Blown Away
DVD Review

The movie Blown Away, looks promising as it opens in a Belfast prison with the focus on the main villain, IRA bomb expert Gaerity, played by Tommy Lee Jones who makes his escape quite ingeniously, but then it devolves into a predictable cliché.

Next stop Boston, USA where our hero, cop and bomb-disposal expert, Jimmy Dove (Jeff Bridges) who, after a lot of family scenes to establish his character, is called to bomb incident where a he has to defuse a bomb that is linked to a computer where an unfortunate student has to keep typing to prevent if from going off. To be fair, tension builds up quite nicely with this scene. Up to this point, not bad.

Then comes the first of many clichés of "what wire to cut, the red or green" to stop bombs exploding.

Then, still in Boston our Irish villain Gaerity, turns up living in a half-wrecked ship, making bombs and speaking with an appalling Irish accent and an evil laugh that wouldn't sound out of place in an episode of Batman shown on TV back in the sixties. He is out for revenge because it turns out that Dove was a former IRA colleague who turned him in to the authorities and fled to the U.S. Bombs start going off all over the city with Dove speeding from site to site, because he is the only one intelligent enough to realise the awesome danger. To be fair though, some of the bomb scenes are good.

Then…. Dove's family comes under threat so he moves them to a safe location.

Unbelievably, his wife gets fed up, refuses to hide anymore and, being a musician, sets off to play in an open-air concert. But I suppose if she doesn't act so stupidly, there'd be no story! So, does she get blown up along with thousands of fans or does Dove save the day?

The acting of both Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones were of fairly good standard, but I would say that the script let them down a little. Lloyd Bridges also appears as Max, Dove's mentor and does the part some justice, but again there's the funny Irish accent that comes and goes before he is blown up - well he has to be doesn't he! I think it would have been better if the producers had dispensed with the accents altogether.

I think one of the most memorable scenes of the movie is played by character called Franklin, who has to have a booby-trapped bomb defused from earphones he is using to listen to music. His fear comes over quite convincingly and I would have loved to have seen a few more scenes like that.

Perhaps I am being a little unfair to this movie, but when I can leave the lounge, go out to the kitchen, make a coffee, come back in and continue to follow the plot with ease it would not be an understatement to say that the movie is easy to watch.

On the cover of the DVD, we have what is described as "A Dazzling Pyrotechnics Showcase"… It didn't do bad, but I have seen better. The disc includes the original theatre trailer, and chapter search of some 21 scene selections.

Blown Away
Amazon.UK

Blown Away
Amazon USA

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