Blow Out (1981)
I'm not a huge Brian de Palma fan. I dig a lot of his movies, but even then I often come away thinking they could have been better. I really dig political thrillers, though, and here we are. Could have been done better. The story was excellent, and it was told pretty well. It was somewhat complex, but you could always catch up to it, and some of the twists were great. Travolta wouldn't have been my first choice, though. Even when he does well, and he does here, he still sounds like Vinnie Barbarino, and it's just impossible to un-hear that. He was honestly a good pick for what De Palma was looking for, you believed him in the part, but he's just got a built-in flaw for me.
For my money it was really John Lithgow who stole the show. He doesn't come in until halfway through the movie, but when he does he completely turns everything around by casually explaining to the conspirators that he's running a completely different operation than the one they'd all agreed on. To pull off his wildcat operation he has to commit numerous other crimes, including a string of rather gruesome prostitute murders. Lithgow's character did all of this with a real workmanlike and dispassionate manner. For him it was always just political business. That made it all the more creepy, and he did it very well.
I'm always intrigued by what offscreen characters are thinking. What are they doing. What will they do. How do they perceive things. Only one of the original conspirators is shown, but it's more than enough to tell you who they are. They're a bunch of wealthy politicians and political backers who were wanting to ratfuck another candidate. The extent to which Lithgow went rogue on them is just extraordinary, and must have been absolutely terrifying from their vantage point. They hatch a plan to blackmail somebody and the next thing they know their man is running around ice-picking prostitutes on their behalf for a plan they disapproved of. This sort of thing just cracks me up, and Lithgow calmly reporting on where they are in his plan in that workmanlike manner was wonderful.
In a way I really like the ending. I'm just fine with endings where the badguys win. I don't need everything neatly sewn up, and sometimes reverting to status quo ante carries with it a pretty good impact. You expect the hero to win for two hours and when he loses it's a bit of a shock. At the same time, the final scene in the film kind of wrecks the character Travolta had actually done a great job with. It was a honestly a throwaway scene that really screwed things up, I think. Like turning a great story into a bad joke at the end. Quite unfortunate. Perhaps there's a hidden meaning I'm not seeing, that happens a lot with me, but there was a far more obvious approach that would have been wonderful. That final scene kept it from being 4* move for me.
Topic: Last movie you saw? v2.0 (Read 51845 times)
