Summer of Films: F/X (1986)

Last week, I mentioned that Body Double was one of a group of films from the 1980’s that weren’t famous or influential, but which were nevertheless quite good and which found long lives with audiences. F/X is another of those films. F/X had no bankable star, no big name director, did not come from a book, and had a budget of only $10 million. It doubled its money, but can hardly be called a hit. Yet, it spawned a belated sequel and a television series, and it continues to find an audience today.

Plot

Roland “Rollie” Tyler (Bryan Brown) is the best special effects man in the movie business. He’s so good that the Department of Justice asks him to help them. They are holding a mobster named Nicholas DeFranco (Jerry Orbach), who is turning state’s evidence against the mob. To protect him, they want to stage a fake assassination so everyone thinks he’s dead. For that, they need Rollie’s help.

Rollie agrees to help, but things go wrong when he finds himself double-crossed by corrupt DOJ agent Martin Lipton (Cliff De Young), who causes Rollie to really kill DeFranco... or does he? Rollie flees and must now figure out what really happened and expose the truth as he is hunted by the corrupt agent. Meanwhile NYC police detective Leo McCarthy (Brian Dennehy) doesn’t believe DeFranco is dead and he begins investigating the Department of Justice agents involved.

What Made This Film Work

Directed by theater director Robert Mandel and starring barely-known Aussie Bryan Brown (Breaker Morant), F/X began life as a proposed low-budget television movie, but was upped to a feature film by producer Dodi Fayed, of Princess Di fame. Fayed made the decision to hire Mandel to direct because he was looking for someone other than an action director because he wanted a film in which the audience cared about the characters...

...he wanted a film in which the audience cared about the characters... Imagine that!

That decision is what made F/X what it is, which is a film you like because the characters interest you and you want to see what happens to them. Indeed, these are very richly drawn characters with lots of relatable traits. What’s more, the film is very smart in how it imparts these character traits in that it never once stops the plot to share them with you.

For example, the film spends considerable effort letting you get to know Rollie. You learn what motivates him and how his own pride can be used to manipulate him. You learn how amazingly talented he is and how good he is at thinking on his feet. You see his passion for special effects, and you learn both how he could be taken in so easily and how he could be such a formidable opponent when things turn. You meet the love of his life. And so on. In fact, the first fifteen or twenty minutes are really spent telling you everything you need to know about Rollie to really like and respect him, and to earn the credibility to achieve everything he does.

BUT... none of this is done in the usual action-film manner. There are no flashbacks. There are no ten minute weepy asides. There is no five minute saccharine sweet snapshot of the lead character’s life which finishes as the kids hug him and his wife kisses him goodbye for the day. Instead, you watch the plot unfold, and as you watch the plot, you learn all these things about Rollie from watching his actions, his responses, and how others respond to him. Essentially, you are awash in characterization, but you don’t even realize it.

You get to know Detective McCarthy the same way. McCarthy also presents values we truly embrace: tenacity, honor, a sense of duty, and a disdain for politics. And he comes across as someone you want to see succeed. To pull us in even more, as with Rollie, the film then puts various obstacles in McCarthy’s path to give us a need to cheer him on as he tries to find Rollie and solve the mystery. In fact, what’s really interesting here is that McCarthy and Rollie don’t even meet until the end of the film. No blockbuster could have resisted a series of chase and fight scenes between the two, but this film does because that would be fake drama.

In addition to the two main characters, the supporting characters too are given substantive roles that are strongly written even when they are very minor characters. There are no clichés, no cardboard, and no plot convenience characters, even among the guys who only show up for a minute or two. Consider, for example, McCarthy’s contact in the police records department, Marisa. She’s barely in the film, yet we know that she has strong feelings for McCarthy which she realizes will never become reality. We see that she is bright, dedicated, and not above going around the system for a good cause. You have McCarthy’s boss, who we see can no longer defend McCarthy, but still defends him personally. You have loyal secretaries with clever lines, dedicated police, not so dedicated police, a bad guy you really dislike and a bad guy you almost feel sorry for... neither of whom is a maniacal puppy kicker – they earn their bad guy status through their deeds. Each of these characters has as much, if not more, characterization built into them than the main characters in most blockbusters today. And as with Rollie, this characterization is presented in their words and deeds and interactions, i.e. they never stop the plot to force feed you character moments.

The end result is this. You have two leads showing you the film from two different perspectives. You like both and you want to get to know them and you want to see them both succeed. They are both very interesting. They are also surrounded by a world of characters that are likewise interesting in their own right. The writing is solid. The dialog is smart and feels realistic. The characters are believable. The film doesn’t make huge logical jumps. It doesn’t rely on chance or coincidence to work. No character does things they don’t seem trained to do. Likewise, the action scenes are really good. They tend to be short and believable. There are no drawn out fight scenes. The film isn’t unnaturally butcherous, but it’s also not unnaturally pacifistic. Rollie will kill because he needs to. He doesn’t whine about it and he doesn’t gloat about it or glory in it. He does what a desperate, but determined man would do. This lends a real sense of reality to a film.

Ultimately, this all makes for solid, enjoyable film with a high degree of re-watchability.

Thoughts?