'Blast' fails at retro romantic humor

Romantic comedy is a funny thing (no pun intended), often requiring just the right touch, just the right balance to succeed on its dual levels. "Blast from the Past" is a textbook example of romantic comedy gone wrong as it tries to walk the genre line and fails - the comedy works much of the time thanks to an amusingly high concept premise, but the romance angle is little more than a laughing matter.

In 1962, the Cold War reigns supreme and you'd be hard pressed to find a more paranoid - or more prepared - anti-Sputnik than scientist Calvin Webber (Christopher Walken). He and his pregnant, pretty, prefab homemaker wife Helen (Sissy Spacek) live in a pretty, prefab suburban home and give pretty, prefab dinner parties. In the midst of one of these, a freak set of coincidences involving the Russians and a plane crash in the Webber backyard convince Cal that the nuclear onslaught has begun. He

Courtesy of New Line Cinema Alicia Silverstone heats up the screen with Brendan Fraser.

and Helen retreat for 35 years to the massive underground fallout shelter he has spent countless months constructing, after which the radiation will have effectively dissipated.

Days later, Helen gives birth to a son whom they smarmily name Adam with the assumption that because of the blast, he is the last new addition to the human race - or at least the last non-mutant addition. Cal makes his son in his image, feeding him "Honeymooners" reruns and teaching him French and Latin. Helen, for her part, teaches him to swing dance (is it terribly obvious how this will help him later in life?) when she isn't busy trying to snag a buzz off of cough syrup. This is where most of the fun in the movie happens. Walken and Spacek are hilarious as the trapped-in-the-'60s parents, caricatures of themselves. The attention to detail down below is especially fun, with row upon row of batteries that keep the shelter humming and a veritable supermarket's worth of food and supplies.

Attention to detail, however, is not enough when "Blast" moves out of the underground la la land and into the real life la la land of Los Angeles. Adam (Brendan Fraser) emerges from his coccooned existence and encounters the wondrous offerings of life in the city such as sky, public transportation and girls who aren't his mother. While Fraser is well-suited to this kind of role with his slightly off-putting, hammy delivery and cartoonish look that worked wonders for him in "George of the Jungle," his object of desire as played by Alicia Silverstone leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. Her name? Eve. Subtle, very subtle.

Eve is essentially a reprisal of Silverstone's "Clueless" character with a less sizable wallet, and likewise she follows the same arc: she meets Adam and engages in verbal jousting, tries to set him up with other women, watches him connect with a couple of honeybabies on the dance floor and with a little encouragement from a friend - in this case her gay brother Troy (Dave Foley, who looks terrible and acts worse) - realizes that she does indeed love Adam. While all of this worked for her in "Clueless," here all it demonstrates is that Silverstone needs to find some range in her acting or become just another piece of excess Hollywood baggage.

"Blast from the Past" tries to be another piece in the kooky retro puzzle phase that America is caught in these days. It's not a complete failure, either - watching Fraser swing around the dance floor is nice eye candy. It's unfortunate that the bulk of the movie can't live up to the nuclear fear hijinks that characterize our early time with the nuclear Webber family, but at least secondary players Walken and Spacek do their best to pick up the slack where Fraser and Silverstone drop it. That's the funny thing about romantic comedy: sometimes the romance and the comedy are where you least expect to find them.

02-12-99