Bigger Bangs for the Bucks

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

WARGAMES Directed by John Badham

Screenplay by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes

BLUE THUNDER Directed by John Badham

Screenplay by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby

One hopes that by now John Badham is cooling his jets in some pleasant place where the dress code calls for swimsuits instead of straitjackets. For the director has obviously suffered a close encounter with paranoia in the past year or so. First of all, visions of the military-industrial complex seem to have caused a humongous helicopter to hover over his head. Loaded to the rotor blades with heavy artillery and the latest in supersnooping devices, the whirling bird is intended to attack such segments of the U.S. civilian population as happen to get unruly--though in these placid times the film makers are hard-pressed to find a domestic threat worthy of their hardware. The principal business of Blue Thunder is to offer a garish and entirely unpersuasive audiovisual demonstration of this preposterous machine in action.

Meantime, behind Badham's back, as it were, the same mighty power complex has created a monstrous computer. Its keepers have programmed it so that it can replace the humans who are supposed to press the buttons that start World War III. Poor WOPR (for that is its name) is an innocent. It thinks the war games it knows how to play are no different from chess and other harmless entertainments at which it is adept; it cannot distinguish between pawns and people.

This is a defect it shares with whoever conceived Blue Thunder, which is by far the lesser of Badham's back-to-back releases. The film's nominal plot has Roy Scheider as a good Los Angeles police department chopper ace assigned to test what amounts to a flying gun platform. Once he discovers its illiberal potential, he must fight his way past Malcolm McDowell, an old neofascist enemy from his Viet Nam days now employed as a power-elite gunslinger. After that dogfight comes a showdown with a couple of Air Force jets.

The story is developed as if it were written by an amuck word processor that somehow got plugged into a survey of the viewing preferences of videogame freaks. The characters are flatter than Pac-Man and Frogger, the action is all hand-eye coordination. The concluding aerial chase above downtown Los Angeles is full of searing flashes, but it is actually as unaffecting as a round of Missile Command. The real estate takes a beating, but not a single innocent bystander is harmed as the aircraft careers around skyscrapers. That, is perhaps the least of the many implausibilities Badham hustles the audience past, cool-eyed, professional as any air-traffic controller with his eyes glued to the radarscope.

But, as memories of Saturday Night Fever suggest, Badham can be more than a high-tech hardware merchant. The first portions of WarGames are nearly irresistible. The reason that the mighty WOPR comes across as funny is that David, a bright high school lad (played by a very savvy young actor, Matthew Broderick, 21), accidentally makes contact with it while fooling around with his home computer. Boy and machine get to be friends, since they are both lonely and misunderstood. David is shy and sweet with his girlfriend (Ally Sheedy) but is wary of his parents and is a troublemaker in school. In short, he is as believable as any recent movie adolescent, and his responses to the Government security forces who are convinced he is an enemy agent are full of injured innocence and inventive ripostes. For about two-thirds of its distance, as it places an ordinary kid in an extraordinary situation, WarGames flirts with an E.T.-like charm. One imagines young David heading toward a small, smart, deadly encounter with gum-snapping Dabney Coleman, who plays, with his usual admirable restraint, a true believer in the Pentagon's, and WOPR's, infallibility.

Instead, the movie takes off on a more obviously melodramatic course. It brings on the machine's creator, now turned so cynical that he believes mankind ought to get on with its ultimate death-wish drama. Overplayed by an eye-rolling John Wood, this burned-out genius rips the delicate fabric of believability that the picture has woven, turns Coleman's character into an onlooker, and makes David's climactic confrontation with WOPR more silly than suspenseful.

Badham gets a lot of distracting colored lights and video screens flashing madly while the lad works against a deadline to talk his electronic pal out of launching a preventive strike against the U.S.S.R. But, as with the end of Blue Thunder, there is more of technique than of conviction in this work. It may be that Badham is an exemplary case: yet another talented craftsman caught up in Hollywood's current belief that the big bucks are in the big-bang school of moviemaking. In War Games the search for a big, effects-laden finish does not render the film entirely unwatchable. It just prevents it from becoming the video fantasy it might have been. -- By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.