Subject: REVIEW: PHENOMENON (1996)

From: [email-masked] (Michael J. Legeros)
Date: 4 Jul 1996 09:50:28 GMT

PHENOMENON
                       A film review by Michael John Legeros
                        Copyright 1996 Michael John Legeros

(Touchstone)
Directed by     John Turtletaub
Written by      Gerald DiPego
Cast            John Travolta, Kyra Sedgwick, Forest Whitaker, Robert
                Duvall
MPAA Rating     "PG-13"
Running Time    123 minutes
Reviewed at     General Cinemas at Pleasant Valley, Raleigh, NC 
                (29JUN96)

==

     This crowd-pleasing melodrama is built around a nifty premise:
popular George Malley (John Travolta), a small-town auto mechanic of
average intelligence, undergoes a change on the night of his 37th
birthday.  He becomes smarter, devouring whole books in the evening
because he doesn't want to sleep.  He begin inventing things, like a
manure-fueled motor that gets 90 miles to the gallon.  He even acquires
such mysterious metaphysical talents as telekinesis and the ability to
predict when an earthquake is coming.  Poor George.  He's probably the
sweetest guy in his small Northern California town and, yet, he's just
as baffled as his doctor (Robert Duvall), his best friend (Forrest
Whitaker), and the divorcee-with-kids (Myra Sedgwick) that he dotes
upon.

     No extrasensory perception is required to predict how the rest of
the movie plays out.  PHENOMENON is designed to go down easy, with no
sharp edges and nothing bitter about the taste.  You know the drill:
warm humor, smiling people, loud musical cues, and all of those
oh-so-quaint, sun-baked surroundings.  The whole thing is about 90%
predictable and that's exactly how the director, Jon Turtletaub (WHILE
YOU WERE SLEEPING), wants it.  He may not be another Spielberg-- a
critical omission, here, is any genuine sense of wonder-- but he does
know how to take a coolly calculated story and turn it into a satisfying
and seemingly spontaneous product.  (Sci-fi fans, however, may be
disappointed to find that Turtletaub is much more interested in the
story's romantic implications than the scientific.)

     Unfortunately, what develops into an honest and rather wholesome
movie is all but negated in the last half-hour.  PHENOMENON turns ugly
somewhere around the ninety-minute mark.  The plot begins taking odd,
manipulative turns and, by the time that we've been subjected to yet
another pop song-scored montage, the story is clearly, though slowly,
spiraling out of control.  These "extra" dramatics are hideous, entirely
unnecessary, *and* suggest that neither the director nor the writer had
any idea about how to end this movie.  (The filmmakers should've quit
while they were ahead.) There is enough emotion at the very end, though,
to satisfy the movie's intended audience.  They'll cry, leave, and be
none the wiser. 

     Grade: C+

--

Mike Legeros - Raleigh, NC 
[email-masked] (h) - [email-masked] (w)
Visit me in MOVIE HELL <URL http://www.n-vision.com/hell/>