Forever Young Reviews

Like 1991's LATE FOR DINNER, FOREVER YOUNG is a "deep-freeze" drama: a romance featuring a character who is cryogenically preserved and then revivified in a later era. In this case, a mildly intriguing idea has been insufficiently developed; the presence of Mel Gibson, however, still made a fairly respectable hit out of this unabashed tear-jerker. Daniel (Mel Gibson) is a 1939 test pilot completely devoted to his girlfriend Helen (Isabel Glasser). Just after he has once again failed to get up the courage to propose marriage, she is hit by a truck and falls into a coma from which, according to the doctors, she may never recover. Crushed, Danny approaches his best friend Harry (George Wendt) and asks to be the subject in his next cryogenic experiment; unable to stand the pain of waiting for his beloved either to revive or die, he agrees to be deep-frozen for one year. Cut to the present day, as two boys, Nat (Elijah Wood) and Felix (Robert Hy Gorman), find and accidentally open the "freezer" while playing in an old air force warehouse. Released from his frozen state, Danny sets about trying to discover what went wrong, and why he's been frozen for so long. In the process, he moves in with Nat and his single mother, Claire (Jamie Lee Curtis), to both of whom he gets very attached. Meanwhile, the Army is also very keen to find out what happened to their long-forgotten experiment. Things get progressively sniffly as the film moves toward a grand, emotional climax. Relentlessly corny, FOREVER YOUNG gets off to a bad start in every department--screenplay, direction, editing and acting. There is an explanation for what went wrong with the experiment, but can we really believe that no one would notice a freezer big enough to hold Mel Gibson, sitting among plane parts? Or that his character would adjust to modern life so easily? Somehow, though, the film seems to come to life as it goes along, with some well-written, keenly observed scenes. (There's a very good one in which Danny teaches Nat how to fly an old plane, using trinkets in Nat's treehouse, with the camera behaving as though they're really in flight.) The last ten minutes of the film are absolutely irresistible. Put together with a little more care and inspiration, FOREVER YOUNG could have been a massive hit. There's a huge potential audience for this sort of GHOST-ly romance, and many of Gibson's female fans prefer to see him without fast cars and guns (in a nice bit of self-referential humor, Gibson screams to Curtis, as she swings a car out of the road and over a drop, "You drive like I do!"). FOREVER YOUNG misses its shot at capturing that market. (Mild profanity.)