Drop Zone Blu-ray offers decent video and solid audio, but overall it's a poor Blu-ray release
Pete Nessip is a Federal Marshall who, teamed with his brother Terry, is escorting criminal computer genius Earl
Leedy to a new prison facility. Pete, Terry and Earl are on a jet en route to Earl's new lockup when terrorists
attempt a daring hijacking. Terry is killed in an explosion aboard the plane, and suddenly Earl is missing. Pete
discovers that a team of sky-diving outlaws, led by former DEA agent gone bad Ty Moncrief, have snatched Earl
from his flight and spirited him away for a special raid on Washington D.C. Ty and his men intend to take
advantage of an obscure rule in which the normally restricted airspace in Washington D.C. is open to parachute
enthusiasts on July 4. Eager to avenge his brother's death and put both Ty and Earl behind bars, Pete recruits
sky-diving expert Jessie Crossman to teach him how to infiltrate Ty's team of sky-bound criminals.
1980s Director extraordinaire John Badham (Wargames, Short Circuit, Blue Thunder) tries his
hand at a high-flying and technologically-centered Crime/Action hybrid picture that flops badly with
every missed opportunity and clichéd character, the result an insipid, lazy, and most detrimental,
dull picture that plods along with no sense of urgency, tension, humor, or excitement. Drop
Zone -- so named for the target areas skydivers aim for when maneuvering about wind
currents while attached to their parachutes -- delivers decent aerial photography but flounders on
the
ground, the picture offering practically no redeeming values or reason to watch beyond a few
scattered minutes of skydiving material that, frankly, can be better enjoyed elsewhere and not
attached to one of the 90's most forgettable films.
Wesley Snipes drops in for some action.
U.S. Marshals Pete Nessip (Wesley Snipes, Rising Sun) and his
brother Terry (Malcolm Jamal-Warner) are tasked with escorting a high-profile and
technologically-savvy inmate, Earl Leedy,
(Michael Jeter) on a flight from Florida to Atlanta. In mid-flight, a group of heavily-armed thugs,
led by former DEA agent and skydiving expert Ty Moncrief (Gary Busey, Point Break) execute
a
daring kidnapping mission to snatch Leedy at high altitude by blowing a hole in the plane's hull
and skydiving out. In the mayhem, Pete's brother is killed, and later, a sorrowful Pete is relieved
of his gun and badge until further notice. Nessip nevertheless pursues the idea that the criminals
and Leedy survived the ordeal -- a notion contrary to the official police report -- and begins taking
skydiving lessons from a woman named Jessie Crossman (Yancy Butler) in hopes of foiling
Moncrief's 4th of July plot to skydive into Washington, DC and, with Leedy's help, steal data on
DEA agents to sell to
an unscrupulous drug kingpin.
There are only so many ways to declare just how putrid a movie Drop Zone truly is. A
film
that cost a cool $45,000,000 to make and grossed less than $29,000,000 at the domestic box
office, audiences clearly saw through the film's routine construction, lifeless characters, invisible
emotion, lack of cohesion, and surprisingly lackadaisical action. Drop Zone is nothing but
a
tired and routine Action movie given a different set of clothes, the tale of a cop tracking down a
bunch of nefarious criminals in a world and within a subculture he's unfamiliar with being one of
the oldest in the book. Despite a barrage of color and the
promised allure of the skydiving sequences, the picture fails to elicit much of a response, the
film's
most
energetic and exciting scenes not even enough to wake drowsing audience members. The
action
consists of a few gunshots, some yelling, running around, and a bit of daring skydiving, the
latter the only thing that comes remotely close to breathing life into a picture that's on life
support
from the get-go and flatlined by the time the credits role. There are literally hundreds of Action
movies and even plenty of direct-to-video Action
flicks that are more engaging and memorable than this.
