{"id":15938,"date":"2021-02-16T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15938"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:17:06","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:17:06","slug":"how-broken-arrow-tried-to-tame-the-baddest-boy-of-the-90s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/how-broken-arrow-tried-to-tame-the-baddest-boy-of-the-90s\/","title":{"rendered":"How Broken Arrow<\/i> Tried to Tame the Baddest Boy of the ’90s"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If white bad boys were your thing, you ate well in the 1990s. Leonardo DiCaprio and the Pussy Posse\u2014half \u201ca frat house of young men,\u201d half \u201ca kind of former-child-actor brigade,\u201d as described by Nancy Jo Sales for New York<\/em> magazine<\/a>, rode high on Leo\u2019s success from What\u2019s Eating Gilbert Grape<\/em>, William Shakespeare\u2019s Romeo + Juliet<\/em>, and Titanic<\/em>. Luke Perry, Jason Priestley, and Jared Leto\u2014all long sideburns and tortured gazes\u2014had TV covered on Beverly Hills<\/em>, 90210<\/em>, and My So-Called Life<\/em>. DiCaprio\u2019s one-time co-star Johnny Depp and River Phoenix exuded the kind of sensitive fragility that made Phoenix\u2019s death such a tragedy in 1993; Ethan Hawke was an original fuckboy in Reality Bites<\/em>; and Mark Wahlberg appealed if you wanted an actual criminal. But no one put together a one-two-three punch like Heathers<\/em>, Pump Up the Volume<\/em><\/a>, and True Romance<\/em><\/a>, and no one was the crown prince of that time period like Christian Slater. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dismiss his whole early schtick as mimicking Jack Nicholson if you like, and you wouldn\u2019t necessarily be wrong; it\u2019s difficult to hear Slater\u2019s \u201cGreetings and salutations\u201d without immediately imagining Nicholson\u2019s expressive eyebrows wiggling in amusement. But the omnipresence achieved by Slater, who got his start as a child actor on One Life to Live<\/em>, toured nationally with The Music Man<\/em>, and starred in John Woo\u2019s Broken Arrow<\/em>, which turns 25 this month, alongside John Travolta and Samantha Mathis, was thanks to more than just his ability to sarcastically deliver a one-liner. There was vulnerability to his misanthropism, a dangerous glint to his wisecracks, and relatability to his bemusement at the myriad disappointments involved in adolescence, and all of that worked together as Slater became the poster boy for Generation X\u2019s lonely, misunderstood, and pissed off. \u201cChaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling,\u201d he drawled in Heathers<\/em>, and if you didn\u2019t swoon, well, were you even a teenager who would later agree with Winona Ryder when she described her life as one big dark room? Or were you happy<\/em> or something? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That early phase of Slater\u2019s career is a lesson in counterculture image creation, and in building a celebrity brand around omnipresence: You say yes to all the work, whenever the work is offered. Heathers<\/em> and Pump Up the Volume<\/em> were both critically praised, the latter in particular for Slater\u2019s lead performance, and the actor leaned in. Young Guns II<\/em>, alongside some of the hottest young actors of that time: Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Viggo Mortensen. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves<\/em>, with A-listers Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Rickman. The animated FernGully: The Last Rainforest<\/em>, one of Slater\u2019s many collaborations with Mathis, and a lesson in exemplary voice acting from Tim Curry and Robin Williams. Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance<\/em>, which almost immediately became a cult favorite. Whenever you went to the movie theater, there Slater was: When Kuffs <\/em>was released in 1992, an Orange County Register<\/em> profile reprinted in The Baltimore Sun<\/em><\/a> observed that for the \u201chot Christian Slater,\u201d it was his \u201c12th film in six years.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cHis name is shouted by squealing fans at premieres, his picture appears on the covers of magazines and he reportedly dominated a yet-unreleased Cosmopolitan<\/em> magazine poll of the most popular young actors in Hollywood,\u201d the profile continued, and the proof is all over Pinterest, Etsy, and eBay, where these magazines are steadily scanned and resold. In the pages of beloved cool-girl publication Sassy<\/em> in 1988 and on the cover in 1990, with the cheeky cover headline that Slater was \u201ctrying to behave.\u201d On the cover of YM<\/em> twice in 1990 and 1992, plus a special pullout edition in 1992 with the teaser \u201cChristian Slater intimate interview.\u201d Seventeen <\/em>declared \u201cWe love him!