Drop Zone (1994)

Directed by John Badham. Starring Wesley Snipes, Yancy Butler, Gary Busey, Kyle Secor, Corin Nemec, Michael Jeter, Claire Stansfield, Grace Zabriskie, Luca Bercovici, Rex Linn, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Mickey Jones, Robert Lasorda. [R]

After his brother/partner is killed and the prisoner he was escorting gets swiped from his custody during a commercial airline flight, U.S. Marshal Snipes goes (barely) undercover as an amateur skydiver to scope out the scene and find a gang of thieves led by live-wire lunatic Busey, who are targeting the DEA mainframe as their next big score, and intend to skydive onto the building on Independence Day. Disposable but periodically kinetic action thriller starts out patently ridiculous and only gets dumber and more illogical from there. If you happen to be a moviegoer who can hit pause on higher cerebral function, at least there’s plenty of good aerial stuntwork and photography to savor (although some of those close-ups are unconvincing, to put it mildly). Director Badham does his customary professional job, but the screenplay can’t even clear the low bar of Point Break, which has striking superficial similarities to this project that are hard to dismiss. For no apparent reason, Snipes’ character’s last name is an anagram of his own: Nessip.

44/100