Chill Factor

Remember Speed?  You know, the movie about a bus that can’t drop below 50 mph or it’ll blow up.  Well apply thermodynamics to that concept, invert it and you got Chill Factor.  It’s about two down-on-their-luck Joes (Skeet Ulrich (Chilly Dogs) and Cuba Gooding Jr (Snow Dogs)) who need to keep a chemical weapon cold enough so its temperature doesn’t go above 50 degrees Fahrenheit or it’ll explode catastrophically.  Jeez talk about a blatant rip off.  I mean come on guys, you couldn’t even change the temperature number to something other than 50?

But really at its heart this is a Shane Black knock off more than anything.  You have a white guy (Skeet) and a black guy (Cuba) teaming up reluctantly to stop the bad guy, lots of jokes and shenanigans between the two leads stemming from the fact that they’re stuck in a shitty situation together, a high tension concept involving selling weapons on the black market and a weak main villain.  What’s missing is this doesn’t take place during Christmas or in California (Montana is the setting here which is different), the mains aren’t cops or private investigators and the plot isn’t so jammed full of ideas that it has trouble getting all of them out.  But overall the filmmakers did a pretty damn good job capturing the Shane Black vibe so at least on that level: mission accomplished.

And because the movie actually builds a solid foundation for itself the rest becomes easy to digest.  At every turn I kept being surprised at how much fun this little piece was.  And it does feel a little like Speed because Skeet and Cuba not only need to keep the weapon on ice but they also need to get to a certain military base where they can drop the thing off.  So the constant threat and constant mobility really keep shit moving along.  Oh and a lunatic colonel (Peter Firth (Lifeforce)) and his team are after the weapon so there’s that too.

One thing though is the action isn’t as smooth as if a veteran crew were handling this (more on that in a minute).  Some of the deaths are particularly nasty like Skeet and a henchman are fighting on top of a moving truck and the henchman isn’t paying attention so he bashes his head against a jutted out rock formation.  Or another bad guy rappels down in front of the same truck firing away hoping he’ll kill Skeet and Cuba.  Only our heroes don’t swerve out of the way.  Instead this bastard’s plan goes completely sideways and he gets smashed to shit like a piñata.  It’s true these are inelegant deaths (as opposed to a cleaner gunshot to the chest or similar) but it’s that they hit hard with the way they’re shot and edited.

After surviving each death defying encounter Skeet and Cuba belt out a “woooo!” or an “alright!” and that gets very annoying.  The filmmakers must’ve thought “this is totally what the audience will be thinking or doing out loud themselves so let’s give it to ‘em”.  That was a mistake.  Once is fine but every time is way too much.  I know our guys are glad to still be alive but they kinda come off like they’re almost happy about killing all of these people.  Almost.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the beautiful poetic justice end that comes to the main villain.  Spoilers.  Ok well right before that Skeet has to take care of the last henchman (henchwoman actually) and she’s got a gun on him and says “don’t worry I’m a professional, this won’t hurt a bit”.  Skeet’s reply is “well I’m an amateur and this is gonna hurt like hell!”  He then kicks her in the groin and knees her in the face.  Fuckin’ A man.  I feel like this line has to have been used before but I can’t think of any other movie where I’ve heard it.  I definitely would’ve remembered that because it’s so damn great.  Anyway Skeet and the mad colonel have their final fight, it looks like the colonel has the upper hand and then Cuba comes up from behind and stabs the colonel in the chest with the digital thermometer that they’ve been using to track the temperature of the weapon with.  It’s so perfect and matter-of-fact-ly executed yet at the same time it never occurred to me that’s what’s going to happen.  Really nice job movie.  But of course the colonel survives this because we need the fatal blow to come from the weapon he wanted so badly and pursued our protagonists all throughout the movie for.  The sonuvabitch gets incinerated in a blaze of, well, maybe not glory but extremely toxic flesh melting chemicals.  What a way to end this sucker huh?

This was the only thing Drew Gitlin and Mike Cheda ever wrote.  Cheda produced a small handful of movies but that’s it.  This is also the only thing Hugh Johnson ever directed.  He was Ridley Scott’s cinematographer on White Squall and G.I. Jane and second unit director on 1492: Conquest of Paradise.  That’s mostly it though.  Skeet too was a strange choice as he wasn’t an action movie guy or had played the lead in anything.  Cuba had more of a resume with starring in Boyz n the Hood and winning a fucking Oscar for Jerry Maguire.  Even still he wasn’t thought of as a leading man.  Most of these folks didn’t have a ton of experience and this was a major Hollywood action picture.  Well I’m glad they rolled the dice on them.

Honestly I was dreading going into this revisit (I’m one of the few that saw this in theaters in ‘99) but the stars kind of aligned and this was such a fun time.  These relatively low budget A pictures are underdogs I can root for, sorta like John Wick: Chapter 2 and how much I loved that.  They need to go out there and prove they can play with the big boys and Chill Factor comes real close.  There are undeniably elements of B movie schlock (the plot for instance) but there’s enough other good stuff that it makes the cheaper parts seem charming.  This picture can chill with me any day.  Give it a whirl.