Half-Assed Movie Reviews

March 29, 2009:  Vanishing Point (1997)

I’ve been a Vanishing Point (1971) fan for nearly 20 years now.  I watched this 1997 TV remake of the film on the same night as the original.  I had not seen this before.  As a Half-Assed movie reviewer of 80+ movies now, this is the first time I find myself reviewing a made-for-TV movie, and I deliberated for a while about whether or not I would count TV movies for my reviews.  I decided that there were several I’ve been meaning to revisit (And the Band Played On, Barbarians at the Gate), ones I’d like to bring to the attention of my readers (Dead Solid Perfect, An American Christmas Carol – yeah, yeah, I know), and the clincher, if I ever come across Killdozer (1974) again, I will NEED to write about that.  So, TV movies are in.

This was part of the so-called “Action Pack” series of syndicated made-for-TV movies in the late 1990s, rehashing old concepts and remaking old movies for cheap and easy TV ratings.  It seems to me that it’s actually a good idea (keep in mind this predates the current tedium of any and every previous concept being made into a movie – for heaven’s sake, someone just bought the movie rights for Bazooka Joe bubble gum), but the execution of this example is just horrendous.

Interestingly, we have a pre-stardom Viggo Mortensen as Kowalski, several years before Lord of the Rings catapulted him to the A-list.  Unfortunately, he’s now Jimmy Kowalski, so the mysterious character from the original, driving through people’s lives, with no first name as a symbol of the fact that nobody knows him, is now a sympathetic everyman.  Further cementing this descent is the fact that the purposeless crazy drive through multiple states now has a specific and understandable reason – so that Jimmy can get to his wife back home who has unexpectedly gone into labour, with Mom’s and baby’s health at risk.  If he had stopped for 3 minutes to think, and maybe not been so belligerent from the moment he found this out, maybe he could have been in a police escort instead of a police chase.

But no, instead we’ve got a comical chase movie with setups that make no sense, a sheriff who decides (after a cop car is totaled) to continue pursuit in his own 1968 Dodge Charger (which is then totaled), an FBI guy hell-bent on catching Kowalski because of some half-baked unproven federal charge from years ago, and a climax which either doesn’t make sense or isn’t properly explained.  This is an absurd approach to a movie, even a TV movie, and with the added “bonus” of Jason Priestley as the DJ with a psychic link to Kowalski, keeping him informed along the way over the radio waves.

Don’t bother with the updated Vanishing Point.  The original isn’t for everyone but is a classic worth looking at.  This one isn’t for anyone.

TV movie travesty insults the original.