Chain Reaction

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Action and intrigue. That's what you expect from a thriller . . . along with decent performances and a believable script, of course. And while director Andrew Davis ("The Fugitive") manages the chase scenes just fine, you have to wonder why he didn't insist that the script be tweaked to make more sense, or why he went with Keanu Reeves in the lead.

I have to admit that ever since I saw Reeves in "Parenthood" playing an undesirable stoner/surfer-dude boyfriend, I see glimpses of that performance in almost everything he does. He's still a little "dudish" in this film, in which he's supposed to be a member of a University of Chicago research team using cold fusion to come up with a viable and sustainable way of harnessing safe hydrogen power as an alternative "green" fuel. Then again, if this is the University of Chicago, which has produced more Nobel laureates than any other institution in America, why is there only one token Asian and one token Indian on the team? Hyde Park is crawling with brilliant Asian- and Indian-Americans, and so it's logical that there'd be greater representation on this research team.

No matter. The focus is on Eddie Kasalivich (Reeves), a college-dropout, motorcycle-riding machinist who works overtime and somehow manages to come up with the key breakthrough in the hydrogen energy project. Physicist Lily Sinclair (Rachel Weisz) and all of the other Ph.D.s who lead this research team can't figure it out, but Eddie does. And so it's party time (even stuffy researchers get toasted when they have a big breakthrough). After escorting a drunken Lily to her apartment, Eddie goes back to the South Side facility in an old warehouse district to get his motorcycle. The problem is, as he approaches the compound he notices an asbestos removal truck coming from the main building. He then hears a warning light, and rushes to the aid of one of the lead professors on the project, finding the good professor tied to a railing, dead, with a plastic bag over his face. But the place is about to blow, and so he rides his bike out of there in a nick of time. Eight blocks totaled, with a mushroom cloud lighting up the skies of Chicago. And Eddie, despite the crash and the blast, with barely a scratch on him.

Enter the FBI, who begin questioning Eddie and Lily and wonder why one key researcher, Lu Chen (Tzi Ma) is suddenly missing. Things escalate. Lily receives a fax allegedly from Dr. Chen asking her to meet him in Beijing with the program data, and she says to Eddie, "It's not his writing. I'm being framed." So is he, it turns out.

Here's where the intrigue (and the confusion) begins. Peter De Vries once remarked that a novel should have "a beginning, a muddle, and an end." "Chain Reaction" is heavy on the muddle, which is why we don't mind that most of the time seems spent watching Eddie and Lily run from the police and the seemingly endless permutations of bad guys in heart-pounding action. The FBI becomes convinced they're the culprits after they're cornered on a rooftop and the state trooper ends up shot. It's only when the ballistics tests come back when the head FBI guy (Fred Ward) starts to suspect the two fugitives are as innocent as they claim.

Admittedly, logic isn't a top priority for the thriller genre, but at some point you really need to figure out what position the project's apparent honcho holds and what side he's really on. Ambiguity is one thing, confusion another. Paul Shannon (Morgan Freeman) calmly smokes a cigar throughout much of the film, reassuring his young researchers (and us) that everything is going to work out okay. But the facile (and not terribly dialog-strong) script from J.F. Lawton and Michael Bortman skips along the surface of logic and doesn't really offer enough explanation for this to work as an effective intrigue.

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