Chameleon Reviews

An unexpectedly benign riff on PREDATOR, this made-for-TV sci-fi odyssey deals with a shape-shifting babe named Kam (Bobbie Phillips) who's only 99 percent human. Engineered by IBI executive Cortez (Philip Casnoff) to act as a corporate assassin, Kam is ordered to wipe out a married activist couple who've developed a credit chip that plays havoc with the profit margin of big businesses like IBI. Kam drives the chip's creators to suicide but cannot bring herself to kill the couple's child, Ghen (Eric Lloyd). Flooded with an inexplicable protective instinct, the artificially manipulated Kam disobeys Cortez and sprits Ghen away to a people's liberation army headquarters in the forest, where she falls for the group's underground leader, Mattheson (John Adam). Returning to the city, Kam discovers that Cortez is really a rogue operative seeking the chip for his own covert operations; she annihilates him when he threatens Ghen. With the resistance movement growing stronger, Kam is faced with a choice: Keep her job as a highly paid hit gal, or make whoopee in the glen with a guerilla Galahad. What's a synthetic woman to do? It's really not as sappy as it sounds: Kam's discovery of a nurturing, maternal instinct is a nice twist, and it helps that Lloyd (who appeared as Tim Allen's son in THE SANTA CLAUSE) isn't a typically precocious child star. The repeated Kam-IBI standoffs grow predictable and the action gets bogged down in empty moralizing, but director Stuart Cooper cannily uses nifty special effects to demonstrate how the chameleon-like mantrap eludes pursuers by fading into the background. Even the sci-fi phobic will enjoy charismatic Phillips, who makes her presence felt even when she's blending into the woodwork.