Lost in the Pacific (2017)
Foywonder
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Starring Brandon Routh, Yuqi Zhang, Russell Wong, Yun Lin, Sunny Wang
Directed by Vincent Zhou
An island overrun by red-eyed, poison-fanged, mutant killer cats!
Brandon Routh as an ex-Special Forces soldier turned sous-chef (”Better to create than destroy” is how he explains his career change) who keeps beating the crap out of the movie’s villain until the moment he’s about to kill him at which moment his crippling PTSD kicks in allowing the bad guy to repeatedly take him down!
An airline captain who feels compelled to remind us that she’s the Captain in nearly every single conversation yet spends very little time in the actual cockpit and even less time actually piloting the plane when she is!
A $10 million dollar Chinese-US co-production with digital effects that aren’t that much more convincing than those seen in your typical Sharknado movie!
How do you say “I can’t believe it’s not an Asylum movie” in Chinese, anyway?
I don’t know. But this is something a Chinese character actually does say in this movie:
”Monsters and insane women… Please just be a nightmare!
Not since William Shatner was possessed by a druid idol in the 1973 TV movie The Horror at 20,000 Feet has an airliner been threatened by a more ludicrous menace played with a straight face than the herd of unconvincingly animated freakish felines frightening the unlucky passengers of the luxury airliner in Lost in the Pacific.
Is it a horror movie?
An airline disaster flick?
An action thriller?
All of the above?
None of the above>
Even when it picks a genre it has a hard time sticking to it because, particularly early on, the thriller elements are nullified by an oddly light-hearted undertone that feels tonally out of synch with the circumstances being portrayed.
Is it possible to describe a movie about an airplane as a “trainwreck”?
Folks, I’m going to level with you. There is no way I can accurately convey to you how preposterous, often quite enjoyably so if you have an appreciation for unadulterated schlock, Lost in the Pacific is without delving into a certain degree of spoilers. Fairly certain reading the next couple paragraphs will help you decide if this is a movie you want to witness with your own eyes and ears. Now I’m not going to let all the mutant cats out of this bag but I feel compelled to give you a basic breakdown of what the actual storyline because you won’t believe what I’m about to describe happened in a movie not produced A) for laughs and/or B) for Syfy.
Okay, here goes.
***ALARM! SHARK ALARM!***
A Chinese businessman whose company is facing financial ruin plans the inaugural flight of his new luxury airliner that may as well have been dubbed “Skytanic”. The passengers for this maiden flight are almost all VIPs and celebrities (famous American boxer, horny Chinese actress who really wants to go a few rounds with the boxer, blind cellist, Chinese idol singer who also happens to be the owner’s estranged son, billionaire Saudi prince, nosy Chinese reporter I am 99% sure was redubbed in post-production, etc.). Very few of them will actually factor into the plot in any substantial fashion despite inordinate amounts of time spent establishing their characters. So determined is the airline owner to persuade the wealthy Saudi prince to invest in his floundering company that he orders the pilots to flow through a major storm to stay on schedule.
Naturally, the storm damages the plane. They’re forced to land on an abandoned island in the Pacific that, according to both pilot and the co-pilot, nobody goes near because it is rumored to be haunted by supernatural creatures. Sure enough; they’re attacked by a herd of mutant cats and forced to take-off despite being desperately low on fuel.
The sight of these cutely ghastly critters charging after the launching airplane en masse looks exactly how I imagine a cat food commercial directed by Roger Corman would be.
In the process of escaping, the plane picks up two more passengers: paramilitary types who had been in hiding on the island for some time. They claim to be part of a United Nations biological containment team but you know that’s not true because they can’t stop behaving suspiciously. In a less than shocking twist, the shady soldiers of fortune turn out to be just that.
When the airline owner’s American assistant (good luck figuring out where the Scott Caan ends and the Scott Adkins begins with this guy) overhears them in the bathroom stall plotting to sell a vial of a soil sample from the island worth $20 million to their employers, the mercs confront him, and — suddenly the body of another character is discovered with the soldiers coming out of her bedroom. Wait. What? Did they kill the wrong person? Was this a continuity error? Did some scenes get left on the cutting room floor? What the hell just happened?
Complicating matters, they’ve lost any and all radio communication because the cat creatures took out the plane’s antennae. Further complicating matters, one of the cat creatures has gotten aboard the plane and begins to attack people (off-camera) and make lots of noises in the ductworks (off-camera) before finally appearing (on-camera) to mostly just stand around doing not much of anything.
The Chinese actress killed off-camera by the cat creature (presumably); turns out she’s alive even after she was pronounced dead by more than one person. Was that a different Chinese actress? Seriously, did I just zone out and miss an explanation? WTF?!?!
Brandon Routh’s Under Siege meets “Iron Chef” impression could have ended the movie a half hour sooner but his debilitating flashbacks allow the main paramilitary villain to subdue him, hijack the plane, and demand they land it on the top secret world’s largest aircraft carrier floating undetected in the middle of the Pacific.
The Captain who finally does some actually captaining and her co-pilot who speaks like he learned English from the “Hooked on Phonics: George Takei Edition” miraculously land the jumbo jet on the even more jumbo aircraft carrier, barely, only to discover everyone on board the carrier is either dead or missing; except, naturally, for the one mortally wounded scientist who lives just long enough to sort-of explain what the hell is going on. The carrier is also overrun with yet another herd of red-eyed, poisonous, mutant kitties. And if that’s not enough, the surviving passengers have to find yet a way off and fast because the vessel has been set to self-destruct in a matter of minutes.
I won’t spoil how it all culminates other than to say you will actually watch a herd of computer-generated pointy-eared black cats get charmed into submission by the musical styling’s of a blind Yo-Yo Ma type cellist after he busts out his instrument right there on the deck of the ship. That actually happened.
***END SHARK ALARM!***
And the most amazing thing of all: this movie is a remake!
I couldn’t believe it when I looked Lost in the Pacific up on IMDB and discovered the director and co-writer made roughly the exact same movie in 2010 on a much lower budget. Somehow, he managed to get an even bigger budget to remake the movie for theatrical release with a more diverse international cast and in 3D to boot. According to IMDB, the budget for Lost in the Pacific was $10 million. I find that hard to fathom, particularly because – well, take a look for yourself at what the cat creatures look like.
That’s not $10 million effects there. That’s 2006 Sci-Fi Channel original movie effects. Ah, hell, this movie would be right at home premiering on Syfy today. The plane doesn’t look all that convincing much of the time, either.
I could almost give Lost in the Pacific a rave review just for the schlock value if it wasn’t for this 20-25 minute stretch right after the initial cat attack when just as the film should be taking off to the heights of absurdity, instead it gets lost in a verbal abyss. It quite literally turns into characters standing around arguing about the plot without actually engaging in one to speak of. Almost all the action during this stretch takes place off-camera and that’s when there’s even any action to speak of, or speak about, as the case may be.
Again, $10 million budget? How much money is Brandon Routh commanding these days?
If you’re a connoisseur of schlock cinema or just looking for an unintentionally ridiculous b-movie to get together with friends to watch and have a few laughs with then Lost in the Pacific should do the trick. For everyone else, who knows? Maybe they’ll remake it again in a few years with an even bigger budget?
Maybe next time they’ll actually get Henry Cavill?
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Film
Categorized:News
