Review by Bob
Ignizio
People love to
whine and moan about how such and such a movie is “just a rip-off”
of another film. We've seen this recently with THE HUNGER GAMES
and BATTLE ROYALE. The truth is, though, there are only so
many basic stories and they get recycled all the time. And as long as
the recycling is done well enough, everybody is happy. Case in point:
how often have you heard anyone complain that STAR WARS EPISODE
IV: A NEW HOPE is “just a rip-off” of Akira Kurosawa's THE
HIDDEN FORTRESS? If you've never seen THE HIDDEN
FORTRESS, check it out and you'll see I'm not kidding. So it's
not really an issue for me that the plot of TOUCHBACK is one
we've seen variations on in countless movies and TV shows; it's what
writer/director Don Handfield does with the premise that matters.
In a nutshell,
TOUCHBACK combines elements of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
and PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, to name just two prominent
films with similar plots. Scott (Brian Presley) was the star
quarterback at a small southern Ohio school in his high school years.
During the final minutes of “the big game”, Scott chose to ignore
his coach (Kurt Russell) and run a different play. His decision results in victory
for the team, but Scott winds up with a debilitating injury that
dashes any hopes for a future in the sport.
Flash forward 15
years and Scott is a soybean farmer struggling to support his wife
(Melanie
Lynskey) and two kids. The bank is about to foreclose on his home, and when
the only harvesting machine available for rent suffers mechanical
problems, it seems all hope is lost. So like George Bailey in LIFE Scott
decides to end it all, using carbon monoxide fumes from his beat up
truck instead of jumping off a bridge. No guardian angel arrives to
intervene; instead, Scott wakes up to find himself transported back
to his high school days ala PEGGY SUE. He's apparently been given a second chance,
but changing the past could mean losing his future family.
TOUCHBACK
is very much old fashioned schmaltzy filmmaking, but with the vast
majority of movies these days trying so hard to be edgy, it's kind of a nice
change of pace. You do still occasionally get this kind of thing from
overtly Christian filmmakers, but TOUCHBACK doesn't ascribe
any religious overtones to its miraculous happenings. Whatever your
spiritual background (or lack thereof), you can watch the film
without feeling like you're being preached to.
There aren't many
surprises here. We know what Scott is going to decide and the
main lessons he's going to learn long before he does, and we know one way or another
things are going to turn out okay. The film's portrayal of small town
rural Ohio life isn't perfect, but it's more realistic most films set
in that milieu. There are other little details that the realism
police will likely point out (for example, I don't know much about
football, but even I know that quarterbacks don't run the ball almost
every play), but given that this is a fantasy set as much in “old
movie land” as 1990s southern Ohio, it seems petty to nitpick.
My biggest
complaint is that the film is too long (almost 2 hours), with a good chunk of the
unnecessary running time coming from the “big game” scene late in
the film. Up until this point, TOUCHBACK has not really been
much of a sports movie, and to suddenly throw in 20-plus minutes
worth of game play, none of which feels all that exciting, is a
misstep. And then there's the solitary black member of the Scott's
team who has never actually played in a game, and in fact prefers to
stay on the bench. I don't think there's any intentional overt racism
here, but when the only black character in the movie is used solely
as scaredy-cat comic relief, it's hard not to think of some of the
less pleasant aspects of Hollywood's past portrayal of minorities.
Those caveats
aside, I think Handfield does an okay job putting a fresh spin on
this tried and true material. There aren't a whole lot of family
films these days that mom and/or dad can go see with their tweens and
teens without one faction or the other cringing, and I think for at least some
families, particularly those living in small rural towns similar to
the one depicted here, this would fit the bill. For me, it was a
little too corny to fully resonate, but there were aspects of the
movie I appreciated (like Scott realizing what a dick he used to be
in high school), and in all honesty I wound up enjoying TOUCHBACK
more than I expected. 2 1/2 out of 4 stars.
Got to interject that I did eventually see THE HIDDEN FORTRESS. Could detect very little if any resemblance between that thing and STAR WARS. Also I didn't discern the famous scene in which Kurosawa allegedly had the whole cast/crew stay still for days/weeks while he waited for a particular cloud formation. Conspiracy theory: Kurosawa-san figured he had a slow-moving, not terribly momentous samurai flick on his hands, threatened to hari-kari himself all over the clean rugs of wimpy western movie critics unless they floated legends that would get more people to see it, like that it directly led to STAR WARS. Now for an encore, let's point out the similarities between KAGAMUSHA and AVATAR. I will grant you that SEVEN SAMURAI had a lot to do with MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, at least.
ReplyDeleteCharles, really? The opening scenes with the two goofball guys wandering around are almost identical to C3PO and R2 wandering around Tatooine. The general is Ben Kenobi, the female lead is Leia, and the bad guy is Vader. Granted, there's no Luke, Han Solo, or Chewbacca counterparts, but there's still a number of plot points and characters lifted right out of 'Fortress', and Lucas has admitted as much in the past (who knows what his revisionist stance is these days). Anyway, the similarities practically jumped out at me when I watched it.
ReplyDeleteWhich takes nothing away from 'Star Wars', mind you, just as the fact that 'A Fistful of Dollars' steals pretty much the entire screenplay of Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo' (which was itself a rip-off of Dashiel Hammet's novel 'Red Harvest') in no way diminishes how great Sergio Leone's first spaghetti western is, or as you point out the fact that 'The Magnificent Seven' is a western remake of 'Seven Samurai' in now way diminishes that film.
In each case the directors doing the stealing were talented artists in their own right who re-purposed the material for their own ends/styles. I'd rather see that than the soulless remakes Hollywood churns out these days.