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Wheeler-dealer finds happiness on his
10-speed
Toronto Star, Monday, February 17, 1986
By Craig MacInnis Toronto Star
Quicksilver (at the Eaton Centre and Market Square) might just as
easily have been called Flashdance On Wheels.
Ostensibly, the movie celebrates the freedom and kinetic exhilaration
of cycling, theorizing that there's nothing wrong with the world that a
bicyle race through the streets of San Francisco won't cure.
Jack Casey (Kevin Bacon of Footloose fame) is a hot-shot options trader
- a wily wheeler-dealer whose brash exploits on the floor of the
Pacific Stock Exchange have earned him a place in the pantheon of
financial wizardry.
Predictably, Jack's midas touch eventually fails him. He loses not only
his own money, but the accumulated life savings of his decent and
hard-working parents.
This is where Quicksilver first strips its cinematic gears. Faced with
humiliating financial ruin, Jack forsakes his career in options trading
for a job as an inner-city bicycle courier. In case you're wondering,
this is what is known in Hollywood parlance as "dropping out." Hedges
bet
Director Tom Donnelly converts San Francisco's seedy urban landscape
into a stylized velodrome, where multi-racial gangs of rowdy but
loveable bike messengers speed through the streets, dodging cars and
avoiding trouble with the local bad-guy, Gypsy (Rudy Ramos).
Donnelly's problem is that he hedges his bet at every turn. The movie
pretends to revel in Jack's maverick spirit - the idea that a jaded
money-manipulator can find true happiness inside the sweaty ranks of
lower-class American society.
But it makes no sense that after rejecting his high-finance past, he
continues to share a huge loft with a blond ballet dancer, she being
the chic, cover-girl epitome of everything our hero seems to be
rebelling against. In the movie's most ludicrous sequence, they perform
a Flashdance-inspired pas de deux - she en pointe, he on his 10-speed.
Quicksilver is the type of movie that would also have us believe that a
street-smart Hispanic messenger, Hector (Paul Rodriguez), would
willingly risk his life savings in order to fulfil his one burning
ambition - opening a hot-dog wagon. Poor people are dumb that way.
Hector's dream cannot be achieved, of course, without the aid of Jack,
who "reluctantly" returns to the stock exchange to raise the necessary
capital for his pal's frankfurter fantasy. 'The love interest'
Along the way, we're also introduced to Terri (Jami Gertz), a doe-eyed,
sexually pent-up woman/child who steals her way into Jack's heart. This
is what is known in Hollywood as "the love interest."
It has nothing to do with the movie, really, but it makes for a happy
ending.
Oh yeah, the ending. Jack returns to the stock exchange and the bad guy
who deals drugs gets his comeuppance.
After all is said and done, Quicksilver is an unabashed celebration of
the rat race. Jack might have had a good time out on the street, but we
all know the street is for tattered losers, a place where a big-money
player like Jack can go to recharge his batteries before jumping back
into the high-financial fray.
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