In true John Badham fashion, technology is at the center of the film's plot and is accompanied by
plenty of beeps and blips, this time the humorously-dated technology being used by the criminal
element to collect data on undercover DEA agents. It's not the antiquated terminals and cheap
computer graphics that pull Drop Zone down; no, it's Badham's lifeless direction of a
meandering plot that says "generic" in every frame. Every character is a walking cliché and the
picture is littered with false emotion and subpar acting, but as to the latter, it's hard to fault
people like Snipes and Busey when this is clearly little more than a payday for the actors. Few
scripts are so devoid of any and all meaning as this one, and fewer still are this stale and lacking
in
purpose. Even the legendary Hans Zimmer phones it in and delivers a score that's as forgettable
as they come, packed with cheesy guitar riffs that from the first note over the opening title
sequences says "run away." As for any positives? Drop Zone is competently made for
what it is; there are no glaring technical flaws to be found save for a few obviously phony
backdrops, but that's like saying a two-week old
donut looks good from a distance but proves not only unpalatable but completely inedible upon
closer inspection.
Drop Zone plummets onto Blu-ray with a middling 1080p, 2.35:1-framed transfer that's
another one of those unfortunate transfers that looks good here and there but contains plenty of
flaws that reveal themselves upon closer inspection. The image is generally vibrant, with colors so
bright that they sometimes strain the eyes, for instance the bright blue seats on the doomed flight
as seen near the beginning of the film. Drop Zone is an incredibly bright film with a wide
array of colors, and for the most part, color reproduction is the film's strength. Detail, however,
wavers; the image picks up the finer nuances in smaller objects in some scenes, but elsewhere, it
looks flat and devoid of more than cursory details and basic shapes. The image looks a bit smoothed
out but not completely detrimentally so early on, but the back half of the picture -- particularly its
dark scenes -- feature an extraordinary amount of grain. Additionally, plenty of random artifacts
and dirt cover the
image and the film's darker climax goes inexplicably soft, a harsh contrast to the film's generally
sharpened appearance. Fortunately, blacks are generally presentable, while flesh tones remain
neutral shades throughout. All in all, Drop Zone doesn't look terrible, but videophiles will
find plenty to nitpick about this release.
Drop Zone's DTS-HD MA 5.1 lossless soundtrack, like the video, proves serviceable but
hardly noteworthy. Dialogue comes across as slightly harsh and underdeveloped, unnatural and not
blending with the rest of the track. The picture's sound effects are neither poorly realized nor
exquisitely presented; everything has a generic, no-frills feel to it, from jet engines soaring off the
runway to the rock-themed score. Action is certainly loud, far more aggressive in volume than
dialogue-heavy scenes, and more sensitive listeners may find themselves scrambling for the remote
on more than one occasion throughout. Discrete surround effects often play as forced and phony,
and atmospherics are only partially convincing, coming across as jumbled and lacking in precision.
Fortunately, some of the skydiving scenes fare better, the track sending hard gusts of wind through
the soundstage and doing a good job of convincing the listener of hurtling through the sky, at least
from a purely aural perspective. Gunshots as heard during the climax deliver a nice ricochet sound
effect and a full back channel presence, and bass rumbles during several scenes to add a nice, hefty
support structure to the track. All told, Drop Zone has its moments but, for the most part,
this disc offers a fledgling, passable track that's about as good as the movie deserves.
Drop Zone is a lazy sleeping man's picture with no redeeming qualities of note. A terribly
bland script, a recycled plot, stale direction, lifeless acting, and a startling absence of action drag this
movie down into the depths of obscurity where it's best left buried and forgotten. When even
direct-to-video Action flicks have more to offer than this, it's a sign that it's time to bail, and the
best time to give up on Drop Zone is before the movie even begins (forget "before it takes
off," because this one never does anything more than lumber along the runway and slowly
meander
into some grassy side area before coming to a halt). Lionsgate's Blu-ray presentation is about what
one
would expect of a bad movie, the studio slapping the film onto a 25GB disc with an inconsistent but
passable technical presentation and a tacked-on trailer. Truly, Drop Zone is one to avoid.
Making his full-length feature directorial debut, Peter Billingsley (who will forever be known as "Ralphie" from A Christmas Story) couldn't have hopped for a better supporting team. On writing detail was popular funnyman Vince Vaughn and the driving force behind ...
Lionsgate Home Entertainment has announced that they will bring the classic action films 'The Running Man', 'Hard Rain', 'Drop Zone', and 'The Phantom' to Blu-ray on February 9th. All four films, which feature performances by such action stars as Arnold Schwarzenegger ...
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