Here we go, a faith-based action film full of
shooting and stabbing and face punching and killin' and all
kinds of stuff. Does a belief in the Lord and white
knuckle action make for a solid mix? Maybe. I'm
just not sure it mixes together all that well in this movie.
A secret medical operation is taking place on a pier, inside
one of those big metal containers, while hardcore but
spiritually damaged mercenary Chad Turner (Craig Sheffer)
keeps an eye out. Apparently the operation isn't that
big of a secret since the pier is soon overrun with folks with
automatic weapons, but Chad Turner kills them all. I
guess. I really couldn't tell. What I do know is
that the doctor performing this operation, as his last act of
life on Earth, injected Chad with the chip he was going inject
on the now dead dude he was operating on. Naturally this
got us to thinking why the medical team just didn't do this in
the first place, if that's all there was to it, as opposed to
setting up secret operating rooms in metal containers, but we
are training ourselves to stop thinking about such things.
Next thing we see is Chad waking up in a hospital room being
gawked at by the super smooth Mr. Cooper (Eric Roberts) who
has informed Chad that he is now the most important person in
the universe because of that chip in his arm. I don't
know what this chip does, and I'm not sure they fully
explained it to us, but it has something to do with
biometrics. I don't know what that is either. The
plan is to jump on a jet and unveil this awesome chip at the
G-20 Summit in a couple of days, and once that happens, the
world as we know it will never be the same.
But there is this Anti-Christ type dude in Phillip Turk (Ivan
Kamaris) who wants this fancy tech all to himself so he can
guide the world towards his own vision, which I'm sure isn't a
good vision. To make this happen he's hired hardcore
badass Joseph Pike (Gary Daniels) to jump on this plane with
his crew of merciless mercenaries, grab this chip and call it
a day.
On this flight Chad reconnects with an old
flame in Dao (Sonia Couling), or at least I hope she was an
old girlfriend as beautiful as this woman was, Chad also meets
a pretty reporter who starts running off at the mouth about
the chip representing the Mark of the Beast and a New World
Order and all kinds of Satanic stuff that this chip stands
for. Chad tells her 'I respect your beliefs, but you're
beliefs are a fantasy' which means he doesn't respect her
beliefs.
Regardless of all of that, the siege on the plane is on.
Pike is shooting people, stabbing people, and causing an
overall ruckus, but he just wants the chip, but he can't have
the chip. Then something really, really odd happens.
Something that will shake the beliefs of every man, woman and
child on this airplane. Heck, on Earth for that matter.
Except Pike who is still punching people in the face.
And now the man who doesn't believe, has to believe, because
it seems the fate of the world, or what will be left of it, is
in his hands.
The problem as I saw it with director James Chankin's 'The
Mark', which has a good set of concepts going for it, is that
as an action movie it is mediocre, and the faith based
elements just aren't integrated all that well into the
action. The action isn't terrible by any means as we are
working with another iteration of Die Hard only on an airplane
this time, it just wasn't all that crisply executed which
shakes out to the action being mundane at the end of the
day. Then we have our faith elements which are shooed in
either through awkward conversations or obtuse
flashbacks. For instance, our pretty reporter was
railing on and on about The Mark of the Beast. Not that
what she's saying wasn't valid, just that it came out of
nowhere. What magazine does she work for and how come
she knows what this chip does and we don't. Or at least
I'm pretty sure I wasn't told what this chip does, so I could
be wrong about all of that. There were other odd
conversations that popped up that felt out of place for the
situation that they were used in, and while the flashbacks
Chad was having with his brother helped define the character,
they didn't help with the natural flow of the movie.
The performances were solid though, despite the fact there's
not an awful lot about Craig Sheffer the screams tortured
badass. Gary Daniels however? No problem.
Eric Roberts as a slick older dude up to no good? He can do
that in his sleep and he kind of did that here. Is Sonia
Couling easy to look at? Her face is like aroma therapy
for the eyes. Those things are positive.
'The Mark' isn't a total loss as it does offer some
entertainment amidst its cinematic missteps and the fact that
it ends in a bit of a cliffhanger didn't upset me all that
much either, which movies that ends in cliffhangers usually
do, because the filmmakers were kind enough to show us a
trailer for 'The Mark: Redemption' which I assume done
already. And whatever I might've said above, you know
I'm gonna watch that too.
