Blast from the Past – 2 stars
Brendan Fraser plays a 35 year old man mistakenly vaulted in a bomb shelter with his parents (Sissy Spacek and Christopher Walken) since the early 60s. Now, he’s out in modern L.A., and he’s wearing a windbreaker and calling black people “Negroes.”
While Fraser is pretty funny, and Walken and Spacek are properly “kooky” as conservative parents who took to the fallout shelter and never came out during the Cuban Missile Crisis, this romantic comedy lags. Alicia Silverstone, as the love interest, is dull and plump, a bad actress with weak comic timing (didn’t she come and go in a hurry?). Dave Foley, of “Kids in the Hall,” plays Silverstone’s gay, advice-dispensing roommate, but he’s forced, and he’s given none of the snappy patter of a Cam or Mitchell from “Modern Family” (and if you needed someone to play the gay roommate from “Kids in the Hall”, why not Scott Thompson?)
In the end, fish-out-of-water can only get you so far.
filmvetter 
You’re a tough audience. Nine consecutive reviews and only two movies have managed to get two stars.
I think “Blast from the Past” is a little gem. Silverstone’s plump and dull appearance actually helps the story because she plays one of those tired and no-longer-attractive party girls who is just starting to realize that the party’s over for her.
And into her life comes this old-fashioned guy who sees her not as an over-the-hill party girl to be targeted for a night’s sexual relief, but as an attractive woman who should be treated as a lady. At first she distrusts him. He’s strange and completely outside her experience of the men she usually meets. But his small courtesies and obvious sincerity eventually win her over.
This is one of the few movies out of Hollywood you’ll ever see whose story, in any measure at all, supports traditional values.
I agree wholeheartedly about the film’s values, which are refreshing and unique. But Fraser’s wide-eyed bit is tiresome, and Silverstone is really an enormous drag – she is just a very bad actress. So, the “romance” of “romantic comedy” is DOA. That leaves the comedy, and there are some funny generational riffs, but every secondary character is flat and unmemorable, and Foley is really poorly cast, over-the-top and badly written.