Reviewed by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Aleksandr Baluyev, Andrey Chubchenko, Aleksey Dmitriev, Valeri Guryev | Written by Vasiliy Golovachev
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 89 minutes | Directed by Konstantin Maximov
Right off the bat, I'd like to say that this Russian sci-fi film is nothing more and nothing less than a disasterpiece. It is as derivative, pretentious and totally meaningless as you could possibly imagine.
Set in 2013, this complete waste of time seems to have an identity crisis. Made only last year, the film-makers seem to have high expectations for what the next four years hold in the way of technological advancements, as it appears that the future has been predicted as taking the form of the regular Moscow of today paired with an array of sterile-grey, architecturally-impossible skyscrapers. In fact, sterile-grey is an understatement, they are just tall buildings of blah. Anyway, onto the plot. There's a plot? Apparently there is. Wait, no, I don't think so. Golovachev's script makes absolutely zero sense. So there's this guy, right, and he's called an “Interceptor”, and he is supposed to prevent some guy who looks a bit like John Prescott from unleashing some kind of genetically-enhanced or mutated weapon onto the world, which killed a few people and raised a little hell a few years previous. Okay, that's the wafer-thin, recycled plot. Kind of. This weapon appears to be some form of endless string of DNA that lives inside John Prescott 2 and controls him; slimy black ropes that look like the Venom DNA from Spider-man.
Yes, this review is written in a fashion similar to the film: fragmented, that's all I can say. The film has no identity. At times the action becomes that of The Matrix, with fancy flips and kicks that no normal person could perform, yet the protagonist is supposed to be a regular human being, and he isn't in an alternate reality like in the aforementioned film. The action scenes are utterly ridiculous and laughable, with the film seemingly creating its own science where a moving car can hit a flimsy road barrier no higher than a zebra crossing and explode into a fiery inferno.
The Interceptor is full of pointless transitional intercuts just to make the film look that little bit “nicer”, but they're all pathetically futile attempts at trying to create something artsy. Everything supposedly futuristic about this film is coloured grey, and often designed in piss-poor CGI. All these crappy elements are wrapped up in a story that is plain nonsense and void of continuity. I made sure I wasn't somehow missing something - or in this case a great many things – with this film, so I did a little digging and found that truly no one who saw it actually understands this awful, cinematic abortion of a film. Why? Because there is nothing to understand.
I cannot recommend enough that you do not see this film. Ever. If somehow my previous four paragraphs haven't persuaded you enough, then I will close out with this quote from the film, the biggest “no shit, Sherlock” in the history of everything: “When it gets dark, it becomes obvious that we need light to see.”. Told you.
EXTRAS * The trailer.