FX2 is like a party guest convinced he's a real card, regardless of all evidence to the contrary; it's a movie that revels in its own cleverness without being clever enough by half.
Rollie Tyler (Bryan Brown), ace special effects designer, has retired from creating illusions of mayhem for the movies. He's also retired from working with the police, since his last real-life effects adventure was too violent for him. He'd rather design elaborate, high-tech toys to delight and
amuse children. Rollie has a new girlfriend, Kim Brandon (Rachel Ticotin), whose small son Chris (Dominic Zamprogna) thinks Rollie is a pretty cool guy. Even her ex-husband Mike (Tom Mason), a detective, comes around to Rollie's charm. It all seems too good to be true, and it is.
Mike asks Rollie to help him set up a sting operation, designed to catch a peeping tom who's been threatening a model. Rollie agrees reluctantly, after being assured there's no way anyone can get hurt. But something goes wrong, and Mike dies. Replaying the tape he made of the event, Rollie
becomes suspicious: the whole thing looks like a set-up, expressly designed to get Mike killed. Rollie calls in Leo McCarthy (Brian Dennehy), his old buddy on the police force. Though retired, Leo can still get the inside scoop on departmental matters.
Together they uncover an unsolved crime, the theft of ten invaluable religious medallions. They realize Mike was on the verge of solving the case, and that his death was part of a conspiracy to keep it in the closed file drawer. Rollie and Leo find themselves on the hot seat, with everyone from
the police to the Mafia determined to teach them to mind their own business. But they persist, discover the location of the medallions, and use Rollie's arsenal of special effects to confront the bad guys and come out of it alive.
F/X was a harmless, undemanding thriller, and the gimmick of a special effects artist using the illusions of his trade to escape real-life danger was novel. True, the stupendous dependability of his tricks flew in the face of what anyone who's ever worked with effects knows--that they never work
the first time, seldom work exactly the way they're supposed to, and are totally dependent on angles and lighting--but the picture moved quickly enough to keep viewers' minds off its implausibility.
In addition, stars Bryan Brown and Brian Dennehy are enormously ingratiating actors; their combined charm went a long way to keeping the whole business afloat. FX2 really suffers from being a sequel; there's no novelty to Rollie Tyler's act, and the act itself has worn thin.
Like the first film, FX2 opens on a reality/illusion joke: we see something violent, then the camera pulls back to reveal that we're on a movie set. But while F/X opened with an all too believable scene--a mob rubout in a Chinese restaurant--FX2 opens with a killer android in drag on the rampage;
no one is fooled for a second. And where F/X delivered some fairly effective illusions, FX2's biggest effect is a life-sized, articulated clown named Bluey, who mimics the actions of anyone wearing a special operator's suit. Naturally, Bluey is used in fight scenes, and Bluey looks astonishingly
dumb. In fact, many things seem dumb, and not endearingly so--using an automatic tennis ball pitcher to heave hot dogs at the dobermans guarding a Mafia mansion is a prize-winning idea by humane society standards, but there are easier ways to put the dogs out of commission--that's what
tranquilizer guns are for. And maybe it's just that thrillers and action films have become so ferociously violent since F/X's release in 1986 that nothing short of gut-busting brutality registers, but FX2 seems hopelessly wimpy. (Violence, profanity.) leave a comment
