So Bad It Makes You Wanna ‘Shout’

Was it only a few years ago that John Travolta was a ‘70s movie sensation, an urban youth movie sex-idol who seemed to blend Brando’s brooding with Presley’s swagger? In “Shout” (citywide), looking a bit fleshy and tired, Travolta is already trying to pass the torch. But there’s nobody to pick it up--at least in this witless, over-pretty dud of a youth musical.

Travolta plays an elder statesman: a patriarch of rock ‘n’ roll, who instructs the Benedict Texas Home for Boys band and apparently believes, with Father Flanagan, that there are no bad boys. (Only bad movies?) For Travolta’s Jack Cabe, rock ‘n’ roll is a kind of religion. His eyes get misty as he predicts it will sweep the nation, and he has the boys tune in to an evangelical pirate blues deejay, the Midnight Rambler.

In a way, it is a religion. Jack only has to give his motley crew one shot of rock, throw away their sheet music, have his James Dean look-alike protege Jesse (James Walters) play one bluesy harmonica solo, and suddenly these previously mediocre musicians, who’ve been sawing away futilely at John Philip Sousa, turn into wailing, stomping, riff-crazy cats. They’re born-again rockers. All they have to do is accept Elvis or Little Richard into their hearts, and they’re saved. (This godly undertheme may be dopey, but it’s no accident. The film, loaded with church scenes, begins and ends with rebels in the belfries.)

It’s hard to enumerate the absurdities of “Shout.” At times, it seems that the filmmakers, especially director Jeffrey Hornaday, who choreographed “Flashdance,” and writer Joe Gayton, are out to break some kind of record.

There’s cold-eyed school director Eugene Benedict (Richard Jordan), who despite his sadism, runs such a loose ship that the inmates continually break into his house and even sleep with his daughter (Heather Graham). There are blissy-woozy seduction scenes, with a stallion usually nearby. There’s that leering old chestnut, the seduction bet that backfires.

There’s Cabe teaching Scott Coffey how to chicken walk to Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” There’s a tender tryst where Jesse’s buddies writhe in front of an iron fence at the girl’s school, and the girls writhe back.

On and on it goes . . . I finally decided that the filmmakers set their movie in 1955, rather than the ‘60s, because of their James Dean obsession and because they didn’t want to deal with the links between rock and the anti-war movement. Given the fact that writer Gayton also scripted the “Rambo”-like thriller “Uncommon Valor,” that may not be implausible.

Few movie gimmicks are more depressing than programmed rebelliousness and prefab sentiment. But perhaps the worst absurdity here--real hubris on the part of the filmmakers--is to believe that they have a story worth telling, instead of the usual collection of marketing hooks, grabs from old movies and scenes geared for the trailers.

“Shout” (MPAA rated PG-13, probably for language and sensuality) comes alive only in its too-too-sparse music scenes. And there are so few of them, it’s as if the town preachers who hate rock had somehow taken over the movie.

‘Shout’

John Travolta: Jack Cabe

James Walters: Jesse Tucker

Heather Graham: Sara Benedict

Richard Jordan: Eugene Benedict

A Universal Pictures presentation of a Robert Simonds production. Director Jeffrey Hornaday. Producer Robert Simonds. Executive producer Lindsley Parsons, Jr. Screenplay by Joe Gayton. Cinematographer Robert Brinkmann. Editor Seth Flaum. Costumes Eduardo Castro. Music Randy Edelman. Production design William F. Matthews. Art director P. Michael Johnston. Set decorator Jim Duffy. Sound Willie D. Burton. With Linda Fiorentino, Scott Coffey. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13