Trespass

Coming from the director who gave us 48 HRS., The Warriors, and The Long Riders, as well as the combined producing talents behind the Back to the Future and Alien films, Trespass is a glaring letdown, an alleged action/adventure for the Nineties that seems more like a mediocre leftover from the Seventies. Set almost entirely in an abandoned waterfront warehouse in Atlanta, Hill's story pits a pair of downcountry firefighters (Paxton, Sadler) against a lethal posse of uptown drug dealers (led by Ices T and Cube), both of whom have ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. As the fish-out-of-water firefighters, Paxton and Sadler have come to the big, blighted city in search of a hidden cache of stolen gold artifacts, the map to which was handed to them by an enigmatic old man just before his fiery immolation in a recent job of theirs. Prowling around the seemingly deserted warehouse, Sadler just happens to witness a violent, drug-related execution of a gang member by Ice T, and suddenly these two white hicks find themselves trapped in a situation rapidly escalating out of their control. Hill has obviously tried to make a hip, ultra-violent actioneer, but what he ends up with is more a choppy, ultimately boring pastiche involving endless shots of automatic weapons fire and peoples' legs pumping furiously as they scramble to avoid the ricochets. Bills Sadler and Paxton are more or less believable as the two Treasure of Sierra Madre-addled hicks, but T and Cube seem to do nothing so much as act out a pair of tedious gansta-rap fantasies onscreen. Much of this movie may remind you of Aliens: panicky men with guns running around in the cramped, debris-strewn darkness of an enclosed set, their faces illuminated from time to time by staccato muzzle flashes. Ultimately, it's a very boring ride.