Chain Reaction / The Vanishing

Description

Chain Reaction: Anyone want to venture a guess that Keanu Reeves was sorry he passed up Speed 2 to make this turkey? Both a ridiculous suspense piece about a renegade intelligence community and an ill-considered hunk of do-gooder agitprop about alternative energy technology, Chain Reaction makes Reeves and almost everyone else involved look about as dumb as dumb can be. Hollywood's own Little Buddha plays a streetwise lab technician who survives an organized assault on his hydrogen-power project. The FBI assumes he's really a spy working for some foreign power, but the truth is that a CIA offshoot is behind the project's funding. Morgan Freeman plays the ramrod-straight company man who sabotages Keanu's excellent experiment, and Rachel Weisz portrays a physicist who goes on the run with the alleged saboteur. Directed by Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), who seems more interested in seeing how many absurd places he can mount a chase scene than offering a solid clue as to who these characters are and why we should care about them. --Tom Keogh The Vanishing: It's not unusual for Hollywood to remake European hits. What is unusual is the director of the original getting the chance to helm the new version with an American cast, which is what happened with this film based on an intensely creepy Dutch film of the same name (both directed by George Sluizer). Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock are on vacation when, while stopped at a crowded rest area, she disappears. He devotes the next several years to discovering what happened to her, ruining his life in the process. When he does get a clue, it leads him to Jeff Bridges, who plays a bizarre and highly organized individual whose motives are almost as strange as he is. Bridges is spooky, but Sluizer ultimately is undone by Hollywood's demand for a happy ending, which makes this film affecting but far less unsettling than the original. --Marshall Fine