Andy Fish

Film sound effects man John Travolta is out late one night recording sounds that he might use in his work when suddenly he witnesses (and records) a car seemingly blow out a tire sending it careening into a nearby lake. Travolta jumps in and saves one of the occupants but the driver was already dead. He’ll soon find out there might be more to the accident than meets the eye when we learn that the driver was a popular up and coming politician. BLOW OUT should have been Brian De Palma’s masterpiece, the success or failure of the film is completely on his shoulders as the writer and director, and many reviews have hailed it as such. I think it’s a swing and a big miss. It’s a movie that is beautifully filmed with a an amazing color palette, this is a film that screams out for Blu Ray and I was just about to order a copy from the Criterion Collection when we got to the third act and De Palma completely lost his way. As Alfred Hitchcock explained in many of his interviews when handling a suspense film you have to build a tension and then you either need to deliver where the audience is expecting things to go in a satisfactory way or you have to completely throw them for a loop and in that case it all has to make sense. With BLOW OUT the climax of the film completely enters the realm of the absurd and the plot behaves in such a way I can only imagine De Palma turned the finale over to a seven year old from the Make A Wish Foundation because that’s the only mindset that would find any of these actions believable. Travolta is an interesting actor, he’s both underrated and overrated at the same time, and I’ve seen him give some pretty good performances, this one isn’t bad but he’s not strong enough to carry his co-star Nancy Allen who is wretched. Cast clearly because she’s De Palma’s wife, she’s shrill and completely without any screen presence whatsoever. Dennis Franz, who would go on to bigger things in just a few years, is hammy and over the top as the sleazy private detective behind most of this, and John Lithgow plays a reckless and impossible unthreatening hired killer out to eliminate the “loose strings” of the coverup. BLOW OUT stats out with tremendous potential but then slowly deflates and eventually loses it’s way. The minor “twist” ending is supposed to be shocking but instead it’s just contrived. This plays more like a film school project with amatuerish acting than a major Hollywood release.