Movie Review: Blast From The Past 2 ½ Stars

I’m a big fan of Brendan Fraser. He’s the kind of actor I’ll give a whole lot of latitude in the dismal failure department. He just plays lunkheads with such…commitment to being a lunkhead, So, sure he’s in every Pauly Shore movie, but he’s also George Of The Jungle.

Fraser’s Adam Weber in Blast From The Past is more of a blank slate than a lunkhead, but a lunkhead nonetheless. Playing opposite a cynical but darling Alicia Silverstone as love interest, Eve, and supported by Christopher Walken as Adam’s anticommunist scientist father, Sissy Spacek as an alcoholic June Cleaver mom, and a gay Dave Foley as gay Troy, Blast From The Past features an outstanding cast.

It also boasts a terrific premise: on the night of the Cuban missile crisis, Calvin Weber spirits his pregnant wife into their fallout shelter, a self-contained environment fully stocked to last 35 years, the radioactive halflife of the bomb. His wife gives birth to Adam, who grows up completely isolated from all humanity save his parents. Emerging from the shelter thirty-five years later, Dr. Weber witnesses a modern-day Los Angeles looks very much like a post-apocalyptic world -- complete with mutant inhabitants. Adam is sent forth to stock up on supplies and, hopefully, meet a healthy nonmutant girl. Classic set-up for a fish-out-of-water comedy-of-errors.

But Blast From The Past too often falls flat, suffering from not enough jokes and too many of the same bits played over and over. Former Kid-In-The-Hall, Dave Foley is by far the shining star, possessing the uncanny quality of making even the feeblest jokes sound funny.

Hopefully his turn as Dudley Do-Right will restore my Fraserlust.