Silly bomb flick that kinda works anyway

“Blown Away” came out, to its detriment, a couple weeks after “Speed”. Both films deal with similar material, though this one wears its importance and dramatic weight more on its sleeve. It’s hard not to compare the two and even more interesting to note which one comes off smarter and less overall goofy. Yet, putting aside which movie would win in a fight, this Jeff Bridges-Tommy Lee Jones actioner isn’t totally disposable either.


Bridges is Tommy Dove, a pro with the Boston bomb squad. He hates the job and is seemingly in it as a form of penance for something that happened 20 years before in Belfast, which he still has nightmarish flashbacks over. He’s ready to get out and be a family man to concert violinist Kate (Suzy Amis) and her daughter. But Jones’ IRA mad bomber character Gaerity is pissed about the event that happened 20 years ago and wants to pull Jimmy back in and make him and his bomb squad squirm.


Trying to establish “the troubles” as a more immediate problem for American audiences, the film is ridiculously unsubtle in its stereotyping. Jones’ militant, vengeful Mick has the thickest, most incomprehensibly baffling Irish accent you’ve ever heard, Bridges tries his hand at one but thankfully only comes off as bad Bostonian, and dad Lloyd Bridges, playing Jimmy’s brother in arms from the old days, pretty much comes across like drunken Darby O’Gill. Nearly every Irishman in the film has an IRA past, the weddings are as Irish as it gets; filled with dance, fiddle playing and drink, and Gaerity becomes a big U2 fan as the movie progresses.


But passed that, the movie becomes a series of situations where bombs need to be defused and some of them are so elaborate they boggle the mind. The first one, in which a school computer has been rigged to explode when it either runs out of bytes or when the student stops typing is so absurdly, wonderfully stupid that it just makes you think once Murtaugh’s toilet got rigged, really anything was possible in the 90’s. Then there’s a whole Rube Goldberg finale inside a hollowed-out casino cruise ship, all set to Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture, which is being played at a concert in a park where coincidentally, there’s another bomb Bridges has to get to.


Director Stephen Hopkins knows how silly this all is but plays into well- there is some terrific tension and great visual flare to a scene where Kate and her daughter arrive home, turning on lights and the stove, not knowing that a bomb may be rigged up inside one of them. He can’t exactly sidestep the tired cut-the-red-or-green-wire stuff but there are some surprises to the bombs and sometimes their detonations result in some powerful consequences.


Bridges is compelling as a man trying to do good in order to appease a past wrong and Jones always seems to savor these over the top villain roles for the fun, over ecstatic bits of comedy he can bring to them. Forest Whitaker also does nice work as Dove’s cocky young partner. The film may be caught between a weird mixture of anxieties over terrorism and silly bomb rigs but there is skill put into some of this- just not much in the script.