You know that fall is coming when summer movies all begin to blend together. Was that flying truck in Twister or Independence Day or both? A fireball flamed through a tunnel in The Rock, or was it in Fled? Well, flying trucks, fireballs and, oh yes, a unique element, an iceboat-helicopter chase, are all crammed into Chain Reaction, but they never add up to more than a run-of-the-reactor thriller.
Despite all the stunts and special effects, Chain Reaction's plot, character development and dialogue are as barren as the snowy winter landscapes that pervade the movie. Chalk one up in the miss column for director Andrew Davis, who turned 1993's The Fugitive into such a snappy and tense piece of work. In Chain, Reeves plays a machinist at a University of Chicago lab who helps scientists transform water into hydrogen, a discovery that could provide cheap, unlimited power. Before you can say Eureka! bad guys steal the technology, blow up the lab and frame Reeves and the comeliest of the physicists (Rachel Weisz, showing little of the spark she had in Stealing Beauty), sending these two off and running. Call in the fireballs.
Reeves is his usual stolid self, possibly even more stolid here because he spends the entire movie clad in slouchy flannel overshirts and lumpy winter parkas. He has zero chemistry with Weisz—it doesn't help that the two look like siblings sporting identical shaggy brunet dos. Freeman, playing a powerful scientist-politician, is here to lend class to the movie, and he does, but not enough. (PG-13)
Robin Williams
Williams, in the latest star vehicle à la Gump, plays a boy whose body is aging at four times the normal rate. By the time he is 10, he has reached a physical middle age and is trapped in Williams's hirsute, thickchested body. It must feel like being buried in a roll of shag carpeting. But Williams moves through the film very lightly, never overdoing the physical comedy of a giant squeezing in among other schoolchildren, not milking the pathos of a boy who has to touch up his graying, thinning hair. Williams himself seems to have grown up into an unexpectedly soulful actor.
Director Francis Ford Coppola keeps everything quiet and sweet, as he did in the 1986 fantasy Peggy Sue Got Married, extracting simple truths about the swift passage of life.
Despite all this, one is not grateful. Nothing in Jack manages to erase the crushingly sad fact that it's about a doomed child, an Elephant Man for kids. (PG-13)
Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman
In this gleefully perverse children's film, the good little girl of the title gets to do bad things but for all the right reasons. Like applying industrial-strength glue to the fedora belonging to her odiously crass father so that his hat won't budge, no matter how hard he tugs. Like using her telekinetic powers—Matilda is a younger, more benevolent Carrie—to save classmates from a sadistic principal.
Matilda, based on a 1988 Roald Dahl children's book, follows the travails of an intellectual whiz kid (Mara Wilson, the adorable, saucer-eyed tot from Mrs. Doubtfire) who was born to neglectful, aggressively lowbrow parents (DeVito and Perlman). "Why read when you've got a television set right in front of you?" DeVito says, snarling at the 6-year-old, ripping up her copy of Moby Dick because, from the title, he assumes it's dirty. Matilda also has to outsmart the tyrannical principal (Pam Ferris), a woman whose motto is, "Use the rod, spank the child."
As both a director and a performer, DeVito brings a zestfully unrestrained enthusiasm to his work here. Matilda's, amusingly despicable, over-the-top adult characters bring to mind a kiddie version of earlier DeVito films such as Ruthless People and The War of the Roses. But don't be scared off. Young viewers, at least those over 7 and with a parent in the seat beside them, will get that all this hyperventilating is for comic effect. Who, after all, believes you could really slip a slimy, wriggly newt into the principal's water glass? (PG)
>the Titanic
THE UNSINKABLE DRAMA
MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE GREAT MINDS think alike—or more likely it's because movie and TV executives think alike—but in Hollywood ideas do seem to come in clusters. Remember how the early '90s brought us multiple Robin Hood movies? How two films about the Ebola virus were going nearly head-to-head for a while? The dual Wyatt Earp movies?
Get ready now for the year of the Titanic. The supposedly unsinkable British luxury liner that went down with 1,500 victims in the North Atlantic on April 14-15, 1912, has inspired several films, most notably 1958's A Night to Remember, starring David McCallum. But in the next 12 months a whole fleet of new Titanics will sail into view.
The award for the most expensive retelling goes to director James Cameron's Titanic, soon to shoot in Mexico, a country known for its near-by icebergs, at a cost of $100 million. The presumed summer of '97 blockbuster features a shipboard romance between first-class passenger Kate Winslet (Sense and Sensibility) and third-class Leonardo DiCaprio (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?). Beating Cameron to the lifeboats, however, will be CBS's four-hour November miniseries, also titled Titanic (starring Peter Gallagher, George C. Scott and Eva Marie Saint), and NBC's two-hour documentary titled—what else?—Titanic. (The latter will run during either the November or May sweeps.) Theater buffs, meanwhile, can consider a musical Titanic, sailing to Broadway next spring.
Can all of these Titanics, float? Probably not, but, says Cameron's executive producer Rae Sanchini, "we welcome the other projects. We see them as ancillary marketing tools." The Titanic, she adds, "is a subject no one will ever tire of."
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