BLOWN AWAY

BLOWN AWAY (Directed by Stephen Hopkins. Starring Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones, Lloyd Bridges, Forest Whitaker, Suzy Amis)

In Hollywood one mad bomber is as good as another. Thus in True Lies it is Arabs who are the bumbling terrorists and in Blown Away it is (once again) the Irish. Well, if you’re going to have a major onscreen conflict, you’ve got to have somebody to fight. Yet Blown Away’s misappropriation of another’s struggle seems a little more shameful than that of True Lies, because whereas Arnie’s battle is an outright fantasy against an unspecified Islamic terrorist group, the makers of Blown Away want to serve up more adult fare, mixing a restrained tale of guilt and redemption with the thrills, spills and explosions promised by the title. The result is not so much a case of having your cake and eating it, as having the damn gateaux blow up in your face and make a bloody great mess of everything.

For once again, it is not the IRA or the INLA or even the UVF who are mounting a bloody American bombing campaign, it is a single, crazed Republican bearing a grudge, wearing a beret, and talking the kind of brogue that has been picked up from careful study of The Quiet Man. Tommy Lee Jones is the guilty party, cackling with glee or clutching his rosary in despair as he blows up half of Boston to torment his former Republican ally Jeff Bridges, who has given up the cause and joined the Boston bomb squad to salve his conscience.

I wouldn’t have thought Boston had much use for a bomb squad, but on this evidence the city is so explosive that Jeff and his crack team of defusers have to wear beepers. When Tommy arrives in town, the beepers are suddenly working overtime. Some of the bomb sequences are effective, director Stephen Hopkins invigorating the centre of the movie with a restrained almost Hitchcockian scene in which everyday actions (switching on the lights, turning on the gas cooker) are rendered nailbiting by the audience’s suspicion that there is a bomb on the premises, but the gung-ho elements of the thriller are actually undercut by the silliness of the premise.

For all his good looks, Jeff Bridges is an actor not an action hero, making too much of his guilty motivation. It is hard to produce a convincing character study when you are suddenly called upon to leap from a motorbike to a speeding car to attempt to defuse a ridiculously elaborate incendiary device, involving children’s toys and lots of little stop watches. Whatever happened to packing a truck with Semtex and fertiliser and parking it outside your target? Perhaps the producer realised there was enough shit in the script already without adding cow shit.

Jeff is not helped in his attempts to find a serious thread through the action by the inclusion of his father, Lloyd, as an old Irish uncle who looks and sounds like he is related to the leprechauns. In one of the movies most unintentionally hilarious scenes, Bridges pere and Tommy Lee O’Jones can be seen waxing euphoric over Guinness that appears to have the colour and consistency of Harp, shooting the blarney in matching West Galway accents. That’s several thousand miles west of Galway, by the way.

Or maybe I’m just being hard on the movie because I’m Irish. Blown Away provides reasonable entertainment, without ever hitting the heights of excitement required by an action thriller, or the depths of moral intrigue required of a drama. Perhaps if it had been a mad mullah in the frame, I could have cheered Jeff’s struggle and remained oblivious to the inconsistencies. But I suspect I would still not have been blown away by the film, which rarely rises to the pitch of tension the scenario requires for suspension of disbelief.

By the way, has anyone seen my bicycle? I left it parked in Bognor and it was gone when I came back.