Above deck, Ice-T radios to a plane. Max appears and both of them throw rope ladders over the side of the ship. Don't ask me why there isn't a single person on deck to see what is happening. This is a low-budget film so they obviously couldn't afford to hire someone who had taken a cruise before as a consultant. In the radio room, two guys pick a mysterious approaching plane on radar. Max walks in looking sexy, which, of course, immediately makes the two guys forget about the radar. These guys apparently are as intelligent as the two castaways who kept trying to eat Bugs Bunny but were enamored of him when he dressed in drag. The mysterious military cargo plane approaches, flying at most a hundred feet above the ship when it passes. We see the same plane a couple of seconds later and it's now above the clouds!?! A bunch of guys parachute out the back, land in the water near the moving ship, swim toward the ladders, come aboard (still with not a single soul on deck or even near a window to notice this stuff happening), and grab more assault rifles and handguns. I try even harder now not to think, knowing that if I just let things keep playing out, it will all be over sooner. With this part of the plan accomplished, Max now offs the two radio guys, thus raising the boat's median IQ, such as it is.
In a stateroom, Aaron and Gloria get ready for the dinner party. He frets about being on time (why the hell should he care?) but Gloria insists she wants to be fashionably late. Maybe she's just nervous. After all, Erika Eleniak was in another movie about a boat attacked by terrorists, Under Siege. Incidentally, that film was far superior to this turd and not only because Erika flashed the goods in that one. Wow, this movie must be really bad if its got me pining for a Steven Seagal film.
With the exceptions of Aaron and Gloria, all passengers on the ship have settled down to dinner. Paul gets to the podium and blurts out some awkward jokes to further the point that he's a douche, so we won't feel bad later when he gets dusted (oops, sorry!). I must say the two-thousand or so passengers aboard this ship look like less than a hundred when you crowd them into one room. Ice-T and his armed henchmen walk in through the kitchen and shoot the entire staff, I guess, to confirm they're bad guys.
Max enters the bridge and shoots two of the three officers there. In the dining hall, Ice-T takes the podium and announces he's there to take about $130 million in goods from the ship's safe. He lets loose a few wisecracks while informing everyone aboard that they are now hostages (all ninety of them). I must say, this movie is rather atypical as far as bad movies go in that the actors are generally competent. However, that just makes the awful visuals and plotting all the more jarring. Teri's cameraman gets shot along the way, which must mean that Ice-T hates TV journalism as much as I do.
Aaron knows something's wrong (firing your agent would solve that) so he takes Gloria with him out to the deck, which is completely barren as usual; at least now there's a reason for that. They decide to head down… somewhere. One may notice a lifesaver in the background, where the ship's name is spelled "Brittanic" as opposed to "Britannic" on the side of the ship.
Back in the dining room, Teri's cameraman continues to suffer from his gunshot wound. I know we're all on edge hoping our beloved cameraman character survives. Ice-T grabs the Captain and demands the codes to the safe. The Captain claims he doesn't have them. Ice doesn't believe him and takes him and rich guy Paul to the bridge. Ice leaves a few henchmen and reassures the hostages by telling them, "You'll survive… metaphorically, of course." This dialogue is stupid... literally of course. Just for the hell of it, Paul's big bodyguard pulls out a gun and gets himself shot and killed.
In an elevator, Ice-T humorously compliments Paul on the refurbishing job on the ship. Ice-T is obviously lying in order to be polite; the boat really looks like shit. Ice-T gets to the bridge with the Captain and Paul in tow and babbles something about stars. He kills an officer to regain some of the gangsta image he pissed away in stuff like Breakin' 2. He keeps demanding the codes to the safe but no dice.
A blurb on the screen lets us know the time is now 12 midnight, as opposed to just 'midnight', which might confuse, I guess. At several points in the film we get time and distance from port updates like this. I hadn't mentioned any of these updates before and won't later, if only because it has/will have nothing to do whatsoever with anything in the plot.
In one of the rooms above deck, Aaron kills a bad guy with a fire extinguisher. Now I've seen at least two films where I remember someone getting killed by a fire extinguisher, this one and Irreversible, another film I find irritating, though for far different reasons. Aaron and Gloria make their way down to the Stalingrad tractor factory… er… engine room.
Max shows up and she and Aaron exchange shots, but Aaron and Gloria get away. Max radios that there are two armed passengers running around. Teri, held hostage in the dining room, cracks a small smile while she has to keep pretending to worry about our dear beloved wounded cameraguy. Aaron and Gloria eventually run into mechanic Rick. They manage to kill a henchman. Max and Aaron have your typical movie handgun fight consisting of 85 shots with no reloads.
In the dining room, horn-dog football hero Phil thinks up a brilliant idea. He pretends to go help the beloved dying cameraguy but really goes to discuss strategy with Teri; I'm not sure if he genuinely wants to try something or he's just angling to get inside Teri's skirt later. I wouldn't blame him, Teri is hot! Teri tells him he's gonna get himself killed but Phil gets up and tries the ol' "ask for a cigarette from a guard, grab guard's gun, lose gun back to guard and get yourself shot dead" move. The move works like a charm. So much for poor Phil and his attempt at something heroic, even if it was with an eye on bumping uglies with Teri.
While down below, Aaron hears about the plans to rob the safe and decides to get on the hand-held radio he took from the fire extinguisher-faced henchman and starts chatting with Ice-T, making this the 685th film to copy that idea from Die Hard. Oh wait, I'm sorry, this film is from 1999, make that only the 381st. Ice-T threatens to kill rich guy Paul if Aaron doesn't give himself up, which immediately makes Aaron's idea to talk to Ice-T a dumb one. Aaron, over Gloria's objections, decides to keep quiet as Ice-T kills Paul. Aaron reasons that Ice-T would've killed Paul anyway, and then killed both of them to boot. Plus, Paul was kind of a dick and you knew he was gonna die sooner or later. I added that last part in. Aaron, Gloria and Rick decide to head toward the ship's safe to try to foil the bad guys' robbery plans.
Max and a beret-wearing henchman (several henchmen wear berets; I guess they belong to the Badguy Special Forces Unit) are already at the safe and begin wiring it to explode. Max wanders off and gets herself taken by surprise by Aaron. Holding her at gunpoint, he walks with her toward the safe. The henchman continues to wire the door and place charges all around it while he holds the detonator. Aaron sees all of this and asks the henchman what he's doing and why. You know, after hearing about the terrorists' robbery plans on the radio then seeing one of them wiring the safe door with explosives while holding the attached detonator, I'd have thought he'd have put two and two together by now.
After a couple of seconds of everyone recovering from Aaron's retarded question, Gloria can't take the suspense anymore and stupidly jumps on top of the henchman (though not in the way he'd probably like), which causes him to detonate the door. Water rushes out, we see a lame CGI model of the side of the hull blowing up and see various shots of people on the boat falling all around from the ship's violent shaking.
Fear not for our heroes, though… despite a catastrophic explosion that nearly knocked everyone on board (all eight dozen of them) off their feet, our heroes, who were standing directly in front of the explosion are all okay. The room is rapidly filling up with water, though, and Rick says the ship has an hour to an hour and a half left before it sinks. That long, Rick? Can't we trim it down please?
