The irreverent FBC series "In Living Color" once did a sketch called "My Left Foot of Fury," in which disabled Irish poet Christie Brown teamed up with Jean-Claude Van Damme to kickbox evildoers. There are times when COMMON BONDS is hardly less absurd. The biggest surprise is how much of
it the actors manage to pull off.
Set in Canada, the opening finds troublemaker J.T. Blake (Michael Ironside) just released from prison. Straightaway he finds his favorite hookers hosting a hated police sergeant and raises a ruckus that puts him right back in the stir. This time Blake lands in Mountain Hill Federal Penitentiary,
where he gets to participate in a truly bizarre experiment in corrections: due to Ottawa's budget cuts, a nearby nursing home for the severely handicapped lacks personnel, so pragmatic liberal social worker Eileen Curtis (Rae Dawn Chong) recruits work-released convicts as caregivers. No mere
nurses, the prisoners are literally chained to the wheelchairs of their helpless charges--the idea is that the cellblock toughs will learn compassion from the patients, while the bewildered patients will gain survival skills by being cuffed to career criminals and maniacs.
Blake meets his match in his assignee, Johnny Reynolds (Brad Dourif), a hospital hellion crippled by cerebral palsy and self-pity. Johnny intentionally soils himself, throws food around and rages at Blake, "I didn't ask for you!" The convict feels equal loathing for Johnny, but after long hours of
pushing the wheelchair and escorting him to the toilet, Blake develops sympathy and understanding for his companion. Johnny begins to behave and introduces Blake to the poetry of Dylan Thomas and e.e. cummings, proving there's more to life than punching out cops.
Though it sounds like sentimental slush, a welcome hard edge to the material makes COMMON BONDS work better than it sounds. Blake's conversion to model prisoner comes a little too rapidly, and so the filmmakers throw in a Van Damme-nable plot complication, a malevolent convict named Casey (Bruce
Glover). This smirking meanie runs the jailhouse rackets with the complicity of corrupt guards, and he gleefully abuses his own wretched wheelchair-mate. Blake rebels and gets the creep carted off to a tougher prison. Casey escapes, and when Blake and Johnny go on a furlough visit to the city, he
seizes the chance for revenge. The token menace overshadows a sensitive subplot about Blake persuading a squeamish prostitute to give Johnny his first dose of sexual healing. Instead the drama climaxes with violence and gunfire, the villain vanquished, and Johnny sustaining a melon-sized bullet
wound and comforted by Blake in the ambulance. It's an ending right out of a typical mismatched-buddy-cop adventure.
Originally released in Canada as CHAINDANCE, COMMON BONDS was a personal project for star Michael Ironside, who receives credit as co-screenwriter and co-producer. The Canadian actor has long been a fixture in action pictures and thrillers, either as vicious bad guys or steely heroes. His COMMON
BONDS performance does a nice job at broadening the actor's range within the boundaries of a restrictive screen persona, and this the first film in a long time in which Michael Ironside can smile and not look like a hungry wolf. Still, one wishes that Blake's path to redemption was a little
rockier and didn't necessitate the formula external threat.
Long consigned to weirdo parts (like the voice of "Chucky" in the CHILD'S PLAY horror films), Brad Dourif faces the daunting comparison with Daniel Day-Lewis's Oscar-winning turn in MY LEFT FOOT. Dourif is equal to the physical challenge. His thin, contorted body makes Johnny's condition
agonizingly real, and often his strangled voice is just barely intelligible. More than that, Dourif conveys the personality beneath all that pathology--and with it the fact that Johnny Reynolds is not a nice guy at the outset. He's needlessly churlish, sometimes absolutely disgusting and as much
in need of an attitude adjustment as Blake.
There's rare sophistication in not depicting this CP victim as a saintly sufferer, which makes COMMON BONDS doubly disappointing when this farfetched but unique tale, directed by Allan Goldstein, segues into cliches. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, adult situations, nudity.) leave a comment
