Matty has a rollickin’ good time with Fred Olen Ray’s solid Die Hard spin.

In the pantheon of Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray collaborations and crossovers, the Treat Williams vehicles they made — two a piece — during their fructiferous unions with Phoenician Entertainment form a quartet of maddeningly underappreciated DTV brilliance. Beginning with the tasty Extreme Limits (2001) and ending with the irresistible double whammy of Venomous (2001) and Gale Force (2002), that the second film in the run, the hugely entertaining CRITICAL MASS, is the weakest tells you everything you need to know about the Wynorski/Ray/Phoenician/Williams continuum’s general quality; and that Venomous’ recent Blu debut has been met with either silence or derision speaks volumes about the actual chops of many a cult film ‘fan’. Another rant for another day…

Ostensibly a reworking of the Wynorski-produced Die Hard (1988) riff Demolition University (1997), its water plant replaced by a nuclear facility, the Chopping Mall (1986) maestro was originally slated to helm Critical Mass until he and Ray decided to swap projects, Wynorski taking the Cliffhanger (1993)-esque Extreme Limits — the Phoenician/Williams programmer Ray was attached to — instead.

“I didn’t want to deal with the cold!” Ray told me in 2019, during a natter conducted for mine and Dave’s old creature feature podcast, Natural Selection. “Now, Phoenician and their parent company, Franchise, they didn’t make the movies as such. Most of the shows from that time frame — the Treat Williams ones, the ones we did with Michael Dudikoff, Ice-T and Brian Bosworth and those guys — they were done by what you’d call a production service company. Phoenician and Franchise would write the cheques and dole out the budgets to an independent company, and a lot of what I did for them were made by my company. The movies tended to be in the $1.2 to $1.4million range and the top billed star in them — well, some of those people were paid in excess of a quarter-of-a-million dollars for a fourteen day shoot. We got a good few years of work out of them, but then that market, the demand for the action and hardware pictures, just imploded.”    

Roughly on par with Ray’s preceding McTiernan variation, Maximum Security (1996), it and Critical Mass offer a real ‘pick your fighter’ moment. Though the late, great Williams is at his charismatic best as Critical Mass’ blue collar hero, and the equally missed Andrew Prine does his whole ‘obnoxious politico’ shtick with tremendous gusto, future fraudster Lori Loughlin amounts to little more than eye candy and the usually bombastic Udo Kier seems thoroughly bored as the film’s dud Hans Gruber analogue. Thus, despite the presentational flaws buoying its awesome ‘lags vs. terrorists’ pitch, Maximum Security trounces Critical Mass — ‘a security guard, senator and journalist vs. terrorists’ —  in the colourful character department. However, as thrilling and as lively as Maximum Security is, Critical Mass has the edge in terms of spectacle.

Like his inaugural Phoenician assignment, the sublime Active Stealth (1999), Critical Mass benefits from a (comparatively) hearty budget and Ray’s relentless desire to keep things moving. Opening and closing with a pair of blistering set pieces — which, in turn, are supplemented by the exemplary use of stock footage cribbed from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Universal Soldier (1992) — the film’s mid-section alternates between scenes of spiky dialogue and booms, bangs and tumbles, the highlight being a stunning high fall from atop an indoor crane.

Never released on physical media here in the U.K., Critical Mass did spend a chunk of the early to mid-‘00s playing in steady rotation on late night Sky. In the U.S. the film was issued on VHS and DVD by Artisan via Phoenician/Franchise’s distribution deal with New City Releasing.

USA ● 2001 ● Action ● 95mins

Treat Williams, Udo Kier, Andrew Prine and Lori Loughlin ● Dir. Fred Olen Ray (as ‘Ed Raymond’) ● Wri. Sean McGinly