Cast: Cuba Gooding Jr., Skeet Ulrich, Peter Firth, David Paymer
Director: Hugh Johnson
Producer: James G. Robinson
Screenplay: Drew Gitlin & Mike Cheda
Cinematography: David Gribble
Music: John Powell, Hans Zimmer
U.S. Distributor: Warner Brothers
At times, Chill Factor has the ingredients of a guilty pleasure, but this particular pleasure isn't worth the discomfort of enduring the rest of the production. For the crowd that goes to movies to experience pure entertainment and prefers not to think too deeply, Chill Factor offers a minimal level of enjoyment. The film is not made with the motion picture connoisseur in mind. Lovers of three-dimensional characters and well-developed narratives should steer clear.
The underlying idea behind Chill Factor recalls that of Speed, albeit in a warped way. In the Jan de Bont/Keanu Reeves thriller, if the velocity of the bus dropped below 50 miles per hour, everything would go kaboom. In this movie, the vehicle on the move is an ice cream truck. In its refrigeration compartment is a deadly biological weapon (think of that next time the Good Humor truck stops by). If the temperature goes above 50 degrees, everything goes kaboom. So the good guys have to keep the weapon (codenamed "Elvis") cold as they travel from Point A to Point B while avoiding the bad guys. Admittedly, this sounds like a pretty thin premise for a 100-minute feature film, but so did the idea behind Speed. The difference is that, while the 1994 thriller managed to generate enough excitement to fill up the running time, Chill Factor has enough for about a half hour. That means roughly two-thirds of the movie is comprised of pointless filler.
Cuba Gooding Jr. and Skeet Ulrich play Arlo and Tim, the two average guys charged by a dying scientist (David Paymer) to transport Elvis to Fort McGruder before the evil Major Andrew Brynner (Peter Firth) can sell it for $100 million to an international terrorist. As we see in the opening sequence, Elvis has an incredible destructive power, and unleashing it anywhere near a population center would mean disaster. So, not only do Arlo and Tim have to keep the device out of Brynner's hands, but they have to find a way to keep it cool. And what kind of action movie would it be if the two mismatched heroes didn't spend most of the time expressing their repressed respect for each other by trading barbed quips? (Gooding, acting like his Jerry Maguire character, gets all the best one-liners. Of course, he also utters the phrase "Oh sh*t!" about 30 times.)
An inordinate amount of Chill Factor is dull and uninteresting. There are few things less compelling than watching a movie make halfhearted stabs at developing characters who are best left as cartoon stick figures. We don't care about Arlo's past problems with his boss or Tim's big "secret." While it's true that developing these two into fleshed-out characters would have improved the movie immeasurably, the script lacks the strength to attempt such an ambitious feat. So we're saddled with a number of obligatory "character" moments that have no impact beyond padding the running time.
Director Hugh Johnson, making his feature debut, manages to craft a few effectively tense scenes. In one, the ice cream truck must inch its way along a narrow mountain road as one side of the pavement threatens to crumble beneath it. In another, a runaway rowboat goes skidding down a mountainside en route to plunging into a river. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of these moments, and the ones that work are confined to Chill Factor's middle third. The first half-hour is primarily setup and exposition, and the final 30 minutes are occupied with a series of false endings. Always remember the key rule of the action film: until you actually see the villain meet his demise, he'll be back.
Gooding and Ulrich (The Newton Boys) exhibit enough charisma to enable us to like them, and they develop an amiable working relationship (although no one is going to begin comparing them to Mel Gibson and Danny Glover). Personally, I think things might have been a little more interesting if one of them had been a female - that way, there could have been some sexual chemistry thrown in as well (as in The Chase). For his small part, David Paymer took the money and. And Peter Firth (Mighty Joe Young) pulls his scenery-chewing performance out of the top drawer of Bad Guys Anonymous.
As late summer action fare goes, it's hard to get more routine than this excursion. It's definitely not the kind of movie for which anyone should make a special trip to a theater. But, for potential viewers who stumble upon it some night while channel surfing, Chill Factor represents a harmless waste of time. It may lack the power to enthrall, but, for the undiscriminating observer, it can divert.
© 1999 James Berardinelli