nibble-1 Review of The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project (1986)

If you like clich'e you'll love this movie

[5/10 · 15 February 2006]

A boy genius builds an atomic bomb with plutonium he steals from his mother's would-be boyfriend. A barely plausible premise but what the heck it's a movie. I can only imagine the producers and actors all anticipating the acclaim that they hope to achieve with this ripoff of 'War Games'. 'War Games' featuring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy was clever, hip, interesting, funny at times and believable: everything that this movie is not. The first scare is John Lithgow as a love interest with Jill Eikenberry. He is not likely to set feminine hearts aflutter and Jill looks great except that her hair looks like it lost a battle with a wombat. As to the cliché's (forgive me if I leave out a few dozen, as there are so many): 1) The kid opens everything with a handy nail file from his nail clipper that he always happens to have in his pocket. He even opens pin-tumbler locks which I assure you are not amenable to nail files. 2) He breaks into the lab to steal the plutonium, swaps it with a bottle of shampoo, then packs everything back into his gym bag, EXCEPT the plutonium which he tapes to the back of a remote control car. You see if he just put the plutonium in his gym bag with all the other stuff (including the huge remote controller for the car) there would be no reason to fire up the enormous Argon-Ion LASER BEAM which he uses to cut a hole in the building to smuggle out the plutonium. And of course the cutsey part where the dodering old fool of a security guard would have no reason to stumble around in dark with flashlight looking for god knows whatever while the kid zooms the car around. Duh! 3) Lithgow brings the kid a puzzle where you are supposed to get four balls in each corner, the kid sets it down and spins it. Eureka problems solved! Only you can see that coming a mile away. And the grand prize cliché is at the end, when they all must clip the six detonator wires SIMULTANIOUSLY! GASP! to prevent the impending nuclear explosion. Except that they only have (I bet you know already) FIVE wire cutters! But guess what? The kid whips out his handy-dandy nail clipper to save the day! TA-DA! Whoooo Maybe I'm being harsh and taking advantage of twenty years of hindsight, after all lasers now fit on key chains instead of taking up entire rooms, but seriously the technical direction in this movie is awful. Despite all that it is entertaining and if you have the opportunity watch it. And while you watch take a good look at all the actors that you will never see again after contributing to this bomb.