“We’re heroes, my man. It’s time to start acting like it. Quit limping around like that.”

Justin’s rating: So many Elvis puns, so little time

Justin’s review: We all know that the ’90s was a hotbed of classic action flicks, with Bruce, Sylvester, Arnold, Jean-Claude, Chow Yun, Nic, and the rest thrilling us with stunts and quips. But what’s fascinated me are the ones that fell behind the front-runners but tried their very hardest anyway. I’m talking about forgotten (but decent!) flicks with biting two-word titles such as Sudden Death, Hard Rain, Drop Zone, Black Dog, and, of course, Chill Factor.

In the very last September of the ’90s, Skeet Ulrich and Cuba Gooding Jr. tried their hand at a tense thriller… and famously failed. Chill Factor absolutely tanked at the box office, Gooding Jr. called up his agent the next day to inquire about Snow Dogs 2, and not a single kid was clamoring for Skeet action figures that Christmas.

But is it a bad movie, or is it one of those overlooked joyrides that deserves a reevaluation?

Chill Factor does start with one heck of a bang. A military science experiment on an island produces a blue goop known informally as “Elvis.” Elvis is cool under pressure but rocks an enormous explosion once the goop goes over 50 degrees (that’s Fahrenheit, not Celsius). In a fun twist, instead of this explosion being a fireball, it ends up as a fast-moving cloud of plague, death, and radioactive decay. It basically chews everything living to the bones or roots.

The Army colonel (Peter Firth) responsible for the security of the experiment is made the scapegoat and thrown in prison to stew until he becomes super-evil. When the colonel gets out, he rounds up some lackeys and goes after the scientist who made Elvis — played by David Paymer — in the hopes of grabbing some of that Pepsi Blue to sell as a bioweapon.

He would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for a couple rascally B-list actors. The scientist manages to get Elvis to his best friend, Mason (Ulrich) before dying. Imagine if a good friend suddenly rushed up to you, thrust a ticking nuclear bomb into your lap, said “good luck with keeping this out of the hands of the terrorists coming with guns!” and promptly died. That’s basically what’s happening here.

Now Mason and a truck driver named Arlo (Gooding Jr.) have to outrace the mercs to get Elvis back to the government. They do this by driving an ice cream truck so that the goop doesn’t warm above 50 degrees and kill everything within a hundreds of miles around it. There’s even a handy digital thermometer on the outside of the canister to keep the audience appraised of the situation. More than 50 bad, m’kay?

So yes, Chill Factor is a blatant clone-hybrid of Speed and The Rock. There’s not an original bone in this movie’s body — and it seems serene in that knowledge. The only twist on the formula here is that Mason and Arlo are just normal guys, not ex-special ops or cops or anything like that. It’s not going to be easy to outrace and outwit battle-hardened soldiers… or will it?

What we have are two guys forging a friendship while doing a delivery run through the wilds of Montana while a bunch of very nasty people are gunning for them. It’s not a bad setup, and it’s even got a Hans Zimmer score to back it up. And if you look at it a certain way, it’s a road (and river) trip with some homicidal intermissions!

I really did like that these are just regular joes doing their best in an impossible situation, even if Skeet Ulrich was an unorthodox choice as an action lead and Cuba Gooding Jr. is there just to be a comic sidekick.

Perhaps the best part are the bad guys, who are vastly over-prepared for what is, in effect, a smash-and-grab robbery. They’ve got a full platoon with military trucks, guys who rappel down from nowhere in particular, rocket launchers, and — of course — a fleet of sleek racing motorcycles. It’s almost as if they knew they’d be chasing down an ice cream truck for its fudge pops.

What’s kind of funny, at least to me, is that Chill Factor is clearly a PG-13 at heart, but the studio really wanted that R. So the characters abruptly swear in very non-authentic ways and the filmmakers jam in a few gory bits that come out of nowhere. R-rating achieved!

Chill Factor doesn’t really excel at anything, but it’s a decent action romp all the same with a few standout stunt sequences. There’s even a part where they trade the truck for a boat, which they slide down a steep hill and into a river without anyone looking ashamed at the ridiculousness of it all. I had a better-than-expected time with all this, although my expectations upon reading that title were very low indeed.

Intermission!

• The Morgan Creek logo always makes me nostalgic for that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves music stinger
• That is such a strange choice of credit font
• Smoking through the gas mask is wicked cool…
• …as is that explosion and fallout
• Did that guy just sit stock still in prison for 10 years?
• Oh hey it’s Exposition Sheriff!
• “Assumptions are always dangerous.”
• I like that Mason presses him for change for the coffee
• Cell phones had terrible service in 1999
• Truck vs motorcycle does not fare well for the cycle
• You’d think the military would be all over the situation when a bunch of their guys are shot up and their facility robbed
• “Every time I look at you, I want to hit you.”
• How’d the bad guy get their phone number?
• MISSILE LAUNCHER VS RANDOM FUEL TRUCK
• Speed had the famous bus jump, Chill Factor has the less-famous “truck edges past a broken road” sequence
• SURPRISE REPELLER!
• How are there still cars on this road when the bad guys just took said road out with a missile?
• Ice cream sandwiches will not do much to keep a metal canister cold
• The boat scene is so silly, it’s masterful
• Hehe the bad guy eating the ice cream sandwich
• Did we really need the dead guy voiceover? He’s not Obi-Wan.
• Hudson Leick is really cute with short spiky hair. I’ll even forgive her for being a bad guy.
• There is NO WAY that the cell phone would take a call through the tunnel, even in 2025.
• “WE’VE GOT ICE!”
• He got shot in the leg like a half-hour ago and nobody’s rushing to help him… until right at the end