Another rubbishy sci-fi channel film.
Phantom Force starts a few hundred years ago on the open Aegean Seas as
a ship's crew become possessed by something from another dimension... Jump to the present & about 30 miles outside Moscow where local TV news crews report that armed terrorists have seized a chemical plant & are holding up to 30 people hostage, some sort of special army unit lead by agent Mark Dupree (Richard Grieco) are sent in to 'solve' the problem. Shortly after Dupree is summoned to see his boss Jack Bavaro (Nigel Bennett) who enlists him to lead a team that will be known as the 'Phantom Force' who will target the categorically indefinable but which still poses a threat, still with me? Good because this thing gets even better, actually I just lied about it getting better as I wanted to try & build it up a bit & make it sound just a little bit interesting. Sorry. Anyway, Jack informs Dupree about his inaugural first mission, a Russian submarine named 'Venture' has been firing torpedo's off & destroying anything that goes near it & since it's located in the Aegean Sea Jack believes the subs crew discovered the Hades Stone which, in the wrong hands, can be used to open an inter dimensional portal & call an endless army of demon warriors to invade the Earth! Scary eh? Dupree, along with the rest of his hand picked team members, Ivan Cutler (Jim Fyfe) the computer whizz, Potts (Tangi Miller) the detective, Rebecca Weaver (Jenna Guring) a parapsychologist, Joe Murray (Tyrone Pinkham) the weapons guy & Kyle Hudson (Atanas Srebrev) who happens to be an expert in diving, sets off for the sub to try to prevent the Hades Stone from falling into the wrong hands... Directed by Christian McIntire Phantom Force is a load of crap & you can definitely understand why he tried to have his name removed from the film, unfortunately for him he was unsuccessful so everyone knows who to blame for making this. The script by Sam Wells is pure baloney of the highest order featuring nuclear submarines, ghosts, a evil stone that looks like it's a garden ornament (one of those stone mushroom decorations) & runs on gas (!), laser guns, alternate dimensions, a shadowy organisation, an evil Macedonian Commander (Hristo Shopov) & a bunch of terrorists. Everything gets lost, it has no real focus, the plotting & basic story are ridiculous, it make little sense overall if you think about it (which writer Mr. Wells obviously didn't) & for some bizarre reason it takes itself extremely seriously which was a bad idea as most of it comes across as laughable anyway. The thing is slow, boring & is deeply uninteresting, it has terrible character's whom have no background at all apart from Potts whom gets a lot of background even going as far as having not one but two flashbacks all to herself which I simply don't understand because no-one else gets anything at all, what did she do exactly? Sleep with the writer? Lets not go there shall we. The climax is very weak & lets just hope the Phantom Force is disbanded! Phantom Force has nothing by which I can recommend it by, basically it's terrible. Director McIntire does a reasonable job but as a whole Phantom Force is both bland & forgettable (& the sooner I forget it the better). Surprisingly some of the CGI effects are actually quite good, while the rest are just crap. There is no excitement or tension or scares or anything really. The only gore is when a guy is cut up with a medical saw, mostly off screen unfortunately although there is a severed arm involved & a quick decapitation. I was amazing to see that Phantom Force had a budget of about $1,400,000 as that sounds like a pretty decent pile of cash, where did the money go exactly? The acting is poor from everyone. Phantom Force is crap, plain & simple. It's muddled, confused stupid nonsense that I can't see many people enjoying, I certainly didn't. One to avoid.. 
Well executed, though formulaic:
This was, as stated previously both predictable and an excellent pilot
for a TV series. Alas, no TV series will follow. Why, then did I give it seven points? It is an excellent execution of a simple plot. Moreover, the Big-Evil-Thingy-In-Question (to avoid a spoiler), has a potentially Lovecraftian, distant, unknowable sort of horror to it. Of course, the script-writer completely failed to exploit it and makes it tangible long before its potential horror has expired. If you like single-concept science fiction, punctuated by insufficiently bloody violence (aka B-movies), you will enjoy this as much as I did. Ich_Yama's SciFi-meter: (BBB: 2 primary characters) (BEM: Spectral and Humanoid) (World: Present/near-future). |
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