy of the State". More than one subplot came together nicely at the end. Contains mystery and suspense interspersed with action. Not being overly critical, I found only one sentence that I would have changed with different words. A seldom seen movie, this little gem has a few surprises that can keep one's interest to the finale.