AIRHEADS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi, Adam Sandler, Joe Mantegna, Michael McKean, Michael Richards, Chris Farley. Screenplay: Rich Wilkes. Director: Michael Lehmann.
It can now be considered official: HEATHERS was a fluke. Director Michael Lehmann's 1989 debut has become a cult classic, an acidic satire of contemporary teen culture with a surreal edge, perhaps most famous for launching Winona Ryder and Christian Slater on the road to stardom. But since then, Lehmann has helmed the practically-straight-to-video clunker MEET THE APPLEGATES and the nigh-legendary bomb HUDSON HAWK. After a couple of years licking his wounds and doing TV work (including THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW), Lehmann has returned to the big screen with an inept would-be rock and roll comedy, AIRHEADS. Only a loopy performance by Adam Sandler and a slightly more energetic final twenty minutes save it from complete disaster.
AIRHEADS stars Brendan Fraser as Chazz, a struggling musician who undergoes a daily ritual of being thrown out of record company offices for trying to smuggle in the demo tape for his band The Lone Rangers. One day, he comes up with a more creative way to get noticed, and he and fellow Lone Rangers Rex (Steve Buscemi) and Pip (Adam Sandler) sneak into a radio station to get the demo on the air. When reason fails, the band takes the station hostage with water guns, including a sarcastic d.j. (Joe Mantegna) and the obnoxious program director (Michael McKean). The attempt to get the demo played becomes a comedy of errors, all played out live over the airwaves to a growing army of fans.
In its appealing trailers, AIRHEADS looked like it was going to be a smart comedy about stupid people. Consider yourself warned: this is another case where every funny line is in the trailer. The main problem with AIRHEADS turns out to be that it's a stupid comedy about people who aren't stupid enough. Adam Sandler is perfect; his thick-as-a-brick reading of Pip is far and away the best thing about AIRHEADS, good for some genuinely inspired comedy. Fraser, however, is playing a basically average guy, and Buscemi comes off as flat-out intellectual. AIRHEADS had the potential for a lot of laughs coming from the reaction of reasonably normal hostages and police to impossibly stupid band members. Unfortunately, some of the hostages and most of the police officers are more idiotic than The Lone Rangers. The result is a bunch of jokes based on lame confrontations between the band members and a militant black d.j., McKean's fatuous corporate type and each other, consisting almost entirely of third-grade insults focusing on bodily functions and sexual preference. The characters in AIRHEADS simply never interact in a way that's remotely interesting or funny. Even the strange supporting cast (including "Seinfeld's" Michael Richards as an accountant sneaking through the radio station's ventilation system) and a few creative cameos (including a voice-only spot by a pair of well-known rock critics) land with a thud.
While the character-based comedy fails, AIRHEADS might have had a chance if it had actually been about something, if it had had a point of view or and attitude about *anything*. It's not a parody of corporate music, or corporate radio, or heavy metal youth culture, or even other hostage-based movies like DOG DAY AFTERNOON. There are a few clever moments near the end which take shots at the cult of personality surrounding crimes-in-progress (all too familiar in the wake of the roadside cheering section in the O. J. Simpson chase), but they come so late that they seem almost incidental. Actually, AIRHEADS might be viewed cynically as about one very specific thing: selling a tie-in soundtrack album.
In a crowd scene near the film's conclusion, there is a glimpse of the Michael Lehmann of HEATHERS. After Chazz is forced to make an embarrassing confession, a number of kids in the crowd outside the radio station make their own embarrassing confessions in a show of solidarity. It's the kind of whacked-out moment that made HEATHERS unique, and there are a couple more like it that briefly give AIRHEADS a bit of juice. Sadly, they are stretched out over a 90 minute movie.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 hostages: 4.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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