Rent Grand Canyon (1991)

Crash Test Dummies - Grand Canyon review by griggs

Kevin Kline’s car breaks down in a rough bit of LA and Danny Glover turns up to tow it, and that’s basically the whole engine of this one — coincidence doing the job the plot should be doing. Lawrence Kasdan clearly means well, and I reckon that’s actually the problem.

Kline gets a string of gentle epiphanies, most of them borrowed from other people’s worse days. Glover, meanwhile, gets stuck playing the wise one again, which felt tired even back in 1991. Steve Martin has the one properly sharp idea in the whole film, playing a producer who survives a shooting and swears off violent movies — and then the script lets him quietly change his mind by the end, like it lost its nerve.

Kasdan basically invented the template Crash would later run into the ground, fourteen years on: earnest, overlapping LA lives, race handled with a sledgehammer. Crash at least committed fully to that sledgehammer, wrong as it was. This one’s softer all over, which somehow makes it the one nobody talks about now — funny, given it picked up the Golden Bear at Berlin, while Crash walked off with the Oscar.

Not boring, a few scenes genuinely land. Everyone in it gets taught a lesson, audience included.