With the world in ruins, ex-major John Garth is hired, with the promise of food and medicine, to break into an abandoned estate to retrieve works of art. He is given command of a small force of commandoes, including the less-than-honorable Lapierre (Steve Bacic), an officer Garth had dealt with in the past. All the team has to do is get past an automated defense system, called Encrypt, and Diana (Vivian Wu), the ghost in the machine.
A serviceable, low-budget, sci-fi, action flick that suffers from dull action, but benefits from a better than average back-story. While starting as a post-apocalyptic tale, the destruction of society is nothing more than a catalyst to get Garth into a combat maze. This is pure kill-the-monster stuff, and is not unlike watching others play a game of Dungeons & Dragons. The team walks down corridors, running into monsters and traps. It takes a greater degree of suspension-of-disbelief than I can muster to accept numbered puzzles on the floor, or invisible warriors (who can’t aim).
Encrypt bit off more than it could chew, which is a minor sin in the world of low budgets. A majority of super-soldiers-in-a-confined-space films spend most of the time with the soldiers arguing with each other, and running. This one attempts to stage multiple involved battles, but the money isn’t there. Those sequences become the least interesting in the film.
Of more interest is the story of Diana, a once-living woman whose spirit resides in the computer and who projects herself as a hologram. If this movie had been retooled as a mystery story, uncovering her past, it might have held my interest. Since the focus is on the action, many of the secrets are given as throwaways. The hologram-human chats also spend far too much time dealing with Garth’s emotions, which can’t be of interest to anyone, including Garth from the way the role is played. Plus, to pull that off, a lazy script allows Diana to access Garth’s life history, via still functioning national security computers, including a video of his dead wife, but makes her surprised that society has fallen. Apparently, her data searches are very, very specific.
There’s the start of a good film here, but it needed more variety in its commandoes, more twists in its plot, and a few more dollars in everything.