Things you won't hear a super-villain terrorist say: "I'm going to destroy the entire state of Utah!" Unless you are watching an episode of Phineas & Ferb, or watching this movie.
Lightspeed is a superhero movie that was marketed taking advantage of the legacy of comic book legend Stan Lee. Depending on which version of the video you pick up, you will find varying accolades hailing the Executive Producer as the Creator of Spiderman, the Hulk, the X-men, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers or any combination thereof. What you will not find is the (implied) name of Marvel Comics anywhere near the project. Stan formed his own company in the early 2000s called POW! Entertainment. He tried to produce movies apart from Marvel which, before the original X-Men movies, had a series of financial mishaps which almost ended the company in bankruptcy. Stan wanted a legacy.
Turns out that the problems with POW! movies was the same problems that the early Marvel movies (Howard the Duck, Captain America (1990), The Fantastic 4) all faced: they weren't grounded. It wasn't that the movie audience wasn't ready for live action hero films. Darkman came out the same year as Captain America and did well. And need we even mention Batman 1989? That movie, along with Christopher Reeve's Superman, put superhero films on the map, and set a high bar.
POW! put out Lightspeed (on the Sci Fi channel) and added in two animated features (The Condor and Mosiac) before sputtering to a near halt. Lightspeed isn't the worst superhero film I have ever seen, but it was close. It stars Jason Connery (son of another more famous Connery) and Lee Majors (the 6 Million dollar man). Majors is no slouch, but Connery needed to quit going in and out of his UK accent when he was excited or yelling. If that was the worst of it, the film would be easy to forgive for it's wooden acting,
crappy writing and cheap un-special effects.
One of the HUGE problems was the villain. Quoting my son Ben once more, you have to have a good villain to make a great hero. Lightspeed does not. The villain is Python, a research scientist who is obsessed about saving his sister from her nearly fatal burn wounds. He is trying to combine snake skin DNA with humans to make burns heal faster. Naturally he gets his government-funded project shut down because of cost, uses the snake DNA on himself, and turns into a megalomaniacal super-villain terrorist to take revenge.
Fortunately, he is operating in the same city as the USA Black Ops unit known as Ghost Squad which is headed up by Lee Majors, and has Jason Connery as their #1 operative, Daniel Leight. But wait, Python is actually Daniel's old buddy Edward. And old buddy Edward is pretty sure that Daniel had something to do with the cutting of the funding for the project, because Daniel works for the government. If you are going "Huh?" at that, just wait.
Python breaks into a high-tech facility (with some name that's a fake knockoff of Halliburton) to steal a thingamajig, and Daniel along with Ghost Squad is sent to stop him. Python, as Edward is now known, tries to kill Daniel by dropping a building on him. The strategy succeeds in crushing Daniel's entire lower half of his body, and they rush him to a medical facility that just happens to have a "extremely dangerous and highly experimental" treatment on tap that can save Daniel if it doesn't kill him. "Do it," says boss Lee Majors.
Python gets into the facility at the moment that Daniel is getting his radiation treatments (after having his lower half all replaced with titanium) and increases the radiation dose to extra-super-dangerous in an attempt to kill Daniel a second time. As expected, the radiation doesn't kill Daniel, but turns him into a cheap knockoff of DC's Flash. Daniel learns to get control of his power, but the rest of his body has to catch up with the enhanced performance of his legs.
The doctor that performed the surgery, and the radiation treatments, has also invented a stabilizing fluid that Daniel has to drink or his heart will explode- or something like that. So Daniel goes to a local sports store. And talks to a guy that sounds like he was camped out in Spicoli's van for about 5 years before getting his job. After just a few seconds of Daniel explaining that he needed a suit that could reduce friction at fast speeds and be aerodynamic, Spicoli's buddy goes in the back room and pulls out a bright blue body suit along with goggles and boots.
The rest of the movie is just a patchwork mess of contrivances to get us to the end fight where Lightspeed kills Python and saves the world. Except that- if you are going to shoot a movie in St Lake City Utah, but pretend it is happening in Washington DC shouldn't you at least cover up the signs that show you are in Utah? It happens at least twice, when Daniel is at the medical facility.
So let's assume we are in Utah. That's a pretty small population (200k) to have a master-criminal base of operations, a super secret Ghost squad, and a Halliburton type high tech facility. And since the map for the caper shows that the target of the Sky-Fire thingamajiggy is Washington DC, they are going to have to travel pretty quickly between locations. Except that Beth (Daniel's love) is being held by Python at a place where he is going to kill her, which is at his HQ, which is in Utah. So the range on the thingamajiggy must be the thing. Or not. It really doesn't matter. This thing has all the appeal of a huge wet dog with bad breath.
IMDB says 2.5/10. Nah. It's worse than Steel (DC) and the Russian Guardians film I reviewed earlier. It's still not as bad as the worst superhero film ever. 1.6/10.