The Alternate

2000 "Kill the President, kill the hostages, escape. A great idea!"
3.1| 1h35m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 14 May 2000 Released
Producted By: Millennium Media
Country: South Africa
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

The President of the United States, in the midst of negative public opinion, is kidnapped while attending a charity function. However, this is all part of a plan to boost his ratings, the 'kidnappers' being a CIA black ops team. It seems like a great idea until the leader of the black ops decides he can make it away with the ransom money himself, but one of his team has other ideas.

Genre

Action, Thriller

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The Alternate (2000) is now streaming with subscription on Prime Video

Director

Sam Firstenberg

Production Companies

Millennium Media

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The Alternate Audience Reviews

Mjeteconer Just perfect...
CommentsXp Best movie ever!
Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
utility_infielder Well, meet the dopiest of them all. And that ain't a bad thing.My oh my, was this silly, ridiculous, borderline idiotic... But it was so darn fun, it can't be considered a waste. Eric Roberts turns in his usual 'cool guy' persona, but this time with a dash of Schwarzenegger for good measure. He moves around pretty well in the few stunt pieces and shoot-outs they let him perform, though most are done with a poorly- matched stunt/fight-double. Ice-T is there for a paycheck, but is still fun to watch. Same can be said for Madsen, who clearly shot his scenes in an afternoon. Probably even left his car running when he arrived. Sam Firstenberg has certainly directed some b-movie action classics. This isn't on the level of 'American Ninja' by any means, but the fights and stunts are well shot for the most part (forgiving some lousy CGI explosions here and there) and the plot moves at such a quick place you can forgive the usual b-movie blemishes of this era.This is the type of movie you can have on in the background while doing something else, not pay too much attention, and still get something out of it. Also, the bloopers during the end credits are a lot of fun.
Gregster-5 I'm not sure whether I was watching the same movie as everyone else here, but I thought movie actually worked very well, even if it was derivative. The action was continuous and the characters were well defined, if not particularly deep. check it out.
luc-21 The Alternate, a story of President's mock-kidnapp that turns into a real hostage situation was aired just recently on nationwide TV here in Czech Rep. I saw it rather accidentally all through to the very end as I really wanted to know if every other minute will be as stupid as all the previous.The Alternate really does it all, but unfortunately the other way out. All the plot twists (all places tha are supposed to be twists) are really the weakest links - the characters do almost always the opposite of what would any sane person do. The president just sits there (afraid of heights), our main hero makes silly phone calls with FBI in which he only says that he is fine and that he is the guy in the suit, and the bad guy (as well as the good guy) just always miss and in situations that should be filled with action, they just start with lines of stupid chat.Really nothing in this movie was quite right. The FX were sometimes really silly, the martial fights were oscillating between acceptable quality and total crap and out of the thousands of rounds fired in the movie there is hardly dozen on target.The act is horrible, but that is mainly due to stupid script and bad direction. You should see this only if you fancy B movies that are so stupid, that you can laugh at them.
Wizard-8 Despite this movie being an obvious rip-off of "Die Hard", I wouldn't have minded seeing this same story again had it been written and executed with relative competence. But overall it's not. The things that happen here are so implausible (shootouts where everyone keeps missing despite it being VERY OBVIOUS that there's no way they could survive, as well as extremely stupid decisions by both the hero and villain) that it becomes quite annoying - quite soon you get annoyed at the gall the filmmakers had for not even TRYING to place one foot in reality. It seems they just had all these stupid things happening so that the movie would last 90 or so minutes.Also, the low budget of the movie is quite obvious at times. Now, I've seen action movies with similarly low budgets that managed to stretch their few dollars out for the entire movie. This time around they do manage to overcome the low budget in several aspects (the cinematography, for one), but every few minutes we see something that smacks of cheapness - a crowd of protesters consisting of just a few people (and all holding signs with exact same style of writing on them), hotel hallways that don't look like the hallways of a high class hotel, a goofy-looking flame thrower that is supposedly shooting long flames (but is obviously not in each shot), etc.The cast is wasted. Ice-T is given prominent billing, but only appears for the first 20 minutes. Madsen has nothing to do but bark orders. Roberts appears in almost every scene, but with the material he's given, the movie ends up being another waste of his talents.It's not all bad. There are a few hand-to-hand fight sequences that, despite not having the speed and flow of Hong Kong movies, have excitement and high power to them. (And are quite brutal.) And a hilarious blooper reel runs during the end credits.