Call it "boy meets world, boy gets girl." That’s the plot of "Blast From the Past" in a nutshell. It’s the latest fish-out-of-water comedy whose other entrants also include "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "Pleasantville." This one, starring Brendan Fraser and Alicia Silverstone, should have stayed in the typewriter for another rewrite (typewriters—you remember those archaic things, don’t you?).
It’s 1962 and eccentric-but-brilliant Prof. Calvin Webbers (Christopher Walken) and his pregnant wife (Sissy Spacek) are hosting a cocktail party when they get word that President Kennedy is about to go toe-to-toe with Khruschev over the Cuban Missile Crisis. The paranoid professor, certain that nuclear Armageddon is at hand, hustles his guests home and his wife down into the elaborate fallout shelter he’s built in the back yard. In true June Cleaver style, Spacek brings the pot roast "so it doesn’t go to waste."
As fate would have it, a plane crashes smack dab on top of the Webbers' house, confirming the professor's worst fears—the Commies have dropped the bomb. He seals himself, his wife and their unborn child in the shelter. The time-locks are activated, ensuring that no "nuclear mutants" can get in for the next 35 years. It also means the small family cannot go topside for another three decades. Not to worry, Webbers has stocked his spacious underground chambers with all the luxuries of their 1960s world. He’s built a replica of their suburban house, including an astro-turfed back yard and patio furniture. There’s a water tank stocked with live trout, a greenhouse for fresh vegetables, a grocery storeroom complete with a shopping cart and reruns of "The Honeymooners" on home movie stock. What more could they need?
When their son, Adam, is born their lives are complete—they’ve become the true nuclear family. Now, flash forward several decades. The locks click open and it’s time to see what kind of world was left on the surface after the bomb did its damage. Adam, who has known only the society of his mother, his father and Jackie Gleason, is sent up the elevator shaft to buy $3,000 worth of supplies and, if the opportunity arises, to find a "healthy girl" to bring home to Mom and Pop. ("Let’s just hope she doesn’t glow in the dark," Walken mutters in what is one of several great lines that indicate how good this script could have been given another draft.)
In the world of the 1990s—a world that does look like it had suffered through nuclear holocaust—that kind of wholesome girl could only be Alicia Silverstone (I guess Meg Ryan’s getting too old for the job). Fraser, as the wide-eyed and extraordinarily polite Adam, falls head over heels for Silverstone who is named (natch) Eve.
The premise of "Blast From the Past" has obvious appeal, but once Adam reaches the surface of the 1990s, the movie loses whatever charm it had generated during the first half hour. Walken and Spacek seem happy to get their chops into comic roles and they do well with the cartoon Ozzie and Harriet roles, but we leave them underground in the shelter all too soon. The two leads, who carry the burden of the film, fizzle when they should sizzle. Brendan Fraser delivers another of his hyper-sincere, puppy-dog performances which (after "George of the Jungle" and "Dudley Do-Right") are wearing a little thin. Silverstone, sporting some of the worst hairstyles ever to hit the silver screen, delivers her lines like they were made of cardboard—which, come to think of it, they are!
You could do worse than "Blast From the Past," but you could also do much, much better. Even the "Back to the Future" movies were a better blast.
Adam Webber Fraser was raised in a bomb shelter by his kooky parents Walken and Spacek. Thirty-five years later he enters the real world where he meet...More at Family Video
Meet Adam Webber (Fraser) born and raised in a bomb shelter with his mad scientist father (Walken) and his sherry-swilling mother (Spacek). Now, 35 ye...More at HotMovieSale.com
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