Detonator

Crime detection makes for strange bedfellows. After witnessing an explosion on the upper level of a Los Angeles skyscraper, former FBI maverick Beau Stoddard (Randall Batinkoff) runs into his ex-partner, Jane Dreyer (Elizabeth Berkeley), and Robert Brickland (Stan Shaw), the bureau chief who fired him. Because Beau’s new position as a postal inspector could help in her investigation of the blast, Jane pulls strings so that Beau can serve as her consultant. The mad bomber continues to blow up LA citizens, but feds can find no link between previous casualties and the latest victim, attorney Anne Harrington (Susan Stahnke). Brickland, who's about to assume a post at Homeland Security, Brickland can’t allow the serial bombings to force cancellation of an upcoming Russian/USA hockey match and pressures the FBI to wrap up the case quickly. Beau studies the killer’s delivery methods, while Brickland impetuously concludes that a recently-released convict James Grimes (Gregory Scott Cummins) must be responsible, and okays a Waco-style attack on the felon’s extremist cohorts. But the actual bomber is Steven Kerwin Jr. (Denis Forest), the son of Grimes’ former cellmate. Though Grimes murdered Steven Kerwin Sr. in prison, Junior is after the high-level creeps who framed his dad for a white collar crime he didn’t commit. Having booby-trapped the inside and outside of a sports arena, Kerwin Jr. kidnaps Brickland, who hasn’t been entirely upfront about his ties to Grimes and Harrington. Intent on punishing his father’s enemies, Kerwin Jr. doesn’t care how many innocent lives he annihilates. As duplicitous Brickland sweats, Beau and Jane must try to avert mass slaughter.

With the occasional topical nod to terrorism, this action yarn could have been made in the seventies. But Hershell Walkoch puts a fresh spin on his kill-all-lawyers scenario, and director Jonathan Freedman makes good use of footage recycled from the Jean-Claude van Damme vehicle, SUDDEN DEATH (1995). leave a comment --Robert Pardi