The reason this is awful is because it was made for the CHINESE market!

Director Dan Mintz is the big cheese at a Shanghai marketing/media conglomerate called DMG (which doesn't stand for his initials, but he'd probably be happy if you thought it did). One of the producers on this pile of junk, Wu Bing, is the president of Mintz's firm. In at least one interview, Mintz claimed he simply "found Chinese financing" for these movies to help him make them, but in reality, the Chinese financing simply came from HIS OWN COMPANY, via Wu Bing. Mintz has been in China for a good couple of decades and reportedly started his company in 1993, but downplays, for some reason, his involvement as a bad bit player in Hong Kong movies of the late 1980's and early 1990's.

Anyways, Mintz secures Chinese backing for this picture and another one prior to it called Cookers or something for the express reason of eventually trumpeting his Chinese connections to Hollywood studios who, as time went on and in spite of the awfulness of his directorial projects (this one using actors at the BOTTOM of their career curves, and bound to stay there because of it) raise an eyebrow or two at this "pan-cultural" mover and shaker who suddenly becomes their "inside man" when they're finally able to really start cracking the mainland Chinese market now that the government wants to divert the populace's attention away from its corrupt practices.

So there you have it, Dan Mintz goes from American ex-pat (for reasons that are still somewhat suspect) to Hong Kong movie bit player, to Shanghai high roller sucking face with Hollywood movie studio titans eager to use his mainland media empire to help them get a firm grip on the lucrative and constantly growing Chinese market all the while being rather oblivious to what a complete and utter HACK he is, reheating ten- to fifteen-year-old American marketing and branding concepts to gullible Chinese executives and apparatchiks who think he's the bee's knees because he directed a couple of crummy American Z-movies with sparkly name actors, movies, I might add, that were nothing but cliche and played well to the rubes in China who didn't know any better (well, the ones who weren't continually gorging themselves on bootlegs of American everything while their government pretended they weren't).

Seriously, people, you don't have to be cutting edge to make it big in China right now. Marketing, advertising and branding concepts that were fresh in North America in 1995 are state-of-the-art in China these days, and Dan Mintz, and probably others like him, have made millions re-heating our leftover ideas for the Chinese, who gobble it up voraciously in their hasty effort to play catch-up to the west after generations of needless gloom that set them so far behind.

I often think Rachel Leigh Cook wears a wig in this out of sheer embarrassment that her career had come to this. Elwes get it, and acts so badly that you know he's just picking up a (predominantly Chinese) paycheck, but the others, well, it was probably the best they could get, and Mintz undoubtedly met their reduced fees.