Drop Zone

An excellent, volatile actor, Wesley Snipes seems intent on creating a black action hero franchise, a laudable ambition. If only he'd line up feistier collaborators. Directed by hack John Badham (Point of No Return), Drop Zone, which pits U.S. marshal Snipes against a troop of skydiving racketeers, is dumb, predictable, and more than a little sick (its psychopathic villains chew a lot more than scenery; one even bites off the finger of a computer hacker). The plane-jumping pyrotechnics — the movie's reason for being — are badly matched to shots of the nonskydiving actors pretending to hit the ground, and lose much of their oomph on video. After that, there's not much left, except the lurid irony of Gary Busey playing an ex-DEA operative. C-