Fear and Low Things

As the world gets meaner year after year, it grows increasingly difficult for Hollywood to come up with bad guys who seem really, really bad. It used to be enough for a villain to kill someone or knock off a bank. Nowadays he's got to kill someone and eat the victim's liver for dinner. He's got to blow up the bank, preferably with lots of people still in it — and that's whether or not he's actually robbed the place. Serial killers and terrorists are the only miscreants potent enough to put the scare into today's audiences, and 1994, with offerings like Speed, True Lies, and Blown Away, has definitely been a year for terrorists, who in two of these movies not only get to wreck everything but provide the hero with a secret sharer of sorts.

While terrorist acts have almost always had a place on the silver screen, one of cinema's first great terrorists was Fry (Norman Lloyd), in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur. He's the fellow hanging from the Statue of Liberty's torch at the end of that movie as Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) tries to pull him up to safety. Kane wasn't trying to save Fry because he was a relative, or because they shared a connection in the past. While subsequent Hollywood treatments of terrorism like to play the doppelganger card to the hilt, Saboteur's wrong-man gambit (falsely accused Cummings knows that only the real terrorist can clear his name) was played strictly for thrills.

It took a while for the terrorist to make a major big-screen comeback, because terrorism didn't loom terribly large in the American consciousness for quite some time after WWII; few mad bombers were around to spoil Eisenhower's America-as-golf-tourney, and the chaotic '60s saw the country more rent from within than from without. And when the geopolitical tenor of the times-the escalation of Middle East conflicts, frequent skyjackings-finally made terrorism a nightmare cliche in the '70s, the terrorist was cast as a contriver of catastrophe, the human factor in what were essentially offshoots of that popular '70s genre the disaster movie. Certainly Black Sunday, about an Arab terrorist's stab at sabotaging the Super Bowl via a bomb-carrying blimp piloted by Bruce Dern as an angry Vietnam vet, had the disaster movie's scope and scale. It also played wild cards that were probably responsible for its box office disappointment: Sunday's Arab terrorist is a woman (played by Marthe Keller, looking improbably Aryan in spite of a dye job), and the film tries to put her activities into some kind of perspective. At one point, a diplomat comments to Israeli agent Robert Shaw that she and her kind ''(are) your creation.'' Naturally, this sort of thing didn't sit well with a lot of people, and Hollywood's subsequent attempts at presenting terrorists in a way that wouldn't touch so many real-life nerves have often been laughable. It's simply easier to deaccentuate the political and concentrate on the personal.

The great terrorist action movie of our day, Die Hard, did this in two ways. Chief terrorist Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) is a suave German who used to be aligned with a radical group, but is now in the game for the money, taking over a skyscraper to enact a daring multimillion-dollar heist. The combination of unalloyed greed with chic, erudite nihilism made Rickman particularly hissable. The movie also introduced the doppelganger element that so many terrorism-themed movies have since exploited-the scene in which Rickman and lone wolf John McClane (Bruce Willis) meet face-to-face in a whose-mask-will-drop-first scenario puts across the two-faces-of-the-same-coin theme nicely.

Then there's the terrorist-as-unwitting-creation-of-the-hero scenario. Sure, in Patriot Games Sean Bean's Sean Miller is a ruthless IRA operative from the start, but once Harrison Ford (as CIA agent Jack Ryan) kills Miller's brother, he gets really mad. Since most Americans don't have much idea of what the IRA wants anyway, Hollywood finds the Irish terrorist convenient (the media tends to depict their activities while downplaying their demands).

It's with the Irish that Blown Away resides, although not with the IRA. The movie takes great pains to establish that Ryan Gaerity (Tommy Lee Jones), an escaped Irish explosives guru hiding out in Boston, was too wacko even for them. Lolling in the local pub, Gaerity is shocked to discover that his former old-country protege Jimmy Dove (Jeff Bridges) is now on the Boston police's bomb squad, defusing bombs as penance for having made a few in his reckless youth. Gaerity decides to whip up several doozies to avenge a perceived betrayal of the cause by his onetime brother-in-arms.

Blown Away establishes a closer relationship between terrorist and antiterrorist than any previous movie in the genre — an interesting idea at least. But the movie's meandering script tries to juggle too many balls at once — Dove's relationship with his new family, his hounding by a new hotshot partner (Forrest Whitaker, in a truly eccentric performance), and more. Plus, director Stephen Hopkins cheats like mad: In a scene where Dove's wife and stepdaughter might be in danger of triggering one of Gaerity's could-be-anywhere bombs, he inserts close-ups of every potential ''ignition'' — a stove lighting, a telephone cord being plugged in. And the movie's climax is basically Speed on a smaller scale, only it's unclear just what the driver of the rigged vehicle has to do to prevent the explosives from going off. Blown Away constantly squanders its potential for gripping personal drama and action thrills, and as a result, this would-be incendiary barely ruffles your hair. Saboteur: A-; Black Sunday: B+; Die Hard: A; Patriot Games: C+; Blown Away: C-

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