Chain Reaction (1996)

There is a particular kind of 1996 studio thriller that arrives with a stern face and a folder full of grievances, and Chain Reaction is that film. Andrew Davis, fresh from the elevated train, turns his attention to a fusion reactor at the University of Chicago. Keanu Reeves plays a machinist who stumbles onto a stabilizing frequency, Rachel Weisz plays the physicist who flees beside him, and Morgan Freeman hovers with the ambiguous gravity of a man who has read the third act. The reactor is destroyed, the pair is framed, and the chase begins. Somewhere in the rubble sits a genuine thesis: a private contractor and its friends in government bury a limitless clean energy source to protect oil revenue and prevent economic upheaval. That is an eat-the-rich premise, stated plainly, though the film treats it as plot machinery instead of a sermon. The greed is a mechanism, not a moral.

The casting is agreeable without ever announcing itself. Freeman commands a major role, Tzi Ma gets a substantial supporting part, and Weisz holds her own as a working scientist rather than a decorative one. Race is not a subject here. Neither is gender, beyond the fact that the woman can do the math and still needs rescuing from a construction lift. The clean-energy device gestures at environmental concern, but the anxiety is corporate, not ecological. Nobody mentions a warming planet. The tension is about who owns the patent.

What the film lacks is instructive. No queer lives, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no reworking of the historical record. It lectures only briefly, and mostly about hydrogen. The whole enterprise is a chase picture wearing a lab coat, and it was nominated for a Razzie rather than an Oscar, opened in fourth place, and remains a curious artifact of a moment when a movie could be mildly angry at corporations and call that sufficient. It is not sufficient. It is, however, honest about its limits, which is more than most.