PHENOMENON
A film review by Michael John Legeros
Copyright 1996 Michael John Legeros
(Touchstone)
Directed by John Turtletaub
Written by Gerald DiPego
Cast John Travolta, Kyra Sedgwick, Forest Whitaker, Robert
Duvall
MPAA Rating "PG-13"
Running Time 123 minutes
Reviewed at General Cinemas at Pleasant Valley, Raleigh, NC
(29JUN96)
==
This crowd-pleasing melodrama is built around a nifty premise: popular George Malley (John Travolta), a small-town auto mechanic of average intelligence, undergoes a change on the night of his 37th birthday. He becomes smarter, devouring whole books in the evening because he doesn't want to sleep. He begin inventing things, like a manure-fueled motor that gets 90 miles to the gallon. He even acquires such mysterious metaphysical talents as telekinesis and the ability to predict when an earthquake is coming. Poor George. He's probably the sweetest guy in his small Northern California town and, yet, he's just as baffled as his doctor (Robert Duvall), his best friend (Forrest Whitaker), and the divorcee-with-kids (Myra Sedgwick) that he dotes upon.
No extrasensory perception is required to predict how the rest of the movie plays out. PHENOMENON is designed to go down easy, with no sharp edges and nothing bitter about the taste. You know the drill: warm humor, smiling people, loud musical cues, and all of those oh-so-quaint, sun-baked surroundings. The whole thing is about 90% predictable and that's exactly how the director, Jon Turtletaub (WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING), wants it. He may not be another Spielberg-- a critical omission, here, is any genuine sense of wonder-- but he does know how to take a coolly calculated story and turn it into a satisfying and seemingly spontaneous product. (Sci-fi fans, however, may be disappointed to find that Turtletaub is much more interested in the story's romantic implications than the scientific.)
Unfortunately, what develops into an honest and rather wholesome movie is all but negated in the last half-hour. PHENOMENON turns ugly somewhere around the ninety-minute mark. The plot begins taking odd, manipulative turns and, by the time that we've been subjected to yet another pop song-scored montage, the story is clearly, though slowly, spiraling out of control. These "extra" dramatics are hideous, entirely unnecessary, *and* suggest that neither the director nor the writer had any idea about how to end this movie. (The filmmakers should've quit while they were ahead.) There is enough emotion at the very end, though, to satisfy the movie's intended audience. They'll cry, leave, and be none the wiser.
Grade: C+
--
Mike Legeros - Raleigh, NC
legeros@nando.net (h) - legeros@unx.sas.com (w)
Visit me in MOVIE HELL
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