Main cast: Mario Lopez (Ryan Murphy), Jaime Pressly (Allison Wade), Greg Serano (Chad Hubbard), Justin Walker (JD Dallas), Nick Spano (Andy Quintana), Damon Sharpe (Peter Dragotta), Charles Mattocks (Jared Liles), Steve Wilder (Bateman), and Richard Grieco (Sergeant Bradley)
Director: David DeCoteau

The Journey: Absolution represents a fascinating failure in David DeCoteau’s filmography – a movie that somehow manages to disappoint on every conceivable level, including the one thing his films are reliably expected to deliver: attractive men in various stages of undress doing things that loosely resembled a plot. It’s like ordering a pizza and receiving an empty box with a note saying, “We forgot the pizza but here’s some cardboard to chew on instead.”

This movie starts with one massive advantage: Mario Lopez at his absolute peak hotness. We’re talking prime Saved by the Bell aftermath Mr Lopez, when he was basically a walking Calvin Klein advertisement with sentient abs. Casting him in a David DeCoteau film should have been foolproof – it’s like hiring a professional baker to make toast. How could this possibly go wrong?

Here’s where things go catastrophically off the rails: the movie features only a handful of men-in-underwear scenes, and they’re filmed with all the erotic appeal of a medical examination. You can’t see ANYTHING, which defeats the entire purpose of having Mario Lopez in your movie in the first place.

This is cinematic malpractice of the highest order. Mr DeCoteau had ONE JOB, and somehow, he managed to fail at his own specialty.

Anyway, the movie opens with computer-generated imagery that looks like it was rendered on hardware that barely qualified as a computer. We’re treated to explosions and Earth destruction sequences that would have looked dated in 1997, let alone today. The opening crawl explains that humanity’s destructive ways have led to planetary catastrophe, and now the last survivors huddle in an Arctic military bunker, which raises the obvious question: who chose the Arctic? Was Florida fully booked?

These opening effects set the perfect tone for what follows — a film that looks like it was made for approximately twelve dollars and a coupon for free sandwich.

Ryan Murphy (absolutely not to be confused with the more successful Ryan Murphy who creates actual stuff that people like… at least for the first season) goes undercover as a military recruit to investigate a missing soldier. This sounds like it could be an actual plot, which is the movie’s greatest deception. What follows is nearly an hour of people who can barely act wandering around cheap sets muttering dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone who learned English from appliance manuals.

The acting is uniformly wooden, except it’s unfair to wood, which at least has structural integrity. The performers deliver their lines with all the conviction of hostages reading ransom demands, moving through sets that look like they were constructed from leftover materials from a high school play about depression.

Then, in a moment of truly inspired absurdity, Jaime Pressly’s character simply shows up at this supposedly top-secret military base like she’s arriving for a dental appointment. No explanation of how she found this hidden Arctic bunker, no security protocols, nothing – she just appears because the script said so.

Her purpose is to have a sex scene with Mr Lopez and serve as a damsel in distress during the finale. But here’s where the director loses the plot: the sex scene focuses exclusively on Ms Pressly’s assets while completely ignoring Mr Lopez’s. Did David DeCoteau forget his entire audience demographic? Did someone swap his shot list with a completely different movie?

Amidst this wasteland of entertainment value, Richard Grieco emerges as the only watchable element, primarily because he’s either deliberately chewing scenery like it’s his last meal or genuinely believes he’s starring in a completely different movie. His performance operates on a frequency so divorced from everyone else’s that it creates its own bizarre entertainment value.

Is he overacting intentionally? Is this method acting gone horribly wrong? Is he the only person who understood the assignment? These questions remain mysteries more compelling than anything in the actual plot.

Every frame of this movie screams “We ran out of money during pre-production but decided to film anyway!” The sets look like they were designed by someone whose only reference for “military bunker” was a particularly depressing basement. The costumes appear to have been purchased in bulk from a going-out-of-business sale at a costume shop that specialized in generic uniforms.

This wouldn’t be fatal if the movie leaned into its exploitation roots and delivered what David DeCoteau’s audiences expected. But instead, we get a film that’s too cheap to look good and too timid to be properly trashy – the worst of both worlds.

Bottom line: unless you have a specific fetish for watching attractive people waste their time in bargain-basement science fiction sets while delivering dialogue written by someone who hates both science and fiction, there is absolutely no reason to watch this movie. Even bad movie enthusiasts will find themselves checking their watches and wondering if there’s something more entertaining that they could be doing – like organizing their sock drawer or watching paint dry.