Out of Bounds is a true time capsule of when it was made, featuring music, fashion, and architecture of the excessive 80s in full hairspray slick and neon glitz. It's filled with club scenes and music, with some recognizable tracks from The Smiths and Suzie and The Banshees.
The script to this is almost unbelievably stupid and bends the rules of plausibility more than most sci-fi movies do. Among the mountain of stupid character choices and lack of a coherent story, I think the most ridiculous aspect is that Jenny Wright's character is able to afford (an absurdly tackily decorated, hideous 80s monstrosity of) an apartment/house in West LA that appears to be 3-stories, all on a waitresses' salary. And a working, good condition classic convertible on top of that!! I know it was the 80s and wages and the economy was slightly better, but Frodo and his adventures in The Shire are more believable than this girl being able to make rent and car payments every month doing what she does.
The movie plays out as if a sheltered 16-year old boy from the suburbs wrote a crime drama. Anthony Michael Hall plays a young lad from Iowa who's just in the wrong place at the wrong time at LAX, with a switched bag story happening to him, putting him in the middle of a drug-ring looking for their product.
A beautiful girl who doesn't know him hits on him and kisses him on the cheek within 5 minutes of knowing him, he kills a man, holds up another on a motorbike, and breaks into a bus station, doing easily over 3,000 dollars worth of property damage, and kills another drug dealer, all without any real consequences by the end of the movie! And they call superhero movies fantasies? This is honestly an absurd wish-fulfillment flick that throws out any semblance of common sense in the first 5-minutes.
I find it interesting how much culture has changed when it comes to something like moviemaking, and in a relatively short amount of time. I'm sure audiences sympathized with (or were expected to) Hall's obnoxious character, but his character is an entitled brat that never really gets his much-deserved karma for making stupid choice after stupid choice. The writing truly fails to make him a sympathetic character that you root for, because his actions show that he doesn't really care about people. That's crucial in the kind of story where an everyman gets into a situation where they're way over their head, you have to have a sense of normalcy and sympathy from characters like this; they can't be a hard-as-steel type like James Bond. He never even shows that much remorse over his brother or his brother's wife getting murdered. That's part of why it plays out like a dream, or something that a spoiled teen would write.
He manages to convince Jenny Wright's character that he's not lying in one scene "because I'm telling the truth", and is painted as a sympathetic character when he literally reaches into his waistband to "give back" a gun in his belt when cops have their guns trained on him. Of course they're going to do that! You're reaching for a gun! From the cop's perspective, you're a kidnapping suspect with a firearm! Yet the movie paints him as put-upon, and we're expected to root for him. And that's just a taste of how stupid this movie is. By the end of the movie, he's caused countless amounts of property damage, murdered 2 people, taken the law into his own hands, trespassed, and more, and is let off by the police. Even if you were a victim in the sense you had the wrong bag, he still knowingly and willingly commits countless other crimes that even a teenager would know not to do, and that he doesn't get held accountable by going to jail for them, is absolutely ridiculous.
Of course Jenny Wright's character doesn't mind that she's lost her job and had her life threatened by this moron, either. 80's cinema strikes again! He gets rewarded with her seemingly unconditional affection no matter what, and hooks up with her in the end. Is it any wonder that if you're like me and were raised on movies, that you can have a tough time with dating in real life as a teen/young adult? Movies have depicted female affection as easy to come by and a reward for what amounts to stupidity for decades.
The dialogue is horrible and laughable, the characters and their actions make no sense, and there's nothing particularly interesting about how it was shot. No wonder I've never heard of this before. Watching this with your friends to laugh at it is highly recommended, especially if you're bored during lockdown, having watched all of your other quality films. The only redeeming aspect is that some of the supporting cast are good actors, the movie is a solid time capsule of 80s culture, and a few of the songs (which are used to greater affect in better movies), are solid hits from the decade also. Out of Bounds was made out of sense.
The script to this is almost unbelievably stupid and bends the rules of plausibility more than most sci-fi movies do. Among the mountain of stupid character choices and lack of a coherent story, I think the most ridiculous aspect is that Jenny Wright's character is able to afford (an absurdly tackily decorated, hideous 80s monstrosity of) an apartment/house in West LA that appears to be 3-stories, all on a waitresses' salary. And a working, good condition classic convertible on top of that!! I know it was the 80s and wages and the economy was slightly better, but Frodo and his adventures in The Shire are more believable than this girl being able to make rent and car payments every month doing what she does.
The movie plays out as if a sheltered 16-year old boy from the suburbs wrote a crime drama. Anthony Michael Hall plays a young lad from Iowa who's just in the wrong place at the wrong time at LAX, with a switched bag story happening to him, putting him in the middle of a drug-ring looking for their product.
A beautiful girl who doesn't know him hits on him and kisses him on the cheek within 5 minutes of knowing him, he kills a man, holds up another on a motorbike, and breaks into a bus station, doing easily over 3,000 dollars worth of property damage, and kills another drug dealer, all without any real consequences by the end of the movie! And they call superhero movies fantasies? This is honestly an absurd wish-fulfillment flick that throws out any semblance of common sense in the first 5-minutes.
I find it interesting how much culture has changed when it comes to something like moviemaking, and in a relatively short amount of time. I'm sure audiences sympathized with (or were expected to) Hall's obnoxious character, but his character is an entitled brat that never really gets his much-deserved karma for making stupid choice after stupid choice. The writing truly fails to make him a sympathetic character that you root for, because his actions show that he doesn't really care about people. That's crucial in the kind of story where an everyman gets into a situation where they're way over their head, you have to have a sense of normalcy and sympathy from characters like this; they can't be a hard-as-steel type like James Bond. He never even shows that much remorse over his brother or his brother's wife getting murdered. That's part of why it plays out like a dream, or something that a spoiled teen would write.
He manages to convince Jenny Wright's character that he's not lying in one scene "because I'm telling the truth", and is painted as a sympathetic character when he literally reaches into his waistband to "give back" a gun in his belt when cops have their guns trained on him. Of course they're going to do that! You're reaching for a gun! From the cop's perspective, you're a kidnapping suspect with a firearm! Yet the movie paints him as put-upon, and we're expected to root for him. And that's just a taste of how stupid this movie is. By the end of the movie, he's caused countless amounts of property damage, murdered 2 people, taken the law into his own hands, trespassed, and more, and is let off by the police. Even if you were a victim in the sense you had the wrong bag, he still knowingly and willingly commits countless other crimes that even a teenager would know not to do, and that he doesn't get held accountable by going to jail for them, is absolutely ridiculous.
Of course Jenny Wright's character doesn't mind that she's lost her job and had her life threatened by this moron, either. 80's cinema strikes again! He gets rewarded with her seemingly unconditional affection no matter what, and hooks up with her in the end. Is it any wonder that if you're like me and were raised on movies, that you can have a tough time with dating in real life as a teen/young adult? Movies have depicted female affection as easy to come by and a reward for what amounts to stupidity for decades.
The dialogue is horrible and laughable, the characters and their actions make no sense, and there's nothing particularly interesting about how it was shot. No wonder I've never heard of this before. Watching this with your friends to laugh at it is highly recommended, especially if you're bored during lockdown, having watched all of your other quality films. The only redeeming aspect is that some of the supporting cast are good actors, the movie is a solid time capsule of 80s culture, and a few of the songs (which are used to greater affect in better movies), are solid hits from the decade also. Out of Bounds was made out of sense.