BLOWN AWAY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones, Forest Whitaker, Lloyd Bridges, Suzy Amis. Screenplay: Joe Batteer & John Rice. Director: Stephen Hopkins.
Sometimes, timing is everything. A few years ago, Kevin Costner beat two other Robin Hood projects into production, forcing one to television and killing the other entirely. This year, Costner is on the other end, as his WYATT EARP was beaten into theaters *and* onto video by TOMBSTONE. Now, in the mad bomber department, BLOWN AWAY comes hard on the heels of SPEED, and suffers greatly by comparison. SPEED's greatest asset was that it never took itself seriously; BLOWN AWAY, on the other hand, takes itself far too seriously. Though there are some nice moments of suspense, BLOWN AWAY sputters out in puddles of melodrama.
Jeff Bridges stars as Jimmy Dove, a member of Boston's bomb squad. What only Jimmy's Uncle Max (Lloyd Bridges) knows is that Jimmy was once Liam McGivney, a radical in Northern Ireland who now sees defusing bombs as a kind of penance for the crimes of his youth. But a blast from the past comes to Boston in the form of Ryan Gaerity (Tommy Lee Jones), Jimmy's former Irish cohort. Escaped from prison after 20 years in custody, Gaerity blames Jimmy for his incarceration and begins targeting friends and loved ones with elaborate bombs, including Jimmy's new wife (Suzy Amis). Jimmy, along with his new partner (Forest Whitaker) must track down Gaerity before all of Beantown is blown away.
There's no better way to describe the key problem with BLOWN AWAY than to say that it's overblown but underdeveloped. Everything in the screenplay by Joe Batteer and John Rice feels forced and artificial. Nothing exemplifies this more than the attempt to ladle on the Irish atmosphere. The characters in BLOWN AWAY speak in heavy brogues, drink Guinness, dance jigs, even listen to us ... everything, practically, but say "faith an' begorrah." Fine, they're Irish already; they're just not real. The same is true of the Boston locations, which are so omnipresent they cease to be atmospheric and become simply oppressive (and there's no excuse for a television announcer calling a home run in Fenway Park "over the Green Monster" when the ball is shown landing over the right field wall). And the same is true of the big emotional breakdowns, and the slow motion build-ups to the explosions, and the length of nearly every scene. BLOWN AWAY simply never clicks because, like Gaerity's bombs, everything is far more convoluted than it needs to be functionally.
Meanwhile, two of the most talented actors in America are stuck with underwritten characters and ineffectual direction. Jeff Bridges is supposed to be haunted by his past, but instead he generally appears simply dazed. He brings no energy and none of the intelligence he usually brings to his roles. Tommy Lee Jones doesn't fare much better, as there is never any clear sense of Gaerity's motivation or state of mind. He's just plain weird, bouncing on beds and making bizarre videotapes, but for all his supposed cock-eyed creativity he never comes off as smart enough to be genuinely threatening. Forest Whitaker is good as the cocky new guy on the bomb squad, but he is the only bright spot among the actors. When two actors like Bridges and Jones go wrong, it's difficult not to point the finger of blame at a director who wasn't doing his job.
Though he fails his actors, Stephen Hopkins has other things working. He manages to create a mounting tension with each subsequent bomb, as we begin to suspect that at any given moment, anything could be a trigger. This is nowhere better handled than in a great scene where Bridges' wife and stepdaughter proceed through their kitchen turning on appliances which may be set to blow. But the production just isn't lean enough to sustain that energy. Watching BLOWN AWAY, I felt that I had had slightly too much to drink: everything seemed a step slow and Peter Levy's photography seemed slightly out-of-focus. Oh, to be sure, there are lots of big explosions in BLOWN AWAY, but the amount of cinematic heat generated could be measured with an oral thermometer.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 hidden bombs: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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