Hale was a bit of an idiot

I watched this on FMC the other day and thought it was really good. I wasn't sure because even though it got a good star rating in TV Guide, it got a fair rating in the online TV Listings and here. All in all, I'd say it's very underrated.

One thing that occurred to me, however, is that I haven't seen an action movie with such a stupid, incompetent hero since Goldfinger. Basically the only thing he does right is lowering the nuke down the mine.

The rest was done by Terri. She lured the helicopter where the pilot could be shot, she threw the bad guy out of the nuke truck, she thought of going to the mine, she thought of escaping through the river, she jumped in the back of the villain's boat, she killed the hacker/seal guy protecting the nuke, she escaped from Deakin, she sabotaged the helicopter, and she separated the train. Am I missing anything?

To put it all into perspective, when Hale can just shoot Deakin at the end, he instead engages in a fistfight with him. Hale surely knows he'll lose, as is established at the beginning of the movie. In the grand action-movie tradition, however, the almost defeated hero gets a last wind and beats up the villain. By the way, I do realize that the reason for the fistfight was that just shooting the villain would have been anticlimactic and was an artistic rather than realistic choice, but it does make Hale out to be even more of an idiot.