i must have seen a different film!!

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Blistering performances.

This wasn't that bad a movie although there were a couple of not possible's. Ships in space do not make externally audible noise, space is a vacuum and noise won't travel in it. Oh well. An interesting beginning to the whole show is when you learn that do to all the cyber crime that cash is the only monetary medium in use now. The plot of the movie has a nice twist when the robbers blow an asteroid so a chunk of it, on a carefully plotted course, will collide with the money ship. When the ship is intercepted by the bad guys the first to die is the captain, still in hibernation. The first robber to die is the stereotypical black man. Then we find out the ship's engineer is the traitor who gave the codes to the criminals. The leader is a stone cold killer and is married to a physcho thrill seeker. During the film the two goodun's get outside in a shuttle, the wife comes after them and gets shot up by the transports auto defenses. She crashes into a bay where it just so happens the turncoat is working to fix a gantry problem. So now there are two goods and one bad. They work together to avoid the asteroid just in the nick of time. Then the engineer shoots the bad guy and there seems to be a standoff between the last two. As the film ends there is a news broadcast saying the mining colony has been bought by someone wishing to remain anonymous and is going to clean the dirty deeds that have been going on. The viewer is left to interpret that as the two survivors kept the $40 billion and are using it for good, kind of, maybe, almost.

The price at which it was sold should have warned me suspicious, but then you never know and I went ahead and bought it. Generally, the better the summary on the back of a DVD is, the worse the film. It certainly proved true in this case. The acting is very weak and most of the developments are so predictable that after some twenty minutes of looking at it, I was on the point of not wasting any more of my valuable life time. Still I looked on until the end. And I was rewarded in some way at least. For me the only thing worth watching in the movie is the relationship between the main character and the navigator. For me the best scene in the movie - and it would be a good scene even in a good movie - is the one in which they both are in the hibernation unit pointing a gun at each other even in their sleep. If only the entire movie should have been like this

Weak story, weak writing and poor acting. The only good thing I can say about this film is that it had mediocre special effects.

Although filled with special effects and sometimes advertised as a sci-fi film, "Velocity Trap" is really an action film. A "Die Hard"-clone set in space. But since I loved "Die Hard" and especially "Under Siege", I decided to buy the film and check it out. Now that I have, I'm not disappointed at all although there were a few flaws.The hero of this film is Olivier Gruner. His most famous film is probably "Cyborg", directed by the legendary Albert Pyun, but he has been in several other films as well. My personal favorite of his films is "Automatic", a surprisingly inventive action film with great fight scenes. Gruner definitely has the right stuff to be an action hero. He has "the accent", his fight scenes are always great and he even has a sense of humor which is especially apparent in "Velocity Trap". Not only that, he even starred in a family film(!) "The White Pony" and didn't look out of place.Now, the plot here is nothing special but I guess nobody expects or even wants it to be. This is after all an action film, not "Boys Don't Cry". However, there are some pretty interesting humorous details in a few scenes. For example, there's a scene where Olivier Gruner is dancing ballet by himself! I thought Mark Dacascos singing karaoke in "Drive" was something but I was wrong. _This_ scene is something! There are also some good bits of dialogue here and there ("Can't take a joke, Stokes?" "Actually, many people find me very funny" or something along those lines).The director is Phillip Roth who's previous work includes "Digital Man" and "Darkdrive". Although his films usually have a pretty low budget, they have some quite good effects and that is the case in this film as well. The chase in the end of the film is surprisingly effective and there are no obvious "blue/green screen-effects". The sets also work pretty well but the music was a letdown. It lacked a good theme and the underscore wasn't that great either. This film would have benefited greatly from a futuristic and energetic synthesizer score.Also, while this is one of the best films from Phillip Roth, it lacks one key element that I expected from it: fight scenes. There's a fair amount of gunplay, some good stunts and some pretty nice explosions but I think fans of Olivier Gruner (myself included) were expecting more fights. As it is, there's really only one fight scene in the beginning of the film and even that is quite short and unspectacular.Anyway, this is an effective action film. It doesn't even try to re-invent the genre but it's never boring. All in all, a very good effort from Mr. Roth, but the next time, a better score and more fight scenes, please! This one gets a 7.Oh, and by the way, the DVD includes a great commentary from Phillip Roth, special effects expert Andy Hoffman and Olivier Gruner himself. This is one of the best and most entertaining commentaries I've heard since the commentary of "Darkdrive", which also includes a commentary by these guys (except Gruner) although it isn't even listed as a feature on the DVD box cover. In case you've heard the commentary of "Velocity Trap", I can tell you that the name of the actor they couldn't remember in the beginning of the movie is Yannick Bisson (here credited as Yannock Bisson, a typo perhaps?) and his show that they refer to is, of course, "High Tide" (a great show, also starred Rick Springfield). I recommend renting the DVD just for the commentary.