Movie Review: Promised Land (1987)

A drama about dreams both broken and non-existent, Promised Land threatens to say something important but remains mired in the company of uninteresting characters.

It's 1984, and in the small town of Ashville, Utah, David Hancock (Jason Gedrick) is the high school basketball star, dating cheerleader Mary Daley (Tracy Pollan) and destined for a college scholarship. Their classmate Danny Rivers (Kiefer Sutherland) is socially awkward and sarcastically nicknamed Senator. He also has a crush on Mary. Despite having no plans or prospects, Danny quits school and leaves town without telling his parents.

Two years later, David is a police officer back in Ashville, his college and sports dreams already shattered. Mary comes back from her college for a Christmas visit. Meanwhile, Danny is in Nevada, squatting in an abandoned warehouse. On a whim, he marries Bev Sykes (Meg Ryan), a woman he met just three days prior. Danny and Bev start the long drive to Ashville where he wants to reconnect with his parents. Meanwhile, David and Mary are unsure where their relationship is going.

Apparently based on real events, Promised Land never quite gets to whatever profound statements it was seeking. With the backing of executive producer Robert Redford, writer and director Michael Hoffman has potentially interesting small-town social topics to work with and an eye for beauty within sparse landscapes. But the movie lands flat, bogged down with David and Mary as one bickering maybe-couple, while Danny and Bev embark on an tedious road trip. 

The jock who peaked in high school, the cheerleader blossoming in college, the misfit still discovering himself, and the wild free-spirit are all defined within the opening 30 minutes. The script lacks meaningful context, progression, and compelling arcs, and the acting often dips into melodramatics. The young cast members do their best while in some cases still learning their craft, but are far from rescuing the sparse material and clunky dialogue.

David as a police officer loves shooting his service revolver at a makeshift shooting range, and the borderline unstable Bev also has a gun, so the hints of something bad about to happen are clear. Similarly obvious is the theme of young men from small towns struggling to make something of themselves with minimal familial support, while Ronald Reagan hovers over the country from his television perch. Promised Land is an idea waiting to happen, getting lost both in small town angst and the featureless desert.



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Movie Review: Iron Eagle (1986)

It is difficult to imagine a worse advertisement for the 1980s. Horrible hair. Horrible soundtrack of limp rock. Horrible script. Horrible performances by horrible actors. Horrible villain spouting horrible one-liners with a horrible accent. And the most horrible, jingoistic, Reagan-era cowboy mentality pretending to be a viable solution to a crisis.

Iron Eagle somehow passed for entertainment in 1986. It's the story of Doug (Jason Gedrick), the hot-headed teenaged son of Air Force pilot Ted Masters (Tim Thomerson). On a mission over the Mediterranean, Ted is shot down, captured, tried and sentenced to be executed by an enemy country (Libya, although never named). When the official U.S. response is timid, young Doug, who is a hotshot fighter pilot himself, partners with the grizzled and semi-retired Colonel "Chappy" Sinclair (Louis Gossett Jr.) to plan and launch the most unlikely of rescue missions. Doug and Chappy somehow arrange to steal a couple of F-16s, then they pull-off a couple of unauthorized mid-air refuelling manoeuvres, before they bomb the Libyans into submission, destroy their air force in a couple of dog-fights, rescue Tom, and jet home.

The U.S. Air Force showed unusually good judgement and mercifully refused to have anything to do with Iron Eagle due to the portrayal of a fighter jet theft, but that may have been just a most convenient excuse because surely even the Pentagon would have recognized the stench emanating from the fetid script.

Canadian director Sidney J. Furie has a chequered resume, and he did his reputation no favours by directing this embarrassment, plus several sequels. Louis Gossett Jr. chews through his lines looking for nothing but impact but finding only cartoon-level intensity. Jason Gedrick needs only a few minutes of screen time to prove that he is all hair and no talent, but unfortunately gets a lot more than a few minutes. The rest of the cast may as well have been drawn in with thick felt markers for all the nuance and texture that they bring to the movie.

Iron Eagle stands as a monument to the level of brainlessness that movies can descend to when catering to the lowest common denominator of dumb action and blind, revenge-driven so-called patriotism.

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