Blam! Kapow! Eat Your Peas!

By BRUCE HANDY

Picture this scene from a recent hit movie. It's night. A car idles at a railroad crossing, waiting for the train. Inside the car are a man and a woman. She's pregnant. She asks the man to feel her stomach--her baby is kicking. It's the kind of dewy moment that wouldn't be out of place in a financial-services commercial, or maybe one for tires.

But wait. Bam! The couple's car is rammed from behind by some bad guys in a van. They're trying to push the couple's car onto the tracks. Ding, ding, ding! The train is coming! Screech! The good guy accelerates, and the bad guys' van ends up on the tracks instead. Wham! Kapow! Impressive fireball! Fortunately, one of the bad guys is still alive and has time to look up and react--Wuh-oh!--just before the van is hit by a second train on parallel tracks, a deft directorial callback to an earlier scene in the same movie when another bad guy had time to look up and react just before being run over by a truck.

Crunch!

Mindless, sadistic violence juxtaposed with rote sentimentality: this is how Hollywood has finally solved the family-values conundrum, the question of how to entertain the blood- and sex-starved masses and be morally proactive at the same time. Well, dig this: Explosions are cool, and so are intact families! That's the message promulgated by Lethal Weapon 4, in which the above-mentioned scene takes place. As Mel Gibson's character comes to terms with impending fatherhood and Danny Glover's with impending grandfatherhood, the film wends its curious way, alternating crashes and neck breakings with scenes of limp domestic comedy--scenes that wouldn't be out of place on Home Improvement, except that Tim Allen never says lines like "This f___ing guy! What the f___!"

Lethal Weapon 4 is only the starkest example of a trend that has seen virtually every action movie released this summer freighted with a subplot about the importance of family. This has had the unprecedented effect of elevating teary-eyed hugs to the same level of cinematic importance as blowing up the Chrysler Building. The emotional climax of Deep Impact, for instance, occurs when Tea Leoni's reporter character embraces her estranged dad as they stand on a windswept Atlantic beach. (Father and daughter then find real closure when they, the Chrysler Building and the rest of the Eastern seaboard are smacked by a mile-high tidal wave.) Armageddon, the summer's other film in the Earth-threatened-by-space-debris genre, ends with Bruce Willis telling young-stud Ben Affleck to "take good care of my little girl" and then, during a stressful moment involving a nuclear weapon, having a vision of his little girl (Liv Tyler) in her wedding dress. The message here is: Explosions are cool, and so are sappy dads who normally hide their mushy sides behind tough-guy dialogue like "Let's chew this iron bitch up!"

Even old rogues like Zorro and Godzilla have been reinvented as family men this summer, the former with a long-lost daughter, the latter with a brood of babyzillas left unattended in Madison Square Garden. Lost in Space, which was released last spring, was already about a family back when it was a crummy TV show. As a crummy movie, it turns itself into a cautionary tale about bad parenting, complete with an It's a Wonderful Life-like parallel universe in which we see what becomes of latchkey kids on other planets (nothing good).

It's quite possible that this new emphasis on family ties is less an expression of the Zeitgeist--Teen pregnancy down! Marriage up! The Clintons still together!--than it is of marketing concerns. The producers of Lethal Weapon 4 may well feel that the female audience, which has been getting increased attention ever since it made Titanic the highest-grossing film ever, will be lured by the sight of Rene Russo nine months pregnant and still able to whip-kick evil Chinese triad members (she carries extremely well).

But with the exception of Russo, mothers are mostly absent from these films--deserting their families, getting killed or, in Godzilla's case, being eliminated altogether thanks to the miracle of asexual reproduction. This should come as no surprise: the entertainment industry has a long tradition of giving mothers short shrift, what with television's statistically unsupported fascination with single dads, dating back to the '50s, and more recent movie comedies like Hook, Jingle All the Way and Liar, Liar, in which neglectful, work-obsessed fathers get in touch with their inner daddies while the camera looks on with the kind of swoony rapture that used to be reserved for sick pets and the kids themselves. Women needn't despair, however. The director Gus Van Sant is currently remaking Psycho, so there's hope for moms yet.