Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (April 13, 2022)
Wow – it feels like just yesterday that I watched Fandango, the first of Kevin Costner’s three movies from 1985.
Oh wait – I did view that film just yesterday.
Easily the most famous of the bunch, Silverado came second. This left American Flyers as Costner’s final entry from 1985.
After the death of their father, brothers Marcus (Costner) and David Sommers (David Grant) suffer from a rift in their relationship. In an attempt to reconcile, Marcus convinces to come with him and wife Sarah (Rae Dawn Chong) to train for a bicycle race across the Rocky Mountains.
However, the family line suffers from a potential brain aneurysm that could severely impair or kill at any moment. The brothers reconnect with this looming specter over them.
Of Costner’s three 1985 films, people really only remember Silverado for non-Costner reasons. While not much of a hit at the box office, it maintained a decent audience and reputation over the years.
Neither Fandango nor Flyers did enough business to come higher than 145th at the US box office among 1985 releases. In the case of the muddled Fandango, the lack of success didn’t seem like a shame.
Though superior to the flawed Fandango, I also can’t claim that Flyers missed out on an audience it deserved. While it comes with some positives, it lacks a lot of real purpose beyond its tear-jerking melodrama.
Screenwriter Steve Tesich earned fame – and an Oscar – for 1979’s Breaking Away. Given that both deal with bicycle racing, Flyers feels like Tesich’s attempt to relive prior glories.
Breaking Away worked because it offered a well-developed character tale with the climactic race as gravy. With Flyers, the story develops neither side of the story in an especially compelling manner.
Though only separated by six years, Away and Flyers really come from two very different cinematic eras. In 1979, movies favored a gritty sense of honesty vs. 1985, at which point rah-rah positivity seemed more important.
Of course, that didn’t hold true for all movies, but it nonetheless feels impossible not to see both as reflective of their eras, and this creates a problem for Flyers. While it wants to dabble in more serious topics, it really prefers to give us superficial material overall.
Flyers essentially splits into two halves. In the first, we get a mix of exposition with road trip bonding, whereas the second focuses on the race as well as medical melodrama.
Neither really works. The opening segment introduces the roles in a superficial manner that never allows them to become more than one-dimensional.
Whereas the second half could – and should – expand the parts, instead it concentrates on the Big Race and the typical elements one expects from that concept. We also see the anticipated health issues, though perhaps not in the way we think we will, as Flyers attempts a curveball.
None of this succeeds. No self-respecting 1985 movie would let the hero lose, so Flyers lacks tension in regard to the competition.
As for the tragic plot beats, Flyers chickens out there. While it hints at these concerns, it lacks the conviction to follow through to the natural conclusion.
All of this feels very “1985”. Again, not every movie from that era ladles on the happy happy cheese and fails to embrace more daring choices, but Hollywood clearly shied away from more challenging fare.
Which leaves us with the simplistic mix of melodrama and inspirational sports fare we find with Flyers. Predictable and trite, the movie disappoints.
