'Evel Knievel' Review

Leaping Tall Fountains at a Single Bound
By Anita Gates
New York Times
July 30, 2004, Friday

There are certain necessities in the film biography of a famous man. There must be a scene in which the man, drunk with his new success, drives his wife to the huge new house he has just bought (without consulting her, but only because he wants to surprise her). Later, there's the scene in which the wife, all alone in that house and justifiably sullen because of neglect, greets the husband, who has been out cavorting with adoring women, spending all his time on his career, or both. The table is set for a meal, which the great man missed hours ago.

TNT's cookie-cutter movie ''Evel Knievel,'' which has its premiere tonight at 8, delivers both scenes in stupefyingly standard fashion. Seeing her new home, Jaime Pressly, as Linda Bork Knievel, says, ''It's so big,'' and, ''This just cost way too much money.'' Later, when Evel (George Eads) makes his first appearance after a night of kissing strange women's breasts and drinking, he appears in the doorway, with his shirt open to the waist. Linda is clearing away the breakfast dishes.

The film, directed by John Badham (whose finest hour was ''Saturday Night Fever''), also offers the obligatory childhood incident that establishes the protagonist's character (little Bobby Knievel of Butte, Mont., steals hubcaps and tries to escape by bicycle) and a waking-up-from-a-coma moment (after Evel's jump over the Caesar's Palace fountains in Las Vegas). And wouldn't you know it? The only man Evel is afraid of is his father-in-law (Beau Bridges). The film's most surprising moment is the appearance of John Derek (Alan Van Sprang) and Linda Evans (Nicola Jones), then Derek's wife, who turn up to film the Las Vegas jump and are never heard from again.

Mr. Eads, who just returned to his role as Nick Stokes on the CBS police series ''C.S.I.'' after a salary dispute, sometimes seems to be impersonating Kurt Russell rather than Mr. Knievel, but maybe it's just the hair. He certainly looks more like the real thing than George Hamilton did when he played the role in the generally ridiculed 1971 feature film also titled ''Evel Knievel.''

The question -- and it must have occurred to Jason Horwitch, who wrote the script based on ''Evel Incarnate: The Life and Legend of Evel Knievel,'' a book by the zine editor Steve Mandich -- is what, if anything, Mr. Knievel's life has to say to us.

Robert Craig Knievel was born poor, got into some trouble as a teenager, married a pretty girl from his Montana hometown, wanted to make something of himself, opened a motorcycle repair business and ran a car dealership and learned that he could amuse people by risking his life. Once he'd built up a local audience for his stunts, he offered himself to Las Vegas in 1967 and spent the next 13 years trying big motorcycle jumps (over cars, trucks, shark tanks), failing almost as often as he succeeded, before retiring in 1980, at 42.

Mr. Knievel reached the height of his fame on Sept. 8, 1974, when he tried and failed to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in a ''sky-cycle,'' designed by his own personal NASA consultant. A parachute deployed prematurely, and not everyone was convinced that that was accidental. The television film doesn't seem to take a side, but does show Evel having a drink beforehand, asking himself in the mirror, ''Are you man enough to do this?''

TNT's ''Evel Knievel'' doesn't shed a bit of light on what makes the man tick or what makes him fascinating to so many people. ''Men admire him, women want to sleep with him, and kids want to be like him,'' an Ideal Toy Company employee tells fellow executives. To an action-figure maker, it doesn't matter why.

Maybe it was the simple appeal of the bad boy. Evel, who declares, ''My life may be short, but it's going to be anything but dull,'' is shown as the kind of guy who calls his elderly accountant ''four eyes'' and loves to shock people by taking the wheel of his private plane, even though he doesn't really know how to fly. Irreverence and opposition to authority were the spirit of Evel's time; he made his reputation during the Vietnam War, when civil disobedience was all the rage. But he combined that with flag-waving patriotism, symbolized by his red, white and blue jumpsuits.

The TNT film, however, seems to take place in a political vacuum. You'd never know that the Snake River jump took place on the same day in 1974 that President Gerald R. Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, from any federal crimes he might have committed related to the Watergate scandal. Other than the cars and women's hairstyles, the film's only hint of the surrounding sociocultural world is a marquee promoting Theodore Bikel's appearance in ''Fiddler on the Roof.''

Of course, there's the predictable soap-opera appeal of the never-say-die character, the man who -- told by doctors that he'll never walk again -- gets up from his wheelchair and goes on to even greater things. That seems to be good enough for TNT.

Some 30 years ago, a few weeks before the Snake River jump, Mr. Knievel, who now lives in Florida, told Dave Anderson of The New York Times: ''I don't know if I'm an athlete, a daredevil, a promoter, a hoax or just a nut. But when I make that jump, I'll be competing against the toughest opponent of all. And that's death.'' And death sells.