When a customer is bitten by a rat in the dressing room of an upscale Manhattan department store, operations manager Susan Costello (gorgeous Mädchen Amick) is given the go ahead to bring in New York’s finest exterminator once it’s discovered that the bitten girl has contracted Weil’s disease. That would be Jack Carver (Vincent Spano) who works discreetly (within reason) and efficiently. Jack and his colleague Ty uncover a colony of mutant rats (due to discarded laboratory experiments) nesting nearby and now the race is on to convince the health department administrator (and Jack’s former boss) Ray Jarrett (a great David Fonteno) how big of a problem they got on their hands. He’s got word from the higher ups to keep a lid on everything for a few more weeks and Susan’s big boss thinks it’s a city problem and they should just send Jack on his merry way. The death of Susan’s landlord shows how much business these vermin mean. Because politics is an arena reserved for the worst of humanity, any good an early warning would do is dismissed for economical and popularity reasons. This just means the rats are about to become a very big problem for a large number of people. It’s gonna be up to Jack, Ty and Susan to take care of business before the rats take over and plenty of New Yorkers end up eaten. Jack and Susan get off to a rocky start so of course they’re gonna fall for each other, helps that Jack is good with her daughter… they meet when the rats charge a swimming pool full of kids. A really good cast takes everything seriously but have no problem accepting the kind of flick they are in… it helps move the thing along. Also helps that our leads are surprisingly likable for a TV movie about killer rats. The effort to the story progression and its ability to restrain itself (for a good amount of the runtime) has it feeling more at home as a 70’s eco-terror flick just a few decades too late, that’s a compliment. Electrically charged rats (don’t ask, it wouldn’t make sense anyways) leads to a stalled subway train getting swarmed by rats and you just know our hero and her daughter happen to be onboard. Dull patches hit and cgi work is exactly what you would expect but it still has way more effort behind it than anyone could (or should) ask for.
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