Gridlock (1996)

(On TV, October 1998) It’s a well-known fact that high-profile film project often inspire cheap b-series movies. Jurassic Park spawned Carnosaur and Twister spun off Tornado (with Bruce Campbell) but here, Gridlock is a low-budget TV-movie exploitation of Die Hard 3: With A Vengeance. To wit: Robbers cause mayhem in New York to cover the fact that they’re robbing the Federal Reserve Bank. But instead of Following Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson through New York, we get to see David Hasselhoff as a police officer trying to rescue his fiancée -played by supermodel Kathy Ireland- from the evil robber terrorists. Hasselhoff is actually credible and Ireland is pretty to look at. The remainder of the movie is an exercise on how to film a standard action flick without the big budget, a competent action director or a big budget: While the preposterous story is adequate by the standards of the genre, the final result falls short of even the most average actionners. (Favorite stupid detail: They steal gold and paper money and erase the numbers of both in the main computer. Why not just grab the gold and melt it afterward? Duuuh…)