ANTIBODY (2002) I'm glad the switch wasn't in his colon! Imagine Fantastic Voyage, done 36 years later with the same budget...and I'm not accounting for inflation. Antibody (which bills itself as an "Incredible Journey") is more or less one of the recent crop of killer-animal movies coming out of eastern Europe. Difference here is, the killer animals are white blood cells and thus very small. But then, so are the victims. Like anything with Lance Henriksen in it, I wanted to like Antibody, but as was the case in Alien Vs. Predator, the movie itself made it impossible. The plot is nonsense, and the movie built out of it is just not thought out. I can only guess that this is a movie that went from pitch to release in a very short amount of time. Henriksen plays a disgraced former FBI agent now in the private sector, running a security company which we see soon enough is woefully inept. A nasty terrorist (with "ties to several right-wing organizations" - a phrase that, maybe, is a little more chilling in eastern Europe than it is here?) has planted a nuclear bomb in Munich, which will go off if the microscopic deadman's switch in his body is triggered. Then he goes into a coma, without explaining his grievance, beyond a vague-sounding "Death to the western world! Long live the new world order!" and a list of demands we don't get to see. So Henriksen is drafted by nanotech pod pilot Robin Givens, they get shrunk down (in the movie's lingo, they "go subhuman") and spend much of the rest of the movie in this blood-submarine, in which they somehow (offscreen) climb in and out of hermetically sealed pods without flooding them or having to de/re-compress. White blood cells attack. Stuff goes wrong. And the world is at stake, because at some point in the movie we're to understand that Munich isn't the only city with a bomb under it. Despite a roster of characters that are supposedly American, the only convincingly American people in the movie are Henriksen, Givens, and Karate Kid bully William Zabka...even Henriksen's kid has a pretty thick accent. Regardless, Teodora Ivanova is adorable as one of the "subhumans", an ice queen who of course gets melted by the defrosting power of love. I know, this would make me puke most of the time, but she's real purty. I don't ask for much hard science in a movie where people get shrunk down to microscopic size and live, but I always expect better than the exhausted moment where desperate crew members have to reverse the polarity of something. And I don't ask for airtight plotting from a movie with a chief villain that's such a complete cipher beyond being a terrorist, but when he wakes up from his coma, how does he instantly understand all about the shrunken dudes in his body? The dialogue is dumb and was dated even in 2002 (there's an XFL joke in here!), and the climax (one of several) essentially cheats ("There is no seven!" Then there is a seven.). The effects aren't bad, except for some moments where the cast has to very unconvincingly shake around in their seats to simulate turbulence. It's not so bad that you wish it had never been made; you just wish you rented something else. BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE