"This is just like a video game," crows Nicholas (Ja Rule) as he picks up some high-tech hardware and gets ready to rumble in this sleek, pointless action picture that nominally stars bloated action icon Steven Seagal. Segal's Sascha Petrosevich is supposedly a life-long felon with a jones for boosting cars, and Nicholas is the slick young operator who brought him into the international crime family of shark-like scumbag Sonny Eckvall (Richard Bremmer). In actuality, Sascha is deep-cover FBI agent, which makes an inherently volatile situation just that little bit more explosive when Nick and Sascha both wind up in the reopened New Alcatraz prison on the very day notorious thief Lester (Bruce Weitz), who got away with $200 million in federal gold bars (and, unfortunately, killed five guards doing it) is scheduled to be the first man to die in the prison's state-of-the-art execution chamber. Lester has never told anyone where he hid the gold, and has made his peace with God and Supreme Court Justice Jane McPherson (Linda Thorson, last and least of the "Avengers" girls), who sentenced him 17 years earlier. McPherson is on hand to witness the execution, along with various media types, prison officials and useless security men. They're joined by a bunch of uninvited guests who parachute into the supposedly impregnable facility in a swirl of MATRIX-like leather dusters and laser sights and open fire on anything that moves. Led by corrupt lawman Donny (Morris Chestnut) and the self-proclaimed "queen bitch of the universe" (Nia Peeples), they're determined to get the gold's location out of Lester, and figure holding a Supreme Court judge hostage in an electric chair might smooth their way off the Rock. Glass shatters, fireballs flare, stuff blows up. The martial arts sequences rely heavily on wire work and stuttering edits that make the action look that little bit more like a computer simulation. The women, who cover a good three generations of action-movie demographics, are all sultry and tough: Peeples is spiffy in black leather, FBI negotiator Claudia Christian looks as though she eats beaurocrats for breakfast and Thorson has legs for days. The entire movie is so formulaic and forgettable that it's hardly over before it begins to fade from memory. --Maitland McDonagh
