Renegade General Pembroke (Steven Grives) calls dishonorably discharged officer Lt. Peter Doyle (Jeremy Callaghan) back to active duty, claiming he is the only man capable of leading a team to a secret government installation in order to disarm a nuclear bomb. Joining Doyle is Pembroke-loyalist and nuclear specialist, Lt. Joyce Darwin (Marjean Holden). Once underway, the team members are picked off one by one by a mysterious alien.
For the first two-thirds, Code Red: The Rubicon Conspiracy is a Predator clone. There’s a small but tough military team, which includes a mystic and a guy with a big gun so the undergrowth-mowing scene can be reproduced. The team has two missions, to deal with rebels (this time they have to shut down an autodestruct nuke that the rebels have activated) and to find out what happened to the previous team. When they find the bodies of those earlier soldiers, something odd has been done to them. Then they find themselves hunted by a guy who is wearing about half of the Predator’s armor. Pretty familiar stuff, though that doesn’t mean it couldn’t work again. It doesn’t hurt that they change things toward the end, with a bit more borrowing from a different extraterrestrial film.
All the alien material is surprisingly good, with the critters looking passable. And the action is above average for a low-budget production. The problems come with the characters. The red-shirts of the team all do their job, but the two main characters are irritating to listen to. They bicker in every clichéd way that the writer could swipe from other poor movies. He stole his plot from a good movie; couldn’t he steal his main characters from something at least watchable? Every moment they are onscreen is unpleasant. Films, even action films, are about characters, and when you can’t do those right, the rest falls apart.
We’re also stuck with an evil general out to acquire advanced weaponry for his personal gain. I believe we need a moratorium on that particular plot point.
Code Red is a missed opportunity. It was never going to be great, but it could have been enjoyable, B-movie action.