Blown Away (1994) * *

Directed by:  Stephen Hopkins

Starring:  Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones, Suzy Amis, Forest Whitaker, Lloyd Bridges

Blown Away contains scenes of mild interest which are islands onto themselves.   A story of a Boston bomb squad cop tracking a mad bomber from his past should be crackling with suspense and tension.     It never achieves liftoff.    Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones are very talented and accomplished Oscar-winning actors.    They deserve better than to be in a film that feels so generic.     Blown Away isn't awful, but just ordinary and sometimes ridiculous. 

Bridges stars as Jimmy Dove, a Boston bomb squad cop who can expertly disarm even the most complex bombs.    In the first thirty minutes alone, he has to disarm two bombs by figuring out which colored wire to snip at just the right time.    It is usually the red wire, it seems, which follows a certain logic.    However, haven't mad bombers figured out that if they install wires or paint wires all the same color, it would make things very hard on the poor bomb squad guys?   

On the loose in Boston is a bomber with an axe to grind with Jimmy, so he threatens to blow up or blows up people that are close to him.     The Troubles in Ireland play a part in this backstory, since the bomber Ryan Gaerity (Jones) is Irish.     Jones can play villains with the best of them.     Despite his shaky Irish accent, he is still a good villain.     Bridges plays a sympathetic hero whose past has come back to haunt him.    There are no issues here with the performances.

Some of the bombs and triggers Gaerity constructs are agonizingly and needlessly complex.    It is as if he built them just so the cameraman could follow a pinball down endless chutes and ladders just to ignite the flame that will detonate the bomb.     How does Gaerity test this mechanism to see if it will work?    What if the ball's path is detoured slightly by even a fraction of an inch?    I picture him driving himself batty if, after all the bells and whistles, the freaking flame doesn't light.    "What a pain in the arse," he mutters as he tries to figure out what went wrong.

Gaerity's other bombs are equally as complicated, including the one which blows up under an overpass.      Jimmy deducts that the trigger lit this, which triggered this, shot a ball over to the opposite wall, and then blew up the whole area.    It is Gaeity's good fortune that no one saw him setting up this contraption.    He could respond like Doc Brown did in Back To The Future, "It's a science experiment."   Again, how does he know if the bomb will work as intended? 

Jimmy has a wife and stepdaughter who become targets, as does his Uncle Max (Lloyd Bridges) who was Jeff's real life father.     Their last scene together is poignant, but once again how is no one around to see Gaerity tying an old man to a statue on a playground...with a bomb attached to him?     I have been accused of looking too deeply into movies and analyzing them.     I have been told that I should just enjoy a movie and not think so much.     Those are fair points, I suppose, but I'll remember that when they start goofing on the implausibility of the next Taken movie.     Or even this one if they should see it again on cable.