This month: Festive Action movies and thrillers! I'm well excited for this. Who doesn't love car chases. gunfights and explosions and stuff?
First up is 2002’s Christmas Rush (aka Breakaway), a made for TV Christmas ‘Die Hard in a shopping mall’ action flick starring TV’s Superman himself Dean Cain as our hero and ‘he’ll-show-up-in-anything’ acting veteran Eric Roberts as a sympathetic villain. Sign me up - this is the sort of braindead but enjoyable action bollocks I live and breathe for. After the predominantly serious, thoughtful, often depressing nature of most of the festive documentaries, watching these guys wage war and blow stuff up in a shopping mall is a great tonic. This sort of thing is like junk food for the brain and, like a massive selection box full of chocco favourites, you know it’s no good for you but goes down so good.
Cain is the excellently named detective Cornelius Morgan, a risk-taking, plays-by-his-own-rules Chicago copper who gets suspended following a sting where he arrested some bad dudes but also shot the place up. I like him already. He’s majorly pissed and gets into it with his wife Cat (Erika Eleniak) on Christmas Eve. Looking to buy some flowers to apologise, Morgan hits the mall just in time to find it being robbed by master thief Jimmy Scalzetti (Roberts) and his dastardly crew who take a bunch of hostages including the mall Santa and - wouldn’t ya know it - Morgan’s wife. It’s on and the stage is set for some Die Hard-inspired silly action antics making great use of the mall location and seasonal setting.
As one might hope, lots of Christmassy stuff gets blown to smithereens, including fancy window displays, decorations, mannequins and more. It’s a movie that makes good on the promise made by its setting - I demand to see lots of gimmicky mall and Christmas stuff and the film, from veteran TV movie director Charles Robert Carner does not disappoint. Resourceful Morgan uses various items from the stores to battle the bad guys including some sort of slippery moisturiser from the make-up department he squirts all over the floor so his assailants will comically slip and slide all over the shop. Nice one. Luckily, the sporting goods store is filled with hockey stuff he can twat the villains with, as well as a trusty bow and arrow - perfect for surprising a cocky goon who knows Morgan’s out of ammo.
It’s noticeably heavy on the Christmas stuff with early scenes showing Morgan and Jimmy crossing paths at a nativity pageant - their kids go to the same school! It’s the sort of unnecessary but enjoyable touch I love from a low-budget actioner that does all it can to punch above its weight. Later on, there’s a fun part with Morgan left dangling up high from a massive Christmas decoration before he falls, the massive mall fir tree breaking his fall. It’s impressive, thrilling stuff for a TV B-movie.
There’s more focus on the ‘Christian’ aspect of the holiday season than you might expect too, with Cat wearing a crucifix that’s prominently shown in closeup a bunch of times and characters stopping to earnestly say prayers. There’s also a weird, uncomfortable bit I don’t care for where the Santa hostage rolls his eyes when another hostage admits to being a Muslim. This was 2002 - not a great time for Muslim Americans, unfortunately.
The thing that helps this film standout is definitely Roberts’ simpatico villain, who’s only pulling off “one last heist” because he needs money for a bone marrow transplant for his kid. I feel for the guy - it’s one of those rare films that makes you almost root for the bad guy. It’s no classic but totally succeeds as a top-tier TV movie and as a Christmas film. Sneakily, this was renamed as the generic-sounding Breakaway for the DVD market, probably to get Direct-to-DVD action fans to buy it all year round, not just Christmas.
Comments