Blown Away

Blown Away opens with a car exploding. The flaming wreck careens into a gas station, which also explodes. This tells you everything you need to know about the movie you’re about to watch. For good and bad.

Corey Haim plays Rich, a college-age activities director at a Canadian ski resort where the season is winding down and so, apparently, is everyone’s judgment. He meets Megan, played by Nicole Eggert, an ice-blonde with a cigarette habit and a talent for disappearing. Rich falls hard. Megan remains elusive. She has her reasons. She fears her father. She believes he killed her mother. She thinks she’s next. Would Rich help her kill him first? Would he do that for her? Rich has known this woman for perhaps two weeks. He considers it.

Let’s get it out of the way. This is a Basic Instinct knockoff. It has the femme fatale, the edgy nudity, the third-act twists that twist mainly because the screenwriter needed them to. Grading on that curve, though, this made-for-cable effort isn’t half bad. It never rivals its inspiration, but it moves, and the Canadian locations give it something most erotic thrillers of this vintage lack: atmosphere. All those leafless trees stretching to the horizon. You feel the cold isolation.

But the real fascination here is meta-textual. If you grew up in the 1980s with the “Two Coreys”, this is a strange and absorbing artifact. Just five years removed from License to Drive, their arguable commercial peak, here they are making an HBO movie. Haim does nude scenes. They play not plucky teens but unabashed womanizers drifting between jobs and parties. You get the uneasy sense you’re seeing something closer to the real thing.

Feldman, third-billed, plays Haim’s brother. The role is underwritten, but Feldman finds something in it anyway, a mix of creepy and charismatic that steals every scene he’s in. Haim seems fine with this, which helps convince you these two share a complicated history. But you wonder: given his lesser billing, how much of Feldman’s character’s resentment toward Haim’s is acting? For those of a certain age, it’s fun to speculate.

Eggert is good as Megan. She’s alluring enough that you believe Haim would ignore every red flag she waves, which is most of them. Her chemistry with Haim was genuine. The two later got engaged. You can tell. There’s a recklessness in their scenes together that no director can manufacture.

Haim’s breakthrough in Lucas proved he has talent. I wouldn’t call this performance great, but he is convincing, and the movie is smart enough to let him be a reactor rather than a hero. He watches. He doubts. He goes along anyway. Most of us would.

I do have questions. In one scene, Rich hides from Megan’s father by dangling from a bedroom balcony, clinging by his fingertips. Tense. Effective. Then Megan lures her father back inside and Rich simply drops to the ground. How high was that balcony? If he could just drop, why dangle? Later, a character discovers a motorcycle rigged with a bomb hidden inside the gas tank. We see its digital timer ticking away, submerged in fuel. Fine, but how did it get in there? The bomb fills most of the tank, which would also mean the bike runs out of gas sooner than anyone expects, but never mind the logistics. How did it fit through the opening?

I’m sure there are other holes. To the film’s credit, it moves fast enough that I didn’t notice them.