Almost 60 years ago, Alfred Hitchcock made a suspense sequence he later regarded as a major mistake of his career. The scene-from the 1937 thriller “Sabotage,” based on Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent”-shows a sympathetic young London lad named Tester given a bomb in a package by terrorist Verloc. Tester gets diverted from delivering it; the tension mounts. Finally, the bomb explodes on a London bus, killing the boy and other passengers.
Confronted with outrage by London critics and filmgoers, Hitch apologized for letting that bomb go off. So what would he have thought of today’s audiences, who probably would become enraged if most of the bombs in their movies didn’t explode?
“Blown Away,” like “Speed,” is a movie about a battle between a mad bomber and harassed heroes, a Boston bomb squad confronted with a genius demolition expert who keeps booby-trapping explosives to kill the squad itself. Like “Speed,” it’s almost a piece of action-painting. Explosion follows explosion; fireballs bloom on Boston’s picturesque shores like toadstools on rotting bark. The bomber is depicted as an artist who keeps creating more complex bombs, deadlier games.
As played, dynamically as ever, by Tommy Lee Jones, bomber Ryan Gaerity is a prison escapee and Irish revolutionary. The hero-Jeff Bridges as Jimmy Dove, who used to be Gaerity’s best friend and is now disguising his radical past-keeps desperately trying to defuse him.
It’s a cat-and-mouse game. Somewhere along the line, Gaerity has become so obsessed with Dove-whom he blames for aborting one of their youthful assassination attempts and getting their teammates killed-that everything he does is aimed at him. Like mad ex-con Robert De Niro in “Cape Fear,” teasing and hounding lawyer Nick Nolte, Gaerity turns the whole city-bursting around them in flame and carnage-into an arena for one obsession.
And, for Dove, who has Americanized himself, buried his Belfast past in the Irish pubs and subcultures of Boston-all shown in gorgeously detailed location scenes-Gaerity is like a bad memory come alive, the past swelling into a monster.
The movie swivels around one of those crazy movie hero-villain death tangos, like Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich in “In the Line of Fire,” Sly Stallone and John Lithgow in “Cliffhanger,” Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman in “Die Hard.” That’s its major strength: Bridges and Jones, though they play almost no scenes together, are well matched.
As Jimmy Dove, Bridges projects the sunny, supple, wary candor and vulnerability that always make his movie hero roles unique. These qualities move any scene, however stylized, toward an unlikely tenderness and openness.
Jones, coming off “The Fugitive,” hits the film up with sheer raw intelligence, compacted rage, lightning instincts, laser glares and red-hot bravado. Playing heavies, he whips up a torrent of malice, though, like Bridges’ heroism, it’s grounded in humanity rather than affect.
The director, Stephen Hopkins, showed a variable vein of baroque mayhem in movies like “Nightmare on Elm Street 5” and “Judgment Night.” His producers, John Watson, Richard Lewis and Pen Densham, are responsible for “Backdraft,” where they burned up Chicago. “Blown Away” is explosive, too-you can’t argue that it doesn’t deliver the blasts-but it’s also strange and garish, a comedy of convulsions. There are so many scenes where bombs tick away as characters either move unawares or freeze in terror as the squad works on disarming, that some inevitably are played for humor.
Forest Whitaker, as the bomb squad’s cocky hotshot, has to sweat out being strapped to an explosive stereo. Suzy Amis, as Dove’s wife, goes about her daily chores and fiddles at the Boston Pops, with a tick behind her. In scenes like these, the filmmakers delight in making us jump, even if, later, they’re ready to snip the red wires.
“Blown Away” has several points in common with “Speed,” including one scene where a car is rigged to explode if it drops under a certain velocity. But it’s not really a “trailer movie” the way “Speed” was. It has more characters, context. And, in a funny way, that may hurt it with people who prefer the close-to-zero, peeled-down abstractions of “Speed”: L.A., a boy, a girl, a bomb, a bus, a bad guy.
The grandaddy of both movies, of course, is “The Wages of Fear,” the 1953 Henri-Georges Clouzot thriller about the truckdrivers pulling loads of nitroglycerin to a burning oil field in a hellish Central American country, a movie whose ads at the time read, “You sit there, waiting for the theater to explode!”
That was true. And the reason you’d sweat it out with Clouzot while, today, you just go along for the ride, is that “Wages of Fear” builds up a whole world and show us why it’s threatened. These days, with every thriller diving into chaos under the main titles, with each preposterously overstated action scene trying to top the last one, audiences may not want much attempt to suggest reality.
Movies like “Blown Away” don’t usually trouble as much with real drama. Even so, Bridges, Jones, Amis and Whitaker give us some. And a colossal vein of Freudian angst opens up when Dove sees his father figure, Max O’Bannon, strapped at twilight to one of Gaerity’s infernal machines. The reason: Max is played by Bridges’ father, Lloyd Bridges, and “Blown Away” has their first big tandem scenes.
More drama, more guts, more mind and soul are almost always what we need in movies. Actually, one wonders why Bridges and Jones had to be Irish to support a violent revolutionary past. Is it because the producers and Hopkins are British? Wouldn’t the movie work just as well, or better, with Gaerity and Dove as American student rebels from the Vietnam years who meet 25 years later?
Like most action movies these days, “Blown Away” is a fantasy composed of other movies, which, in the blast and fury of its location scenes, opens up some windows on life. Just barely. We can almost see Boston through the flames, almost see Gaerity and Dove through the smoke. And we can almost see the city and people as the buildings blow away.
”BLOWN AWAY”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Stephen Hopkins; written by Joe Batteer and John Rice; photographed by Peter Levy; edited by Timothy Wellburn; production designed by John Graysmark; music by Alan Silvestri; produced by John Watson, Richard Lewis and Pen Densham. A MGM release; opens Friday at Chestnut Station, Webster and outlying theaters. Running time: 2:00. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Jimmy Dove………………………….Jeff Bridges
Ryan Gaerity……………………..Tommy Lee Jones
Kate Dove……………………………..Suzy Amis
Anthony Franklin………………….Forest Whitaker
Max O’Bannon……………………….Lloyd Bridges
