When an extreme-sports filmmaking team sets out to make a commercial featuring a gold-medal skier outrunning an avalanche, they run afoul of a Serbian war criminal hiding out in a mountain resort. So it's snowboards vs. bullets on steep slopes of snow-and if that's your thing, Extreme Ops is for you. There are also subplots about the high-class skier (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, House on Haunted Hill) trying to prove herself with the rough-and-tumble snowboard scamps, and various romantic sparks flying, but the only real point to this movie is lengthy shots of stuntpeople zipping down the mountainsides. Though it could stand to have less plot and more action, there's a good dose of spectacle nonetheless. Rufus Sewell (Dark City), Devon Sawa (Final Destination), and the cast do a serviceable job, but poor Brit Rupert Graves (excellent in Mrs. Dalloway) was forced to act through a terrible American accent. -Bret Fetzer.

Robert De Niro stars as an American intelligence operative adrift in irrelevance since the end of the Cold War-much like a masterless samurai, a. k. a. "ronin. " With his services for sale, he joins a renegade, international team of fellow covert warriors with nothing but time on their hands. Their mission, as defined by the woman who hires them (Natascha McElhone), is to get hold of a particular suitcase that is equally coveted by the Russian mafia and Irish terrorists. As the scheme gets underway, De Niro's lone wolf strikes up a rare friendship with his French counterpart (Jean Reno), gets into a more-or-less romantic frame of mind with McElhone, and asserts his experience on the planning and execution of the job-going so far as to publicly humiliate one team member (Sean Bean) who is clearly out of his league. The story is largely unremarkable-there's an obligatory twist midway through that changes the nature of the team's business-but legendary filmmaker John Frankenheimer (Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate) leaps at the material, bringing to it an honest tension and seasoned, breathtaking skill with precision-action direction. The centerpiece of the movie is an honest-to-God car chase that is the real thing: not the how-can-we-top-the-last-stunt cartoon nonsense of Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon), but a pulse-quickening, kinetic dance of superb montage and timing. In a sense, Ronin is almost Frankenheimer's self-quoting version of a John Frankenheimer film. [+]

Anyone want to venture a guess that Keanu Reeves was sorry he passed up Speed 2 to make this turkey? Both a ridiculous suspense piece about a renegade intelligence community and an ill-considered hunk of do-gooder agitprop about alternative energy technology, Chain Reaction makes Reeves and almost everyone else involved look about as dumb as dumb can be. Hollywood's own Little Buddha plays a streetwise lab technician who survives an organized assault on his hydrogen-power project. The FBI assumes he's really a spy working for some foreign power, but the truth is that a CIA offshoot is behind the project's funding. Morgan Freeman plays the ramrod-straight company man who sabotages Keanu's excellent experiment, and Rachel Weisz portrays a physicist who goes on the run with the alleged saboteur. Directed by Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), who seems more interested in seeing how many absurd places he can mount a chase scene than offering a solid clue as to who these characters are and why we should care about them. -Tom Keogh.