Mystery Date

Rating

Director

Jonathan Wacks

Screenplay

Parker Bennett, Terry Runte

Length

1h 37m

Starring

Ethan Hawke, Teri Polo, Brian McNamara, Fisher Stevens, BD Wong, Tony Rosato, Don S. Davis, James Hong

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
It’s the classic tale of boy meets girl, has a really lousy first date with lots of crazy, seemingly happenstance events, and finds himself unexpectedly in a race for his life.

Mystery Date stars Ethan Hawke as awkward teenager Tom McHugh who has an intense crush on his neighbour, Geena Matthews (Teri Polo), only he doesn’t know how to approach her. As a result, he spends much of his time watching her through his telescope. One afternoon, his brother Craig (Brian McNamara) calls Geena and arranges a date that Craig thinks the girl will like, but Tom soon comes to find that she thinks the whole idea is trite. The minute Craig leaves Tom on his own, bad things start happening. Dwight (Fisher Stevens), a flower delivery guy, gets rudely tipped and backs into Tom’s limo, causing Tom to ‘borrow’ his brother’s convertible to pick up his date.

It turns out that Craig is a petty crook who has angered a large syndicate of toughs, who plague Tom and Geena on their date because they think Tom is Craig. If it doesn’t get confusing enough there, it gets more confusing when people start trying to kill Tom because one of their most prominent thugs ends up dead and they think Tom, still mistaken for Craig, killed him.

In the spirit of Adventures in Babysitting and other late 1980s and early 1990s teen adventure films, Mystery Date tries to be too many things at once. First, it takes itself too seriously. Movies of this style must keep themselves light. The only attempt at this is through the recurring Dwight character, who is the only one with worse luck than Tom. He is constantly in search of Tom/Craig to get revenge for having caused him to be fired and injured in so many ways, simply because he can’t bring himself to leave the destroyer of his life alone.

The performances are of your typical, run-of-the-mill variety. Hawke and Polo do what they can with an obviously weak screenplay. Meanwhile, Fisher plays his role to the hilt while McNamara does everything but glare directly through the fourth wall. The screenplay is immature at best, although with some cutting and embellishing, it might have been a far better entry into the genre.

Mystery Date is fast and fun despite its negative aspects. It will keep the audience entertained while it looks for a premise. The happily-ever-after ending is traditional and people will see it coming a mile away, but sometimes a moviegoer just needs to sit back, turn off one’s brain and enjoy. This movie will provide that relief.

Review Written

November 12, 2003