Suspect Device (1995)

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

The Story: Dan W. Jericho, a low-level government analyst, finds a mysterious program named 'Suspect Device' on his computer. At that moment, an armed terrorist team breaks in & massacres everyone in the building except for Dan. On the run, with armed assassins from the CIA's Gamma dark ops division after him, Dan discovers that nobody knows him & that he has the fighting skills of a martial arts master. After tracking down a college girlfriend, Dan finds out that he is an indestructible cyborg with a small nuclear bomb in his skull.Sometimes you never know when you find a decent film while shopping for bargain-basement DVDs. After buying a box-set of ten cheap action films for ten dollars, I wasn't expecting much. True, eight of the films were crappy military-themed actioners from the Royal Oaks stable, but the remaining two, "Dark Breed" & "Suspect Device", were surprisingly good. I liked them so much that I bought them on their own (for $2 each)."Suspect Device" at first starts off like just another action cheapie from the studios of Roger Corman. There's a very badly directed scene involving a poker game between friends being interrupted by heavily armed terrorists who gun down everyone, only for us to discover that it's a dream, followed by a cheap sex scene with C. Thomas Howell banging a blonde with massive breasts. Sure enough, the action scenes in this film are quite silly, with Howell shooting bad guys in the open, with no visible cover.In the final half hour, the film changes from being a rip-off of "Three Days of the Condor" to being a quite original film involving nuclear-armed cyborgs. There's a cool moment when Howell's body spits out bullets & heals in a few seconds. I was quite surprised. There are a few plot holes in the script, for example, we never know which parts of Howell's life are real or fantasy, but that does not detract from the film too much.

If you ignore the cheesy Corman-level of special effects, direction, and all things related to budget, this turns out to be a good movie. No, really. In the first 30, 40 Minutes you may shake your head in disbelief, how miscast the main character for it role is - but later on, the story gets going, and it all fits. Nice ideas, especially for the genre.OK, it is still a cheesy, cheap flick, but I am about certain, if it was filmed with expensive actors, effects and direction, there would be about nothing left of what makes it interesting. They simply wouldn't have dared to leave the good parts of the story intact, especially the ending (which I rather like).It's good for TV; it's an OK rental, it's a no-no for cinema - except for those trash-movie "vote your movies" nights, if you have those where you live. If it's on TV and you don't have anything else to do, watch it.

It's standard stuff for the first half or so, with a plot that's a pretty blatant rip-off of THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR. Then suddenly we get some twists in the plot that are so silly and/or jaw-dropping, you can't help but get sucked in. And it had a very memorable ending. Film suffers from typical Roger Corman cheapness (including ripping off footage from a famous made-for-tv movie), and the action scenes sometimes get pretty dumb, especially when you see wimpy C. Thomas Howell attempting to be an action hero. Verdict: if you like B-movies, and you don't mind them a little cheesy, you'll probably like this.

Lot of potential in plot but somehow it didn't flow as it should have (poor direction?). Good acting by C. Thomas and lead actress.