The Banger Sisters

Rating

Director

Bob Dolman

Screenplay

Bob Dolman

Length

1h 38m

Starring

Goldie Hawn, Susan Sarandon, Geoffrey Rush, Erika Christensen, Robin Thomas, Eva Amurri, Matthew Carey, Andre Ware

MPAA Rating

R

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:
What could have been a colossal failure is saved by its beautiful leading ladies. The Banger Sisters stars Academy Award winners Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn and Geoffrey Rush.

Hawn plays washed up cocktail waitress Suzette who loses her job and seeks out her old college friend Vinnie (Sarandon) for a financial loan. While on the road, she picks up a failed playwright returning home to shoot his father. Harry Plummer (Geoffrey Rush) is an obsessive compulsive whose life is turned upside down as he falls in love with the flattering Suzette. Upon arrival in Vinnie’s hometown, Suzette tracks down her friend, who is now going by her given name Lavinia and is married to Raymond Kingsley (Robin Thomas), a rich socialite who wouldn’t understand their wild past together.

Chickening out without even meeting Vinnie, Suzette returns to Harry’s hotel room where she espies her old friend’s daughter Hannah (Erika Christensen) drunkenly pass out in the hotel hallway. She takes responsibility for the girl and takes her home the next day, where she finally comes face to face with Vinnie. Together they begin reminiscing of their days as groupies following bands and offering themselves to their members and staff.

Hawn hasn’t lost much of her beauty, a wiser and more serious attitude gives her a more adult visage, but her performance conjures to memory her old roles on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Hawn fits the part too perfectly, giving the audience the impression that perhaps Hawn herself was a groupie as a teenager. Sarandon on the other hand, plays the model of a modern well-to-do mother who has stripped off the vestiges of her former life to lead a dull and predictable one. Her performance is filled with the nervous energy that has made so many of her other roles believable.

Rush rounds out the talented cast as the phobic screenwriter whose delusions of success were crippled by his father’s cryptic prophesy. To return the favour, Rush gives us a self-centered malcontent whose pristine life is shattered by an outside force the strength of a hurricane. Rush is good in many ways, but in others he gives a performance similar to his work in Shine. Christensen never lives up to the brilliant expectations set in her first major film role in the 2000 drama Traffic. Here she plays the typical ne’er-do-well teenager with love for her parents, but no love for herself. Her role, while only a pale copy of her performance in Traffic, is limited and uneventful.

The cast isn’t The Banger Sisters’ problem. The lacklustre script and inept direction are to blame. This, Bob Dolman’s, directorial debut, is not his first screenplay. Dolman has by and large done very little with only two writing credits since his movie debut in 1988 with Willow. Dolman gives us a story that reeks of déjà-vu. We’ve seen the premise before in so many movies. Rowdy woman breaks up perfect marriage, but everything works out in the end for everyone. It’s an age-old archetypical story and we don’t see a better treatment here. The Banger Sisters is predominantly an actor-driven movie with roles that don’t give much room for growth and never expand the actors’ potential.

The Banger Sisters sits as a love and hate kind of movie. The performances are easy to love while the story is not. Audiences will likely find this film tedious and wasteful while hoping that its stars could find better vehicles for their talents.

Review Written

July 2, 2003