Crappy film

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This silly thriller has a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan having a battle of wits with a deranged terrorist who has devised an unlikely bomb, in water, which reacts with stomach acid and causes people to explode. This is a pretty bad film, coming across as a weak thriller with a few horror elements combined, but it may be worth watching just for the unusual premise and the fact that you get to see lots of explosions and people on fire - a somewhat morbid fascination for the producers of this film.This is a film which never, not for one instant, engages the emotions. From start to finish we never get to care about any of the characters. Brosnan is a disappointment here, going through the thing on autopilot and uttering a few curses here and there when things go wrong. Ben Cross has to be one of the weakest bad guys I've seen in a film for a long time, and as for being threatening...you'd be better off watching one of the pros like Alan Rickman to see how it should be done. Ron Silver is wasted in a nothing role, and the only interesting thing about him is his death (he falls from a building and gets impaled on some railings - ouch!).The best bits of this film are the various moments where people explode. Typically some poor fool is usually standing at the edge of the explosion when this happens and gets ignited, so it's pretty sadistic. The victims also have their skin split open and their eyeballs fill with blood, so the gross-out factor is played for all it's worth. Not bad at all...otherwise, this is strictly predictable fare.

In this flick Pirece "Remington Steele" Brosnan plays a detective who think s he's James Bond and who suffers from sporadic bouts of potty mouth. He has a girl friends with a great pair o' gams who doesn't know much about anything but she looks good which always helps in a movie. I liked PB in RS-even though it was a bit 'conservative'-I thought it worked & I liked that he had a female "sidekick" who was smarter than he was-it showed he was intelligent himself. This film is 'exploitation cinema' as it tries to sell you the idea that it is about catching terrorists when it really isn't about anything. It suggests the idea a tasteless & colorless poison can be added to water to generate a super powerful explosion. Yeh and its called 'Dues ex Machina'-just like in old Roman plays when they ran out of ideas.Might work if you had a lousy date with someone and wanted to erase the memory of it. Combine with booze kind of thing-other than that its basically a dud that bare passes on the high number of camera movements it uses.

I'll admit, up until watching this film, I wasn't a Brosnan fan at all. I despise all James Bond films, and associate Pierce with the tuxedo clad secret agent, even when he is playing someone different. Pierce adds plenty of depth to his character, that has become Hollywood's most cherished stereotype, the drunk law enforcement agent.After the death of his daughter, Dan(Brosnan) seeks solace with alcohol, while his wife Teri(Eilbacher) jumps in bed with a crooked senator(Silver). For some reason Dan still loves the dirty tramp, and attempts to protect her when a group of terrorists, lead the the always dastardly Ben Cross, set their designs on the senator his wife is sleeping with.This film doesn't lack action or excitement, but the chief reasons to catch this film is for Pierce's clever interaction with Silver's senator character, the one-liners are good, but Pierce makes them noteworthy, and Lisa Eilbacher's jaw-droppingly excellent form. It's good to be Pierce

There was a simple recipe in the late 1980's early 1990's for the common action film:Take one part flawed hero (preferably divorced, a heavy smoker and drinker), Mix in their defiance for authority figures, Add one part tragic family history (the loss of a child works best), Add corrupt politicians, Stir with mix of gratuitous violence set to a heavy electric guitar musical score, And serve with plenty of one-liners preferably after a death or tense moment has passed.1992's Live Wire follows this recipe to the exact measurements. Pierce Bronson plays Danny O'Neill, a member of the FBI bomb squad that stumbles on a plot consisting of corrupt Senators and a new form of explosive that is in the form of drinking water - when mixed with acidity of the human stomach, one becomes a walking time bomb that even the strongest Alka-Seltzer wouldn't cure. Danny has had a rough year. His only daughter died in a swimming pool accident, his wife left him (for a Senator no less – didn't see that coming!), and now he works his job uttering such unique catchphrases as ‘Man, I love Mondays'. But when Danny is assigned to a job of investigating a rash of murdered politicians where no triggering device is evident in the debris, Danny soon fears for his wife's safety, and thus his extra incentive to bring the bad guys to justice. Yawn.Live Wire is helmed by perennial television director Christian Duguay (Million Dollar Babies, Joan of Arc), and it is the advice of this reviewer that he stick to that forum. And its not that the premise of this movie is so awful, its actually the opposite. I was intrigued of the notion of bodies being used as bombers, but Duguay does not seem to know where to take the story or characters outside of the normal formulaic routine. He doesn't even try. Thrown into the mix are Ron Silver (Timecop, Blue Steel), and Ben Cross (Chariots of Fire) who just waste time and are less interesting than the robot they use to assess bomb threats. It would have been interesting to see what the movie could have been in the hands of a more seasoned or focused director. As bad as Live Wire was, it was still better than other films released in the same decade like Tango & Cash or Raw Deal. I would tell you how the film ends, but I would not want to ruin the surprise. I will leave you wondering if our hero will get back with his wife once he exposes the Senator, whether anyone will fall from a great height onto a sharp object or…wait for it…if the final bomb will be defused in the nick of time!Finally, one postscript. At the beginning of the film, we read that last decade 3,600 lives were taken due to terrorist acts around the world, but due to American's stable political system, the U.S. has been safe…until now. Somehow in this post 9/11 world, I bet Christian Duguay would want that one back for a re-write.