Blown Away (1994)

Stephen Hopkins did not want to make a movie about a bomb squad, and the reluctance shows in the best way. Blown Away (1994) is a Boston procedural with an Irish problem, a film that spends its runtime defusing devices and almost no time telling the audience how to feel about them. Jeff Bridges plays Jimmy Dove, a technician counting down to retirement, and Tommy Lee Jones plays the bomber who followed him across the Atlantic. The pleasure here is mechanical: the microphotography of a ticking marble, the sound design that puts us inside the casing. The film trusts suspense to carry its meaning, and mostly it does.

Where it gestures at social awareness, the gestures are faint. Forest Whitaker's Franklin is a competent colleague who earns his moment in the final act, presented without comment, which is the 1990s ensemble approach in its plainest form. Suzy Amis's Kate is a violinist who becomes a car bomb waiting to happen, an object of rescue instead of an agent. The conflict is Irish against Irish, and the screenplay has nothing to say about race, class, or the climate. The villain is an anarchist, but we are never asked to read him as an indictment of anything larger than his own grudges. He is a man with a grievance and a talent for wiring, and that is the whole of him.

The IRA material is melodrama, not history, though a Guildford Four consultant lent the production some texture. The accent work lingers, and has been justly memorialized as among the worst ever committed to celluloid. A film this uninterested in sermonizing is a small relic now, a reminder that a thriller could once simply be a thriller, with flawed men, unearned redemption, and a dog that did not deserve its fate.