Very disappointing...

So much average

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I've had my fair share of deliberately exposing myself to awful films with my film student friends in college in the nineties but this was RIDICULOUS! I can't even be bothered to say anything insulting about it, it was so befuddlingly bad. I mean - it was BAD. Not bad meaning good but bad meaning bad. All I can say is I'm glad I bittorrented it and didn't buy it or even waste time watching it on TV. I watched it in two sittings (the first one I fell asleep and I was sitting on a swivel chair). Gladly, spawnyjoe, zipper69, and JL have outlined the main aspects of awfulness so I needn't revisit them again. I suppose as an excuse it WAS made for an American audience, and indeed the performances weren't even up to the standard of bad UK TV, they were more like performances of westerners in an 80s HK film like Jackie chan (who usually seem to just be extreme sports guys or random English teachers or porn stars or something). I guess you can't blame the actors for this, the script sucked and the director was clearly out to lunch. The setpieces looked like they were made in the Blue Peter studio at the BBC. The explosions were OK though and the soundtrack was pretty good too - for that alone it gets two stars instead of one. It's a shame because I remember the series being pretty good - but then I was about twelve when I last watched it. Stay away from this at all costs and trust me, the time reading one of these reviews which save you from the time wasted watching the film is time well spent.

It's hard to know where to begin. Anderson is always good value and does his best with a fairly hopeless script. Brian Blessed is (I'm sorry to say) a positive embarrassment - unless the director was screaming "More ham, Brian" there is no excuse for his shameless gurning, vocal projection and am-dram theatrics. Perhaps for an uninformed US audience the Hollywood version of England and the (Battersea) Balkans would pass muster but they remind one too much of the "foreign" locations used on "Murder She Wrote". The plot holes are not just obvious but are yawning chasms in reality, McGyver supposedly studied under Blessed and yet has to ask how to pronounce a Greek (?) name on the ark. The "cliff-hanger" pre-story makes no sense and avoids telling us how the dilemma was resolved. How the good guys take the villain's short hop prop driven aeroplane in South West England and fly it without flight plan or ATC permission all the way to Thera is glossed over. The finale beneath the volcano is ludicrous as machinery thousands of years old grinds obediently into action, and the Bad Guy, supposedly a big wheel in the field of Archeology is so incensed that the "treasure" is scrolls filled with lost Atlantean knowledge that he plunges his hand into them and crumbles them to dust - good move (Dead Sea Scrolls, anybody?).And that "Torch of Atlantis" gizmo looked like a reject from a 1970's episode of Doctor Who...pitiful.

I loved the MacGyver TV series and I also loved this MacGyver movie even though most people pick on it. It may not be 100% brilliant but it's great fun and has all the elements that made the TV show so great. Sadly, MacGyver is the only character from the TV show to appear in this movie. He teams up with Brian Blessed who I have always found amusing because of his booming voice and over acting. They go off to find the Lost treasure of Atlantis which nobody else believes exists. There is plenty of action and MacGyver as usual has to build things out of nothing to get them out of various pickles. The only thing that spoils this movie is the sets. The caves especially. They look like they've been built for a children's school play, but if you ignore that, you have a brilliant movie.

This film misses everything that is good about Macguyver. From the inexplicable, and unexplained, cliff-hanger at the beginning to the "epic" finale, visiting such locations as the Eastern European military base (Battersea power station, London) and "London University" (Royal Holloway College, Windsor), this film stinks as bad as Brian Blessed's acting. Speaking of which, if Oscars(tm) were awarded purely on sheer weight of acting Brian Blessed would have won Leading Actor for three years running, and one leading actress. Oh, and best sound effects. Imagine an episode of the TV series at twice the length with half the budget and you still would not imagine how bad this film is.