Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Jessica Rabbit is famously quoted in the classic ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ that "I’m not really bad, I’m just drawn that way". The same could probably be said for young actress Taylor Cole who could quite honestly be the nicest girl on the planet but God sure did make her look naughty. And in the couple of the roles I've seen the child in, her characters have been very, very bad. Like her role in this film, the completely disposable ‘Finish Line’ in which Ms. Cole plays the borderline psychopathic, terminally horny daughter of an illegal arms dealer played by Scott Baio. How old am I that the man I once knew as kid Chachi is playing the father of grown ass women? Damn.

Mitch Campella (Sam Page) is a washed up race car driver who has just blew his last chance at the big time by not listening to the sage advice of his father Joe (Dan Lauria) and wrecking their sixty thousand dollar stock car. Mitch looks like he might be about 22 so I don’t know how washed up he can be, but there you go. Wanting desperately to pay his old man back for his screw up, Mitch’s good buddy Gooch (Ian Reed Kesler) has informed the youth about a sweet gig he has working for slick businessman Frank Chase (Baio) who Gooch introduces him to and manages to snag Mitch a gig caring for Frank’s fleet of exotic automobiles. You would think a red flag would’ve gone off for Mitch from this initial meeting with Frank, considering the man was being harassed by the FBI and lead Agent Matthews (Timilee Romonili) for some kind of crime against humanity, but whatever, dude needed a job I guess.

So Mitch starts his job an has immediately caught the attention of Frank’s daughter Jessie (Cole) who everybody from his dad to Frank’s large and oppressive right hand man Karl (John Enos III) has warned him to stay away from, but the girl is so deliciously naughty and so brutally aggressive, what’s a poor boy to do? Turns out that Frank is using his export / import business to acquire some of the mythical Red

Mercury and sell it to a few terrorist types, which would make Frank a hater of freedom. Mitch is oblivious to all of this until he sees Frank and Karl murderize an undercover FBI agent, who has gotta be the worlds worst undercover agent of all time, and now Agent Matthews wants Mitch to act as the new undercover agent and basically get the intel to stop Frank from acquiring and selling this theoretical nuclear bomb making substance to Freedom Haters and destroying the United States or something. Now I’m thinking that perhaps washed up teenage race car drivers shouldn’t be saddled with the gargantuan task of protecting my native born inalienable rights as a U.S. American, but there you go, yet again.

I think I’ve run into a problem where I watch so many bad Straight-to-DVD style movies that my bad movie meter has been irreparably altered. Take ‘Finish Line’ for instance which quite honestly was pretty bad, but yet I didn’t completely despise the brief time I spent with the movie. Truth be told, the only reason that I rented this flick was to see my man ‘Charles in Charge’ in action. That was like my show when I was teenager, man. For real. There are a couple of things that keep ‘Finish Line’ from being a ‘good’ movie such as a sloppy, hole ridden script, car racing scenes that lacked any kind of real energy which is never good for movie calling itself ‘Finish Line’, and a fairly generic and uninspired performance from headliner Sam Page. Actually the entire film on the whole was fairly generic and uninspiring.

There are a few of things, however, that keep ‘Finish Line from totally sucking ass too, with the plusses being a trio of grand performances from Scott Baio, John Enos III, and Taylor Cole. Baio really does a surprising job of being bad, but not over the top bad, but playing to his boyish charm, which he still possesses on the dark side of forty, treating the Freedom Hating Frank Chase as more of mischievous bad guy who simply wants to sell nukes to terrorist just to buy some more dope rides. John Enos III, who similar to Taylor Cole is simply designed to be a bad guy because he looks so damn ornery, is bigger than everybody else on the screen and seems to be in a perpetual state of poor disposition. And finally there’s the lovely Ms. Cole who spends a lot of the movie in various stages of undress, though it is PG-13 style undress and on those occasions she did wear clothes she didn’t wear much, though director Gerry Lively goes through an awful lot of trouble attempting shield certain elements of her boobs, which had to have been time some real time consuming post production type stuff. Ms Cole plays a horny unbalanced bitch slut about as well as anybody of her generation.

So sure, ‘Finish Line’ really isn’t all that great and tells a fairly lackluster story but it’s short movie, it features Charles in Charge and has a lovely young woman in it amongst its cast who spends the majority of the movie walking around in her panties. There’s good in everything if you just look for it people.

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