"Blown Away" is a string of firecrackers what they should have done is light the fuse and just step back.īlown Away is rated R for violence, language and intense action. Unfortunately, they aren't nearly as good at storytelling or characterization as they are at blowing stuff up. And while he's convincing and at times even moving as Dove, he is so outshined by Jones's high-candle brilliance that his character seems to disappear.ĭirector Hopkins (along with screenwriters Joe Batteer and John Rice) has gone to great lengths to give "Blown Away" the appearance of weight and relevance. Bridges is a great actor, but he's not stylish or flamboyant. The problem in any film with a villain as charismatic as this one is that, by comparison, the hero will seem stodgy and dull, and "Blown Away" is no exception. Like lethal Rube Goldberg creations, his bombs aren't merely meant to explode they're macabre jokes, designed with killer punch lines. Coming off his picture-stealing performance in "The Fugitive," Jones gives another one here, and while the drawled precision of his work in that earlier film was a master's lesson in concentrated restraint, his acting here is gloriously hammy and theatrical. On the plus side, Tommy Lee Jones plays this eccentric killer with such maniacal verve that believability becomes a minor matter. As it is, Gaerity just happens to catch a glimpse of his nemesis on the tube, and given the obsessiveness of his feelings the connection is too casually made to be believed. If the filmmakers had given some indication that Gaerity had come to Boston specifically to take his revenge on Dove, the movie might have had at least some hint of plausibility. Gaerity's return both sinks the film and saves it. The fact that Gaerity - who apparently popped through the hole in his cell and onto the streets of Boston - is behind the bombings isn't as much of a revelation as the nature of the mad bomber's connection with Dove. Someone is intentionally trying to kill off members of the bomb squad someone very brilliant and very, very sick. Under normal circumstances, Dove could easily turn the job over to Franklin (Forest Whitaker), but after the first explosion kills a member of the squad, he gets an uneasy feeling that his friend wasn't just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just as Dove is on the verge of retiring to settle down with his new wife (Suzy Amis), someone starts planting bombs all over the city. But the violent flashbacks he experiences after every near miss indicate something else - perhaps a guilty conscience. The assumption is that Dove's an adrenaline junkie, hooked on the rush of nearly blowing himself to bits. While we wait, the film switches to Boston, where it focuses on the members of a bomb squad led by a nonchalant daredevil named Dove (Jeff Bridges), who appears to be a little too much in love with the life-and-death nature of his job. And the prospect of his return is about all that sustains us through the film's dragging early moments. With equal abruptness, Gaerity also disappears from the film - at least for a while. Striking like a scorpion, he murders his cellmate, retrieves part of a bomb he'd hidden in the man's guts, blows a hole in the wall of his cell and vanishes into the darkness. From his shaggy locks and the books on the shelf behind him, it looks as if he's been in prison for a long while - 20 years, we later discover - but he won't be there much longer. As it turns out, the building is a prison in Ireland, and the man sitting on his cot like a grenade waiting for its pin to be pulled is an IRA soldier named Gaerity (Tommy Lee Jones). "Blown Away," Stephen Hopkins's mostly passable new thriller, isn't quite as one-dimensional as its title implies, but just about.Īs the picture begins, the camera snakes down a dark shoreline through the drenching rain to a complex of jagged stones so brooding and Gothic that, you think, it has to be Castle Elsinore.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |