Executive Target Reviews

Despite more car crashes and explosions than any one film should really have, EXECUTIVE TARGET is a surprisingly good thriller from direct-to-video action specialists Joseph Mehri and Richard Pepin. When President Carlson (Roy Scheider) announces plans to cut back the military budget, a rogue military group hires terrorist Lamar Quentin (Keith David) to kidnap him. From a top-secret, underground military installation known as "Area 55," Lamar plans to snatch the President while he is visiting Los Angeles. For his plan to work, he needs an expert driver. His choice: Nick James (Michael Madsen), a former stunt driver imprisoned on a trumped-up drug charge. Lamar's cohorts, Lacey (Angie Everhart) and Ripple (Gareth Williams), stage a traffic accident in LA in order to get into the bus that is transporting Nick and other prisoners. Nick escapes them and heads to the house of his estranged wife Nadia (Kathy Christopherson). But Lacey and Ripple are waiting for him there, and bring both Nick and Nadia to Area 55. Lamar sends Nick out as driver on a bank robbery as a test to see how he will do. When he passes with flying colors, Lamar tells him about the Presidential kidnapping. As long as Lamar is holding Nadia, Nick has no choice but to go along. As part of an intricate plan that involves disrupting the Presidential motorcade as it heads through downtown LA, Nick takes the Chief Executive from his incapacitated car while Lamar's men slaughter the President's security guards. But after Nick and the President have escaped from both government security and Lamar's forces, Nick changes the plan, taking the President not to Area 55 but to a friend's home for safekeeping. After Nick explains the situation, the President agrees to lie low while Nick and a few Marines return to Area 55 to rescue Nadia and destroy Lamar's operation. For a presumably low-budget feature, EXECUTIVE ACTION looks pretty spectacular. It doesn't appear as if the producers ever once said "No" to whoever was in charge of crashing vehicles and blowing things up (inevitably in huge, fiery explosions). The problem with all this mayhem is that it quickly becomes anonymous; the car chase that takes up most of the film's first quarter hour comes before we've had much chance to learn about our hero Nick, and as a result is nothing more than pyrotechnics (albeit impressive). There are several such set pieces in the film, all of which cause the story to come to a dead halt. Normally that might not be a bad thing in this kind of film, but EXECUTIVE ACTION has an interesting enough story and characters that it would have been preferable to spend more time with them and less with the vehicular fireballs. Aside from Keith David, who hams it up as the smirking villain, the entire leading cast is uniformly good, with co-writer Dayton Calle lending effective comic relief as Nick's buddy Bela. (Violence, nudity, profanity.)