The Alternate (2000)

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Umpteenth variation on the "Die Hard" formula stars Eric Roberts as an unnamed hero who turns out to be the only hope for the President of the United States (John Beck) when a traitorous government agent (Bryan Genesse, who also wrote the movie) takes advantage of events that occur. You see, it seems that the Presidents' ratings are very low and a member of his staff engineers a phony kidnapping to try to make him look sympathetic. Genesse, a part of the group involved, sees this as his opportunity to make a bunch of money. However, Roberts, an agent himself, still has some scruples and tries to foil Genesses' plans.The movie isn't completely worthless. Director Sam Firstenberg, who'd guided so many classic martial arts movies of the 1980s, keeps it moving forward at an adequate pace. Some of the action set pieces, such as the fights and one amazing stunt, are competently done. However, the script isn't very good, and the nods to "Die Hard" are way too obvious. The characters are fairly nondescript, good guys and bad guys alike, although some of the actors try their best. If one is watching this for co-stars Ice-T and Michael Madsen, be warned that they never do very much. Things very much fall on the shoulders of Roberts and Genesse. The oddest touch is occasionally cutting back to a redneck couple watching the whole event on TV and making commentary.A cast of familiar faces helps some. The movie co-stars Roberts' wife Eliza as the Presidents' Chief of Staff and Genesses' wife Brooke as one of the villains (with whom Roberts has a big fight scene). Also appearing are Larry Manetti, Sal Landi, and Brookes' TV dad Bill Kirchenbauer (from the series 'Just the Ten of Us') in a cameo as a "loud Texan".If you stick it through to the end, you do get rewarded with some fairly amusing outtakes that play out alongside the ending credits.Five out of 10.

The plot is totally SUPER BOGUS. The action is so awful you'll sleep throuhg it. It's G.I. JOE, fire a 100 shots and still no one's hit. The acting is not even plastic, it's hysterical and pathetic.The cast made me watch it. BUT 1)Eric Roberts's is a career wasted and the film does'nt add much to it. It even makes you wanna swear you won't watch his movie ever again.2)ICE T falls asleep in the first half hour and does'nt get up. (Maybe he ran away.)3)Micheal Madsen looks like he shot for the movie while going for a walk and did it just for the goggles.Rest of the crew is the hotel staff 9I'm not kidding.)Save yourselves from it.I COULD'NT.

The Alternate, a story of President's mock-kidnapp that turns into a real hostage situation was aired just recently on nationwide TV here in Czech Rep. I saw it rather accidentally all through to the very end as I really wanted to know if every other minute will be as stupid as all the previous.The Alternate really does it all, but unfortunately the other way out. All the plot twists (all places tha are supposed to be twists) are really the weakest links - the characters do almost always the opposite of what would any sane person do. The president just sits there (afraid of heights), our main hero makes silly phone calls with FBI in which he only says that he is fine and that he is the guy in the suit, and the bad guy (as well as the good guy) just always miss and in situations that should be filled with action, they just start with lines of stupid chat.Really nothing in this movie was quite right. The FX were sometimes really silly, the martial fights were oscillating between acceptable quality and total crap and out of the thousands of rounds fired in the movie there is hardly dozen on target.The act is horrible, but that is mainly due to stupid script and bad direction. You should see this only if you fancy B movies that are so stupid, that you can laugh at them.

Despite this movie being an obvious rip-off of "Die Hard", I wouldn't have minded seeing this same story again had it been written and executed with relative competence. But overall it's not. The things that happen here are so implausible (shootouts where everyone keeps missing despite it being VERY OBVIOUS that there's no way they could survive, as well as extremely stupid decisions by both the hero and villain) that it becomes quite annoying - quite soon you get annoyed at the gall the filmmakers had for not even TRYING to place one foot in reality. It seems they just had all these stupid things happening so that the movie would last 90 or so minutes.Also, the low budget of the movie is quite obvious at times. Now, I've seen action movies with similarly low budgets that managed to stretch their few dollars out for the entire movie. This time around they do manage to overcome the low budget in several aspects (the cinematography, for one), but every few minutes we see something that smacks of cheapness - a crowd of protesters consisting of just a few people (and all holding signs with exact same style of writing on them), hotel hallways that don't look like the hallways of a high class hotel, a goofy-looking flame thrower that is supposedly shooting long flames (but is obviously not in each shot), etc.The cast is wasted. Ice-T is given prominent billing, but only appears for the first 20 minutes. Madsen has nothing to do but bark orders. Roberts appears in almost every scene, but with the material he's given, the movie ends up being another waste of his talents.It's not all bad. There are a few hand-to-hand fight sequences that, despite not having the speed and flow of Hong Kong movies, have excitement and high power to them. (And are quite brutal.) And a hilarious blooper reel runs during the end credits.