I have never rollerbladed. By the time it caught on and became yet
another “Extreme Sport” (or “X-Treme” for the marketing savvy), I was well and
fully over it. I did, however,
rollerskate on occasion back in the day (cue the theme to The Andy Griffith Show). And
like most things in my youth that I took joy in, I did it in the most low-rent,
Army Pete, hand-me-down sort of way imaginable.
My first pair of rollerskates (nay, my only pair) were these hideous white
leather numbers with red accents. They
were maybe a step up from the metal slabs with wheels that you could just strap
onto the bottom of your sneakers. What
made them even more exceptionally crappy were the tiny clay wheels. They looked like they were made out of very
old rocks (possible from Stonehenge), and they were as noisy as the proverbial
dump truck rolling through a nitroglycerin plant (thank you, Uncle Lewis). They were the kind of wheels that if you hit
anything thicker than a leaf, you stopped dead and went ass over chisel onto
the very unforgiving ground. There was
also no way to stop on the skates, so you either grabbed onto the nearest solid
object (usually a nice, rusty fence) or ran into the nearest patch of grass
(which again would send you ass over chisel onto the very unforgiving ground). I don’t recall if I ever wore them to the
local skate rink, Skate Odyssey, but
I want to say I probably did. After all,
there was no way I could afford skate rentals, and the rink wouldn’t have larger
skates for a kid like me with extraordinarily wide, fat feet (which I still
have and the shitty arches to go with them).
Yes, dear reader, I most likely rode around Skate Odyssey, jamming to Loverboy’s
“Working for the Weekend,” wearing a pair of rollerskates that would have sent Jim Bray into fits of apoplexy. And I did it with my head held high (or at
the absolute minimum, not hung in shame).
Stick that in your pipe, Mitchell Goosen (Shane McDermott)!
The aforementioned Mitchell
(whom, bizarrely, no one ever refers to as “Goose”) just loves blading from his
house to the beach and catching some tasty waves every single day of his lazy
life. However, when his parents (Louan Gideon and Jim Jansen) get a grant to do a zoological study in Australia,
Mitch finds himself shunted off to Cincinnati, Ohio with Aunt Irene (Edie McClurg) and Uncle Louis (Patrick O’Brien). Teaming up with oddball cousin Wiley (Seth Green), Mitchell soon discovers
that his laidback attitude may be a bit much in the landlocked states of the
Union.
The very first thing that should
strike you about Rob Bowman’s Airborne is its heavy reliance on
fantasies. What’s a little more
interesting is in how we are introduced to this motif. When Mitchell goes to his first class at his
new school, he catches the eye of Jack’s (Chris
Conrad) girlfriend Debbie (Katrina
Fiebig). This is immediately followed
by Jack grabbing Mitchell and throwing him through a window. But, of course, our very next cut is of Jack,
fuming but seated, this shot matching the one which preceded his outburst. Mere moments later, Debbie fantasizes about
Mitchell with his shirt off, sunlight beaming down over him. The first two fantasies in the film don’t
belong to our protagonist, yet they go a long way in grounding the approach to
the story and the world that Mitchell has entered. These are teens, and teens have very strong,
very immediate urges. It’s also a great
shorthand to set up some primary character relationships. It doesn’t really pay off on any of them
(which I’ll get to later), but their establishment is solid stuff.
By contrast, Mitchell constantly
fantasizes about the rolling waves he misses so much. What’s odd here is that, the wave symbolism
has no deeper connection to the plot, its on-the-nose explanation from the
protagonist being as skin deep as skin deep gets (which would be just skin
deep). In what is perhaps one of the
most frustrating dream sequences ever put on film, we see the waves, Mitchell
wakes up, and then relates his convoluted dream which we have not been privy to
outside of the water imagery. All of the
fantasies in the film are frustrating in similar regard because outside of
generating a slight amount of visual stimulation, they have no bearing on the
story whatsoever. In that respect at
least, they are fantasies as teens may experience and process them, but from a
viewer standpoint, their lack of meaning despite their emphasis throughout renders
them superfluous.
I mentioned the stymieing of
expectations, and this is the film’s biggest flaw. We expect the primary conflict in the film to
be between Mitchell and Jack with Debbie complicating things with her puppy
love for Mitch and Mitch’s puppy love for Nikki (Brittney Powell) growing. It
isn’t. We expect Mitchell to grudgingly
gain the respect of his new peers by teaming up with them to beat the Preps in
their beloved sport of hockey, thus learning something about himself and coming
to admire his teammates as equals. He
doesn’t. We expect Mitchell to get taken
down a peg and understand that he doesn’t, in fact, have the answer to
everything (something McDermott
punctuates by constantly ending every sentence with a jaw-clenched rictus) and
that there is as much value in the relationships he is forming in Ohio as those
he left in California. He doesn’t, and
his obstinate self-righteousness is truly nerve-grinding to put up with, to
boot. In much the same way that the
fantasies are essentially meaningless, the conflicts in the story are also
meaningless, because the filmmakers don’t seem to care enough about any of them
to develop them beyond passing fancies.
I’m not sure if Bowman and company thought they were
being more clever than they actually are in confounding audience assumptions at
every turn, but by giving us surrogates to resolve those expectations and then
deriving no real sense of progress with these surrogates, instead of providing
us with something to champion as a standout work in a cliché genre, we get an
admixture which is still enjoyable for the notes it hits but lacking in any
resonance outside of its value as a snapshot of the Nineties (and not even a
very illuminating snapshot, at that). The
film is still entertaining enough on a strictly surface level, and it could
make a decent third feature on a triple bill with Rad and Thrashin’. But all by its lonesome, it’s a schizophrenic
mélange, a highlight reel of a more cohesive movie that may very well only
exist in Mitchell Goosen’s fantasies.
MVT: Bowman’s direction is highly capable, and the film looks great, so
I certainly can’t take that away from anyone.
If he had a better script, however…
Make Or Break: The race down
the Devil’s Backbone (read: the entirety of Cincinnati, Ohio) is the
standout. It’s remarkably well-blocked,
it’s well-edited by Harry B. Miller III,
and the cinematography by Daryn Okada
is dynamic and nicely framed, capturing the locations attractively.
Score: 6.75/10