Brendan Fraser is the last nice guy in American cinema. In a Hollywood where drooling morons and self absorbed freaks equal big office (Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey in any number of previous roles) Fraser is a welcome respite -- an actor who has built a career on playing guileless -- but not clueless -- men with a healthy sense of honor and a hunky masculinity. (And, as The Waterboy outgrossed The Wedding Singer -- in both sense of the term -- we can likely expect more of Sandler's brand of inbred cretins.) So Fraser is something of a treasure, a man who can play sensitive, sweet heroes with innocent sincerity. In a film as slight as Blast From the Past, his presence makes all the difference in the world.
Well, Blast From the Past is really more of a cartoon than a movie -- like so many "high concept" comedies pouring out of Hollywood. As such it's not too hard to simply sit back and accept the outrageous coincidences that the script forces in to get the ball rolling. An eccentric millionaire scientist Calvin (Christopher Walken) living in fear of the red menace has built a secret underground fallout shelter only slightly smaller than Madison Square Garden under his suburban back yard. The year is 1962 and when news of the Cuban Missile Crisis reaches Calvin, he trundles his pregnant wife Helen (Sissy Spacek) down the high tech cellar into a near exact reproduction of their middle class home -- it looks like a movie studio set, complete with missing ceilings -- just as an Air Force jet that coincidentally crashes on top of the hatch. Alarms set off convincing them that the bomb has been dropped. Fine, you need something to justify their decision to spend 35 years without nary a peek up on the surface.
So Helen gives birth to our young hero Adam (a succession of kids who emerge as Fraser), who grows up in a world of perpetual sitcom early sixties, watching the same "Honeymooners" episode over and over again, getting a basic education from Dad, manners and social graces from Mom (including swing dancing -- which turns out to be terrifically handy in the 1990s dating scene), and ready to finally hit the surface and find a wife. Gosh, what'll it be like?
What seems like a particularly long prologue turns out to be the most enjoyable moments of the film. The 35 years up, Dad scouts the surface and discovers a collapsed civilization, surely the result of mutation. Actually his suburb has become a slum and he popped up on an average night of hookers, drunks, gangbangers and cross-dressers. But before they can lock themselves back up they need supplies and it's up to Adam to make the trek, which he does with stoic heroism and confident aplomb.
On the surface our rather young looking 35 years old meets his Eve (Alicia Silverstone), a teased, talky, self-proclaimed material girl who, as defined by the script, is a rather amorphous, ill defined character. Through a rather complicated series of events he hires her as an agent -- she helps him buy food and sell of his father's baseball card collection to fund the project, and as a side project she agrees to play cupid.
Silverstone's child-woman act was much cuter when she was a teenager -- as a young adult the pouts and puzzled looks are more precious than attractive. The entire foundation of the film is the inevitability of romance between nice guy Adam and sweet-at-heart Eve, and there's not a single spark in between the two of them. Third wheel Troy (Dave Foley, as the now de riguer gay roommate -- I guess you can tell Foley is doing his gay shtick because... he has a bad haircut and likes to go shopping?), doesn't have anything particularly biting or clever to say and skates along on his charm, which is put to better on his sitcom "News Radio." It's a relief to get back to doddering Dad and tippling Mom, marking time below the surface as they await the homecoming of their prodigal son.
Director Hugh Wilson has never been one to mine the possibilities of his material -- stylistically he's a mere step beyond his sitcom roots, and conceptually he's a one note musician. His vision of LA as a city full of wounded romantics merely posing as cynics is kind of sweet if underdeveloped: a dose of Adam and voila! hearts open and manners improve. But he never gets beyond the obvious surface gags, and even then he slips into overkill. When Adam follows the contradictory advice of Eve and Troy and is sent to pick up a predatory party girl at a retro club -- he's supposed to fail, obviously -- he wins her over with his good hearted sincerity and proceeds to wow the crowd with amazing swing dancing moves while he guides not one but two gorgeous women on the dance floor. It's a great scene -- and with the bouncing swing beat and swirling moves why shouldn't it be -- but Wilson completely blows every opportunity to have flirting fun between Adam and his sexy dance partners. Meanwhile he constantly cuts back to a steaming Eve, her jealousy so pronounced I'd swear I saw her hair curl even tighter. About the fifth time we returned to her lip-biting pout I completely lost interest. But then I'd pretty much lost interest in the film as a whole. Fraser is the only thing that kept me around, but good manners and naive charm will only take a film so far. Somewhere along the line a story is necessary, and unfortunately Wilson left it locked up in the fallout shelter. Maybe in another 35 years...