Miracle Mile (1988)

Starring: Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, John Agar, Lou Hancock, Mykel T. Williamson, Denise Crosby

First, the Lowdown: A man finally meets the woman of his dreams, and has to rescue her before the world ends.

It’s amazing what can happen when you’re in love. Harry Washello is an old-fashioned kinda guy. He is the lead trombonist for a jazz ensemble and considers himself to be quite contentedly single. Then he meets Julie – the perfect woman. She doesn’t cringe at his taste in music or movies, hell one afternoon she brings her elderly father along to watch Harry play in his band. Things are going great.

Like all relationships there are the occasional stumbling blocks. Julie works a swing shift at an all-night diner. However she doesn’t see that as a reason to prevent them from having a tête-à-tête afterwards, so after Harry drops her off he arranges to pick her up at 1am. And then an electrical fire shorts out the power to his hotel – so while Harry sleeps his alarm fails to wake him up until 3 hours later.

Now completely overdue, Julie goes to her mother’s house, depressed because she thinks Harry stood her up, while Harry rushes to the diner. Once at the diner Harry finds out that he missed Julie by a couple HOURS, so he tries calling her on the payphone outside. Unable to reach her, Harry decides to cut his losses, get some breakfast, and try to make amends later in the morning.

And then the payphone rings.

Having nothing better to do, Harry answers it. On the other end is a frantic voice who tells Harry (thinking that he’s the caller’s father) that the missile base that he is stationed at in North Dakota has just launched its warheads – the missiles will reach their targets in 45 minutes and the Soviets’ retaliation will reach us in 70. At first Harry thinks the whole thing is a joke and tries to write it off as such when a gunshot is heard and a new voice tells him, “Forget what you’ve heard and go back to sleep.”

Now fully convinced that the proverbial end is nigh, Harry informs the other patrons of the diner of what just has happened. Of them a stock broker with a cellular phone (a rarity in 1988, folks) informs them that quite a few of her colleagues who run around in the political circles have inexplicably left for the southern hemisphere. So any doubt that Harry may have had about his mysterious caller’s story begins to fade away by the minute. Now he has to figure out two things: how to get out of the city in 70 minutes and to a safe location, and how to take the love of his life with him.

Remember the 80’s folks? When all we had to worry about was nuclear war? Now things are much more stable – we don’t have to worry about an equally armed country with a competing ideology to rub noses with. Gone are the days where we had to fret about fallout and bomb shelters. Nope, nowadays it’s much more peaceful with all the religious fanatics and biological agents being spread about.

This movie is pretty dated, folks. Both the music (provided by Tangerine Dream, no less) and the fashions really slap you in the face that it’s a product of the 1980’s. Not to say that it’s necessarily a negative on it’s part. After all, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall went the cliché of the post-nuclear war or pre-nuclear war thriller. (Unfortunately the idea of nuclear war is still pretty realistic, it’s that the players have changed slightly – China still has warheads trained on us.) But it's a movie about nuclear disaster, not politics - the Russians barely get mentioned as people are more worried about how they're going to survive (patriotism isn't going to shield you from a blast wave, folks.)

Miracle Mile is a great movie because of how small it starts. It’s not like most of the World War III films of its time where the impending nuclear holocaust is broadcast over the airwaves and there’s already panic in the streets. Here the threat of attack still has a current of doubt swirling through it. After all, it was just some random phone call – what if our mysterious messenger was part of a drill? What if it really was a prank? It’s amazing what can happen with a rumor, however and the more the movie progresses the more the fear spreads. (One other thing to note is that the movie is mostly in real time, so once the 70-minute mark has been reached things have completely gone apeshit.)

Line of the movie: “You better brush your teeth every day, kids, or in 15,000 years you’re gonna look like that.”

Four stars. Please share my umbrella.