Seconds to Spare (2002)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Powerful

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The acting in this movie is really good.

First, when I read the plot summary, I thought: a hijacked passenger train? That's gotta be an Under Siege 2 rip-off. And how amazing, it absolutely is. We got the train being hijacked, we got a lone hero who's swerving all over the train trying to stop the bad guys, we got the blonde chick who actually does resemble Katherine Heigl, and we got a counter-terrorism unit that tries to figure out how to stop the train.But Seconds to Spare is much, much inferior to Steven Seagals masterpiece. Kimberley Davies is just a bit too old to be a real good chick, and Paul Blake is just ridiculous as the hero. The best illustration for this is when he's fighting with one bad guy on the car-carriage and he desperately tries to break the bad guy's neck (and fails). Surely Steven wouldn't have allowed the rogue to get away. It's the same with the rest of the Seagal-imitating that Blake pulls off. Walking over the roof of the train really costs him a lot of effort; remember Steven strolling along the roof as if it were a day in the park? Or Blake hanging on the side of the train, trying to get a hold of some lever? Seagal and Morris Chestnut did the same in US2, but at least they were getting somewhere and weren't wasting their time bungling from the train for 15 minutes.Talking about these bad guys: that's really the low point of the movie. In Under Siege 2, you just gotta love Everett McGill and Eric Bogosian; especially Bogosian might arguably the best villain in cinema history. But the scam that we're looking at in Seconds to Spare is nothing more than that. We're to believe that some eco-terrorists (!) hijacked a passenger train, and that they want to release some nerve gas in Sydney to kill 5 million people (talking about ecological disaster huh?). Then the bad girl gets cold feet, and subsequently we're annoyed with some sort of psychological storyline about whether it makes sense to try and save humanity from its own destruction of planet earth. I don't care if you want to get in depth about ecological problems, but please, make it worth while.Oh, and then we got the counter-terrorism units. We're supposed to believe that this whole operation trying to stop the train, is run by ONE guy in his 50s, assisted by some blonde in her early 20s. So when this guy decides the train should be bombed before it reaches Sydney, possibly killing 30 people, he absolutely doesn't have to get any green light from military or government officials. Besides, the blonde is fully supportive of the decision, since the terrorists shot her soldier boyfriend out of his helicopter. Even more hilarious: the boyfriend appears to run the whole anti-terrorism unit on the ground by himself. He drives the jeeps, flies the helicopters, takes the sniper guns etc. etc. Some marine! I really don't know what got into the heads of the makers of this movie, even though I must say I enjoyed watching all these huge plot holes and irregularities. On the other hand: it again proves what an exceptional influential filmmaker Steven Seagal is. And it again makes you realize what a great filmmaker he is.

Hollywood actioners which involve Terrorists/Trains/He-Man Heroes,etc were already tediously out-dated when this Australian hybrid was made;the only fun to be had is see if the Aussies can make them as derivatively and dully as Hollywood.The answer is they certainly can after this film,only on a lower budget!Kimberley Davies(Annalise from 'NEIGHBOURS)stars,and despite her limited acting ability is not helped by the hopelessly hackneyed script.She is,in fact,the only reason for watching;the dull,monosyllabic hero makes Arnie S seem like Larry O;the comic book villains are alternately over-the-top or wooden,with the wimpiest of cowards thrown in for good measure.Some incidents are reworked from SILVER STREAK(1976)and loads of other(equally clichéd)films.At least SILVER STREAK was often intentionally funny;the humour here is always unintended.Only watchable on that level.

Basically what we have here is a bargain basement action thriller set mainly on a train and utilising numerous bits of other film's scripts (spot the photocopied plots from Under Siege 2, Death Train and numerous others here).Add every cliché in the book, some truly awful acting, standard issue one liners that don't work, various cardboard characters, the token eye candy and a cast that seemed to be only in this as they desperately needed the money to a budget of about ten dollars and this is the mess you wind up with.The locomotives acted better than the cast, probably because they did not have to recite the cheesy clichéd dialogue that basically ran from start to finish, it is little wonder that one comment from an Australian (where this Antipodean codswallop was made and is set) wanted to hang his head in shame that they where producing stuff like this.Stick to Mad Max films please.......

For every Natalie Imbruglia there are 10 Sarah Vandenberghs; there's a carload of Rachel Blakelys for every Kylie Minogue. What I'm getting at is that post-"Neighbours" life can be a sorry one - consider Kimberley Davies, aka Annalise. Now back on her home turf after an unsuccessful turn in the US (chiefly in "Pacific Palisades," a series from Aaron Spelling where she played a sexy real estate agent which was so unsuccessful that the producers drafted in Joan Collins - now THAT'S desperate), she's stuck in stuff like "Seconds to Spare." And she still can't act, but fortunately she's still gorgeous, which is one of the few things this Australian-American TV movie has going for it.To be honest, no one has the right to expect much from a movie where the names "Carlton America" and "Antonio Sabato Jr." appear in the opening credits; ASJr plays an ex-DEA agent chasing a criminal to Australia, who's fallen in league with a band of eco-terrorists who steal some canisters of nerve gas to make a statement against the Australian government's stance on toxic dumping, and hijack a train in order to get their point across. "Die Hard" on a train it's not (that was "Under Siege 2," anyway), in more ways than one; the movie not only lacks real suspense but has villains who are ultimately and infinitely more interesting than our plank-esque hero - the leader of the treehuggers (Kate Beahan) doesn't want to use violence to win, which puts her in conflict with the main villain (Jerome Ehlers, clearly enjoying himself).Chugging along at a pace considerably slower than the train, with a lacklustre score and effects work, and dire acting and dialogue ("All the while she was doing my root canal, my husband was..."), there's not a surprise to be had in the entire movie - with the exception of the name of co-executive producer Sabato Jr's production company (Namtab Productions Inc. - though given his uselessness, Etimtab Productions Inc. would have been more appropriate). Unless Nine Network Australia wanted to prove that the US doesn't have a monopoly on making naff actioners, there's not much of a point to this; and unless you want to see Nick Tate in something even sillier than "Space: 1999," there's no reason to watch.Kimberley Davies still fills out a white T-shirt wonderfully, however. (Okay, there's at least two reasons to watch.)