- Title: F/X
- IMDb: link
Throwback Thursday takes us back to 80s action. 1986’s F/X, which would later spawn both a lesser sequel and 90s TV-show, stars Australian actor Bryan Brown as practical special-effects expert Roland Tyler. Enlisted by members of the Justice Department (Cliff De Young and Mason Adams) to fake the assassination of a mob witness (Jerry Orbach), Tyler agrees only for things to go wrong very quickly. Soon Tyler is running from corrupt cops and attempting to expose what is really going on with an overly-complicated plot that works best when you don’t put too much thought into how it all fits together.
Brian Dennehy gets second billing, in a decidedly smaller role, as your typical gruff cop who always gets his man while bending the rules and pissing off everyone else on the force. He spends most of the time arguing to superiors and trying to figure out how the death of Tyler’s girlfriend (Diane Venora) factors into the mob storyline.
If Tyler stands out a bit in the genre for his unusual profession, Dennehy’s Detective McCarthy could be pulled directly from any number of action flicks of any era. We also get Martha Gehman as his assistant whose main purpose appears to be to get Tyler the supplies necessary to go on offense. The convoluted path to the climax provides its share of fun with Tyler putting his various skills to work to avoid police and eventually get a measure of revenge.
The film was a financial success while also garnering positive responses from critics. F/X has holds up fairly well today, possibly even making one nostalgic for the pre-CGI effects days. The creation of the film seems like an interesting story to explore as well coming from first-time screenwriters in actor Gregory Fleeman and documentarian Robert T. Megginson, whose credits outside the world of F/X are quite sparse. With producers wanting something different than a regular action movie, director Robert Mandel and cinematographer Miroslav Ondrícek (Amadeus and Hair) were brought on to bring a more atypical guiding hand. That, along with casting Brown as lead, certainly helps it stand out from other films of the era.
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