With a title like High Explosive, you’d think there might be some excitement or thrills involved with this film. Apparently not. Part moral fable, part wannabe action thriller, the movie fails to succeed in either department. With a drab look, generic characters and a ho-hum storyline, High Explosive amounts to little more than a firecracker on America’s fourth of July.
The film stars Patrick Bergin (The Invisible Circus) as Jack Randall, a sanctioned United Nations peacekeeper sent to Angola to defuse landmines that lie strewn throughout the war-ravaged country. After a peace treaty dissolves, Randall and a small entourage must escape to neighbouring Namibia before getting captured by rebel forces.
High Explosive opens and closes with a brief commentary on the problems land mines are causing in the African country. A couple of facts are dropped, as is the late Princess Diana’s name for her commitment to the cause. These bookends set the film up as though it were an educational tool, which it could have been if there were more facts. The story could have continued, but some more background on the cause of the conflict in Angola might have been added. As it stands, High Explosive is not so much about mines as it is about low-budget action sequences.
As pure entertainment, this movie fails to provide compelling characters, style or a well-paced story. Randall is a typical gruff father whose son, Tom (Daniel Petronijevic), is along for the ride, visiting from Toronto. Tom is your average movie teenager, so he’s got an attitude and some sort of underlying anger toward his father. Hildy Koller (Desiree Nosbusch) is a UN doctor who refuses to leave anyone behind, and her step-daughter Kat (Nina Muschallik) is a nice girl brought along as a piece of eye candy. Which is a good thing, because High Explosive is not only set in a desert, it also lacks any style that might bring the locales to life. Director Timothy Bond, largely a television director, employs a simple point-and-shoot philosophy where almost everything is done in a head-on medium shot spliced together in the most basic chronological order. Budgetary considerations might have been an issue with this production, but Bond refuses to take any risks and plays it safe with boring results.
The cat and mouse story doesn’t help liven things up either, as Randall and his entourage make their way across the drab landscape in search of a bridge that will lead them into the safe zone of Namibia. Along the way, they run into the occasional group of soldiers to provide a short and pointless gun fight. The journey continues, another gun fight or some other contrived complication stands in their way, and so on.
If High Explosive stuck with being an educational tool, it might have worked. The look, characters and story would have been just good enough to provide the framework within which Bond could have shed some light on a complicated and tragic real-life situation. Instead, it tells just enough to say who the main players are in the on-going conflict, but none of the why. As entertainment, High Explosive is a simple and boring B-action film without any excitement or higher purpose. Either way you look at it, this movie is a fizzled dud.
