Evasive Action (1998)

Sometimes I'm watching a film and an actor turns up whose presence has you asking 'What the Hell are they doing in this shit?'.  Which is exactly what I thought when Roy Scheider turned up in a low budget direct-to-video action film called Evasive Action (1998).  It as a real shock to the system to see Scheider in such a movie - it wasn't as if it was a cameo, but rather he was playing the main villain.  Surely, I asked myself, by that stage in his career he wasn't so hard up that he found himself forced to appear in this kind of bargain basement production?  But perhaps he was.  After all, Scheider had never really been a megastar - he was principally a supporting and character actor who had had the good luck to appear in a number of hit movies during the seventies, notably The French Connecton (1971), where supported Gene Hackman and Jaws (1975), where he supported Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss.  Occasionally he got a lead, but these tended to be in slightly lesser productions, such as The Seven Ups (1973), Last Embrace (1979), All That Jazz (1979), Blue Thunder (1983), 52 Pick Up (1986) or even the inevitable Jaws 2 (1978).  All decent enough films, (with the possible exception of the Jaws sequel), but only Blue Thunder was really a big box office success on release.  By the early nineties he was starring in Seaquest DSV on TV and after that it was a rapid slide into direct-to-video fare.  At first, he was at least featuring in Dolph Lundgren and Michael Madsen vehicles, but the late nineties it was down to the likes of Evasive Action, which starred Dorian Harewood, (who also wrote and performed the song over the closing titles).  I find it fascinating that only a few years previously, the biggest names you'd find in this type of production would be the likes of Cameron Mitchell or Jack Palance, (both excellent actors), but by the late nineties they could muster the likes of Roy Scheider. 

Now, to be absolutely fair, Evasive Action isn't the worst direct-to-video action film I've ever seen.  In fact, I have considerable admiration for the fact that, despite having next to no budget, the film gamely tries to rip off the big budget Con Air (1997).  In fact, it is Con Air on a train, with jailed mob boss Scheider organising a break out when he and several other dangerous prisoners are being transferred between jails by rail.  It actually references Con Air to explain why the transfer is being made by train, with one character noting that since a plane full of prisoners had come down in Las Vegas the previous year, the FAA had banned all such flights.  Mind you, this still doesn't explain why the high security prison car is attached to the back of a regular passenger train rather than being run as part of a special train.  But hey, without the consequent hostage drama, there'd be no plot.  Harewood, of course, is the Nicholas Cage equivalent, the good guy only in prison for killing the scumbag who murdered his family, while Clint Howard plays the Steve Buscemi role of the crazy psycho-killer obsessed, in this case, with movies.  In fact, the film is full of familiar faces apparently fallen on hard times: Ray Wise as a Sheriff who looks like he's going to be the hero, before being abruptly killed off; Ed O'Ross as a crooked prison governor and even Sam 'Flash Gordon' Jones as a prisoner beaten to death by Scheider after having been on screen only two minutes.  Every other character is a cliche, from the plucky lady train bar tender to the precocious twelve year old girl travelling unaccompanied - they're just there to provide plot contrivances.

Despite packing in a number of gun fights, fights on top of the train and a helicopter crash, the film shows its paucity of budget in the way that it cuts away from various action scenes at critical moments.  When Harewood tries to get back on the train by chasing it on a motorbike and jumping aboard, for instance, we don't see him (or rather his stunt double) actually make the jump - instead we see him alongside an open carriage door, then cut to him back inside the coach.  Similarly, we don't see the explosion when one of the convicts blasts his way into the locomotive cab, only hearing the blast as the camera cuts away at the crucial moment.  Even the climactic train crash, (lifted from another low budget direct-to-video production), looks cheaply done with less than convincing miniatures work.  Nevertheless, I find it impossible to actually dislike Evasive Action - while its on it is reasonably entertaining and, if nothing else, has an above average cast for this sort of movie.  That said, it is still startling to see Roy Scheider in it - while there are plenty of other familiar faces present, in truth, none of them had ever scaled the heights in terms of the sheer quality of productions that Scheider had appeared in during the seventies and eighties.  Still, despite the fact that he is slumming it and knows that he's slumming it, he actually delivers an enjoyable performance, such was his professionalism.