I have an irrational fondness for this film because I reviewed it for community radio in the early 90s and was given a free copy of the soundtrack - and it's a good soundtrack with The Pogues and The Sundays and the actual score.
It wasn't very popular, despite featuring Tommy Lee Jones at his early 90s action film star peak, and it isn't very good. Movies about bomb disposal experts struggle because you know the hero isn't going to die and also it's hard to justify that many bombs unless you get the setting right. The Hurt Locker worked brilliantly because it was set in occupied Iraq, was an interesting character study, and you know it wasn't conventional Hollywood so the lead could be killed at anytime - along with any other character. In this you know that Jeff Bridges isn't going to die so most of the tension comes from wondering how his friends are going to be bumped off. Also bomb disposal in the 90s wasn't as high tech as it is now so you don't have the same mobile phones and trickiness - it's still very much red wire/blue wire sort of thing.
The plot has Irish terrorist Tommy Lee Jones escaping from prison and seeking revenge on former comrade Jeff Bridges, who has made a new life for himself in Boston as a bomb disposal expert (and he's awfully busy). That's not much of a story since we don't care about Bridges - we never saw him save those people, his presence is causing his team to die. It needed more people's lives to be at risk. I guess he threatens Suzy Amis and the kid but who cares.
Jeff Bridges has fantastic hair but he isn't a proper movie star - he's a good looking character actor, always has, always will be - but this film needed say Clint Eastwood or someone. Tommy Lee Jones would've been better - better certainly than in the role of baddy. Lloyd Bridges hams it up outrageously as Bridges' Irish mentor, though he gets what is probably the film's best moment - gazing at the sunset before setting off a bomb to kill himself. Suzy Amis is sweet as his wife.
There's some neat bomb stuff - the opening bomb diffusion scene at the uni is clever. But the drama never builds, it feels as though it lacks logic, the climax is undercooked (it takes place after Jones has been killed... something I remember also happening in another bomb story, the Michael Crichton novel Binary). Scenes feel tampered with and rewritten, as if a whole bunch of people were called in to punch up the script.
One thing I kept thinking while watching this movie is how needlessly expensive so many scenes are - Bridges going to see Amis at her job, which is playing in an orchestra and there's a full orchestra; the kid's party full of kids running around and the only real point is to show Bridges gets along with the daughter, Lloyd Bridges at the baseball stadium. It's like the studio went "Irish terrorists and a bomb disposal expert... it'll be Patriot Games meets Speed". Didn't turn out that way.
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