Review by Jay Pinkerton View This Trailer Here's a trailer that, not three seconds in, all but yells "Straight to video." Our generation being as steeped in irony as it is, you'd almost expect a movie with a name like Extreme Ops to be a satire of that genre of film. And yet no -- Extreme Ops wants you to take it seriously. There are operations (called "ops", I suppose, because the parties involved do enough of them to merit the shorthand). These ops are extreme. Very extreme. Intensely extreme, even. These ops are a danger to themselves and others. We are first introduced to the Extreme Ops team (our heroes, unfortunately) as they are airlifted to a remote mountain peak in the middle of a thunderstorm. "A remote peak," intones our sober Narrator. Lightning crackles. Tense banshee-wail music builds. "An empty hotel," he continues, tension mounting. Rain drips from shadowy walls. Fireballs plume up out of nowhere. I don't know about you, but when I'm greeted with this kind of creepy set-up, I assume the film is a horror movie. All the pieces are there: the cast of stupid young people; the remote location cut off from the help of others; the lightning and suspense. So it is somewhat jarring when, ten seconds later, this set-up is abandoned entirely. Techno music thumps in, everything gets all extreme, and we're introduced to "six of the most insane people in extreme sports" flying out of planes on mountain bikes, snowboarding behind trains, and, I don't know, lugeing down an icy precipice with their heads or something. I know these kinds of people. The trailer can go right ahead and dub them "six of the most insane people in extreme sports." It's only trying to distract you from the fact that, in real life, people like this are called "idiots." To be charitable, I could meet the trailer halfway with "six of the most insane people in extreme idiocy."  I'm not saying I have anything against adrenalin-junkies "livin' on the edge." Get your kicks however you want, I'm not stopping you. I'm simply saying that if your idea of extreme sporting is snowboarding behind a train, you're a moron. There isn't snow behind a train. There are train tracks behind a train. A snowboard is capable of handling many surfaces, from snow to water to other types of snow. But asking it to "glide" along steel rails, gravel, wooden beams and assorted detritus at two hundred miles an hour is, I'm sorry to say, a little beyond its capabilities.
Nonetheless, there's our beloved Extreme Ops team, doing just that. What better way to endear these characters to our hearts than by showing them doing repulsively stupid things? Fifteen seconds into the trailer, I was already waiting for some kind of mishap that would kill one of them. I don't doubt that they'd bleed Mountain Dew instead of plasma, their last words a throaty "Rock on" while they made the Devil Sign with their fingers. Why? Again, because they're morons. Why die with dignity when it would fly so much in the face of everything they'd done while alive? Following the techno-pumped montage of extreme sporting, our heroes (it makes me sad to keep defining them as that) hop into a jacuzzi. This is, I imagine, to reassure the sorts of people who'd go to this kind of movie that, yes, there will be extreme humping. Mention is made of nudeness. In theaters everywhere, thirteen year old boys need to position their popcorn boxes very strategically. The rest of the trailer does not deserve frame-by-frame analysis, as it involves our Extreme Ops team fighting terrorists. With guns? Hand-to-hand combat? Cunning? Ha ha, no. With extreme sporting. Feel free to wince. I did. The terrorists (Serbian, I think, which seems in line with Hollywood's intent to make all terrorists Serbian) shoot Russian automatic weapons and chase the plucky youngsters with rocket launcher-equipped helicopters, but to no avail: their extreme sports stop the terrorists cold every time! The trailer finishes off with the tragic tagline "Survival is an Attitude." If you can make any sort of sense out of that, please email me with a detailed hypothesis. Who writes taglines like this? Is it even done by people, or is there just some software application that randomly pairs up nonsensical buzz-words? "Survive To The Max." "In-Your-Face Survival Overdrive." "Off-The-Hook Surviving In Phat Pants, Yo." Watching this tired premise play itself out, I couldn't begin to imagine a target market a trailer like this would appeal to. A few possibilities:
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