What Not To Watch: Termination Point

Question, have you considered watching 2007’s Termination Point starring Jason Priestly and Lou Diamond Phillips? If you answered yes, allow me to give you a bit of advice…

A good termination point for the your Termination Point viewing experience would be right before you hit play… unless you have developed a transporter (like Lou Diamond Phillips’ character did in the movie) that will allow you to watch the movie, then go back in time to before you watched the movie so it is like you never watched the movie in the first place.

• Starting Point: Our movie begins with two young lovers, who may or may not have met on FarmersOnly.com, as they steal away to a barn for a literal roll in the hay! But before farm boy can get his girl’s top off something interrupts them and it wasn’t just the PG-13 rating… it was the unidentified object that crashed through the barn roof. With the mood destroyed, our country guy and gal go out to investigate and realize that the object that crashed through the barn roof was a part of a passenger airplane and there are other parts of the plane strewn about the property… they find the remnants of a boarding pass but get this… the date on it is for the NEXT DAY!?!!? Cue the opening credits…

• Get to the Point: Lou Diamond Phillips plays a brilliant scientist named Dr. Daniel Winter. Winter’s claim to fame was working on the highly classified Alpha String project. Alpha String made the concept of teleportation and time travel a reality… but when Winter finds out that the government wants to use this technology for military purposes, he freaks out, steals the Alpha String controllers from the lab and then books a flight to Mexico to go into hiding. Yes, Doc Winter has the ability to teleport to ANYWHERE in the world and he instead chooses to buy a plane ticket and fly to Mexico. And this guy is supposed to be brilliant?? Jason Priestly plays government agent Caleb Smith. Smith and his wife and daughter are about to take their first family vacation in six years… The Smiths are actually boarding the plane when Caleb gets the call (on his flip phone) about the security breach, so he has to leave the plane and tells his wife he will take a late flight and meet her in Mexico. Yes, Caleb Smith was already in the exact place he needed to be to apprehend Dr. Winter but he was called into action. Isn’t ironic? Speaking of “Ironic”… this movie was as Canadian as Alanis Morissette.
• The Point of No Return: So Caleb is already out looking for Dr. Winter when the agency he works for finds out Winter and the Alpha String controller are on Flight 507 to Mexico along with Caleb’s family. But the government is not taking any chances and the plan is to shoot Flight 507 down… and unfortunately for Caleb his opinion on the matter is not enough to sway the decision made by the President. But before the missiles can shoot down Flight 507, Dr. Winter activates the Alpha String controller and the airplane is sucked into a worm hole.  Dr. Winter had previously only used this technology on lab rats, a passenger plane being considerably larger than a lab rat led to some unforeseen complications as the plane now finds itself stuck in a null space between dimensions and only those who were sitting closest to Winter and the controller survived. Now the remaining passengers on board find themselves slowly floating towards a vortex that will crush and kill them once they enter it.

• Pointless: Speaking of vortexes, when Flight 507 transported into the wormhole it created a vortex in atmosphere so big that it won’t close… in fact it is getting bigger and destroying little towns in California as it sucks up people from the ground and shoots lightning at other stuff. This vortex is heading towards Los Angeles where millions will die and from there it is believed that the vortex will continue to expand until it eventually swallows the entire universe… but there is a second Alpha String controller that will allow our hero Caleb Smith to turn back time, erase all the events that have happened in the movie and in turn rescue his family and save the world! Things aren’t easy for Caleb though as he has to contend with rogue agents around every corner and stay ahead of the world eating vortex.

Jason Priestly’s performance was probably the biggest positive in a movie filled with negatives that included a convoluted storyline, bad CGI and a total waste of Lou Diamond Phillips’ talents. I’d like to see what Priestly could do in a better quality action flick because I bought into him as an action hero.

And if you’d like to see some Bonus Bullet Points, we are now boarding…

• Familiar Face: The rogue agents were everywhere in Termination Point, even on Flight 507! Two men who identified themselves as “Air Security” were on board to get the Alpha String controller from Dr. Winter and force him to transport them to a rendezvous point where they  could deliver the technology to the evil people who hired them. One of the rogues was played by Gary Hudson, who I recognized from The Force and as Jeff Wincott’s no good brother in Martial Outlaw.
• PG-13 Quote: “Give me a freaking break!”
• One Question: When Winter’s girlfriend tells Caleb that the second Alpha String controller is in the bank with her dying breath, it is assumed Winter put the controller in a safety deposit box… but in actuality he had it in a piggy bank. How the fuck did he get a Blackberry sized controller INSIDE a piggy bank? The ship in a bottle technique?
• Fly By Night: The airline depicted in Termination Point is named Sky Wing Airlines, which sounds like the most fly by night company in the history of aviation.