Out of the ‘Past’ and Endearingly Clueless

If you do something often enough, you’re likely to get better at it. Even if it’s playing the fool.

Brendan Fraser has done well by acting dumb. As the title character in the successful “George of the Jungle,” he was regularly outsmarted by his animal friends, and in “Gods and Monsters” he’s a bear of little brain outmaneuvered by Ian McKellen’s canny James Whale.

With “Blast From the Past,” his latest film, Fraser is getting more assured and sophisticated about his innocence. As Adam Webber, a naif raised under unusual circumstances to be the perfect gentleman, he gives an engaging and endearing performance. It’s so good, in fact, it throws into relief what’s lacking in the rest of the film.

Fraser co-stars in “Blast From the Past” (with Alicia Silverstone) as a hunk and a half who’s been raised in total ignorance of present-day life; he’s more or less the physical embodiment of the title. But while Fraser’s good humor is contagious, it doesn’t infect enough of the film to make a major difference.

As directed by Hugh Wilson (“The First Wives Club” and TV’s “WKRP in Cincinnati”) from a script he co-wrote with Bill Kelly, “Blast” begins in 1962 with the happily married Southern California couple of Calvin and Helen Webber (Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek).

While the pregnant Helen is occupied fine-tuning the perfect pot roast, Calvin, once a Caltech professor, toils as a self-employed inventor, “a bona fide genius but a borderline nut case,” someone says, who spends a lot of his time drinking hot Dr Pepper and worrying about the Red menace.

Calvin is so fearful about the communist threat that he’s built an enormous bomb shelter under his house, as well-stocked as any Safeway. When a misunderstanding on the night of John Kennedy’s Cuban missile crisis speech causes Calvin to think a nuclear war has started, he hustles his wife underground and sets the shelter’s time locks for 35 years, the half-life of the atomic radiation he thinks is covering the Earth.

Both Walken and Spacek, though unconventional choices for comedy, give adept performances as the happily obsessed couple. Still, even with the amusing riffs about the changes a malt shop built above the shelter undergoes in 35 years, the first half-hour of “Blast” has a pokey, half-formed feeling, like it sounded funnier in the pitch meeting than it ends up playing on screen.

Once Fraser makes an appearance as Calvin and Helen’s grown son, the film’s energy level shoots up. Raised to be an earnest “yes, ma’am” kind of guy, a lover of Perry Como whose strongest expression is “hot diggity dog,” Adam can hardly wait to venture forth into L.A. in search of a potential bride, who, his father advises, “doesn’t glow in the dark.”

In Fraser’s hands, Adam’s bottomless, puppy-like demeanor is a pleasure to experience. Whether it’s encountering the sky, the ocean or any number of new phenomena, Fraser makes Adam’s enthusiasm so funny and so palpable we almost rediscover the world along with him.

The appropriately named Eve Rostokov is the first potential mate Adam sees, and he is immediately smitten. It must be love, or else why would such a sweet guy fall for such a sour young woman?

Silverstone rose to almost immediate stardom on the strength of her fresh and cheerful performance in “Clueless,” and it’s unfortunate that “Blast” is unable to utilize her to her best advantage. Her character’s complete cynicism and whiny, pouting ways do not wear as well as Adam’s cheerfulness, and even the addition of a pro forma gay best friend (Dave Foley) does not make Eve any less strident. It’s hard not to feel that Adam deserves better than this, and, so does this intermittently appealing movie romance.

* MPAA rating: PG-13 for brief language, sex and drug references. Times guidelines: discussions of sexuality.

‘Blast From the Past’

Brendan Fraser: Adam

Alicia Silverstone: Eve

Christopher Walken: Calvin

Sissy Spacek: Helen

Dave Foley: Troy

A Midnight Sun Pictures production, released by New Line Cinema. Director Hugh Wilson. Producers Renny Harlin, Hugh Wilson. Executive producers Amanda Stern, Sunil Perkash, Claire Rudnick Polsten. Screenplay by Bill Kelly and Hugh Wilson. Cinematographer Jose Luis Alcaine. Editor Don Brochu. Costumes Mark Bridges. Music Steve Dorff. Production design Robert Ziembicki. Art director Ted Berner. Set decorator Michael Taylor. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

In general release throughout Southern California.