The Forgotten Action Movie Speed KILLED
Blown Away, Twin Movies, & The Making Of A Box Office Dud
Now, you might be thinking that, if Blown Away isn't as good as Speed, and boasts a similar premise, then surely it's only fair that it's been consigned to that great big bargain bin in the sky? To that end, what would be the point in reappraising or reclaiming the film as a highlight of nineties-era action? It doesn't have the notoriety of a Hudson Hawk or Batman & Robin, and was pretty much instantly forgotten following its premiere. Is it actually possible to "reclaim" a movie no one really cares about?
I'm not going to sit here and clackety-clack on my keyboard and tell you that Blown Away is some unheralded masterpiece denied its time in the sun, but I do think one of the reasons I've found myself so drawn to it is how the film speaks to the lack of tangibility that pervades our current filmmaking context. Blown Away features impressive location work, gorgeous visual effects, and approaches its somewhat bonkers premise with complete sincerity. Compare that to a similarly scaled production from the last five years, like, say, the Russo brothers' The Grey Man - whose title helpfully connoted not just its pallid, digital visuals, but also its profound sense of nothingness - and the difference is stark.
Have the Russos ever blown up a gigantic freight ship in an actual harbour before? At the expense of a whole bunch of innocent, Bostonian windows? No? Stephen Hopkins did, and it was magic.
Ebert was right when he called Blown Away preposterous, but it's a weird metric to measure an action movie by and also diminishes the film's many, many technical merits. The fact it was so quickly dismissed and forgotten, though, made finding Blown Away feel like happening upon an oasis in the desert, all the more so for the fact that it came from the halcyon days of dadcore movie vibes. Just when you thought you'd mined that iceberg for all its worth, having waded through the Striking Distances and Daylights of the world, here comes a diamond with TLJ making his turn in Under Siege seem positively hinged by comparison.
Blown Away, like Speed, was very much cut from the Die Hard mould, albeit with a little sprinkling of Lethal Weapon-esque buddy cop-isms for good measure.
The film follows Boston PD bomb squad member Jimmy Dove (a surname with some obtuse irony, we later learn), who finds himself caught in the sights of fugitive IRA man Ryan Gaerity. The former, played by Jeff Bridges, is living his best life, working hard defusing bombs by day, and letting off steam with his friends and loved ones at night (including a surrogate father played by his real-life dad, Lloyd Bridges). Gaerity comes to Boston on a quest for vengeance, toying with Jimmy with deadly precision and all the eccentricities that accompany a '90s-era Tommy Lee Jones villain performance, as the sins of the past return to wreak havoc on the Boston PD man's peaceful existence.
Like Patriot Games, which released two years prior, Blown Away tackles the context of The Troubles with all the grace of an exploding clown at an outdoor charity event (see: Live Wire), but it's more a foible than an outright failing. It turns out that Dove, whose real name is actually Liam McGivney, was an IRA man himself back in the day and fled Northern Ireland to the US after protesting Gaerity's disregard for civilian casualties. There, he put his guilt to use by disarming bombs rather than making them, taking the name "Dove" because, you know, birds of peace and all that.
Gaerity's return sparks a huge crisis for Jimmy/Liam, as the house of cards he'd carefully assembled comes crashing down, and he's forced once again to reckon with the wounds of his past while mending the fibres of his future.
Lending charisma and weight to the set-up are the father-son Bridges duo and also Forest Whitaker, the latter of whom plays a hot-shot up-and-comer on the Beantown bomb squad who has his own "rival-to-friend" arc with Bridges' Dove.
And despite the theatrics of Blown Away's plot not always cohering (and I would say that doesn't matter too much when you have Tommy Lee Jones being Tommy Lee Jones), the melodrama is compellingly drawn and acted, and Bridges - always a versatile performer, and here just a few years before he Duded himself with The Big Lebowski - carries a real warmth and sincerity in his acting. That may be a given with many of Bridges' movies, but credit must also be given to Hopkins and screenwriters John Rice and Joe Batteer for making the interpersonal aspects of Blown Away so authentic, because those in turn make the suspense so much more palpable.
On paper, all the suspense should be negated by TLJ being his best lil' stinker self, but because Bridges and co. are all so committed, the stakes always feel significant. It's a livewire balancing act Blown Away successfully navigates until its overdrawn finale, which, even then, comes equipped with the Mother Of All Explosions to cap things off with a Rube Goldberg-propelled bang.
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