Cheap Mach 2 (DVD) (Fred Olen Ray) Price

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Customer Reviews of Mach 2

Crashing and burning at way less than Mach 2
Synopsis:
Air Force Liaison Jack Tyree (Bruce Bosworth) is assigned to protect presidential candidate Stuart Davis (David Hedison) on his trip to Bosnia to try and secure the release of American prisoners of War. While en-route on a Concorde Jet, the plane is taken over by terrorists hired by Davis's political rival, Vice President Pike (Cliff Robertson), to kill everyone on the plane. Only Tyree stands between them and the corrupt Vice President Pike's clean sweep into the office of President.

If you think that sounds exciting, don't be fooled.

About the Movie:
For a low budget film, Mach 2's production values aren't that bad. The Concorde flight sequences are pretty nice to look at. It's hard to know if they're stock footage or not.

The problem isn't in the production values or special effects, it's a lot more simple than that. This movie has a kernel of potential that's utterly wasted by bad casting, bad editing and a dismal screenplay.

You know how sometimes when a book or movie is so poorly written that a person might say, "I could have written better than this?" It's usually said sarcastically, but in this case, it can be said with real sincerity. /I/ could have written a better screenplay than what was used here. In fact, I actually got frustrated at this movie for that reason. If this is the quality of writing that gets into B-rate movies these days, I ought to move to Hollywood. I'd clean up.

But on a more serious note, this is the poster child of what not to do in a movie. Honestly.

For one thing, Mach 2 simply had an extremely poorly constructed plot progression, so poor in fact, you wonder if it was written by someone who even knows anything about constructing a story. It meanders here and there, and worse, is so obvious pretty early about who the bad guy is that it completely blows any opportunity for suspense.

Then it makes matters worse by putting way too many characters into the mix. In this case, there are at least 6 sets of them all at the same time, with perhaps almost 20 speaking roles, many of them shoehorned into being roles that are supposed to be significant somehow. But there are so many characters that none of them really get much development. Then when we're supposed to care about certain characters being killed off, we don't at all because they were barely even introduced.

And worse, many of them are completely superfluous. At least a third could have been cut from the movie entirely with a little reworking and would have created a tighter movie overall. For example, the subplot of the two reporters out to get a scoop doesn't have any relation to the characters in the airplane at all. What results is a series of scenes that are completely inane, don't tell us anything we didn't learn from other characters, and instead just ate up screen time and slowed down the movie. Cut them completely and the movie wouldn't have been hurt at all. They weren't even needed!

Editing could only have helped a little with this. Even with the bad screenplay, better editing could have cleaned up the convoluted mess and made it flow together a little better. Still, given the content of the movie, it makes me wonder if the editor groaned when he saw what he had to work with.

Then there's the casting (spoiler warning). The worse of it was Michael Dorn, best known in his role as Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He plays the bad guy here. It comes as a surprise when it's revealed, but then the surprise is utterly wasted by his utter inability to be anything other than what he looks like, a hunkish, nice, clean-cut guy. So, his bad guy comes off as utterly laughable. I'm not saying he had to be psychotic in the role, but as it is he's so darn polite and nice to his hostages that you can't help but giggle at the silliness of his performance.

The Hero in Bruce Bosworth isn't horrible, but he's not great either, speaking out one-liners that are supposed be clever, but instead sound like he's utterly bored. It really gets bad in the attempted romance between him and the female lead. You end up with a hammy attempt at double entendres between a male lead who's as stiff as a board and an attractive female lead who comes off and not even wanting to touch him, despite what she's saying.

I could go on and on. (I haven't even touched on the soundtrack.) I mean, you don't expect high quality work when you talk direct to video b-list films, but this is really bad. Really, really bad. And it didn't have to be.

There are bad movies that are so bad they're funny. This one's so bad, it's frustrating. It's like they didn't even try.

About the DVD:
Mach 2 comes in a hard plastic snap case on a single sided DVD. The movie is presented in widescreen and Dolby Digital 2.0 sound. It has a single audio track, in English, and has optional Spanish Subtitles. Picture and sound are both pretty good.

Bottom Line: A budget movie on a budget DVD. This movie is horrible. Just terrible. Bad Bad Bad. 1 Star.

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Twice the speed of sound?
Despite a good plot, I'm afraid that even with outstanding acting talent by just about all cast members, I found myself thinking that this was a movie that was a COULD HAVE BEEN GREAT MOVIE, but WASN'T, due to too many characters, too many non-essential scenes, too much confusion, and bad editing.

Once into the story (finally, after a subplot that should have been omitted to make the story tighter) it was fast paced and exciting, but even then it needed more intriege and believability.

The star of this film had little opportunity to be the real hero,and I found his part actually rather bland. Not his fault of course that he couldn't give it more 'omph' or 'pizzaz'.

But, the film had an intrieging plot in keeping with these uncertain times, and I enjoyed seeing such great stars as David Hedison in a gutsy supporting role of which I only wish there had been more of.