One dimensional villains and a very noisy soundtrack of intense action makes this outdoorsy thriller too unbelievable and headache inducing. A direct to DVD release (and I can see why), this is one step barely above an Asylum film, had they decided to rip off "The River Wild" with their usual annoying cliched characters and stock bad guys.
It takes forever for the real plotline of this to begin, about half an hour. You shouldn't have that long for character development especially when that part of the script just isn't any good. It's a messy opening without believable motivation that has father Brendan Fraser neglecting his family for environmental issues which ends up with him in jail. Once he's out, he's thrown into the crisis of trying to find his children who have been white water rafting and over here the shots of the murder being committed which has the killers on their trail.
Fraser's a great actor, one of my favorites to come out of the past 30 or 40 years, and it's a shame that his career has been derailed for Hollywood political reasons. To make a living, he has taken roles in films not worthy of his name, and he's one of the saving graces of this movie. Fortunately the actors playing his kids are not cloying ( a rare occurrence not felt in many recent films), and the villains are downright rotten without remorse. You know how this is going to turn out so basically it's 90 + minutes of very loud synthesized music (mostly base), and thus predictable and unnecessary. One of the lesser villains keeps referring to Fraser's wife as mama which is actually pretty sick. I didn't exactly hate this movie, but it's one that I really could have done without although I did enjoy scenes in the woods where I imagined the birds, bees and squirrels chanting simultaneously "Uh oh. There goes the neighborhood."
It takes forever for the real plotline of this to begin, about half an hour. You shouldn't have that long for character development especially when that part of the script just isn't any good. It's a messy opening without believable motivation that has father Brendan Fraser neglecting his family for environmental issues which ends up with him in jail. Once he's out, he's thrown into the crisis of trying to find his children who have been white water rafting and over here the shots of the murder being committed which has the killers on their trail.
Fraser's a great actor, one of my favorites to come out of the past 30 or 40 years, and it's a shame that his career has been derailed for Hollywood political reasons. To make a living, he has taken roles in films not worthy of his name, and he's one of the saving graces of this movie. Fortunately the actors playing his kids are not cloying ( a rare occurrence not felt in many recent films), and the villains are downright rotten without remorse. You know how this is going to turn out so basically it's 90 + minutes of very loud synthesized music (mostly base), and thus predictable and unnecessary. One of the lesser villains keeps referring to Fraser's wife as mama which is actually pretty sick. I didn't exactly hate this movie, but it's one that I really could have done without although I did enjoy scenes in the woods where I imagined the birds, bees and squirrels chanting simultaneously "Uh oh. There goes the neighborhood."