Get your own Free Home Page
Director Gregory Hoblit has a history of getting good movies out of ideas that sound less than convincing on paper. Primal Fear was about the brutal murder of a child-molesting Catholic bishop by an altar boy; Fallen dealt with a demonic serial killer that jumps from host to host via handshake. But each boasted a redeeming knockout performance; Edward Norton got an Oscar nom for his first movie role in the former, and Denzel Washington was gripping as usual in the latter. When trailers about Hoblit's new film, concerning Frank Sullivan, a 1969 New York fireman (Dennis Quaid), who via ham radio teams with grown-up son John, a 1999 NYC cop (Jim Caviezel, from The Thin Red Line), to pursue a serial killer, the thing hadn't hit theaters yet and already I was reaching for my copy of Vocabulary for Reviewing Lousy Films, by Pauline Kael.
Time to be humbled yet again, and I don't mean by the guy who wrote in to say that Deuce Bigelow was the best thing he'd seen since Hot Dog...The Movie. Despite dubious physics and math (the 30-year anomaly, caused by sunspots on an 11-year cycle, allow the pair not only to converse but to selectively screw with the fabric of the universe), inconsistent accents (most characters speak restrained Gothamese, while furiously gum-chewing Quaid spits out things like "commanduh" and "fiyuh fightuh"), and uneven makeup (everybody except the 1969 children plays the same character in 1999; some look convincing enough in present-day guise to be altogether different actors, while others varyingly appear either to have nothing worse than early-morning pillow creases, or be readying for a community theatre production of On Golden Pond), and predictable plotting (the ending is telegraphed almost from the opening scene), everybody concerned, including Andre Braugher as a cop working on the case in both times, gives it a great sell. The tear-jerking implications of John's opportunity to speak to his long-dead father, and temptation to prevent his death, are quite moving in an Einstein/Spelling sort of way.
I would have rated it a half-grade higher if it hadn't wound up with a Garth Brooks music video. B-
Get your own Free Home Page