fun till the last act

Rating: 6/10 (25 August 2007)

Can you believe that only thirty years ago working-class social realism was a commercial cliché? This movie looks and feels like 'Taxi Driver' when the strobe lights are off, and there's cussin' and humpin' all over it. A lot of it is very fun, including the revelation of hearing that Bee Gees stuff in context, as seventies soundtrack music, which turns out to make perfect sense. And it's truly freaky to see John Travolta fawning over bedroom posters of Farrah, Stallone and Al Pacino, and realize that this guy was the next wave - at this remove he's one of them, but here he's standing outside looking in. And he's been caught in the turnstile ever since, of course. Unfortunately the class politics do get pretty muddled, especially in the love-interest department - however pretentious what's-er-name's upward mobility turns out to be, their partnership does turn out to be a means of 'getting out,' an unnecessary conceit. And in order to justify that conceit, things get laid on pretty thick; the paper-thin ironic distance is suddenly dropped, buddy pulls a Sal Mineo on the bridge, and you half think that Badham takes Travolta's ex for a "c*nt" too.In other words, it stops being fun. I had to entertain myself by imagining that Robert Stigwood optioned "Wedding in White" and morphed it into this script in one very loud, three-hour story meeting. Coulda happened!