Blow Out

Brian De Palma's reworking of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960s classic, Blow-Up, starts strongly and has some interesting ideas in play at times but ultimately loses itself amongst its broad action thriller strokes. 

John Travolta plays Jack Terri, a sound engineer employed by an exploitation film-maker, who accidentally record what he believes to be the murder of a Presidential candidate in a car crash and must convince the powers-that-be of it before he and the young woman (Nancy Allen) he pulled from the wreckage are bumped off by the conspirators .

The film starts niftily with an amusing satire of one of Jack’s teen slasher films (a corpus of work which includes titles such as ''Blood Beach,'' ''Blood Beach 2'' and ''Bordello of Blood'') and the producer’s search for the perfect scream. It represents the kind of self-reflexive meta-commentary on film violence that would have pleased Antonioni and have modern film studies undergrads drooling.  Thereafter it drops into the main plot, which is Blow-Up by way of  Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (which was in turn inspired by the Antonioni film) with Jack trying to decipher some kind of Watergate-ish cover-up of a Chappaquiddick-like event.

All this is good material but instead of using it to build a tight story with political resonances, about the mid-point De Palma introduces a psycho-killer (John Lithgow) and from thence on the film progressively loses its way amongst the routine stylistic tropes of the genre, culminating in a big but empty red-white-and blue action set piece, the conspiracy theory material simply wafting away before the film briefly returns to the promising opening gambit.

A cast-against-type Travolta who was then in his first career incarnation as the pin-up boy of Saturday Night Fever  (1977) and Grease  (1978) (he had also starred in De Palma's 1976 film, Carrie) makes a committed effort in his role although his chin dimple tends to command the bulk of our attention. Nancy Allen, who was married to De Palma at time (she had also starred in the director’s previous film, Dressed To Kill) has a fun time as an air-headed makeup artist whilst Dennis Franz (who had also been in Dressed To Kill) has a small but winning role as Manny Karp, a sleazy studio photographer.

 

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