Spark (1998)

A Disappointing Continuation

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I'm about half way through this right now. I watched it based on the intriguing plot summary that a hapless African American couple would find themselves unfairly besieged in a small town. Instead this story seems to be about how going into a small community and acting like a jackass will make everyone mad at you. I was already aware of that.Screen writing 101: Make us like, identify with and root for your main character. The male lead in this movie has managed to be such a jerk to so many people so quickly that I'm hoping this movie ends with him getting killed. Maybe that dog he maimed will crawl back into town and chew on his face? I hope, however, that the female lead finishes her trip to LA and meets a nice gentleman there who knows more than just cuss words and treats people with a little bit of respect.

I like small town/road movies and this was free on encore so I thought I'd give this a go and for the first half of the movie, it was simmering along nicely as Terrence Howard played the angry black man stuck in a desert town wanting to get his car repaired, feeling racist undertones in the all white town. But then the plot goes haywire as he becomes involved in the murder of the mechanic who was fixing his car, it all gets a bit silly and pointless and then at the end, his girlfriend wakes up on a beach and you don't even know what happened to him!One to avoid unless you like confusing movies with lots of plot holes.

This movie was crazy! Once again, Terrance plays another character who is not a bad guy. He's just angry all the time. Why didn't Nicole's character leave that boring town for LA as soon as she could? Did Terrance's character die at the end of the movie? We never knew! How many people who are moderately mentally retarded can actually drive a truck? Why didn't that crazy psychopath guy who killed his father because he did a bad job repairing his mother's car just stop instead of trying to kill more people. I understand that his mother died in an accident from a bad brake job. This movie will have anyone hollering at the screen because the plot was just that bad.

Director Garret Williams expands on his short film of 1996 of the same title. Not having seen the first one, we took a chance at the newest version when it showed up on cable recently. Basically, the main interest was the presence of Terrence Howard, one of our most talented young actors working currently in films."Spark" falls into the category of road movie since its principals, Byron and Nina are traveling by car from Chicago to Los Angeles, where they plan to settle down. A lot of things happen to this pair along the way. Worst of all is the mistake they make in befriending Mooney, who is a loose canon and who plays heavily in the development of the story.Terrence Howard had been acting for a while, so this is not his first job, yet, the actor doesn't seem to have the the same 'spark' that marks his better appearances in the cinema. He was still a few years away from "Hustle & Flow", perhaps his best work, so far. His Byron is an enigma the way it comes on the screen, following Mr. Williams' direction, or maybe the way the character was conceived. Brendan Sexton III does good work as Mooney.A film for fans of this talented actor that will watch Mr. Howard in anything he appears.