Tom Sizemore and Steven Seagal: together at last! In Ticker, a straight-to-video action movie resembling at least five action movies that did play in theaters, Sizemore (Heat) is Ray Nettles, an unshaven San Francisco detective on the hunt for a mad bomber, while Seagal (in his first multiplex-skipping starrer, sandwiched between his theatrical swan songs of Exit Wounds and Half Past Dead) is Frank Glass, a member of the bomb squad adept at snipping wires.
It should come as no surprise that Dennis Hopper essays the role of mad bomber, but don’t think for a second that he’s merely repeating what he did in 1994’s Speed! Heavens, no! This is completely different because he:
a) has a beard,
b) sometimes speaks in an Irish accent, and
c) is always singing AT&T’s old “Reach out and touch someone” jingle. Hopper’s character keeps blowing up buildings and killing innocent people because the cops won’t release his girlfriend (Jaime Pressly, Torque), because, you know, she’s kinda cute to have around to look at.
Sizemore isn’t too bad, because he plays his character like he had everything else up to then. A meatloaf-cheeked Seagal does the same, yet that makes him bad. I prayed for him to make a quick exit as he did in Executive Decision, but no dice, Chicago. Ticker comes courtesy of director Albert Pyun (1990’s Captain America), while gangsta rapper Nas plays a guy named Fuzzy, which couldn’t have been good for his street cred. —Rod Lott