A first-rate action sequence ensues.
But it's one of Fleming's best-plotted novels, and as Telly Savalas plans biological warfare in his Swiss eyrie there are first-rate action sequences, a superior script by Simon Raven, and Diana Rigg as a lovely doomed heroine.
Hiding out in the woods, Hallam starts picking off hunters like a second-rate action director.
From here, though, it all slips into a second-rate action movie.
It's sort of like a second-rate action movie, like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
If anything, it tries much too hard, stuffing great gobs of second-rate action, secondhand humor and warmed-over sentiment into every nook and cranny of its relentlessly busy 3-D frames.
This bit of news — apocryphal, perhaps — has great significance for Jean-Claude Van Damme, the star, protagonist and leading ontological conundrum of "JCVD," as well as a one-time rival of Mr. Seagal's for the title of world's second-best second-rate action hero.
In other words, this movie is as nuts as a period drama could be, particularly one featuring Ms. Bellucci, known for her dark-eyed, steamy turns in movies like "Malèna," and Mr. Dacascos, the kickboxer from second-rate action pictures like "Only the Strong".
Intriguingly, this offered a pre-vision of later work; the taciturn mask he tends to fall back on as shorthand in third-rate action pictures like "Mercury Rising" or "The Jackal," when he can't connect to a character, most likely because it's the standard Man With a Past.
By now nothing interesting remains to be said about "The Artist" or any of the other worthy contenders, and there was never much to say about the mostly second-rate action movies and romantic comedies taking up the seasonal slack in the multiplexes.
