Back to Back Reviews

BACK TO BACK walks the thin line between the offbeat and the merely ridiculous, eventually tumbling headlong into the latter. The setting is the Superstition Mountains of Arizona, a place long haunted by legends of buried treasure and ill-gotten riches. The story, which unfolds in a confusing shuffle of flashbacks and through Johnson's voiceover narration, begins, more or less, with the robbery of an armored car loaded with $7 million. The bandits and the car vanish completely, leaving one wounded security guard, Hank Brand (David Michael-Standing), as the only survivor. Encouraged by Sheriff Duro (Luke Askew), whose brother, Manny (Roger Brook), was murdered during the heist, the numbskull townspeople blame Hank for orchestrating the crime. A firebombing turns Hank into a scarred invalid, but until his death he continues to search for possible witnesses to clear his name. Stung by the hostility of the townsfolk and the sheriff, Hank's oldest son, Bo (Bill Paxton), a successful LA-based lawyer, takes up his father's search, working from Hank's notes. Hitting the trail, Bo and his younger, mentally impaired brother, Todd (Todd Field), are joined almost immediately by Jessie (Apollonia Kotero), a calculating hitchhiker. Meanwhile, Sheriff Duro follows them; in addition to revenge, he wants the missing cash for himself. Various witnesses help the Brands piece together the truth, and in time it becomes clear that the bandits double-crossed and killed one another after leaving the stolen armored car and money buried in rubble on land owned by Eli Hix (Ben Johnson), a longtime desert resident. When Bo and company finally meet Eli, he is happy to have the bloodstained loot taken off his hands. But as the group finishes digging out the truck, Jessie declares that she is none other than Manny Duro's daughter and that she, and not the sons of the evil Hank Brand, deserves the money. Just then Sheriff Duro and his henchmen show up and a gun battle ensues, during which Jessie finds evidence proving that it was her father and not Hank who was in cahoots with the bandits. How devastatingly ironic. In the ludicrous climax, the sheriff is set on fire, but while shrouded in flames, he manages to shoot an arrow that pierces both Bo and Todd, giving new meaning to the term "male bonding" and providing one interpretation of the movie's title. Naturally, this dual-impalement doesn't injure the Brands seriously, and Todd stays behind with Eli, having at last found his place in the world. The final scene also contains a plot twist concerning Eli's motivations, but it will be lost on anyone unfamiliar with the historical lore of the Superstition Mountains. That the twist will not be clear to everyone is the least of the film's problems, however. Filmed largely in Apache Junction, Arizona, BACK TO BACK boils down to an ordinary, predictable melodrama, gussied up with a non-linear flashback structure and offering a truly bizarre attempt to duplicate the offbeat brotherly-love motif of RAIN MAN. Streetwise Bo and childlike Todd are deliberately fashioned to recall Tom Cruise's and Dustin Hoffman's RAIN MAN characters; however, the makers of BACK TO BACK are left with a major problem: the Brands just aren't very compelling characters. The initial appearance of Apollonia's Jessie promises some excitement, but her ulterior motive and her father's guilt are telegraphed early on. In the film's other key roles, Askew makes a terribly one-dimensional bad guy, but Johnson's homey appeal helps a little, as does James L. Carter's luminous photography. To its credit, the script contains some almost-memorable B-movie dialog, and a peripheral figure is named after Sam Peckinpah's western character Cable Hogue, but more healthy self-parody would have improved the picture considerably. The soundtrack is spiked with monotonous rock 'n' roll tunes, most of which are on a cassette in Paxton's car stereo, but the music gets better after Field destroys the tape during a temper tantrum. It's only too bad the film doesn't. (Profanity, violence, adult situations, sexual situations.)