\u201d in July 1991. Smash Hits<\/em>, Movieline<\/em>, Details<\/em>, Jackie<\/em>, The Face<\/em>, Premiere<\/em>, Detour<\/em>, Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em>, GQ<\/em>. Where wasn\u2019t<\/em> he? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, fortunes change. Slater stepped into 1994\u2019s Interview with the Vampire<\/em> after Phoenix\u2019s tragic death, but that was the same year Slater served three days of community service for a gun possession arrest. In 1995, Slater starred in the critically-shrugged-at Murder in the First <\/em>and was also sued by his former fianc\u00e9e for palimony<\/a>. The work kept on coming, but Slater\u2019s offscreen behavior hit its nadir: In 1997<\/a>, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for hitting his girlfriend and then fighting with police after a drug bender; he served 59 days and entered rehab. Although Slater mostly righted himself in the court of law (and realm of public opinion), his career shifted into TV-pilot, self-cameo, and direct-to-DVD territory for years before launching to mainstream popularity again with his exceptional work in Sam Esmail\u2019s labyrinthine thriller series Mr. Robot<\/em>. It\u2019s no coincidence, maybe, that Slater shines so much in it because he\u2019s essentially playing a nihilistic, grown-up version of Jason Dean or Mark Hunter, a.k.a. Hard Harry\u2014another figure burnt out on authority, fucked over by the mainstream, and primarily interested in burning it all down. \u201cDo you ever get the feeling everything in America is completely fucked up?\u201d Slater wondered in Pump Up the Volume<\/em>, and the direct line between that character and his role in Mr. Robot<\/em> as the charismatic, idealistic, and increasingly militant leader of a hacker group intent on anti-capitalist revolution is pretty clear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t to say, though, that Slater can\u2019t play good guys, because Broken Arrow<\/em> proved otherwise. In the Woo film, Slater is the straight man to a scenery-chewing John Travolta, who struts, preens, and thoroughly lives it up as a US Air Force major who decides to double cross the military by stealing and selling nuclear missiles after being passed up for a promotion one too many times. Yes, there are broad strokes of narrative similarity between Broken Arrow<\/em> and Michael Bay\u2019s The Rock<\/em>, which coincidentally also came out in 1996 and was also scored by Hans Zimmer, and The Rock<\/em> was the more successful of the two films, garnering more than double Broken Arrow<\/em>\u2019s take at the box office. But Broken Arrow<\/em> is so purely, wonderfully a Woo production\u2014all rapid zoom-ins, exhilarating stunt work, and so many<\/em> fiery helicopter crashes\u2014and Slater and Travolta are doing such unexpectedly oppositional things in it that the film has an array of legitimately enjoyable moments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The opening overhead shot of Slater and Travolta duking it out in a boxing ring, a clear homage to Neil Leifer\u2019s legendary aerial shot<\/a> of Muhammad Ali celebrating his knockout of Cleveland Williams at the 1966 World Heavyweight Title fight in Houston. Captain Riley Hale\u2019s (Slater) deadpan delivery of \u201cscare the cows, wake the farmers,\u201d his description for the nighttime flying mission he\u2019ll be manning with Major Vic Deakins (Travolta), during which they\u2019ll be testing the military\u2019s ability to track nuclear missiles on the move. Zimmer\u2019s unexpected incorporation of a musical cue that sounds quite a bit like Angelo Badalamenti\u2019s Twin Peaks<\/em> score amid otherwise pulsing synths. Travolta\u2019s tooth-first performance, which suggests he was already in the kooky mindset that would be needed to mimic Nicolas Cage in his next film with Woo, 1997\u2019s iconic Face\/Off<\/em>. (Slater would work again with Woo, too, in 2002\u2019s Windtalkers<\/em>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Broken Arrow<\/em> is pure \u201890s popcorn bullshit, and Slater grounds the film with a toned-down version of his usual sardonic antics, an understandably aggrieved squinty gaze, and a believably scrappy physicality. Slater didn\u2019t become an action star after Broken Arrow<\/em> (unless you count his voice work on FX\u2019s animated spy series Archer<\/em>), and he would rarely play a character this straightforwardly heroic again. But his work in Woo\u2019s film is a reminder of the reasons for his former ubiquity, the spark of unpredictability this industry used to allow in its young actors, and how Slater once operated as, in the words of Hard Harry, the dirty thought in Hollywood\u2019s nice clean mind. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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