Post-pleasant

>> Blast From the Past's laboured affair

by JOANNE LATIMER

After Encino Man, George of the Jungle and Dudley Do-Right, Brendan Fraser is playing another goof. This time, he's the naïve bachelor in Blast From the Past, a cartoon-like fable about a family living in a nuclear fallout bunker for 30 years.

Blast starts as a glorious lampoon of the late '50s: free-flowing booze in suburbia, bouffant hair, clean language, Jell-O moulds, Kennedy versus Khrushchev, the Jackie Gleason Show and Cold War anxiety. That's fun--for a while. It's pleasant (Pleasantville, in fact) to spot the easy sign-posts of an era that filmmakers find so attractive to recreate.

"I think I'm being chased by a psychiatrist," says Adam (Fraser), once he surfaces in L.A. and is mistaken for a lunatic. Fraser is now 30 years old and experiencing modern '90s society for the first time. Born and raised in a bomb shelter with nothing but references to '50s culture, Fraser is free to play him like a dupe. His wide-eyed wonderment and wholesome attraction to Eve (Alicia Silverstone) gets pretty tiring, as Fraser gosh and gollys his way into her heart.

No one can accuse Fraser of taking himself too seriously. Unfortunately, his Forrest Gump act doesn't take a lot of comic skill, and his slow-blink affectation doesn't work after 10 minutes. So the real laughs in Blast come from the other actors. Fraser's loopy parents, Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek, are a manic duo with lots of tics and foibles. (If you've seen That '70s Show, you'll feel like you've met these folks before.)

Dave Foley plays the only refreshing character in the cast: he is Troy, Silverstone's gay roommate. This cynical meddler is really a romantic with cutting one-liners, great hair and wise advice for the superficial Silverstone. The romance between Adam and Eve (come on!) is a laboured affair, while we wait for her to come to her senses. Thank God for Foley, or the '90s section of the film would be torture.

Director Wilson (First Wives Club, Guarding Tess) doesn't go in for much wit or highbrow irony, so Foley's all alone in Blast, the kind of film that's safe and flat enough to screen in airplanes.

Blast From the Past opens Friday, February 12