Blast from the Past

***

Cast: Christopher Walken, Sissy Spacek, Brendan Fraser, Alicia Silverstone

Director: Hugh Wilson

Rating: M

Reviewer: Peter Calder

What family could be more nuclear than one that heads for the bomb shelter when JFK makes the address to the nation that announces the 1962 Cuban missile crisis?
Calvin Webber (Walken) scurries underground with his pregnant wife Helen (Spacek) and locks the doors just as an explosion erupts outside.

The scientific genius who has built the world's biggest private bomb shelter - a perfect replica of their grindingly kitsch above-ground home, complete with patio furniture - isn't smart enough to tell a nuclear blast from the crash of a small plane. But he knows enough about the half-life of uranium to realise that they're stuck down there for 35 years and he's set the time-lock doors to ensure they don't sneak an early peek.

The Webbers raise a boy named Adam (Fraser) into a wide-eyed hunk of comically exaggerated politeness and there's a pleasure in watching the family's slow meltdown. When Helen discovers the medicinal properties of cooking sherry, the glaze in her eyes gets progressively wilder.

Meanwhile Calvin (Walken, who usually plays ice-eyed psychopaths, is a genuinely daffy comic presence) teaches Adam five languages and all the sciences, watches an old Jackie Gleason movie over and over and with each passing year looks more like a mad professor.

The script is littered with little implausibilities (Calvin has laid in spare textured ceiling panels but has to repair his glasses with sticking plaster, and the 35-year supply of food looks more like six months' worth) but the whole thing holds together until the time-locks hiss and the family emerges into Los Angeles 1997.

"People throw up in the streets," Calvin tells his family after returning from an exploratory mission.
"Others point guns." This is by way of introducing the film's second half when Adam will wander through the San Fernando Valley convinced he's looking at a world full of post-apocalyptic mutants.

It's a shop-worn idea, the innocent abroad, though Fraser - who did much the same thing in the title role of George of the Jungle - discharges it well enough. But the film begins to disintegrate quite quickly when Adam gets his 35th birthday wish - to meet a girl.

She's called Eve, of course, and Alicia Silverstone is doubtless the main attraction for the teenage target audience. But while she's a pretty and talented presence her arrival on screen marks the end of the movie's best bits; as the sly satire gets mixed up with a predictable love story, this blast just runs out of steam.