Phenomenon (1996)

(Disney Streaming, July 2022) The only thing more entertaining than a big-budget film doing things right is a big-budget film doing things… badly. In Phenomenon’s case, it means smashing two movies together, wallowing in weird middle-America notions of intelligence, and going for tragedy when the bag of ideas runs dry. John Travolta stars as a semi-rural everyman who, after seeing a strange light in the sky, suddenly finds himself hyper-intelligent—absorbing knowledge like a sponge, coming up with new theories and inventions, easily mastering multiple disciplines and languages, predicting earthquakes, and eventually developing telekinesis (what?) as a bonus. Despite some egregious shortcuts in describing magical levels of intelligence, the first half of Phenomenon does have its charm in the idea of a world-class genius turning his attention to mundane pursuits of interest to a North California town and its inhabitants. There isn’t a lot of friction in this first half, with caricatural evil government workers out of the picture and no one having turned on the protagonist yet. But the script, sadly, isn’t done—and before long, the usual weird conspiracy theories about the American government rear their head up and our protagonist is kidnapped for study. This doesn’t last a long time, however, and before long the usual amount of anti-intellectualism shows up to teach the protagonist not to get too big for the town’s undersized britches. Still lacking a third act, the film then turns to the ultimate humbling of its protagonist: A fatal tumour turns Phenomenon into an attempted weeper. Except that, by this time, it’s so incoherent, atonal and contrived that it feels as if a good film has been left behind. The treatment of intelligence is (ironically) dumbed down and safely neutered to ensure that audiences don’t feel too bad about a genius running around not solving world hunger. It’s too bad—the first half does have promise, the small-town atmosphere is nicely rendered (until it isn’t) and there’s some decent supporting work from Kyra Sedgwick, Forest Whitaker and Robert Duvall. But the result feels like a big bowl of everything with far too much mawkishness thrown in. How did this go wrong?