When I was in my teens, a group of friends and I were shocked to find Prince’s “Darling Nikki” on the jukebox of a Waffle House which we briefly occupied in the middle of the night. Just before leaving, I think it would be hilarious to put a fairly large bill in and make it play as frequently as possible. Needless to say, I was a real asshole back in the day. Years later, I learned from somebody who had worked in such a place that I had wasted my money, that customers frequently do this, and an employee inevitably unplugs the jukebox and plugs it back in, thus resetting it.
I wonder why nobody thought to do that in the story Greta Scacchi tells Tom Berenger in 1991’s Shattered about the time the couple in Mexico, and they spun The Moody Blues’s “Nights in White Satin” so many times that somebody offered to pay them to stop doing that. I wonder how many times they played that song before somebody spoke up. I like to imagine it was only once.
Scacchi is telling Berenger this because she is trying to help him recover his memory. This is after they were in a car crash so severe that it required him to have complete facial reconstructive surgery. I’m surprised he survived at all, given the car flew through a stone protective wall and rolled some distance down a very steep hill. They will later go see the wreckage, which is, unbelievably, still there after some considerable time had to have passed. The crash is suspicious, with Joanne Whalley telling him, “You came this close to getting killed. She didn’t even sprain her ankle.”
Whalley is the wife of Corbin Bernsen, who is Berenger’s best friend. Together, Bernsen and Berenger have an architecture firm so prestigious that its offices are in the Transamerica building. I don’t know the name of the firm, but I wish it had been named a combination of the actor’s real surnames: “Bernenger”. At one point Berenger will fly into a rage and hurl a fax machine through a window. Fortunately, nobody on the street is killed by that, but I still wondered why there weren’t charges brought against him. More than that, I wondered why the windows of this famous building would be fragile enough for this to happen at all.
Soon, Berenger finds a roll of camera negatives in his bottom his pipe tobacco, and it is surveillance photos of Scacchi having sex with a man we can’t see, but who obviously isn’t her husband. He will track the source of these photos back to Bob Hoskins, a former private detective turned pet shop owner who still does some P.I. work on the side. I like to imagine somebody coming into his establishment and try to do the Python “parrot sketch” and Hoskins just shooting them dead.
Hoskins tells Berenger the man sustained greater injuries that would be possible only from the crash. So, there is obviously a conspiracy of some sort, but does it involve Scacchi, Bernsen, Whalley, or some combination of them? Is Scott Getlin, as Scacchi’s apparent former lover still around and, if so, is he involved? Is Hoskins somehow involved a treacherous manner? And what is the deal with the rusting boat wreck full of hazardous chemicals which is blocking the architecture firm’s big waterfront project?
That ship is an interesting set-piece. I think it is odd all the things in movies which never triggered my gag reflex, but what is shown here is so realistic as to nearly do so. It is a truly horrible place and, in that regard, it is one of the most interesting and distinctive elements of the film.
And there is a great deal that is interesting beyond that. For roughly the first half of the runtime, I was completely engrossed. Alas, the plot will start going in some screwy directions around that time which had me wondering if the wheels were coming off. Not only do the wheels come off, but a deeply shocking twist sends the film through a stone wall and rolling a long ways down a steep embankment. It is a twist that is superficially clever, maybe even without precedent, but so carelessly worked into the plot that I was completely taken out of the viewing experience.
I am curious as to what drew director Wolfgang Petersen to this movie, as his work before this such pictures as Das Boot and The Neverending Story. Shattered seems to foretell his transition to a career of middle, adult action films, such as Air Force One and The Perfect Storm.
As for the actors, Berenger really gets to shine here, showing a range and vulnerability I have not seen in his other performances. Scacchi is little more than the femme fatale, which she plays to varying degrees of success. Honestly, I think Whalley would have fared better in that role, and I think the film could have been improved by the actors switching their assignments. Hoskins seems to be having the most fun, though I think Petersen should have reigned him in a bit. I’ve heard stories of how Hoskins smoked a ton of pot while making Super Mario Bros. two years later, and I can’t help but wonder he was doing the same on this shoot.
I have some odd observations I couldn’t work in elsewhere into this essay. I was amused by some of the things we see which were omnipresent in the late 80’s through the 90’s until they seemingly disappeared all at once. One is that fax machine I mentioned. Another is a giant At-A-Glance planner calendar, and few people seem to remember how every white-collar worker had one of those or a Franklin Planner at the time. A “555-“ number written in Berenger’s is how he comes to discover he had hired Hoskins to investigate his wife. I like to think he simply called because he was wondering why he had an obviously fake number written down.
I also made the strangest association between this film and 1989 horror pic Night Visitor, as the serial killers in that one call them women they abduct “furniture” and Scacchi says of her husband before the crash that he treated her like furniture. I also wonder why nobody ever specifies what kind of furniture, because it could be something high-end which would actually be flattering, something like, “He treated me like an antique secretary desk that was handcrafted in late 18th century.”
Circling back to music, Shattered mostly had me thinking of the Stones song of the same title. Like a lyric from that track, it left my brain in tatters, though it was quite strong in the first half. It is movies like this which leave me wondering whether it is better to start out solid and squander their potential, or if would have been better it had not been good at all.
Dir: Wolfgang Petersen
Starring Tom Berenger, Greta Scacchi, Bob Hoskins, Joanne Whalley
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray