I hope Extreme Ops was fun to make, with all
that snowboarding and skiing and whatnot, because it
certainly wasn’t fun to watch. An hour of extreme
stunts followed by forty-five minutes of running from
gun-toting Serbs, it offers one of the most
uninspiring experiences in theaters this holiday
season. Virtually plotless, jokeless, and thrillless,
it is a catastrophe of crappy proportions; a “craptastrophe”
if you will.
The film’s trailers and commercials attempt to
put it off as a “snowboarders versus terrorists”
movie; which, if true, would be a movie good for some
absurd thrills, at the very least. I distinctly recall
the trailer mentioning something about “uncovering a
plot” and having to escape to “warn the world.”
In reality, or the flimsy interpretation of reality
the film offers, the terrorists are really one escaped
war criminal (think a buffer and balder version of
Slobodan Milosevich) and his buddies and mistress, and
the snowboarders haven’t uncovered anything, they
merely stumbled across this guy, and the very
knowledge of his existence is enough to send him into
a murderous rage. Also, this hunt nonsense is limited
to the end of the film - it’s really little more
than an overblown subplot.
Before this Extreme Ops rambles from one
stunt setup to the next, with only the premise of a
“production crew making a commercial” to sustain
it. The director is played by Rufus Sewell, and his
assortment of snowboarders and skiers include
Bridgette Wilson-Sampras and a chubby Devon Sawa. They
like to perform such reckless stunts as skateboarding
on top of trains, snowboarding at night, and
performing lines that would have sounded hackneyed to
Ed Wood. For reasons kept unclear to the audience, the
crew decides to film themselves outrunning an
avalanche as part of their commercial.
They travel to Austria, where avalanches are a dime
a dozen apparently, and it’s on a “remote mountain
peak” that they find those pesky war criminals, who
don’t take kindly on being accidentally videotaped
making out with their materialistic girlfriends. Of
course, by the time the movie’s settled on milking
this situation for drama, the audience is already
fleeing for the exits. With a mostly plotless movie
and mostly witless characters, our brains are invited
to wander onto such fascinating topics as counting the
number of lights in the theater ceiling and trying
guess which audience member will walk out first.
I did enjoy the extreme stupidity of Silo (Joe
Absolom) who has the indignity of being the only
character shown naked, and also the one who gets the
lion’s share of stinker lines. Introducing himself
to the group for the first time, he shouts what
sounded to me like, “’Sup sitches?” I am
unfamiliar with the term “sitches” which made its
enthusiastic delivery that much more entertaining.
Suffice it to say that I’ll be calling lots of
people “sitches” in the near future.
Simply put, there is nothing to see in Extreme
Ops that you can’t find on ESPN2 or an IMAX
movie where the impressive stunts are put into a
context that allows their beauty to be admired without
a tiresome plot. Two years ago, I was duped into
seeing the film Vertical Limit, which had
enough exciting moments to fill a two minute trailer,
and not a second more. Extreme Ops doesn’t
even have that much entertainment. Weirdos like me
might enjoy the sheer awfulness of it all, the clunky
plotting, the atrocious dialogue, but your average
moviegoer? They’re better off watching the Yule Log
this December.
