6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.8 |
An Irish bomber escapes from prison and targets a member of the Boston bomb squad.
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones, Suzy Amis, Lloyd Bridges, Forest WhitakerThriller | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 16-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
The summer of 1994 saw the release of two films pitting members of a police bomb disposal unit against a mad bomber. One was Jan de Bont's Speed, which became a box office hit and an action classic. The other, Stephen Hopkins' Blown Away, got trounced at the box office and scorned by reviews, despite spectacular effects and the presence of Jeff Bridges, his father Lloyd and Tommy Lee Jones, all working at the top of their game. In the newly recorded commentary for this release by Kino Studio Classics, director Hopkins notes that Speed rushed its post-production schedule to make it into theaters earlier (June 10 vs. July 1), which is always an advantage with similarly themed pictures. But Speed had the additional advantage of being a thrill ride, a skillfully crafted adrenaline rush, whereas Blown Away had a different rhythm. Hopkins' film is a drama with action beats, a dark story of revenge and redemption that, with the distance of several decades, the director believes may have suffered from his conflicting desires to explore the story's tragic dimension and also make a crowd-pleaser. Blown Away also labored under technical handicaps. Hopkins and his cinematographer, Peter Levy (Broken Arrow), experimented with photographic techniques intended to give the film the look of a Seventies thriller, but the experiments didn't work out as planned, and the team did not have the fallback of digital post-production to make adjustments. In an era when cinematography was already trending toward vivid colors and visual "pop", Blown Away's drab palette drew criticism; one reviewer called it the ugliest movie he had ever seen. And having worked long and hard to master the villain's Irish accent and the hero's Boston-Irish pronunciations, Tommy Lee Jones and Jeff Bridges had to be recalled for looping sessions to redub the entire film—twice!—after preview audiences complained they couldn't understand their dialogue. But as soon as the accents were sufficiently diluted to eliminate that complaint, they were deemed fake. Given the choice between opaque and phony, the producers opted for the latter, with the result that nearly every review mocked the characters' accents, especially Jones's. I may be in the minority, but I have always liked Blown Away. I also think it has aged well. The key is to think of the villain not so much as a bomber, but as a fun-loving psychopath for whom guns, and even conventional bombs, are far too quick and simple. His devices are so insanely elaborate and overcomplicated that they become almost an end in themselves: extended foreplay to a consummation that is almost mystical. Unlike Speed's maniac, he doesn't want money. He's a Hannibal Lecter for whom pyrotechnics serves the purpose of haute cuisine.
As director Hopkins describes in his new commentary, he and cinematographer, Peter Levy (who has continued to work with Hopkins on numerous projects), experimented on Blown Away with "flashing" the film, which involves pre-exposing it to light in an effort to alter contrast and, depending on the nature of the light, color. (One of the best-known practitioners of the technique is Vilmos Zsigmond, who used it on such films as Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller.) Hopkins says that he and Levy were not satisfied with the results, but doesn't specify the reason. Certainly the film's color palette is one of the dullest and least interesting of films from this era. The fire balls from the explosions are bright orange, but most colors are undersaturated and, with rare exceptions such as Lizzy's birthday party, dull. A kind of haze is often visible overlaying the entire frame; the wedding sequence provides a good example. In this regard, the Blu-ray image accurately reflects how the film has always looked. In other respects, Kino's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray looks astonishingly good, considering that the company has squeezed a 121-minute film onto a BD-25, with extras. (The average bitrate is 17.94 Mbps.) With due allowance for the effects of "flashing", the image is clear, sharp and detailed, without obvious evidence of artificial sharpening or high frequency filtering (although the latter cannot be ruled out entirely). Blacks aren't as deep as one would like, but this is often an effect of "flashing". Visibility in the darkened interior of the ship where Gaerity has built his ultimate bomb is quite good, allowing the viewer to appreciate the intricacies of the bombmaker's crazy mechanisms. The source material is in sound shape, with a few minor speckles but no major damage.
Blown Away's aggressive 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in DTS-HD MA, does full justice to the powerful explosions of Gaerity's bombs, as well as the massive fireworks display for the Fourth of July celebration that plays an important part in the film's final act. In a subtler vein, the track also conveys the much-amplified sounds of such ordinary events as oven dials turning, telephone cords being plugged into jacks and electric light bulbs switching on, as Hopkins' camera magnifies these events to mammoth proportions. The multiple stages of Gaerity's elaborate ignition system (mercury pouring, fuses burning, switch terminals making contact) all have distinctive sound effects that are presented as major events. Indeed, it would be accurate to say that Blown Away's sound mix routinely shifts the aural perspective between macro and micro, almost as if it were entering the mind of a mad bombmaker as he imagines how his devices will operate. As discussed in the introduction, all of the dialogue by Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones was redubbed. As a result, although the lines match the lip movements, occasional words are not clear. This has always been the case, and while it is common to blame this weakness on bad accents, the opposite is true: Good accents necessitated the redubbing, resulting in a less than optimal mix. Subtitles are available and can be switched on as necessary. Alan Silvestri's expressive score has been composed to underline the story's emotional content far more than its action beats. For variety, there is also the "1812 Overture" (performed by the Boston Pops) and several familiar songs from U2, to whom Gaerity enjoys listening. Kino has included a DTS-HD MA 2.0 track, but it is unclear why, since the original audio format was not stereo.
MGM's 1997 DVD of Blown Away contained only a trailer. Kino has included major additional extras.
As Hopkins relates in the new commentary, the production of Blown Away received threats and required extra security because the Irish "troubles" were still active at the time the film was being made. Today, with a negotiated peace in Ireland, such concerns have receded, and the film is more likely to call up uncomfortable associations with the Boston Marathon bombing. Neither association is particularly relevant to the story, which, in essence, is about a stalker with an unusual skill set. In the hands of lesser actors, the film could easily have veered into nonsense, but Jones and Bridges (father and son) make it work. Kino has delivered an impressive set of extras and a decent video and audio presentation. Recommended.
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