We gave Barclay a try 'cause our main man, Stephen King thinks the world of this guy......and Uncle Stevie's blurbs are among the only ones we trust........
Yep, we had a good enough time with this and it zipped along nicely (a HUGE plus with us, since BQ hates dawdling thrillers with a vengeance.....)
But, oh sweet Lord, it's all over the place.........with a far-fetched plot that wanders through soap opera complications, dabbles with domestic terrorism, and finishes up with a grand finale that evokes those old Irwin Allen disaster movies like "Towering Inferno".......
Entertaining but hardly believable, it reads like it's patched together from bits and pieces of old 1990's Bruce Willis/Arnold Schwarzenegger movies........(even throwing in an absurd chunk of comic relief involving a homegrown terrorist, his clueless wife and his homophobic minion....)
The basic premise........a villain who's taken the phrase 'you're goin' down!' literally figures out a way to hack some of NYC's skyscraper elevators, making them, as we say, go horribly awry......
If you're already shivering at the thought of what happens to those poor innocent suckers unlucky enough to take the hacked elevators.......you should be. Grisly gore ensues......and how.
Naturally this plays hell with the Mayor's standing in the city....... and.he's already a douchebag who regularly humiliates and browbeats his P.R. flunky who's also his son. Mr. Mayor attempts handling the problem by shutting down all the city's elevators until they're inspected.........which promptly leads to the expected montage of the misery and chaos that results in the world's most high-rise city...........(wanna guess what happens when the first 86 year old starts climbing 20 flights to his apartment?)
Meanwhile, two dogged detectives methodically track down whoever brutally killed a guy who happened to work as.....aha!.....an elevator repairman.......
You won't find this boring for even for a second, even as it wobbles around from TV-style drama to black humor to police procedural. And Barclay clearly enjoys his sideways swipe at heartland-based domestic terrorists, with an absurd, dark comedy scene that unfolds in a motel men's room.......
By all means, take it on a long airplane trip as an okay time-killer.........but whatever you do, do NOT read this standing in a skyscraper elevator on its way down....down....down....
3 stars (***)
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