Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 18-December-05
Spoiler Rating: Low

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)

If it's true that kids grow into their names, you can rest assured that a child christened "Buckaroo Banzai" would become an adult who lives larger than most. The titular hero of this 1984 cult classic is in fact a brilliant neurosurgeon who devotes his spare time to studying martial arts, frontlining a rock band, advising world leaders, and blazing new trails in the field of physics. (He's hot and has his own comic book, too, but credits others for those accomplishments.) "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" follows this superman (Peter Weller) as he journeys into the eighth dimension and unwittingly rouses a pack of nefarious aliens who have been exiled from Planet Ten. The fate of the Earth then rests with his band of intrepid musician-scientists as they try to protect a device called the "oscillation overthruster," which would allow the aliens to blast off and leave our world to destruction.

You may guess from this synopsis that "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" is not your average adventure film, and the truth is, it's better than average because it maintains the perfect degree of fully committed absurdity. Weller appears to accept the reality of Buckaroo without question, and the rest of the cast takes his lead. Lewis Smith is a knockout (one of my teenage fantasies, actually) as the golden boy, Perfect Tommy, while Jeff Goldblum is his usual quirky-but-intelligent self as the new guy in the tight-knit group. These and other supporting actors in the Banzai camp are matched for tongue-in-cheek gravity by Dan Hedaya, Christopher Lloyd, and Vincent Schiavelli (familiar faces, all) as the aliens of the opposition. Only John Lithgow hams it up as an Italian physicist who was taken over by an alien in the 1930s and now has horrible teeth and extreme megalomania to show for it.

The one bad-goofy part of the movie (as opposed to the predominately good-goofy ones) involves the token female and love interest, Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin). Poor Penny offers nothing beyond the standard damsel-in-distress routine, and her connection to Buckaroo feels forced and creepy . Still, the movie hints that her story might be worth exploring in a later episode, so it's easy to cut her some slack. I attribute her lameness to the cryptic workings of planets, dimensions, and oscillation overthrusters, which dictate why one person gets to be Buckaroo Banzai while another is Penny Priddy, and why some sequels that should have been made never were.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.