Okay, here's the deal. There's a story about comedian Milton Berle that I absolutely love. The story has some variables, but the point is clear. Some say the subject of the story was Jerry Lewis, some say Woody Allen, And I've even heard Jim Carrey, but, for the sake of the story, I'll use Woody Allen. It seems Uncle Miltie was holding court at the Friars' Club in NYC during one of the famous Friars' Club Roasts. Everyone wanted to talk to Milton, ask his opinions, bounce a joke off of him, that sort of schmoozing. One person asked, "Hey Milton! What do you think about this new guy, Woody Allen?" Milton said he wasn't sure who Allen was. The guy said, "Woody Allen? He's a hot new comic, ready to start making movies and everything."
Berle looked at the man and said, "I've never stolen a joke from him. How good can he be?"
I tell that story to ask a question. In movies today, just how "original" can you be before you're outright copycatting something that's been done for years? Tarantino's "new vision" is based on hundreds of images from everyone from Tsui Hark and John Woo to Sam Fuller and Scorsese. John Carpenter's "masterpiece," Assault on Precinct 13, was a thinly-disguised remake of Rio Bravo. Kevin Williamson's "regeneration X" slasher movie Scream actually revels in the fact that entire plotlines and scenarios are ripped right out of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Elm Street parade. Remember when Brian DePalma was the "new lord" of Hollywood? Pssssst. Here's a secret for you. Every memorable scene in The Untouchables? Five finger discounted from everyone from Hitchcock to Eisenstein and back again, including two direct thefts from himself, if those can be counted.
I couldn't help but scratch this itcher over and over while I was sitting through a movie called Switchback the other night. For about 45 minutes, this thing has promise, but, very abruptly, it becomes a home version of the popular board game, "What Film is That From?"
Switchback stars Dennis Quaid as FBI agent Frank Lacrosse, a man obsessed with a cross-country serial killer. He's been tracking this mysterious murderer for months now, but the intensity has increased tenfold since the killer branched out into kidnapping, specifically, the agent's young son. His investigation involves him with a good-ol'-boy sheriff (R. Lee Ermey), who's running for re-election, a former railroad worker (Danny Glover), and a quiet young med student who's riding with Glover (Jared Leto).
Writer/director Jeb Stuart weaves these four characters into a tight little story that points fingers in every direction. At any given point, any one of these four, including Quaid, could be the killer. You really don't know where to turn for a while. Then, near the end, it cops out much the same way Kiss The Girls does, and goes for a blowout ending rather than a thought-out one. The half-baked finalé aboard a speeding train in the Rocky Mountains is tiring rather than exciting, and it ultimately spoils what could have been a decent thriller.
My earlier question, though, goes back to the whole story of Stuart's script and its ten-year voyage throughout Hollywood before it finally got made into a motion picture. Stuart wrote this thing while he was a student at Stanford University, and it quickly became the talk of Hollywood. But nobody could get the project jumpstarted. In the meantime, Stuart went on to write the screenplays for such films as Die Hard and The Fugitive. Those films and others peek through the back curtains all through this film. One can see the tight storytelling of The Fugitive in certain points, the cringing suspense scenes of Die Hard in others. It becomes a lark at times to notice the other influences. The entire first sequence is almost lifted entirely from Halloween and Scream, Quaid's Agent LaCrosse, is a tight-jawed stereotype in the mold of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive and, to a lesser extent, Kyle MacLachlan's white-bread Twin Peaks' Agent Cooper. Glover's character is a twist-off of his charming loner in To Sleep With Anger, a little off the beaten path but still loveable. One has to wonder at times, given the script's pre-film life, exactly who was borrowing from whom when these things were being produced.
The story itself suffers from a "check out at my creativity" attitude that gets too cute for its own good at times, and, while it's not necessarily awful, it's not all that great, either. I found myself more concerned with the smaller back stories, particulary the sheriff, than I did with the whole serial killer plot. There's very little to keep us from finding out the identity of the killer after the first hour, and the only suspense becomes whether or not he's going to kill anyone else before the film is over. With that detail out of the way, the movie's left to boil over into a lame Die Hard-wanna-be, packing in slam thrills rather than slow-building tension. And, friends, we've all seen that before, too many times to remember. Need I bring up Passenger 57 or Speed 2?
While Stuart has a great eye for little details, he just doesn't pull what he needs from his actors or his own script. Instead, he just lets everything get lost in the shuffle of lame characterizations and borrowed setups. We're left to dig through a pile of stank, hoping like heck we're going to find a pony. Unfortunately, the pony rode off in the with the first half of the movie, with everything else good that the movie had to offer. It's becoming way too common a practice that movies have all of their intricacies in the first act, and offer up the other acts to the pyrotechincal technicians. Like Seven Years in Tibet, I found myself more interested in the story of a minor character rather than the main plotline. I wanted to see more of Ermey's voter-concerned sheriff than I did the FBI guy or the railroad worker and his hitchhiker buddy. His story was more thoughtful and intricate, but they buried it in plot exposition and other unnecessary trifles.
Switchback is the lame-duck thriller this fall. It never had a chance to play with the big guns coming up. It has to hit hard and hit fast at the box office, because November is going to be packed full of high-buck scorers. But it just doesn't live up to its potential, and that is almost unforgiveable in the cash registers. Movies like these thrive on word-of-mouth publicity, and, when the movie really isn't worth talking about, the silence is deadly. Unless you're a (pardon the pun) diehard Quaid or Glover fan, this thing is hardly worth the effort. Any money you spend on this thing is just going to add to the long list of rip-offs in this movie.
Copyrighted image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
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