CHAOS THEORY

A movie stuntman and his pals take on a gang of bad guys who’ve been making trouble since 500 BCE.

Horror specialist Masterton (Edgewise, 2007, etc.) foregoes the bag of supernatural tricks for a thriller that whips around from Gibraltar to Hollywood. The story starts when tough but amiable movie stuntman Noah Flynn overdoes a stunt, sending an expensive movie camera and some incredibly expensive footage to the bottom of the Mediterranean. After a jolly, boozy night with his fellow movie techies, Noah, assisted by ravishing Finnish co-stunt chum Silja, goes diving in search of the camera. The camera turns up quickly on the ocean floor, but so does some interesting World War II wreckage. Noah sends up some of the pilot’s effects with the camera. Among the items is a medallion bearing the pilot’s last name on one side and cuneiform markings on the other. The object is not unique. Its near twin shows up on the neck of a fellow seeking to assassinate lovely, randy, West African peace ambassador Adeola Davis thousands of miles away in the Middle East. Back in L.A., Noah asks a chum with academic connections to decipher the cuneiform. Bad idea. The intensely evil professor who tackles the translation is the latest top dog in a succession of evildoers going back to Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. These are villains who believe that peace is the greatest obstacle to human advancement. With no time to mourn his ex-girlfriend, whose throat the bad guys slit, or his comedy-writing buddy Mo, whom they castrate as well as butcher, Noah, assisted by the intrepid and erotically athletic Silja, goes to war on the creeps, a quest that soon merges with the heavy duty of keeping Adeola alive.

No literary pretension here, just a lot of violent action with bad guys and good guys and a little bit of Hollywood lore.