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Forever
Young
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Forever Young is an effortless but also rather maddening entertainment – expertly, busily patterned on the surface, but avoiding even the slightest intimation of depth. It plays with a fascinating premise – a man who comes back to life after being frozen in a scientific experiment, only to find that the world around him has radically changed. As in David Cronenberg's more dramatic The Dead Zone (1983), this is also the cue for a full-on male weepie, since pilot Mel Gibson never told the love of his former life what he truly felt for her ... Gibson, with his mixture of stoic heroism and childlike sensitivity, is in fact the best feature of this movie. Around him, director Steve Miner (Warlock, 1989) proficiently executes a neat series of plot set-ups and pay-offs involving planes, kids, and a very modern single mother (Jamie Lee Curtis). The film studiously sidesteps all perverse hints and sticky questions (particularly at the finale) and, like the Back to the Future series, offers us a time traveller who is fascinated with telephones and television, but completely indifferent to war, politics and deep social change. MORE Miner: Halloween H2O, Lake Placid, Soul Man © Adrian Martin October 1993 |
