Chaos (2005 )
Chaos is a 2005 action thriller film starring Jason Statham, Ryan Phillippe and Wesley Snipes, and written and directed by Tony Giglio. The film premiered in the United Arab Emirates on December 15, 2005, but did not receive a North American release until over two years later, where it was distributed direct-to-DVD on February 19, 2008.
Plot.
Seattle PD Detective Quentin Conners and his partner Jason York are implicated in the death of a hostage taken by a carjacker named John Curtis. After a fellow police officer, Callo, testifies against them, Conners is suspended, and York is fired. In reality, York tried to shoot Curtis, but accidentally killed the hostage. Curtis in turn fired back, and Conners killed him in self-defense. Some time later, Lorenz and four other criminals take hostages in a bank. Lorenz has only one demand, to negotiate with Conners. Conners is reinstated but put under the surveillance of a new partner, the recently-graduated Shane Dekker. Conners is given control of the negotiations, and after a bank teller is shot, he orders a SWAT unit to cut the building’s power and go in. During an explosion, the criminals flee during the ensuing panic and chaos. Dekker and Conners learn more about each other at a local diner, slowly building a friendship, but Dekker disapproves of Conners’ “cowboy cop” methods.
Dekker explains that during negotiations, Lorenz was making many cryptic references to chaos theory. As they leave to examine new evidence, Conners puts a ten dollar bill on the table for his share of the bill. Dekker swaps the ten for a twenty of his own. A TV camera caught a shot of one of the criminals, who is arrested together with his girlfriend at her home, where banknotes are found with a scent used to mark evidence collected by the police. The banknote serial numbers did not come from that day’s robbery, but had been placed in police storage and signed out two weeks earlier by Callo. He is found shot dead in his home, together with incriminating evidence linking him to the heist.
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When reviewing video footage from the bank, Dekker notices one corner of the bank is deliberately shielded from view. In that corner, they find the bank regional manager’s computer. Fingerprints on the keyboard reveal the identity of a hacker that Conners himself had arrested, but whose conviction was overturned after the shooting on the bridge. Conners and Dekker want to question the hacker, but he is shot dead by Lorenz, and a gunfight ensues, during which Lorenz manages to escape. Dekker questions the hospitalized bank robber identified in the news footage and finally breaks him when he casually explains the impact of a massive overdose of morphine while slowly injecting something into the suspect’s drip.
Production.
The film was a co-production between the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Principal photography took place in Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia, in locations including Simon Fraser University and the Burrard Street Bridge. The film was originally set to be produced by Franchise Pictures with distribution by Warner Bros., which began to suffer serious financial problems early into production due to the failures of its previous film Battlefield Earth, and allegations of fraud concerning artificial inflation of the film’s budget to increase investment from German production company Intertainment AG. This led to Franchise’s then-parent company Mobius International to take over production. Due to last-minute budgetary constraints imposed by the new producers, the film’s script was heavily rewritten to accommodate a reduced shooting schedule (40 days to 22 days).
Release.
Screen Gems at one point was attached as the film’s theatrical distributor, but a financial deal couldn’t be made regarding release prints and advertising between the studio and producers. Eventually Lionsgate picked up the film and went through the same drama with producers, leading to a three-year delay in the film’s North American release.