Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.5

Blown Away Blu-ray Movie Review

Brothers in Bombs

Reviewed by Michael Reuben July 14, 2015

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.

The villain of Blown Away is an Irish terrorist named Ryan Gaerity (Jones), who is too crazy even for the IRA. Forming his own splinter cell, Gaerity waged a private war against the British with elaborately constructed devices until a failed operation killed most of his group and led to Gaerity's imprisonment. After twenty years inside, Gaerity improvises a bomb that blows open his prison wall and escapes to America.

The only other surviving member of Gaerity's cell was his former best friend, Liam McGivney (Bridges), who evaded capture twenty years ago and re-emerged with a new identity as a Boston native named James "Jimmy" Dove. Only Jimmy's uncle, Max O'Bannon (Lloyd Bridges), knows his true identity. Putting his education in bomb-making to good use, Jimmy joined the Boston PD's bomb squad under Capt. Fred Roarke (John Finn), where he has become a star and, like many in his line of work, something of an adrenaline junkie. Lately, however, Jimmy senses that it's time to quit. His impending marriage to Kate (Suzy Amis), a widow with a daughter, Lizzy (Stephi Lineburg), who adores Jimmy, has prompted him to reevaluate his life. It's precisely at this point that Jimmy is spotted on local television by his former terrorist comrade, Gaerity, after defusing a bomb on the campus of M.I.T.

Despite the overlay of Irish politics, Blown Away is entirely about a personal vendetta, as Gaerity systematically targets one person after another in Jimmy's life, beginning with members of the bomb squad. His devices are increasingly—and ridiculously—complicated, and his insistence on toying with Jimmy, taunting him by phone, stalking Kate and Lizzy, sending videotaped puppet shows (yes, puppet shows) to the bomb squad with cryptic messages that only Jimmy will understand, provides an extreme example of a villain who is so busy anticipating his dastardly plan that he gives the hero just enough time to foil it. But Tommy Lee Jones's artfully unhinged performance conveys the method in Gaerity's madness. With twenty years' accumulation of bitterness, anger and revenge fantasies to draw on, Jones's Gaerity will not forgo a single moment's enjoyment in the infliction of suffering. In one memorable shot, Gaerity appears to be praying and shedding a tear, as one of his victims explodes nearby, only to break into a sudden smile of undeniable pleasure.

Bridges plays Jimmy as a man haunted not only by the sins of his past but also by the knowledge that he, as much as Gaerity, is the cause of the death and destruction now raining down around him. Worse, he has to continue concealing what he knows from his colleagues, a task that becomes especially difficult when the bomb squad's newest member, a former SWAT cop named Anthony Franklin (Forest Whitaker), begins to suspect that Jimmy isn't who he says he is.

Director Hopkins stages several memorable set pieces, including (i) a suspenseful demonstration of the many spots in an ordinary household where a bomber could conceal a trigger, using POV shots from inside walls and household appliances, and (ii) the detonation of what Gaerity calls his masterpiece, the explosion of a derelict ship in Boston harbor, with a Rube Goldberg trigger that has no purpose beyond its sheer complexity. But the essence of Blown Away, and the key to its odd rhythm, is the timetable of a man who was already deranged before twenty years of plotting his revenge drove him to new heights of evil. "I should have been pair of ragged claws!" exclaims Gaerity, quoting T.S. Eliot in one of his wackier monologues. Actually, he should have been a super-villain in a comic book. He quit being human long ago.

Blown Away Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

Blown Away Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

MGM's 1997 DVD of Blown Away contained only a trailer. Kino has included major additional extras.

• Commentary with Director Stephen Hopkins: Like many commentaries recorded years after the fact, when the participants(s) haven't seen the film for a long time, Hopkins' comments have a detached, sometimes bemused tone, almost as if someone else had made the film—which is true, in a sense. People change after more than twenty years, and Hopkins remarks at one point that he has come to believe that he does not have the right sensibility for American action films. (His most recent project is a bio-pic of American Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens.) Though low-key, the commentary is filled with useful information about the film that, as far as I know, has not been readily available elsewhere, including the logistics of shooting various explosions, all of which were done practically under conditions that no city would allow in today's security-conscious environment.



• The Making of Blown Away: A Day in the Life of the Bomb Squad (480i; 1.33:1; 20:47): This made-for-TV promotional piece is hosted by Lloyd Bridges and features vintage interviews with Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones and Hopkins. It also gives attention to members of the Boston bomb squad who served as both technical advisors and extras.



• "Take Me Home" Music Video—Joe Cocker & Bekka Bramlett (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 4:24): The song plays over the closing credits.



• Original Theatrical Trailer (480i; 2:35:1, enhanced; 1:35): In a shameless effort to evoke the feel of Die Hard, the trailer is set to the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Blown Away Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.