MIRACLE MILE (1988) - ***1/2

Imagine you're a guy (Anthony Edwards) that while in the heart of Los Angeles you happen to meet the perfect girl (Mare Winningham). She doesn't just share your hobbies, but she also is mutually attracted to you. I'm going to screw your eyes blue! You have a wonderful day together, and you both make plans for a date at midnight, meeting at the "Miracle Mile" neighborhood coffee shop where she works. But the power goes out at your joint, so you accidentally oversleep. You rush down there to find that she's since long gone home hours ago, and her co-workers think you're an asshole for standing her up.

A lousy night gets worse when outside, you answer the ringing payphone, and its from a frantic guy working at a missile silo out in North Dakota who was trying to call his dad. He says that America has just launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the enemy. Our nuclear arsenal will be launched in 50 minutes, and the "blowback" against us in 70 minutes. He's cut off by machine gun fire, and a new voice, threatening and ominous, tells you to "forget everything you just heard and go back to sleep."

Was he simply jerking you around, or do you really only have a hour left before the apocalypse?

A better question is......what would you do?

It was that great premise of a dramatic quandary that made Steve De Jarnatt's screenplay for MIRACLE MILE so admired in Hollywood...and De Jarnatt's answer to that last question was why nobody would produce it. It was like everyone wanted MILE to be MILE, without being what made itself MILE in the first place. After a decade of development hell as one of the best-unfilmed scripts around, De Jarnatt said screw it. He bought MILE back from Warner Bros., and Hemdale Film let the dude shoot it himself with a B-movie budget, like they did previously with James Cameron and Oliver Stone for THE TERMINATOR and PLATOON.

If anything, DeJarnatt's MIRACLE MILE is really three different movies, of which MILE skips between without mostly missing a step.

The first 30 minutes is like a very lightweight romantic comedy, what with the couple walking in the park, him buying the freedom of some lobsters from a restaurant, her wacky parents who haven't spoken to each other in 15 years, that sort of fluff. In fact, you begin wondering if you rented the wrong movie. Really, Edwards and Winningham have great chemistry that makes not just the "love at first sight" shtick credible, but arguably make rest of the movie work as well.

Because once the phone call happens, MILE gets deadly serious as a real-time thriller, and damn effective at that. MILE subscribes to my theory that a good suspense movie is one where the narrative grabs your throat once the plot kicks in, and squeezes tighter as the clock winds down to the deadline, which by then you're grasping for air.

You feel this with Edwards after he gets the call, and I'm reminded of how tremendously underrated Edwards is. Yeah people seem to only remember him for TOP GUN and ER, but if every other actor would play a nervous breakdown by shouting and jumping around like a monkey, Edwards does it like any one of us would do if we became an unwilling prophet of doom: your brain would practically shut down as we get nervous, upset, and confused as what to do next, along with a million other things rushing through your mind at once. Then he has a moment of clarity:

Go find her.

Seriously, after seeing this and last year's ZODIAC, Hollywood or some indie filmmakers have to hire Edwards out more.

It's perhaps best that such a story be told with a miniscule approach instead. If this was a major studio project, MILE easily could have faded into being a series of major set pieces strung together with thin storytelling and characterization this side of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, and we wouldn't give a shit. Instead, DeJarnatt's forced-focus on the people themselves instead of special effects or the action actually make us care about the fate of Winningham, Edwards, and everyone else. Or to put it another way, its a pretty epic small story.

Take when Edwards carjacks Mykelti Williamson at gunpoint so he could drive him to Winningham's apartment. Turns out Williamson has some stolen electronics in his trunk, and when cops confront them at a gas station, he kills them to escape some jail time. Now you want to hate him for what he does, but when Edwards tells Williamson of the "news"...the guy then demands to go find his sister before they pick up Winningham.

You feel for him, and when he does ditch Edwards, you can't really blame the guy. I mean compare that with the unseen "government VIPs" supposedly behind green lighting World War 3, who apparently are already out of the Western Hemisphere, leaving the rest of us to enjoy their radiation bath.

Now what I really dig about MILE is I guess what I would the call its "third" movie, and that's just the randomness that occurs within the story. Edwards throws out a cigarette of his, which a bird swoops up...later we cut to its nest, which has become a fireball and causes the power outage. He accidentally backs up into a palm tree, and rats spill out (which they've been known to do). Winningham's parents reconcile and try to enjoy perhaps their last day together...and they go back to squabbling with each other. Two Beverly Hills elite women storm a skyscraper with semi-automatics. During the riot, when everyone is looting or killing each other, a couple is humping out in front of a store.

Its not stop-dead "comedy" moments, but just the funny weird shit you just happen to run into at the dead of night this side of AFTER HOURS.

This includes my favorite sequence in the movie, where Edwards is looking for a pilot to fly the helicopter out of town, and he runs into a gym. In a terrific tracking shot by DeJarnatt, you see these muscle men and women pumping iron, with imagery all over the place of peak human physicality...and you realize that within a few minutes, all their hard work will be for nothing.

With the climax, Edwards' original news of Armageddon has spread throughout the city, causing mass hysteria and violent rioting with disturbing shades of what will really happen within L.A. in the Riots of 1992. Yet when we come to the ending, probably the biggest objection Hollywood always had with the script, its really the perfect ending...or at least as perfect as a story mixing romance with nuclear war can be. I mean, this aint the political morality play THE DAY AFTER or the prozac-friendly TESTAMENT.

Yeah I can criticize of sorts how DeJarnatt's directing doesn't equal his writing (and in fact, DeJarnatt hasn't directed a movie since then), but MIRACLE MILE is a pretty cool idea for a movie, that he shot as a pretty good little movie that was the CLOVERFIELD of sorts for its day, but most of all sticks with the right conclusion.

It's a gutsy finale for a gutsy film.