"No Way Back" sticks FBI agent Crowe in the middle of a crude conglomeration of assorted Mafia weirdos, FBI agents, cops, Yakuza, and an airline flight attendant in its attempt to mix action with attitude and tongue-in-cheek humor. The result is a messy plot which accomplishes little save lurching from one mediocre action scene to the next. An okay no brainer for insomniacs.

My suspicions that the 1990s were the worst decade for film are confirmed with this absolutely atrocious travelogue-cum-thriller which wastes the talents of rising star Russell Crowe in an painfully awful piece of predictable filmmaking. Writer/director Frank A. Cappello is the guy responsible for this monstrosity and I don't know what he was thinking, because as a coherent film it's awful.

The movie opens with future starlet Kelly Hu dispatching a room of bland bad guys before Crowe, playing a wisecracking cop, gets involved. His job takes him to Japan and back again while he has to contend with a kidnapping (that doesn't seem to phase him too much) and gets saddled with a stewardess (Helen Slater) who might well be the worst supporting female role ever put in a film. It's not just that Slater is terrible (although she is),but her character is even more irritating than Erika Eleniak's in UNDER SIEGE, and that's saying something.

Despite the relative shortness of the running time, the plot meanders along with one cringe-inducing gag after another. The action sequences, despite reoccurring at regular intervals, are terribly handled and watch out for the excruciating bit of FX work when a helicopter crashes. The film increasingly tries your patience as it progresses so that by the end I was half sleep, barely aware of the credits rolling; never a good sign!

What starts off as a fairly promising film completely collapses after the first 20 to 30 minutes. Kelly Hu plays rookie FBI agent "Seiku Kobayshi" who volunteers to go undercover as a call-girl in order to plant a listening device into the bathroom of a dangerous white supremacist organization. Once inside the organization she guns down the leader, "Victor Serlano" (played by Ian Zierling) and several of his men. When FBI agent "Zack Grant" (played by Russell Crowe) arrives on the scene, Seiku jumps out of the high-rise to her death. During the follow-up investigation it is learned that Seiku had very recently contacted an important leader of the Yakuza named "Yuji" (Etsushi Toyokawa). This results in speculation that she was somehow coerced by Yuji to kill Victor, so FBI agent Zack Grant is sent to Japan to investigate. A gun-battle then ensues and Zack arrests Yuji in order to take him back to the United States. Meanwhile, Frank Serlano (Michael Lerner),the father of the white supremacist leader, kidnaps Zack's son "Eric" (Andrew J. Ferchland) in order to pressure Zack to bring Yuji to him. On the way back "Mary" (Helen Slater) is introduced into the film as one of the flight attendants who becomes inadvertently involved in the scenario. So far so good. Unfortunately, it is at this point where the film begins to deteriorate as the audience is treated to one far-fetched incident after another. While Helen Slater played her part adequately, the same can't be said for Russell Crowe as this wasn't one of his better performances. But the main responsibility for this fiasco belongs on the shoulder of the director/writer, Frank A. Cappello. With the cast that he had he should have been able to produce a much better film. Instead he chose stunts and gimmicks over good acting and a reasonable plot. What a shame.