Chain of Command comes across as a would-be Tom Clancy adaptation – although one that lacks Clancy’s tightly wound thriller plotting. Indeed there are more than a few similarities between Chain of Command and the later screen adaptation of Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears (2002). Perhaps you could see Chain of Command as falling somewhere between Fail-Safe (1964), a Tom Clancy film and being yet another screen copy of Die Hard (1988) – especially of a film like Under Siege (1992), which featured a very similar plot with Steve Seagal as a lone hero defending an aircraft carrier from terrorists wanting to hijack its nuclear arsenal.

The action scenes in Chain of Command are competently conducted, although ultimately some of the scale of the film – the hijacking of a cruise liner, the detonation of a nuclear weapon – demonstrates that the film’s script is a good deal more ambitious than the B-budget it is being conducted on (even if Chain of Command is a more lavish production than most of CineTel’s other films). Certainly you could quite easily see Chain of Command being conducted as a big spectacular A-budget film for cinema screens.

What makes Chain of Command a good deal more interesting than the average action film is the extra political dimension it has. First of all there is Roy Scheider’s President who seems clearly modelled on Bill Clinton and his perpetual womanising. (The film gives the initial impression of being written by an ardent pro-Republican who holds Clinton’s womanising in contempt). There’s a particularly captivating opening where we go from the two Secret Service agents making snide comments as Roy Scheider’s Presidential hopeful eyes another man’s wife during a tennis game, whereupon we abruptly cut to the two agents standing guard as Scheider bangs the woman in a toilet cubicle. The film however never quite develops this interesting contrast of a morally weak President and hero Patrick Muldoon’s disgust with him – the script later discards this disapprobation and requires us to stand with Scheider as an heroic President who has the moral high ground and casting Patrick Muldoon as his saviour.

The other equally interesting political angle in the film, something that one could almost have been written from a contemporary headline, is of a Taiwanese villain who hijacks the US nuclear launch codes in an effort to force China to back off its frequent sabre-rattling stance over Taiwan’s stated independence. Chain of Command is surprisingly topical in this regard and moreover quite daring in its criticism of the hypocritical stance that the US has taken over Taiwan – of the US normalizing trade relations with China during Clinton’s presidency despite China’s poor record on human rights, yet remaining strangely aloof when it comes to defending the free and open democracy of Taiwan from China’s belligerence. Although again here Chain of Command never fully grapples with the political/moral complexities it draws up – it both depicting Roy Scheider’s President with disdain, yet also regarding him as a hero; it never entirely sure whether the nuclear-threatened China is a good guy that needs to be defended from the show’s villain or a bad guy for its strong-arm stance on Taiwan; and equally muddying the equation in regard to being unclear whether Taiwan’s independence is a good thing or whether such should be dismissed along with the villain’s demands. Nevertheless, this is an incisive political angle that is a surprising to find in an action film of any sort, a genre that usually unthinkingly supports American militarism without even the slightest second thought.