Brainless action movies can be fun, but you wouldn't know that from watching Extreme Ops. What you'll see if you decide to endure Extreme Ops is a lazy excuse for an action movie -- one that compensates for its lack of spark or excitement by trying to make everything the characters do seem cool. There's a big difference between Vin Diesel outrunning an avalanche in XXX and the heroes of Extreme Ops doing the same thing; the former looks good, the latter just stupid. 

A handful of country's most wild and extreme athletes have been gathered together to be a part of a TV commercial. Will (Devon Sawa), Silo (Joe Absolom), Kittie (Jana Pallaske), and award-winning skier Chloe (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras) are assembled to film the last portion of the commercial in some Austrian mountains, staying at a nearby, near-finished resort hotel. The four, plus the director (Rufus Sewell) and his business partner (Rupert Graves), settle in for a few days of fun and filming, hitting the slopes to hawk a new camera to the masses. But the situation quickly turns into a rejected Die Hard sequel when the athletes discover that an Eastern European war criminal (Klaus Löwitsch), thought to be dead,  is hiding out at the hotel, plotting his next moves. The athletes decide to take matters into their own hands, using their daredevil attitudes and endless supply of adrenaline to  stop the international terrorists once and for all.

I am truly in awe at how moronic and dumb Extreme Ops is.  Not a a single element of fun, even on the guiltiest of levels, appears in any of this picture's 94 minutes. The only way I could have a good time watching the film was by making fun of it. Granted, the cinematography is used to its fullest advantages, giving us some terrific shots of mountain landscapes, but when it comes to capturing the athletes in action, the directing couldn't be more inept. Director Christian Duguay (Screamers) is more concerned with shoving extreme editing down our throats than he is about injecting realism and excitement into such moments as the "rail-boarding" bit and the climactic avalanche. Referring to  Extreme Ops as a good actioner is like calling David Lynch a mainstream filmmaker.

The listless casting doesn't help either. Sawa, so good as the hero of Final Destination, makes a dull choice as the closest thing to a lead figure among the athletes. Absolom and Pallaske try to have as much fun as they can, but their performances disappear amidst a sea of cheesiness, as does Wilson-Sampras' turn as a mainstream athlete trying to prove herself to these X Games rejects. Dark City's Sewell gets to deliver the film's best line; when asked if he's part of the CIA, his character replies: "Worse -- Hollywood." Poor Graves is stuck as the token jerk. As for those villains, Löwitsch and David Scheller (as the main baddie's even more psychotic son) couldn't be more like carbon copies of every other action movie antagonist if they wore paper bags on their heads marked "Foreign Bad Guy." They're all the bland equivalents of Star Trek crew members with red shirts, just waiting to get shot or killed while the heroes snowboard their way to victory without injury.

Suspension of disbelief requires that viewers forget all the preposterous events taking place in the picture and just have a good time. I tried to have fun with Extreme Ops, admiring the good cinematography and the fact that, despite all its flaws, the movie at least managed to keep me awake. But in the end, I had to face the facts: Extreme Ops is the Dude, Where’s My Car? of action movies.

MY RATING: * ½ (out of ****)

(Released by Paramount Pictures and rated "PG-13" for violence/peril, language and some nudity.)

Review also posted on www.ajhakari.com.