FilmBlather.com

"I can do anything I put my mind to."

If you take a look at the poster for Extreme Ops, above the flipping skateboarders and menacing-looking helicopters, you may notice the film's tagline: "Fear is a trigger."

What the hell does that mean? What can it mean? For that matter, what does one make of the title, altered from "The Extremists" because apparently, the word "extremist" hits some sort of nerve at this point in our culture. Whatever. I don't know what can possibly offend in a movie as commercialized and calculated as this one, except perhaps for its excruciating tediousness. It isn't aggressively atrocious in any discernible way, it's just worthless, from its pseudo-rock-video opening to the idiocy of its last frames.

There isn't much I can write here, to be honest with you, as Extreme Ops consists entirely of an hour's worth of setup for a twenty-minute chase scene down a mountain. I swear that's it. If you must have details, here goes: a group of daredevil entrepreneurs travels to a very tall mountain (I forget which, if it was even mentioned) to film one of those extreme sports themed commercials for a camcorder. They set up at an unfinished resort, with no one but construction workers to impede their operations, or so they think.

Turns out that the resort is actually a hideaway for a notorious terrorist named -- ahem -- Slobovan Pavlov, presumed dead in a plane crash, planning a major attack somewhere in Holland and willing to go to great lengths to prevent being discovered. So when a member of the filming crew inadvertently catches Pavlov on videotape, he decides to annihilate them all, with the help of his psychotic son and a second-in-command who resembles Gorbachev.

You understand, this happens a good hour into the 90 minute flick. What precedes it is boring almost beyond description. Exorbitant footage of "extreme" skiing and snowboarding is intercut with bizarre attempts at character development, usually taking the form of lines like "I can do anything I put my mind to!" or "I am a damn good skier! I know I am!" Arguments break out, love affairs begin, friendships are forged, all seemingly at random. This is all very curious, as every modicum of development is summarily dumped in the final half hour, which is certainly more frenetic than the preceding sixty minutes, but somehow every bit as uninteresting.

I spent most of the movie attempting to figure out whether or not one of Rufus Sewell's eyes really is bigger than the other. (I'm still not sure, but it's really very odd; take a look next time you see a movie with him, though preferably not this one.) I cannot recall a moment in which I was filled with disgust or hatred, but I remember plenty of thumb-twiddling, as well as more than a few times when I was compelled to break out in laughter.

It's hard to justify wasting any more of either your time or mine writing about this dreck. It isn't even a movie so much as a collection of snowboarding footage and random dialogue, edited together by a chimpanzee. Don't go near it.