Imagine if you will a Tony Hawk skating video interspliced with footage from Behind Enemy Lines and set to Jersey shore techno. An American film crew heads to the Austrian Alps to shoot an extreme sports video and discovers Yugoslav rebel Slobovan Pavlov is using an annex of their makeshift hotel space as a secret hideout. Soon after the boys dodge a pack of Dobermans, they share some downtime with the girls (a World Cup gold medal winner and an Angelina Jolie clone) in an impromptu Jacuzzi—the men strip, the girls swap saliva and the Serbs get horny for more. Forget the audacity and ludicrousness with which this terrorist plot has been flimsily and irresponsibly applied to the film’s extreme ops proceedings—far more fatal is the complete and utter lack of cinematic fervor. That said, there is a final moment of transcendence, at once pretense-free and cutely self-aware. But while the filmmakers may openly acknowledge that politics always played a backseat to their extreme sports, it doesn’t make the shit storm any less crippling. It’s not clear who the hell any of the these people are skiing down Extreme Ops’ snowy Austrian slopes but its definitely not the film’s actors. Rupert Graves is the most recognizable face in the crowd and, seeing as there’s more skiing going on here than actual acting, it’s anyone’s guess why the roles in the film weren’t simply handed over to the people in the stunts department. Not only would this approach have been more cost-efficient but it would have also guaranteed that the film wouldn’t have been pieced together entirely from extreme long shots of the stunts crew and close-ups of the film’s actors.
Image/Sound
The bad news is that Extreme Ops is every bit as atrocious on the small screen as it was on the big screen. The good news is that the disc’s anamorphic video transfer is impeccable all around. Skin tones are dead-on and blacks are rock solid. Considering how much snow there is in the film, it’s amazing just how little bleeding there is. Though one dimensional, the Dobly Digital 5.1 surround track does justice to the cheesy techno soundtrack.
Extras
Zilch. Interestingly, though, Paramount unveils a first: From the start, you have the option of watching a bunch of previews or going straight to the DVD’s main menu.
Overall
For the one or two people in the world not embarrassed to own this DVD, you’d think the folks at Paramount could have at least provided a naked chicks photo gallery.
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