Judgment Day 2000 Horror Movie Review

An enormous asteroid is heading towards Earth and threatens to wipe out all life on the planet!  Sound familiar?  Since the Cold War nuclear-threat movies played out sometime in the early Nineties, there was a spate of films that found the Earth threatened by H.R. Giger-style aliens or giant rocks from outer space.  With a movie like Judgment Day, comparisons to Independence Day and Deep Impact are inevitable.  Actually, this direct-to-video release is the more enjoyable, without the insultingly simplistic plot of the former or the heavy-handed chin-rubbing portent of the latter.  A boulder crashes into a Peruvian village, obliterating it; it’s a mere pebble compared to the whopper that will crash earthward in a couple of days.  The military brass opts for a Star Wars-style weapon to destroy it, but the only man who can help make the thing work has been kidnapped by a cult led by religious head-case Mario Van Peebles.  Enter the FBI and convict Ice-T, imprisoned for taking revenge on Van Peebles to settle a personal score.  The film veers towards being a political thriller, a ‘hood movie (with a Coolio cameo), an action film, a buddy movie and old-fashioned sci-fi along the way, but the sum total is a pretty entertaining B-movie that never quite takes itself too seriously.  Fans of TV’s Barney Miller should enjoy seeing Max Gail getting a migraine as the head of Air Defense Command, Van Peebles is great as the charismatic religious screwball and Ice-T is…well, Ice-T.  —Jerry Renshaw