I was buying groceries the other day and out in front of the store is one of the many new Red Box DVD vending machines we see everywhere. I have a habit of stopping on my way out to see what’s there. I had never actually used the service before, but on this occasion I noticed a new movie that kind of snuck up on me. It was an action movie that appeared to be direct-to-video, but it starred Jason Statham, Ryan Phillippe and Wesley Snipes. I though, “Hmm… it may be watchable. Besides, maybe Snipes is finally trying to revive his career after his time spent fighting the IRS.” So, I rented the DVD and this is how it went.

I’ll let IMDB.com give you the DVD case synopsis … [In Seattle, detective Quentin Conners is unfairly suspended and his partner Jason York leaves the police force after a tragic shooting on Pearl Street Bridge, when the hostage and the criminal die. When a bank is heist with hostage situation, Conners is assigned in charge of the operation having the rookie Shane Dekker as partner. The thieves, leaded by Lorenz, apparently do no steal a penny from the bank. While chasing the gangsters, the police team discloses that they planted a virus in the system, stealing one billion dollars from the most different accounts, using the principle of the Chaos Theory. Further, they find that Lorenz is killing his accomplices. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil]

Chaos (2005) meets the quality equivalent of an average television cop drama, at best. Oh yeah, it was made in 2005. So, why is it just recently popping up on DVD in the States? It could be due to a couple different reasons. First, upon watching the film, I couldn’t help but notice some plot elements that seemed to be borrowed from both Inside Man and War. The I caught myself and realized this film precedes both of those, respectively released in 2006 and 2007. I will, however, state that Inside Man is a far superior movie and, while I wasn’t the biggest fan of War, it too was better than Chaos. This left me with one remaining theory, the movie was not seen as a sure-fire profit-maker for the distributors. I can only assume that the recent popularity boost for Statham finally encouraged them to release this sub-par action film that the director, Tony Giglio (Soccer Dog) repeatedly refers to as more of a mystery than and action movie in the Making of featurette. Another element of this DVD extra that bugged me was how he kept suggesting that this was the type of script that Statham and Phillippe hadn’t done before. Well, Giglio actually mentions Phillippe’s work on Way of the Gun, so I find this contradictory. As for Statham, these are primarily the only type of movies he makes. [Again, I refer to War, despite its later release, but we can also consider Crank and Transporter.]

Please note that I’m not bashing Statham, or any of the other cast, but rather reflecting on the smooth-flowing but otherwise boring and unoriginal screenplay. The twists are hyped to be a big mystery, but a viewer cannot help but connect the major plot similarities of Chaos to War, simply because we’ve seen War already. OK, sure … its not the directors fault that the two movies’ release dates got twisted out of order, but it hurts the film’s element of surprise. The acting was fine, as good as is to be expected, the directing and cinematography meet at about the same junction, but as a whole the movie just falls kind of flat. The action really isn’t that exciting and even the chase scene between Phillippe on a Harley pursuing a perp in a truck is only mildly exciting. All things being equal, Chaos is worth the one dollar I digitally dropped at the Red Box, but anything more would have been just shy of upsetting.

[rating:2.5/5]