The Fourth Angel Movie Review

Presumably postponed after 9/11 spooked studios and canned after Collateral Damage turned out stillborn, The Fourth Angel arrives on DVD and revisits a theme much like Arnold's movie: Man's wife and daughter killed by terrorists in hijacking gone bad, man goes vigilante when the government does nothing about it.

Jeremy Irons plays Jack Elgin, the unlikely Goetz in this tale, at first distraught and then angry enough to devise meticulous plans to get vengeance on the plane's hijackers who shot his family members so callously. Elgin at first proceeds rather predictably, hunting down the terrorists thanks to tip-off info from people sympathetic to his cause, and then the feds (led by Forest Whitaker, though we're in in England... never mind all that) start to close in. But wait: Is Elgin being set up by someone else who wants the thugs dead?

Angel is perplexing on a number of levels. Foremost is how a magazine editor can singlehandedly take out a large gang of presumable well-trained terrorists. But beyond that we have an enormous government machine that is powerless to stop any of this, and one of the most obvious "behind the scenes" bad guys in movie history.

Still, The Fourth Angel is a reasonably good flick (the title is a real stretch, referring to a line in Revelations), fun to watch and surprising from time to time. You won't find many surprises in store for you (explaining why this movie never saw the light of day, I'm sure), but by golly it beats whatever's on UPN right now.