“Whatever you do, don’t call Snookie.”

Drake’s rating: This flick might be terminal, but it’s not in a rush

Drake’s review: What happens when the director of Ski School teams up with the writer of The Class of 1999 II: The Substitute to create a film that shamelessly rips off Die Hard? Well, you get Terminal Rush, a movie so lacking in originality that you can mute the TV and supply your own dialogue, and there’s about a 99% chance your lines will be better than those which spewed out of Mark Sevi’s word processor.

So here we have Don “The Dragon” Wilson, whom we last saw kicking things in the future, returning to the present to kick things in a more contemporary manner. Well, “the present” as of 1996, so really he’s now kicking things in the past. He’s indulging in past-kicking, and we’re along for the ride. The dreary, familiar ride that we’ve all been on at least a few dozen times by now. Sure, Die Hard is a fairly easy formula to emulate: Take a guy with fighting skills and a few bad guys with a nefarious scheme, lock them in the same place together and add some decent action and entertaining dialogue. That’s it. That’s all you need to do.

Well, we do get our hero in the same place as the baddies, and there is a nefarious scheme afoot, but unfortunately what we’re lacking in is decent action and even moderately well-written dialogue. And unfortunately the location is a rather bland one, all in all. Look, Jean-Claude Van Damme got a hockey rink for his Die Hard movie, Steven Seagal got a battleship and a train, and Anna Nicole Smith got…

Well, OK, Smith got a skyscraper, just like Bruce Willis, but that still beats fighting the baddies in a dam.

Yeah, that’s right. Don “The Dragon” Wilson gets to play John McClane in the Hoover Dam. So there’s a lot of concrete and big pipes and generators and circuit boards, which make for a pretty tedious backdrop. Even Wilson looks bored with the place by the second reel, past-kicking the terrorist baddies with all the enthusiasm of a ten year-old waiting in the doctor’s office for his flu shot.

So why the Hoover Dam?

I dunno. Look, “Rowdy” Roddy and some British guy take over the Hoover Dam for funsies and also for cash. More the latter than the former, really. They want $25 million or they’ll blow the dam up and cause a flood. They’re just anti-social like that. Don’s father is one of the hostages, so the Dragon’s going to past-kick some guys until he finds dear old dad, but of course it’s not quite that easy since the film runs for 90 minutes on a 10-minute plot. So we get lots of filler, tiresome gunfights, a semi-inept FBI agent, painful dialogue, and martial arts scenes that look like they were choreographed by the Burbank karate club.

Honestly, there are about a zillion* Die Hard rip-offs out there and the best thing that can be said about Terminal Rush is that it’s one of them. Unless you need some sleep and counting sheep just ain’t doing it, do yourself a favor and find one of those others when you’re in the mood for some Die Hard action sans Bruce Willis.

*A conservative estimate.

Intermission!

• You’re fired! And here’s a bullet instead of a severance package!
• Planning a major crime looks like fun. You get to play with toy cars!
• Man, that guy is Kevin Baconing so hard.
• There’s so much background noise in the bar. Whatever happened to quiet on the set?
• He brought a gun to a karate fight? Get past-kicked!
• Taking off your sunglasses to reveal a painted on domino mask. I do that all the time.
• One guy has a gun that sounds like a wind-up toy.
• Flashing back to events that happened five minutes ago. Padding the flick this early is a bad sign.
• For any younger viewers, the transparent box that the guy walks into was called a telephone booth.
• Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
• This movie really should’ve been called Dam Hard.