MIRACLE MILE


Available on disc

On the day he finally meets his dream girl, Harry oversleeps and shows up hours late for the date they arrange. Whilst waiting in the diner to see if Julie will come back for a breakfast rather than a dinner, he answers the ringing payphone and finds a frantic soldier on the other end of the line, shouting that nuclear war is coming and the city will be destroyed in an hour. From there, his night goes downhill as he rushes to find Julie and get her on a plane to Antarctica to escape the conflagration.

A year after failing to hit any of the right notes with post-apocalypse action comedy CHERRY 2000, writer and director Steve De Jarnatt crafts an astonishingly powerful end of the world saga, without confirming until the final moments whether it is the end of the world or not.

The film starts off as a kooky romcom, with Harry charming Julie with his antics at the local La Brea Tar Pits museum and encountering her kooky relatives. To this point, the film isn't proving to be either kooky or charming. Then, with a single phone call, the whole tenor of the piece flips and the terror begins. The hero races to save the woman he loves, but is stymied at every turn by his own panic, that of others, the early morning hour where nobody is available to help, horrible circumstance and sheer bad luck. From the moment of the phone call, the tension is ratcheted right up with only moments of whimsy to give some relief (Julie's insistence on believing she has been woken from a valium-aided sleep to go on a ballon ride for example). Before anyone knows it, our hero is falling from moving vehicles, pointing guns at people and seeing police officers turned into pillars of fire. And all this intense activity takes place within the confines of the titular area, often bringing him back to the same place time and again.

During the romcom phase at the beginning, spirits may sink at the stilted acting and resultingly shaky performances, but once the real part of the film gets underway, Anthony Edwards hands in a fine showing as the flawed hero who is as hamstrung by his own good intentions as by the steady vortex of disaster he is being drawn into. Mykelti Williamson also stands out as the seller of stolen stereos who is caught up in the chaos through no fault of his own, but brings about the worst of the consequences. Mare Winningham's role is a thankless one and she doesn't really get to do anything with it. The audience is left not understanding why Harry is so instantly obsessed with her in the first place, but that can be taken on faith.

The prospect of nuclear war was never far away from the public's mind back in the 80s and it is perhaps the children of that age who will appreciate this film the most, having a closer connection to the times and the concern.

It may not stick the landing (it doesn't), but from the moment of the phone call to the end of the film, MIRACLE MILE deserves to have a much larger reputation than the one it enjoys with fans of end of the world movies.